The Renaissance

He tried his hand at almost every science. He took enthusiastically to mathematics as the purest form of reasoning; he felt a certain beauty in geometrical figures, and drew some on the same page with a study for The Last Supper.⁶⁵ He expressed vigorously one of the fundamental principles of science: “There is no certainty where one can neither apply any of the mathematical sciences nor any of those that are based upon them.”⁶⁶ And he proudly echoed Plato: “Let no man who is not a mathematician read the elements of my work.”⁶⁷

He was fascinated by astronomy. He proposed to “make glasses in order to see the moon large,”⁶⁸ but apparently he did not make them. He writes: “The sun does not move… the earth is not in the center of the circle of the sun, nor in the center of the universe.”⁶⁹ “The moon has every month a winter and a summer.”⁷⁰ He discusses acutely the causes of spots on the moon, and combats, on that matter, the views of Albert of Saxony.⁷¹ Taking a lead from the same Albert, he argues that since “every heavy substance presses downward, and cannot be upheld perpetually, the whole earth must become spherical,” and will ultimately be covered with water.⁷²

He noticed on high elevations the fossil shells of marine animals, and concluded that the waters had once reached those altitudes⁷³ (Boccaccio had suggested this about 1338 in his Filocopo⁷⁴). He rejected the notion of a universal flood,⁷⁵ and ascribed to the earth an antiquity that would have shocked the orthodoxy of his time. He assigned to the accumulations brought down by the Po a duration of 200,000 years. He made a map of Italy as he imagined it to have been in an early geological era. The Sahara Desert, he thought, had once been covered with salt water.⁷⁶ Mountains have been formed through erosion by rain.⁷⁷ The bottom of the sea is continually rising with the detritus of all the streams that flow into it. “Very great rivers flow underground”;⁷⁸ and the movement of life-giving water in the body of the earth corresponds to the movement of the blood in the body of man.⁷⁹ Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed not by human wickedness but by slow geological action, probably the subsidence of their soil into the Dead Sea.⁸⁰

Leonardo followed avidly the advances made in physics by Jean Buridan and Albert of Saxony in the fourteenth century. He wrote a hundred pages on motion and weight, and hundreds more on heat, acoustics, optics, color, hydraulics, and magnetism. “Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences, for by its means one comes to the fruit of mathematics” in useful work.⁸¹ He delighted in pulleys, cranes, and levers, and saw no end to what they could lift or move; but he laughed at seekers for perpetual motion. “Force with material movement, and weight with percussion, are the four accidental powers in which all the works of mortals have their being and their end.”⁸² Despite these lines he was not a materialist. On the contrary he defined force as “a spiritual capacity… spiritual because the life in it is invisible and without body… impalpable because the body in which it is produced is increased neither in size nor in weight.”⁸³

He studied the transmission of sound, and reduced its medium to waves of air. “When the string of a lute is struck it… conveys a movement to a similar string of the same tone on another lute, as one may convince oneself by placing a straw on the string similar to the one struck.”⁸⁴ He had his own notion of a telephone. “If you cause your ship to stop, and place the head of a long tube in the water, and place the other extremity to your ear, you will hear ships at a great distance from you. You can also do the same by placing the head of the tube upon the ground, and you will then hear anyone passing at a distance.”⁸⁵

But sight and light interested him more than sound. He marveled at the eye: “Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe?”⁸⁶—and he wondered even more at the power of the mind to recall an image long past. He gave an excellent description of the means by which spectacles compensate for the weakening of the muscles of the eyes.⁸⁷ He explained the operation of the eye by the principle of the camera obscura: in the camera and in the eye the image is inverted because of the pyramidal crossing of the light rays that come from the object into the camera or the eye.⁸⁸ He analyzed the refraction of sunlight in the rainbow. Like Leon Battista Alberti he had a good notion of complementary colors four centuries before the definitive work of Michel Chevreul.⁸⁹

He planned, began, and left countless notes for, a treatise on water. The movements of water captivated his eye and mind; he studied placid and turbulent streams, springs and falls, bubbles and foam, torrents and cloudbursts, and the simultaneous fury of wind and rain. “Without water,” he wrote, repeating Thales after twenty-one hundred years, “nothing can exist among us.”⁹⁰ He anticipated Pascal’s fundamental principle of hydrostatics—that the pressure exerted upon a fluid is transmitted by it.⁹¹ He noted that the liquids in communicating vessels keep the same level.⁹² Inheriting Milan’s tradition of hydraulic engineering, he designed and built canals, suggested ways of conducting navigable canals under or over the rivers that crossed them, and proposed to free Florence from her need of Pisa as a port by canalizing the Arno from Florence to the sea.⁹³ Leonardo was not a Utopian dreamer, but he planned his studies and works as if he had a dozen lives to live.

Armed with the great text of Theophrastus on plants, he turned his alert mind to “natural history.” He examined the system on which leaves are arranged about their stalks, and formulated its laws. He observed that the rings in a cross section of a tree trunk record the years of its growth by their number, and the moisture of the year by their width.⁹⁴ He seems to have shared several delusions of his time as to the power of certain animals to heal some human diseases by their presence or their touch.⁹⁵ He atoned for this uncharacteristic lapse into superstition by investigating the anatomy of the horse with a thoroughness to which recorded history had no precedent. He prepared a special treatise on the subject, but it was lost in the French occupation of Milan. He almost inaugurated modern comparative anatomy by studying the limbs of men and animals in juxtaposition. He set aside the superannuated authority of Galen, and worked with actual bodies. The anatomy of man he described not only in words but in drawings that excelled anything yet done in that field. He planned a book on the subject, and left for it hundreds of illustrations and notes. He claimed to “have dissected more than thirty human cadavers,”⁹⁶ and his countless drawings of the foetus, the heart, lungs, skeleton, musculature, viscera, eye, skull, and brain, and the principal organs in woman, support his claim. He was the first to give—in remarkable drawings and notes—a scientific representation of the uterus, and he described accurately the three membranes enclosing the foetus. He was the first to delineate the cavity of the bone that supports the cheek, now known as the antrum of Highmore. He poured wax into the valves of the heart of a dead bull to get an exact impression of the chambers. He was the first to characterize the moderator band (catena) of the right ventricle.⁹⁷ He was fascinated by the network of bloodvessels; he divined the circulation of the blood, but did not quite grasp its mechanism. “The heart,” he wrote, “is much stronger than the other muscles… The blood that returns when the heart opens is not the same as that which closes the valves.”⁹⁸ He traced the bloodvessels, nerves, and muscles of the body with fair accuracy. He attributed old age to arteriosclerosis, and this to lack of exercise.⁹⁹ He began a volume De figura umana, on the proper proportions of the human figure as an aid to artists, and some of his ideas were incorporated in his friend Pacioli’s treatise De divina proportione. He analyzed the physical life of man from birth to decay, and then planned a survey of mental life. “Oh, that it may please God to let me also expound the psychology of the habits of man in such fashion as I am describing his body!”¹⁰⁰

Fig. 15 —ANDREA DEL SARTO: Madonna delle Arpie; Uffizi Gallery, Florence PAGE 167

Fig. 16 —CRISTOFORO SOLARI: Tomb Effigies of Lodovico il Moro and Beatrice d’Este; Certosa di Pavia PAGE 190

Fig. 17—AMBROGIO DA PREDIS or LEONARDO DA VINCI: Portrait of Bianca Sforza; Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan PAGE 197

Fig. 18—LEONARDO DA VINCI: Virgin of the Rocks; Louvre, Paris PAGE 204

Fig. 19—LEONARDO DA VINCI: Self-portrait, red chalk; Turin Gallery PAGE 215

Fig. 20—LEONARDO DA VINCI: Mona Lisa; Louvre, Paris PAGE 211

Fig. 21—PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA: Portrait of Duke Federigo da Montefeltro; Uffizi Gallery, Florence PAGE 232

Fig. 22—LUCA SIGNORELLI: The End of the World (detail), fresco; Cathedral of Orvieto, Chapel of San Brizio PAGE 234

Fig. 23—IACOPO DELLA QUERCIA: The Nativity, one of four reliefs from the main portal; San Petronio, Bologna PAGE 237

Fig. 24—IACOPO DELLA QUERCIA: Noah’s Ark, relief; San Petronio, Bologna PAGE 237

Fig. 25—PERUGINO: Self-portrait; Sistine Chapel, Rome PAGE 245

Fig. 26 —PINTURICCHIO: The Nativity; Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome PAGE 244

Fig. 27—ANDREA MANTEGNA: Lodovico Gonzaga and His Family; Castello, Mantua PAGE 253

Fig. 28—ANDREA MANTEGNA: Adoration of the Shepherds; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York PAGE 253

Fig. 29—LEONARDO DA VINCI: Portrait of Isabella d’Este; Louvre, Paris PAGE 255

Fig. 30—TITIAN: Portrait of Isabella d’Este; Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna PAGE 256

Was Leonardo a great scientist? Alexander von Humboldt considered him “the greatest physicist of the fifteenth century,”¹⁰¹ and William Hunter ranked him as “the greatest anatomist of his epoch.”¹⁰² He was not as original as Humboldt supposed; many of his ideas in physics had come down to him from Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and other predecessors. He was capable of egregious errors, as when he wrote that “no surface of water that borders upon the air will ever be lower than that of the sea”;¹⁰³ but such slips are remarkably few in so vast a production of notes on almost everything on the earth or in the sky. His theoretical mechanics were those of a highly intelligent amateur; he lacked training, instruments, and time. That he achieved so much in science, despite these handicaps and his labors in art, is among the miracles of a miraculous age.

From his studies in so many fields Leonardo rose at times to philosophy. “O marvelous Necessity! Thou with supreme reason constrainest all effects to be the direct result of their causes, and by a supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by the shortest possible process.”¹⁰⁴ This has all the proud ring of nineteenth-century science, and suggests that Leonardo had shed some theology. Vasari, in the first edition of his life of the artist, wrote that he was of “so heretical a cast of mind that he conformed to no religion whatever, accounting it perchance better to be a philosopher than a Christian”¹⁰⁵—but Vasari omitted this passage in later editions. Like many Christians of the time, Leonardo took a fling now and then at the clergy; he called them Pharisees, accused them of deceiving the simple with bogus miracles, and smiled at the “false coin” of celestial promissory notes which they exchanged for the coinage of this world.¹⁰⁶ On one Good Friday he wrote: “Today all the world is in mourning because one man died in the Orient.”¹⁰⁷ He seems to have thought that dead saints were incapable of hearing the prayers addressed to them.¹⁰⁸ “I could wish that I had such power of language as should avail me to censure those who would extol the worship of men above that of the sun… Those who have wished to worship men as gods have made a very grave error.”¹⁰⁹ He took more liberties with Christian iconography than any other Renaissance artist: he suppressed halos, put the Virgin across her mother’s knee, and made the infant Jesus try to bestride the symbolic lamb. He saw mind in matter, and believed in a spiritual soul, but apparently thought that the soul could act only through matter, and only in harmony with invariable laws.¹¹⁰ He wrote that “the soul can never be corrupted with the corruption of the body,”¹¹¹ but he added that “death destroys memory as well as life,”¹¹² and “without the body the soul can neither act nor feel.”¹¹³ He addressed the Deity with humility and fervor in some passages;¹¹⁴ but at other times he identified God with Nature, Natural Law, and “Necessity.”¹¹⁵ A mystic pantheism was his religion until his final years.

VIII. IN FRANCE: 1516–19

Arrived in France, Leonardo, sixty-four and ill, was established with his faithful companion Francesco Melzi, twenty-four, in a pretty house at Cloux, between the town and château of Amboise on the Loire, then the frequent residence of the King. His contract with Francis I designated him as “painter, engineer, and architect of the King, and state mechanician,” at an annual salary of seven hundred crowns ($8750). Francis was generous, and appreciated genius even in its decline. He enjoyed conversation with Leonardo, and “affirmed,” reported Cellini, “that never had any man come into the world who knew so much as Leonardo, and that not only in sculpture, painting, and architecture, for in addition he was a great philosopher.”¹¹⁶ Leonardo’s anatomical drawings amazed the physicians at the French court.

For a time he labored manfully to earn his salary. He arranged masques and pageants for royal displays; worked on plans to bind the Loire and the Saône with canals and to drain the marshes of Sologne,¹¹⁷ and may have shared in designing parts of the Loire chateaux; some evidence links his name with the jewel loveliness of Chambord.¹¹⁸ Probably he did little painting after 1517, for in that year he suffered a paralytic stroke that immobilized his right side; he painted with his left hand, but needed both hands for careful work. He was now a wrinkled wreck of the youth whose repute for beauty of body and face came down to Vasari across half a century. His once proud self-confidence faded, his serenity of spirit yielded to the pains of decay, his love of life gave place to religious hope. He made a simple will, but he asked for all the services of the Church at his funeral. Once he had written: “As a day well spent makes it sweet to sleep, so a life well used makes it sweet to die.”¹¹⁹

Vasari tell a touching story of how Leonardo died, on May 2, 1519, in the arms of the King; but apparently Francis was elsewhere at the time.¹²⁰ The body was buried in the cloister of the Collegiate Church of St. Florentin in Amboise. Melzi wrote to Leonardo’s brothers informing them of the event, and added: “It would be impossible for me to express the anguish that I have suffered from this death; and while my body holds together I shall live in perpetual unhappiness. And for good reason. The loss of such a man is mourned by all, for it is not in the power of Nature to create another. May Almighty God rest his soul forever!”¹²¹

How shall we rank him?—though which of us commands the variety of knowledge and skills required to judge so multiple a man? The fascination of his polymorphous mind lures us into exaggerating his actual achievement; for he was more fertile in conception than in execution. He was not the greatest scientist or engineer or painter or sculptor or thinker of his time; he was merely the man who was all of these together and in each field rivaled the best. There must have been men in the medical schools who knew more of anatomy than he; the most notable works of engineering in the territory of Milan had been accomplished before Leonardo came; both Raphael and Titian left a more impressive total of fine paintings than has survived from Leonardo’s brush; Michelangelo was a greater sculptor; Machiavelli and Guicciardini were profounder minds. And yet Leonardo’s studies of the horse were probably the best work done in the anatomy of that age; Lodovico and Caesar Borgia chose him, from all Italy, as their engineer; nothing in the paintings of Raphael or Titian or Michelangelo equals The Last Supper; no painter has matched Leonardo in subtlety of nuance, or in the delicate portrayal of feeling and thought and pensive tenderness; no statue of the time was so highly rated as Leonardo’s plaster Sforza; no drawing has ever surpassed The Virgin, Child, and St. Anne; and nothing in Renaissance philosophy soared above Leonardo’s conception of natural law.

He was not “the man of the Renaissance,” for he was too gentle, introverted, and refined to typify an age so violent and powerful in action and speech. He was not quite “the universal man,” since the qualities of statesman or administrator found no place in his variety. But, with all his limitations and incompletions, he was the fullest man of the Renaissance, perhaps of all time. Contemplating his achievement we marvel at the distance that man has come from his origins, and renew our faith in the possibilities of mankind.

IX. THE SCHOOL OF LEONARDO

He left behind him at Milan a bevy of younger artists who admired him too much to be original. Four of them—Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Andrea Salaino, Cesare da Sesto, and Marco d’Oggiono—are figured in stone at the base of the patriarchal statue of Leonardo in the Piazza della Scala in Milan. There were others—Andrea Solari, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Bernardino de’ Conti, Francesco Melzi… All had worked in Leonardo’s studio, and learned to imitate his grace of line without reaching his subtlety or depth. Two other painters acknowledged him as their teacher, though we are not sure that they knew him in the flesh. Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, who allowed himself to come down in history under the name of Sodoma, may have met him in Milan or Rome. Bernardino Luini exalted sentiment, but with an engaging straightforwardness that charms away reproach. He chose as his repeated subject the Madonna and her Child; perhaps he rightly saw in this most hackneyed of all pictorial themes the supreme embodiment of life as a stream of births, of love as surmounting death, and of womanly beauty that is never mature except in motherhood. More than any other follower of Leonardo he caught the master’s effeminate delicacy and the tenderness—not the mystery—of the Leonardesque smile; the Holy Family in the Ambrosiana at Milan is a delectable variation on the Master’s Virgin, Child, and St. Anne; and the Sposalizio at Saronno has all the grace of Correggio. He seems never to have doubted, as Leonardo did, the touching story of the peasant maid who bore a god; he softened the lines and colors of his paintings with a simple piety that Leonardo could hardly feel or represent; and the unwilling skeptic who can still respect a lovely and inspiring myth will pause longer, in the Louvre, before Luini’s Sleep of the Infant Jesus and Adoration of the Magi than before Leonardo’s St. John, and will find in them a profounder satisfaction and truth.

With these elegant epigoni the great age of Milan died away. The architects, painters, sculptors, and poets that had made Lodovico’s court surpassingly brilliant had seldom been natives of the city, and many of them sought other pastures when the gentle despot fell. No outstanding talent rose in the ensuing chaos and servitude to take their place; and a generation later the castle and the cathedral were the sole reminders that for a magnificent decade—the last of the fifteenth century—Milan had led the pageant of Italy.

CHAPTER VIII

Tuscany and Umbria

I. PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA

IF now we cross back into Tuscany, we find that Florence, like another Paris, absorbed the talents of her dependencies, and left only here and there among them a figure that bids us pause in our pilgrimage. Lucca bought a charter of autonomy from the Emperor Charles IV (1369), and managed to remain a free city till Napoleon. The Lucchesi were properly proud of their eleventh-century cathedral; they kept it in form with repeated restorations, and made it a veritable museum of art. There eye and soul may still feast on the lovely stalls (1452) and stained glass (1485) of the choir; on a noble tomb by Iacopo della Quercia (1406); on one of Fra Bartolommeo’s profoundest pictures—Madonna with St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist (1509); and on one handsome work after another by Lucca’s own son, Matteo Civitali.

Pistoia preferred Florence to freedom. The conflict of “Whites” and “Blacks” so disordered the city that the government appealed to the Florentine Signory to take over its management (1306). Thereafter Pistoia received its art as well as its laws from Florence. For the Ospedale del Ceppo—named from the hollow stump into which one might drop contributions for the hospital—Giovanni della Robbia and some aides designed (1514–25) a frieze of gleaming terra-cotta reliefs of the Seven Works of Mercy: clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, nursing the sick, visiting prisons, receiving strangers, burying the dead, and comforting the bereaved. Here religion was at its best.

Pisa, once so rich that it could transform mountains of marble into a cathedral, baptistery, and Leaning Tower, had owed its wealth to its strategic position at the mouth of the Arno. For that reason Florence beat it into subjection (1405). Pisa never reconciled itself to this servitude; it rebelled again and again. In 1431 the Florentine Signory expelled from Pisa all males capable of bearing arms, and kept their women and children as hostages for their good behavior.¹ Pisa took advantage of the French invasion (1495) to reassert its independence; for fourteen years it fought off the Florentine mercenaries; finally, after a fanatically heroic resistance, it succumbed. Many leading families, choosing exile rather than vassalage, migrated to France or Switzerland—among them the Sismondi ancestors of the historian who in 1838 wrote an eloquent account of these events in his History of the Italian Republics. Florence tried to atone for her despotism by financing the University of Pisa, and sending her artists to adorn the cathedral and the Campo Santo; but not even the famous frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli in that Holy Field of the dead could comfort a city geologically doomed to decay. For the detritus of the Arno gradually and mercilessly advanced the shore line, creating a new port at Livorno—Leghorn—six miles away; and Pisa lost the commercial situation that had made its fortune and its tragedy.

San Gimignano took its name from St. Geminian, who saved the incipient village from the hordes of Attila about 450. It rose to some prosperity in the fourteenth century; but its rich families divided into murderous factions, and built the fifty-six fortress towers (now reduced to thirteen) that gave the town its fame as San Gimignano delle Belle Torri. In 1353 the strife grew so violent that the city accepted with resigned relief its absorption into the Florentine dominion. Thereafter life seems to have gone out of it. Domenico Ghirlandaio made the Santa Fina Chapel of the Collegiata famous with his finest frescoes, and Benozzo Gozzoli rivaled his Medici Chapel cavalcades with scenes from the life of St. Augustine in the church of Sant’ Agostino, and Benedetto da Maiano carved superb altars for those shrines. But commerce took other routes, industry starved, stimulus died; San Gimignano remained becalmed in her narrow streets and disintegrating towers; and in 1928 Italy made the city a national monument, preserved as a half-living picture of medieval life.

Forty miles up the Arno from Florence, Arezzo was a vital spot in the web of Florentine defense and trade. The Signory itched and angled to control it; in 1384 Florence bought the city from the duke of Anjou; Arezzo never forgot the indignity. It gave birth to Petrarch, Aretino, and Vasari, but failed to hold them, for its soul still belonged to the Middle Ages. Luca Spinello, also called Aretino, went from Arezzo to paint in the Campo Santo at Pisa lively frescoes stirring with the shock of battle (1390–2), but also portraying Christ and Mary and the saints with an intense and moving piety. If we wish to believe Vasari, Luca portrayed Satan so repulsively that the Devil appeared to him in a dream and reprimanded him with such violence that Luca died of fright—at ninety-two.²

Northeast of Arezzo, on the upper Tiber, the town of Borgo San Sepolcro seemed too small to have and to hold an artist of high rank. Piero di Benedetto was called della Francesca after his mother; for she, left pregnant with him after his father’s death, reared him lovingly, and guided and aided him to an education in mathematics and art. Though we know that he was born in the Town of the Holy Sepulcher, the earliest notice of him places him in Florence in 1439. That was the year in which Cosimo brought the Council of Ferrara to Florence; presumably Piero saw the gorgeous costumes of the Byzantine prelates and princes who had come to negotiate the reunion of the Greek with the Roman Church. We may more confidently presume that he studied the frescoes of Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel; this was routine for any art student in Florence. The dignity, power, and resolute perspective of Masaccio mingled in Piero’s art with the picturesque grandeur and majestic beards of the Eastern potentates.

When he returned to Borgo (1442) Piero was elected, aged thirty-six, to the town council. Three years later he received his first recorded commission: to paint a Madonna della Misericordia for the church of San Francesco. It is still preserved in the Palazzo Comunale: a strange assemblage of somber saints, a semi-Chinese Virgin enfolding eight praying figures in the robe of her mercy, a stiff Archangel Gabriel making a very formal announcement of her motherhood to Mary, an almost peasant Christ in a grimly realistic Crucifixion, and vivid forms of the Mater Dolorosa and the Apostle John. This is half-primitive painting, but powerful: no pretty sentiment, no delicate decoration, no idealized refinement of the tragic tale; but bodies soiled and consumed with the struggle of life, and yet rising to nobility in the silence of their suffering, their prayers, and their forgiveness.

His fame now spread through Italy, and Piero was in demand. At Ferrara (1449?) he painted murals in the Ducal Palace. Rogier van der Weyden was then court painter there; probably Piero learned from him something of the new technique of painting with pigments mixed in oil. At Rimini (1451) he pictured Sigismondo Malatesta—tyrant, murderer, and patron of art—in an attitude of pious prayer, redeemed by the presence of two magnificent dogs. In Arezzo, at intervals between 1452 and 1464, Piero painted for the church of San Francesco a series of frescoes that mark the zenith of his art. They told mainly the story of the True Cross, culminating in its capture by Khosru II, and its recovery and restoration to Jerusalem by the Emperor Heraclius; but they found place also for such episodes as the death of Adam, the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon, and the victory of Constantine over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. The emaciated figure of the dying Adam, the worn face and drooping breasts of Eve, the powerful bodies of their sons and their almost equally virile daughters, the flowing majesty of the Queen of Sheba’s retinue, the profound and disillusioned face of Solomon, the startling incidence of light in The Dream of Constantine, the fascinating turmoil of men and horses in The Victory of Heraclius— these are among the most impressive frescoes of the Renaissance.

Probably in the interludes of this major effort Piero painted an altarpiece at Perugia, and some murals in the Vatican—later whitewashed to make more space for Raphael’s conquering brush. At Urbino in 1469 he produced his most famous picture—the arresting profile of Duke Federigo da Montefeltro. Federigo’s nose had been broken, and his right cheek scarred, in a tournament. Piero showed the left side, intact but hilly with moles, and portrayed the crooked nose with dauntless realism; he made the firm lips and half-closed eyes and sober face reveal the administrator, the stoic, the man who has plumbed the shallowness of wealth and power; we miss, however, in these features, the refinement of taste that guided Federigo in organizing music at his court and collecting his celebrated library of classical and illuminated manuscripts. Paired with this portrait in the Uffizi diptych is a profile of Federigo’s wife, Battista Sforza—a face almost Dutch, and pale to sallowness—against a background of fields, hills, sky, and battlemented walls. On the obverse of the portraits Piero painted two “triumphs”—one chariot drawing Federigo, the other Battista, in solemn state; both elegantly absurd.

About 1480 Piero, now sixty-four, began to suffer from eye trouble. Vasari thought he became blind, but apparently he could still draw well. In those declining years he wrote a manual of perspective, and a treatise De quinque corporibus regolaribus, in which he analyzed the geometrical relations and proportions involved in painting. His pupil Luca Pacioli adopted Piero’s ideas in his own book De divina proportione; and perhaps through this mediation Piero’s mathematical ideas influenced Leonardo’s studies in the geometry of art.

The world has forgotten Piero’s books and has rediscovered his paintings. When we place him in time, and note that his work was completed when Leonardo’s had just begun, we must assign him a rank with the leading Italian painters of the fifteenth century. His figures seem crude, their faces coarse; many seem cast in a Flemish mold. What ennobles them is their quiet dignity, their grave mien and stately carriage, the restrained and yet dramatic force of their action. What transfigures them is the harmonious flow of the design, and, above all, the uncompromising faithfulness with which Piero’s hand, disdaining idealization and sentimentality, has represented what his eye has seen and his mind has conceived.

He lived too far from the intense centers of the Renaissance to attain the potential perfection, or to exert the full influence, of his art. Nevertheless he numbered Signorelli among his pupils, and shared in forming Luca’s style. It was Raphael’s father who invited Piero to Urbino; and though this was fourteen years before Raphael’s birth, that blessed youth must have seen and studied the paintings left by Piero there and in Perugia. Melozzo da Forlì learned from Piero something of strength and grace in design; and Melozzo’s angel musicians in the Vatican recall those which Piero painted in one of his final works—the Nativity of the London National Gallery—even as Piero’s angel choristers recall Luca della Robbia’s Cantoria. So men hand down to their successors their heritage—their lore and codes and skills; and transmission becomes half the technique of civilization.

II. SIGNORELLI

When Piero della Francesca was painting his masterpieces at Arezzo, Lazzaro Vasari, great-grandfather of the historian, invited a young art student, Luca Signorelli, to come and live in the Vasari home and study with Piero. Luca had first seen the light at Cortona, some fourteen miles southeast of Arezzo (1441). He was only eleven when Piero came, but he was twenty-four when Piero finished. In the interval the youth, taking with passion to the painter’s art, learned from Piero to draw the nude body with merciless veracity—with a stern rigor that went back to his teacher, and a masculine force that pointed forward to Michelangelo. In the studio and the hospitals, under the gibbet and in the cemeteries, he sought the human body, as naked as he could find it; and he asked of it not beauty but strength. He seems to have cared for nothing else; if he painted anything else it was by impatient concession; and then, as often as not, he would use nude figures for incidental ornament. Like Michelangelo he was not at home (if we may speak so carelessly) with female nudes; he drew them with scant success; and among males he preferred not the young and fair, as Leonardo did and Sodoma, but the middle-aged man in the full development of musculature and virility.

Carrying this passion with him, Signorelli moved about among the cities of central Italy depositing nudes. After some early works in Arezzo and San Sepolcro he moved on to Florence (c. 1475), and there painted, and presented to Lorenzo, The School of Pan, a canvas crowded with naked pagan gods. Probably for Lorenzo he painted the Virgin and Child now in the Uffizi: the Virgin ample but beautiful, the background largely composed of naked men; here Michelangelo would find a hint for his Doni Holy Family.

And yet this carnal pagan could paint piously. The Virgin in his Uffizi Holy Family is one of the fairest figures in Renaissance art. At the behest of Pope Sixtus IV he went to Loreto (c. 1479), and adorned the sanctuary of Santa Maria with excellent frescoes of the evangelists and other saints. Three years later we find him in Rome contributing to the Sistine Chapel a scene from the life of Moses—admirable in its male figures, ungainly in its women. Called to Perugia (1484), he painted some minor frescoes in the cathedral. Thenceforth he seems to have made Cortona his home, producing pictures there for delivery elsewhere, and leaving it chiefly for major assignments in Siena, Orvieto, and Rome. In the cloister of the monastery of Monte Oliveto at Chiusuri, near Siena, he depicted scenes from the life of St. Benedict. For the church of Sant’ Agostino in Siena he completed an altarpiece which was ranked among his best works; only the wings remain. For the palace of the Sienese dictator, Pandolfo Petrucci, he painted episodes from classic history or legend. Then he passed on to Orvieto for his culminating achievement.

The cathedral council there had waited in vain for Perugino to come and decorate the chapel of San Brizio. It had considered and rejected Pinturicchio. Now (1499) it summoned Signorelli, and bade him complete the work that Fra Angelico had begun in that chapel half a century before. It was the favorite altar in the great cathedral, for over it hung an old picture of the Madonna di San Brizio, who (the people liked to believe) could ease the pains of childbirth, keep lovers and husbands faithful, ward off the ague, and quiet a storm. Under the ceiling frescoes where Fra Angelico had pictured the Last Judgment in the full spirit of medieval hopes and fears, Signorelli painted similar themes—Antichrist, The End of the World, The Resurrection of the Dead, Paradise, and The Descent of the Damned Into Hell. But these old themes were for him merely a frame wherein to show the naked bodies of men and women in a hundred different attitudes, and in a hundred varieties of joy and pain. Not until Michelangelo’s Last Judgment would the Renaissance see again such an orgy of human flesh. Bodies handsome or deformed, faces bestial or celestial, the grimaces of devils, the agony of the condemned sprayed by jets of fire, the torturing of one sinner by breaking his teeth and his thighbone with a club—did Signorelli delight in these scenes, or was he instructed to paint them as encouragement to piety? In any case he pictured himself (in a corner of the Antichrist) looking upon the melee with the equanimity of the saved.

After spending three years on these frescoes, Signorelli returned to Cortona, and painted a Dead Christ for the church of Santa Margherita. It was about this time that tragedy overtook him in the violent death of his favorite son. When the corpse was brought to him, says Vasari, “he caused it to be stripped, and with extraordinary fortitude, without shedding a tear, he made a drawing of the body, so that he might always behold in this work of his hands what Nature had given him and cruel Fortune had taken away.”³

In 1508 a different misfortune came. With Perugino, Pinturicchio, and Sodoma he was commissioned by Julius II to decorate the papal chambers in the Vatican. While their labors were progressing Raphael arrived, and so pleased the Pope with his initial frescoes that Julius turned over all the rooms to him, and dismissed the other artists. Signorelli was then sixty-seven, and perhaps his hand had lost its skill or steadiness. Nevertheless, eleven years later, he painted with success and acclaim an altarpiece commissioned by the Company of San Girolamo at Arezzo; when it was finished the brothers of the Company came to Cortona and carried this Madonna and Saints on their shoulders all the way to Arezzo. Signorelli accompanied them, and again lodged in the house of the Vasari. There Giorgio Vasari, a lad of eight, saw him, and received from him long-remembered words of encouragement in the study of art. Once a youth of impetuous passion, Signorelli was now a kindly old gentleman, nearing eighty, living in moderate prosperity in his native town, and honored by all. At the age of eighty-three he was elected for the last time to the governing council of Cortona. In that year, 1524, he died.

Excellent scholars⁴ have thought that Signorelli’s fame is inadequate to his deserts; but perhaps it exceeds them. He was a facile draftsman, who amazes us with his studies of anatomy, posture, perspective, and foreshortening, and amuses us with his use of human figures in composition and ornament. Sometimes in his Madonnas he reaches a note of tenderness, and the musician angels at Loreto have charmed discriminating minds. But for the rest he was the apostle of the body as anatomy; he gave it no sensual softness, no voluptuous grace, no glory of color, no magic of light and shade; he seldom realized that the function of the body is to be the outward expression and instrument of a subtle and intangible spirit or character, and that the sovereign task of art is to find and reveal that soul through its veil of flesh. Michelangelo took from Signorelli this idolatry of anatomy, this loss of the end in the means, and in the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel he repeated on a larger scale the physiological frenzy of the Orvieto frescoes; but on the ceiling of that same chapel, and in his sculpture, he used the body as the voice of the soul. In Signorelli painting passed at one step from the terrors and tenderness of medieval art to the strained and soulless exaggerations of baroque.

III. SIENA AND SODOMA

In the fourteenth century Siena had almost kept pace with Florence in commerce, government, and art. In the fifteenth she exhausted herself with such fanatical factional violence as no other city in Europe could match. Five parties—monti, hills, the Sienese called them—ruled the city in turn; each in turn was overthrown by revolution, and its more influential members, sometimes numbering thousands, were exiled. We may judge the bitterness of this strife from the oath that two of the factions swore to end it (1494). An awed eyewitness describes them as gathering solemnly at dead of night, in separate aisles, in their vast and dimly lit cathedral.

The conditions of the peace were read, which took up eight pages, together with an oath of the most horrible sort, full of maledictions, imprecations, excommunications, invocations of evil, confiscations of goods, and so many other woes that to hear it was a terror; even in the hour of death no sacrament should save, but should rather add to the damnation of, those who should break the conditions; so that I… believe that never was made or heard a more awful or horrible oath. Then the notaries, on either side of the altar, wrote down the names of all the citizens, who swore upon the crucifix, of which there was one on each side; and every couple of the one or other faction kissed, and the church bells rang, and Te Deum laudamus was sung with the organs and the choir while the oath was being sworn.⁵

From this turmoil a dominant family emerged, the Petrucci. In 1497 Pandolfo Petrucci made himself dictator, took the title il Magnifico, and proposed to give Siena the order, peace, and gentlemanly autocracy that had been the fortune of Florence under the Medici. Pandolfo was clever, and always landed on his feet after any crisis, even eluding the vengeance of Caesar Borgia; he patronized art with some discrimination; but he so often resorted to secret assassination that his death (1512) was celebrated with universal acclaim. In 1525 the desperate city paid the Emperor Charles V 15,000 ducats to take it under his protection.

In the lucid intervals of peace Sienese art had its final fling. Antonio Barile continued the medieval tradition of the wondrous carving of wood. Lorenzo di Mariano built in the church of Fontegiusta a high altar of classic beauty. Iacopo della Quercia took his cognomen from a village in Siena’s hinterland. His early sculptures were financed by Orlando Malevolti, who thus belied his name of Evil Faces. When Orlando was banished for taking the losing side in politics, Iacopo left Siena for Lucca (1390), where he designed a stately tomb for Ilaria del Carretto. After competing unsuccessfully against Donatello and Brunellesco in Florence, he went on to Bologna, and carved over and alongside the portal of San Petronio marble statues and reliefs which are among the finest sculptures of the Renaissance (1425–8). Michelangelo saw them there seventy years later, admired the vigor of the nude and virile figures, and found in them for a time inspiration and stimulus. Returning to Siena, Iacopo spent much of the next ten years on his masterpiece, the Fonte Gaia. On the base of this Gay Fountain he cut in marble a relief of the Virgin as the official sovereign of the city; around her he represented the Seven Cardinal Virtues; for good measure he added scenes from the Old Testament, and filled the surviving spaces with children and animals—all with a power of conception and execution that presaged Michelangelo. For this work Siena renamed him Iacopo della Fonte, and paid him 2200 crowns ($55,000?). He died at sixty-four, exhausted by his art and mourned by the citizens.

Through most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the proud city engaged a hundred artists, of any provenance, to make its cathedral the architectural jewel of Italy. From 1413 to 1423 Domenico del Coro, a master of intarsia, was superintendent of the cathedral work; he and Matteo di Giovanni and Domenico Beccafumi and Pinturicchio and many others inlaid the floor of the great shrine with marble marquetry picturing episodes from Scripture, and making this the most remarkable church pavement in the world. Antonio Federighi carved for the cathedral two handsome baptismal fonts, and Lorenzo Vecchietta cast for it a dazzling tabernacle in bronze. Sano di Matteo raised the Loggia della Mercanzia in the Campo (1417–38), and Vecchietta and Federighi faced its pillars with harmonious statuary. The fourteenth century saw a dozen famous palaces take form—the Salimbeni, the Buonsignori, the Saracini, the Grottanelli… and about 1470 Bernardo Rossellino supplied plans for the Florentine style palace of the Piccolomini family. Andrea Bregno designed for the Piccolomini an altar in the cathedral (1481); and Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini built, as an adjunct to the duomo, a library (1495) to house the books and manuscripts bequeathed to him by his uncle Pius II. Lorenzo di Mariano gave the library one of the handsomest portals in Italy; and Pinturicchio and his aides (1503–8) painted on the walls, within superb architectural frames, delightful frescoes picturing scenes in the life of the scholar Pope.

Siena in the fifteenth century was rich in painters of secondary excellence. Taddeo Bartoli, Domenico di Bartolo, Lorenzo di Pietro called Vecchietta, Stefano di Giovanni called Sassetta, Sani di Pietro, Matteo di Giovanni, Francesco di Giorgio—all continued the strong religious tradition of Sienese art, painting devout themes and somber saints, often in stiff and cramping polyptychs, as if resolved to prolong the Middle Ages forever. Sassetta, recently restored to fame by a passing whim of critical opinion, painted in simple line and color a charming procession of Magi and attendants moving sedately through mountain passes to the crib of Christ; he described in a graceful triptych the birth of the Virgin; celebrated the wedding of St. Francis to poverty; and died in 1450, “stabbed through and through by the sharp southwest wind.”^5a

Only toward the end of the century did Siena produce an artist whose name, for good or evil, rang through Italy. His real name was Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, but his ribald contemporaries rechristened him Sodoma because he was so candid a catamite. He accepted the cognomen with good humor as a title that many deserved but failed to obtain. Born at Vercelli (1477), he moved to Milan, and may have learned painting and pederasty from Leonardo. He put a Vincian smile on his Brera Madonna, and copied Leonardo’s Leda so well that for centuries his imitation was taken for the Master’s original. Migrating to Siena after Lodovico’s fall, he developed a style of his own, picturing Christian subjects with a pagan joy in the human form. Perhaps it was during this first stay at Siena that Bazzi painted a powerful Christ at the Column— about to be scourged, yet physically perfect. For the monks of Monte Oliveto Maggiore he told the story of St. Benedict in a series of frescoes, some carelessly done, some so seductively beautiful that the abbot insisted, before paying Sodoma, that the nude figures should be prefaced with clothing to preserve peace of mind in the monastery.⁶

When the banker Agostino Chigi visited his native Siena in 1507 he took a fancy to Sodoma’s work, and invited him to Rome. Pope Julius II set the artist to work painting one of the rooms of Nicholas V in the Vatican, but Sodoma spent so much time living up to his name that the old Pope soon turned him out. Raphael replaced him, and Sodoma, in a modest moment, studied the young master’s style, and absorbed something of his smooth finish and delicate grace. Chigi rescued Sodoma by engaging him to paint in the Villa Chigi the story of Alexander and Roxana, and soon Leo X, succeeding Julius, restored Sodoma to papal favor. Giovanni painted for the jolly Pope a nude Lucretia stabbing herself to death; Leo rewarded him well, and made him a Cavalier of the Order of Christ.

Returning to Siena with these laurels, Sodoma received numerous commissions from clergy and laity. Though apparently a skeptic, he painted Madonnas almost as lovely as Raphael’s. The martyrdom of St. Sebastian was a subject especially to his taste; and his rendering of the theme in the Pitti Palace has never been excelled. In the church of San Domenico at Siena he pictured St. Catherine fainting, so realistically that Baldassare Peruzzi pronounced the painting incomparable in its kind. While engaged on these religious subjects, Sodoma scandalized Siena with what Vasari calls his “bestial pursuits.”

His manner of life was licentious and dishonorable; and as he always had boys and beardless youths about him, of whom he was inordinately fond, this earned him the name of Sodoma. Instead of feeling shame, he gloried in it, writing verses about it, and singing them to the accompaniment of the lute. He loved to fill his house with all kinds of curious animals: badgers, squirrels, apes, catamounts, dwarf asses, Barbary race horses, Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, turtle doves, and similar creatures.… In addition to these he had a raven which he had taught to speak so well that it imitated his voice, especially in answering the door, and many mistook it for its master. The other animals were so tame that they were always about him, with their strange gambols, so that his house resembled a veritable Noah’s ark.⁷

He married a woman of good family; but after giving him one child she left him. Having worn out his welcome and his income in Siena, he went to Volterra, Pisa, and Lucca (1541–2), seeking new patrons. When these too ran out, Sodoma went back to Siena, shared his poverty for seven years with his animals, and died at seventy-two. He had accomplished in art all that a skilled hand could do without a deepened soul to guide it.

The man who superseded him at Siena was Domenico Beccafumi. When Perugino came there in 1508 Domenico studied his style. When Perugino left, Domenico sought further instruction in Rome, familiarized himself with the remains of classic art, and sought the secrets of Raphael and Michelangelo. In Siena again, he first imitated Sodoma, then rivaled him. The Signory asked him to decorate the Sala del Consistorio; he painted its walls during six laborious years (1529–35) with scenes from Roman history; the result was technically excellent, spiritually dead.

When Beccafumi died (1551) the Sienese Renaissance was finished. Baldassare Peruzzi was of Siena, but left it for Rome. Siena fell back into the arms of the Virgin, and adjusted itself without discomfort to the Counter Reformation. To this day it is contentedly orthodox, and lures tired or curious spirits with its simple piety, its picturesque annual palio or tournament of races (from 1659), and its precious immunity to modernity.

IV. UMBRIA AND THE BAGLIONI

Hemmed in by Tuscany on the west, Latium on the south, and the Marches on the north and east, mountainous Umbria lifts up, here and there, the cities of Terni, Spoleto, Assisi, Foligno, Perugia, Gubbio. We preface them here with Fabriano—across the border in the Marches—because Gentile da Fabriano was a prelude to the Umbrian school.

Gentile is an obscure but dominating figure: painting medieval pictures in Gubbio and Perugia and the Marches, feeling vaguely the influence of the early Sienese painters, and slowly maturing to such prominence that Pandolfo Malatesta, says a quite incredible tradition, paid him 14,000 ducats to fresco the chapel of the Broletto in Brescia (c. 1410).⁸ Some ten years later the Venetian Senate commissioned him to paint a battle scene in the Hall of the Great Council; Gentile Bellini seems to have been among his pupils at that time. We find him next in Florence, painting for the church of Santa Trinità an Adoration of the Magi (1423) which even the proud Florentines acclaimed as a masterpiece. It is still preserved in the Uffizi: a bright and picturesque cavalcade of kings and retinues, stately horses, musing cattle, squatting monkeys, alert dogs, a lovely Mary, all compellingly focused upon a charming Infant who places an explorative hand upon the bald head of kneeling royalty; it is a picture admirable in gay color and flowing line, but almost primitively innocent of perspective and foreshortening. Pope Martin V called Gentile to Rome, where the artist deposited some frescoes in San Giovanni Laterano; they have disappeared, but we may surmise their quality from the enthusiasm of Rogier van der Weyden, who, on seeing them, pronounced Gentile the greatest painter in Italy.⁹ In the church of Santa Maria Nuova Gentile painted other lost frescoes, one of which led Michelangelo to say to Vasari, “he had a hand like his name.”¹⁰ Gentile died in Rome in 1427, at the height of his renown.

His career is evidence that Umbria, to which he culturally belonged, was generating its own geniuses and style in art. By and large, however, the Umbrian painters took their lead from Siena, and continued the religious mood without a break from Duccio to Perugino and the early Raphael. Assisi was the spiritual source of Umbrian art. The churches and legends of St. Francis disseminated through the neighboring provinces a devotion that dominated painting as well as architecture, and discountenanced the pagan or secular themes that were elsewhere invading Italian art. Portraits were seldom asked of Umbrian painters, but private individuals, sometimes using the savings of a lifetime, commissioned an artist, usually local, to paint a Madonna or a Holy Family for their favorite chapel; and there was hardly a church so poor but it could raise funds for such a symbol of hopeful piety and community pride. So Gubbio had her own painter, Ottaviano Nelli, and Foligno had Niccolò di Liberatore, and Perugia boasted Bonfigli, Perugino, and Pinturicchio.

Perugia was the oldest, largest, richest, and most violent of the Umbrian towns. Placed sixteen hundred feet high on an almost inaccessible summit, it commanded a spacious view of the surrounding country; the site was so favorable for defense that the Etruscans built—or inherited—a city there before the foundation of Rome. Long claimed by the popes as one of the Papal States, Perugia declared itself independent in 1375, and enjoyed over a century of passionate factionalism surpassed only by Siena. Two wealthy families fought for control of the city—its commerce, its government, its benefices, its 40,000 souls. The Oddi and the Baglioni murdered one another by stealth or openly in the streets; their conflicts fertilized with blood the plain that smiled beneath their towers. The Baglioni were noted for their handsome faces and physiques, their courage and their ferocity. In the heart of pious Umbria they scorned the Church, and gave themselves pagan names—Ercole, Troilo, Ascanio, Annibale, Atalanta, Penelope, Lavinia, Zenobia. In 1445 the Baglioni repelled an attempt of the Oddi to seize Perugia; thereafter they ruled the city as despots, though formally acknowledging it to be a papal fief. Let Perugia’s own historian, Francesco Matarazzo, describe the Baglioni government:

From the day the Oddi were expelled, our city went from bad to worse. All the young men followed the trade of arms. Their lives were disorderly, and every day divers excesses were divulged, and the city had lost all reason and justice. Every man administered right unto himself, by his own authority and with royal hand. The pope sent many legates, if so be the city could be brought to order. But all who came went back in dread of being hewn to pieces; for the Baglioni threatened to throw some from the windows of the palace, so that no cardinal or other legate durst approach Perugia unless he were their friend. And the city was brought to such misery that the most lawless men were most prized; and those who had slain two or three men walked as they pleased through the palace, and went with sword or poignard to speak to the podesta and other magistrates. Every man of worth was trodden down by bravos whom the nobles favored, nor could a citizen call his property his own. The nobles robbed first one and then another of goods and land. All offices were sold or else suppressed; and taxes and extortions were so grievous that everyone cried out.¹¹

What can be done, a cardinal asked of Pope Alexander VI, with “these demons who have no fear of holy water”?¹²

Having disposed of the Oddi, the Baglioni divided into new factions, and fought one of the bloodiest feuds of the Renaissance. Atalanta Baglioni, being left a widow through the assassination of her husband, consoled herself with the beauty of her son Grifonetto, whom Matarazzo describes as another Ganymede. Her happiness seemed fully restored when he married Zenobia Sforza, whose beauty matched his own. But a minor branch of the Baglioni plotted to overthrow the ruling branch—Astorre, Guido, Simonetto, and Gianpaolo. Valuing Grifonetto’s bravery, the conspirators won him to their plan by deluding him into the belief that Gianpaolo had seduced his young wife. One night in the year 1500, when the dominant Baglioni families had left their castles and assembled in Perugia for the wedding of Astorre and Lavinia, the conspirators attacked them in their beds, and killed all but one of them. Gianpaolo escaped by clambering over roofs, hiding through the night with some frightened university students, disguising himself in a scholastic gown, and so passing out through the city gates at dawn. Atalanta, horrified to learn that her son had shared in these murders, drove him from her presence with curses. The assassins dispersed, leaving Grifonetto homeless and alone in the city. On the morrow Gianpaolo, with an armed escort, re-entered Perugia, and came upon Grifonetto in a public square. He wished to spare the youth, but the soldiers wounded Grifonetto mortally before Gianpaolo could restrain them. Atalanta and Zenobia came from their concealment to find son and husband dying in the street. Atalanta knelt by him, took back her curses, gave him her blessing, and asked him to forgive those who had slain him. Then, says Matarazzo, “the noble youth extended his right hand to his young mother, pressing her white hand, and forthwith he breathed his soul from his beautiful body.”¹³ Perugino and Raphael were painting in Perugia at this time.

Gianpaolo had a hundred men massacred, in the streets or in the cathedral, on suspicion of complicity in the plot; he had the Palazzo Comunale decorated with the heads of the slain, and with their portraits hung head downward; here was a substantial commission for Perugian art. Thereafter he ruled the city unchallenged until he yielded to Julius II (1506), and consented to govern as vicar of the popes. But he did not know how to govern except by assassination. In 1520 Leo X, tired of his crimes, lured him to Rome with a safe-conduct, and had him beheaded in the Castel Sant’ Angelo; this was one form of Renaissance diplomacy. Other Baglioni maintained themselves in power for a time; but after Malatesta Baglioni had murdered a papal legate Pope Paul III sent forces to take final possession of the city as an appanage of the Church (1534).

V. PERUGINO

Under this cloak-and-dagger government literature and art prospered surprisingly; the same passionate temperament that worshiped the Virgin, flouted cardinals, and murdered close kin could feel the fever of creative writing, or steel itself to the discipline of art. Matarazzo’s Cronaca della Città di Perugia, describing the zenith of the Baglioni, is one of the most vivid literary products of the Renaissance. Commerce, before the Baglioni came to power, had accumulated enough wealth to build the massive Gothic Palazzo Comunale (1280–1333), and to adorn it and the adjoining Collegio del Cambio (1452–6)—Chamber of Commerce—with some of the finest art in Italy. The Collegio had a judicial throne and a moneychangers’ bench so exquisitely carved that no one could reproach the businessmen of Perugia with lack of taste. The church of San Domenico had choir stalls (1476) almost as elegant, and a celebrated chapel of the Rosary designed by Agostino di Duccio. Agostino hesitated between sculpture and architecture; usually he combined them, as in the oratorio or prayer chapel of San Bernardino (1461), where he covered almost the entire façade with statues, reliefs, arabesques, and other ornament. An unadorned surface always aroused an Italian artist.

At least fifteen painters were busy meeting such challenges in Perugia. Their leader in Perugino’s youth was Benedetto Bonfigli. Apparently through association with Domenico Veneziano or Piero della Francesca, or through studying the frescoes painted by Benozzo Gozzoli at Montefalco, Benedetto learned something of the new techniques that Masolino, Masaccio, Uccello, and others had developed in Florence. When he painted frescoes for the Palazzo Comunale he displayed a knowledge of perspective new among Umbrian artists, though his figures borrowed stereotyped faces and were shrouded in shapeless drapery. A younger rival, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, equaled Benedetto in dullness of color, surpassed him in delicacy of sentiment and occasional grace. Both Bonfigli and Fiorenzo, in Perugian tradition, taught the two masters who brought Umbrian painting to its culmination.

Bernardino Betti, called Pinturicchio, learned the arts of tempera and fresco from Fiorenzo, but never adopted the oil technique that came to Perugino from the Florentines. In 1481, aged twenty-seven, he accompanied Perugino to Rome, and covered a panel in the Sistine Chapel with a lifeless Baptism of Christ. But he improved; and when Innocent VIII bade him decorate a loggia of the Belvedere Palace he struck out on a new line by painting views of Genoa, Milan, Florence, Venice, Naples, and Rome. His drawing was imperfect, but there was a pleasant plein-air quality in his painting that attracted Alexander VI. That genial Borgia, wishing to adorn his own chambers in the Vatican, commissioned Pinturicchio and some aides to paint the walls and ceilings with frescoes of prophets, sibyls, musicians, scientists, saints, Madonnas, and perhaps a mistress. These again so pleased the Pope that when an apartment was designed for his use in the Castel Sant’ Angelo he engaged the artist to portray there some episodes in the Pope’s conflict with Charles VIII (1495). By this time Perugia had heard of Pinturicchio’s fame; it called him home; and the church of Santa Maria de’ Fossi asked him for an altarpiece. He responded with a Virgin, Child, and St. John that satisfied all but the professionals. In Siena, as we have seen, he made the Piccolomini Library radiant with a vivid portrayal of the life and legend of Pius II; and despite many technical faults, this pictorial narrative makes that room one of the most delightful remains of Renaissance art. After spending five years on this work Pinturicchio went to Rome, and shared in the humiliation of Raphael’s success. Thereafter he faded from the artistic scene, perhaps through illness, perhaps because Perugino and Raphael so obviously excelled him. A doubtful story reports that he died of hunger in Siena, aged fifty-nine (1513).¹⁴

Pietro Perugino received that surname because he made Perugia his home; Perugia itself always called him by his family name, Vannucci. Born in nearby Città della Pieve (1446), he was sent to Perugia at the age of nine and was there apprenticed to an artist of uncertain identity. According to Vasari his teacher ranked the painters of Florence as the best in Italy, and advised the youth to go and study there. Pietro went, carefully copied the frescoes of Masaccio, and enrolled as an apprentice or assistant to Verrocchio. Leonardo entered Verrocchio’s studio about 1468; very probably Perugino met him, and, though six years older, did not disdain to learn from him some qualities of finish and grace, and a better handling of perspective, coloring, and oils. These skills already appear in Perugino’s St. Sebastian (Louvre), together with a pretty architectural setting, and a landscape as placid as the face of the perforated saint. After leaving Verrocchio, Perugino returned to the Umbrian style of demure and tender Madonnas; and through him the harder and more realistic traditions of Florentine painting may have been softened into the warmer idealism of Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto.

By 1481 Perugino, now thirty-five, had won sufficient repute to be invited by Sixtus IV to Rome. In the Sistine Chapel he painted several frescoes, of which the finest survivor is Christ Giving the Keys to Peter. It is too formal and conventional in its symmetrical composition; but here, for the first time in painting, the air, with its subtle gradations of light, becomes a distinct and almost palpable element in the picture; the drapery, so stereotyped in Bonfigli, is here tucked and wrinkled into life; and a few of the faces are finished to striking individuality—Jesus, Peter, Signorelli, and, not least, the large, rotund, sensual, matter-of-fact countenance of Perugino himself, transformed for the occasion into a disciple of Christ.

In 1486 Perugino was again in Florence, for the archives of the city record his arrest for criminal assault. He and a friend disguised themselves, and, armed with clubs, waited in the dark of a December night to waylay some chosen enemy. They were detected before they could commit any injury. The friend was banished, Perugino was fined ten florins.¹⁵ After another interlude in Rome he set up a bottega in Florence (1492), hired assistants, and began to turn out pictures, not always carefully finished, for customers near and far. For the Gesuati brotherhood he made a Pietà whose melancholy Virgin and pensive Magdalen were to be repeated by him and his aides in a hundred variations for any prosperous institution or individual. A Madonna and Saints found its way to Vienna, another to Cremona, another to Fano, another—the Madonna in Glory—to Perugia, another to the Vatican; another is in the Uffizi. Rivals charged him with turning his studio into a factory; they thought it scandalous that he should grow so rich and fat. He smiled and raised his prices. When Venice invited him to paint two panels in the Ducal Palace, offering 400 ducats ($5000?), he demanded 800; and when these were not forthcoming he remained in Florence. He clung to cash, and let the credit go. He made no pretense of despising wealth; he was resolved not to starve when his brush began to tremble; he bought property in Florence and Perugia, and was bound to land on at least one foot after any overturn. His self-portrait in the Cambio at Perugia (1500) is a remarkably honest confession. A pudgy face, large nose, hair flowing carelessly from under a close red cap, eyes quiet but penetrating, lips slightly contemptuous, heavy neck and powerful frame: here was a man hard to deceive, ready for battle, sure of himself, and holding no high opinion of the human race. “He was not a religious man,” says Vasari, “and would never believe in the immortality of the soul.”¹⁶

His skepticism and commercialism did not prevent him from occasional generosity,¹⁷ or from producing some of the tenderest devotional pictures of the Renaissance. He painted a lovable Madonna for the Certosa di Pavia (now in London); and the Magdalen attributed to him in the Louvre is so fair a sinner that one would not need divine mercy to forgive her. For the nuns of Santa Clara at Florence he painted an Entombment in which the women had a rare beauty of features, and the faces of the old men summarized their lives, and the lines of composition met on the bloodless corpse of Christ, and a landscape of slender trees on rocky slopes, and distant town on a quiet bay, shed an atmosphere of calm over the scene of death and grief. The man could paint as well as sell.

His success in Florence finally convinced the Perugians of his worth. When the merchants of the Cambio decided to adorn their Collegio they emptied their pockets with tardy largesse and offered the assignment to Pietro Vannucci. Following the mood of the age and the suggestions of a local scholar, they asked that their hall of audience should be decorated with a medley of Christian and pagan subjects: on the ceiling the seven planets and the signs of the zodiac; on one wall a Nativity and a Transfiguration; on another the Eternal Father, the prophets, and six pagan sibyls, prefiguring Michelangelo’s; and on another wall the four classical virtues, each illustrated by pagan heroes: Prudence by Numa, Socrates, and Fabius; Justice by Pittacus, Furius, and Trajan, Fortitude by Lucius, Leonidas, and Horatius Codes; Temperance by Pericles, Cincinnatus, and Scipio. All this, it seems, was accomplished by Perugino and his aides—including Raphael—in the one year 1500, the very year when the feuds of the Baglioni incarnadined the streets of Perugia. When the blood had been washed away the citizens could stream in to see the new beauty of the Cambio. Perhaps they found the pagan worthies a bit wooden, and wished that Perugino had shown them not posing but engaged in some action that would have given them life. But the David was majestic, the Erythrean Sibyl almost as gracious as a Raphael Madonna, and the Eternal Father a remarkably good conception for an atheist. On those walls, in his sixtieth year, Perugino reached the fullness of his powers. In 1501 the grateful city made him a municipal prior.

From that zenith he rapidly declined. In 1502 he painted a Marriage of the Virgin, which Raphael imitated two years later in the Sposalizio. About 1503 he returned to Florence. He was not pleased to find the city in much ado about Michelangelo’s David; he was among the artists summoned to consider where the figure should be placed, and his opinion was overruled by the sculptor himself. The two men, meeting shortly afterward, traded insults; Michelangelo, then a lad of twenty-nine, called Perugino a blockhead, and informed him that his art was “antiquated and absurd.”¹⁸ Perugino sued him for libel, and won nothing but ridicule. In 1505 he agreed to finish for the Annunziata a Deposition that the late Filippino Lippi had begun, and to add to it an Assumption of the Virgin. He completed Filippino’s work with skill and dispatch; but in the Assumption he repeated so many figures that he had used in previous pictures that the artists of Florence (still jealous of his quondam fees) condemned him for dishonesty and sloth. He left the city in anger, and took up his residence in Perugia.

The inevitable defeat of age by youth was repeated when he accepted an invitation from Julius II to decorate a room in the Vatican (1507). When he had made some progress his former pupil, Raphael, appeared, and swept everything before him. Perugino left Rome with heavy heart. Back in Perugia, he prospected for commissions, and kept on working to the end. He began (1514) and apparently finished (1520) a complex altarpiece for the church of Sant’ Agostino, recounting again the story of Christ. For the church of the Madonna delle Lagrime at Trevi he painted (1521) an Adoration Of the Magi which, despite some palsied drawing, is an astonishing product for a man of seventy-five. In 1523, while he was painting at neighboring Fontignano, he fell a victim to the plague, or perhaps died of old age and weariness. According to tradition he refused the last sacraments, saying that he preferred to see what would happen, in the other world, to an obstinately impenitent soul.¹⁹ He was buried in unhallowed ground.²⁰

Everyone knows the defects of Perugino’s painting—the exaggerated sentiment, the dolorous and artificial piety, the stereotyped oval faces and ribboned hair, the heads regularly bent forward in modesty, even those of stern Cato and bold Leonidas. Europe and America can show a hundred Peruginos of this repetitious type; the master was more fertile than inventive. His pictures want action and vitality; they reflect the needs of Umbrian devotion rather than the realities and significance of life. And yet there is much in them that can please the soul mature enough to surmount its sophistication: the living quality of their light, the modest loveliness of their women, the bearded majesty of their old men, the soft and quiet colors, the gracious landscapes covering all tragedies with peace.

When Perugino returned to Perugia in 1499, after long stays in Florence, he brought into Umbrian painting the technical skill, without the critical faculty, of the Florentines. When he died he had faithfully passed down those skills to his associates and pupils—to Pinturicchio, Francesco Ubertino “II Bachiacca,” Giovanni di Pietro “Lo Spagna,” and Raphael. The master had served his purpose: he had enriched and transmitted his heritage, and had trained a pupil to surpass him. Raphael is Perugino faultless, perfected, and complete.

CHAPTER IX

Mantua

1378–1540

I. VITTORINO DA FELTRE

MANTUA was fortunate: throughout the Renaissance it had but one ruling family, and was spared the turmoil of revolutions, court murders, and coups d’état. When Luigi Gonzaga became capitano del popolo (1328) the ascendancy of his house was so well established that he could occasionally leave his capital and hire himself out to other cities as general—a custom followed by his successors through several generations. His great-great-grandson Gianfrancesco I was raised to the dignity of marquis (1432) by their theoretical sovereign the Emperor Sigismund, and this title became hereditary in the Gonzaga family until it was exchanged for the still loftier title of duke (1530). Gian was a good ruler. He drained marshes, promoted agriculture and industry, supported art, and brought to Mantua, to tutor his children, one of the noblest figures in the history of education.

Vittorino took his surname from his native town of Feltre, in northeast Italy. Catching the itch for classical erudition that swept like an epidemic through the Italy of the fifteenth century, he went to Padua and studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, and rhetoric under divers masters; he paid one of them by serving as his domestic. After being graduated from the university he opened a school for boys. He chose his pupils by their talent and eagerness rather than by their pedigree or funds; he made the richer students pay according to their means, and charged the poor students nothing. He tolerated no idlers, exacted hard work, and maintained strict discipline. As this proved difficult in the roistering atmosphere of a university town, Vittorino transferred his school to Venice (1423). In 1425 he accepted the invitation of Gianfrancesco to come to Mantua and teach a selected group of boys and girls. These included four sons and a daughter of the Marquis, a daughter of Francesco Sforza, and some other scions of Italian ruling families.

The Marquis provided for the school a villa known as Casa Zojosa, or Joyous House. Vittorino turned it into a semimonastic establishment, in which he and his students lived simply, ate sensibly, and devoted themselves to the classic ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body. Vittorino himself was an athlete as well as a scholar, an expert fencer and horseman, so at home in weather that he wore similar clothing winter and summer, and walked in nothing but sandals in the severest cold. Inclined to sensuality and anger, he controlled his flesh by periodic fasting and by flogging himself every day; his contemporaries believed that he remained a virgin till his death.

To chasten the instincts and form sound character in his pupils, he first of all required of them a regularity of religious devotions, and instilled in them a strong religious feeling. He sternly rebuked all profanity, obscenity, or vulgarity of language, punished any lapse into angry dispute, and made lying almost a capital crime. However, he did not have to be told, as Lorenzo’s wife warned Politian, that he was educating princes who might some day face the tasks of administration or war. To make their bodies healthy and strong he trained them in gymnastics of many kinds, in running, riding, leaping, wrestling, fencing, and military exercises; he accustomed them to bear hardships without injury or complaint; though medieval in his ethics, he rejected the medieval scorn of the body, and recognized with the Greeks the role of physical health in the rounded excellence of man. And as he formed the bodies of his pupils with athletics and toil, and their characters with religion and discipline, so he trained their taste with instruction in painting and music, and their minds with mathematics, Latin, Greek, and the ancient classics; he hoped to unite in his pupils the virtues of Christian conduct with the sharp clarity of the pagan intellect and the esthetic sensitivity of Renaissance men. The Renaissance ideal of the complete man —l’uomo universale—health of body, strength of character, wealth of mind—reached its first formulation in Vittorino da Feltre.

The fame of his methods spread through Italy and beyond. Many visitors came to Mantua to see not its Marquis but its pedagogue. Fathers begged from Gianfrancesco the privilege of enrolling their sons in this “School of Princes.” He agreed, and such later notables as Federigo of Urbino, Francesco da Castiglione, and Taddeo Manfredi came under Vittorino’s formative hand. The most promising students enjoyed the master’s personal attention; they lodged with him under his own roof, and received the priceless instruction of daily contact with integrity and intelligence. Vittorino insisted that poor but qualified applicants should also be admitted; he persuaded the Marquis to provide funds, facilities, and assistant teachers for the education and maintenance of sixty poor scholars at a time; and when such funds did not suffice, Vittorino made up the difference out of his modest means. When he died (1446) it was found that he had not left enough to pay for his funeral.

Lodovico Gonzaga, who succeeded Gianfrancesco as marquis of Mantua (1444), was a credit to his teacher. When Vittorino took him in hand Lodovico was a lad of eleven years, fat and indolent. Vittorino taught him to control his appetite and to make himself fit for all the tasks of government. Lodovico performed these duties well, and left his state flourishing at his death. Like a true Renaissance prince, he used part of his wealth to nourish literature and art. He collected an excellent library, largely of Latin classics; he employed miniaturists to illuminate the Aeneid and The Divine Comedy; he established the first printing press in Mantua. Politian, Pico della Mirandola, Filelfo, Guarino da Verona, Platina were among the humanists who at one time or another accepted his bounty and lived at his court.¹ At his invitation Leon Battista Alberti came from Florence and designed the Incoronata Chapel in the cathedral, and the churches of Sant’ Andrea and San Sebastiano. Donatello came too, and made a bronze bust of Lodovico. And in 1460 the Marquis brought into his service one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance.

II. ANDREA MANTEGNA: 1431–1506

He was born at Isola di Cartura, near Padua, thirteen years before Botticelli; we must here retrace our steps in time if we are to appreciate Mantegna’s achievement. He was enrolled in the painters’ guild in Padua when he was but ten years old. Francesco Squarcione was then the most famous teacher of painting not only in Padua but in Italy. Andrea entered his school, and progressed so rapidly that Squarcione took him into his home and adopted him as a son. Inspired by the humanists, Squarcione collected into his studio all the significant remains of classic sculpture and architecture that he could appropriate and transport, and bade his students copy them over and over again as models of strong, restrained, and harmonious design. Mantegna obeyed with enthusiasm; he fell in love with Roman antiquity, idealized its heroes, and so admired its art that half his pictures have Roman architectural backgrounds, and half his figures, of whatever nation or time, bear a Roman stamp and garb. His art profited and suffered through this youthful infatuation; he learned from these exemplars a majestic dignity and a stern purity of design, but he never fully emancipated his painting from the petrified calm of sculptural forms. When Donatello came to Padua Mantegna, still a lad of twelve, felt again the influence of sculpture, together with a powerful impulse toward realism. At the same time he was fascinated by the new science of perspective, so recently developed in Florence by Masolino, Uccello, and Masaccio; Andrea studied all its rules, and shocked his contemporaries with fore-shortenings ungracious in their truth.

In 1448 Squarcione received a commission to paint frescoes in the church of the Eremitani friars at Padua. He assigned the work to two favorite pupils: Niccolò Pizzolo and Mantegna. Niccolò finished one panel in excellent style, then lost his life in a brawl. Andrea, now seventeen, continued the work, and the eight panels that he painted in the next seven years made him a name from one end of Italy to the other. The themes were medieval, the treatment was revolutionary: the backgrounds of classical architecture were carefully detailed, the virile physique and gleaming armor of Roman soldiers were mingled with the somber features of Christian saints; paganism and Christianity were more vividly integrated in these frescoes than in all the pages of the humanists. Drawing reached here a new accuracy and grace; perspective appeared in painstaking perfection. Rarely had painting seen a figure as splendid in form and bearing as that of the soldier guarding the saint before the Roman judge; or anything so grimly realistic as the executioner raising his club to beat out the martyr’s brains. Artists came from distant cities to study the technique of the amazing Paduan youth.—All but two of these frescoes were destroyed in the Second World War.

Iacopo Bellini, himself a painter of renown, and already (in 1454) father of painters fated to eclipse his fame, saw these panels in the making, took a fancy to Andrea, and offered him his daughter in marriage. Mantegna accepted. Squarcione opposed the union, and punished Mantegna’s flight from his adoptive home by condemning the Eremitani frescoes as stiff and pallid imitations of marble antiques. More remarkable, the Bellinis succeeded in conveying to Andrea a hint that there was some truth in the charge.² Most remarkable, the hot-tempered artist accepted the criticism, and profited from it by turning from the study of statuary to the intent observation of life in all its actuality and details. In the last two panels of the Eremitani series he included ten portraits of contemporaries; and one, squat and fat, was Squarcione.

Canceling his contract with his teacher, Mantegna was now free to accept some of the invitations that besieged him. Lodovico Gonzaga offered him a commission in Mantua (1456); Andrea held him off for four years, and meanwhile, in Verona, he painted for the church of San Zeno a polyptych that to this day makes that noble edifice a goal of pilgrimage. In the central panel, amid a stately framework of Roman columns, cornice, and pediment, the Virgin holds her Child, while angel musicians and choristers envelop them; beneath this a powerful Crucifixion shows Roman soldiers throwing dice for the garments of Christ; and at the left the Garden of Olives presents a rugged landscape that Leonardo may have studied for his Virgin of the Rocks. This polyptych is one of the great paintings of the Renaissance.*

After three years in Verona Mantegna finally agreed to go to Mantua (1460); and there, except for brief stays in Florence and Bologna, and two years in Rome, he remained till his death. Lodovico gave him a home, fuel, corn, and fifteen ducats ($375) a month. Andrea adorned the palaces, chapels, and villas of three successive marquises. The sole survivors in Mantua of his labors there are the famous frescoes in the Ducal Palace, specifically in the Sala degli Sposi—the Hall of the Betrothed—named and decorated for the engagement of Lodovico’s son Federigo to Margaret of Bavaria. The subject was simply the ruling family—the Marquis, his wife, his children, some courtiers, and Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga welcomed by his father Lodovico on the young prelate’s return from Rome. Here was a gallery of remarkably realistic portraits, among them Mantegna himself, looking older than his forty-three years, with lines in his face and pouches under his eyes.

Lodovico too was aging rapidly, and his last years were dark with troubles. Two of his daughters were deformed; wars consumed his revenues; in 1478 plague so devastated Mantua that economic life almost stopped, state revenues fell, and Mantegna’s salary was one of many that went for a time unpaid. The artist wrote Lodovico a letter of reproach; the Marquis answered with a gentle plea for patience. The plague passed; Lodovico did not survive it. Under his son Federigo (1478–84) Mantegna began, and under Federigo’s son Gianfrancesco (1484–1519) he completed, his finest work, The Triumph of Caesar. These nine pictures, painted in tempera on canvas, were designed for the Corte Vecchia of the Ducal Palace; they were sold to Charles I of England by a needy duke of Mantua, and are now in Hampton Court. The enormous frieze, eighty-eight feet long, depicts a procession of soldiers, priests, captives, slaves, musicians, beggars, elephants, bulls, standards, trophies, and spoils, all escorting Caesar riding on a chariot and crowned by the Goddess of Victory. Here Mantegna returns to his first love, classic Rome; again he paints like a sculptor; nevertheless his figures move with life and action; the eye is drawn along, despite a hundred picturesque details, to the culminating coronation; all the painter’s artistry of composition, drawing, perspective, and meticulous observation enters into the work, and makes it the master’s masterpiece.

During the seven years that elapsed between the undertaking and the completion of The Triumph of Caesar, Mantegna accepted a call from Innocent VIII, and painted (1488–9) several frescoes that vanished in the later vicissitudes of Rome. Complaining of the Pope’s parsimony—while the Pope complained of his impatience—Mantegna returned to Mantua, and rounded out his prolific career with a hundred pictures on religious themes; he was forgetting Caesar and returning to Christ. The most famous and disagreeable of these paintings is the Cristo morto (Brera), the dead Christ lying on His back with His vast foreshortened feet toward the spectator, and looking more like a sleeping condottiere than like an exhausted god.

A final pagan picture came from Mantegna’s old age. In the Parnassus of the Louvre he put aside his usual resolve to capture reality rather than picture beauty; he surrendered himself for a moment to an unmoral mythology, and portrayed a nude Venus throned on Parnassus beside her soldier lover Mars, while at the mountain’s base Apollo and the Muses celebrate her loveliness in dance and song. One of the Muses was probably the Marquis Gianfrancesco’s wife, the peerless Isabella d’Este, now the leading lady in the land.

It was Mantegna’s last great painting. His final years were saddened by ill health, bad temper, and mounting debts. He resented Isabella’s presumption to lay down the precise details of the pictures she asked of him; he retired into an angry solitude, sold most of his art collection, finally sold his house. In 1505 Isabella described him as “tearful and agitated, and with so sunken a face that he seemed to me more dead than alive.”³ A year later he died, aged seventy-five. Over his tomb, in Sant’ Andrea, a bronze bust-perhaps by Mantegna himself—portrayed with angry realism the bitterness and exhaustion of a genius who had used himself up in his art for half a century. Those who desire “immortality” must pay for it with their lives.

III. THE FIRST LADY OF THE WORLD

La prima donna del mondo—so the poet Niccolò da Correggio called Isabella d’Este.⁴ The novelist Bandello considered her “supreme among women”;⁵ and Ariosto did not know which to praise most highly in “the liberal and magnanimous Isabella”—her gracious beauty, her modesty, her wisdom, or her fostering of letters and arts. She possessed most of the accomplishments and charms that made the educated woman of the Renaissance one of the masterpieces of history. She had a wide and varied culture without being an “intellectual” or ceasing to be an attractive woman. She was not extraordinarily beautiful; what men admired in her was her vitality, her high spirits, the keenness of her appreciation, the perfection of her taste. She could ride all day and then dance all night, and remain every moment a queen. She could rule Mantua with a tact and good sense alien to her husband; and in the debility of his later years she held his little state together despite his blunders, his wanderings, and his syphilis. She corresponded on equal terms with the most eminent personalities of her time. Popes and dukes sought her friendship, and rulers came to her court. She subpoenaed nearly every artist to work for her, she inspired poets to sing of her; Bembo, Ariosto, and Bernardo Tasso dedicated works to her, though they knew that her purse was small. She collected books and art with the judgment of a scholar and the discrimination of a connoisseur. Wherever she went she remained the cultural focus and sartorial exemplar of Italy.

She was one of the Estensi—the brilliant family that gave dukes to Ferrara, cardinals to the Church, and a duchess to Milan. Isabella, born in 1474, was a year older than her sister Beatrice. Their father was Ercole I of Ferrara, their mother was Eleonora of Aragon, daughter of King Ferrante I of Naples; they were well equipped with lineage. While Beatrice was sent to Naples to learn vivacity at the court of her grandfather, Isabella was brought up amid the scholars, poets, dramatists, musicians, and artists that were making Ferrara for a time the most brilliant of Italian capitals. At six she was an intellectual prodigy who made diplomats gape; “though I had heard much of her singular intelligence,” wrote Beltramino Cusatro to Marquis Federigo of Mantua in 1480, “I could never have imagined such a thing to be possible.”⁶ Federigo thought she would be a good catch for his son Francesco, and so proposed to her father. Ercole, needing the support of Mantua against Venice, agreed, and Isabella, aged six, found herself engaged to a boy of fourteen. She remained for ten years more at Ferrara, learning how to sew and sing, to write Italian poetry and Latin prose, to play the clavichord and the lute, and to dance with a sprightly grace that seemed to attest invisible wings. Her complexion was clear and fair, her black eyes sparkled, her hair was a mesh of gold. So, at sixteen, she left the haunts of her happy childhood, and became, proudly and seriously, the Marchioness of Mantua.

Gianfrancesco was swarthy, bushy-haired, fond of hunting, impetuous in war and love. In those early years he attended zealously to government, and faithfully maintained Mantegna and several scholars at his court. He fought with more courage than wisdom at Fornovo, and chivalrously or prudently sent to Charles VIII most of the spoils that he had captured in the tent of the fleeing King. He used the soldier’s privilege of promiscuity, and began his infidelities with the first confinement of his wife. Seven years after his marriage he allowed his mistress Teodora to appear in almost regal raiment at a tournament in Brescia, where he rode in the lists. Isabella may have been partly to blame: she became a bit plump, and went on long visits to Ferrara, Urbino, and Milan; but doubtless the Marquis was not inclined to monogamy in any case. Isabella bore with his adventures patiently, took no public notice of them, remained a good wife, gave her husband excellent advice in politics, and supported his interests by her diplomacy and her charm. But in 1506 she wrote to him—then leading papal troops—a few words warm with the hurt she felt: “No interpreter is needed to make me aware that Your Excellency has loved me little for some time past. Since this, however, is a disagreeable subject, I will… say no more.”⁷ Her devotion to art, letters, and friendship was in part an attempt to forget the bitter emptiness of her married life.

There is nothing more pleasant in all the rich diversity of the Renaissance than the tender relations that bound together Isabella, Beatrice, and Isabella’s sister-in-law Elisabetta Gonzaga; and few passages finer in Renaissance literature than the affectionate letters they exchanged. Elisabetta was grave and weak, and often ill; Isabella was merry, witty, brilliant, more interested in literature and art than either Elisabetta or Beatrice; but these differences of character were made complementary by good sense. Elisabetta loved to come to Mantua, and Isabella worried more about her sister-in-law’s health than about her own, and took every measure to make her well. Yet there was a selfishness in Isabella quite absent from Elizabeth. Isabella could ask Caesar Borgia to give her Michelangelo’s Cupid, which Borgia had stolen after seizing Elisabetta’s Urbino. After the fall of Lodovico il Moro, the brother-in-law who had lavished every courtesy upon her, she went to Milan and danced at a ball given by Lodovico’s conqueror, Louis XII; perhaps, however, it was her feminine way of saving Mantua from the resentment aroused in Louis by the injudicious candor of her husband. Her diplomacy accepted the interstate amorality of that time and ours. Otherwise she was a good woman, and there was hardly a man in Italy that would not have been glad to serve her. Bembo wrote to her that he “desired to serve her and please her as if she were pope.”⁸

She spoke Latin better than any other woman of her time, but she never mastered the language. When Aldus Manutius began to print his choice editions of the classics she was among his most enthusiastic customers. She employed scholars to translate Plutarch and Philostratus, and a learned Jew to translate the Psalms from the Hebrew so that she might assure herself of their original magnificence. She collected Christian classics too, and read the Fathers with courage. Probably she treasured books more as a collector than as a reader or a student; she respected Plato, but really preferred the chivalric romances that entertained even the Ariostos of her generation and the Tassos of the next. She loved finery and jewelry more than books and art; even in her later years the women of Italy and France looked to her as the glass of fashion and the queen of taste. It was part of her diplomacy to move ambassadors and cardinals with the combined allure of her person, her dress, her manners, and her mind; they thought they were admiring her erudition or her wisdom when they were relishing her beauty, her costume, or her grace. She was hardly profound, except perhaps in statesmanship. Like practically all her contemporaries she listened to astrologers, and timed her enterprises by the concurrence of the stars. She amused herself with dwarfs, maintained them as part of her entourage, and had six rooms and a chapel built to their measure for them in the Castello. One of these favorites was so short (said a wit) that if it had rained an inch more he would have been drowned. She was fond, too, of dogs and cats, chose them with the finesse of a fancier, and buried them with solemn funerals in which the surviving pets joined with the ladies and gentlemen of the court.

The Castello—or Reggia, or Palazzo Ducale—over which she reigned was a medley of buildings of various dates and authorship, but all in that style of outer fortress and inner palace which raised similar structures in Ferrara, Pavia, and Milan. Some components, like the Palazzo del Capitano, went back to the Buonacolsi rulers in the thirteenth century; the harmonious Castello San Giorgio was a creation of the fourteenth; the Camera degli Sposi was the work of Lodovico Gonzaga and Mantegna in the fifteenth; many rooms were rebuilt in the seventeenth and eighteenth; some, like the sumptuous Sala degli Specchi, or Hall of Mirrors, were redecorated during the rule of Napoleon. All were elegantly fitted out; and the vast congeries of residential chambers, reception halls, and administrative offices looked out on courts, or gardens, or Virgil’s meandering Mincio, or the lakes that bordered Mantua. In this labyrinth Isabella occupied different quarters at different times. In her later years she loved best a little apartment of four rooms (camerini), known as il Studiolo or il Paradiso; here, and in another room called il Grotto, she gathered her books, her objets d’art, and her musical instruments—themselves finished works of art.

Next to her care for the preservation of Mantua’s independence and prosperity, and sometimes above her friendships, the ruling passion of her life was the collection of manuscripts, statues, paintings, majolica, antique marbles, and little products of the goldsmith’s art. She used her friends, and employed special agents, in cities from Milan to Rhodes, to bargain and buy for her, and to be on the alert for “finds.” She haggled because the treasury of her modest state was too narrow for her ideas. Her collection was small, but every item in it stood high in its class. She had statuary by Michelangelo, paintings by Mantegna, Perugino, Francia; not content, she importuned Leonardo da Vinci and Giovanni Bellini for a picture, but they held her off as one who paid more in praise than in cash, and doubtless, too, because she specified too immutably what each picture should represent and contain. In some cases, as when she paid 115 ducats ($2875) for Jan van Eyck’s Passage of the Red Sea, she borrowed heavily to satisfy her eagerness for a masterpiece. She was not generous to Mantegna, but when that ogre of a genius died she persuaded her husband to lure Lorenzo Costa to Mantua with a handsome salary. Costa decorated Gianfrancesco Gonzaga’s favorite retreat, the palace of St. Sebastian, made portraits of the family, and painted a mediocre Madonna for the church of Sant’ Andrea.

In 1524 Giulio Pippi, called Romano, the greatest of Raphael’s pupils, settled at Mantua, and astonished the court with his skill as architect and painter. Almost the entire Ducal Palace was redecorated according to his designs, and by the brushes of himself and his pupils—Francesco Primaticcio, Niccolò dell’ Abbate, and Michelangelo Anselmi. Federigo, Isabella’s son, was ruler now; and since he, like Romano, had acquired at Rome a taste for pagan subjects and decorative nudes, he had the walls and ceilings of several rooms in the Castello painted with inviting pictures of Aurora, Apollo, the Judgment of Paris, the Rape of Helen, and other phases of classic myth. In 1525, on the outskirts of the town, Giulio began to build his most famous work, the Palazzo del Te.* A vast rectangle of one-storied structures, in a simple design of stone blocks and Renaissance windows, surrounds what was once a pleasant garden but is now a neglected waste in the impoverished aftermath of war. The interior is a succession of surprises: rooms tastefully adorned with pilasters, carved cornices, painted spandrels, and coffered vaults; walls, ceilings, and lunettes picturing the story of the Titans and the Olympians, Cupid and Psyche, Venus and Adonis and Mars, Zeus and Olympia, all in a revel of splendid nudes, in the amorous and reckless taste of the later Renaissance. To crown these masterpieces of sexual license and gigantic strife, Primaticcio carved in stucco a grand processional relief of Roman soldiers in the manner of Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar, and almost with the chiseled excellence of Pheidias. When Primaticcio and dell’ Abbate were summoned to Fontainebleau by Francis I they brought to the royal palaces of France this style of decoration—with rosy nudes—which Giulio Romano had brought to Mantua from his work with Raphael in Rome. From the citadel of Christianity pagan art radiated to the Christian world.

The last years of Isabella mingled sweet and bitter in her cup. She helped her invalid husband to govern Mantua. Her diplomacy saved it from falling prey to Caesar Borgia, then to Louis XII, then to Francis I, then to Charles V; one after another she humored, flattered, charmed, when Gianfrancesco or Federigo seemed on the edge of political disaster. Federigo, who succeeded his father in 1519, was an able general and ruler, but he allowed his mistress to displace his mother as ruler of the Mantuan court. Perhaps retreating from this indignity, Isabella went to Rome (1525) to seek a red hat for her son Ercole. Clement VII was noncommittal, but the cardinals welcomed her, made her suite in the Colonna Palace a salon, and kept her there so long that she found herself imprisoned in the palace during the sack of Rome (1527). She escaped with her usual adroitness, won the coveted cardinalate for Ercole, and returned to Mantua in triumph.

In 1529, attractive at fifty-five, she went to the Congress of Bologna, courted Emperor and Pope, helped the lords of Urbino and Ferrara to keep their principalities from being absorbed into the Papal States, and persuaded Charles V to make Federigo a duke. In that same year Titian came to Mantua and painted a famous portrait of her; the fate of this picture is uncertain, but the copy made of it by Rubens shows a woman still in the vigor and love of life. Bembo, visiting her eight years later, was amazed by her vivacity, the alertness of her mind, the scope of her interests. He called her “the wisest and most fortunate of women,”⁹ but her wisdom fell short of accepting old age cheerfully. She died in 1539, aged sixty-four, and was buried with preceding rulers of Mantua in the Capella dei Signori in the church of San Francesco. Her son ordered a handsome tomb to be raised to her memory, and joined her in death a year later. When the French pillaged Mantua in 1797 the tombs of the Mantuan princes and princesses were shattered, and the ashes they contained were mingled in the indiscriminate dust.

CHAPTER X

Ferrara

1378–1534

I. THE HOUSE OF ESTE

IN the first quarter of the sixteenth century the most active centers of the Renaissance were Ferrara, Venice, and Rome. The student who wanders through Ferrara today can hardly believe—until he enters the mighty Castello—that this slumbering city was once the home of a powerful dynasty, whose court was the most splendid in Europe, and whose pensioners included the greatest poet of the time.

The city owed its existence partly to its position on the route of commerce between Bologna and Venice, partly to the agricultural hinterland that used it as a mart and was itself enriched by three branches of the Po. It was included in the territory given to the papacy by Pepin III (756) and Charlemagne (773), and was again deeded to the Church by the Countess Matilda of Tuscany (1107). While formally acknowledging itself to be a papal fief it governed itself as an independent commune, dominated by rival mercantile families. Disordered by these feuds it accepted Count Azzo VI of Este as its podesta (1208), and made this office hereditary in his progeny. Este was a small Imperial fief, some forty miles north of Ferrara, which had been given to Count Azzo I of Canossa by the Emperor Otho I (961); in 1056 it became the seat of the family, and soon gave it its name. From this historic house came the later royal families of Brunswick and Hanover.

From 1208 to 1597 the Estensi ruled Ferrara technically as vassals of the Empire and the papacy, but practically as independent lords, with the title of marquis or (after 1470) duke. Under their government the people prospered tolerably, and supplied the needs and luxuries of a court that entertained emperors and popes, and supported a notable retinue of scholars, artists, poets, and priests. Despite lawless cruelties and frequent wars, the Estensi retained the loyalty of their subjects through four centuries. When a legate of Pope Clement V expelled the Estensi and proclaimed Ferrara a papal state (1311), the people found ecclesiastical rule more irksome than secular exploitation; they drove out the legate, and restored the Estensi to power (1317). Pope John XXII laid an interdict upon the city; soon the people, deprived of the sacraments, began to murmur. The Estensi sought reconciliation with the Church, and obtained it on hard conditions: they acknowledged Ferrara to be a papal fief, which they would rule as vicars of the popes; and they pledged themselves and their successors to pay, from the revenues of the state, an annual tribute of 10,000 ducats ($250,000?) to the papacy.¹

During the long rule (1393–1441) of Niccolò III the house of Este reached the acme of its power, governing not only Ferrara but also Rovigo, Modena, Reggio, Parma, and even, briefly, Milan. Niccolò married as widely as he ruled, having a long succession of wives and mistresses. One especially pretty and popular wife, Parisina Malatesta, committed adultery with her stepson Ugo; Niccolò had them both beheaded (1425), and ordered that all Farrarese women convicted of adultery should be put to death. When it became clear that this edict threatened to depopulate Ferrara, it was no longer enforced. For the rest Niccolò ruled well. He reduced taxes, encouraged industry and commerce, summoned Theodorus Gaza to teach Greek in the university, and engaged Guarino da Verona to establish at Ferrara a school rivaling in fame and result the school of Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua.

Niccolò’s son Leonello (1441–50) was a rare phenomenon—a ruler both gentle and virile, refined and competent, intellectual and practical. Trained in all the arts of war, he cherished peace, and became the favored arbiter and peacemaker among his fellow rulers in Italy. Taught letters and literature by Guarino, he became—a generation before Lorenzo de’ Medici—one of the most cultivated men of the age; the learned Filelfo was astonished by Leonello’s mastery of Latin and Greek, rhetoric and poetry, philosophy and law. This Marquis was the scholar who first suggested that the supposed letters of St. Paul to Seneca were spurious.² He established a public library, provided fresh funds and inspiration for the University of Ferrara, brought to its staff the best scholars that he could find, and participated actively in their discussions. No scandal or bloodshed or tragedy marred his reign, except its tragic brevity. When he died at forty, all Italy mourned.

A succession of able rulers continued the Golden Age that Leonello had begun. His brother Borso (1450–71) was a man of sterner stuff, but he maintained the policy of peace, and Ferrara’s prosperity became the envy of other states. He did not care for literature or art, yet he supported them amply. He administered his realm with skill and comparative justice, but he taxed his people heavily, and spent much of their substance on court pageants and displays. He loved rank and title, and longed to be a duke like the Visconti of Milan; by expensive gifts he persuaded the Emperor Frederick III to invest him with the dignity of Duke of Modena and Reggio (1452), and marked the occasion with a costly festival. Nineteen years later he secured from his other feudal lord, Pope Paul II, the title of Duke of Ferrara. His fame spread throughout the Mediterranean world; the Moslem sovereigns of Babylonia and Tunis sent him gifts, presuming him to be the greatest ruler in Italy.

Borso was fortunate in his brothers: Leonello, who had given him the best of examples; and Ercole, who had refused to sanction a conspiracy to depose him, had remained his loyal aide to the end, and now succeeded to his power. For six years Ercole continued the reign of peace, pageantry, poetry, art, and taxation. He cemented friendship with Naples by marrying King Ferrante’s daughter Eleonora of Aragon, and welcomed her with the most lavish festivities that Ferrara had ever seen (1473). But in 1478, when Sixtus IV declared war on Florence because of its punishment of the Pazzi conspirators, Ercole joined Florence and Milan against Naples and the papacy. That war having ended, Sixtus induced Venice to join him in attacking Ferrara (1482). While Ercole lay sick in bed the Venetian forces advanced to within four miles of the city; the dispossessed peasantry crowded within the gates, and joined in the general starvation. Then the temperamental Pope, fearing that Venice, not the papacy or his nephew, would get Ferrara, made peace with Ercole; and the Venetians, retaining Rovigo, retired to their lagoons.

The fields were planted again, food came into the city, trade was resumed, taxes could be gathered. Ercole complained that the fines levied for blasphemous profanity were falling away from the normal total of 6000 crowns a year ($150,000?); he could not believe that profanity was any less popular than before; he demanded strict enforcement of the law.³ Every penny was needed, for Ercole, perceiving that the people had multiplied beyond their housing, built an extension as large as the older city. He had this Addizione Erculea designed with such wide straight streets as no Italian town had known since Roman days; the new Ferrara was “the first really modern city in Europe.”⁴ Within a decade the growth and influx of population had filled the added space. Ercole raised churches, palaces, and convents, and coaxed holy women to make Ferrara their home.

The focus of the people’s life was the twelfth-century cathedral. The elite preferred the giant Castello that Niccolò II had built (1385) to protect the government from foreign attack or domestic revolt. Restored and transformed through seven generations, its massive towers still dominate the central square of the city. Below are the dungeons in which Parisina and many others died; above are the spacious halls, adorned by Dosso Dossi and his assistants, where duke and duchess held court, musicians played and sang, dwarfs pranced, poets recited their verses, buffoons put on their antic jests, male sought female, ladies and cavaliers danced through the night, and on quieter days, in quieter rooms, dames and lasses read romances of chivalry. Isabella and Beatrice d’Este, born to Ercole and Eleonora in 1474 and 1475, grew up like fairy princesses in this environment of wealth and festival, war and song and art. But a fond grandfather lured Beatrice to Naples, a betrothed called her to Milan; and in that same year 1490 Isabella left for Mantua. Their departure saddened many hearts in Ferrara, but their marriages strengthened the alliance of the Estensi with the Sforzas and Gonzagas. Ippolito, one of several sons, was made an archbishop at eleven, a cardinal at fourteen, and became one of the most cultured and dissolute prelates of the age.

We should in fairness note again that such ecclesiastical appointments, ignoring fitness and age, were part of the diplomatic alliances of the time. Alexander VI, pope since 1492, was eager to please Ercole, for he aimed at making his daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, the duchess of Ferrara. When he proposed to Ercole that Alfonso, son and heir of the Duke, should marry Lucrezia, Ercole received the proposal coldly, for Lucrezia had not then the fumigated reputation that she has now. He finally consented, but after wringing from the eager father such concessions as made Alexander call him a haggling shopkeeper. The Pope was to give Lucrezia a dowry of 100,000 ducats ($1,250,000?); the annual tribute of Ferrara to the papacy was to be reduced from four thousand to one hundred florins ($1250?); and the duchy of Ferrara was to be settled by papal confirmation upon Alfonso and his heirs forever. Despite all this Alfonso was reluctant, until he saw the bride. We shall see later how he welcomed her.

In 1505 he succeeded to the ducal throne. He was a new type among the Estensi. He had traveled through France, the Lowlands, and England, studying industrial and commercial techniques. Leaving to Lucrezia the patronage of arts and letters, he devoted himself to government, machinery, and pottery. With his own hands he made a painted fine majolica, and founded the best cannon of the time. He studied the art of fortification until he was the leading authority on the subject in Europe. He was normally a just man; he treated Lucrezia kindly, despite her epistolary flirtations; but when he dealt with external enemies or internal revolt he gave scant play to sentiment.

One of Lucrezia’s ladies, Angela, charmed two of Alfonso’s brothers: Ippolito and Giulio. In a moment of thoughtless arrogance Angela taunted Ippolito by telling him that his whole person was worth less to her than the eyes of his brother. The Cardinal, with a band of bravos, waylaid Giulio, and looked on while these pierced Giulio’s eyes with stakes (1506). Giulio appealed to Alfonso to avenge him; the Duke banished the Cardinal, but soon allowed him to return. Stung by Alfonso’s apparent indifference, Giulio conspired with another brother, Ferrante, to murder both the Duke and the Cardinal. The plot was discovered, and Giulio and Ferrante were imprisoned in the cells of the Castello. Ferrante died there in 1540; Giulio was freed by Alfonso II in 1558, after fifty years of genteel confinement; he emerged an old man, white of hair and beard, and dressed in the fashion of half a century before. He died shortly after his release.

Alfonso’s qualities were what his government needed, for Venice was expanding into the Romagna and was plotting to absorb Ferrara; while Julius II, the new Pope, resenting the concessions made to the Estensi in connection with Lucrezia’s marriage, was resolved to reduce the principality to the status of an obedient and profitable fief. In 1508 Julius persuaded Alfonso to join with him and France and Spain in subduing Venice; Alfonso agreed because he yearned to recover Rovigo. The Venetians concentrated their attack upon Ferrara. Their fleet, sailing up the Po, was destroyed by Alfonso’s concealed artillery; and their soldiers were routed by Ferrarese troops under Cardinal Ippolito, who enjoyed war only next to venery. When Venice seemed on the verge of defeat, Julius, not wishing to weaken irreparably the strongest Italian bulwark against the Turks, made peace with her, and ordered Alfonso to do the same. Alfonso refused, and found himself at war with both his enemy and his late ally. Reggio and Modena fell to the papal forces, and Alfonso seemed lost. In desperation he went to Rome and asked the Pope for terms; Julius demanded the complete abdication of the Estensi and the absorption of Ferrara into the Papal States. When Alfonso rejected these demands Julius tried to arrest him; Alfonso escaped, and after three months of disguises, wanderings, and perils, reached his capital. Julius died (1513); Alfonso retook Reggio and Modena. Leo X resumed the war of the papacy for Ferrara; Alfonso, always improving his artillery and shifting his diplomacy, held his own obstinately until Leo too died (1521). Pope Adrian VI gave the indomitable Duke an honorable settlement, and Alfonso was allowed, for a spell, to turn his talents to the arts of peace.

II. THE ARTS IN FERRARA

Ferrarese culture was purely aristocratic, and its arts sedulously served the few. The ducal family, so often at war with the papacy, had no stronger stimulus to piety than to give a devout example to the people. Some new churches were built, but of no memorable quality. The cathedral received in the fifteenth century an unprepossessing campanile, a choir in the Renaissance style, and a pretty Gothic loggia and Virgin in its façade; non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa. The architects of the time, and their patrons, preferred palaces. About 1495 Biagio Rossetti designed one of the finest, the Palazzo di Lodovico il Moro; according to a doubtful tradition Lodovico had commissioned it in the thought that he might some day be driven from Milan; it was left unfinished when he was taken to France; its cortile, with simple but graceful arcades, is among the lesser jewels of the Renaissance. Lovelier still was the court of the palace built for the Strozzi (1499), and now named Bevilacqua (Drinkwater) from a later occupant. Imposing is the Palazzo de’ Diamanti, designed by Rossetti (1492) for Duke Ercole’s brother Sigismondo, and faced with 12,000 marble bosses whose diamond shape gave the building its name.

Pleasure palaces were in fashion, and had fancy names: Belfiore, Belriguardo, La Rotonda, Belvedere, and, above all, the summer palace of the Estensi, the Palazzo di Schifanoia—”Skip Annoyance,” or, as Frederick the Great would say, Sans Souci (“Without Care”). Begun in 1391, finished by Borso about 1469, it served as one home of the court, and as a dwelling for minor members of the ducal family. When Ferrara declined, the palace was turned into a tobacco factory, and the murals that Cossa, Tura, and others had painted in the main hall were covered with calcimine. In 1840 this was removed, and seven of the twelve panels were salvaged. They constitute a remarkable record of the costumes, industries, pageantry, and sports of Borso’s time, strangely mingled with personages from pagan mythology. These frescoes are the happiest product of a school of painting that for half a century made Ferrara a busy center of Italian art.

Ferrarese painters humbly followed the Giottesque tradition until Niccolò III stirred the stagnant waters by bringing in foreign artists to compete with them —Iacopo Bellini from Venice, Mantegna from Padua, Pisanello from Verona. Leonello added stimulus by welcoming Rogier van der Weyden (1449), who helped to turn Italian painters to the use of oil. In the same year Piero della Francesca came from Borgo San Sepolcro to paint murals (now lost) in the Ducal Palace. What finally formed the Ferrara school was Cosimo Tura’s zealous study of Mantegna’s frescoes at Padua, and of the techniques taught there by Francesco Squarcione.

Tura became court painter to Borso (1458), made portraits of the ducal family, shared in decorating the Schifanoia palace, and won such acclaim that Raphael’s father ranked him among the leading painters of Italy. Giovanni Santi apparently relished Cosimo’s dignified and somber figures, his ornate architectural backgrounds, his landscapes of fantastic rocks; but Raffaello Santi would have missed in these pictures any element of tenderness or grace. We find those elements in Tura’s pupil Ercole de’ Roberti, who succeeded his teacher as court painter in 1495; but this Hercules lacked power and vitality, unless we except the Frans-Halsian Concert once ascribed to him in the London Gallery. Francesco Cossa, the greatest of Tura’s pupils, painted in the Schifanoia two masterpieces rich in both vitality and grace: The Triumph of Venus and The Races, revealing the charm and joy of life at the Ferrara court. When Borso paid him for these at the official rate—ten bolognini per foot of painted space—Cossa protested; and when Borso failed to see the point Francesco took his talents to Bologna (1470). Lorenzo Costa did likewise thirteen years later, and the school of Ferrara lost two of its best men.

Dosso Dossi revitalized it by studying in Venice in the heyday of Giorgione (1477–1510). Returning to Ferrara, he became the favorite painter of Duke Alfonso I. Ariosto, his friend, ranked him and a forgotten brother among the immortals:

Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Gian Bellino,

Duo Dossi, e quel ch’a par sculpe e colora

Michel, più che mortale, angel divino, Bastiano, Rafael, Tizian.⁵

We can understand why Ariosto liked Dosso, who brought into his pictures an outdoor quality almost illustrative of Ariosto’s sylvan epic, and bathed them in the warm colors that he had borrowed from the sumptuous Venetians. It was Dosso and his pupils who decorated the Sala di Consiglio in the Castello with lively scenes of athletic contests in the ancient style, for Alfonso liked athletics more than poetry. In his later years Dosso painted with uneven hand the allegorical and mythological scenes on the ceiling of the Sala dell’ Aurora. Here the pagan motives rampant in Italy triumphed in a celebration of physical beauty and sensuous life. Perhaps the decadence that now began in Ferrarese art—due chiefly to the exhausting cost of Alfonso’s wars—had one source in this victory of flesh over spirit; the passion and grandeur of the old religious themes faded from a largely secular art, leaving it predominantly decoration.

The most brilliant figure in this decline was Benvenuto Tisi, named Garofalo from his native town. On two visits to Rome he became so enamored of Raphael’s art that, though two years his senior, he enrolled as an assistant in the young master’s studio. When family affairs recalled him to Ferrara he promised Raphael to return, but Alfonso and the nobility gave him so many commissions that he could never tear himself away. He consumed his energy, and divided his ability, in producing a multitude of paintings, of which some seventy remain. They lack both force and finish; and yet one Holy Family, in the Vatican, shows how even the minor artists of the Renaissance could now and then touch greatness.

The painters and the architects were only a fraction of the artists who labored to please the fortunates of Ferrara. Miniaturists produced there, as elsewhere in that eager age, works of a delicate beauty on which the eye rests longer and more contentedly than on many a famous painting; the Schifanoia palace has preserved several of these gems of illumination and calligraphy. Niccolò III brought in tapestry weavers from Flanders; Ferrarese artists furnished designs; the patient art flourished under Leonello and Borso; the resulting tapestries decorated palace walls, and were lent to princes and nobles for their special festivities. Goldsmiths were kept busy making ecclesiastical vessels and personal ornaments. Sperandio of Mantua and Pisanello of Verona made here some of the finest medallions of the Renaissance.

Last and least was sculpture. Cristoforo da Firenze molded the man, Niccolò Baroncelli the horse, for a bronze statue of Niccolò III; it was set up in 1451, two years before Donatello’s Gattamelata rose in Padua. Beside it, in 1470, was placed a bronze statue of Duke Borso, calmly seated as became a man of peace. In 1796 both monuments were destroyed by revolutionists who branded the bronzes as mementos of tyranny, and melted them into cannon to end all tyranny and all wars. Alfonso Lombardi adorned the “Alabaster Chambers” of the Castello with stately statuary; then, like so many Ferrarese artists, he decamped to Bologna, where we shall find him in glory. The court of Ferrara was too narrow in its ideas, tastes, and fees to transmute evanescent wealth into immortal art.

III. LETTERS

The intellectual life of Ferrara had two roots: the University, and Guarino da Verona. Founded in 1391, the University had soon closed for lack of funds; reopened by Niccolò III, it led a half-starved existence until Leonello (1442) reorganized and refinanced it with an edict whose prelude deserves commemoration:

It is an ancient opinion, not only of the Christians but of the Gentiles, that the heavens, the sea, and the earth must some day perish; in like manner, of many magnificent cities nothing but ruins leveled with the ground can now be seen, and Rome the conqueror herself lies in the dust and is reduced to fragments; while only the understanding of things divine and human, which we call wisdom, is not extinguished by length of years, but retains its rights in perpetuity.⁶

By 1474 the University had forty-five well paid professors, and the faculties of astronomy, mathematics, and medicine were rivaled in Italy only by those at Bologna and Padua.

Guarino, born at Verona in 1370, went to Constantinople, lived there five years, mastered the Greek language, and returned to Venice with a cargo of Greek manuscripts; a legend told how, when a box of these was lost in a storm, his hair turned white overnight. He taught Greek at Venice, where he had Vittorino da Feltre among his pupils, and then at Verona, Padua, Bologna, and Florence, absorbing the classical scholarship of each city in turn. He was already fifty-nine when he accepted an invitation to Ferrara. There, as tutor to Leonello, Borso, and Ercole, he trained three of the most enlightened rulers in Renaissance history. As professor of Greek and rhetoric in the University his success was the talk of Italy. So popular were his lectures that students made their way through any rigor of winter to wait outside the unopened doors of the room in which he was scheduled to speak. They came not only from Italian cities, but from Hungary, Germany, England, and France; and many of them went forth from his instruction to fill vital posts in education, law, and statesmanship. Like Vittorino, he supported poor students out of his personal funds; he lived in humble quarters, ate but one meal a day, and used to invite his friends not to feasts but to fave e favole—beans and conversation.⁷ He was not quite the equal of Vittorino as a moral paragon; he could pen virulent invectives like any humanist, perhaps as a literary game; but his thirteen children were apparently begotten on one wife, he was temperate in everything but study, and he maintained health, vigor, and mental clarity till his ninetieth year.⁸ It was chiefly due to him that the dukes of Ferrara supported education, scholarship, and poetry, and made their capital one of the most renowned cultural centers in Europe.

The revival of antiquity brought with it a renewed acquaintance with classic drama. Plautus, son of the people, and Terence, manumitted darling of the aristocracy, came alive again after fifteen centuries, and were acted on temporary stages at Florence and Rome, above all at Ferrara. Ercole I, in particular, loved the old comedies, and spared no revenues in producing them; one representation of the Menaechmi cost him a thousand ducats. When Lodovico of Milan saw a performance of this play at Ferrara he begged Ercole to send the players to repeat it at Pavia; Ercole not only sent them but went with them (1493). When Lucrezia Borgia came to Ferrara, Ercole celebrated her hymeneals with five of Plautus’ comedies performed by 110 actors, with lavish interludes of music and ballet. Guarino, Ariosto, and Ercole himself translated Latin plays into Italian, and performances were given in the vernacular. It was through imitation of these classic comedies that Italian drama took form. Boiardo, Ariosto, and others wrote plays for the ducal company. Ariosto drew up plans, and Dosso Dossi painted the fixed scenery, for the first permanent theater of Ferrara and modern Europe (1532).

Music and poetry also won the patronage of the court. Tito Vespasiano Strozzi needed no ducal subsidies for his verse, for he was the scion of a rich Florentine family. He composed in Latin ten “books” of a poem in praise of Borso; leaving it unfinished at his death, he bequeathed to his son Ercole the task of completing it. Ercole was well fitted for the assignment; he wrote excellent lyrics, Latin and Italian, and a longer poem, La caccia —The Hunt— dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia. In 1508 he married a poetess, Barbara Torelli; thirteen days later he was found dead near his home, his body savagely pierced with twenty-two wounds. This is a mystery story still unsolved after four centuries. Some have thought that Alfonso had approached Barbara, had been repulsed, and revenged himself by hiring assassins to kill his successful rival. It is unlikely, for Alfonso, as long as Lucrezia lived, showed her every sign of fidelity. The desolate young widow composed an elegy whose ring of sincerity is rare in the usually artificial literature of the Ferrara court. “Why may I not go down to the grave with thee?” she asks the slain poet:

Vorrei col foco mio quel freddo ghiaccio

Intorpidire, e rimpastar col pianto

La polve, e ravivarla a nuove vita!

E vorrei poscia, baldanzosa e ardita,

Mostrarlo a lui che ruppe il caro laccio,

E dirgli: amor, mostro crudel, può tanto.*

In this courtly society, dowered with leisure and fair women, the French romances of chivalry were a daily food. In Ferrara Provençal troubadours had sung their lays in Dante’s time, and had left a mood of fanciful, not onerous, chivalry. Here, and throughout northern Italy, the legends of Charlemagne, his knights, and his wars with the Moslem infidels had become almost as familiar as in France. The French trouvères had spread and swelled these legends as chansons de geste; and their recitals, piling episode upon episode, hero upon heroine, had become a mass of fiction monumental and confused, crying out for some Homer to weave the tales into sequence and unity.

As an English knight, Sir Thomas Malory, had recently accomplished this with the legends of Arthur and the Round Table, so now an Italian nobleman took up the task for the cycle of Charlemagne. Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, was among the most distinguished members of the Ferrara court. He served the Estensi as ambassador on important missions, and was entrusted by them with the administration of their largest dependencies, Modena and Reggio. He governed poorly but sang well. He addressed passionate verses to Antonia Caprara, soliciting and publishing her charms, or reproaching her for lack of fidelity in sin. When he married Taddea Gonzaga he turned his muse to graze in safer pastures, and began an epic—Orlando innamorato (1486f)—recounting the troubled love of Orlando (i.e., Roland) for the enchantress Angelica, and mingling with this romance a hundred scenes of tilt, tournament, and war. A humorous legend tells how Boiardo sought far and wide to find a properly resounding name for the boastful Saracen in his tale, and how, when he hit upon the mighty cognomen of Rodomonte, the bells of the Count’s fief, Scandiano, were set ringing for joy, as if aware that their lord was unwittingly giving a word to a dozen languages.

It is hard for us, in our own exciting times, agitated even in peace with the tilts and tournaments of hostile words, to interest ourselves in the imaginary wars and loves of Orlando, Rinaldo, Astolfo, Ruggiero, Agramante, Marfisa, Fiordelisa, Sacripante, Agricane; and Angelica, who might have stirred us by her beauty, disconcerts us by the supernatural enchantments that she practises; we are no longer bewitched by sorceresses. These are tales that befitted a comely audience in some palace bower or garden close; and indeed, we are told, the Count read these cantos at the Ferrara court⁹—doubtless a canto or two at a sitting; we do Boiardo and Ariosto injustice when we try to take them an epic at a time. They wrote for a leisurely generation and class, and Boiardo for one that had not yet seen the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. When that disillusioning humiliation came, and Italy saw how helpless she was, with all her art and poetry, against the ruthless powers of the North, Boiardo lost heart, and after writing 60,000 lines he dropped his pen with a stanza of despair:

Mentre che io canto, o Dio redentore,

Vedo l’ Italia tutto a fiamma e foco,

Per questi Galli, che con gran valore

Vengon, per disertar non so che loco…*

He did well to end, and wisely died (1494) before the invasion had reached full force. The noble sentiment of chivalry that had found rough utterance in his poetry evoked only the rarest response in the troubled generation that ensued. Though he had earned a niche in history by developing the modern romantic epic, his voice was soon forgotten in the wars and turmoil of Alfonso’s reign, in the alien rape of Italy, and in the seductive beauty of Ariosto’s gentler verse.

IV. ARIOSTO

As we approach the supreme poet of the Italian Renaissance, we must remind ourselves that poetry is an untranslatable music, and that those of us to whom the Italian language is not a native boon must not expect to understand why Italy ranks Lodovico Ariosto only next to Dante among her bards, and reads the Orlando furioso with an affectionate delight surpassing that which Englishmen take in Shakespeare’s plays. We shall hear the words but miss the melody.

He was born on September 14, 1474, at Reggio Emilia, where his father was governor. In 1481 the family moved to Rovigo, but apparently Lodovico received his education in Ferrara. Like Petrarch he was set to study law, but preferred to write poetry. He was not much disturbed by the French invasion of 1494; and when Charles VIII prepared a second descent into Italy (1496), Ariosto composed an ode, in Horatian style, putting the matter in what seemed to him a proper perspective:

What signifies to me the coming of Charles and his hosts? I shall rest in the shade, hearkening to the gentle murmur of the waters, watching the reapers at work; and thou, O my Phyllis, wilt stretch thy white hand among the enameled flowers, and weave me garlands to the music of thy voice.¹⁰

In 1500 the father died, leaving to his ten children a patrimony sufficient to support one or two. Lodovico, the oldest, became father of the family, and began a long struggle with economic insecurity. His anxieties warped his character into a timidity and angry subservience unintelligible to those who have never hungered between rhymes. In 1503 he entered the service of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este. Ippolito had little taste for poetry, and kept Ariosto uncomfortably busy with diplomatic errands and trivia, for which the poet received 240 lire ($3000?) a year, irregularly paid. He sought to improve his position by writing lauds of the Cardinal’s courage and chastity, and defending the blinding of Giulio. Ippolito offered to raise his salary if he would take holy orders and become eligible for certain available benefices; but Ariosto disliked the clergy, and preferred to philander rather than to burn.

It was during his service with Ippolito that he wrote most of his plays. He had begun as an actor, and had been one of the company that Ercole sent to Pavia. When he himself devised dramas they bore the stamp of Terence or Plautus, and were frankly offered as imitations.¹¹ His Cassaria was performed at Ferrara in 1508, his Suppositi at Rome in 1519 before an approving Leo X. He continued to write plays till his last year, and left the best of them, Scolastica, unfinished at his death. Nearly all turn on the classic theme of how one or more young men, usually through the wits of their servants, may possess themselves, by marriage or seduction, of one or more young women. Ariosto’s plays rank high in Italian comedy, low in the history of drama.

It was again during his employment with Ippolito that the poet wrote most of his enormous epic, Orlando furioso; apparently the Cardinal was no hard taskmaster after all. When Ariosto showed Ippolito the manuscript the realistic prelate, according to an uncertain tradition—se non vero, ben trovato— asked him, “Where, Messer Lodovico, have you found so much nonsense (tante corbellerie)?”¹² But the laudatory dedication seemed to make more sense, and the Cardinal paid the cost of publishing the poem (1515), and secured all rights and profits of its sale to Ariosto. Italy did not think the poem nonsense, or thought it delectable nonsense; nine printings were bought up between 1524 and 1527. Soon the choicest passages were being recited or sung throughout the peninsula. Ariosto himself read much of it to Isabella d’Este in her illness at Mantua, and rewarded her patience with a eulogy in later editions. He spent ten years (1505–15) writing the Furioso, sixteen more in polishing it; every now and then he added a canto, until the whole ran to almost 39,000 lines, equivalent to the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.

At first he merely proposed to continue and expand Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato. He took from his predecessor the chivalric setting and theme, the loves and battles of Charlemagne’s knights, the central characters, the loose episodic construction, the suspension of one narrative to pass to another, the magic operations that often turn the tale, even the idea of tracing the pedigree of the Estensi to the marriage of the mythical Ruggiero and Bradamante. And yet, while praising a hundred others, he never mentions Boiardo’s name; no man is a hero to his debtor. Perhaps Ariosto felt that the theme and characters belonged to the cycle of legends themselves, rather than to Boiardo.

Like the Count, and unlike the legends, he stressed the role of love above that of war, and so proclaimed in his opening lines:

Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori,

Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto—

“Women I sing, and knights, and arms, and loves, and deeds of chivalry and bold emprise.” The story carries out this program faithfully: it is a series of combats, some for Christianity against Islam, most for women. A dozen counts and kings contest Angelica; she flirts with them all, plays them one against another, and is caught in an anticlimax when she falls in love with a handsome mediocrity, and marries him before she has time to make the usual examination of his income. Orlando, who enters the story after eight cantos have rolled by, pursues her over three continents, neglecting meanwhile to go to the aid of his sovereign Charlemagne when the Saracens attack Paris. He goes mad on learning that he has lost her (canto XXIII), and recovers sanity sixteen cantos later when his lost wits are found in the moon and brought back to him by a predecessor of Jules Verne’s lunar navigators. This central theme is confused and obfuscated by the interpolated adventures of a dozen other knights, who pursue their respective women through forty-six cantos of seductive verse. The women enjoy the chase, perhaps excepting Isabella, who persuades Rodomonte to cut off her head rather than to deflower her, and earns a monument. The old legend of St. George is included: the beautiful Angelica is chained to the rocks beside the sea as a propitiatory offering to a dragon who hungers for a virgin annually; and before Ruggiero can arrive to rescue her the poet contemplates her with Correggian appreciation:

La fiera gente inospitale e cruda

Alla bestia crudel nel lito espose

La bellissima donna così ignuda

Come Natura prima la compose.

Un velo non ha pure in che rinchiuda

I bianchi gigli e le vermiglie rose,

Da non cader per Iuglio o per Decembre,

Di che non sparse le polite membre.

Creduta avria che fosse statua finta

O d’alabastro o d’altri marmi illustri

Ruggiero, e su lo scoglio così avvinta

Per artificio di scultori industri;

Se non videa la lachrima distinta

Tra fresche rose e candidi ligustri

Far rugiadose le crudette pome,

E l’ aura sventolar l’aurate chiome.¹³

Which may be rendered, musicless:

A people fierce, inhospitable, crude

Exposed upon the shore, to savage beast,

A woman fairest of the fair, and nude

As when first Nature her sweet form composed.

No smallest veil enclosed the lilies white

And vermeil roses of her flesh, that bear

Midsummer’s ardor and December’s cold

Unhurt, and gleam on her resplendent limbs.

She might have seemed to him a statue made

Of alabaster, or some marble form

Bound to the stone by sculptor’s artifice,

Had he not seen a bright tear fall between

The roses and white privets of her cheeks,

Bedewing breasts like apples firm, and seen

The breezes breathing on her golden hair.

Ariosto does not take all this too seriously; he is writing to amuse; he deliberately charms us, by the incantation of his verse, into an unreal world, and mystifies his tale with fairies, magic weapons and enchantments, winged horses touring the clouds, men turned into trees, fortresses melting at an imperious word. Orlando spits six Dutchmen on one spear; Astolfo creates a fleet by throwing leaves into the air, and catches the wind in a bladder. Ariosto laughs with us at all this, and smiles tolerantly, not sarcastically, at the tilts and shams of chivalry. He has an excellent sense of humor, salted with gentle irony; so he includes, in the waste deposited by the earth upon the moon, the prayers of hypocrites, the flatteries of poets (peccavit), the services of courtiers, the Donation of Constantine (XXXIV). Only now and then, in a few moral exordiums, does Ariosto pretend to philosophy. He was so completely the poet that he lost and consumed himself in forging and polishing a beautiful form for his verse; he had no energy left to pour into it an ennobling purpose or a philosophy of life.^13a

Italians love the Furioso because it is a treasury of exciting stories—with never a pretty woman too far away—told in melodious and yet unaffected language, and in racy stanzas that lure us swiftly on from scene to scene. They forgive the long detours and descriptions, the innumerable and sometimes labored similes, for these too are dressed in sparkling verse. They are rewarded, and silently shout “Bravo!” when the poet hammers out a striking line, as when he says of Zerbino,

Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa,—¹⁴

“Nature made him, and then broke the mold.” They are not long disturbed by Ariosto’s expectant flattery of the Estensi, his paeans to Ippolito, his praise of Lucrezia’s chastity. These obeisances were in the manner of the times; Machiavelli would stoop as low to conquer a subsidy; and a poet must live.

But this became difficult when the Cardinal decided to campaign in Hungary, and desired Ariosto to accompany him. Ariosto demurred, and Ippolito freed him from further service and recompense Alfonso saved the poet from penury by giving him an annual stipend of eighty-four crowns ($1050?), plus three servants and two horses, and requiring almost nothing in return. After forty-seven years of obstinate but hardly celibate bachelordom, Ariosto now married Alessandra Benucci, whom he had loved when she was still the wife of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi. By her he had no children, but two natural sons had rewarded his premarital efforts.

For three years (1522–5) he served unhappily as governor of the Garfagnana, a mountainous region racked with brigandage. But he was unfit for action or command, and gladly retired to spend the remaining eight years of his life in Ferrara. In 1528 he bought a plot of land on the outskirts of the city, and built a pretty house, still shown in the Via Ariosto, and maintained by the state. Across the front he inscribed Horatian lines of proud simplicity: Parva sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non sordida, parta meo sed tamen aere domus—”Small but suitable for me, hurtful to no one, not mean, yet acquired by my own funds: home.” there he lived quietly, working occasionally in his garden, and revising or expanding the Furioso every day.

Meanwhile, further emulating Horace, he had written to various friends seven poetical epistles that have come down to us under the name of satires. They are not as sharp and compact as those of his model, nor as bitter and lethal as Juvenal’s; they were the product of a mind loving and never quite finding peace, bearing fretfully the whips and scorns of time, the proud man’s contumely. They describe the faults of the clergy, the simony rampant in Rome, the nepotism of worldly popes (Satire i). They excoriate Ippolito for paying his menials better than his poet (ii). They expound a cynical conception of women as rarely faithful or honest, and offer the advice of a tardy expert on choosing and taming a wife (iii). They lament the indignities of a courtier’s life, and wryly recount an unsuccessful visit to Leo X (iv):

I kissed his foot, he bent down from the holy seat, took my hand, and saluted me on both cheeks. Besides, he made me free of half the stamp dues I was bound to pay. Then, breast full of hope but body soaked with rain and smirched with mud, I went and had my supper at the Ram.

Two satires mourn his narrow life at Garfagnana, his days “spent in threatening, punishing, persuading, or acquitting,” his muse frightened and paralyzed into silence by crimes, lawsuits, and brawls; and his mistress so many miles away! (v-vi) The last epistle asks Bembo to recommend a Greek tutor for Ariosto’s son Virginio:

The Greek must be learned but also of sound principles, for erudition without morality is worse than worthless. Unhappily, in these days, it is difficult to find a teacher of this sort. Few humanists are free from the most infamous of vices, and intellectual vanity makes most of them skeptics also. Why is it that learning and infidelity go hand in hand?¹⁵

Ariosto himself had through most of his life taken religion lightly; but, like nearly all the intellects of the Renaissance, he made his peace with it in the end. Even from youth he had suffered from a bronchial catarrh, which was probably aggravated by his travels as courier for the Cardinal. In 1532 the trouble sank deeper, and became tuberculosis. He struggled against it as if not satisfied with a mere immortality of fame. He was only fifty-eight when he died (1533).

He had become a classic long before his death. Twenty-three years earlier Raphael had painted him, in the Parnassus fresco of the Vatican, with Homer and Virgil, Horace and Ovid, Dante and Petrarch, among the unforgettable voices of mankind. Italy calls him her Homer, and the Furioso her Iliad; but even to an idolater of Italy this appears more generous than just. The world of Ariosto seems light and fantastic beside the ruthless siege of Troy; his knights—some as indistinguishable in their character as in their armor—hardly rise to the majesty of Agamemnon, the passion of Achilles, the wisdom of Nestor, the nobility of Hector, the tragedy of Priam; and who will equate the fair and flighty Angelica with the dia gynaikon, the goddess among women, Helen conqueror in defeat? And yet the last word must be as the first: only those can judge Ariosto who know his language thoroughly, who can catch the nuances of his gaiety and his sentiment, and can respond to all the music of his melodious dream.

V. AFTERMATH

It was the Italians themselves, with their lusty sense of humor, who provided an antidote to the romanticism of the two Orlandos. Six years before Ariosto’s death Girolamo Folengo published an Orlandino in which the absurdities of the epics were caricatured with hilarious exaggerations. Girolamo heard the skeptical lectures of Pomponazzi at Bologna, adopted a curriculum of amours, intrigues, fisticuffs, and duels, and was expelled from the University. His father disowned him, and he became a Benedictine monk (1507), perhaps as a means of subsistence. Six years later he fell in love with Girolama Dieda, and eloped with her. In 1519 he published a volume of burlesques under the title of Maccaronea, which thenceforth gave its name to a swelling literature of rough and ribald satire in mingled Latin and Italian verse. The Orlandino was a riotous mock epic, in coarse and popular vernacular, pursuing a serious vein for a stanza or two, then startling the reader with a thought and phrase worthy of the most scatophilic privy councilor. The knights, armed with kitchen utensils, rush into the lists on limping mules. The leading churchman of the tale is the monk Griffarosto—Abbot Grab-the-Roast—whose library consists of cook books interspersed with victuals and wine, and “all the tongues he knew were those of oxen and swine”;¹⁶ through him Folengo satirizes the clergy of Italy to any Lutheran’s content. The work was received with guffaws of applause, but the author continued to starve. Finally he retired again to a monastery, wrote pious poetry, and died in the odor of sanctity at fifty three (1544). Rabelais relished him,¹⁷ and perhaps Ariosto, in his final years, joined in the merriment.

Alfonso I kept his little state secure against all the assaults of the papacy, and at last took a reckless revenge by encouraging and abetting the German-Spanish army that besieged, captured, and plundered Rome (1527).¹⁸ Charles V expressed appreciation by restoring to him Ferrara’s ancient fiefs, Modena and Reggio, so that Alfonso transmitted his duchy undiminished to his heirs. In 1528 he sent his son Ercole to France to bring home a diplomatic bride from the royal family—Renée or Renata—tiny, somber, deformed, and secretly won by the heresy of Calvin. Alfonso, after Lucrezia’s passing, consoled himself with a mistress, Laura Dianti, and perhaps married her before his death (1534). He had outwitted every enemy but time.

CHAPTER XI

Venice and Her Realm

1378–1534

I. PADUA

UNDER the dictatorship of the Carraresi Padua was a major Italian power, rivaling and threatening Venice. In 1378 Padua joined Genoa in attempting to subjugate the island republic. In 1380 Venice, exhausted by her war with Genoa, ceded to the duke of Austria the city of Treviso, strategically situated on her north. In 1383 Francesco I da Carrara bought Treviso from Austria; soon afterward he tried to take Vicenza, Udine, and Friuli; had he succeeded he would have commanded the roads from Venice to her iron mines at Agordo, and the routes of Venetian trade with Germany; i.e., Padua would have controlled vital sources of Venetian industry and commerce. Venice was saved by the skill of her diplomats. They persuaded Giangaleazzo Visconti to join Venice in war against Padua; Gian, while doubtless distrusting Venice, seized the opportunity to extend his frontier eastward with Venetian connivance. Francesco I da Carrara was defeated and abdicated (1389); and his son, namesake, and successor renewed (1399) a treaty of 1338 that had acknowledged Padua to be a dependency of Venice. When Francesco II da Carrara resumed the struggle and attacked Verona and Vicenza, Venice declared war to the death, captured and executed him and his sons, and brought Padua under direct rule by the Venetian Senate (1405). The weary city abandoned the luxury of a native exploiter, prospered under an alien but competent administration, and became the educational center of the Venetian domain. From all quarters of Latin Christendom students came to its renowned university—Pico della Mirandola, Ariosto, Bembo, Guicciardini, Tasso, Galileo, Gustavus Vasa who would be King of Sweden, John Sobieski who would be King of Poland…. The chair of Greek was founded in 1463 and occupied by Demetrius Chalcondyles sixteen years before he went to Florence. A century later Shakespeare could still speak of “Fair Padua, nursery of arts.”

One Paduan was himself a famous educational institution. Trained as a tailor, Francesco Squarcione developed a passion for classic art, traveled widely in Italy and Greece, copied or sketched Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, collected ancient medals, coins, and statuary, and returned to Padua with one of the best classical collections of his time. He opened a school of art, installed his collection there, and gave his pupils two main directives: to study ancient art and the new science of perspective. Few of the 137 artists whom he formed remained in Padua, since most of them came from outside. But in return Giotto came from Florence to paint the Arena frescoes; Altichiero came from Verona (c. 1376) to adorn a chapel in St. Anthony’s; and Donatello left memorials of his genius in the cathedral and its square. Bartolommeo Bellano, a pupil of Donatello, set up two lovely female statues for Gattamelata’s chapel in the same church; Pietro Lombardo of Venice added a fine figure of the condottiere’s son, and a splendid tomb for Antonio Roselli. Andrea Briosco—“Riccio”—and Antonio and Tullio Lombardo carved for the Gattamelata chapel some superb marble reliefs; and Riccio set up in the choir of the church one of the most imposing candelabra in Italy. He shared with Alessandro Leopardi of Venice and Andrea Morone of Bergamo in designing the unfinished church of Santa Giustina (1502f), a chaste example of the Renaissance architectural style.

It was from Padua and Verona that Iacopo Bellini and Antonio Pisanello brought to Venice the seeds of that Venetian school of painting through which the splendor of Venice was blazoned to the world.

II. VENETIAN ECONOMY AND POLICY

In 1378 Venice was at nadir: her Adriatic trade was bottled up by a victorious Genoese fleet, her communications with the mainland were blocked by Genoese and Paduan troops, her people were starving, her government contemplated surrender. Half a century later she ruled Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Treviso, Belluno, Feltre, Friuli, Istria, the Dalmatian coast, Lepanto, Patras, and Corinth. Secure in her many-moated citadel, she seemed immune to the political vicissitudes of the Italian mainland; her wealth and power mounted until she sat like a throned queen at the head of Italy. Philippe de Comines, arriving as French ambassador in 1495, pictured her as “the most triumphant city that I have ever seen.”¹ Pietro Casola, coming from hostile Milan about the same time, found it “impossible to describe the beauty, magnificence, and wealth”² of this unique assemblage of 117 islands, 150 canals, 400 bridges, all dominated by the flowing promenade of the Grand Canal, which the traveled Comines pronounced “the most beautiful street in the world.”

Whence came the wealth that supported this magnificence? Partly from a hundred industries—shipbuilding, iron manufactures, glass blowing, leather dressing and tooling, gem cutting and setting, textiles… all organized in proud guilds (scuole) that united master and man in patriotic fellowship. But perhaps more of Venetian opulence came from the mercantile marine whose sails flapped on the lagoons, whose galleys took the products of Venice and her mainland dependencies, and the German and other wares that scaled the Alps, and carried them to Egypt, Greece, Byzantium, and Asia, and returned from the East with silks, spices, rugs, drugs, and slaves. The exports of an average year were valued at 10,000,000 ducats ($250,000,000?);³ no other city in Europe could equal this trade. The Venetian vessels could be seen in a hundred ports, from Trebizond in the Black Sea to Cadiz, Lisbon, London, Bruges, even in Iceland.⁴ On the Rialto, the commercial center of Venice, merchants could be seen from half the globe. Marine insurance covered this traffic, and a tax on imports and exports was the mainstay of the state. The annual income of the Venetian government in 1455 was 800,000 ducats ($20,000,000?); in the same year the revenue of Florence was some 200,000 ducats, of Naples 310,000, of the Papal States 400,000, of Milan 500,000, of all Christian Spain, 800,000.⁵

This commerce dictated the policies, as it so largely financed the operations, of the Venetian Republic. It raised to power a mercantile aristocracy that made itself hereditary and controlled all the organs of the state. It kept a population of 190,000 (in 1422) profitably employed, but it left them dependent upon foreign markets, materials, and food. Imprisoned in her labyrinth, Venice could feed her people only by importing food; she could supply her industries only by importing lumber, metals, minerals, leather, cloth; and she could pay for these imports only by finding markets for her products and her trade. Dependent on the mainland for food, outlets, and raw materials, she fought a succession of wars to establish her control over northeastern Italy; dependent likewise on non-Italian areas, she was anxious to dominate the regions that supplied her wants, the markets that took her goods, the routes by which her vital commerce passed. She became by “manifest destiny” an imperialistic power.

So the political history of Venice turned on her economic needs. When the Scaligeri at Verona, or the Carraresi at Padua, or the Visconti at Milan attempted to spread their sway over northeastern Italy, Venice felt en dangered and took to arms. Fearful that Ferrara might control the mouths of the Po, she tried to determine the choice or policy of the ruling marquis there, and resented the claims of the papacy to Ferrara as its fief. Her own westward expansion angered Milan, which had expansive ideas of its own. When Filippo Maria Visconti attacked Florence (1423), the Tuscan Republic appealed to Venice for aid, and pointed out that a Milan master over Tuscany would soon absorb all Italy north of the Papal States. In a debate often repeated in history, Doge Tommaso Mocenigo, dying, pled in the Venetian Senate the cause of peace; Francesco Foscari argued for an offensive war of defense; Foscari won, and Venice began with Milan a series of wars that lasted, with some lucid intervals, from 1425 to 1454. The death of Filippo Maria (1447), the chaos of the Ambrosian Republic in Milan, and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks inclined the rival states to sign at Lodi a treaty that left the island Republic exhausted but victorious.

Her expansion in the Adriatic began with a legitimate excuse. Her geographical position as the northernmost port of the Mediterranean was the fortune of Venice, but it was of no worth without control of the Adriatic. The eastern coast offered in its isles and bays convenient lairs for pirate vessels, whose raids were a frequent loss and constant peril to Venetian shipping. When Venice bribed the Crusaders to help her take Zara in 1202, she acquired a post from which year by year to clear out these pirate nests, until all the Dalmatian coast accepted her sovereignty. When those same Crusaders raped Constantinople (1204), Venice received, as her share of the spoils, Crete, Salonika, the Cyclades, and the Sporades, precious links in a golden chain of trade. With leisurely pertinacity she took Durazzo, the Albanian coast, the Ionian Islands (1386–92), Friuli and Istria (1418–20), Ravenna (1441); she was now indisputably Queen of the Adriatic, and charged tolls to all non-Venetian vessels plying that sea.⁶ As the advance of the Ottoman Turks toward Constantinople made it difficult for that capital to defend the outlying possessions of Byzantium, many Greek islands and cities submitted themselves to Venice as the only power ready to protect them. In Cyprus a stately queen, Caterina Cornaro, last of the Lusignan line, was persuaded that she could not hold her island against the Turks; she abdicated in favor of a Venetian governor (1489) and a Venetian pension of 8000 ducats a year; she retired to an estate at Asolo, near Treviso, set up an unofficial court, patronized literature and art, and became the subject or dedicatee of poems and operas, and paintings by Gentile Bellini, Titian, and Veronese.

All these laborious conquests of diplomacy or arms, these outlets, guardians, and tributaries of Venetian trade faced in their turn the rising tide of the Ottomans. At Gallipoli (1416) a Turkish garrison attacked a Venetian fleet; the Venetians fought with their usual courage and won a decisive victory; for a generation the rival powers lived in a truce and commercial amity that shocked a Europe anxious to have Venice fight Europe’s battle against the Turks. Even the fall of Constantinople did not disrupt this entente; Venice arranged a tolerable commercial treaty with the victorious Turks, and exchanged courtesies with the conqueror. But now Venetian access to the lucrative trade of the Black Sea ports was dependent on Turkish permission, and soon met with irritating limitations. When Pius II, voicing the sentiments of a Christian and the commercial interests of Europe, proclaimed a crusade against the Turks, and received pledges of arms and men from the European powers, Venice responded to the call, hoping to repeat the strategy of 1204. But the powers welched on their promises, and Venice found herself alone at war with the Turks (1463). For sixteen years she carried on this struggle. She was defeated and despoiled; by the peace that she signed in 1479 she ceded Negroponte (Euboea), Scutari, and Morea to the Turks, paid 100,000 ducats as a war indemnity, and pledged 10,000 ducats a year for the privilege of trading in Turkish ports. Europe denounced her as a traitor to Christendom. When another pope proposed another crusade against the Turks Venice turned a deaf ear. She agreed with Europe that trade was more important than Christianity.

III. VENETIAN GOVERNMENT

Even her enemies admired her government, and sent agents to study its structure and functioning. Its military organs were the most efficient navy and army in Italy. Besides her merchant fleet, which in need could be converted to men-of-war, Venice had in 1423 a navy of forty-three galleys and 300 auxiliary vessels.⁷ These were used even in wars with land powers in Italy; in 1439 they were dragged overland on rollers across mountains and valleys to be launched on the Lago di Garda, where they bombarded the possessions of Milan.⁸ While other Italian states still waged their wars with mercenaries, Venice built her army around a militia of her own loyal population, well seasoned and trained, and armed with the latest muskets and artillery. For generals, however, she relied on condottieri schooled in the Renaissance style of campaign by strategy. In her wars with Milan Venice developed the talents of three famous condottieri: Francesco Carmagnola, Erasmo da Narni “Gattamelata,” and Bartolommeo Colleoni; the last two distinguished by historic statues, the other by having his head cut off, in the Venetian Piazzetta, on a charge of privately negotiating with the enemy.

This government, which even Florentines sought to emulate, was a closed oligarchy of old families so long enriched by commerce that only the initiate could smell the money in their nobility. These families had managed to restrict membership in the Maggior Consiglio to male descendants of persons who had sat in this Great Council before 1297. In 1315 the names of all eligibles were inscribed in a Libro d’oro, or Book of Gold. Out of its 480 members the Council named sixty—later 120—Pregadi (“invited men”) to serve in yearly terms as a legislative Senate; it appointed the heads of the numerous governmental departments, who together constituted an administrative Collegio; and it selected as chief executive—always subject to the Council—a doge or leader who presided over it and the Senate, and held office for life unless the Council cared to depose him. The doge was aided by six privy councilors, who with him composed the Signoria. This Signory and the Senate were in practice the real government of Venice; the Great Council proved too large for effective action, and became a body of electors exercising appointive and supervisory powers. It was an efficient constitution, which normally maintained the people in a reasonable degree of prosperity; and it was capable of long-term and well calculated policies that might have been impossible in a government subject to the fluctuations of public emotion or sentiment. The great majority of the population, though excluded from office, showed no active resentment against the ruling minority. In 1310 a group of excluded nobles under Bajamante Tiepolo rose in revolt; and in 1355 Doge Marino Faliero conspired to make himself dictator. Both attempts were easily suppressed.

To guard against internal or external conspiracies, the Maggior Consiglio yearly chose from its membership a Council of Ten as a committee of public safety. Through its secret sessions and trials, its spies and swift procedure, this Consiglio di Died became for a time the most powerful body in the government. Ambassadors often reported to it secretly, and held its instructions more binding than those of the Senate; and any edict of the Ten had the full force of law. Two or three of its members were delegated, each month, as Inquisitori di stato, to search among the people and the officials for any suspicion of malfeasance or treason. Many legends arose around this Council of Ten, usually exaggerating its secrecy and severity. It published its decisions and sentences to the Great Council; though it allowed secret denunciations to be placed in the mouths of lions’ heads scattered about the city, it refused to consider any unsigned charges, or any that did not offer two witnesses;⁹ and even then a four-fifths vote was required before the accusation could be put on the agenda.¹⁰ Any person arrested had the right to choose two counsel for his defense before the Ten.¹¹ A condemnatory sentence had to receive a majority vote on five successive ballots. The number of persons imprisoned by the Ten was “very small.”¹² However, it was not above arranging the assassination of spies, and of enemies of Venice in foreign states.¹³ In 1582 the Senate, feeling that the Council had served its purpose and had often exceeded its authority, reduced its powers; and from that date the Council of Ten existed only in name.

The forty judges appointed by the Great Council provided an efficient and severe judiciary. The laws were clearly formulated, and were strictly enforced against nobles and commoners alike. Penalties reflected the cruelty of the times. Imprisonment was often in narrow cells admitting a minimum of light and air. Flogging, branding, mutilation, blinding, cutting out the tongue, breaking limbs on the wheel, and other delicacies were included among legal punishments. Persons condemned to death could be strangled in jail, or secretly drowned, or hanged from a window of the Doges’ Palace, or burned at the stake. Persons guilty of atrocious crimes or sacrilegious theft were tortured with red-hot pincers, dragged along the streets by a horse, and then beheaded and quartered.¹⁴ As if to compensate for this ferocity, Venice opened her doors to political and intellectual refugees, and dared to shelter Elisabetta Gonzaga and her Guidobaldo against the terrible Borgia, when her sister-in-law Isabella had been frightened into letting her depart from her native Mantua.

The administrative organization was probably the best in Europe in the fifteenth century, though corruption found openings here as in every government. A bureau of public sanitation was established in 1385; measures were taken to provide clean drinking water and to prevent the formation of swamps. Another bureau fixed the maximum prices that might be charged for food. A postal and courier service was set up not only for the government but also for private correspondence and parcel transportation.¹⁵ Retired public servants were pensioned, and provision was made for their widows and orphans.¹⁶ The administration of dependent territories on the Italian mainland was relatively so just and competent that these districts prospered better under Venetian rule than ever before, and readily returned to Venetian allegiance after being detached from it by the chances of war.¹⁷ Venetian administration of overseas dependencies was not so laudable; they were used chiefly as prizes of war, much of their soil was awarded to Venetian noblemen and generals, and the native population, while retaining their local institutions of government, seldom reached the higher offices. In her relations with other states Venice was especially well served by her diplomats. Few governments possessed such acute observers and intelligent negotiators as Bernardo Giustiniani. Guided by the informed reports of her ambassadors, the careful statistical records of her bureaucracy, and the astute statesmanship of her senators, Venice repeatedly won in diplomacy what she had lost in war.¹⁸

Morally this government was no better than the others of the time, in penal legislation worse. It made and broke alliances according to fluctuations of advantage, allowing no scruple, no sentiment of fidelity, to hamper policy: such was the code of all Renaissance powers. The citizens readily accepted this code; they approved every Venetian victory, however won; they gloried in the strength and stability of their state, and offered it, in its need, a patriotism and fullness of service unmatched among their contemporaries. They honored the doge only next to God.

The doge was usually the agent, quite exceptionally the master, of the Council and the Senate; his splendor far outshone his power. In his public appearances he was clothed in magnificent raiment and was heavy with gems; his official bonnet alone contained jewels to the value of 194,000 ducats ($4,850,000?).¹⁹ Venetian painters may have learned from his garb the gorgeous colors that flowed from their brushes; and some of their most brilliant portraits are of doges in official robes. Venice believed in ceremony and display, partly to impress ambassadors and visitors, partly to awe the population, partly to give it pageantry in place of power. Even the dogaressa received a sumptuous coronation. The doge received foreign dignitaries, and signed all important documents of state; his influence was pervasive and continuous through his lifelong tenure amid persons elected for a year; in theory, however, he was merely the servant and spokesman of the government.

A long and colorful succession of doges marches through Venetian history, but only a few impressed their personalities upon the character or fortunes of the state. Despite the dying eloquence of Tommaso Mocenigo, the Great Council chose the expansionist Francesco Foscari to succeed him. Coming to the throne at the age of fifty, the new Doge, in a reign of thirty-four years (1423–57), carried Venice through blood and turmoil to the zenith of her power. Milan was defeated, Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, Crema were won. But the growing autocracy of the victorious Doge aroused the jealousy of the Ten. They charged him with having won his election by bribery; and unable to prove this they accused his son Iacopo of treasonable communication with Milan (1445). Under the agony of the wheel Iacopo admitted or pretended his guilt. He was exiled to Rumania, but was soon permitted to live near Treviso. In 1450 one of the Inquisitors of the Ten was assassinated; Iacopo was credited with the crime; he denied it even under extreme torture; he was exiled to Crete, where he went mad with loneliness and grief. In 1456 he was brought back to Venice, charged again with secret correspondence with the government of Milan; he admitted it, was tortured to the verge of death, and was returned to Crete, where he died soon afterward. The old Doge, who had borne the perils and responsibilities of a long and unpopular war with stoic fortitude, broke down before these trials, which not all his dignity could prevent. At eighty-six he became incapable of carrying the burdens of his office; he was deposed by the Great Council with a life annuity of 2000 ducats. He retired to his home, and there, a few days later, he died of a burst blood vessel as the bells of the campanile announced the accession of a new doge.

Foscari’s victories had earned Venice the hatred of all the Italian states; none could any longer feel secure in the nearness of her grasping power. A dozen combinations were formed against her; finally (1508) Ferrara, Mantua, Julius II, Ferdinand of Spain, Louis XII of France, and the Emperor Maximilian joined in the League of Cambrai to destroy her. Leonardo Loredano (1501–21) was Doge in that crisis; he led the people through it with an incredible tenacity only partly revealed in the handsome portrait of him by Giovanni Bellini. Nearly all that Venice had won on the mainland by a century of forceful expansion was taken from her; Venice herself was surrounded. Loredano minted his plate; the aristocracy brought forth its hidden wealth to finance resistance; the armorers forged a hundred thousand weapons; and every man armed himself to fight for island after island in what seemed to be a hopeless cause. Miraculously, Venice saved herself, and recovered part of her mainland realm. But the effort exhausted her finances and her spirit; and when Loredano died—though fifty-seven years of Titian, and most of Tintoretto and Veronese, were still to come—Venice knew that in wealth and power her zenith and glory had passed.

IV. VENETIAN LIFE

The last decades of the fifteenth century, and the early decades of the sixteenth, were the period of greatest splendor in Venetian life. The profits of a world trade that had made its peace with the Turks, and had not yet suffered severe curtailment from the rounding of Africa or the opening of the Atlantic, poured into the islands, crowned them with churches, walled the canals with palaces, filled the palaces with precious metals and costly furniture, glorified the women with finery and jewelry, supported a brilliant galaxy of painters, and overflowed in bright festivals of tapestried gondolas, masked liaisons, and babbling waters echoing with song.

The life of the lower classes was the normal routine of toil, eased by Italian leisureliness and loquacity, and the inability of the rich to monopolize any but the most perfumed delights of love. Every humpbacked bridge, and the Grand Canal, teemed with men transporting the products of half the world. There were more slaves here than in other European cities; they were imported, chiefly from Islam, not as laborers but as domestic servants, personal guards, wet nurses, concubines. Doge Pietro Mocenigo, at the age of seventy, kept two Turkish slaves for his sexual entertainment.²⁰ One Venetian record tells of a priest who sold a female slave to another priest, who on the following day had the contract annulled because he had found her with child.²¹

The upper classes, though so well served, were not idlers. Most of them, in their mature years, were active in commerce, finance, diplomacy, government, or war. The portraits we have of them show men rich in conscious personality, proud of their place, but also serious with a sense of obligation. A minority of them dressed in silks and furs, perhaps to please the artists who painted them; and a set of young bloods—La Compagnia della Scalza, “the Company of the Hose”—flaunted tight doublets, silk brocades, and striped hose embroidered with gold or silver or inset with gems. But every young patrician sobered his dress when he became a member of the Great Council; then he was required to wear a toga, for by a robe almost any male may be endowed with dignity, and any woman with mystery. Occasionally, in their magnificent palaces, or in their villa gardens at Murano or other suburbs, the nobles betrayed their secret wealth to lavishly entertain a visitor, or to celebrate some vital event in the history of their city or their family. When Cardinal Grimani, high in both the nobility and the Church, gave a reception for Ranuccio Farnese (1542), he invited three thousand guests; most of them came in cabined gondolas smoothed with velvet and eased with cushions; and he provided them with music, acrobatics, ropewalking, dancing, and dinner. Normally, however, the Venetian nobility in this period lived, ate, and dressed in moderate style, and earned some fraction of their keep.

Perhaps the middle classes were the happiest of all, and joined most lightheartedly in private and public merriment. They provided the lower hierarchy of the Church, the bureaucracy of the government, the professions of physician, attorney, and pedagogue, the management of industry and the guilds, the mathematical operations of foreign commerce, the control of local trade. They were neither so harassed as the rich to preserve a fortune, nor so worried as the poor to feed and clothe their young. Like the other classes they played cards, threw dice, and deployed chessmen across the hours, but they rarely gambled into ruin. They loved to play musical instruments, to sing and dance. As their houses or apartments were small, they made promenades and patios of the streets; these were almost free of horses and vehicles, since transport preferred the canals. So it was not unusual for the less sedate classes, of an evening or on some festal day, to form impromptu dances and choruses in the public squares. Every family had musical instruments and included some bearable voice. And when Adrian Willaert led the great double choir in St. Mark’s, the thousands who could get in to hear reversed their famous boast, and became for a moment Christians first and Venetians afterward.

The festivals of Venice, in their unrivaled setting of churches, palaces, and sea, were the most gorgeous in Europe. Every excuse was used for pomp and pageantry: the inauguration of a doge, some religious holyday or national holiday, the visit of a foreign dignitary, the conclusion of a favorable peace, the Gharingello or Women’s Holiday, the anniversary of St. Mark or the patron saint of a guild. In the fourteenth century the joust was still the crowning event of a festival; indeed, as late as 1491, when Venice received with stately ceremony the abdicated Queen of Cyprus, some troops from Crete held a joust on the frozen Grand Canal. But the joust seemed inappropriate to a naval power, and it was gradually replaced with some form of water festival, usually a regatta. The greatest feast of all the year was the Sposalizio del Mare, the solemn and colorful rite of marrying Venice—La Serenissima, the most serene—to the Adriatic. When Beatrice d’Este came to Venice in 1493 as the captivating emissary of Lodovico of Milan, the Grand Canal was adorned throughout its length like some splendid avenue in Christmas time; the ship Bucentaur, symbolizing the Venetian state and all decorated in purple and gold, sailed to meet her; a thousand boats rowed or sailed around it, each adorned with garlands and bunting; so many were the vessels, said an enthusiastic chronicler, that for a mile around the water could not be seen.

In a letter written from Venice on this occasion Beatrice described a momaria given in her honor in the Palace of the Doges. It was a dramatic spectacle, mostly in pantomime, presented by masked actors called momari, mummers. The Venetians were fond of divers such performances. They retained till 1462 the medieval “mysteries”; but popular demand caused these religious plays to be prefaced or interrupted with comic interludes of so loose and disorderly a character that they were forbidden in that year. Meanwhile the humanist movement renewed Italian acquaintance with classic comedy; Plautus and Terence were staged by the Compagnia della Scalza and other groups; and in 1506 Fra Giovanni Armonio, monk, actor, and musician, presented in Latin, in the convent of the Eremitani, Stephanium, the first modern comedy. From these beginnings Venetian comedy progressed toward Goldoni, always competing with the Harlequin and Pantaloon of the commedia dell’ arte, and at times so rivaling this in uninhibited humor that Church and state engaged in a running war with the Venetian stage.

An earthy licentiousness and profanity sat side by side, in the Venetian or Italian character, with orthodox belief and hebdomadal piety. The populace crowded St. Mark’s on Sundays and holydays, and drank homeopathic doses of the religion of terror and hope pictured in the mosaics or sculptured in statue or relief; the deliberate darkness of the pillared cavern intensified the effect of the icons and sermons; and even the prostitutes, hiding for a time the yellow handkerchief which the law required them to display as the badge of their tribe, came here, after a weary night, to cleanse themselves with prayer. The Venetian Senate favored this popular piety, and surrounded the doge and the state with all the awe of religious ritual. It imported at great cost, after the fall of Constantinople, the relics of Eastern saints, and offered to pay ten thousand ducats for the seamless coat of Christ.

And yet that same Senate, which Petrarch likened to an assembly of the gods,²² repeatedly flouted the authority of the Church, ignored the most terrible papal decrees of excommunication and interdict, offered asylum to prudent skeptics (till 1527),²³ sharply reproved a friar for attacking the Jews (1512), and sought to make the Church in Venice an appanage of the state. Bishops for Venetian sees were chosen by the Senate, and were presented to Rome for confirmation; such appointments were in many cases put into effect despite papal refusal to confirm them; after 1488 none but a Venetian could be appointed to a Venetian episcopate; and no revenues could be collected or used by any ecclesiastic, in the Venetian realm, who had not been approved by the government. Churches and monasteries were subject to state supervision, but no churchman could hold a public office.²⁴ All legacies to monastic establishments paid a tax to the state. Ecclesiastical courts were carefully watched to see to it that guilty ecclesiastics should receive the same penalties as guilty laymen. The Republic long resisted the introduction of the Inquisition; when it yielded it made all verdicts of the Venetian inquisitors subject to review and sanction by a senatorial commission; and only six sentences of death were issued in all the history of the Inquisition in Venice.²⁵ The Republic proudly took the stand that in temporal matters it “recognized no superior except the Divine Majesty.”²⁶ It openly accepted the principle that a general council of the bishops of the Church is above the pope, and that an appeal may be made from a pope to a future council. When Sixtus IV laid an interdict on the city (1483) the Council of Ten ordered all clergy to continue their services as usual. When Julius II renewed the interdict as part of his war against Venice, the Ten forbade the publication of the edict in Venetian territory, and had their agents in Rome affix to the doors of St. Peter’s an appeal from the Pope to a future council (1509).²⁷ Julius won that war, and forced Venice to accept his spiritual authority as absolute.

All in all, Venetian life was more attractive in its setting than in its spirit. The government was competent, and showed high courage in adversity; but it was sometimes brutal and always selfish; it never thought of Venice as part of Italy, and seemed to care little what tragedy might befall that divided land. It developed powerful personalities—self-reliant, shrewd, acquisitive, valiant, proud; we know a hundred of them in their portraits by artists whom they had just enough refinement to patronize. It was a civilization that, compared with the Florentine, lacked subtlety and depth; that, compared with the Milanese under Lodovico, lacked finesse and grace. But it was the most colorful, sumptuous, and sensually bewitching civilization that history has ever known.

V. VENETIAN ART

1. Architecture and Sculpture

Sensuous color is the essence of Venetian art, even of its architecture. Many Venetian churches and mansions, some business buildings, had mosaics or frescoes on their fronts. The façade of St. Mark’s gleamed with gilt and almost haphazard ornament; every decade brought to it new spoils and forms, until the face of the great fane became a bizarre medley of architecture, sculpture, and mosaic, in which decoration drowned structure, and the parts forgot the whole. To admire that façade with something fonder than wonder one must take his stand 576 feet away, at the farther end of the Piazza San Marco; in that perspective the brilliant conglomeration of Romanesque portals, Gothic ogees, classical columns, Renaissance railing, and Byzantine domes blends into one exotic phantasm, an Aladdin’s magic dream.

The Piazza was not then as ample and majestic as now. In the fifteenth century it was still unpaved; part of it was occupied by vines and trees, a stonecutter’s yard, and a latrine. In 1495 it was paved with brick; in 1500 Alessandro Leopardi cast for the three flagstaffs such pedestals as no later ones would ever surpass; and in 1512 Bartolommeo Buon the Younger raised the majestic campanile. (It fell in 1902, but was rebuilt on the same design.) Not so pleasing are the offices of the Procurators of St. Mark—the Procuratie Vecchie and Nuove, built between 1517 and 1640, and hemming in the Piazza on north and south with their immense and monotonous façades.

Between St. Mark’s and the Grand Canal stood the chief glory of civic Venice, the Palace of the Doges. It underwent in this period so many renovations that little remained of its earlier form. Pietro Baseggio rebuilt (1309–40) the southern wing facing the Canal; Giovanni Buon and his son Bartolommeo Buon the Elder raised a new wing (1424–38) on the western or Piazzetta front, and set up the Gothic Porta della Carta (1438–43)* at the northwestern corner. These southern and western façades, with their graceful Gothic arcades and balconies, are among the happiest products of the Renaissance. To the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries belong most of the sculptures on the façades, and the superb carvings of the column capitals; Ruskin thought one of these capitals—beneath the figures of Adam and Eve—the finest in Europe. Within the court Bartolommeo Buon the Younger and Antonio Rizzo built an ornate arch, named after Francesco Foscari, and mingling three architectural styles in unexpected harmony: Renaissance columns and lintels, Romanesque arches, Gothic pinnacles. In the niches of the arch Rizzo placed two strange statues: Adam protesting his innocence, and Eve wondering at the penalties of knowledge. Rizzo planned, and Pietro Lombardo completed, the eastern façade of the court, a delightful marriage of round and pointed arches with Renaissance cornices and balconies. It was Rizzo again who designed the Scala de’ Giganti, or Giants’ Stairs, from the court to the first floor—a simple, stately structure named from the gigantic statues of Mars and Neptune set up by Iacopo Sansovino at the head of the steps to symbolize Venetian mastery of land and sea. In the interior were prison cells, administrative offices, reception rooms, assembly halls for the Great Council, the Senate, and the Ten. Many of these rooms were, or were soon to be, decorated with the proudest murals in the history of art.

While the Republic glorified itself in this architectural gem, the richer nobles… Giustiniani, Contarini, Gritti, Barbari, Loredani, Foscari, Vendramini, Grimani… bounded the Grand Canal with their palaces. We must picture these not in their present deterioration but in their fifteenth-and sixteenth-century heyday: with their façades of white marble, porphyry, or serpentine; their Gothic windows and Renaissance colonnades; their carved portals opening on the water; their hidden courtyards adorned with statuary, fountains, gardens, frescoes, urns; their interiors with tile or marble floors, mighty fireplaces, inlaid furniture, Murano glass, silken canopies, hangings of gold or silver cloth, bronze chandeliers gilded, enameled, or chased, coffered ceilings, and murals by men whose names have gone around the world. So, for example, the Palazzo Foscari was decorated with paintings by Gian Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Paris Bordone, Veronese. Perhaps these rooms were more magnificent than comfortable, the chairs too straight-backed, the windows drafty, and no mode of heating that could warm both sides of a room or a man at the same time. Some Venetian palaces cost 200,000 ducats; a law of 1476 tried to limit expenditure to 150 ducats per room, but we hear of rooms whose fixtures and furnishings cost 2000. Probably the most ornate of the palaces was the Ca d’Oro, named the House of Gold because the owner, Marino Contarini, ordered that almost every inch of the marble façade should be covered with decoration, much of it in gilt. Its Gothic balconies and tracery still make it the prettiest front on the Canal.

These millionaires, while feathering their own nests, spared something for the citadels of their incidental faith. Strange to say, St. Mark’s was not till 1807 the cathedral of Venice; formally it was the private chapel of the doge and the shrine of the city’s patron saint; it belonged, so to speak, to the religion of the state. The episcopal see was attached to the minor church of San Pietro di Castello, in the northeastern corner of the city. In the same remote section the Dominican friars had their seat, in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo; there Gentile and Giovanni Bellini found their final rest. More important to history is the church of the Franciscans—Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (1330–1443), known in fond abbreviations as I Frari, the Friars. Externally it made no show, but its interior gathered fame through the years as the tomb of celebrated Venetians—Francesco Foscari, Titian, Canova—and as a gallery of art. Here Antonio Rizzo designed a noble monument for the Doge Niccolò Tron; Gian Bellini set up his Frari Madonna, and Titian his Madonna of the Pesaro Family; here, above all, Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin rises in majesty behind the altar. Lesser masterpieces adorned lesser fanes: San Zaccaria offered its congregation inspiring Madonnas by Giovanni Bellini and Palma Vecchio; Santa Maria dell’ Orto had Tintoretto’s Presentation of the Virgin, and his bones; San Sebastiano received Veronese’s remains and some of his finest paintings; and for San Salvatore Titian painted an Annunciation in his ninety-first year.

In the construction and decoration of the churches and palaces of Venice a remarkable family of architects and sculptors played a persistent part. The Lombardi came to Venice from northwestern Italy, and so earned their cognomen, but their real name was Solari. They included the Cristoforo Solari who carved the effigies of Lodovico and Beatrice, and his brother Andrea, a painter; both men worked in Venice as well as Milan. Pietro Lombardo left his mark upon a score of buildings in Venice. He and his sons Antonio and Tullio designed the churches of San Giobbe and Santa Maria de’ Miracoli—hardly to our current taste; the tombs of Pietro Mocenigo and Niccolò Marcello in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, of Bishop Zanetti in Treviso Cathedral, and of Dante in Ravenna; and the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, in which Wagner died; and in most of these enterprises they supplied the sculpture as well as the architectural plans. Pietro himself did much architectural and sculptural work in the Palace of the Doges. Tullio and Antonio, aided by Alessandro Leopardi, set up the tomb of Andrea Vendramin in Santi Giovanni e Paolo—the greatest work of sculpture in Venice excepting only the Colleoni of Verrocchio and Leopardi in the square before that church. For the adjoining Scuola di San Marco, or Fraternity of St. Mark, Pietro Lombardo designed a rich portal and a strange façade. Finally a Sante Lombardo shared in building the Scuola di San Rocco, famous for its fifty-six paintings by Tintoretto. Largely through the work of this family the Renaissance style of columns, architraves, and decorated pediments prevailed over Gothic ogives and pinnacles, and Byzantine domes. In Venice, however, Renaissance architecture, still unsteady under Oriental influence, was too ornate, and obscured its lines with ornament. The atmosphere and classic traditions of Rome were needed to give the new style its definitive and harmonious form.

2. The Bellini

Next to St. Mark’s and the Ducal Palace, the glory of Venetian art was in painting. Many forces conspired to make the painters the favorites of Venetian patronage. The Church, here as elsewhere, had to tell the Christian story to its people, of whom only a few could read; she needed pictures and statuary to continue the passing effect of speech; so each generation, and many churches and monasteries, had to have Annunciations, Nativities, Adorations, Visitations, Presentations, Massacres of the Innocents, Flights into Egypt, Transfigurations, Last Suppers, Crucifixions, Entombments, Resurrections, Ascensions, Assumptions, Martyrdoms. When detachable paintings faded, or grew stale to a congregation, they might be sold to collectors or museums; they were periodically cleaned and occasionally repainted or retouched; their authors, if reincarnated, might not recognize them today. This, of course, did not apply to murals, which usually disintegrated on their walls. Sometimes, to avoid this fatality, the picture was painted upon canvas and this was then fixed to the wall, as in the Hall of the Great Council. In Venice the state rivaled the Church in appetite for murals, for these could feed patriotism and pride by celebrating the grandeur and ceremonies of the government, the triumphs of trade or war. The scuole, too, might order murals and painted banners to commemorate their patron saints or their annual pageantry. Rich men wanted scenes of outdoor beauty or indoor love pictured on the walls of their palaces; and they sat for portraits to cheat for a while the ironic brevity of fame. The Signory ordered a portrait of every doge in turn; even the Procurators of St. Mark so preserved their features for a careless posterity. It was in Venice that the portrait and the easel picture achieved most popularity.