The Renaissance

Until the middle of the fifteenth century painting developed slowly in Venice; then, like some flower catching the morning sun, it burst into unparalleled radiance as Venetians found in it a vehicle of the color and life that they had learned to love. Perhaps some of that Venetian flair for color had come to the lagoons from the East, with merchants who imported Oriental ideas and tastes as well as goods, who brought back with them memories of gleaming tiles and gilded domes, and displayed in Venetian markets, churches, or homes Oriental silks, satins, velvets, brocades, and cloth of silver or gold. Indeed Venice never quite made up its mind whether it was an Occidental or an Oriental state. On the Rialto East and West did meet; Othello and Desdemona could become man and wife. And if Venice and her painters could not learn color from the East, they could get it from the Venetian sky, observing its infinite variety of light and mist, and the splendor of sunsets touching campaniles and palaces, or mirrored in the sea. Meanwhile the victories of Venetian arms and fleets, and the heroic recovery from threatened ruin, roused the pride and imagination of patrons and painters, and commemorated themselves in art. Wealth discovered that it was meaningless unless it could transform itself into goodness, beauty, or truth.

An external stimulus was added to generate a Venetian school of painting. In 1409 Gentile da Fabriano was brought to Venice to decorate the Hall of the Great Council, and Antonio Pisano, called Pisanello, came from Verona to collaborate. We cannot say how well they performed, but it is probable that they stirred the Venetian painters to replace with softer contours and richer colors the dark and rigid hieratic forms of the Byzantine tradition, and the pale and lifeless forms of the Giottesque school. Perhaps some minor influence came down over the Alps with Giovanni d’Alamagna (d. 1450); but Giovanni seems to have grown up, and learned his art, in Murano and Venice. With his brother-in-law Antonio Vivarini he painted for the church of San Zaccaria an altarpiece whose figures begin to have the grace and tenderness that would make the work of the Bellini a revelation to Venice.

The greatest influence of all came from Sicily, or Flanders. Antonello da Messina grew up as a businessman, and presumably had no thought, in his youth, that his name would be carried down for centuries in the history of art. While in Naples he saw (if we accept Vasari’s perhaps romantic account) an oil painting that had been sent to King Alfonso by some Florentine merchants in Bruges. From Cimabue (c. 1240-c. 1302) to Antonello (1430–79) Italian painting on wood or canvas had relied on tempera—mixing the colors with a gelatinous substance. Such colors left a rough surface, were maladapted to blending for delicate shades and gradations, and tended to crack and slake off even before the artist’s death. Antonello saw the advantages of mixing pigments with oil: readier blending, easier handling and cleaning, brighter finish, greater permanence. He went to Bruges, and there studied the oil technique of the Flemish painters, then basking in the heyday of Burgundy. Having occasion to go to Venice, he became so enamored of the city—being himself “greatly addicted to women and pleasure”²⁸—that he spent there the remainder of his life. He abandoned business, and gave all his industry to painting. For the church of San Cassiano he painted in oil an altarpiece that became a model for a hundred similar pictures: the Madonna enthroned between four saints, with musician angels at her feet, and full Venetian colors on the brocades and satins of the drapery. Antonello shared his knowledge of the new method with other artists, and the great age of Venetian painting began. Many nobles sat to him for their portraits, and several of these pictures survive: the crude, strong Poet at Pavia, the Condottiere in the Louvre, the Portrait of a Man, plump and quizzical, in the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia, the Portrait of a Young Man in New York, and the Self-Portrait in London. At the height of his success Antonello fell sick, developed pleurisy, and died at the age of forty-nine. The artists of Venice gave him a sumptuous funeral, and acknowledged their debt in a generous epitaph:

In this ground is buried Antoninus the painter, the highest ornament of Messina and all Sicily; celebrated not only for his pictures, which were distinguished by singular skill and beauty, but because, with high zeal and tireless technique, through mixing colors with oil, he first brought splendor and permanence to Italian painting.²⁹

Among the pupils of Gentile da Fabriano at Venice was Iacopo Bellini, founder of a brief but major dynasty in Renaissance art. After this tutelage Iacopo painted in Verona, Ferrara, and Padua. There his daughter married Andrea Mantegna; and through him, as well as more directly, Iacopo came under Squarcione’s influence. When he returned to Venice he brought with him, if we may mingle metaphors, a rubbing of the Paduan technique, and an echo of the Florentine. All this, and the Venetian heritage, and, later, Antonello’s tricks with oil, passed down to Iacopo’s sons, the rival geniuses Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.

Gentile was twenty-three when the family moved to Padua (1452). He felt intimately the influence of his brother-in-law Mantegna; when he painted the shutters for the organ in the Padua cathedral he followed too carefully the hard figures and bold foreshortenings of the Eremitani frescoes. But in Venice a new gentleness appeared in his portrait of San Lorenzo Giustiniani. In 1474 the Signory assigned to him and his half-brother Giovanni the task of painting or repainting fourteen panels in the Hall of the Great Council. These canvases were among the earliest Venetian pictures painted in oil.³⁰ They were destroyed by fire in 1577, but the sketches that remain show that Gentile used for the pictures his characteristic narrative style, in which some major incident is portrayed at the center, and a dozen episodes play at the side. Vasari saw the paintings, and marveled at their realism, variety, and complexity.³¹

When Sultan Mohammed II sent a request to the Signory for a good portrait painter, Gentile was chosen. In Constantinople (1474) he enlivened the Sultan’s chambers and spirits with erotic pictures, and made of him a portrait (London) and a medallion (Boston), both showing a powerful character drawn by an expert hand. Mohammed died in 1481; his successor, more orthodox, obeyed the Moslem ban on the painting of human figures, and scattered into oblivion all but those two of the works done by Gentile in the Turkish capital. Luckily Gentile had returned to Venice in 1480, heavy with gifts and decorations from the old Sultan. He rejoined Giovanni in the Ducal Palace, and completed his contract with the Signory. It rewarded him with a pension of two hundred ducats a year.

In his old age he painted his greatest pictures. The guild of St. John the Evangelist had what it believed to be a miracle-working relic of the True Cross. It solicited Gentile to describe in three paintings the healing of an invalid by the relic, a Corpus Christi procession carrying it, and the miraculous finding of the lost fragment. The first panel has yielded its splendor to time. The second, painted when Gentile was seventy, is a brilliant panorama of dignitaries, choristers, and candle bearers parading around the Piazza San Marco, with St. Mark’s in the background, appearing very much as it is today. In the third picture, painted at seventy-four, the relic has fallen into the San Lorenzo Canal; the people crowding the bywalks and bridges are panic-stricken, and many kneel in prayer; but Andrea Vendramin plunges into the water, recovers the relic, and then, buoyed up by it, moves with uninfected dignity toward the shore. Every figure in these crowded canvases is drawn with realistic fidelity. And again the artist delights in surrounding the main event with engaging episodes: a boat slipping away from its dock while the gondolier watches the recovery of the relic; and a nude black Moor poised to dive into the stream.

Gentile’s last great picture (Brera) was painted at the age of seventy-six for his own confraternity of St. Mark, and showed the Apostle preaching in Alexandria. As usual it is a crowd; Gentile preferred to take humanity wholesale. He died at seventy-eight (1507), leaving the picture to be finished by his brother Gian.

Giovanni Bellini (Gian Bellini, Giambellino) was only two years younger than Gentile, but outlived him by nine. In this span of eighty-six years he ranged the whole gamut of his art, tried and mastered a rich variety of genres, and brought Venetian painting to its first peak. At Padua he absorbed Mantegna’s technical teaching without imitating his hard and statuesque style; and in Venice he adopted with unprecedented success the new method of mixing pigments with oil. He was the first Venetian to reveal the glory of color; and at the same time he attained to a grace and accuracy of line, a delicacy of feeling, a depth of interpretation, that, even in the lifetime of his brother, made him the greatest and most sought-for painter in Venice.

Churches and guilds and private patrons seemed never to tire of his Madonnas; he bequeathed the Virgin in a hundred forms to a dozen lands. The Venetian Academy alone has a host of them: Madonna with the Sleeping Child, Madonna with Two Holy Women, Madonna con Bambino, Madonna degli Alberetti, Madonna with St. Paul and St. George, Madonna Enthroned… and, best of this group, the Madonna of St. Job; this, we are told, is the first picture that Giovanni painted in oils, and it is one of the most brilliantly colored works in Venice—which is to say in the world. The little Museo Correr at the western end of the Piazza San Marco has another Giambellino Madonna, tender and sad and lovely; San Zaccaria has a variation on the Madonna of St. Job; the church of the Frari has a Madonna Enthroned, a little stiff and severe and hemmed in by gloomy saints, but appealing in her rich blue robes. The zealous wanderer will find many more of Gian’s Virgins, in Verona, Bergamo, Milan, Rome, Paris, London, New York, Washington. What more, in color, could be said of Our Lady after this polygraphic devotion? Perugino and Raphael would rival this multiplicity, and Titian, in that same church of the Frari, would find something more to say.

Giovanni did not do so well with the Son. Christ Blessing, in the Louvre, is middling, but the Sacred Conversation near it is movingly beautiful. The famous Pietà in the Brera at Milan has been warmly praised,³² but it shows a duet of charmless faces holding up a dead Christ who seems to need nothing more, for perfect physical condition, than to be freed from too much attention; this harsh and crude burial picture—undated—belongs to Bellini’s Mantegnesque youth. How much more pleasing is the Santa Justina in a private collection in Milan!—again somewhat stylized and posed, but with a delicacy of features, a modest drooping of the eyelids, a splendor of costume, that make this one of Gian’s most successful efforts. It was apparently a portrait, and Gian was now so skilled in rendering a living face and soul that a hundred patrons begged to share his immortality. Look again at Doge Loredano; with what depth of understanding, and keenness of eye, and dexterity of hand Bellini has caught the unfaltering, serene power of the man who could lead his people to victory in a war for survival against the united assault of nearly all the great states of Italy and transalpine Europe!—And then, rivaling the Leonardo who was creeping up on him in skill and fame, Giovanni tried his palette at bizarre landscapes like that medley of rocks, mountains, castles, sheep, water, riven tree, and clouded sky which St. Francis (in the Frick Collection) calmly confronts as he receives the stigmata.

In his old age the master tired of repeating the usual sacred themes, and experimented with allegory and classic mythology. He turned Knowledge, Happiness, Truth, Slander, Purgatory, the Church herself, into persons or stories, and sought to bring them to life with alluring landscapes. Two of his pagan pictures hang in the Washington National Gallery: Orpheus Charming the Beasts, and The Feast of the Gods—a picnic of bare-breasted women and half-naked, half-drunken men. The picture is dated 1514; it was painted for Duke Alfonso of Ferrara when the artist was eighty-four years old. We are reminded again of Alfieri’s boast—that the man-plant grows more vigorously in Italy than elsewhere on the earth.

Giovanni lived only a year after signing that testament of youth. His was a full and reasonably happy life: an astonishing procession of masterpieces, a kaleidoscope of warm colors on soft robes, an immense advance in grace, composition, and vitality upon the Giotteschi and the Byzantophiles, a power of perception and individualization unseen in the arid figures and indiscriminate masses of Gentile’s pictures, a fruitful mediation, in time and style, between a Mantegna who knew only Romans and a Titian who felt and pictured every phase of life from Flora to Charles V. One of Gian’s pupils was Giorgione, who developed his master’s idyls of wood and stream; Titian worked with Giorgione, and received the great tradition. Generation by generation Venetian art was accumulating its knowledge, varying its experiments, and preparing its culmination.

3. From the Bellini to Giorgione

The success of the Bellini made painting popular in Venice, where mosaics had held so long a sway. Studios multiplied, patrons opened their purses, and artists developed who, though they were not Bellini or Giorgiones, would have been the brightest stars in lesser galaxies. Vincenzo Catena painted so well that many of his pictures were credited to Gian Bellini or to Giorgione. Antonio Vivarini’s younger brother, Bartolommeo, met a conservative demand by applying to medieval themes the technique of Squarcione and the fuller colors that painting had learned to mix and convey. Bartolommeo’s nephew and pupil, Alvise Vivarini, threatened for a time to rival Gian Bellini with pretty Madonnas, and achieved a monumental altarpiece—Madonna with Six Saints—which passed from Italy to the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Alvise was a good teacher, for three of his pupils found moderate fame. Bartolommeo Montagna we leave to Vicenza. Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano worked for the Madonna market; one at Parma has a handsome figure of the Archangel Michael, while another in Cleveland redeems itself with brilliant color. Marco Basaiti painted a fine Calling of the Sons of Zebedee (Venice), and a delightful portrait—A Youth— in the London National Gallery.

Carlo Crivelli may also have been a pupil of the Vivarini; however, he had to abscond from Venice soon after his seventeenth year (1457): having abducted the wife of a sailor, he was fined and jailed; released, he sought safety in Padua, where he studied in Squarcione’s school. In 1468 he moved to Ascoli, and spent his remaining twenty-five years painting pictures for the churches there and thereabouts. Perhaps because he left Venice so soon, Crivelli hardly shared in the progressive movement of Venetian painting; he preferred tempera to oil, kept to the traditional religious subjects, and adopted an almost Byzantine scheme of subordinating representation to decoration. He gave his pictures an enamel finish, which went well with the gilded frames of the polyptychs he filled; and though his Madonnas seem cold, there is a delicate grace in their drawing that presages Giorgione.

Vettor (Vittore) Carpaccio was a major among these minors. Starting with studies in perspective and design in the manner of Mantegna, he adopted the narrative style of Gentile Bellini, added to it a youthful preference for imaginary idyls rather than contemporary events, and applied to his romantic themes a fully developed technique. Quite alien to his usually blithe spirit is an early picture (in New York), Meditation on the Passion—a macabre study of Sts. Jerome and Onofrius imagining Christ seated before them dead, with skull and crossbones at their feet, and a background of lowering clouds. When he was thirty-three (1488) Carpaccio received an important commission: to paint for the School of St. Ursula a series of pictures illustrating her history. In nine picturesque panels he told how the handsome Prince Conon of England had come to Brittany to wed Ursula, daughter of its king; how she begged him to postpone the wedding until, with a train of 11,000 virgins, she could make a pilgrimage to Rome; how Conon accompanied her lovingly, and all received the papal blessing; how, then, an angel appeared to Ursula and announced that she and her virgins must go to Cologne and be martyred; how she leaves the sorrowing Conon and, with her train, goes in calm dignity to Cologne; how its pagan kinglet proposes marriage to her, and, when she refuses, slays all 11,001. The legend suited Carpaccio’s fancy; he delighted in picturing the crowds of maidens and courtiers, and made nearly every one of them aristocratic and fair and colorfully dressed; and to the various scenes he brought not only his pictorial science but his knowledge of actual things—the forms of architecture, the shipping in a bay, the patient procession of the clouds.

In an interval of his nine years’ labor with Ursula, Carpaccio painted for the School of St. John the Evangelist The Healing of the Demoniac by a relic of the Holy Cross. Daring comparison with Gentile Bellini, Vittore described a scene on a Venetian canal, crowded with people, gondolas, and palaces. Here was all of Gentile’s realism and detail, done with a brilliant finish beyond the older man’s reach. Stirred by Carpaccio’s success, the School of St. George of the Slavonians asked him to commemorate their patron saint on the walls of their Venetian oratory. Again he took nine years, and painted nine scenes. They do not quite equal the Ursula series, but Carpaccio, now in his fifties, had not lost his flair for representing graceful figures in harmonious combinations, and architectural backgrounds fanciful in conception but convincing in presentation. St. George attacks the dragon in an impetuous charge; in contrast St. Jerome is shown as the quiet scholar immersed in study in a surprisingly handsome room, with no other company than his lion. Every feature in the room is pictured with minute fidelity, even to the musical score so legible on a fallen scroll that Molmenti transcribed it for the piano.

In 1508 Carpaccio and two obscure artists were appointed to set a value on a strange mural painted by a rising young artist on an outer wall of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi—the warehouse of the Teuton merchants near the Rialto bridge. He judged it worth a fee of 150 ducats ($1875?). Though Carpaccio still had eighteen years of life in him, he painted only one more great picture—a Presentation in the Temple (1510) for the chapel of the Sanudo family in the church of San Giobbe. There it had to compete with Gian Bellini’s Madonna of St. Job; and though the Virgin and her attendant ladies are lovely, Giovanni, not Vittore, is victor in this silent contest. Carpaccio, in a later century, might have been the master of the age; it was his misfortune that he came between Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione.

4. Giorgione

It might seem strange that artists should be hired at high fees to paint a warehouse wall. But in 1507 the Venetians felt that life without color was dead; and the German traders there, some from the great Dürer’s Nuremberg, had their own lusty sense of art. So they sublimated part of their profits into two murals, and had the luck to choose immortals for the task. The paintings soon succumbed to salt moisture and the sun, and only vague blotches remain, but even these attest the early fame of Giorgione da Castelfranco. He was then twenty-nine years old. We do not know his name; an old story made him the love child of an aristocratic Barbarelli and a woman of the people; but this may be an afterthought.³³ In his thirteenth or fourteenth year (c. 1490) he was sent from Castelfranco to Venice to serve as apprentice to Gian Bellini. He developed rapidly, won substantial commissions, bought a house, painted a fresco on its front, and filled his home with music and revelry; for he played the lute well, and preferred gay women in the flesh to the loveliest of them on canvas. What influences formed his wistful style it is hard to say, for he was unlike the other painters of his day, except that he may have learned from Carpaccio some grace and charm. Probably the decisive influence came from letters rather than from art. When Giorgione was twenty-seven or twenty-eight Italian literature was taking a bucolic turn; Sannazaro published his Arcadia in 1504; perhaps Giorgione read these poems and found in their pleasant fancies some suggestions of idealized landscapes and amours. From Leonardo—passing through Venice in 1500—Giorgione may have acquired a taste for a mystic, dreamy softness of expression, a delicacy of nuance, a refinement of manner that made him, for a tragically brief moment, the summit of Venetian art.

Among the earliest works attributed to him—for in hardly any case can we be sure of his authorship—are two wood panels describing the exposure and rescue of the infant Paris; the story is an excuse for painting shepherds and rural landscapes breathing peace. In the first picture that is by common consent his—The Gypsy and the Soldier—we get a typically Giorgionesque fancy: a casual woman, naked except for a shawl around her shoulders, sits on her discarded dress on the mossy bank of a rushing stream, nurses a child, and looks anxiously about her; behind her stretches a landscape of Roman arches, a river and a bridge, towers and a temple, curious trees, white lightning, and green storm-laden clouds; near her is a comely youth holding a shepherd’s staff—but richly garbed for a shepherd!—and so pleased with the scene that he ignores the gathering storm. The story is uncertain; what the picture means is that Giorgione liked handsome youths, soft-contoured women, and nature even in its moods of wrath.

In 1504 he painted, for a bereaved family in the town of his birth, the Madonna of Castelfranco. It is absurd and beautiful. In the forefront St. Liberale, in the shining armor of a medieval knight, holds a lance for the Virgin, and St. Francis preaches to the air; high aloft on a double pedestal Mary sits with her babe, who leans recklessly out from his high perch. But the green and violet brocade at Mary’s feet is a wonder of color and design; Mary’s robes fall about her in wrinkles as lovely as wrinkles can ever be; her face has the gentle tenderness that poets picture in the mates of their dreams; and the landscape recedes with Leonardesque mystery till the sky melts into the sea.

When Giorgione and his friend Tiziano Vecelli received the assignment to paint the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Giorgione chose the wall fronting the Grand Canal, and Titian took the Rialto side. Vasari, examining Giorgione’s fresco half a century later, found it impossible to make head or tail of what another spectator described as “trophies, nude bodies, heads in chiaroscuro… geometricians measuring the terrestrial globe, perspectives of columns, and between them men on horseback, and other fantasies.” However, the same writer adds: “It may be seen how accomplished Giorgione was in handling colors in fresco.”³⁴

But his genius lay in conception rather than coloring. When he painted the Sleeping Venus that was a priceless treasure of the Dresden Gallery, he might have thought of her in purely sensual terms as an inviting formation of molecules. Doubtless she is that, too, and marks the passage of Venetian art from Christian to pagan themes and sentiment. But there is nothing immodest or suggestive about this Venus. She lies asleep, precariously nude in the open air, on a red cushion and a white silken robe, her right arm under her head, her left hand serving as a fig leaf, one perfect limb outstretched over another raised beneath it; seldom has art so simulated the velvet texture of feminine surfaces, or so conveyed the grace of a natural pose. But on her face is a look of such innocence and peace as rarely accord with naked beauty. Giogione here has put himself beyond good and evil, and lets the esthetic sense transiently dominate desire. In another piece—the Fête champêtre or Pastoral Symphony of the Louvre—the pleasure is frankly sexual, and yet again has all the innocence of nature. Two nude women and two clothed men are enjoying a holiday in the countryside: a patrician youth, in a doublet of gleaming red silk, strumming a lute; beside him a disheveled shepherd painfully trying to bridge the gap between a simple and a cultivated mind; the aristocrat’s lady, in a graceful motion, emptying a crystal pitcher into a well; the shepherd’s lass waiting patiently for him to attend to her charms or her flute. No notion of sin has entered their heads; the lute and the flute have sublimated sex into harmony. Behind the figures rises one of the richest landscapes in Italian art.

Finally, in The Concert of the Pitti Palace, desire seems forgotten as irrelevantly primitive, and music is all, or becomes a bond of friendship subtler than desire. Until the nineteenth century this “most Giorgionesque” of all pictures³⁵ was regularly accredited to Giorgione; many critics now ascribe it to Titian; since the matter is still doubtful let us leave the authorship to Giorgione, because he loved music only next to woman, and because Titian is rich enough in masterpieces to spare one to his friend. At the left a plumed youth stands, a bit lifeless and negative; a monk sits at a clavichord, his beautifully rendered hands on the keys, his face turned round to a bald cleric on our right; the cleric lays one hand on the monk’s shoulder, and holds in the other a cello resting on the floor. Has the music ended, or not yet begun? It does not matter; what moves us is the silent depth of feeling in the countenance of the monk, whose every fiber has been refined, and his every sentiment ennobled, by music; who hears it long after all the instruments have been mute. That face, not idealized but profoundly realized, is one of the miracles of Renaissance painting.

Giorgione lived a short life, and apparently a merry one. He seems to have had many women, and to have healed each broken romance with a new one soon begun. Vasari reports that Giorgione caught the plague from his latest love; all that we know is that he died in the epidemic of 1511 at the age of thirty-four. His influence was already extensive. A dozen “Giorgionesque” minor artists painted rural idyls, conversation pieces, musical interludes, masque costumes, in vain efforts to capture the refinement and finish of his style, the airy overtones of his landscapes, the guileless eroticism of his themes. He left two pupils who were to make a stir in the world: Sebastiano del Piombo, who went off to Rome, and Tiziano Vecelli, the greatest Venetian of all.

5. Titian: The Formative Years: 1477–1533

He was born in the town of Pieve, in the Cadoric range of the Dolomites, and those rugged mountains were well remembered in his landscapes. When he was nine or ten he was brought to Venice, and was apprenticed successively to Sebastiano Zuccato, Gentile Bellini, and Giovanni Bellini. In Giovanni’s studio he worked side by side with Giorgione, who was his senior by only a year. When that Keats of the brush set up his own studio Titian probably went with him as assistant or associate. He was so deeply influenced by Giorgione that some of his early pictures have been ascribed to Giorgione, and some of Giorgione’s later pictures to Titian; the inimitable Concert probably belongs to this period. Together they painted the Fondaco walls.

From the plague that took Giorgione’s life—or from the moratorium laid upon Venetian art by the war of the League of Cambrai—Titian fled to Padua (1511). There he painted three frescoes for the Scuola del Santo, recording miracles of St. Anthony; if we may judge from their crudity, Titian at thirty-five had far to go before equaling the best work of Giorgione; Goethe, however, with penetrating hindsight, saw in them “the promise of great things.”³⁶ Returning to Venice, Titian addressed to the doge and the Council of Ten (May 31, 1513) a letter that recalls Leonardo’s appeal to Lodovico a generation before:

Illustrious Prince! High and mighty lords! I, Titian of Cadore, have from childhood upwards studied the art of painting, desirous of a little fame rather than of profit…. And although in the past, and also in the present, I have been urgently invited by His Holiness the Pope and other lords to enter their service, I, as the faithful subject of your Excellencies, have rather cherished the wish to leave behind me a memorial in this famous city. Therefore, if it seem good to your Excellencies, I am anxious to paint in the Hall of the Great Council, employing therein all my powers; and to begin with a canvas of the battle on the side of the Piazzetta, which is so difficult that no one has yet had the courage to attempt it. I should be willing to accept for my labor any reward that may be thought proper, or even less. Therefore, being, as aforesaid, studious only of honor and to please your Excellencies, I beg to ask for the first broker’s patent, for life, that shall fall vacant in the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi, irrespective of all promised reversions of such patent, and on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions as Messer Zuan Belin [Gian Bellini], besides two assistants to be paid by the Salt Office, as well as all colors and necessaries.… In return for which I promise to do the work above named with such speed and excellence as will satisfy the Signori.³⁷

A “broker’s patent” (senseria) was formally an appointment as trade intermediary between Venetian and foreign merchants; actually, in the case of the broker’s patent with the German merchants in Venice, it made the holder the official painter of the state, and paid him 300 crowns ($3750) a year for painting a portrait of the doge and such other pictures as the government might require. Apparently Titian’s proposal was tentatively accepted by the Council; in any case he began to paint The Battle of Cadore in the Ducal Palace. But his rivals persuaded the Council to withhold the patent from him, and to suspend the pay of his assistants (1514). After negotiations that irritated all concerned, he received the post and pay of the patent without the title (1516). He in his turn procrastinated, and did not complete till 1537 the two canvases that he had begun in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio. They were destroyed by fire in 1577.

Titian developed leisurely, like any organism dowered with a century of life. But as early as 1508 he showed the spiritual penetration and technical power that were to put him above all his rivals in portraiture. A nameless portrait once named Ariosto has in it a memory of Giorgione’s style—a poetic face, and subtle eyes a little malicious, and sumptuous raiment that set a model for a thousand later works. And in this period (1506–16) the maturing artist already knew how to paint women of ample loveliness, stemming from Giorgione and expanding toward Rubens. The movement from the Virgin to Venus continued in Titian, even while he painted religious pictures of great spendor and renown. The same hand that stirred piety with a Gypsy Madonna and an Adoration of the Shepherds could turn to a Woman at Her Toilet, and that incarnation of voluptuous innocence, the Flora of the Uffizi Gallery. This gentle face and generous bosom probably served again in The Daughter of Herodias; Salome is as thoroughly Venetian as the severed head is powerfully Hebraic.

In or near the year 1515 Titian produced two of his most celebrated pictures. The Three Ages of Man shows a group of naked infants sleeping beneath a tree; a Cupid so soon inoculating them with the mad pursuit; a bearded octogenarian contemplating a skull; and a young couple happy in the spring of love, yet looking at each other wistfully, as if foreseeing the erosive pertinacity of time. Sacred and Profane Love has a modern title that would surprise a resurrected Titian. When first mentioned (1615), the picture was called Beauty Adorned and Unadorned;³⁸ probably it aimed not to point a moral but to adorn a tale. The “profane” nude is the most perfect figure in Titian’s repertoire, the very Venus de Milo of the Renaissance. But the “sacred” lady is secular too; her jeweled girdle draws the eye, her silken gown tempts the touch; probably she is the same buxom courtesan who posed for Flora and the Woman at Her Toilet. If the spectator looks long enough he will see a complex landscape behind the figures: plants and flowers and a thick clump of trees, a shepherd tending his flock, two lovers, hunters and dogs chasing a hare, a town and its towers, a church and its campanile, a green Giorgionesque sea, a clouded sky. What difference does it make that we cannot know just what the picture “means”? It is beauty made to “stay awhile”; and is that not what Faust thought worth a soul?

Having learned that female beauty, adorned or natural, would always find customers, Titian pursued the theme joyously. Early in 1516 he accepted the invitation of Alfonso I to paint some panels in the Castello at Ferrara. The artist was lodged there, with two assistants, for some five weeks, and presumably came frequently thereafter from Venice. For the Alabaster Hall Titian painted three pictures that continued Giorgione’s pagan mood. In The Bacchanal men and women, some of them naked, drink, dance, and make love before a landscape of brown trees, blue lake, and silver clouds; a scroll on the ground bears a French motto: “He who drinks and does not drink again does not know what drinking is.” In the distance an old Noah sprawls naked and drunk; closer a lad and lass join in dance, their garments whirling in the breeze; in the foreground a woman whose firm breasts display her youth lies nude and sleeping on the grass; and near her an anxious child raises his dress to ease his bladder and bring the Bacchic cycle to completion. In Bacchus and Ariadne the abandoned woman is startled by a Bacchic procession bursting through the woods-drunken satyrs, a naked male entwined with snakes, the nude god of wine leaping from his chariot to capture the fleeing princess. In these pictures, and The Worship of Venus, the Pagan Renaissance is in full command.

Meanwhile Titian painted an arresting portrait of his new patron, the Duke Alfonso: a handsome intelligent face, a corpulent body dignified with robes of state, a beautiful hand (hardly that of a potter and gunner) resting on a beloved cannon; this is the picture that stirred even Michelangelo to praise. Ariosto sat for a portrait, and returned the compliment with a line in a later edition of the Furioso. Lucrezia Borgia too sat for the great portraitist, but no trace of that painting remains; and Laura Dianti, Alfonso’s mistress, may have posed for a picture that survives only in a copy in Modena. It was probably for Alfonso that Titian made one of his finest pictures, The Tribute Money: a Pharisee with the head of a philosopher, asking his question sincerely, and a Christ answering without resentment, brilliantly.

It is characteristic of the times that Titian could pass from Bacchus to Christ, from Venus to Mary, and back again, with no apparent loss to his peace of mind. In 1518 he painted for the church of the Frari his greatest work, The Assumption of the Virgin. When it was placed behind the high altar, in a majestic marble frame, the Venetian diarist Sanudo thought the event worth noting: “May 20, 1518: Yesterday the panel painted by Titian for… the Minorites was put up.”³⁹ To this day the sight of the Frari Assumption is an event in any sensitive life. Near the center of the immense panel is the figure of the Virgin, full and strong, clothed in a robe of red and a mantle of blue, rapt in wonder and expectation, lifted up through the clouds by an inverted halo of winged cherubim. Above her is an inevitably futile attempt to portray the Deity—all raiment and beard, and hair disheveled by the winds of heaven; finer is the angel that brings Him a crown for Mary. Below are the Apostles, a variety of magnificent figures, some gazing in astonishment, some kneeling in adoration, some reaching up as if to be taken with her into paradise. Standing before this powerful evocation, the unwilling skeptic mourns his doubts, and acknowledges the beauty and aspiration of the myth.

In 1519 Iacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos in Cyprus, in gratitude for the victory of his Venetian fleet over a Turkish squadron, commissioned Titian to paint another altarpiece for the Frari—for the chapel that had been dedicated there by his family. Titian knew the risk he was running in challenging comparison between this Madonna of the Pesaro Family and his masterpiece so lately acclaimed. He worked for seven years on the new picture before he released it from his studio. He chose to represent the Virgin enthroned; but, defying precedent, he placed her at the right in a diagonal scheme that put the donor at the left, with St. Peter between them, and St. Francis at her feet. The composition would have been thrown off balance but for the bright illumination focusing the Mother and her Child. Many an artist, tired of the traditional centralized or pyramidal structure of such pictures, welcomed and imitated the experiment.

About 1523 Marquis Federigo Gonzaga invited Titian to Mantua. The artist did not stay long, for he had commitments in Venice and Ferrara; but he began a series of eleven paintings representing Roman emperors; these have been lost. On one of his visits he painted an attractive portrait of the young bearded Marquis. Federigo’s mother, the splendid Isabella, was still living, and sat for a picture. Finding the result uncomfortably realistic, she put it among her antiquities, and asked Titian to copy a portrait that Francia had made of her forty years before. It was from this that Titian produced (c. 1534) the famous picture with the turban hat, the ornate sleeves, the stole of fur, the pretty face. Isabella protested that she had never been so beautiful, but she arranged to have this reminiscent portrait descend to posterity.

Here for a while we leave Tiziano Vecelli. To understand his later career we must fill in the background of political events in which his greatest patron after 1533—Charles V—was intimately concerned. Titian was fifty-six in 1533. Who would have supposed that he had still forty-three years to live, and that he would paint as many masterpieces in his second half-century as in the first?

6. Minor Artists and Arts

We must retrace our steps now, and briefly honor two painters who were born after Titian but died long before his death. We bow, in passing, to Girolamo Savoldo, who came to Venice from Brescia and Florence, and painted pictures of high excellence: the Madonna and Saints now in the Brera Gallery; an ecstatic St. Matthew in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and a Magdalen in Berlin, far more tempting than the stout lady of that name in Titian.

Giacomo Nigreti was named Palma from some hills near his birthplace, Serina, in the Bergamasque Alps; he became Palma Vecchio when his grand-nephew Palma Giovane also acquired fame. For a time he was considered the equal of Titian by their contemporaries. Perhaps some jealousy arose between them, which was not eased by Titian’s stealing of Giacomo’s mistress. Giacomo had painted her as Violante; Titian had her pose for his Flora. Like Titian, Palma handled sacred and profane themes with equal skill if not with equal zest; he specialized in Sacred Conversations or Holy Families, but probably owed his fame to his portraits of Venetian blondes—full-bosomed women who dyed their hair to an auburn hue. Nevertheless his finest pictures are religious: a Santa Barbara in the church of Santa Maria Formosa, the patron saint of the Venetian bombardiers; and the Jacob and Rachel of the Dresden gallery—a handsome shepherd sharing a kiss with a buxom lass. Palma’s portraits would have ranked with the best of his time and city had not Titian produced half a hundred deeper ones.

His pupil Bonifazio de’ Pitati, called Veronese from his birthplace, adopted the style of Giorgione’s Fête champêtre and Titian’s Diana to adorn Venetian walls and furniture with attractive landscapes and nudes; and his Diana and Actaeon is worthy of these masters.

Lorenzo Lotto, less popular than Bonifazio in their day, has gained repute with the years. A shy, pious, melancholy spirit, he was not quite at home in Venice, where paganism resumed its sway as soon as the church bells and choirs ceased to sing. At the age of twenty (1500) he produced one of the most original paintings of the Renaissance, the St. Jerome in the Louvre: no hackneyed image of the emaciated eremite, but an almost Chinese study of somber chasms and mountainous rocks, amid which the old scholar is a minor element, at first hardly seen; this is the first European painting that reproduces nature in its wild dominance rather than as an imaginary background.⁴⁰ Passing to Treviso, Lorenzo painted for the church of Santa Cristina a monumental altar back of The Madonna Enthroned, which made his fame throughout northern Italy. Another success with a Madonna for the church of San Domenico at Recanati earned him a call to Rome. There Julius II commissioned him to paint some rooms in the Vatican; but when Raphael came the frescoes that Lotto had begun were destroyed. Perhaps this humiliation helped to darken Lorenzo’s mood. Bergamo better appreciated his peculiar talent for moderating the warm colors of Venetian art into softer tones more congruous with piety; twelve years he labored there, modestly paid but content to be first in Bergamo rather than fourth in Venice. For the church of San Bartolommeo he painted an overcrowded but still beautiful altarpiece, The Madonna in Majesty. Lovelier is an Adoration of the Shepherds at Brescia; the color, while full and pervasive, has a subdued tone more restful to eye and spirit than the brilliant effects of the great Venetians.

A sensitive soul like Lotto’s could at times penetrate more deeply into a personality than Titian. Few artists have caught the glow of healthy youth so intimately as in Lotto’s Portrait of a Boy in the Castello at Milan. His Self-Portrait shows Lorenzo himself apparently well and strong, but he must have known much sickness and pain to represent illness so sympathetically as in The Sick Man of the Borghese Gallery, or in another of the same title in the Galleria Doria at Rome—an emaciated hand pressed over the heart, a look of pain and bewilderment on the face, as if asking why should he, so good or so great, be chosen by the germ? A more famous portrait, Laura di Pola, shows a woman of quiet beauty, also puzzled by life, and finding no answer except in religious faith.

Lotto too came to that consolation. Restless, solitary, unmarried, he wandered from place to place, perhaps from philosophy to philosophy, until in his final years (1552–6) he settled down as a resident in the convent of the Santa Casa at Loreto, near the Holy House that pilgrims believed to have once sheltered the Mother of God. In 1554 he gave all his property to the convent, and took an oblate’s vows. Titian called him “as good as goodness, and as virtuous as virtue.”⁴¹ Lotto had outlived the Pagan Renaissance, and had sunk to rest, so to speak, in the arms of the Council of Trent.

In that vibrant century—1450–1550 —during which Venetian commerce suffered so many defeats, and Venetian painting scored so many victories, the minor arts shared in the cultural exuberance. It was not for them a Renaissance, for they were old and mature in Italy by Petrarch’s time, and merely continued their medieval excellence. Perhaps the mosaicists had lost some of their skill or patience; even so their work on St. Mark’s was at least abreast of their age. The potters were now learning to make porcelain; Marco Polo had brought some from China; a sultan had sent fine specimens of it to the doge (1461); by 1470 the Venetians were making their own. The glass blowers at Murano reached in this period the acme of their art, making cristallo of exquisite purity and design. The names of the leading glass blowers were known throughout Europe, and every royal house competed for their wares. Most of them used a mold or model; some put the mold aside, blew a bubble into the molten glass as it poured from the furnace, and shaped the substance into cups, vases, chalices, ornaments of a hundred colors and a thousand forms. Sometimes, learning from the Moslems, they painted the surface with colored enamel or gold. The glass artisans kept jealously in their families the secret processes by which they achieved their miracles of fragile beauty, and the Venetian government passed stern laws to prevent these esoteric subleties from becoming known in other lands. In 1454 the Council of Ten decreed that

if a workman carry into another country any art or craft to the detriment of the Republic, he will be ordered to return; if he disobeys, his nearest relatives will be imprisoned, in order that the solidarity of the family may persuade him to return; if he persists in his disobedience, secret measures will be taken to have him killed wherever he may be.⁴²

The only known case of such an assassination was at Vienna in the eighteenth century. Despite the law, Venetian artists and artisans found their way over the Alps in the sixteenth century, and brought their technique to France and Germany as gifts to the conquerors of Italy.

Half the artisans of Venice were artists. The pewterers embellished dishes, platters, beakers, and cups with graceful borders and floral designs. The armorers were famous for damascened cuirasses, helmets, shields, swords, and daggers, and sheaths chased or engraved with elegant patterns; and other masters might make for short weapons ivory handles studded with gems. In Venice, about 1410, Baldassare degli Embriachi, a Florentine, carved in bone the great altarpiece, in thirty-nine sections, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The wood carvers not only made fine sculptural figures and reliefs, like the Circumcision in the Louvre, or the chest painted by Bartolommeo Montagna and formerly in the bombed Poldi-Pezzoli Museum in Milan; they decorated the ceilings and doors and furniture of Venetian aristocrats with carvings, bosses, and intarsia, and chiseled the choir stalls of such churches as the Frari and San Zaccaria. Venetian jewelers met a heavy foreign as well as domestic demand, but took time to rise from quantity to quality. The goldsmiths, now under German instead of Oriental influence, turned out tons of plate, personal adornment, and decorative fixtures for everything from cathedrals to shoes. The illumination and calligraphy of manuscripts continued, slowly yielding to print. French and Flemish influences entered into the designs of Venetian textiles, but Venetian dyes and skills gave the products their favored texture and hues. It was from Venice that the queen of France ordered three hundred pieces of dyed satin (1532); and it was in the soft and luxurious stuffs worked in Venetian shops, and in the colors given them in Venetian vats, that the great painters of Venice found models for the lordly and glowing robes that made half the brillance of their art. Venice almost realized Ruskin’s ideal of an economy in which every industry would be an art, and every product would proudly express the personality and artistry of the artisan.

VI. VENETIAN LETTERS

1. Aldus Manutius

Venice was in this period too busy living to care much for books; and still its scholars, libraries, poets, and printers shared in giving it a fair name. It took no prominent part in the humanist movement; nevertheless humanism had here one of its noblest exemplars—Ermolao Barbaro, who was crowned poet by an emperor at fourteen, taught Greek, translated Aristotle, served his fellow men as a physician, his country as a diplomat, and his Church as a cardinal, and was killed by the plague at thirty-nine. Venetian women made as yet little pretense to education; they were content to be physically alluring, or maternally fertile, or finally venerable; but in 1530 Irene of Spilimbergo opened a salon for men of letters, studied painting under Titian, sang sweetly, played well on viol, harpsichord, and lute, and talked learnedly about ancient and modern literature. Venice gave protection to intellectual refugees from the Turks in the East and from the Christians in the West; here Aretino would laugh securely at popes and kings, as, centuries later, Byron would here celebrate their decay. Aristocrats and prelates formed clubs or academies for the cultivation of music and letters, and opened their homes and libraries to the assiduous, the melodious, and the erudite. Monasteries, churches, and private families collected books; Cardinal Domenico Grimani had eight thousand, which he gave to Venice; Cardinal Bessarion did the same with his precious hoard of manuscripts. To house these, and the remnants of Petrarch’s bequest, the government twice ordered the erection of a public library; war and other distractions foiled the plan; at last (1536) the Senate engaged Iacopo Sansovino to build the Libreria Vecchia, architecturally the most handsome library in Europe.

Meanwhile Venetian printers were producing the finest printed books of the age, perhaps of all time. They were not the first in Italy. Sweynheim and Pannartz, once aides to Johann Fust in Mainz, set up the first Italian press in a Benedictine monastery at Subiaco in the Apennines (1464); in 1467 they transferred their equipment to Rome, and published twenty-three books in the next three years. In 1469, or earlier, printing began in Venice and Milan. In 1471 Bernardo Cennini opened a printing establishment in Florence, to the dismay of Politian, who mourned that “now the most stupid ideas can in a moment be transferred into a thousand volumes and spread abroad”⁴³ Copyists thrown out of work vainly denounced the new gadget. By the end of the fifteenth century 4987 books had been printed in Italy: 300 in Florence, 629 in Milan, 925 in Rome, 2835 in Venice.⁴⁴

The superiority of Venice in this regard was due to Teobaldo Manucci, who changed his name to Aldo Manuzio, and later Latinized it into Aldus Manutius. Born at Bassiano in the Romagna (1450), he learned Latin at Rome and Greek at Ferrara, both under Guarino da Verona; and then him-self lectured at Ferrara on the classics. Pico della Mirandola, one of his pupils, invited him to come to Carpi and tutor his two nephews, Lionello and Alberto Pio. Teacher and pupils developed a lasting mutual affection; Aldus added the name Pio to his own, and Alberto and his mother, Countess of Carpi, agreed to finance the first large-scale adventure in publishing. Aldus’ plan was to collect, edit, print, and broadcast at nominal cost all the significant Greek literature that had been salvaged from the storms of time. It was a heady enterprise for a dozen reasons: manuscripts were hard to get; different manuscripts of the same classic varied dishearteningly in their text; nearly all manuscripts were heavy with errors of transcription; editors would have to be found and paid to collate and revise texts; fonts of Latin and Greek type would have to be designed and cast; paper would have to be imported in large quantities; typesetters and pressmen would have to be engaged and trained; a machinery of distribution would need to be improvised; a book-buying public would have to be coaxed into existence on a wider base than ever before; and all this would have to be financed without the protection of copyright laws.

Aldus chose Venice for his headquarters because its commercial connections made it an excellent center for distribution; because it was the richest city in Italy, and had many magnates who might want to adorn their rooms with uncut books; and because it harbored scores of refugee Greek scholars who would be glad to be employed as editors or proofreaders. John of Speyer had already established the first printing press in Venice (1469?); Nicholas Jensen of France, who had learned the new art in Gutenberg’s Mainz, set up another a year later. In 1479 Jensen sold his press to Andrea Torresano. In 1490 Aldus Manutius settled in Venice, and in 1499 he married Torresano’s daughter.

In his home near the church of Sant’ Agostino Aldus gathered Greek scholars, fed them, bedded them, and set them to editing classic texts. He talked Greek with them, and wrote in Greek his dedications and prefaces. In his house the new type was molded and cast, the ink was made, the books were printed and bound. His first publication (1495) was a Greek and Latin grammar by Constantine Lascaris, and in that same year he began to issue the works of Aristotle in the original. In 1496 he published the Greek grammar of Theodorus Gaza, and in 1497 a Greek-Latin dictionary compiled by himself. For he continued to be a scholar even amid the hazards and tribulations of publishing. So in 1502, after years of study, he printed his own Rudimenta grammaticae linguae Latinae, with an introduction to Hebrew for good measure.

From these technical beginnings he went on to publish one after another of the Greek classics (1495f): Musaeus (Hero and Leander), Hesiod, Theocritus, Theognis, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Lysias, Plato, Pindar, Plutarch’s Moralia.… In those same years he put forth a large number of Latin and Italian works, from Quintilian to Bembo, and the Adagia of Erasmus, who, sensing the vital import of Aldo’s enterprise, came in person to live with him for a time, and edit not only his own Adagia or Dictionary of Quotations, but Terence, Plautus, and Seneca too. For the Latin books Aldus had a graceful semiscript type designed, not, as legend said, from the handwriting of Petrarch, but by Francesco da Bologna, an expert calligrapher; this is the type that we now, from that origin, call italic. For the Greek texts he cut a font based on the careful handwriting of his chief Greek scholar, Marcus Musurus of Crete. He marked all his publications with a motto, Festina lente—”Make haste slowly”—and accompanied it with a dolphin symbolizing speed and an anchor standing for stability; this symbol, along with the pictured tower that Torresano had used, established the custom of the printer’s or publisher’s colophon.*

Aldus worked at his enterprise quite literally night and day. “Those who cultivate letters,” he wrote, in his preface to Aristotle’s Organon, “must be supplied with the books necessary for their purpose; and until this supply is secured I shall not rest.” Over the door of his study he placed a warning inscription: “Whoever thou art, thou art earnestly requested by Aldus to state thy business briefly, and to take thy departure promptly…. For this is a place of work.”⁴⁵ He was so absorbed in his publishing campaign that he neglected his family and his friends, and ruined his health. A thousand tribulations sapped his energy: strikes disrupted his schedule, war suspended it for a year during the Venetian struggle for survival against the League of Cambrai; rival printers in Italy, France, and Germany pirated the editions whose manuscripts had cost him dearly, and whose texts he had paid scholars to revise. But the sight of his small and handy volumes, clearly typed and neatly bound, going forth to a widening public at a modest price (about two dollars in the currency of today) gladdened his heart and repaid his toil. Now, he told himself, the glory of Greece would shine upon all who cared to receive it.⁴⁶

Inspired by his devotion, Venetian scholars joined with him to found the Neacademia, or New Academy (1500), dedicated to the acquisition, editing, and publishing of Greek literature. The members, at their meetings, spoke only Greek; they changed their names to Greek forms; they shared the tasks of editing. Distinguished men labored in this Academy—Bembo, Alberto Pio, Erasmus of Holland, Linacre of England. Aldus gave them much credit for the success of his enterprise, but it was his own energy and passion that carried it through. He died exhausted and poor (1515), but fulfilled. His sons continued the work; but when their son, Aldo the second, died (1597), the firm dissolved. It had served its purpose faithfully. It had taken Greek literature from the half-hidden shelves of rich collectors, and had scattered it so widely that even the ravaging of Italy in the third decade of the sixteenth century, and the desolation of northern Europe by the Thirty Years’ War, could lose that heritage as it had been so largely lost in the dying ages of ancient Rome.

2. Bembo

Besides helping to revive the literature of Greece, the members of the New Academy contributed vigorously to the literature of their time. Antonio Coccio, called Sabellicus, chronicled Venetian history in his Decades. Andrea Navagero composed Latin poems so nearly perfect in form that his proud countrymen hailed him as having snatched the leadership of letters from Florence to Venice. Marino Sanudo kept a lively diary of current events in politics, literature, art, manners, and morals; the fifty-eight volumes of these Diarii picture the life of Venice more fully and vividly than any history of any city in Italy.

Sanudo wrote in the racy language of daily speech; his friend Bembo devoted half a long life to polishing an artificial style in Latin and Italian. Pietro imbibed culture in his cradle, for he was the child of rich and lettered Venetians. Moreover, as if to confirm his literary purity, he was born in Florence, proud home of the Tuscan dialect. He studied Greek in Sicily under Constantine Lascaris, and philosophy at Padua under Pomponazzi. Perhaps, if we may judge from his conduct—for he seldom took sin very seriously—he imbibed some skepticism from Pomponazzi, who doubted the immortality of the soul; but he was too much of a gentleman to disturb the consolations of the faithful; and when the reckless professor was accused of heresy Bembo persuaded Leo X to deal with him leniently.

Bembo’s happiest days were spent at Ferrara, from his twenty-eighth to his thirty-sixth year (1498–1506). There he fell in love, if only in a literary way, with Lucrezia Borgia, queen of that courtly court. He forgot her dubious background at Rome in the lure of her quiet grace, the glow of her “Titian” hair, the fascination of her fame; for fame too, like beauty, can intoxicate. He wrote her, in scholarly diction, letters as tender as might comport with his safety in the precincts of that excellent gunner, her husband Alfonso. He dedicated to her an Italian dialogue on Platonic love, Gli asolani (1505); and he composed in her praise Latin elegiacs as elegant as any in Rome’s Silver Age. She wrote to him carefully, and may have sent him that tress of her hair which is preserved, with her letters to him, in the Ambrosian Library at Milan.⁴⁷

When Bembo moved from Ferrara to Urbino (1506) he was at the height of his charm. He was tall and handsome, of noble birth and breeding, of distinguished presence without obtrusive pride; he could write poetry in three languages, and his letters were already prized; his conversation was that of a Christian, a scholar, and a gentleman. His Asolani, published during his stay at Urbino, fell in with the spirit of that court. What topic could be more pleasant than love?—what mise en scène fitter for such discourse than the gardens of Caterina Cornaro at Asolo?—what occasion more suitable than the wedding of one of her maids of honor?—who could better speak of love, however Platonic, than the three youths and three maidens into whose mouths Bembo put his savory mixture of philosophy and poetry? Venice, whose artists took hints and scenes from the book, Ferrara, whose Duchess received the adoring dedication, Rome, where ecclesiastics were glad ragionar (d’amore, Urbino, which boasted the author in the flesh—all Italy acclaimed Bembo as a master of delicate sentiment and polished style. When Castiglione idealized in The Courtier the discussions he had heard or imagined in the Ducal Palace at Urbino, he gave to Bembo the most distinguished role in the dialogue, and chose him to phrase the famed concluding passages on Platonic love.

In 1512 Bembo accompanied Giuliano de’ Medici to Rome. A year later Giuliano’s brother became Leo X. Bembo was soon lodged in the Vatican as a secretary to the Pope. Leo liked his wit, his Ciceronian Latin, his easy-going ways. For seven years Bembo was an ornament of the papal court, an idol of society, an intellectual father to Raphael, a favorite with millionaires and generous women. He was only in minor orders, and accepted the opinion current in Rome that his trial marriage with the Church did not forbid a little gracious venery. Vittoria Colonna, purest of the pure, doted on him.

Meanwhile, at Venice, Ferrara, Urbino, Rome, he wrote such Latin poetry as Catullus or Tibullus might have penned—elegies, idyls, epitaphs, odes; many frankly pagan, some, like his Priapus, in the best vein of Renaissance licentiousness. The Latin of Bembo and Politian was idiomatically perfect, but it came at the wrong time; had they been born fourteen centuries earlier they would have been de rigueur in the schools of modern Europe; writing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they could not be the voice of their country, their epoch, even of their class. Bembo realized this, and in an essay Delia volgar lingua he defended the use of Italian for literary purposes. He tried to show the way by composing canzoni in the manner of Petrarch; but here his passion for polish devitalized his verse, and turned his amours into poetic conceits. Nevertheless many of these poems were set to music as madrigals, some by the great Palestrina himself.

The sensitive Bembo found Rome a ghostly city after the death of his friends Bibbiena, Chigi, and Raphael. He retired from his papal post (1520), and, like Petrarch, sought health and ease in a rural home near Padua. Now, at fifty, he fell in love in no mild Platonic way. For the next twenty-two years he lived in a free union with Donna Morosina, who gave him not only three children but such comforts and consolations, such solicitude and care, as had never graced his fame, and now came doubly welcome to his declining years. He still enjoyed the income of several ecclesiastical benefices. He used his wealth largely to collect fine paintings and sculptures, and among them Venus and Jove held an honored place beside Mary and Christ.⁴⁸ His home became a goal of literary pilgrimage, a salon of artists and wits; and from that throne he laid down the laws of style for Italy. Even while papal secretary he had cautioned his associate Sadoleto to avoid reading the Epistles of St. Paul, lest their unpolished speech of the commonalty should mar his taste; “put away these trifles,” Bembo told him, “for such absurdities do not become a man of dignity.”⁴⁹ All Latin, he told Italy, must be modeled upon Cicero, all Italian upon Petrarch and Boccaccio. He himself, in his old age, wrote histories of Florence and Venice; they are beautiful and dead. But when his Morosina died the great stylist forgot his rules, forgot Plato and Lucrezia and Castiglione, and wrote to a friend a letter that, perhaps alone of all that flowed from his pen, invites remembrance:

I have lost the dearest heart in the world, a heart which tenderly watched over my life—which loved it and sustained it neglectful of its own; a heart so much the master of itself, so disdainful of vain embellishments and adornments, of silk and gold, of jewels and treasures of price, that it was content with the single and (so she assured me) supreme joy of the love I bore it. This heart, moreover, had for vesture the softest, gracefulest, daintiest of limbs; it had at its service pleasant features, and the sweetest, most graciously endowed form that I have ever met in this land.

He can never forget her dying words:

“I commend our children to you, and beseech you to have care of them, both for my sake and for yours. Be sure they are your own, for I have never deceived you; that is why I could take Our Lord’s body just now with a soul at peace.” Then, after a long pause, she added, “Rest with God,” and a few minutes afterward closed her eyes forever, those eyes that had been the clear-shining faithful stars of my weary pilgrimage through life.⁵⁰

Four years later he was still mourning her. Losing his ties with life, he became pious at last; and in 1539 Paul III could make him a priest and a cardinal. For his remaining eight years he was a pillar and exemplar of the Church.

VII. VERONA

If now, leaving the egregious Aretino to a later chapter, we move out of Venice to her northern and western dependencies, we shall find there too some radiance of the Golden Age. Treviso could boast that it had begotten Lorenzo Lotto and Paris Bordone; and its cathedral had an Annunciation by Titian and a fine choir designed by the innumerable Lombardi. The little town of Pordenone gave its name to Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchi, and still shows in its duomo one of his chefs-d’oeuvre, a Madonna with Saints and Donor. Giovanni was a man of buoyant energy and self-confidence, ready of wit and sword, willing to undertake anything anywhere. We find him painting in Udine, Spilimbergo, Treviso, Vicenza, Ferrara, Mantua, Cremona, Piacenza, Genoa, Venice, forming his style on Giorgione’s landscapes, Titian’s architectural backgrounds, and Michelangelo’s muscles. He gladly accepted an invitation to Venice (1527), anxious to pit his brush against Titian’s; his St. Martin and St. Christopher, painted for the church of San Rocco, achieved an almost sculptural effect by modeling with light and shade; Venice hailed him as a worthy rival of Titian. Pordenone resumed his travels, married thrice, was suspected of killing his brother, was knighted by King John of Hungary (who had never seen any of his pictures), and returned to Venice (1533) to resume his duel with Titian. Hoping to prod Titian on to finishing his battle picture in the Ducal Palace, the Signory engaged Pordenone to do a panel on the opposite wall. The competition between Leonardo and Michelangelo was here repeated (1538), with a dramatic supplement: Pordenone wore a sword at his belt. His canvas—splendid in color, too violent in action—was adjudged second best, and Pordenone moved on to Ferrara to design some tapestries for Ercole II. Two weeks after arrival he died. His friends said it was poisoning; his enemies said it was time.

Vicenza too had heroes. Bartolommeo Montagna founded a school of painting rich in middling Madonnas. Montagna’s best is the Madonna En throned in the Brera; it cleaves safely to Antonello’s model of two saints on the right, two on the left, and angels making music at the Virgin’s feet; but these angels deserve their name, and the Virgin, with comely features and graceful robe, is one of the finest figures in the crowded gallery of Renaissance Madonnas. Vicenza’s heyday, however, awaited Palladio.

Verona, after a proud history of fifteen hundred years, became a Venetian dependency in 1404, and remained so till 1796. Nevertheless she had a healthy cultural life of her own. Her painters fell behind those of Venice, but her architects, sculptors, and woodworkers were not surpassed in the “Most Serene” capital. The fourteenth-century tombs of the Scaligers, though too ornate, suggest no lack of sculptors; and the equestrian statue of Can Grande della Scala, with the flowing caparison of the horse so vividly portraying motion, falls short only of the masterpieces of Donatello and Verrocchio. The most sought-for wood carver in Italy was Fra Giovanni da Verona. He worked in many cities, but he devoted a large part of his life to carving and inlaying the choir stalls of Santa Maria in Organo in his native city.

The great name in Veronese architecture was “that rare and universal genius” (Vasari calls him), Fra Giocondo. Hellenist, botanist, antiquarian, philosopher, and theologian, this remarkable Dominican friar was also one of the leading architects and engineers of his time. He taught Latin and Greek to the famous scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger, who practised medicine in Verona before moving to France. Fra Giocondo copied the inscriptions on the classic remains in Rome, and presented a book on the subject to Lorenzo de’ Medici. His researches led to the discovery of the greater part of Pliny’s letters in an old collection in Paris. While in that city he built two bridges over the Seine. When the detritus of the River Brenta threatened to fill up the lagoons that made Venice possible, Fra Giocondo persuaded the Signory to order, at great cost, the diversion of the river to empty farther south; but for this procedure Venice would not be today a miracle of liquid streets; hence Luigi Cornaro called Giocondo the second founder of the city. In Verona his masterpiece is the Palazzo del Consiglio, a simple Romanesque loggia surmounted by an elegant cornice, and crowned with statues of Cornelius Nepos, Catullus, Vitruvius, Pliny the Younger, and Emilius Macer—all ancient gentlemen of Verona. In Rome Giocondo was made architect of St. Peter’s with Raphael and Giuliano da Sangallo, but died in that year (1514), aged eighty-one. It was a well-spent life.

Giocondo’s work on the ruins of Rome excited another Veronese architect. Giovanmaria Falconetto, after drawing all the antiquities of his own locality, marched off to Rome to do the same thing there, and devoted twelve years, on and off, to the task. Returning to Verona, he took the losing side in politics, and had to move to Padua. There Bembo and Cornaro encouraged him in the application of classical design to architecture; and the generous centenarian housed, fed, financed, and loved Giovanmaria to the end of the artist’s seventy-six years. Falconetto designed a loggia for Cornaro’s palace in Padua, two of that city’s gates, and the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Giocondo, Falconetto, and Sanmicheli constituted a trio of architects rivaled only in Rome.

Michele Sanmicheli gave himself chiefly to fortification. Son and nephew of Veronese architects, he went to Rome at sixteen, and carefully measured the ancient buildings. After making a name for himself in designing churches and palaces, he was sent by Clement VII to build defenses for Parma and Piacenza. The distinguishing feature of his military architecture was the pentagonal bastion, from whose projecting balcony guns could be fired in five directions. When he examined the fortifications of Venice he was arrested as a spy; but his examiners were so impressed by his knowledge that the Signory engaged him to construct fortresses in Verona, Brescia, Zara, Corfu, Cyprus, and Crete. Back in Venice, he built a massive fort on the Lido. In preparing for the foundations he soon struck water. Following the example of Fra Giocondo, he sank a double cordon of connected piles, pumped the water from between the two circles, and set the foundations in this dry ring. It was a hazardous undertaking, whose success was in doubt to the last minute. Critics predicted that when heavy artillery should be fired from this fort the structure would shake itself loose from its foundations and collapse. The Signory placed in it the stoutest cannon in Venice, and ordered them all fired at once. Pregnant women fled from the neighborhood to avoid premature deliveries. The cannon were fired, the fort stood firm, the mothers returned, and Sanmicheli was the toast of Venice.

In Verona he designed two majestic city gates, adorned with Doric columns and cornices; Vasari ranked these structures, architecturally, with the Roman theater and amphitheater that had survived in Verona from Roman days. He built the Palazzo Bevilacqua there, and the Grimani and Mocenigo palaces; he reared a campanile for the cathedral, and a dome for San Giorgio Maggiore. His friend Vasari tells us that though Michele in youth had indulged in some moderate adultery, he became in later life a model Christian, taking no thought for material gains, and treating all men with kindness and courtesy. He bequeathed his skills to Iacopo Sansovino and a nephew whom he loved exceedingly. When news came to him that this nephew had fallen in Cyprus while fighting for Venice against the Turks, Sanmicheli developed a fever, and died in a few days, aged seventy-three (1559).

To Verona belonged the finest medalist of the Renaissance, perhaps of all time.⁵¹ Antonio Pisano, known to history as Pisanello, always signed himself Pictor, and thought of himself as a painter. Half a dozen of his paintings survive, and they are of excellent quality;* but it is not these that have sustained his name through the centuries. Recapturing the skill and compact realism of Greek and Roman coin designs, Pisanello molded little circular reliefs, seldom more than two inches in diameter, combining finesse of workmanship with such fidelity to truth that his medallions are the most trustworthy representations we have of several Renaissance notables. These are not profound works; they have no philosophical overtones; but they are treasures of painstaking workmanship and historical illumination.

Excepting Pisanello and the Carotos, Verona, in painting, remained medieval. After the fall of the Scaligers it subsided quietly into a secondary role. It was not, like Venice, a Rialto where merchants from a dozen lands rubbed elbows and faiths and wore out one another’s dogmas with mutual attrition. It was not, like Lodovico’s Milan, a political power, nor like Florence a focus of finance, nor like Rome an international house. It was not so close to the Orient, nor so captivated by humanism, as to tincture its Christianity with paganism; it continued content with medieval themes, and rarely reflected in its art the sensuous zest that evoked the nudes of Giorgione and Titian, Correggio and Raphael. In a later period one of its sons, who indeed is known by its name, entered gaily into the pagan mood; but Paolo Veronese became in life a Venetian rather than a Veronese. Verona was becalmed.

In the fourteenth century its painters were still abreast of their times; note how Padua called one of them—Altichiero da Zevio—to decorate the chapel of San Giorgio. Toward the end of that century Stefano da Zevio went to Florence and learned the Giottesque tradition from Agnolo Gaddi; returning to Verona he painted frescoes that Donatello pronounced the best yet done in those parts. His pupil Domenico Morone advanced upon him by studying the works of Pisanello and the Bellini; the Defeat of the Buonacolsi, in the Castello at Mantua, emulates the multitudinous panoramas of Gentile. Domenico’s son Francesco, by his murals, helped Fra Giovanni’s woodwork to make the sacristy of Santa Maria in Organo one of the treasure rooms of Italy. Domenico’s pupil Girolamo dai Libri, at the age of sixteen (1490), painted in the same favorite church an altarpiece—Deposition from the Cross— “which when uncovered,” reports Vasari, “excited such wonder that the whole city ran to congratulate the artist’s father”;⁵² its landscape was one of the best in fifteenth-century art. In another of Girolamo’s pictures (New York) a tree was so realistically portrayed that—on the word of a holy Dominican—birds tried to perch on its branches; and the grave Vasari himself avers that in a Nativity that Girolamo painted for Santa Maria in Organo you might count the hairs on the rabbits.⁵³ Girolamo’s father had received the name dai Libri from his skill in illuminating manuscripts; the son carried on the art, and came to excel in it all other miniaturists in Italy.

About 1462 Iacopo Bellini painted in Verona. One of the boys who served him was Liberale, who later received the name of his city; through this Liberale da Verona a touch of Venetian color and vitality entered Veronese painting. Liberale, like Girolamo, found that he prospered best by illuminating manuscripts; he earned 800 crowns ($20,000?) in Siena by his miniatures. Badly treated in his old age by his married daughter, he bequeathed his estate to his pupil Francesco Torbido, went to live with him, and died at the reasonable age of eighty-five (1536). Torbido studied also with Giorgione, and improved upon Liberale, who forgave him. Another of Liberale’s pupils, Giovanfrancesco Caroto, was strongly influenced by Mantegna’s masterly polyptych in San Zeno. He went to Mantua to study with the old master, and made such progress that Mantegna sent out Caroto’s work as his own. Giovanfrancesco made excellent portraits of Guidobaldo and Elisabetta, Duke and Duchess of Urbino. He returned to Verona a rich man, who could afford, now and then, to speak his mind. When a priest accused him of making lascivious figures, he asked, “If painted figures move you so, how can you be trusted with flesh and blood?”⁵⁴ He was among the few Veronese painters who wandered from religious themes.

If to these men we add Francesco Bonsignori, Paolo Morando, called Cavazzolo, Domenico Brusasorci, and Giovanni Caroto (Giovanfrancesco’s younger brother), the roster of Veronese painters in the Renaissance is relatively complete. They were almost all good men; Vasari has a moral pat on the back for nearly every one of them; their lives were orderly for artists, and their work had a placid and wholesome beauty that reflected their natures and their environment. Verona sang a pious and tranquil minor chord in the song of the Renaissance.

CHAPTER XII

Emilia and the Marches

1378–1534

I. CORREGGIO

FIFTY miles south of Verona one comes to the old Via Emilia, or Emilian Way, which ran 175 miles from Piacenza through Parma, Reggio, Modena, Bologna, Imola, Forlì, and Cesena to Rimini. * We pass over Piacenza and (for the moment) Parma, to note a little commune eight miles northeast of Reggio, and sharing its name. Correggio is one of several towns in Italy that are remembered only through some genius to whom they gave a cognomen. Its ruling family also was called Correggio; one member was the Niccolò da Correggio who wrote genteel verses for Beatrice and Isabella d’Este. It was a place where you might expect genius to be born and to die, but not to stay, for it had no significant art, or clear tradition, to give to ability instruction and form. But in the first decades of the sixteenth century the house of Correggio was headed by Count Gilbert X, and his wife, Veronica Gambara, was one of the great ladies of the Renaissance. She could speak Latin, knew Scholastic philosophy, wrote a commentary on patristic theology, composed delicate Petrarchian verses, was called “the tenth Muse.” She made her little court a salon for artists and poets, and helped to spread that romantic worship of woman which was now replacing, among the upper classes of Italy, the medieval worship of Mary, and was molding Italian art toward the representation of feminine charms. On September 3, 1528, she wrote to Isabella d’Este that “our Messer Antonio Allegri has just finished a masterpiece picturing Magdalen in the desert, and expressing in full the sublime art of which he is a great master.”¹

It was this Antonio Allegri who unwittingly stole the name and made the fame of his town, though his family name might have well expressed the joyous nature of his art. His father was a small landed proprietor, prosperous enough to win for his son a bride with a dowry of 257 ducats ($6425?). When Antonio showed a flair for drawing and painting he was apprenticed to his uncle Lorenzo Allegri. Who taught him further we do not know; some say that he went to Ferrara to study with Francesco de’ Bianchi-Ferrari, then to the studios of Francia and Costa at Bologna, then with Costa to Mantua, where he felt the influence of the massive frescoes of Mantegna. In any case he spent most of his life in Correggio in comparative obscurity, and presumably he was the only one in the town who suspected that he would be ranked among the “immortals.” He seems to have studied the engravings that Marcantonio Raimondi had made from Raphael, and probably saw, if only in copy, the chief works of Leonardo. All these influences entered into his completely individual style.

The sequence of his subjects corresponds to the decline of religion among the literate classes of Italy in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and the rise of secular patronage and themes. His early works, even when painted for private purchasers, told again, and mostly for churches, the Christian story: The Adoration of the Magi, where the Virgin has the pretty, girlish face that Correggio later confined to subordinate characters; The Holy Family; The Madonna of St. Francis, still traditional in all its features; The Repose on the Return from Egypt, freshly original in composition, coloring, and characterization; La Zingarella, where the Virgin, leaning fondly over her babe, is drawn with full Correggian grace; and The Madonna Adoring Her Child, which makes the infant the radiant source of the scene’s illumination.

His pagan turn came through an odd commission. In 1518 Giovanna da Piacenza, abbess of the convent of San Paolo in Parma, engaged him to decorate her apartment. She was a lady of more pedigree than piety; she chose as theme of the frescoes chaste Diana, goddess of the hunt. Over the fireplace Correggio portrayed Diana in a splendid chariot; above her, in sixteen radial sections converging in the cupola, he painted scenes from classical mythology; in one a dog, too passionately hugged by a child, expresses with a remarkably pictured eye his fear of being choked with love, and shames by his alert beauty all the human and divine figures scattered about. From this time forward the human body, mostly nude, became for Correggio the chief element in pictorial decoration, and pagan motives entered into even his Christian themes. The abbess had converted him from Christianity.

His success made a stir in Parma, and brought him lucrative assignments. About 1519 he painted The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (Naples); the Virgin and the saint were here unspeakably beautiful; and yet, four years later, Correggio surpassed them when he used the same subject for the picture that is one of the treasures of the Louvre—lovely faces, an alluring landscape, the magic play of light and shade upon flowing raiment and waving hair.

In 1520 Correggio accepted an arduous commission from Parma—to paint frescoes in the cupola and over the tribune and side chapels of a new Benedictine abbey church, San Giovanni Evangelista. He toiled on this task for four years, and in 1523 he moved with his wife and children to Parma to be nearer his work. In the dome he represented the Apostles, seated comfortably in a circle on soft clouds, and fixing their gaze upon a Christ whose foreshortened figure, seen from below, gives an astonishing illusion of distance. The splendor of this dome is in the superbly modeled figures of the Apostles, some of them quite nude, rivaling the gods of Pheidias, and perhaps echoing in their muscular splendor the figures that Michelangelo had painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling twelve years before. In a spandrel between two arches a powerful St. Ambrose discusses theology with an Apostle John who is as handsome as any Parthenon ephebus. Luscious youthful forms, theoretically angels, fill the interstices with angelic faces, buttocks, legs, and thighs. The Greek revival, already old in humanism and Manutius, is here in full swing in Christian art.

In 1522 the great cathedral of Parma opened its doors to the young artist, and contracted to pay him a thousand ducats ($12,500) to paint the chapels, apse, choir, and dome. On this assignment he worked at intervals through eight years, from 1526 till his death. For the dome he chose the Assumption of the Virgin, and shocked many of the cathedral canons by making this culminating picture a whirling panorama of human flesh. In the center the Virgin, reclining on the air, floats up to heaven with arms outstretched to meet her Son; around and beneath her a heavenly host of Apostles, disciples, and saints—magnificent figures worthy of Raphael at his best—seems to puff her upward with the breath of adoration; and supporting her is a choir of angels looking remarkably like healthy boys and girls in all the splendor of youthful nudity; these are the loveliest adolescent nudes in Italian art. One of the canons, confused by so many arms and legs, denounced the painting as “a fricassee of frogs”; apparently other members of the chapter were dubious about this melee of human flesh celebrating a virgin; and Correggio’s work on the cathedral seems to have been interrupted for a time.

He was now (1530) advancing in middle age, and longed for the peace of a settled life. He bought some acres outside Correggio, became, like his father, a landed proprietor, and strove to support his family and his farm with his brush. During and after his major enterprises he produced a series of religious pictures, almost every one of them masterly: Magdalen Reading; The Virgin of St. Sebastian— the fairest Virgin in Correggio; The Madonna della Scodella— “with a bowl” and an incomparable Bambino; The Madonna di San Girolamo, sometimes called Il Giorno or Day, in which the Jerome is worthy of Michelangelo, and the angel holding a book before the Child is a vision of girlish beauty, and the Magdalen laying her cheek upon the Child’s thigh is the purest and tenderest of sinners, and the warm rich reds and yellows make a canvas worthy of Titian at his best; and finally a companion picture, The Adoration of the Shepherds, which fancy has called La Notte, Night. What interested Correggio in these pictures was not the religious sentiment but the esthetic values—the adoring devotion of the young mother, herself so comely with oval face, glossy hair, dropped eyelids, slender nose, thin lips, full bosom; or the masculine muscles of athletic saints; or the demure loveliness of Magdalen, or the rosy flesh of a child. Correggio, coming down from cathedral scaffolds, refreshed himself with composite visions of beauties that might be.

About 1523 a series of commissions from Federigo II Gonzaga invited the full expression of the pagan element in his art. Wishing to court the favor of Charles V, the Marquis ordered picture after picture, sent them as gifts to the Emperor, and received his coveted bauble, the title of duke. For him, schooled in the paganism of Rome, Correggio painted a succession of mythological subjects, commemorating Olympian triumphs of love or desire. In The Education of Eros Venus blindfolds Cupid (lest the human race should die); in Jupiter and Antiope the god, disguised as a satyr, advances upon the lady as she lies in naked slumber on the grass; in Danaë a winged herald prepares for Jupiter’s coming by undraping the fair maid, while beside her bed two putti play in happy indifference to the morality of the gods; in 10 Jupiter descends from his boredom in a concealing cloud and clasps with omnipotent hand a plump lady who hesitates gracefully and ends by yielding to the compliment of desire. In The Rape of Ganymede a pretty boy is flown to heaven by an eagle in haste to meet the needs of the ambidextrous god of gods. In Leda and the Swan the lover is a swan, but the motive is the same. Even in The Virgin and St. George two naked Cupids romp before the Virgin, and St. George, in his flashing mail, is the physical ideal of Renaissance youth.

We must not conclude that Correggio was merely a sensualist with a flair for painting flesh. He loved beauty perhaps immoderately, and in these mythologies he stressed the surface of it too exclusively; but in his Madonnas he had done justice to a profounder beauty. He himself, while his brush romped through Olympus, lived like an orderly bourgeois, devoted to his family, and seldom leaving home except to work. “He was content with little,” Vasari tells us, “and lived as a good Christian should.” He is reported to have been timid and melancholy; who would not be melancholy coming every day into a world of deformed adults from a haunting dream of loveliness?

Perhaps some quarrel arose about payment for the work in the cathedral. When Titian visited Parma he heard echoes of the dispute, and gave his opinion that if the dome could be inverted and filled with ducats they would not adequately pay for what Correggio had painted there. In any case the payments were curiously involved in the artist’s premature death. In 1534 he received an installment of sixty crowns ($750?), all in coppers. Carrying this weight of metal, he set out from Parma on foot; he became overheated, drank too much water, took a fever, and died on his farm March 5, 1534, in the fortieth (some say forty-fifth) year of his age.

For so short a life his achievement was stupendous, far greater than all that Leonardo, or Titian, or Michelangelo, or anyone but Raphael could show in their first forty years. Correggio equals them all in grace of line, the soft modeling of contours, in portraying the living texture of human flesh. His coloring has a liquid and radiant quality, alive with reflections and transparencies, softer—with its violet, orange, rose, blue, and silver hues —than the glaring brilliance of the later Venetians. He was a master of chiaroscuro, of light and shade in their endless combinations and revelations; in some of his Madonnas matter becomes almost a form and function of light. He experimented bravely with schemes of composition—pyramidal, diagonal, circular; but in his cupola frescoes he let unity slip through a superabundance of Apostolic and angelic legs. He played too fondly with foreshortenings, so that the figures in his cupolas, though drawn as science might require, seem huddled and cramped and ungainly, like the ascending Christ of San Giovanni Evangelista. On the other hand he cared nothing for mechanics, so that many of his characters, like Micawber, lack all visible means of support. He painted some religious subjects with exquisite tenderness, but his prevailing interest was in the body—its beauty, movements, attitudes, joys; and his later pictures symbolized the triumph of Venus over the Virgin in sixteenth-century Italian art.

His influence in Italy and France was rivaled only by Michelangelo’s. In the later sixteenth century the Bolognese school of painting, led by the Carracci, took him as their model; and their followers, Guido Reni and Domenichino, founded upon Correggio an art of physical excellence and sensual sentiment. Charles Le Brun and Pierre Mignaud imported into France, and deployed in Versailles, a rosy voluptuous style of decoration through pagan figures, darting Cupids, and chubby cherubim. Correggio, rather than Raphael, conquered France, and left upon its art an influence that lasted till Watteau.

In Parma itself his work was continued, and then transformed, by Francesco Mazzuoli, called by Italian whim il Parmigianino—the Parmesan. Born an orphan (1504), he was reared by two uncles who were painters, so that his talent ripened rapidly. At seventeen he was commissioned to decorate a chapel of that same church—San Giovanni Evangelista—in which Correggio was painting the dome; in these frescoes his style achieved an almost Correggian grace, to which he added his own peculiar love of fine raiment. About this time he painted a remarkable portrait of himself as seen in a mirror; this is one of the most engaging autorittrati in art, revealing a lad of refinement, sensitivity, and pride. When Parma was besieged by papal troops his uncles packed up this and others of his pictures, and sent Francesco with them to Rome (1523) to study the works of Raphael and Michelangelo, and seek the favor of Pope Clement VII. He was on the way to full success when the sack of Rome forced him to flee to Bologna (1527). There a fellow artist robbed him of all his engravings and designs. Presumably by this time his protective uncles had died. He earned his bread by painting for Pietro Aretino the queenly Madonna della Rosa, formerly in Dresden, and for some nuns the Santa Margherita, which still survives in Bologna. When Charles V came there to reorganize a devastated Italy, Francesco made a portrait of him in oils; the Emperor liked it, and might have made the artist’s fortune, but Parmigianino took the portrait back to his studio to give it a few finishing touches, and never saw Charles again.

He returned to Parma (1531), and received a commission to paint a vault in the church of the Madonna della Steccata. He was now at the top of his powers, and his incidental products were of a high order: a Turkish Slave who looks more like a princess; a Marriage of St. Catherine matching Correggio’s handling of this theme, with children of unearthly beauty; and an anonymous portrait allegedly of his mistress Antea, described as one of the most famous courtesans of the time, but here angelically demure, with robes too gorgeous for anyone less than a queen.

But now Parmigianino, perhaps goaded on by his misfortunes and poverty, became ardently interested in alchemy, and neglected his painting to set up furnaces for the improvisation of gold. The ecclesiastics of San Giovanni, unable to recall him to his work there, ordered his arrest for violation of contract. The painter fled to Casalmaggiore, lost himself in alembics and crucibles, let his beard grow, neglected his person and his health, caught a chill and fever, and died as suddenly as Correggio (1540).

II. BOLOGNA

If we pass over Reggio and Modena in unseemly haste it is not because they had no cherished heroes of sword or brush or pen. In Reggio an Augustinian monk, Ambrogio Calepino, compiled a dictionary of Latin and Italian, which in successive editions grew into a polyglot lexicon of eleven languages (1590). Little Carpi had a handsome cathedral designed by Baldassare Peruzzi (1514). Modena had a sculptor, Guido Mazzoni, who shocked his townsmen by the realism of a terra-cotta Cristo morto; and the fifteenth-century choir stalls of the eleventh-century cathedral matched the beauty of the façade and campanile. Pellegrino da Modena, who worked with Raphael in Rome and then returned to his native city, might have become a painter of note had he not been murdered by ruffians bent upon killing his son. Doubtless Renaissance violence snuffed out in their growth a regiment of potential geniuses.

Bologna, standing at a main crossing of Italy’s trade routes, continued to prosper, though her intellectual leadership was passing to Florence as humanism dethroned Scholasticism. Her university was now only one of many in Italy, and could no longer read the law to pontiffs and emperors; but its medical school was still supreme. The popes claimed Bologna as one of the Papal States, and Cardinal Albornoz had passingly enforced the claim (1360); but the schism of the Church between rival popes (1378–1417) reduced papal control to a technicality. A rich family, the Bentivogli, rose to political mastery, and maintained throughout the fifteenth century a mild dictatorship, which observed republican forms and acknowledged but ignored the overlordship of the popes. As capo or head of the Senate, Giovanni Bentivoglio governed Bologna for thirty-seven years (1469–1506) with sufficient wisdom and justice to win the admiration of princes and the affection of the people. He paved streets, improved roads, and built canals; he helped the poor with gifts, and organized public works to mitigate unemployment; he actively supported the arts. It was he who brought Lorenzo Costa to Bologna; for him and his sons Francia painted; Filelfo, Guarino, Aurispa, and other humanists were welcomed to his court. During the later years of his rule, embittered by a conspiracy to depose him, he used harsh methods to maintain his ascendancy, and forfeited the good will of the people. In 1506 Pope Julius II advanced upon Bologna with a papal army, and demanded his abdication. He yielded peaceably, was allowed to depart intact, and died in Milan two years later. Julius agreed that Bologna should thenceforth be ruled by its Senate, subject to veto, by a papal legate, of legislation opposed by the Church. The rule of the popes proved more orderly and liberal than that of the Bentivogli; local self-government was unhindered; and the university enjoyed remarkable academic freedom. Bologna remained a papal state, in fact as well as name, till the advent of Napoleon (1796).

Renaissance Bologna was proud of its civic architecture. The guild of merchants raised an elegant Mercanzia, or Chamber of Commerce (1382f), and the lawyers rebuilt (1384) their imposing Palazzo dei Notari. The nobles built handsome palaces like the Bevilacqua, where the Council of Trent would hold its sittings in 1547, and the Palazzo Pallavicini, described by a contemporary as “not unworthy of kings.”³ The massive Palazzo del Podestà, seat of the government, received a new façade (1492), and Bramante designed a stately spiral staircase for the Palazzo Comunale. Many façades had arcades on the street level, so that one might walk for miles in the heart of the city without being exposed—except at crossings—to sun or rain.

While in the university skeptics like Pomponazzi questioned the immortality of the soul, the people and their rulers built new churches, adorned or repaired old ones, and brought hopeful offerings to miracle-working shrines. The Franciscan friars added to their picturesque church of San Francesco one of the fairest campaniles in Italy. The Dominicans enriched their church of San Domenico with choir stalls painstakingly carved and inlaid by Fra Damiano of Bergamo; and they engaged Michelangelo to carve four figures for the ornate arca or tabernacle in which the bones of their founder were zealously preserved. The great pride and tragedy of Bolognese art was the cathedral of San Petronio. Far back in the fifth century this Petronius had served the city as its bishop, and had been deeply loved for his beneficence. In 1307 many worshipers claimed to have been healed of blindness, deafness, or other infirmities by washing the diseased parts with water from the well beneath his shrine. Soon the city had to provide accommodations for hundreds of pilgrims seeking cures. In 1388 the communal council decreed that a church should be built for San Petronio, and on a scale that would humble the Florentines and their duomo; it was to be 700 by 460 feet, with a dome rising to 500 feet from the ground. Money proved less ample than pride; only nave and aisles to the transept were completed, and only the lower part of the façade. But that lower part is a masterpiece that attests the noble aspirations and taste of Renaissance art. The portal jambs and architrave were carved with reliefs (1425–38) challenging in subjects and surpassing in power Ghiberti’s gates to the Florentine Baptistery, and yielding to them only in refinement of finish; and in the pediment, along with unprepossessing figures of Petronius and Ambrose, a Madonna and Child, carved in the round, worthy of comparison with Michelangelo’s Pietà. These works of Iacopo della Quercia of Siena were an inspiration to Michelangelo, and he might have been saved from the muscular exaggerations of his sculptural style had he accepted more of the classic purity in della Quercia’s designs.

Sculpture rivaled architecture in Bologna. Properzia de’ Rossi carved a bas-relief for the façade of San Petronio; it won such praise that when Clement VII came to Bologna he asked to see her; but she had died in that week. Alfonso Lombardi, whose reliefs won Michelangelo’s praise, stepped into history on the coattails of Titian. Learning that Charles V, during the conference at Bologna (1530), was to sit for Titian, he persuaded the painter to take him along as a servant; and while Titian painted, Alfonso, partly concealed behind him, modeled the Emperor in stucco. Charles spied him, and asked to see his work; he liked it, and asked Alfonso to copy it in marble. When Charles paid Titian a thousand crowns he bade him give half to Alfonso. Lombardi brought the finished marble to Charles at Genoa, and received an additional three hundred crowns. Now famous, Alfonso was taken to Rome by Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, and was commissioned by him to carve tombs for Leo X and Clement VII. But the Cardinal died in 1535; and Alfonso, losing his commissions and his patron, followed him, within a year, to the grave.

Painting, in fourteenth-century Bologna, was chiefly illumination; and when it graduated into murals it followed a stiff Byzantine style. It was apparently two artists from Ferrara who aroused Bolognese painters from the rigor mortis of Byzantium. When Francesco Cossa came to make his home in Bologna (1470) there was still in his painting a certain Mantegnesque severity and sculptural hardness of line, but he had learned to infuse his figures with feeling as well as dignity, to set them in motion, and to bathe them in a living play of light. Lorenzo Costa arrived in Bologna when he was a lad of twenty-three (1483), and he stayed there for twenty-six years. He took a studio in the same house as Francia; the two men became fast friends, and influenced each other to mutual advantage; sometimes they painted a picture together. Costa won the praise and ducats of Giovanni Bentivoglio by painting an excellent Madonna Enthroned in San Petronio. When Giovanni fled at the approach of the terrible Julius (1506), Costa accepted an invitation to succeed Mantegna at Mantua.

Meanwhile Francesco Francia was making himself the head and crown of the Bolognese school. His father was Marco Raibolini, but as surnames were loose in Italy, Francesco became known by the name of the goldsmith to whom he was apprenticed. For many years he practised the goldsmith’s art, silverwork, niello, enameling, and engraving. He was made master of the mint, and engraved the coins of the city for both Bentivoglio and the popes; and his coins were so distinguished by their beauty that they became collectors’ items, bringing high prices soon after his death. Vasari describes him as a lovable man, “so pleasant in conversation that he could divert the most melancholy individuals, and won the affection of princes and lords and all who knew him.”⁴

We cannot say what turned Francia to painting. Bentivoglio discovered his talent, and commissioned him—already forty-nine—to paint an altarpiece for a chapel in San Giacomo Maggiore (1499). The dictator was pleased, and engaged Francia to decorate his palace with murals. They were destroyed when the populace sacked the palace in 1507, but we have Vasari’s word for it that these and other frescoes “brought Francia such reverence in the city that he was reckoned as a god.”⁵ Commissions poured in upon him, and perhaps he accepted too many to allow his best potentialities to mature. Mantua, Reggio, Parma, Lucca, and Urbino received panels from his brush; the Pinacoteca Bolognese has a roomful of them; Verona has a Holy Family, Turin an Entombment, the Louvre a Crucifixion, London a Dead Christ and a striking portrait of Bartolommeo Bianchini, the Morgan Library a Virgin and Child, the Metropolitan Museum of Art a delightful portrait of Federigo Gonzaga in youth. None of these is of the first order, but each is gracefully drawn, softly colored, and suffused with a tenderness and piety that makes them heralds of Raphael.

Francia’s epistolary friendship with Raphael is one of the pleasantest episodes of the Renaissance. Timoteo Viti was among Francia’s pupils at Bologna (1490–5), and became at Urbino one of Raphael’s early teachers; possibly some quality of Francia passed to the young artist.⁶ When Raphael had achieved fame in Rome he invited Francia to visit him. Francia excused himself as too old, but he wrote a sonnet in Raphael’s praise. Raphael sent him a letter (September 5, 1508) rich in Renaissance courtesy:

M. Francesco mio caro:

I have just received your portrait, brought to me in good condition… for which I thank you very warmly. It is most beautiful, so lifelike that I sometimes mistake, believing myself to be with you and to hear your words. I pray you to excuse and pardon the delay and postponement of my self-portrait, which, because of important and incessant occupation, I have not yet been able to execute with my own hand in accordance with our agreement…. However, I send you meanwhile another drawing, of the Nativity, done amid so many other things that I blush for it; I do this trifle rather in sign of obedience and love than for anything else. If in exchange I shall receive [the drawing of] your story of Judith I shall place it among the things that are dearest and most precious to me.

Monsignor il Datario expects your little Madonna with great anxiety, and Cardinal Riario the large one.… I look for them with that pleasure and satisfaction with which I see and praise all your works, never seeing any others more beautiful, or more devout and well done, than yours.

Meanwhile take courage, take care of yourself with your wonted prudence, and be assured that I feel your afflictions as if they were my own. Continue to love me as I love you with all my heart.

Always entirely at your service,

Your Raffaelle Sancio.⁷

We may allow here for some mannerly flourish, but that this mutual affection was real appears from another letter, in which Raphael sent his famous St. Cecilia to Francia, to be placed in a chapel at Bologna, and asked him, “as a friend, to correct any errors he might find in it.”⁸ Vasari relates that when Francia saw the picture he was so overwhelmed by its beauty, and so painfully recognized his own inferiority, that he lost all will to paint, grew ill, and presently died, in the sixty-seventh year of his age (1517). This is one of many dubious deaths in Vasari; but he adds, graciously, that there were other theories.

Perhaps, before his death, Francia saw some engravings made in Rome by his pupil Marcantonio Raimondi from the drawings of Raphael. Visiting Venice, Mark saw some engravings by Albrecht Dürer on copper or wood. He spent almost all his travel money buying thirty-six wood engravings by the Nuremberg master on the Passion of Christ; he copied them on copper, made prints from the copies, and sold the prints as Dürer’s works. Going to Rome, he engraved on copper a drawing by Raphael, so faithfully that the painter allowed a great number of his drawings to be engraved, and prints to be made and sold. Raimondi copied also the paintings of Raphael and others, transferred the copy to copper, and sold the prints. While he made a living in this novel way, the artists of Europe, without visiting Italy, could now know the design of the famous paintings of the Renaissance masters. Finiguerra, Raimondi, and their successors did for art what Gutenberg and Aldus Manutius and others did for scholarship and literature: they built new lines of communication and transmission, and offered to youth at least the outlines of its heritage.

III. ALONG THE EMILIAN WAY

Eastward from Bologna lies a string of minor towns that contributed their commensurate luster to the total splendor of the Renaissance. Little Imola had its Innocenzo da Imola, who studied with Francia, and left a Holy Family almost worthy of Raphael. Faenza gave its name and partial industry to faience; there—as in Gubbio, Pesaro, Castel Durante, and Urbino—Italian potters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries perfected the art of coating earthenware with opaque enamel, and painting thereon, with metallic oxides, designs that on firing became brilliant purples, greens, and blues. Forlì (anciently Forum Livii) was made famous by two painters and one virile heroine. Melozzo da Forlì we defer to Rome, his favorite theater of operations. His pupil Marco Palmezzano painted the old Christian themes for a hundred churches or patrons, and left us a deceptively charming portrait of Caterina Sforza.

Born out of wedlock to Galeazzomaria Sforza, Duke of Milan, Caterina married the cruel and rapacious Girolamo Riario, despot of Forlì. In 1488 his subjects rebelled, killed him, and captured Caterina and her children; but troops loyal to her held the citadel. She promised her captors, if released, to go and persuade these soldiers to surrender; they agreed, but kept her children as hostages. Once in the castle she had its gates closed, and vigorously directed the resistance of the garrison. When the rebels threatened to kill her children unless she and her men submitted, she defied them, and told them from the ramparts that she had another child in her womb, and could easily conceive more. Lodovico of Milan sent troops who effected her rescue; the rebellion was mercilessly suppressed; and Caterina’s son Ottaviano was made lord of Forlì under his mother’s iron thumb. We shall meet her again.

North and south of the Emilian Way two ancient capitals survive: Ravenna, once the retreat of Roman emperors, and San Marino, the inextinguishable republic. Around the ninth-century convent of St. Marinus (d. 366) a tiny settlement formed, which, from its once easily defensible perch on a rocky mountain top, remained immune to all the condottieri of the Renaissance. Its independence was formally recognized by Pope Urban VIII in 1631, and endures by the courtesy of the Italian government, which finds little there to tax. Ravenna recaptured a passing prosperity after the Venetians took it in 1441; Julius II reclaimed it for the papacy in 1509; and three years later a French army, having won a famous battle near by, felt entitled to sack the city so thoroughly that it never recovered until the Second World War, which shattered it again. There, on a commission from Bernardo Bembo, father of the poet cardinal, Pietro Lombardo designed the tomb (1483) that houses Dante’s bones.

Rimini—where the Emilian Way, just south of the Rubicon, reached its Adriatic end—entered violently into Renaissance history through its ruling family, the Malatestas—Evil Heads. They appear first toward the end of the tenth century as lieutenants of the Holy Roman Empire, governing the Marches of Ancona for Otho III. By playing Guelf and Ghibelline factions against each other, and making obeisance now to the emperor, now to the pope, they acquired actual, though not formal, sovereignty over Ancona, Rimini, and Cesena, and ruled them as despots acknowledging no morals except those of intrigue, treachery, and the sword. Machiavelli’s Prince was a feeble echo of their reality—blood and iron turned into ink, like Bismarck into Nietzsche. It was a Malatesta, Giovanni, who, in a monogamous moment, killed his wife Francesca da Rimini and his brother Paolo (1285). Carlo Malatesta established the repute of the family in the patronage of arts and letters. Sigismondo Malatesta carried the dynasty to its zenith of power, culture, and assassination. His many mistresses gave him several children, in some instances with disturbing simultaneity.⁹ He married thrice, and killed two wives on pretext of adultery.¹⁰ He was alleged to have made his daughter pregnant, to have attempted sodomy with his son, who repelled him with drawn dagger,¹¹ and to have wreaked his lust upon the corpse of a German lady who had preferred death to his embrace;¹² however we have for these exploits only the word of his foes. To his final mistress, Isotta degli Atti, he gave unwonted devotion and ultimately marriage; and after her death he set up in the church of San Francesco a monument marked Divae Isottae sacrum—”Sacred to the Divine Isotta.” He seems to have denied God and immortality; he thought it a merry prank to fill with ink the holy-water stoup of a church, and to watch the worshipers bespatter themselves as they entered.¹³

Crime had not enough varieties to exhaust his energy. He was an able general, known for reckless bravery, and for resolute endurance of all the hardships incident to military life. He wrote poetry, studied Latin and Greek, supported scholars and artists, and delighted in their company. He was especially fond of Leon Battista Alberti, the Leonardo before da Vinci, and commissioned him to transform the cathedral of San Francesco into a Roman temple. Leaving the thirteenth-century Gothic church intact, Alberti fronted it with a classic façade modeled on the Arch of Augustus erected at Rimini 27 B.C.; he planned to cover the choir with a dome, but this was never built; the result is an unpleasant torso, called by contemporaries Tempio Malatestiano. The art with which Sigismondo had the interior refinished was a paean to paganism. In a brilliant fresco by Piero della Francesca, Sigismondo was shown kneeling before his patron saint; but this was almost the only Christian symbol left in the church. In one of the chapels Isotta was buried; and on the tomb an inscription was placed twenty years before her death: “To Isotta of Rimini, in beauty and virtue the glory of Italy.” In another chapel were representations of Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Diana, and Venus. The walls of the church were carved with marble reliefs of a high order, chiefly by Agostino di Duccio, representing satyrs, angels, singing boys, and personified arts and sciences, and emblazoned with the initials of Sigismondo and Isotta. Pope Pius II, a lover of the classics, described the new structure as a “nobile templum… so filled with pagan symbols that it seemed the shrine not of Christians but of infidels worshiping heathen deities.”¹⁴

At the Peace of Mantua (1459) Pius compelled Sigismondo to restore his principalities to the Church. When the doughty despot renewed his hold upon them, Pius hurled a bull of excommunication at him, charging him with heresy, parricide, incest, adultery, rape, perjury, treason, and sacrilege.¹⁵ Sigismondo laughed at the bull, saying that it had not perceptibly lessened his enjoyment of food and wine.¹⁶ But the patience, arms, and strategy of the scholar Pope proved too much for him; in 1463 he knelt in penitence before a papal legate, surrendered his realm to the Church, and received absolution. Still afire with energy, he took command of a Venetian army, won several victories against the Turks, and returned to Rimini with what seemed to him a prize as precious as the bones of the greatest saint—the ashes of the philosopher Gemistus Pletho, the Greek Platonist who had in effect proposed the replacement of Christianity with a Neoplatonic pagan faith. Sigismondo buried his treasure in a splendid tomb alongside his Tempio. Three years later (1468) he died. We must not forget him in our composite image of the Renaissance.

If Sigismondo represented that small but influential minority which had more or less openly ceased to accept the medieval Christian creed, we need only follow the Adriatic down from Rimini into the Marches to Loreto to find a living symbol of the old religion still warm in Italian hearts. Every year during the Renaissance, as in our times, thousands of earnest pilgrims traveled to Loreto to visit the Casa Santa, or Holy House, in which, they were told, Mary and Joseph and Jesus had lived in Nazareth, and which, said the marvelous legend, had been miraculously transported by angels first to Dalmatia (1291), then (1294) over the Adriatic to a laurel grove (lauretum) near Recanati. Around the little stone house a marble screen was built from designs by Bramante, and Andrea Sansovino added sculptural decorations; and over the Casa a church called the santuario was raised by Giuliano da Maiano and Giuliano da Sangallo (1468f). On a small altar inside the Holy House was a figure of Mary and her Child in black cedar, which piety ascribed to the artist hand of Luke the Evangelist. Consumed by fire in 1921, the group was replaced by a reproduction, adorned with jewels and precious stones; and silver lamps keep lights burning before it day and night. This too was part of the Renaissance.

IV. URBINO AND CASTIGLIONE

Twenty miles inland from the Adriatic, midway between Loreto and Rimini, hidden aloft on a scenic spur of the Apennines, the little principality of Urbino—forty miles square—was in the fifteenth century one of the most civilized centers on the earth. That fortunate territory, two hundred years before, had come into the possession of a family—the Montefeltri—that made fortunes as condottieri, and spent them as wisely as they were darkly earned. In a remarkable reign of thirty-eight years (1444–82) Federigo da Montefeltro ruled Urbino with a skill and justice unequaled even by Lorenzo the Magnificent. He began judiciously by being a pupil of Vittorino da Feltre, and his life was the finest encomium that noble teacher ever received. While governing Urbino he hired himself out as a general to Naples, Milan, Florence, and the Church. He never lost a battle, and never allowed war to touch his own soil. He captured a town by forging a letter, and sacked Volterra with superfluous thoroughness; yet he was reputed the most merciful commander of the time. In civil life he was a man of high honor and fidelity. He earned enough as a condottiere to administer his state without oppressively taxing his people; he walked unarmed and unprotected among them, confident of their affectionate loyalty. Every morning he gave audience, in a garden open on all sides, to any who wished to speak to him; in the afternoon he rendered judgment, in the Latin tongue. He relieved the destitute, dowered orphan girls, filled his granaries in time of plenty, sold grain cheaply in time of dearth, and forgave the debts of impoverished purchasers. He was a good husband, a good father, a generous friend.

In 1468 he built for himself, his court, and the five hundred members of his government a palace that served not so much as a bastion of defense as a center of administration and a citadel of letters and arts. Luciano Laurana, a Dalmatian, designed it so well that Lorenzo de’ Medici sent Baccio Pontelli to make drawings of it. A façade of four stories, with four superimposed arches in the center and a machicolated tower at each side; an inner cortile of graceful arcades; rooms now mostly bare but still revealing, by their irremovable carvings and magnificent fireplaces, the taste and luxury of the time; this was the center of the court where Castiglione molded his Courtier. The rooms that most delighted Federigo were those in which he gathered his library, and discoursed with the artists, scholars, and poets who enjoyed his friendship and patronage. He himself was the most widely accomplished man in the state. He preferred Aristotle to Plato, and knew the Ethics, Politics, and Physics thoroughly. He put history above philosophy, doubtless feeling that he could learn more about life by studying the record of human behavior than by tracing the web of human theory. He loved the classics without surrendering his Christianity; he read the Fathers and the Scholastics, and heard Mass every day; in peace as well as war he was a foil to Sigismondo Malatesta. His library was as well provided with patristic and medieval literature as with classic works. For fourteen years he kept thirty copyists transcribing Greek and Latin manuscripts, until his library was the fullest in Italy outside the Vatican. He agreed with his librarian, Vespasiano da Bisticci, that no printed book should be allowed entry to the collection; for they thought of a book as a work of art in binding, lettering, and illumination, as well as a vehicle of ideas; and almost every book in the palace was carefully handwritten on vellum, illustrated with miniatures, and bound in crimson leather with silver clasps.

Miniature painting was a favorite art at Urbino. The Vatican Library, which purchased Federigo’s collection, prizes particularly two volumes of the “Urbino Bible” which the Duke commissioned Vespasiano and others to illustrate, bidding them, says Vespasiano, to “make this most excellent of all books as rich and worthy as possible.”¹⁷ To adorn the palace walls Federigo brought in tapestry weavers and the painters Justus van Ghent from Flanders, Pedro Berruguete from Spain, Paolo Uccello from Florence, Piero della Francesca from Borgo San Sepolcro, and Melozzo da Forli; here Melozzo painted two of his finest pictures (one now in London, the other in Berlin), showing the cultivation of the “sciences” (i.e., literature and philosophy) at the court of Urbino, with a splendid portrait of Federigo. From these painters, and from Francia and Perugino, came the stimulus that developed Urbino’s own school, led by the father of Raphael. When Caesar Borgia appropriated the art treasures of the palace in 1502 they were valued at 150,000 ducats ($1,875,000?).¹⁸

Federigo had few enemies, many friends. Pope Sixtus IV made him a duke (1474), Henry VII of England made him a Knight of the Garter. When he died (1482) he bequeathed a flourishing principality and an inspiring tradition of justice and peace. His son Guidobaldo did his best to follow in his steps, but disease interfered with his military pursuits, and left him an invalid through most of his life. In 1488 he married Elisabetta Gonzaga, sister-in-law of Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua. Elisabetta too was a frequent invalid, made timid and gentle by physical weakness. Perhaps she was relieved to find that her husband was impotent;¹⁹ she was content, she said, to live with him as a sister;²⁰ and on that basis they avoided the quarrels of man and wife. She became his mother rather than his sister, cared for him tenderly, never deserted him in his tragic tribulations. Her letters to Isabella are all the more precious because they reveal a delicacy of feeling, a warmth of family attachment, that are sometimes ignored in moral appraisals of the Renaissance. When, after a fortnight’s visit at Urbino in 1494, the lively Isabella returned to Mantua, Elisabetta sent after her this touching note:

Your departure made me feel not only that I had lost a dear sister, but that life itself had gone from me. I know not how else to soften my grief, except by writing every hour to you, and telling you on paper all that my lips desire to say. If I could express the sorrow I feel, I believe that you would come back out of compassion for me. And if I did not fear to vex you, I would follow you myself. But since both these things are impossible from the respect which I owe to Your Highness, all I can do is to beg you earnestly to remember me sometimes, and to know that I bear you always in my heart.²¹

One of the questions discussed at the court of Guidobaldo and Elisabetta was, “After perseverance, what is the best proof of love?” The answer was, “The sharing of joys and griefs.”²² The young couple gave plentiful proof. In November, 1502, Caesar Borgia, after flourishing protestations of friendship for Guidobaldo, suddenly turned his army up the road to Urbino, claiming that principality as a fief of the Church. The ladies of Urbino brought to the Duke their diamonds and pearls, their necklaces, bracelets, and rings, to finance an impromptu mobilization for defense. But Borgia’s treachery had left no time for effective resistance; what troops could now be mustered would be easy victims of the trained and ruthless force that was advancing; the bloodshed would be useless. Duke and Duchess left their power and wealth, fled to Città del Castello and thence to Mantua, where Isabella received them with loving commiseration. Borgia, fearing that Guidobaldo would organize an army there, demanded that Isabella and her Marquis should dismiss the exiles; and to protect Mantua Guidobaldo and Elisabetta moved on to Venice, whose fearless Senate gave them protection and sustenance. A few months later Borgia and his father, Alexander VI, were struck down with acute malarial fever in Rome; the Pope died; Caesar recovered, but his finances collapsed. The people of Urbino rose against his garrison, drove it from the city, and joyously welcomed the return of Guidobaldo and Elisabetta (1503). The Duke adopted his nephew Francesco Maria della Rovere as heir to his throne; and as Francesco was nephew also to Pope Julius II, the little principality remained for a decade secure.

In the five ensuing years (1504–8) the court of Urbino became the cultural model and paragon of Italy. Though fond of the classics, Guidobaldo encouraged the literary use of Italian; and it was at his court that one of the earliest Italian comedies—Bibbiena’s Calandra— received its first performance (c. 1508). Sculptors and painters carved and painted scenery for the occasion; the spectators sat on carpets; an orchestra, hidden behind the stage, provided music; children sang a prelude; ballets were danced between the acts; at the close a Cupid recited some verses, viols played a song without words, and a quartet sang a hymn to love. For though Urbino’s was the most moral court in Italy, it was also the center of the movement that raised woman upon a pedestal, and liked to talk of love—Platonic or unphilosophical. The leading spirits in the cultural life of the court were Elisabetta, who had no viable alternative to Platonic love, and Emilia Pio, who remained to the end of her life the chaste and grieving widow of Guidobaldo’s brother. A livelier element was contributed to the circle by Bembo the poet and Bibbiena the dramatist; an esthetic dash by a famous singer, Bernardino Accolti, called Unico Aretino—”the one and only Arezzian”—and the sculptor Cristoforo Romano, whom we have met in Milan. A seasoning of noble blood was provided by Giuliano de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo; Ottaviano Fregoso, soon to be Doge of Genoa; his brother Federigo, destined to be a cardinal; Louis of Canossa, soon to be papal nuncio to France. Others now and then joined the group: high ecclesiastics, generals, bureaucrats, poets, scholars, artists, philosophers, musicians, distinguished visitors. This varied company gathered in the evening in the salon of the Duchess, gossiped, danced, sang, played games, and conversed. There the art of conversation—the polite and urbane, serious or humorous consideration of significant matters—reached its Renaissance peak.

It was this genteel company that Castiglione described and idealized in one of the most famous books of the Renaissance—Il Cortigiano, The Courtier, by which he meant the gentleman. He was himself an exemplary gentleman: a good son and husband, a man of honor and decency even amid the dissolute society of Rome, a diplomat esteemed by friend and foe, a loyal friend who never had an unkind word for anyone, a gentleman in the best definition as a man always considerate of all. Raphael caught his inmost character astonishingly well in the superb portrait that hangs in the Louvre: a wistful meditative face, dark hair and soft blue eyes; too guileless to be successful in diplomacy except by the sheer charm of his integrity; clearly a man who would love beauty, in woman and art, in manners and style, with the sensitiveness of a poet and the comprehension of a philosopher.

He was the son of Count Cristoforo Castiglione, who held an estate in the territory of Mantua, and had married a Gonzaga relative of the Marquis Francesco. At eighteen (1496) he was sent to the court of Lodovico at Milan, and pleased everyone by his good nature, good manners, and versatile excellence in athletics, letters, music, and art. When his father died his mother urged him to marry and attend to the perpetuation of his line; but though Baldassare could write most elegantly of love, he was too Platonic for matrimony; and he kept his mother waiting seventeen years before he yielded to her counsel. He joined the army of Guidobaldo, achieved nothing but a broken ankle, convalesced in the ducal palace at Urbino, and remained there for eleven years, enamored of the mountain air, the courtly company, the gracious conversation, and Elisabetta. She was not beautiful, she was six years older than he, and almost as heavy, but her gentle spirit captivated his; he kept her picture behind a mirror in his room, and composed secret sonnets in her praise.²³ Guidobaldo eased the situation by sending him on a mission to England (1506); but Baldassare seized the first excuse to hurry back, The Duke perceived that there was no harm in him, and graciously consented to form with him and Elisabetta a Platonic ménage à trois. Castiglione stayed on till the Duke’s death (1508), continued in chaste devotion to the widow, and remained at Urbino until Leo X deposed the nephew of Guidobaldo and put upon the ducal throne a nephew of his own (1517).

He returned to his little patrimony near Mantua, and disinterestedly married Ippolita Torelli, twenty-three years his junior. Then he began to fall in love with her, first as a child, then as a mother; he perceived that he had never really known woman, or himself, before, and the new experience brought him a profound and unprecedented happiness. But Isabella persuaded him to serve as Mantuan ambassador in Rome; he went reluctantly, leaving his wife behind in the care of his mother. Soon across the divisive Apennines a tender letter came:

I have given birth to a little girl. I do not think you will be disappointed. But I have been much worse than before. I have had three bad spells of fever; I am better now, and I hope it will not return. I will write no more, as I am not very well yet, and I commend myself to you with all my heart.—From your wife who is a little exhausted with the pain, from your Ippolita.²⁴

Ippolita died shortly after writing this letter, and Castiglione’s love of life died with her. He continued to serve Isabella and the Marquis Federigo in Rome; but even at the polished court of Leo X he missed not only the peace of his Mantuan home but the integrity, kindliness, and grace that had made the Urbino circle almost the embodiment of his ideals.

He had begun in Urbino (1508), he finished in Rome, the book that carried him down to posterity. Its purpose was to analyze the conditions that produced, and the conduct that distinguished, a gentleman. Castiglione imagined that fine company at Urbino discussing the subject; perhaps he reported, nicely refined, some of the conversations he had heard there; he used the names of the men and women who had spoken there, and gave them sentiments agreeing with their characters; so he put into the mouth of Bembo a paean to Platonic love. He sent the manuscript to Bembo, asking if the now exalted secretary of the pope had objections to this use of his name; the genial Bembo had none. Even so the timid author kept his book unpublished till 1528; then, a year before his death, he surrendered it to the world only because some friends forced his hand by circulating copies of it in Rome. Within ten years it was translated into French; and in 1561 Sir Thomas Hoby made it a quaint and piquant English classic, which every educated Elizabethan read.

Castiglione was not quite sure, but he inclined to believe that the first requisite of a gentleman must be gentle birth; i.e., it would be very difficult for one to acquire good manners, and an easy grace of body and mind, except by being reared among persons already possessing these qualities; aristocracy seemed a necessary depository, nursery, and vehicle of manners, standards, and taste. Secondly, the gentleman must, early in life, become a good horseman, and learn the arts of war; enthusiasm for peaceful arts and letters must not be carried to the point of weakening in the citizens the martial qualities without which a nation is soon enslaved. Too much war, however, can make a man a brute; he needs, along with the hardening hardships of soldiering, the refining influence of women. “No court, how great soever it be, can have any sightliness or brightness in it, or mirth, without women; nor any courtier can be gracious, pleasant, or hardie [brave], nor at any time undertake any gallant enterprise of chivalrie, unless he be stirred with the conversation and love… of women.”²⁵ To wield this civilizing influence woman must as far as possible be feminine, avoiding all imitation of the male in carriage, manners, speech, or dress. She must discipline her body to comeliness, her speech to kindness, her soul to gentleness; therefore she should learn music, dancing, literature, and the art of entertaining; in this way she may achieve that inner beauty of spirit which is the stimulating object and genesis of true love. “The body, where beauty shineth, is not the fountain whence beauty springeth… because beauty is bodiless.”²⁶ “Love is nothing else but a certain coveting to enjoy beauty”;²⁷ but “whoso thinketh in possessing the body to enjoy beauty, he is far deceived.”²⁸ The book ends by transforming the lusty chivalry of the Middle Ages into that pale Platonic love which is the last disappointment that a woman will forgive.

The ideal world of refined culture and mutual consideration that Castiglione had conceived collapsed in the brutal sack of Rome (1527). “Many times,” reads a passage toward the end of his book, “abundance of wealth is cause of great destruction, as in poor Italy, which hath been, and still is, a prey and booty in the teeth of strange nations, as well for the ill government as for the abundance of riches in it.”²⁹ He could in some measure reproach himself for the disaster. Clement VII sent him (1524) as papal nuncio to Madrid to reconcile Charles V to the papacy; Clement’s own behavior made the mission difficult, and it failed. When the news reached Spain that the troops of the Emperor had invaded Rome, imprisoned the Pope, and destroyed half the wealth and grace that Julius and Leo and a thousand artists had created there, life flowed out of Baldassare Castiglione as from a severed vein; and at Toledo in 1529, aged but fifty-one, the gentlest gentleman of the Renaissance passed away.

His body was taken to Italy, and his mother, “who against her will survives her son,” raised a tomb to his memory in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie outside of Mantua. Giulio Romano designed the monument, and Bembo composed for it an elegent inscription; but the finest words engraved on the stone were the verses that Castiglione himself had composed for the grave of his wife, whose remains were now, in accordance with his will, brought to lie beside his own:

Non ego nunc vivo coniunx dulcissima vitam

corpore namque tuo fata meam abstulerunt,

sed vitam tumulo cum tecum condar in isto,

iungenturque tuis ossibus ossa mea:

“I do not live now, O sweetest spouse, for fate has taken my life from your body; but I shall live when I am laid in the same tomb with you, and my bones are joined with yours.”³⁰

CHAPTER XIII

The Kingdom of Naples

1378–1534

I. ALFONSO THE MAGNANIMOUS

SOUTHEAST of the Marches and the Papal States all mainland Italy constituted the Kingdom of Naples. On the Adriatic side it included the ports of Pescara, Bari, Brindisi, and Otranto; a bit inland the city of Foggia, once the lively capital of the wondrous Frederick II; on the “instep” the ancient port of Taranto; on the “toe” another Reggio; and on the southwestern coast one scenic splendor after another, rising to the glory of Salerno, Amalfi, Sorrento, and Capri, and culminating in busy, noisy, loquacious, passionate, joyous Naples. It was the only great city in the realm. Outside of it and the ports the country was agricultural, medieval, feudal: the land was tilled by serfs or slaves, or by peasants “free” to starve or to work for bread and a shirt, under barons whose ruthless rule of their great estates defied the authority of the throne. The king had little revenue from those lands, but had to finance his government and court from the returns of his own feudal domains, or by exploiting to the point of diminishing returns the royal control of commerce.

The house of Anjou had begun a rapid decline with the escapades of Queen Joanna I, which ended when Charles of Durazzo had her strangled with a silken cord (1382). Joanna II, though forty at her accession (1414), was as excitable as the first. She married thrice, banished her second husband, and had the third murdered. Faced by revolt, she called to her aid King Alfonso of Aragon and Sicily, and adopted him as her son and heir (1420). Rightly suspecting him of planning to replace her, she disowned him (1423), and left her state to René of Anjou at her death (1435). A long war of succession followed, in which Alfonso, having sampled Naples, fought to seize its throne. While he was besieging Gaeta he was captured by the Genoese, and was brought before Filippo Maria Visconti at Milan. With consummate logic surely never learned in schools, he persuaded the Duke that French power re-established in Naples, added to French power already pressing upon Milan from the north and Genoa from the west, would hold half of Italy in a vise, which the Visconti would be the first to feel. Filippo understood, freed his prisoner, and bade him Godspeed to Naples. After many battles and intrigues Alfonso won; the rule of the house of Anjou at Naples (1268–1442) ended, that of the house of Aragon (1442–1503) began. This usurpation provided the legal basis for the French invasion of Italy in 1494, which was the first act in the tragedy of Italy.

Alfonso was so pleased with his new royal seat that he left the rule of Aragon and Sicily to his brother John II. He was not an easy ruler; he taxed with a hard hand; allowed financiers to squeeze the people, then squeezed them in turn; and extorted money from Jews by threatening to baptize them. But most of his taxation fell upon the merchant class; Alfonso reduced the taxes levied from the poor, and helped the destitute. The Neapolitans thought him a good king; he walked among them unarmed, unattended, and unafraid. Having no children by his wife, he begot some on the ladies of his court; his wife killed one of these rivals, and Alfonso never admitted the Queen to his presence thereafter. He was a zealous churchgoer, and listened to sermons faithfully.

Nevertheless he caught the humanist fever, and supported classical scholars with so open a hand that they named him il Magnanimo. He welcomed Valla, Filelfo, Manetti, and other humanists to his table and his treasury. He paid Poggio 500 crowns ($12,500?) for a translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia into Latin; paid Bartolommeo Fazio 500 ducats a year for writing an Historia Alfonsi, and 1500 more when it was finished; in the one year 1458 he distributed 20,000 ducats ($500,000) among literary men. He carried some classic with him wherever he went; at home and on campaigns he had a classic read to him at meals; and students who wished to hear these readings were admitted to them. When the supposed remains of Livy were discovered at Padua, he sent Beccadelli to Venice to buy a bone, and he received it with all the awe and devotion of a good Neapolitan watching the flow of St. Januarius’ blood. When Manetti orated to him in Latin Alfonso was so fascinated by the Florentine scholar’s idiomatic style that he allowed a fly to feast on the royal nose till the oration was complete.¹ He gave his humanists full freedom of speech, even to heresy and pornography, and protected them from the Inquisition.

The most remarkable of the scholars at Alfonso’s court was Lorenzo Valla. Born in Rome (1407), he studied the classics with Leonardo Bruni, and became an enthusiastic, even a fanatical, Latinist, among whose many wars was a campaign to destroy Italian as a literary language, and make good Latin live again. While teaching Latin and rhetoric at Pavia he wrote a violent diatribe against the famous jurist Bartolus, laughing at his laborious Latinity, and contending that only a man skilled in Latin and in Roman history could understand Roman law. The law students in the university defended Bartolus, the art students rallied around Valla; the debate graduated into riots, and Valla was asked to leave. Later, in Notes on the New Testament (Adnotationes ad novum testamentum), he applied his linguistic learning and fury to Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, and revealed many an error in that heroic undertaking; Erasmus would later praise, epitomize, and use Valla’s critique. In another treatise, Elegantiae linguae Latinae, Valla gave his rules for Latin elegance and purity, ridiculed the Latin of the Middle Ages, and joyfully exposed the bad Latin of many humanists. In an age that adored Cicero he preferred Quintilian. He was left with hardly a friend in the world.

To confirm his isolation he published (1431) a dialogue On Pleasure and the True Good (De voluptate et vero bono), which expounded the amoralism of the humanists with astonishing temerity. He used as persons of the dialogue three men still living: Leonardo Bruni to defend Stoicism, Antonio Beccadelli to vindicate Epicureanism, and Niccolò de’ Niccoli to reconcile Christianity and philosophy. Beccadelli was made to speak with such force that readers rightly assumed that his views were Valla’s own. We must suppose, argued Beccadelli, that human nature is good, for it was created by God; indeed Nature and God are one. Consequently our instincts are good, and our natural desire for pleasure and happiness is in itself a justification of the pursuit of these as the proper object of human life. All pleasures, whether of the senses or of the intellect, are to be held legitimate until proved injurious. Now we have an imperious instinct to mate, and certainly no instinct for lifelong chastity. Such continence is therefore unnatural; it is an intolerable torment, and should not be preached as virtue. Virginity, Beccadelli was made to conclude, is a mistake and a waste; and a courtesan is of more value to mankind than a nun.²

So far as his means allowed, Valla lived this philosophy. He was a man of promiscuous passion, hot temper, and extreme speech. He wandered from city to city, seeking literary employment. He asked for a place in the papal secretariat, and was turned away. When Alfonso took him up (1435), the King of Aragon and Sicily was fighting for the throne of Naples, and counted among his foes Pope Eugenius IV (1431–47), who claimed Naples as a lapsed papal fief. A reckless scholar like Valla, learned in history, skilled in polemics, and with nothing to lose, was a handy tool against the Pope. Under Alfonso’s protection Valla wrote (1440) his most famous treatise, On the Falsely Believed and Lying Donation of Constantine (De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione). He assailed as a ridiculous forgery the Constitutum Constantini by which the first Christian emperor transferred to Pope Sylvester I (314–35) full secular dominion over all Western Europe. Nicholas of Cusa had recently (1433) exposed the falsity of the Donation in his De concordantia Catholica, written for a Council of Basel also at odds with Eugenius IV; but Valla’s historical and linguistic criticism of the document was so devastating (though he himself made many errors) that the question was settled once and for all.

Valla and Alfonso were not content with scholarship; they waged war. “I attack not only the dead but the living,” said Valla; and he excoriated the relatively decent Eugenius with the most idiomatic abuse. “Even were the Donation authentic, it would be null and void, for Constantine could have no power to make it, and in any case the crimes of the papacy would already have annulled it.”³ And if the Donation was a forgery, Valla concluded (ignoring the territorial donations of Pepin and Charlemagne to the papacy), then the temporal power of the popes had been a thousand-yearlong usurpation. From that temporal power had come the corruption of the Church, and the wars of Italy, and the “overbearing, barbarous, tyrannical priestly domination.” Valla appealed to the people of Rome to rise and overthrow the papal government of their city, and invited the princes of Europe to deprive the popes of all territorial possessions.⁴ It sounded like the voice of Luther, but it was Alfonso who inspired the pen; humanism had become a weapon of war.

Eugenius fought back with the Inquisition. Valla was summoned before its agents at Naples; he ironically professed his complete orthodoxy, and refused to say more. Alfonso ordered the Inquisitors to let him alone, and they dared not disobey. Valla continued his attacks on the Church: he showed that the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite were unauthentic; that the letter of Abgarus to Jesus, published by Eusebius, was a forgery; and that the Apostles had had no hand in composing the Apostles’ Creed. However, when he surmised that Alfonso was moving toward reconciliation with the papacy he decided that he too had better make peace. He addressed an apology to Eugenius, retracting his heresies, reaffirming his orthodoxy, and asking pardon for his sins. The Pope made no answer. But when Nicholas V ascended the papal throne, and sent out a call for scholars, Valla was made a secretary to the Curia (1448), and was employed to make Latin translations from the Greek. He ended his life as a canon of St. John Lateran, and was buried in holy ground (1457).

His friendly rival, Antonio Beccadelli, illustrated the morals of his time by writing an obscene book and receiving acclaim for it from the leading men of Italy. Born at Palermo (1394), and therefore nicknamed il Panormita, he imbibed his higher education, and perhaps his ambiguous morals, in Siena. About 1425 he composed, under the title of Hermaphroditus, a series of Latin elegies and epigrams rivaling Martial in Latinity and pornography. Cosimo de’ Medici accepted the dedication, probably without reading the book; the virtuous Guarino da Verona praised the eloquence of its language; a hundred others added encomiums; finally the Emperor Sigismund placed a poet’s crown upon Beccadelli’s head (1433). Priests denounced the volume, Eugenius proclaimed the excommunication of all who read it, friars publicly burned it at Ferrara, Bologna, Milan. Nevertheless Beccadelli lectured summa cum laude in the universities of Bologna and Pavia, received a stipend of eight hundred scudi from the Visconti, and was invited to Naples as court historiographer. His history Of the Memorable Words and Deeds of King Alfonso was written in such idiomatic Latin that Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini—Pope Pius II—himself no middling Latinist, considered it a model of Latin style. Beccadelli lived to be seventy-seven, and died rich in honors and property.

II. FERRANTE

Alfonso left his kingdom to his putative son Ferdinand (r. 1458–94). Ferrante, as his people called him, was of dubious parentage. His mother was Margaret of Hijar, who had other lovers besides the King; Pontano, Ferrante’s secretary, affirmed that the father was a Valencian marrano—i.e., a Christianized Spanish Jew. Valla was his tutor. Ferrante was not known for sexual profligacy, but he had most of the vices that can come from a passionate nature untamed by a firm moral code, and aroused by apparently unreasonable hostility. Pope Calixtus III legitimated his birth but refused to recognize him as king; he declared the Aragonese line in Naples extinct, and claimed the Kingdom as a fief of the Church. René of Anjou made another attempt to regain the throne bequeathed him by Joanna II. While he landed forces on the Neapolitan coast, the feudal barons rose in revolt against the house of Aragon, and allied themselves with the foreign foes of the King. Ferrante confronted these simultaneous challenges with angry courage, overcame them, and revenged himself with somber ferocity. One by one he lured his enemies with pretended reconciliation, gave them excellent dinners, killed some of them after dessert, imprisoned others, let several starve to death in his dungeons, kept some of them in cages for his occasional delectation, and, when they died, had them embalmed and dressed in their favorite costumes, and preserved them as mummies in his museum;⁵ these stories, however, may be “war atrocities” manufactured by historians in a hostile camp. It was this king who dealt so fairly with Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1479. Revolution nearly upset him in 1485, but he recovered his footing, completed a long reign of thirty-six years, and died amid general rejoicing. The rest of the story of Naples belongs to the collapse of Italy.

Ferrante did not continue Alfonso’s patronage of scholars, but he engaged as his prime minister a man who was at once a poet, a philosopher, and a skillful diplomat. Giovanni Pontano developed—Beccadelli had founded —the Neapolitan Academy. Its members were men of letters who met periodically to exchange verses and ideas. They took Latin names (Pontano became Jovianus Pontanus), and loved to think that they were continuing, after a long and cruel interlude, the stately culture of Imperial Rome. Several of them wrote a Latin worthy of the Silver Age. Pontanus composed Latin treatises on ethics, praising the virtues that Ferrante allegedly ignored, and an eloquent essay De principe, recommending to a ruler those amiable qualities which Machiavelli’s Prince, twenty years later, would contemn. Giovanni dedicated this exemplary tract to his pupil, Ferrante’s son and heir Alfonso II (1494–5), who practised all that Machiavelli preached. Pontano taught in verse as well as in prose, and expounded in Latin hexameters the mysteries of astronomy and the proper cultivation of oranges. In a series of pleasant poems he celebrated every species of normal love: the mutual itching of healthy youth, the tender attachment of newlyweds, the reciprocal satisfactions of marriage, the joys and griefs of parental love, the merger of mates into one being by the accumulation of the years. He described in verses seemingly as spontaneous as Virgil’s, and with a surprising command of the Latin lexicon, the holiday life of the Neapolitans: the workers sprawling on the grass, the athletes at their games, the picnickers in their carts, the seductive girls dancing the tarantella to the clash of their tambourines, the lads and lasses flirting on the bayside promenade, the lovers keeping tryst, the bluebloods taking the baths at Baiae as if fifteen centuries had not passed since Ovid’s raptures and despairs. Had Pontano written in Italian with the same felicity and grace with which he composed Latin verse, we should have ranked him with the bilingual Petrarch and Politian, who had the good sense to march with the present as well as roam in the past.

After Pontano the most prominent member of the Academy was Iacopo Sannazaro. Like Bembo he could write Italian in the purest Tuscan dialect—far different from the Neapolitan speech; like Politian and Pontano he could mold Latin elegies and epigrams that would not have shamed Tibullus or Martial. For one epigram praising Venice Venice sent him six hundred ducats.⁶ Alfonso II, at war with Alexander VI, took Sannazaro with him on his campaigns to shoot poetic darts into Rome. When the Justy Pope, whose Borgia family carried a Spanish bull on its coat of arms, took Giulia Farnese as his alleged mistress, Sannazaro gored him with two lines that must have made Alfonso’s soldiers regret their ignorance of Latin:

Europen Tyrio quondam sedisse iuvenco

quis neget? Hispano Iulia vecta tauro est;⁷

which is to say:

That once on Tyrian bull Europa sat,

Who doubts? A Spanish bull bears Julia.

And when Caesar Borgia took the field against Naples, a barb went his way:

Aut nihil aut Caesar vult dici Borgia; quidni?

cum simul et Caesar possit et esse nihil;⁸

i.e.,

Caesar or nothing Borgia would be called;

But why not both, since he is both at once?

Such sallies passed from mouth to ear in Italy, and shared in forming the legend of the Borgias.

In a gentler mood Sannazaro composed (1526) a Latin epic On the Virgin Birth (De partu Virginis). It was an astonishing tour de force: it used the classical machinery of the pagan gods, but brought them in as adjuncts to—eavesdroppers on—the Gospel narrative; and it dared comparison with Virgil by quoting the famous Fourth Eclogue in the body of the poem. It was excellent Latin, and delighted Clement VII, but not even a pope will lose himself in it today.

The masterpiece of Sannazaro was written in the living tongue of his people, in a medley of prose and verse—Arcadia (1504). Like Theocritus in ancient Alexandria, the poet had grown tired of cities, and had learned to love rural fragrance and peace. It was an urban sentiment that Lorenzo and Politian had expressed, with evident sincerity, some twenty years before. The landscapes in the painting of the time marked a growing appreciation of the countryside; and men of the world began to babble of woods and fields, limpid streams, and virile shepherds piping amorous lays. Sannazaro’s book caught these fancies at their flow, and was carried to such fame and popularity as favored no other book of the Italian Renaissance. He led his readers into an imaginary world of strong men and beautiful women—none of these old, and most of them nude; he described their splendor, and that of natural scenes, in a poetic prose that set a fashion in Italy, and later in France and England; and he interspersed his prose with pardonable poetry. In this book the modern pastoral was born, perhaps less graceful than the ancient, more elongated and windy, but with interminable effect upon literature and art. Here Giorgione, Titian, and a hundred artists after them would find themes for their pigments; here Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney would take impressions for their faery queens and an English Arcadia. Sannazaro had rediscovered a continent more enchanting than the New World of Columbus, a melodious Utopia where any soul might enter at no other cost than literacy, and might build its castle to its taste and whim without lifting a finger from the page.

The art of the Regno was more masculine than its poetry, though there too the soft Italian touch showed its hand. Donatello and Michelozzo came down from Florence and set the pace with an imposing mausoleum for Cardinal Rinaldo Brancacci in the church of San Angelo a Nilo. For the Castel Nuovo, begun by Charles I of Anjou (1283), Alfonso the Magnanimous ordered a new gate (1443–70), which Francesco Laurana designed, and for which Pietro di Martino, and probably Giuliano da Maiano, carved handsome reliefs of the King’s achievements in war and peace. The church of Santa Chiara, built for Robert the Wise (1310), still contains the lovely Gothic monument set up by the brothers Giovanni and Pace da Firenze soon after the King’s death in 1343. The cathedral of San Gennaro (1272) received a new Gothic interior in the fifteenth century. There, in the costly Cappella del Tesoro, the blood of St. Januarius, protective patron of Naples, flows three times a year, insuring the prosperity of a city weary with commerce and burdened with centuries, but consoled by faith and love.

Sicily remained aloof from the Renaissance. She produced a few scholars like Aurispa, a few painters like Antonello da Messina, but they soon migrated to the wider opportunities of the mainland. Palermo, Monreale, Cefalù had great art, but only as the relic of Byzantine, Moslem, or Norman days. The feudal lords who owned the land preferred the eleventh to the fifteenth century, and lived in knightly scorn or ignorance of letters. The people whom they exploited were too poor to have any cultural expression beyond their colorful dress, their religion of bright mosaics and somber hope, their songs and simple poetry of love and violence. The lovely island enjoyed its own Aragonese kings and queens from 1295 to 1409; thereafter, for three centuries, it was a jewel in the crown of Spain.

Lengthy as this brief survey of non-Roman Italy has seemed, it has done scant justice to the full and varied life of the passionate peninsula. Consideration of morals and manners, of science and philosophy, may be deferred till we have spent some chapters with the Renaissance popes; but even in those cities that we have touched how many precious byways of life and art have escaped our eyes! We have said nothing of a whole branch of Italian literature, for the greatest novelle belong to a later period. We have inadequately visualized the major role that the minor arts played in the adornment of Italian bodies, minds, and homes. What deformed or inflated botches were majestically transformed by the textile arts! What would some of the grandees and grand dames glorified by Venetian painting have been without their velvets, satins, silks, and brocades? They did well to cover their nakedness and brand nudity as a sin. Wise it was of them, too, to cool their summers with gardens, even though so formal; to beautify their homes with colored tiles on roof and floor, with iron wrought into lacery and arabesques, and copper vessels gleaming smooth, and figurines of bronze or ivory reminding them how fair might men and women be, and woodwork carved and marquetried and built to last a thousand years, and lustrous pottery brightening table and cupboard and mantelpiece, and the miraculous embroidery of Venetian glass offering its fragile challenge to time, and the golden dies and silver clasps of leather bindings around treasured classics illuminated by happy bondsmen of the pen. Many painters, like Sano di Pietro, chose to ruin their eyesight with drawing and coloring miniatures rather than spread their subtle and intimate dreams of beauty crudely over panels and walls. And sometimes, weary of walking through galleries, one could sit gladly for hours over the illumination and calligraphy of such manuscripts as still hide in the Schifanoia palace at Ferrara, or in the Morgan Library at New York, or in the Ambrosiana at Milan.

All these, as well as the greater arts, and the labor and love, chicanery and statesmanship, devotion and war, faith and philosophy, science and superstition, poetry and music, hatreds and humor, of a lovable and volcanic people combined to make the Italian Renaissance, and to bring it to fulfillment and destruction in Medicean Rome.

BOOK IV

THE ROMAN RENAISSANCE

1378–1521

CHAPTER XIV

The Crisis in the Church

1378–1447

I. THE PAPAL SCHISM: 1378–1417

GREGORY XI had brought the papacy back to Rome; but would it stay there? The conclave that met to name his successor was composed of sixteen cardinals, only four of whom were Italians. The municipal authorities petitioned them to choose a Roman, or at least an Italian; and to support the suggestion a crowd of Romans gathered outside the Vatican, threatening to kill all non-Italian cardinals unless a Roman were made pope. The frightened conclave, by a vote of fifteen to one, hastily elected (1378) Bartolommeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, who took the name of Urban VI; then they fled in fear of their lives. But Rome accepted the compromise.¹

Urban VI ruled the city and the Church with impetuous and despotic energy. He appointed senators and municipal magistrates, and reduced the turbulent capital to obedience and order. He shocked the cardinals by announcing that he proposed to reform the Church, and to begin at the top. Two weeks later, preaching publicly in their presence, he condemned the morals of the cardinals and the higher clergy in unmeasured terms. He forbade them to accept pensions, and ordered that all business brought to the Curia should be dispatched without fees or gifts of any kind. When the cardinals murmured he commanded them to “cease your foolish chattering”; when Cardinal Orsini protested the Pope called him a “blockhead”; when the Cardinal of Limoges objected Urban rushed at him to strike him. Hearing of all this, St. Catherine sent the fiery Pontiff a warning: “Do what you have to do with moderation… with good will and a peaceful heart, for excess destroys rather than builds up. For the sake of the crucified Lord keep these hasty movements of your nature a little in check.”² Urban, heedless, announced his intention to appoint enough Italian cardinals to give Italy a majority in the College.

The French cardinals gathered in Anagni, and planned revolt. On August 9, 1378, they issued a manifesto declaring Urban’s election invalid as having been made under duress of the Roman mob. All the Italian cardinals joined them, and at Fondi on September 20 the entire College proclaimed Robert of Geneva to be the true pope. Robert, as Clement VII, took up his residence at Avignon, while Urban clung to his pontifical office in Rome. The Papal Schism so inaugurated was one more result of the rising national state; in effect it was an attempt by France to retain the vital aid of the papacy in her war with England and in any furure contest with Germany or Italy. The lead of France was followed by Naples, Spain, and Scotland; but England, Flanders, Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Portugal accepted Urban, and the Church became the political plaything of the rival camps. The confusion reached a pitch that aroused the scornful laughter of expanding Islam. Half the Christian world held the other half to be heretical, blasphemous, and excommunicate. St. Catherine denounced Clement VII as a Judas; St. Vincent Ferrer applied the same term to Urban VI.³ Each side claimed that sacraments administered by priests of the opposite obedience were invalid, and that the children so baptized, the penitents so shriven, the dying so anointed, remained in a state of mortal sin, doomed to hell or limbo if death should supervene. Mutual hatred rose to a fervor equaled only in the bitterest wars. When many of Urban’s newly appointed cardinals plotted to place him in confinement as a dangerous incompetent, he had seven of them arrested, tortured, and put to death (1385).

His own death (1389) brought no compromise; the fourteen cardinals surviving in his camp made Piero Tomacelli Pope Boniface IX, and the divided nations prolonged the divided papacy. When Clement VII died (1394) the cardinals at Avignon named Pedro de Luna to be Benedict XIII. Charles VI of France proposed that both popes should resign; Benedict refused. In 1399 Boniface IX proclaimed a jubilee for the following year. Realizing that many potential pilgrims would be kept at home by the chaos and insecurity of the times, he empowered his agents to give the full indulgence of the jubilee to any Christian who, having confessed his sins and done due penance, should contribute to the Roman Church the sum that a trip to Rome would have cost him. The collectors were not scrupulous theologians; many of them offered the indulgence without requiring confession; Boniface reproved them, but he felt that no one could make better use than he of money so secured; even amid the acute pains of the stone, said his secretary, Boniface “did not cease to thirst for gold.”⁴ When some collectors tried to cheat him he had them tortured till they disgorged. Other collectors were torn to pieces by the Roman mob for letting Christians get the jubilee indulgence without coming to spend money in Rome.⁵ Amid the jubilee celebrations and solemnities the Colonna family aroused the people to demand the restoration of republican government. When Boniface refused, the Colonna led an army of eight thousand against him; the aging pope stood siege resolutely in Sant’ Angelo; the people turned against the Colonna, the rebel army dispersed, and thirty-one leaders of the revolt were jailed. One of them was promised his life if he would serve as executioner of the rest; he consented, and hanged thirty men, including his father and his brother.⁶

On the death of Boniface and the election of Innocent VII (1404), revolt broke out again, and Innocent fled to Viterbo. The Roman mob, led by Giovanni Colonna, sacked the Vatican, smeared the emblems of Innocent with mud, and scattered papal registers and historic bulls through the streets (1405).⁷ Then the people, bethinking themselves that Rome without the popes would be ruined, made their peace with Innocent, who returned in triumph and, a few days later, died (1406).

His successor, Gregory XII, invited Benedict XIII to a conference. Benedict offered to resign if Gregory would do likewise; Gregory’s relatives dissuaded him from consent. Some of his cardinals withdrew to Pisa, and called for a general council to elect a pope acceptable to all Christendom. The King of France again urged Benedict to resign; when Benedict again refused, France renounced its allegiance, and adopted an attitude of neutrality. Deserted by his cardinals, Benedict fled to Spain. His cardinals joined with those who had left Gregory, and together they issued a call for a council to be held at Pisa on March 25, 1409.

II. THE COUNCILS AND THE POPES: 1409–18

Rebellious philosophers, almost a century before, had laid the foundations of the “conciliar movement.” William of Occam protested against identifying the Church with the clergy; the Church, he said, is the congregation of all the faithful; that whole has authority superior to any part; it may delegate its authority to a general council, which should have the power to elect, reprove, punish, or depose the pope.⁸ A general council, said Marsilius of Padua, is the gathered intelligence of Christendom; how shall any one man dare set up his own intelligence above it? Such a council should be composed not only of clergy but also of laymen elected by the people; and its deliberations should be free from domination by the pope.⁹ Heinrich von Langenstein, a German theologian at the University of Paris, in a tract Concilium pacis (1381), applied these ideas to the Papal Schism. Whatever logic there might be (said Heinrich) in the arguments of the popes for their supreme, God-derived authority, a crisis had arisen from which logic offered no escape; only a power outside the popes, and superior to the cardinals, could rescue the Church from the chaos that was crippling her; and that authority could only be a general council. Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, in a sermon preached at Tarascon before Benedict XIII himself, reasoned that since the exclusive power of the pope to call a general council had failed to end the Schism, that rule must be abrogated for the emergency, and a general council must be otherwise summoned, and must assume the authority to end the crisis.¹⁰

The Council of Pisa met as scheduled. In the majestic cathedral gathered twenty-six cardinals, four patriarchs, twelve archbishops, eighty bishops, eighty-seven abbots, the generals of all the great monastic orders, delegates from all major universities, three hundred doctors of canon law, ambassadors from all the governments of Europe except those of Hungary, Naples, Spain, Scandinavia, and Scotland. The Council declared itself canonical (valid in Church law) and ecumenical (representing the whole Christian world)—a claim which ignored the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church. It summoned Benedict and Gregory to appear before it; neither appearing, it declared them deposed, and named the Cardinal of Milan as Pope Alexander V (1409). It instructed the new Pope to call another general council before May, 1412, and adjourned.

It had hoped to end the Schism, but as both Benedict and Gregory refused to recognize its authority, the result was that there were now three popes instead of two. Alexander V did not help matters by dying (1410); his cardinals chose as his successor John XXIII, the most unmanageable man to occupy the papal throne since his predecessor of that name. Baldassare Cossa had been made papal vicar of Bologna by Boniface IX; he had governed the city like a condottiere, with absolute and unscrupulous power; he had taxed everything, including prostitution, gambling, and usury; according to his secretary, he had seduced two hundred virgins, matrons, widows, and nuns.¹¹ But he was a man of precious ability in politics and war; he had accumulated great wealth, and commanded a force of troops personally loyal to him; perhaps he could conquer the Papal States from Gregory, and reduce Gregory to impecunious submission.

John XXIII delayed as long as he could to call the council decreed at Pisa. But in 1411 Sigismund became King of the Romans, and the uncrowned but generally acknowledged head of the Holy Roman Empire. He compelled John to call a council, and chose Constance for its seat as free from Italian intimidation and open to Imperial influence. Taking the initiative from the Church like another Constantine, Sigismund invited all prelates, princes, lords, and doctors in Christendom to attend. Everybody in Europe responded except the three popes and their retinues. So many dignitaries came, at their own dignified leisure, that half a year was spent in assembling them. When, finally, John XXIII consented to open the Council on November 5, 1414, only a fraction had arrived of the three patriarchs, twenty-nine cardinals, thirty-three archbishops, one hundred and fifty bishops, one hundred abbots, three hundred doctors of theology, fourteen university deputies, twenty-six princes, one hundred and forty nobles, and four thousand priests who were to make the completed Council the largest in Christian history, and the most important since the Council of Nicaea (325) had established the creed of the Church. Where normally Constance had sheltered some six thousand inhabitants, it now successfully housed and fed not only some five thousand delegates to the Council, but, to attend to their wants, a host of servants, secretaries, pedlars, physicians, quacks, minstrels, and fifteen hundred prostitutes.¹²

The Council had hardly formulated its procedure when it was faced with the dramatic desertion of the Pope who had convened it. John XXIII was shocked to learn that his enemies were preparing to present to the assembly a record of his life, crimes, and incontinence. A committee advised him that this ignominy could be averted if he would agree to join Gregory and Benedict in a simultaneous abdication.¹³ He agreed; but suddenly he fled from Constance disguised as a groom (March 20, 1415), and found refuge in a castle at Schaffhausen with Frederick, Archduke of Austria and foe to Sigismund. On March 29 he announced that all the promises made by him in Constance had been drawn from him through fear of violence, and could have no binding force. On April 6 the Council issued a decree—Sacrosancta—which one historian has called “the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world”:¹⁴

This holy synod of Constance, being a general council, and legally assembled in the Holy Spirit for the praise of God and for ending the present Schism, and for the union and reform of the Church of God in its head and its members… ordains, declares, and decrees as follows: First, it declares that this synod… represents the Church Militant, and has its authority directly from Christ; and everybody, of whatever rank or dignity, including also the pope, is bound to obey this council in those things that pertain to the faith, to the ending of this Schism, and to a general reform of the Church in its head and members. Likewise it declares that if anyone, of whatever rank, condition, or dignity, including also the pope, shall refuse to obey the commands, statutes, ordinances, or orders of this holy council, or of any other holy council properly assembled, in regard to the ending of the Schism or to the reform of the Church, he shall be subject to proper punishment… and, if necessary, recourse shall be had to other aids of justice.¹⁵

Many cardinals protested against this decree, fearing that it would end the power of the college of cardinals to elect the pope; the Council overrode their opposition, and thereafter they played but a minor role in its activities.

The Council now sent a committee to John XXIII to ask for his abdication. Receiving no definite answer, it accepted (May 25) the presentation of fifty-four charges against him as a pagan, an oppressor, a liar, a simoniac, a traitor, a lecher, and a thief;¹⁶ sixteen other accusations were suppressed as too severe.¹⁷ On May 29 the Council deposed John XXIII; and broken at last, he accepted the decree. Sigismund ordered him confined in the castle of Heidelberg for the duration of the Council. He was released in 1418, and found asylum and sustenance, as an old man, with Cosimo de’ Medici.

The Council celebrated its triumph with a parade through Constance. When it returned to business it found itself in a quandary. If it should choose another pope it would be restoring the threefold division of Christendom, for many districts still obeyed Benedict or Gregory. Gregory rescued the Council by an act at once subtle and magnanimous: he agreed to resign, but only on condition that he should be allowed to reconvene and legitimate the Council by his own papal authority. On July 4, 1415, the Council, so reconvened, accepted Gregory’s resignation, confirmed the validity of his appointments, and named him legate governor of Ancona, where he lived quietly the two remaining years of his life.

Benedict continued to resist, but his cardinals left him and made their peace with the Council. On July 26, 1417, the Council deposed him. He retired to his family stronghold near Valencia, and died there at ninety, still counting himself pope. In October the Council passed a decree—Frequens —requiring that another general council should be convened within five years. On November 17 an electoral committee of the Council chose Cardinal Oddone Colonna as Pope Martin V. All Christendom accepted him, and after thirty-nine years of chaos the Great Schism came to an end.

The Council had now accomplished its first purpose. But its victory on this point defeated its other purpose—to reform the Church. When Marrtin V found himself pope he assumed all the powers and prerogatives of the papacy. He displaced Sigismund as president of the Council, and with courteous and subtle address negotiated with each national group in the Council a separate treaty of ecclesiastical reform. By playing off each group against the others he persuaded each to accept a minimum of reform, couched in carefully obscure language which each party might interpret to save its emoluments and its face. The Council yielded to him because it was tired. It had labored for three years, it longed for home, and felt that a later synod could take up in sharper detail the problem of reform. On April 22, 1418, it declared itself dissolved.

III. THE TRIUMPH OF THE PAPACY: 1418–47

Martin V, though himself a Roman, could not go at once to Rome; the roads were held by the condottiere Braccio da Montone; Martin thought it safer to stay in Geneva, then Mantua, then Florence. When at last he reached Rome (1420), he was shocked by the condition of the city, by the dilapidation of the buildings and the people. The capital of Christendom; was one of the least civilized cities in Europe.

If Martin continued a characteristic abuse by appointing his Colonna relatives to places of income and power, it may be because he had to strengthen his family in order to have some physical security in the Vatican. He had no army, but upon the Papal States, from every side, pressed the armed forces of Naples, Florence, Venice, and Milan. The Papal States, for the most part, had again fallen into the hands of petty dictators who, though they called themselves vicars of the pope, had assumed practically sovereign powers during the division of the papacy. In Lombardy the clergy had for centuries been hostile to the bishops of Rome. Beyond the Alps lay a disordered Christendom that had lost most of its respect for the papacy, and grudged it financial support.

Martin faced these difficulties with courage and success. Though he had inherited an almost empty treasury, he allotted funds for the partial rebuilding of his capital. His energetic measures drove the brigands from the roads and Rome; he destroyed a robber stronghold at Montelipo, and had its leaders beheaded.¹⁸ He restored order in Rome, and codified its communal law. He appointed one of the early humanists, Poggio Bracciolini, to be a papal secretary. He engaged Gentile da Fabriano, Antonio Pisanello, and Masaccio to paint frescoes in Santa Maria Maggiore and St. John in the Lateran. He named men of intellect and character, like Giuliano Cesarini, Louis Allemand, Domenico Capranica, and Prospero Colonna, to the college of cardinals. He reorganized the Curia to effective functioning, but found no way to finance it except by selling offices and services. Since the Church had survived for a century without reform, but could hardly survive a week without money, Martin judged money to be more urgently needed than reform. Pursuant to the Frequens decree of Constance, he called a council to meet at Pavia in 1423. It was sparsely attended; plague compelled its transference to Siena; when it proposed to assume absolute authority Martin ordered it to dissolve; and the bishops, fearing for their sees, obeyed. To soothe the spirit of reform Martin issued (1425) a bull detailing some admirable changes in the procedure and financing of the Curia; but a thousand obstacles and objections arose, and the proposals faded in the quick oblivion of time. In 1430 a German envoy to Rome sent to his prince a letter that almost sounded the tocsin of the Reformation:

Greed reigns supreme in the Roman court, and day by day finds new devices… for extorting money from Germany under pretext of ecclesiastical fees. Hence much outcry… and heartburnings;… also many questions in regard to the papacy will arise, or else obedience will at last be entirely renounced, to escape from these outrageous exactions of the Italians; and this latter course, as I perceive; would be acceptable to many countries.¹⁹

Martin’s successor faced the accumulated problems of the papacy from the background of a devout Franciscan monk ill equipped for statesmanship. The papacy was a government more than a religion; the popes had to be statesmen, sometimes warriors, and could rarely afford to be saints. Eugenius IV was sometimes a saint. True, he was obstinate and dourly inflexible, and the gout that gave him almost constant pain in his hands helped his sea of troubles to make him impatient and unsociable. But he lived ascetically, ate sparingly, drank nothing but water, slept little, worked hard, attended conscientiously to his religious duties, bore no malice against his enemies, pardoned readily, gave generously, kept nothing for himself, and was so modest that in public he seldom raised his eyes from the ground.²⁰ Yet few popes have earned so many foes.

The first were the cardinals who had elected him. As the price of their votes, and to protect themselves from such one-man rule as that of Martin, they had induced him to sign capitula— literally, headings—promising them freedom of speech, guarantees for their offices, control over half the revenues, and consultation with them on all important affairs; such “capitulations” set a precedent regularly followed in papal elections throughout the Renaissance. Furthermore, Eugenius made powerful enemies of the Colonna. Believing that Martin had transferred too much Church property to that family, he ordered restoration of many parcels, and had Martin’s former secretary tortured almost to death to elicit information in the matter. The Colonna made war upon the Pope; he defeated them with soldiery sent him by Florence and Venice, but in the process he aroused the hostility of Rome. Meanwhile the Council of Basel, called by Martin, met in the first year (1431) of the new pontificate, and proposed again to assert the supremacy of the councils over the popes. Eugenius ordered it to dissolve; it refused, commanded him to appear before it, and sent Milanese troops to attack him in Rome. The Colonna seized the chance for revenge; they organized a revolution in the city, and set up a republican government (1434). Eugenius fled down the Tiber in a small boat pelted by the populace with arrows, pikes, and stones.²¹ He found refuge in Florence, then in Bologna; for nine years he and the Curia were exiles from Rome.

The majority of the delegates to the Council of Basel were French. They aimed, as the bishop of Tours frankly said, “either to wrest the Apostolic See from the Italians, or so to despoil it that it will not matter where it abides.” The Council therefore assumed one after another the prerogatives of the papacy: it issued indulgences, granted dispensations, appointed to benefices, and required that annates should be paid to itself and not to the pope. Eugenius again ordered its dissolution; it countered by deposing him (1439) and naming Amadeus VIII of Savoy as Antipope Felix V; the Schism was renewed. To complete the apparent defeat of Eugenius, Charles VII of France convened at Bourges (1438) an assembly of French prelates, princes, and lawyers, which proclaimed the supremacy of councils over popes, and issued the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges: ecclesiastical offices were henceforth to be filled through election by the local chapter or clergy, but the king might make “recommendations”; appeals to the Papal Curia were forbidden except after exhausting all judicial possibilities in France; the collection of annates by the pope was prohibited.²² This Sanction in effect established an independent Gallican Church, and made the king its master. A year later a diet at Mainz adopted measures for a similar national church in Germany. The Bohemian Church had separated itself from the papacy in the Hussite revolt; the archbishop of Prague called the pope “the Beast of the Apocalypse.”²³ The whole edifice of the Roman Church seemed shattered beyond repair; the nationalistic Reformation seemed established a century before Luther.

Eugenius was rescued by the Turks. As the Ottomans came ever nearer to Constantinople, the Byzantines decided that Constantinople was worth a Roman Mass, and that a reunion of Greek with Roman Christianity was an indispensable prelude to securing military aid from the West. The Emperor John VIII sent an embassy to Martin V (1431) to propose a council of both churches. The Council of Basel despatched envoys to John (1433), explaining that the Council was superior in power to the pope, was under the protection of the Emperor Sigismund, and would procure money and troops for the defense of Constantinople if the Greek Church would deal with the Council rather than with the Pope. Eugenius sent his own embassy, offering aid on condition that the proposal of union should be laid before a new council to be called by him at Ferrara. John decided for Eugenius. The Pope summoned to Ferrara such of the hierarchy as were still loyal to him; many leading prelates, including Cesarini and Nicholas of Cusa, abandoned Basel for Ferrara, feeling that the matter of prime importance was the negotiation with the Greeks. The Council at Basel lingered on, but with mounting exasperation and declining prestige.

The news that Christendom, divided between the Greek and the Roman Churches since 1054, was now to be united stirred all Europe. On February 8, 1438, the Byzantine Emperor, the Patriarch Joseph of Constantinople, seventeen Greek metropolitans, and a large number of Greek bishops, monks, and scholars, arrived at Venice, still partly a Byzantine city. At Ferrara Eugenius received them with a pomp that must have meant little to the ceremonious Greeks. After the opening of the Council various commissions were appointed to reconcile the divergences of the two Churches on the primacy of the pope, the use of unleavened bread, the nature of the pains of purgatory, and the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and/or the Son. For eight months the pundits argued these points, but could come to no agreement. Meanwhile plague broke out in Ferrara; Cosimo de’ Medici invited the Council to move to Florence and be housed at the expense of himself and his friends; it was so ordered; and some would date the Italian Renaissance from that influx of learned Greeks into Florence (1439). There it was agreed that the formula acceptable to the Greeks—that “the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father through the Son” (ex Patre per Filium procedit)— meant the same as the Roman formula, “proceeds from the Father and the Son” (ex Patre Filioque procedit); and by June 1439 an accord was reached on purgatorial pains. The primacy of the pope led to hot debates, and the Greek Emperor threatened to break up the Council. The conciliatory Archbishop Bessarion of Nicaea contrived a compromise that recognized the universal authority of the pope, but reserved all the existing rights and privileges of the Eastern churches. The formula was accepted; and on July 6, 1439, in the great cathedral that only three years before had received from Brunellesco its majestic dome, the decree uniting the two Churches was read in Greek by Bessarion and in Latin by Cesarini; the two prelates kissed; and all the members of the Council, with the Greek Emperor at their head, bent the knee before that same Eugenius who had seemed, so recently, the despised and rejected of men.

The joy of Christendom was brief. When the Greek Emperor and his suite returned to Constantinople they were met with insults and ribaldry; the clergy and population of the city repudiated the submission to Rome. Eugenius kept his part of the bargain; Cardinal Cesarini was sent to Hungary at the head of an army to join the forces of Ladislas and Hunyadi; they were victorious at Nish, entered Sofia in triumph on Christmas Eve of 1443, and were routed at Varna by Murad II (1444). The antiunion party in Constantinople won the upper hand, and the Patriarch Gregory, who had supported union, fled to Italy. Gregory fought his way back to St. Sophia, and read the decree of union there in 1452; but from that time the great church was shunned by the people. The antiunion clergy anathematized all adherents of union, refused absolution to those who had attended the reading of the decree, and exhorted the sick to die without the sacraments rather than receive them from a “Uniate” priest.²⁴ The patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem repudiated the “robber synod” of Florence.²⁵ Mohammed II simplified the situation by making Constantinople a Turkish capital (1453). He gave the Christians full freedom of worship, and appointed as patriarch Gennadius, a devoted foe of unity.

Eugenius returned to Rome in 1443, after his legate general, Cardinal Vitelleschi, had suppressed the chaotic republic and the turbulent Colonna with a ferocity unequaled by the Vandals or the Goths. The Pope’s stay at Florence had acquainted him with the development of humanism and art under Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Greek scholars who had attended the Council of Ferrara and Florence had aroused in him an interest in the preservation of the classic manuscripts that the imminent fall of Constantinople might forfeit or destroy. He added to his secretariat Poggio, Flavio Biondo, Leonardo Bruni, and other humanists who could negotiate with the Greeks in Greek. He brought Fra Angelico to Rome, and had him paint frescoes in the Chapel of the Sacrament at the Vatican. Having admired the bronze gates that Ghiberti had cast for the Florentine Baptistery, Eugenius commissioned Filarete to make similar doors for the old church of St. Peter (1433). It was significant—though already it aroused hardly any comment—that the sculptor placed upon the portals of the chief church in Latin Christendom not only Christ and Mary and the Apostles, but Mars and Roma, Hero and Leander, Jupiter and Ganymede, even Leda and the swan. In the hour of his victory over the Council of Basel Eugenius brought the pagan Renaissance to Rome.

CHAPTER XV

The Renaissance Captures Rome

1447–92

I. THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

WHEN Pope Nicholas V mounted the oldest throne in the world,* Rome was hardly a tenth of the Rome that had been enclosed by the walls of Aurelian (A.D. 270–5), and was smaller in area and population (80,000)¹ than Venice, Florence, or Milan. Since the ruin of the major aqueducts by the barbarian invasions, the seven hills had been without a reliable water supply; some minor aqueducts remained, some springs, many cisterns and wells; but a large proportion of the inhabitants drank the water of the Tiber.² Most of the people lived in the unhealthy plains, subject to inundation from the river and to malarial infection from the neighboring swamps. The Capitoline hill was now called Monte Caprino, from the goats (capri) that nibbled its slopes. The Palatine hill was a rural retreat, almost uninhabited; the ancient palaces from which it derived its name were dusty quarries. The Borgo Vaticano, or Vatican Town, was a small suburb across the river from the central city, and huddled about the decaying shrine of St. Peter. Some churches, like Santa Maria Maggiore or Santa Cecilia, were beautiful within but plain without; and no church in Rome could compare with the duomo of Florence or Milan, no monastery could rival the Certosa di Pavia, no town hall rose to the dignity of the Palazzo Vecchio, or the Castello Sforzesco, or the Palace of the Doges, or even the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. Nearly all the streets were muddy or dusty alleys; some were paved with cobblestones; only a few were lit at night; they were swept only on extraordinary occasions like a jubilee, or the formal entry of some very important person.

The economic support of the city came partly from pasturage and the production of wool, and the cattle that grazed in the environing fields, but chiefly from the revenues of the Church. There was little agriculture, and only petty trade; industry and commerce had well-nigh disappeared through lack of protection from brigand raids. There was almost no middle class—only nobles, ecclesiastics, and commoners. The nobles, who owned nearly all the land that had not fallen to the Church, exploited their peasantry without Christian compunction or hindrance. They suppressed revolt, and waged their feuds, with bravi— strong-arm ruffians kept in their employ and trained to beat or kill. The great families—above all the Colonna and the Orsini—seized tombs, baths, theaters, and other structures in or near Rome and turned them into private fortresses; and their rural castles were designed for war. The nobles were usual hostile to the popes, or strove to name and govern them. Time and again they created such disorder that the popes fled; Pius II prayed that any other city might be his capital.³ When Sixtus IV and Alexander VI warred against such men it was in a forgivable effort to win some security for the Papal See.

Normally the ecclesiastics ruled Rome, for they had the Church’s varied revenue to spend. The inhabitants were dependent upon that influx of gold from a dozen countries, upon the employment it enabled churchmen to provide, and upon the charity that it allowed the popes to dispense. The people of Rome could not be enthusiastic about any reform of the Church that would lessen that golden flow. Precluded from rebellion, they substituted for it a sharpness of satire unequaled elsewhere in Europe. A statue in the Piazza Navona, probably a Hellenistic Hercules, was/renamed Pasquino—perhaps from a nearby tailor—and became the bulletin board of the latest squibs, usually in the form of Latin or Italian epigrams, and often against the reigning pope. The Romans were religious, at least on occasion; they crowded to receive the papal blessing, and were proud to imitate ambassadors by kissing the papal feet; but when Sixtus IV, suffering from gout, failed to appear for a scheduled benediction they cursed him with Roman virulence. Moreover, since Eugenius IV had abrogated the Roman Republic, the popes were the secular rulers of Rome, and received the contumely usually awarded to governments. It was the misfortune of the papacy to be seated amid the most lawless population in Italy.

The popes felt themselves thoroughly justified in claiming a degree and area of temporal power. As the heads of an international organization they could not afford to be the captives of any one state, as they had been in effect in Avignon; so trammeled, they could hardly serve all peoples impartially, much less realize their majestic dream of being the spiritual governors of every government. Though the “Donation of Constantine” was a palpable forgery (as Nicholas admitted by hiring Valla), the donation of central Italy to the papacy by Pepin (755), confirmed by Charlemagne (773), was an historical fact. The popes had coined their own money at least as far back as 782,⁴ and for centuries no one had questioned their right. The unification of local powers, feudal or martial, in a central government was taking place in the Papal States as in the other nations of Europe. If the popes from Nicholas V to Clement VII ruled their states as absolute monarchs they were following the fashion of the times; and they could with reason complain when reformers like Chancellor Gerson of the University of Paris proposed democracy in the Church but deprecated it in the state. Neither state nor Church was ready for democracy at a time when printing had not yet begun or spread. Nicholas V became pope seven years before Gutenberg printed his Bible, thirty years before printing reached Rome, forty-eight years before the first publication of Aldus Manutius. Democracy is a luxury of disseminated intelligence, security, and peace.