The Renaissance

He was the most generous, but not the most enlightened, of patrons. With all his patronage no great literature arose in his reign. Ariosto and Machiavelli were beyond him, though he could appreciate Bembo and Politian. His taste in art was not as sure and lordly as that of Julius; it was not to him that we owe St. Peter’s or The School of Athens. He loved beautiful form too much, too little the revealing significance that great art clothes in beautiful form. He overworked Raphael, underestimated Leonardo, and could not, like Julius, find a way through Michelangelo’s temper to his genius. He liked comfort too much to be great. It is a pity to judge him so harshly, for he was lovable.

The age received his name, and perhaps rightly; for though he rather took than gave its stamp, it was he who brought from Florence to Rome the Medicean heritage of wealth and taste, the princely patronage that he had seen in his father’s house; and with that wealth, and papal sanction, he provided an exciting stimulus to such literature and art as excelled in style and form. His example stirred a hundred other men to seek out talent, support it, and set northern Europe a precedent and standard of apprecation and worth. He more than any other pope protected the remains of classic Rome, and encouraged men to rival them. He accepted the pagan enjoyment of life, and yet, in his own conduct, remained remarkably continent in an uninhibited age. His support of the Roman humanists helped to spread into France their cultivation of classic literature and form. Under his aegis Rome became the throbbing heart of European culture; thither the artists flocked to paint or carve or build, the scholars came to study, the poets to sing, the men of wit to sparkle. “Before I forget thee, Rome,” wrote Erasmus, “I must plunge into the river of Lethe…. What precious freedom, what treasures in the way of books, what depths of knowledge among the learned, what beneficial social intercourse! Where else could one find such literary society, or such versatility of talent in one and the same place?”¹⁰⁵ The gentle Castiglione, the polished Bembo, the learned Lascaris, Fra Giocondo, Raphael, the Sansovini and Sangalli, Sebastiano and Michelangelo—where shall we find again, in one city and decade, such a company?

BOOK V

DEBACLE

CHAPTER XIX

The Intellectual Revolt

1300–1534

I. THE OCCULT

IN every age and nation civilization is the product, privilege, and responsibility of a minority. The historian acquainted with the pervasive pertinacity of nonsense reconciles himself to a glorious future for superstition; he does not expect perfect states to arise out of imperfect men; he perceives that only a small proportion of any generation can be so freed from economic harassments as to have leisure and energy to think their own thoughts instead of those of their forebears or their environment; and he learns to rejoice if he can find in each period a few men and women who have lifted themselves, by the bootstraps of their brains, or by some boon of birth or circumstance, out of superstition, occultism, and credulity to an informed and friendly intelligence conscious of its infinite ignorance.

So in Renaissance Italy civilization was of the few, by the few, and for them. The simple common man, named legion, tilled and mined the earth, pulled the carts or bore the burdens, toiled from dawn to dusk, and at evening had no muscle left for thought. He took his opinions, his religion, his answers to the riddles of life from the air about him, or inherited them with the ancestral cottage; he let others think for him because others made him work for them. He accepted not only the fascinating, comforting, inspiring, terrifying marvels of the tradicional theology—which were daily reimpressed upon him by contagion, inculcation, and art—but he added to them, in his mental furniture, the demonology, sorcery, portents, magic, divination, astrology, relic-worship, and miraclemongering that composed, so to speak, a popular metaphysics unauthorized by the Church, which deprecated them as a problem sometimes more troublesome then unbelief. While the uncommon man in Italy was half a century or more ahead of his class beyond the Alps in wealth and culture, the common man south of the Alps shared equally with his transalpine peers the superstitions of the time.

Often the humanists themselves surrendered to the genius or stultus loci, and sprinkled their Ciceronian pages with the spirit or foolishness of their surroundings. Poggio revels in portents and prodigies like headless horsemen migrating from Como to Germany, or bearded Tritons rising from the sea to snatch fair women from the shore.¹ Machiavelli, so skeptical of religion, suggested the possibility that “the air is peopled with spirits,” and declared his belief that great events are heralded by prodigies, prophecies, revelations, and signs in the sky.² The Florentines, who liked to think that the air they breathed made them clever beyond compare, held that all important events happened on Saturday, and that it was a sure misfortune to march out to war by certain streets.³ Politian was so upset by the Pazzi conspiracy that he attributed to it a disastrous rainfall that followed it, and condoned the youths who, to end the rain, exhumed the corpse of the chief conspirator, paraded it through the city, and then flung it into the Arno.⁴ Marsilio Ficino wrote in defense of divination, astrology, and demonology, and excused himself from visiting Pico della Mirandola on the ground that the stars were in an unfavorable conjunction⁵—or was it a whimsy? If humanists could believe so, how could the people, with no advantage of leisure or education, be blamed for thinking of the natural world as the shell and instrument of numberless supernatural powers?

The people of Italy reckoned so many objects as true relics of Christ or the Apostles that one might have furnished from Renaissance Roman churches alone all the scenes of the Gospels. One church claimed to have a swaddling cloth of the Infant Jesus; another, hay from the Bethlehem stall; another, fragments of the multiplied loaves and fishes; another, the table used at the Last Supper; another, the picture of the Virgin painted by angels for St. Luke.⁶ Venetian churches displayed the body of St. Mark, an arm of St. George, an ear of St. Paul, some roasted flesh of St. Lawrence, some of the very stones that had killed St. Stephen.⁷

Nearly every object—every number and letter—was believed to have some magic power. According to Aretino some Roman harlots fed to their lovers, as an aphrodisiac, the rotting flesh of human corpses stolen from the cemeteries.⁸ Incantations were used for a thousand purposes; by the proper one, said Apulian peasants, you could protect yourself from mad dogs. Spirits beneficent or malevolent peopled the air; Satan often appeared, in person or by deputy, to tempt or terrify, to seduce, empower or instruct; demons had a fund of mystic knowledge that could be tapped if one should properly propitiate them. Some Carmelite monks at Bologna (till Sixtus IV condemned them in 1474) taught that there was no harm in seeking knowledge from devils;⁹ and professional sorcerers offered their expert charms in invoking the aid of demons for paying customers. Witches—sorcerers usually female—were believed to have special access to such helpful devils, whom they treated as lovers and gods; by delegated demonic power these women, in the belief of the people, could foresee the future, fly in a moment over long distances, pass through closed gates and doors, and wreak dire evils upon persons who offended them; they could induce love or hate, produce abortion, manufacture poisons, and cause death by a spell or a glance.

In 1484 a bull of Innocent VIII (Summis desiderantes) forbade resort to witches, took for granted the reality of some of their claimed powers, ascribed to them some storms and plagues, and complained that many Christians, falling away from orthodox worship, had contracted carnal union with devils, and, by spells and magic rhymes, curses and other diabolical arts, had done grievous harm to men, women, children, and beasts.¹⁰ The Pope advised the officers of the Inquisition to be on the alert against such practices. The bull did not impose belief in witchcraft as the official doctrine of the Church, nor did it inaugurate the prosecution of witches; popular belief in witches, and occasional punishment of them, long antedated the bull. The Pope was here faithful to the Old Testament, which had commanded, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”¹¹ The Church had for centuries maintained the possibility of demonic influences upon human beings;¹² but the Pope’s assumption of the reality of witchcraft encouraged belief in it, and his admonition to the inquisitors played some part in the witchcraft persecution.¹³ In the year following the promulgation of the bull forty-one women were burned for witchcraft in Como alone.¹⁴ In 1486 the inquisitors at Brescia condemned several alleged witches to “the secular arm”—i.e., to death; but the government refused to execute the sentence, whereat Innocent was much peeved.¹⁵ Matters went more harmoniously in 1510, when we hear of 140 persons burned at Brescia for witchcraft; and in 1514, in the pontificate of the gentle Leo, three hundred more were burned at Como.¹⁶

Whether through perverse stimulation by persecution, or from other causes, the number of persons who believed themselves, or were believed, to have practised witchcraft rapidly increased, especially in subalpine Italy; it took on the nature and proportions of an epidemic; popular report claimed that 25,000 persons had attended a “witches’ sabbath” on a plain near Brescia. In 1518 the inquisitors burned seventy alleged witches from that region, and had thousands of suspects in their prisons. The Signory of Brescia protested against this wholesale detention, and interfered with further executions; whereupon Leo X, in a bull Honestis (February 15, 1521), ordered the excommunication of any officials, and the suspension of religious services in any community, that refused to execute, without examination or revision, the sentences of the inquisitors. The Signory, ignoring the bull, appointed two bishops, two Brescian physicians, and one inquisitor to supervise all further witchcraft trials, and to inquire into the justice of previous condemnations; only these men were to have the power to condemn the accused. The Signory admonished the papal legate to put an end to the condemnation of persons for the sake of confiscating their property.^16a It was a brave procedure; but ignorance and sadism got the upper hand, and in the next two centuries, in Protestant as well as Catholic lands, in the New World as well as the old, burnings for witchcraft were to form the darkest spots in the history of mankind.

The mania to know the future supported the usual variety of fortune-tellers—palmists, dream interpreters, astrologers; these last were more numerous and powerful in Italy than in the rest of Europe. Almost every Italian government had an official astrologer, who determined the celestially propitious times when important enterprises should commence. Julius II would not leave Bologna till his astrologer marked the time as auspicious; Sixtus IV and Paul III let their stargazers fix the hours of their major conferences.^16b So general was the belief that the stars governed human character and affairs that many university professors in Italy annually issued iudicia—predictions based on astrology;^16c it was one of Aretino’s humorous devices to parody these learned almanacs. When Lorenzo de’ Medici reestablished the University of Pisa he made no arrangements for a course in astrology, but the students clamored for it, and he had to yield.^16d In Lorenzo’s erudite circle Pico della Mirandola wrote a powerful attack upon astrology, but Marsilio Ficino, still more learned, defended it. “How happy are the astrologers!” exclaimed Guicciardini, “who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred lies, while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred truths.”^16e Yet astrology had in it a certain groping toward a scientific view of the universe; it escaped in some measure from belief in a universe ruled by divine or demonic whim, and aimed to find a coordinating and universal natural law.

II. SCIENCE

The superstitions of the people, rather than the opposition of the Church, retarded the development of science. Censorship of publications did not become a substantial hindrance to science until the Counter Reformation that followed the Council of Trent (1545f). Sixtus IV brought to Rome (1463) the most famous astronomer of the fifteenth century, Johann Müller “Regiomontanus.” During Alexander’s pontificate Copernicus taught mathematics and astronomy in the University of Rome. Copernicus had not yet come to his world-shaking theory of the earth’s orbital revolution, but Nicholas of Cusa had already suggested it; and both men were churchmen. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Inquisition was relatively weak in Italy, partly through the absence of the popes in Avignon, their quarrels in the Schism, and their infection with the enlightenment of the Renaissance. In 1440 the materialist Amadeo de’ Landi was tried by the Inquisition at Milan, and was acquitted; in 1497 Gabriele da Salò, a freethinking physician, was protected from the Inquisition by his patron, though “he was in the habit of maintaining that Christ was not God but the son of Joseph.”^16f Despite the Inquisition, thought was freer in Italy, and education more advanced, than in any other country in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Her schools of astronomy, law, medicine, and literature were the goals of students from a dozen lands. Thomas Linacre, English physician and scholar, after completing his university courses in Italy, set up an altar in the Italian Alps as he was returning to England, and, taking a last view of Italy, dedicated the altar to her as Alma mater studiorum, the fostering mother of studies, the postgraduate university of the Christian world.

If, in this atmosphere of superstition beneath and liberalism above, science made only modest advances in the two centuries before Vesalius (1514–64), it was largely because patronage and honor went to art, scholarship, and poetry, and there was as yet no clear call, in the economic or intellectual life of Italy, for scientific methods and ideas. A man like Leonardo could take a sweeping cosmic view, and touch a dozen sciences with eager curiosity; but there were no great laboratories, dissection was only beginning, no miscroscope could help biology or medicine, no telescope could yet enlarge the stars and bring the moon to the edge of the earth. The medieval love of beauty had matured into magnificent art; but there had been little medieval love of truth to grow into science; and the recovery of ancient literature stimulated a skeptical epicureanism idealizing antiquity rather than a stoic devotion to scientific research aiming to mold the future. The Renaissance gave its soul to art, leaving a little for literature, less for philosophy, least for science. In this sense it lacked the multiform mental activity of the Greek heyday from Pericles and Aeschylus to Zeno the Stoic and Aristarchus the astronomer. Science could not advance until philosophy had cleared the way.

Therefore it is natural that the same reader who knows by name a dozen Renaissance artists will find it hard to recall one Renaissance Italian scientist, barring Leonardo; even of Amerigo Vespucci he will have to be reminded; and Galileo (1564–1642) belongs to the seventeenth century. In truth there were no memorable names except in geography and medicine. Oderic of Pordenone went to India and China as a missionary (c. 1321), returned via Tibet and Persia, and wrote an account of what he had seen, adding much of value to what Marco Polo had reported a generation before. Paolo Toscanelli, astronomer, physician, and geographer, noted Halley’s comet in 1456, and is reputed to have given Columbus knowledge and encouragement for his Atlantic venture.^16g Amerigo Vespucci of Florence made four voyages to the New World (1497f), claimed to have been the first to discover the mainland, and prepared maps of it; Martin Waldseemüller, publishing them, suggested that the continent be called America; the Italians liked the idea, and popularized it in their writings.^16h

The biological sciences were the last to develop, for the theory of the special creation of man—almost universally accepted—made it unnecessary and dangerous to inquire into his natural origin. For the most part these sciences limited themselves to practical pursuits and studies in medical botany, horticulture, floriculture, and agriculture. Pietro de’ Crescenzi, at the age of seventy-six (1306), published Ruralia commoda, an admirable manual of agriculture, except that it ignored the still better writings of Spanish Moslems in this field. Lorenzo de’ Medici had kept a semipublic garden of rare plants at Careggi; the first public botanical garden was founded by Luca Ghini at Pisa in 1544. Almost all rulers of style had zoological gardens; and Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici kept a human menagerie—a collection of barbarians of twenty different nationalities, all of splendid physique.

III. MEDICINE

The most prosperous science was medicine, for men will sacrifice anything but appetite for health. Physicians received a stimulating share of Italy’s new wealth. Padua paid one of them two thousand ducats a year to serve as consultant, while leaving him free to charge for his private practice.¹⁶ⁱ Petrarch, standing on his benefices, indignantly denounced the high fees of physicians, their robes of scarlet and their miniver hoods,^16j their sparkling rings and golden spurs. He earnestly warned the sick Pope Clement VI against trusting physicians:

I know that your bedside is beleaguered by doctors, and naturally this fills me with fear. Their opinions are always conflicting, and he who has nothing new to say suffers the shame of limping behind the others. As Pliny said, in order to make a name for themselves through some novelty, they traffic with our lives. With them—not as with other trades—it is sufficient to be called a physician to be believed to the last word, and yet a physician’s lie harbors more danger than any other. Only sweet hope causes us not to think of the situation. They learn their art at our expense, and even our death brings them experience; the physician alone has the right to kill with impunity. Oh, Most Gentle Father, look upon their band as an army of enemies. Remember the warning epitaph which an unfortunate man had inscribed on his tombstone: “I died of too many physicians.”¹⁷

In all civilized lands and times physicians have rivaled women for the distinction of being the most desirable and satirized of mankind.

The basis of progress in medicine was the renaissance of anatomy. Ecclesiastics, co-operating with physicians as well as with artists, sometimes provided corpses for dissection from the hospitals that they controlled. Mondino de’ Luzzi dissected cadavers at Bologna, and wrote an Anatomia (1316) which remained a classic text for three centuries. Nevertheless corpses were hard to get. In 1319 some medical students at Bologna stole a corpse from a cemetery and brought it to a teacher at the University, who dissected it for their instruction. The students were prosecuted but acquitted, and from that time the civil authorities winked an eye at the use of executed and unclaimed criminals in “anatomies.”¹⁸ Berengario da Carpi (1470–1550), professor of anatomy at Bologna, was credited with having dissected over a hundred corpses.¹⁹ Dissection was practised at the University of Pisa at least as early as 1341; soon it was permitted in all the medical schools of Italy, including the papal school of medicine in Rome. Sixtus IV (1471–84) officially authorized such dissections.²⁰

Slowly Renaissance anatomy regained its forgotten classic heritage. Men like Antonio Benivieni, Alessandro Achillini, Alessandro Benedetti, and Marcantonio della Torre liberated anatomy from Arabic tutelage, went back to Galen and Hippocrates, questioned even these sacred authorities, and added, nerve by nerve, muscle by muscle, and bone by bone, to the scientific knowledge of the body. Benivieni directed his anatomies to finding the internal causes of disease; his treatise On Several Hidden and Wonderful Causes of Disease and Cures (De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationum causes 1507) founded pathological anatomy, and made post-mortem examinations a main factor in the development of modern medicine. Meanwhile the new art of printing accelerated medical progress by facilitating the diffusion and international exchange of medical texts.

We may loosely estimate the medieval relapse of medical science in Latin Christendom by noting that the most advanced anatomists and physicians of this age had barely reached, by 1500, the knowledge possessed by Hippocrates, Galen, and Soranus in the period from 450 B.C. to A.D. 200. Treatment was still based on the Hippocratic theory of humors, and bloodletting was a panacea. The first known transfusion of human blood was attempted by a Jewish physician in the case of Pope Innocent VIII (1492); as we have seen, it failed. Exorcists were still called in to treat impotence and amnesia by religious incantations or the kissing of relics, perhaps because such suggestive therapy was found occasionally helpful. Strange pills and drugs were sold by apothecaries, who added to their incomes by including stationery, varnish, confectionery, spices, and jewelry among their wares.²¹ Michele Savonarola, father of the fiery friar, wrote a Practica medicinae (c. 1440), and some shorter treatises; one of these discussed the frequency of mental pathology (bizaria) in great artists; another told of noted men who had lived long by the daily use of alcoholic drinks.

Medical quacks were still numerous, but medical practice was now more carefully regulated by law. Penalties were prescribed for persons who practised medicine without a medical degree; and this presumed a four-year medical course (1500). No physician was allowed to prognose a grave disease except by consultation with a colleague. Venetian legislation required physicians and surgeons to meet once a month to exchange clinical notes, and to keep their knowledge up to date by attending a course on anatomy at least once a year. The graduating medical student had to swear that he would never protract the sickness of a patient, that he would supervise the preparation of his prescriptions, and that he would take no part of the price charged by the apothecary for filling them. The same law (Venice, 1368) limited the apothecary’s charge for filling a prescription to ten soldi²²—coins now impossible to evaluate. We hear of several cases in which the medical fee, by a specific contract, was made conditional on cure.²³

Surgery was rising rapidly in repute as its repertoire of operations and instruments approached the variety and competence of ancient Egyptian practice. Bernardo da Rapallo devised the perineal operation for stone (1451), and Mariano Santo became famous for his many successful lithotomies by lateral incision (c. 1530). Giovanni da Vigo, surgeon to Julius II, developed better methods of ligature for arteries and veins. Plastic surgery, known to the ancients, reappeared in Sicily about 1450: mutilated noses, lips, and ears were repaired by grafts of skin from other parts of the body, and so well that the lines of adhesion could scarcely be detected.²⁴

Public sanitation was improving. As Doge of Venice (1343–54), Andrea Dandolo established the first known municipal commission of public health;²⁵ other Italian cities followed the example. These magistrati della sanità tested all foods and drugs offered for public sale, and isolated the victims of some contagious diseases. As a result of the Black Death, Venice in 1374 excluded from her port all ships carrying persons or goods suspected of infection. At Ragusa (1377) such arrivals were detained for thirty days in special quarters before being admitted into the city. Marseille (1383) lengthened the detention period to forty days—la quarantine, and Venice followed suit in 1403.²⁶

Hospitals were multiplying under the zeal of both laity and clergy. Siena built in 1305 a hospital famous for its size and services, and Francesco Sforza founded the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan (1456). In 1423 Venice converted the island of Santa Maria di Nazaret into a lazaretto to hospitalize infected persons; this is the first institution of its kind known in Europe.²⁷ Florence in the fifteenth century had thirty-five hospitals.²⁸ These establishments were generously supported by public and private donations. Some hospitals were notable examples of architecture, like the Ospedale Maggiore; some adorned their halls with inspiring works of art. The Ospedale del Ceppo at Pistoia engaged Giovanni della Robbia to mold for its walls terra-cotta reliefs vividly describing typical hospital scenes; and the façade of the Ospedale degli Innocenti at Florence, designed by Brunellesco, was signalized by the charming terra-cotta medallions placed in the spandrels of its portico arches by Andrea della Robbia. Luther, who was so shocked by the immorality that he found in Italy in 1511, was also impressed by its charitable and medical institutions. He described the hospitals in his Table Talk:

In Italy the hospitals are handsomely built, and admirably provided with excellent food and drink, careful attendants, and learned physicians. The beds and bedding are clean, and the walls are covered with paintings. When a patient is brought in, his clothes are removed in the presence of a notary who makes a faithful inventory of them, and they are kept safely. A white smock is put on him, and he is laid on a comfortable bed, with clean linen. Presently two doctors come to him, and servants bring him food and drink in clean vessels…. Many ladies take turns to visit the hospitals and tend the sick, keeping their faces veiled, so that no one knows who they are; each remains a few days and then returns home, another taking her place…. Equally excellent are the foundling asylums of Florence, where the children are well fed and taught, suitably clothed in a uniform, and altogether admirably cared for.²⁹

It is often the fatality of medicine that its heroic advances in therapy are balanced—almost pursued—by new diseases. Smallpox and measles, hardly known in Europe before the sixteenth century, now came to the fore; Europe experienced its first recorded influenza epidemic in 1510; and epidemics of typhus—a disease not mentioned before 1477—swept Italy in 1505 and 1528. But it was the sudden appearance and rapid dissemination of syphilis in Italy and France toward the end of the fifteenth century that constituted the most startling phenomenon and test of Renaissance medicine. Whether syphilis existed in Europe before 1493, or was brought from America by the return of Columbus in that year, is a matter still debated by the well informed, and not to be settled here.

Certain facts support the theory of an indigenous European origin. On July 25, 1463, a prostitute testified in a court at Dijon that she had dissuaded an unwelcome suitor by telling him that she had le gros mal—not further described in the record.³⁰ On March 25, 1494, the town crier of Paris was directed to order from the city all persons afflicted with la grosse verole.³¹ We do not know what this “great pox” was; it may have been syphilis. Late in 1494 a French army invaded Italy; on February 21, 1495, it occupied Naples; soon afterward a malady became rampant there, which the Italians called il morbo gallico, “the French disease,” alleging that the French had brought it into Italy. Many of the French soldiers were infected with it; when they returned to France, in October, 1495, they scattered the disease among the people; in France, therefore, it was called le mal de Naples, on the assumption that the French army had contracted it there. On August 7, 1495, two months before the return of the French army from Italy, the Emperor Maximilian issued an edict in which mention was made of malum francicum; obviously this “French disease” could not be ascribed to the French army not yet returned from Italy. From 1500 on, the term morbus gallicus was used throughout Europe to mean syphilis.³² We may conclude that there are suggestions, but no convincing evidence, that syphilis existed in Europe before 1493.

The case for an American origin is based upon a report written between 1504 and 1506 (but not published till 1539) by a Spanish physician, Ruy Diaz de l’Isla. He relates that on the return voyage of Columbus the pilot of the admiral’s vessel was attacked by a severe fever, accompanied with frightful skin eruptions, and adds that he himself, at Barcelona, had treated sailors infected with this new disease, which, he says, had never been known there before. He identified it with what Europe was” calling morbus gallicus, and contended that the infection had been brought from America.³³ Columbus, on his first return from the West Indies, reached Palos, Spain, on March 15, 1493. In that same month Pintor, physician to Alexander VI, noted the first appearance of the morbus gallicus in Rome.³⁴ Almost two years elapsed between the return of Columbus and the French occupation of Naples—sufficient time for the disease to spread from Spain to Italy; on the other hand, it is not certain that the plague that ravaged Naples in 1495 was syphilis.³⁵ Very few bones whose lesions may be interpreted as syphilitic have been found in pre-Columbian European remains; many such bones have been found among the relics of pre-Columbian America.*³⁶

In any case the new disease spread with terrifying speed. Caesar Borgia apparently contracted it in France. Many cardinals, and Julius II himself, were infected; but we must allow the possibility, in such instances, of infection by innocent contact with persons or objects bearing the active germ. Skin pustules had long since been treated in Europe with mercurial ointment; now mercury became as popular as penicillin is in our day; surgeons and quacks were called alchemists because they turned mercury into gold. Prophylactic measures were taken. A law of 1496 in Rome forbade barbers to admit syphilitics, or to use instruments that had been employed by or on them. More frequent examination of prostitutes was established, and some cities tried to evade the problem by expelling courtesans; so Ferrara and Bologna banished such women in 1496, on the ground that they had “a secret kind of pox which others call the leprosy of St. Job.”³⁸ The Church preached chastity as the one prophylaxis needed, and many churchmen practised it.

The name syphilis was first applied to the disease by Girolamo Fracastoro, one of the most varied and yet best integrated characters of the Renaissance. He had a good start: he was born at Verona (1483) of a patrician family that had already produced outstanding physicians. At Padua he studied almost everything. He had Copernicus as a fellow student, and Pomponazzi and Achillini to teach him philosophy and anatomy; at twenty-four he was himself professor of logic. Soon he retired to devote himself to scientific, above all medical, research, tempered with a fond study of classic literature. This association of science and letters produced a rounded personality, and a remarkable poem, written in Latin on the model of Virgil’s Georgics, and entitled Syphilis, sive de morbo gallico (1521). Italians since Lucretius have excelled in writing poetical didactic poetry, but who would have supposed that the undulant spirochete would lend itself to fluent verse? Syphilus, in ancient mythology, was a shepherd who decided to worship not the gods, whom he could not see, but the king, the only visible lord of his flock; whereupon angry Apollo infected the air with noxious vapors, from which Syphilus contracted a disease fouled with ulcerous eruptions over his body; this is essentially the story of Job. Fracastoro proposed to trace the first appearance, epidemic spread, causes, and therapy of “a fierce and rare sickness, never before seen for centuries past, which ravished all of Europe and the flourishing cities of Asia and Libya, and invaded Italy in that unfortunate war whence from the Gauls it has its name.” He doubted that the ailment had come from America, for it appeared almost simultaneously in many European countries far apart. The infection

did not manifest itself at once, but remained latent for a certain time, sometimes for a month… even for four months. In the majority of cases small ulcers began to appear on the sexual organs…. Next, the skin broke out with encrusted pustules…. Then these ulcerated pustules ate away the skin, and… infected even the bones.… In some cases the lips or nose or eyes were eaten away, or, in others, the whole of the sexual organs.³⁹

The poem goes on to discuss treatment by mercury or by guaiac—a “holy wood” used by the American Indians. In a later work, De contagione, Fracastoro dealt in prose with various contagious diseases—syphilis, typhus, tuberculosis—and the modes of contagion by which they could be spread. In 1545 he was called by Paul III to be head physician for the Council of Trent. Verona raised a noble monument to his memory, and Giovanni dal Cavino graved his likeness on a medallion which is one of the finest works of its kind.

Before 1500 it was usual to class all contagious diseases together under the indiscriminate name of “the plague.” It was one measure of the progress of medicine that it now clearly distinguished and diagnosed the specific character of an epidemic, and was prepared to deal with so sudden and virulent an eruption as syphilis. Mere reliance on Hippocrates and Galen could never have sufficed in such a crisis; it was because the medical profession had learned the necessity of ever fresh and detailed study of symptoms, causes, and cures, in an ever widening and intercommunicated experience, that it could meet this unexpected test.

And it was because of such high qualifications, devotion, and practical success, that the better class of physicians was now recognized as belonging to the untitled aristocracy of Italy. Having completely secularized their profession, they made it more respected than the clergy. Several of them were not only the medical but as well the political advisers, and the frequent and favored companions, of princes, prelates, and kings. Many of them were humanists, familiar with classical literature, collecting manuscripts and works of art; often they were the close friends of great artists. Finally, many of them realized the Hippocratic ideal of adding philosophy to medicine; they passed with ease from one subject to another in their studies and their teaching; and they gave the professional philosophical fraternity a stimulus to subject Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas—as they subjected Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna—to a fresh and fearless examination of reality.

IV. PHILOSOPHY

At first glance the Italian Renaissance does not seem to offer a reasonable harvest of philosophy. Its product cannot compare with the heyday of French Scholasticism from Abélard to Aquinas, not to speak of “the school of Athens.” Its most famous name in philosophy (if we extend the time limit of the Renaissance) is Giordano Bruno (1548?-1600), whose work lies beyond the period of our study in this volume. Pomponazzi remains; but who now does reverence to his poor heroic skeptical squeak?

The humanists incubated a philosophical revolution by discovering, and cautiously revealing, the world of Greek philosophy; but, for the most part, and excepting Valla, they were too clever to lay their beliefs on the table. The university professors of philosophy were hobbled by the Scholastic tradition: after spending seven or eight years struggling through that wilderness, they either abandoned it for other fields of study, or drove another generation into it, glorifying the hurdles that had broken their wills and brought their intellects to a safe dead end. And who knows but many of them felt a certain mental and economic security in confining themselves to recondite problems carefully and fruitlessly phrased in unintelligible terminology? In most philosophical faculties Scholasticism was still de rigueur, and already stiffening with the approach of death. The old medieval questions were laboriously reviewed in the old medieval forms of disputation, and in the proud publications of the staff.

Two elements of life entered to revive philosophy: the conflict between Platonists and Aristotelians, and the division of Aristotelians into orthodox and Averroists. At Bologna and Padua these conflicts became veritable duels, literally matters of life and death. The humanists were mostly Platonists; under the influence of Gemistus Pletho, Bessarion, Theodorus Gaza, and other Greeks, they drank deeply of the wine of the Dialogues, and could hardly understand how anyone could bear the arid logic, impotent Organon, and leaden golden mean of the cautious Aristotle. But these Platonists were resolved to remain Christians; and it was, so to speak, as their representative and delegate that Marsilio Ficino devoted half his life to reconciling the two systems of thought. For this purpose he studied widely, going so far afield as to Zoroaster and Confucius. When he reached Plotinus, and himself translated the Enneads, he felt that he had found in mystic Neoplatonism the silken cord that would bind Plato to Christ. He tried to formulate this synthesis in his Theologia platonica, a confused medley of orthodoxy, occultism, and Hellenism, and arrived hesitantly at a pantheistic conclusion: God is the soul of the world. This became the philosophy of Lorenzo and his circle, of the Platonic Academies in Rome, Naples, and elswhere; from Naples it reached Giordano Bruno; from Bruno it passed to Spinoza and thence to Hegel; it is still alive.

But there was something to be said for Aristotle, especially if he could be misinterpreted. Was Aquinas right in understanding him to teach personal immortality, or was Averroes right in reading De anima as affirming the deathlessness of only the collective soul of mankind? The terrible Averroes, that ogre of an Arab, whom Italian art had long since pictured as prostrate under the feet of St. Thomas, was so active a competitor for the domination of the Aristotelians that both Bologna and Padua were hot with his heresy. It was at Padua that the Marsilius who took its name had lost his reverence for the Church;* at Padua that Filippo Algeri da Nola, the precursor of Nola-born Bruno, had imbibed those frightful errors for which he was sorrowfully cast into a barrel of boiling pitch.⁴⁰ Nicoletto Vernias, as professor of philosophy at Padua (1471–99), appears to have taught there the doctrine that only the world-soul, not the individual soul, is immortal;⁴¹ and his pupil Agostino Nifo propounded the same notion in a treatise De intellectu et daemonibus (1492). Usually the skeptics sought to sooth the Inquisition by distinguishing (as Averroes had done) between two kinds of truth—religious and philosophical: a proposition, they urged, might be rejected in philosophy from the standpoint of reason, while still accepted on faith in the word of Scripture or the Church. Nifo professed the principle with reckless simplification: Loquendum est ut plures, sentiendum ut pauci—”We must speak as the many do, we must think as the few.”⁴² Nifo changed his mind or his speech as his hair changed, and reconciled himself to orthodoxy. As professor of philosophy at Bologna he drew lords, ladies, and multitudes to lectures dramatized with grimaces and antics and salted with anecdotes and wit. He became socially the most successful opponent of Pomponazzi.

Pietro Pomponazzi, the microscopic bombshell of Renaissance philosophy, was so diminutive that his familiars called him Peretto—“little Peter.” But he had a large head, a vast brow, a hooked nose, small, black, penetrating eyes: here was a man doomed to take life and thought with painful seriousness. Born at Mantua (1462) of patrician stock, he studied philosophy and medicine at Padua, took both degrees at twenty-five, and was soon himself a professor there. All the skeptical tradition of Padua descended to him and culminated in him; as his admirer Vanini was to put it, “Pythagoras would have judged that the soul of Averroes had transmigrated into the body of Pomponazzi.”⁴³ Wisdom seems always a reincarnation or echo, since it remains the same through a thousand varieties and generations of error.

Pomponazzi continued to teach at Padua from 1495 to 1509; then the winds of war swept through the city, and closed its historic University halls. In 1512 we find him established at the University of Bologna. There he remained to the end of his days, marrying thrice, always lecturing on Aristotle, and modestly likening his relation to his master to that of an insect exploring an elephant.⁴⁴ He thought it safer to offer his ideas not as his own but as implied or explicit in Aristotle interpreted by Alexander of Aphrodisias. His procedure seems at times too humble, apparently subservient to a dead authority; but since the Church, following Aquinas, claimed her doctrine to be that of Aristotle, Pomponazzi may have felt that any demonstration of a heresy as truly Aristotelian would be one way, short of the stake, of teasing the orthodox tail. The Fifth Council of the Lateran, under the presidency of Leo X (1513), condemned all who should assert that the soul is one and indivisible in all men, and that the individual soul is mortal. Three years later Pomponazzi published his major work, De immortalitate animae, in which he sought to show that the condemned view was precisely that of Aristotle. Mind, said Pietro’s Aristotle, is at every step dependent upon matter; the most abstract knowledge is ultimately derived from sensation; only through the body can mind act upon the world; consequently a disembodied soul, surviving the mortal frame, would be a functionless and helpless wraith. As Christians and faithful sons of the Church, Pomponazzi concluded, we are warranted in believing in the immortality of the individual soul; as philosophers we are not. It seems never to have occurred to Pomponazzi that his argument had no validity against Catholicism, which taught the resurrection of the body as well as of the soul. Perhaps he did not take this doctrine seriously, and had no thought that his readers would. No one, so far as we know, urged it against him.

The book ran into a storm. The Fransciscan friars persuaded the doge of Venice to order all procurable copies to be publicly burned, which was done. Protests were made to the papal court, but Bembo and Bibbiena were then high in Leo’s councils, and advised him that the conclusions of the book were perfectly orthodox; the conclusions were. Leo was not fooled; he knew quite well this little trick of the two truths; but he contented himself with ordering Pomponazzi to write a decent word of submission.⁴⁵ Pietro complied in Apologiae libri tres (1518), reasserting that as a Christian he accepted all the teaching of the Church. About the same time Leo commissioned Agostino Nifo to compose an answer to Pomponazzi’s book; as Agostino loved controversy, he executed this assignment with pleasure and skill. It is remarkable, and perhaps illustrates a continuing antipathy between the universities and the clergy, that while Pomponazzi’s head hung, so to speak, in this Inquisitorial balance, three universities competed for his services. Hearing that Pisa was seeking to lure him to her halls, the magistrates of Bologna, formally subject to the pope but deaf to the Franciscan furor, confirmed Pomponazzi’s professorial tenure for eight years further, and raised his annual salary to 1600 ducats ($20,000?).⁴⁶

In two minor books, which he did not publish in his lifetime, Pomponazzi continued his skeptical campaign. In De incantatione he reduced to natural causes many supposedly supernatural phenomena. A physician had written to him about cures allegedly due to incantations or charms; Pietro bade him doubt. “It would be ridiculous and absurd,” he wrote, “to despise what is visible and natural in order to have recourse to an invisible cause the reality of which is not guaranteed to us by any solid probability.”⁴⁷ As a Christian he accepts angels and spirits; as a philosopher he rejects them; all causes under God are natural. Reflecting his medical training, he laughs at the widespread belief in occult sources of cure: if spirits could cure the ills of the flesh they would have to be material, or use material means, to affect a material body; and he ironically pictures the healing spirits as rushing about with their paraphernalia of plasters, ointments, and pills.⁴⁸ However he admits certain curative powers in some plants and stones. He will accept the miracles of the Bible, but suspects that they were natural operations. The universe is governed by uniform and invariable laws. Miracles are unusual manifestations of natural forces whose powers and methods are only partly known to us; and what the people cannot understand they ascribe to spirits or to God.⁴⁹ Without contradicting this view of natural causation, Pomponazzi accepts much of astrology. Not only are the lives of men subject to the action of the heavenly bodies, but all human institutions, he thinks, even including religions, rise and flourish and decay according to celestial influences. This is true also of Christianity; at the present moment, says Pomponazzi, there are signs that Christianity is dying.⁵⁰ He adds that as a Christian he rejects all this as nonsense.

His final book, De fato, seems more orthodox, for it is a defense of free will. He admits its incompatibility with divine foreknowledge and omniscience, but stands on his consciousness of free activity, and on the necessity of assuming some freedom of choice if there is to be any moral responsibility in man. In his treatise on immortality he had faced the question whether a moral code could succeed without supernatural punishments and rewards. He held, with stoic pride, that the sufficient reward of virtue is virtue itself, not any post-mortem paradise;⁵¹ but he confessed that most men can be induced to decency only by supernatural hopes and fears. Hence, he explained, great legislators have taught the belief in a future state as an economical substitute for ubiquitous police; and, like Plato, he justifies the inculcation of fables and myths if these can help to control the natural wickedness of men.⁵²

Therefore they have posited, for the virtuous, eternal reward in another life, but, for the sinful, eternal punishments, which frighten them very greatly. And the greater part of men, if they do good, do it more from fear of eternal punishment than hope of eternal good, since the punishments are more known to us than those eternal goods. And since this last device can benefit all men, of whatever class they are, the legislator, seeing the proneness of men to evil, and intending the common good, has decreed that the soul is immortal, not caring for truth but only for righteousness, so that he may bring men to virtue.^52a

Most men, he thinks, are so simple mentally and so brutish morally that they must be treated as children or invalids. It is not wise to teach them the doctrines of philosophy. “These things,” he says of his own speculations, “are not to be communicated to common people, for they are incapable of receiving these secrets. We must beware even of holding discourse concerning them with ignorant priests.”⁵³ He divides mankind into philosophers and religious persons, and innocently believes that “philosophers alone are the gods of the earth, and differ as much from all other men, of whatever rank and condition, as genuine men differ from those painted on canvas.”⁵⁴

In humbler moments he realized the narrow limits of human reason, and the honorable futility of metaphysics. He pictured himself in his later years as worn and haggard with thought about it and about, and likened the philosopher to Prometheus, who, because he wished to steal fire from heaven—i.e., snatch at divine knowledge—was condemned to be bound to a rock and to have his heart gnawed at by a vulture endlessly.⁵⁵ “The thinker who inquires into the divine mysteries is like Proteus…. The Inquisition persecutes him as a heretic, the multitude mocks him as a fool.”⁵⁶

The controversies in which he engaged wore him down and helped to ruin his health. He suffered from one illness after another, until finally he determined to die. He chose a hard form of suicide: he starved himself to death. Resisting every argument and every threat, and triumphing even over force, he refused either to eat or to speak. After seven days of this regimen he felt that he had won his battle for the right to die, and might now safely speak. “I depart gladly,” he said. Some one asked him, “Where are you going?” “Where all mortals go,” he answered. His friends made a final effort to persuade him to eat, but he preferred to die (1525).⁵⁷ Cardinal Gonzaga, who had been his pupil, had the remains transported to Mantua and buried there, and, with typical Renaissance tolerance, raised a statue to his memory.

Pomponazzi had put into philosophic form a skepticism that had for two centuries been attacking the foundations of Christian belief. The failure of the Crusades; the influx of Moslem ideas through Crusades, trade, and Arab philosophy; the removal of the papacy to Avignon and its ridiculous division in the Schism; the revelation of a pagan Greco-Roman world full of wise men and great art and yet without the Bible or the Church; the spread of education, and its increasing escape from ecclesiastical control; the immorality and worldliness of the clergy, even of popes, suggesting their private disbelief in the publicly professed creed; their use of the idea of purgatory to raise funds for their purposes; the reaction of the rising mercantile and moneyed classes against ecclesiastical domination; the transformation of the Church from a religious organization into a secular political power: all these factors, and many more, combined to make the Italian middle and upper classes, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, “the most skeptical of European peoples.”⁵⁸

It is clear from the poetry of Politian and Pulci, and the philosophy of Ficino, that the circle of Lorenzo had no actual belief in another life; and the sentiment of Ferrara appears in the fun that Ariosto makes of the inferno that to Dante had seemed so frightfully real. Almost half the literature of the Renaissance is anticlerical. Many of the condottieri were open atheists;⁵⁹ the cortigiani or courtiers were far less religious than the cortigiane or courtesans; and a polite skepticism was the mark and requisite of a gentleman.⁶⁰ Petrarch lamented the fact that in the minds of many scholars it was a sign of ignorance to prefer the Christian religion to pagan philosophy.⁶¹ In Venice, 1530, it was found that most of the upper ranks neglected their Easter duty—i.e., did not go to confession and communion even once a year.⁶² Luther claimed to have found a saying current among the educated classes in Italy on going to Mass: “Come, let us conform to the popular error.”⁶³

As to the universities, a curious incident reveals the temper of professors and students. Shortly after Pomponazzi’s death his pupil Simone Porzio, invited to lecture at Pisa, chose as his text Aristotle’s Meteorology. The audience did not like the subject. Several cried out impatiently: Quid de anima?—“What about the soul?” Porzio had to set the Meteorology aside and take up Aristotle’s De anima; at once the audience was all attention.⁶⁴ We do not know whether in that lecture Porzio expressed his belief that the human soul differs in no essential point from the soul of a lion or a plant; we do know that he so taught in his book De mente humana—On the Human Mind;⁶⁵ and he seems to have escaped unharmed. Eugenio Tarralba, indicted by the Spanish Inquisition in 1528, related that as a youth he had studied in Rome under three teachers, all of whom taught that the soul was mortal.⁶⁶ Erasmus was astonished to find that at Rome the fundamentals of the Christian faith were topics of skeptical discussion among the cardinals. One ecclesiastic undertook to explain to him the absurdity of belief in a future life; others smiled at Christ and the Apostles; many, he assures us, claimed to have heard papal functionaries blaspheming the Mass.⁶⁷ The lower classes kept their faith, as we shall see; the thousands who heard Savonarola must have believed; and the example of Vittoria Colonna shows that piety could survive education. But the soul of the great creed had been pierced with the arrows of doubt; and the splendor of the medieval myth had been tarnished by its accumulated gold.

V. GUICCIARDINI

The mind of Guicciardini summarizes the skeptical disillusionment of the times. It was one of the sharpest minds of the age; too cynical for our taste, too pessimistic for our hopes, but penetrating as a roving searchlight in the skies, and candid with the frankness of a writer who has wisely resolved on solely posthumous publication.

Francesco Guicciardini had the initial advantage of aristocratic birth. From his childhood he heard educated conversation in good Italian, and learned to accept life with the realism and grace of a man confident of his footing. His great-uncle was several times gonfalonier of the republic; his grandfather held in turn most of the principal offices in the government; his father knew Latin and Greek, and filled several diplomatic posts; “my godfather,” wrote Francesco, “was Messer Marsilio Ficino, the greatest Platonic philosopher then in the world”⁶⁸—which did not prevent the historian from becoming an Aristotelian. He studied civil law, and at the age of twenty-three was appointed professor of law at Florence. He traveled widely, even to noting “the fantastic and bizarre inventions” of Hieronymus Bosch in Flanders.⁶⁹ At twenty-six he married Maria Salviati “because the Salviati, in addition to their wealth, surpassed other families in influence and power, and I had a great liking for these things.”⁷⁰

Nevertheless he had a passion for excellence, and the self-discipline to create works of literary art. His Storia Fiorentina, written at twenty-seven, is one of the most surprising products of an age when genius, swollen with its recovered heritage but loosened from tradition, flowed full and free in a dozen streams. The book limited itself to a short segment of Florentine history, from 1378 to 1509; but it treated that period with an accuracy of detail, a critical examination of sources, a penetrating analysis of causes, a maturity and impartiality of judgment, a command of vivid narrative in fine Italian, that were not matched by the Storie Fiorentine that Machiavelli wrote eleven years later in the sixth decade of his life.

In 1512, still a youth of thirty, Guicciardini was sent as ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic. In quick succession Leo X and Clement VII made him governor of Reggio Emilia, Modena, and Parma, then governor general of all the Romagna, then lieutenant general of all papal troops. In 1534 he returned to Florence, and supported Alessandro de’ Medici throughout that scoundrel’s quinquennium of tyranny. In 1537 he was the chief agent in promoting the accession of Cosimo the Younger to be Duke of Florence. When his hopes of dominating Cosimo faded, Guicciardini retired to a rural villa to write in one year the ten volumes of his masterpiece, the Storia d’ltalia.

It is inferior to his earlier work in freshness and vigor of style; Guicciardini had meanwhile studied the humanists, and slipped into formality and rhetoric; even so it is a stately style, presaging Gibbon’s monumental prose. The subtitle, History of the Wars, limits the subject to matters military and political; at the same time the field is widened to all Italy, and to all Europe as related to Italy; this is the first history to view the European political system as a connected whole. Guicciardini writes of what for the most part he knew at first hand, and, toward the end, of events in which he had played a part. He collected documents sedulously, and is far more accurate and reliable than Machiavelli. If, like his more famous contemporary, he returns to the ancient custom of inventing speeches for the persons of his tale, he frankly states that they are true only in substance; some he specifies as authentic; and all are used effectively to state both sides of a debate, or to reveal the policies and diplomacy of the European states. Taken together, this massive history, and the brilliant Storia Fiorentina, constitute Guicciardini as the greatest historian of the sixteenth century. As Napoleon was anxious to see Goethe, so Charles V, at Bologna, kept lords and generals waiting in an anteroom while he conversed at length with Guicciardini. “I can create a hundred nobles in an hour,” he said, “but I cannot produce such an historian in twenty years.”⁷¹

As a man of the world he did not take too seriously the efforts of philosophers to diagnose the universe. He must have smiled at the excitement aroused by Pomponazzi, if he noticed it. Since the supernatural is beyond our ken, he considered it useless to war over rival philosophies. Doubtless all religions are based upon assumptions and myths, but these are forgivable if they help to maintain social order and moral discipline. For man, in Guicciardini’s view, is by nature self-seeking, immoral, lawless; he has to be checked at every turn by custom, morals, law, or force; and religion is usually the least disagreeable means to these ends. But when a religion becomes so corrupt that it has a demoralizing rather than a moralizing influence, a society is in a bad way, for the religious supports of its moral code have been sapped. Guicciardini writes, in his secret record:

To no man is it more displeasing than to me to see the ambition, covetousness, and excesses of priests, not only because all wickedness is hateful in itself, but because… such wickedness should find no place in men whose state of life implies a special relationship to God…. My relations with several popes have made me desire their greatness at the expense of my own interest. Had it not been for this consideration, I would have loved Martin Luther as myself; not that I might set myself free from the laws imposed upon us by Christianity… but that I might see this swarm of scoundrels (questa caterva di scelerati) confined within due limits, so that they might be forced to choose between a life without crime or a life without power.⁷²

Nevertheless his own morality was hardly superior to that of the priests. His personal code was to adjust himself to whatever powers were at the moment supreme; his general principles he kept for his books. There, too, he could be as cynical as Machiavelli:

Sincerity pleases and wins praise, dissimulation is censured and hated; the former, however, is more useful to others than to oneself. Therefore I should praise him whose usual mode of life was open and sincere, and who only used dissimulation in certain things of great importance; it then succeeds all the better, the more one has contrived to establish a reputation for sincerity.⁷³

He saw through the shibboleths of the various political parties in Florence; each group, though it shouted for liberty, wanted power.

It seems clear to me that the desire of dominating one’s fellows and asserting superiority is natural to man, so that there are few so in love with liberty that they would not seize a favorable opportunity of ruling and lording it. Look closely at the behavior of the indwellers of the selfsame city; mark and examine their dissensions, and you shall find that the object is preponderance rather than freedom. Those, then, who are the foremost citizens do not strive after liberty, though that be in their mouths; but the increase of their own sway and pre-eminence is really in their hearts. Liberty is a cant term with them, and disguises their lust of superiority in power and honor.⁷⁴

He despised the Soderini merchant republic, accustomed to defend its liberties with gold instead of arms. And he had no faith in the people or democracy:

To speak of the people is to speak of madmen, for the people is a monster full of confusion and error, and its vain beliefs are as far from truth as is Spain from India…. Experience shows that things very rarely come to pass according to the expectations of the multitude.… The reason is that the effects… commonly depend on the will of a few, whose intentions and purposes are nearly always different from those of the many.⁷⁵

Guicciardini was one of thousands in Renaissance Italy who had no faith whatever; who had lost the Christian idyl, had learned the emptiness of politics, expected no utopia, dreamed no dreams; and who sat back helpless while a world of war and barbarism swept over Italy; somber old men, emancipated in mind and broken in hope, who had discovered, too late, that when the myth dies only force is free.

VI. MACHIAVELLI

1. The Diplomat

One man remains, hard to classify: diplomat, historian, dramatist, philosopher; the most cynical thinker of his time, and yet a patriot fired with a noble ideal; a man who failed in everything that he undertook, but left upon history a deeper mark than almost any other figure of the age.

Niccolò Michiavelli was the son of a Florentine lawyer—a man of moderate means, who held a minor post in the government, and owned a small rural villa at San Casciano ten miles out of the city. The boy received the ordinary literary education; learned to read Latin readily, but no Greek. He took a fancy to Roman history, became enamored of Livy, and found for almost every political institution and event of his day an illuminating analogue in the history of Rome. He began, but seems never to have completed, the study of law. He cared little for the art of the Renaissance, and expressed no interest in the discovery of America; perhaps he felt that merely the theater of politics was now enlarged, while the plot and characters would remain unchanged. His one absorbing interest was politics, the technique of influence, the chess of power. In 1498, aged twenty-nine, he was appointed secretary to the Dieci della Guerra—a Council of Ten for War—and held that post for fourteen years.

It was at first a modest function—compiling minutes and records, summarizing reports, writing letters; but he was in government, he could watch the politics of Europe from an inside observation point, he could try to forecast developments by applying his knowledge of history. His eager, nervous, ambitious spirit felt that only time was needed before he would be at the top, playing the heady game of state against the duke of Milan, the Senate of Venice, the king of France, the king of Naples, the pope, the emperor. Soon he was sent on a mission to Caterina Sforza, Countess of Imola and Forlì (1498). She proved too subtle for him, and he came back empty-handed, chastened. Two years later he was tried again, accompanied Francesco della Casa as associate envoy to Louis XII of France; della Casa fell ill, and Machiavelli had to head the mission; he learned French, followed the court from château to château, and transmitted to the Signory such alert intelligence, such keen analyses, that on his return to Florence his friends acclaimed him as now a graduate diplomat.

The turning point in his intellectual development was his mission, as aide to Bishop Soderini, to Caesar Borgia at Urbino (1502). Called back to Florence for a personal report, he celebrated his rise in the world by taking a wife. In October he was again despatched to Caesar. He joined him at Imola, and arrived at Senigallia just in time to note Borgia’s happiness at having successfully ensnared, and strangled or caged, the men who had conspired against him. These were events that stirred all Italy; to Machiavelli, meeting the brilliant ogre in the flesh, they were lessons in philosophy. The man of ideas found himself face to face with the man of action, and did him homage; envy burned in the young diplomat’s soul as he realized the distance he had still to travel from analytical and theoretical thought to a magnificent crushing deed. Here was a man, six years younger than himself, who in two years had overthrown a dozen tyrants, given order to a dozen cities, and made himself the very meteor of his time; how weak words seemed before this youth who used them with such scornful scarcity! From that moment Caesar Borgia became the hero of Machiavelli’s philosophy, as Bismarck would be of Nietzsche’s; here, in this embodied will to power, was a morality beyond good and evil, a model for supermen.

Back in Florence (1503), Machiavelli perceived that some members of the government suspected him of having been swept off his mental feet by the dashing Borgia. But his industrious scheming to advance the interests of his city regained for him the esteem of the Gonfalonier Soderini and the Council of Ten for War. In 1507 he saw the triumph of one of his basic ideas. No self-respecting state, he had long argued, could entrust its defense to mercenary troops; they could not be relied upon in a crisis; and they or their leader could almost always be bought by an enemy armed with sufficient gold. A national militia should be formed, said Machiavelli, composed of citizens, preferably of vigorous peasants used to hardship and the open air; it should be kept always in good equipment and training; and it should serve as the last firm line of the republic’s defense. After long hesitation the government accepted the plan, and empowered Machiavelli to realize it in action. In 1508 he led his new milizia to the siege of Pisa, where it acquitted itself well; Pisa surrendered, and Machiavelli returned to Florence at the height of his arc.

On a second mission to France (1510) he passed through Switzerland; his enthusiasm was aroused by the armed independence of the Swiss Confederation, and he made it his ideal for Italy. Returning from France, he saw the problem of his country: how could its separate principalities unite to protect Italy if a united nation like France should decide to absorb the whole peninsula?

The supreme test of his militia came too soon. In 1512 Julius II, furious against Florence for having refused to join in expelling the French from Italy, ordered the armies of the Holy League to suppress the republic and restore the Medici; and Machiavelli’s militia, assigned to defend the Florentine line at Prato, broke and fled before the trained mercenaries of the League. Florence was taken, the Medici triumphed; Machiavelli lost both his reputation and his governmental post. He made every effort to appease the victors, and might have succeeded; but two ardent youths, conspiring to re-establish the republic, were detected; among their papers was found a list of persons on whose support they had counted; it included Machiavelli. He was arrested and tortured with four turns of the rack; but no evidence of his complicity having been found, he was released. Fearing rearrest, he removed with his wife and four children to the ancestral villa at San Casciano. There he spent all but the last of his remaining fifteen years, fretting in hopeful poverty. But for this disaster we should never have heard of him, for it was in those hungry years that he wrote books that moved the world.

2. The Author and the Man

It was a dreary isolation for one who had lived at the very core of Florentine politics. Occasionally he would ride into Florence to talk with old friends and explore any chance of re-employment. Several times he wrote to the Medici, but he received no reply. In a celebrated letter to his friend Vettori, then Florentine ambassador in Rome, he described his life, and told how he came to write The Prince:

Since my last misfortunes I have led a quiet country life. I rise with the sun, and go into one of the woods for a few hours to inspect yesterday’s work; I pass some time with the woodcutters, who have always some troubles to tell me, either of their own or their neighbors’. On leaving the wood I go to a spring, and thence up to my bird-snaring enclosure, with a book under my arm—Dante, Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, such as Tibullus or Ovid. I read their amorous transports and the history of their loves, recalling my own to my mind, and time passes pleasantly in these meditations. Then I betake myself to the inn by the roadside, chat with passers-by, ask news of the places whence they come, hear various things, and note the varied tastes and diverse fancies of mankind. This carries me to the dinner hour, when, in the company of my brood, I swallow whatever fare this poor little place of mine, and my slender patrimony, can afford me. In the afternoon I go back to the inn. There I generally find the host, a butcher, a miller, and a couple of brick-makers. I mix with these boors the whole day, playing at cricca and tric trac, which games give rise to a thousand quarrels and much exchange of bad language; and we generally wrangle over farthings, and our shouts can be heard in San Casciano town. Steeped in this degradation my wits grow moldy, and I vent my rage at the indignity of fate….

At nightfall I return home and seek my writing room; and divesting myself on its threshold of my rustic garments, stained with mud and mire, I assume courtly attire; and thus suitably clothed, I enter within the ancient courts of ancient men, by whom, being cordially welcomed, I am fed with the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born, and am not ashamed to hold discourse with them and inquire the motives of their actions; and these men in their humanity reply to me; and for the space of four hours I feel no weariness, remember no trouble, no longer fear poverty, no longer dread death; my whole being is absorbed in them. And since Dante says that there could be no science without retaining that which is heard, I have recorded that which I have acquired from the conversation of these worthies, and have composed a pamphlet De principatibus, in which I plunge as deeply as I can into cogitations upon this subject, discussing the nature of princedom, of how many species it consists, how these are to be acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost; and if you ever cared for any of my scribbles, this one ought not to displease you. And it should be especially welcome to a new prince; for which reason I dedicate it to his Magnificence, Giuliano…. (December 10, 1513)⁷⁶

Probably Machiavelli has here simplified the story. Apparently he began by writing his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, completing his commentary on only the first three books. He dedicated these Discorsi to Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, saying: “I send you the worthiest gift I have to offer, inasmuch as it comprises all that I have learned from long experience and continuous study.” He remarks that classic literature and law and medicine have been revived to enlighten modern writing and practice; he proposes likewise to resuscitate classic principles of government, and apply them to contemporary politics. He does not derive his political philosophy from history, but selects from history incidents supporting the conclusions to which he has been led by his own experience and thought. He takes his examples almost entirely from Livy, sometimes in his haste basing arguments on legends, and occasionally helping himself to morsels from Polybius.

As he proceeded with the Discourses, he perceived that they would be too long, and too long delayed in their completion, to serve as a practical gift to one of the ruling Medici. Therefore he interrupted the work to write a summary that would embody his conclusions; this would have a better chance of being read, and of bringing a fair return in the friendship of the powerful family that now (1513) ruled half of Italy. So he composed Il principe (as he came to entitle the book) in a few months of that year. He planned to dedicate it to Giuliano de’ Medici, then ruling Florence; but Giuliano died (1516) before Machiavelli could make up his mind to send the book to him; so he rededicated it, and sent it, to Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, who made no acknowledgment of it. It circulated in manuscript, and was surreptitiously copied; it was not printed till 1532, five years after the author’s death. Thereafter it was among the most frequently reprinted books in any language.

To his own description of himself we can add only the anonymous portrait of him in the Uffizi Gallery. It shows a slender figure with pale face, hollow cheeks, sharp dark eyes, thin lips tightly closed; obviously a man of thought rather than of action, and of keen intelligence rather than of amiable will. He could not be a good diplomat because he was too visibly subtle, nor a good statesman because he was too intense, grasping ideas fanatically as in the portrait he tightly clasps the gloves that affirm his semigenteel rank. This man who so often wrote like a cynic, whose lips so often curled into sarcasm, who plumed himself on such perfect mendacity that he could make people think he lied when he spoke the truth,⁷⁷ was in his heart of hearts a flaming patriot, who made the salus populi the suprema lex, and subordinated all morality to the unification and redemption of Italy.

There were many unlikable qualities in him. When Borgia was up he idealized him; when Borgia was down he followed the crowd and denounced the broken Caesar as a criminal and “a rebel against Christ.”⁷⁸ When the Medici were out he condemned them eloquently; when they were in he licked their boots for a post. He not only visited brothels before and after marriage, but sent his friends detailed descriptions of his adventures there.⁷⁹ Several of his letters are so coarse that not even his most voluminous and admiring biographer has dared to publish them. Nearing fifty, Machiavelli writes: “Cupid’s nets still enthrall me. Bad roads cannot exhaust my patience, nor dark nights daunt my courage…. My whole mind is bent on love, for which I give Venus thanks.”⁸⁰ These things are forgivable, for man was not made for monogamy; but less pardonable, though quite in harmony with the custom of the times, is the complete absence, from all of Machiavelli’s considerable surviving correspondence, of any word of tenderness—of any word—about his wife.

Meanwhile he turned his able pen to divers forms of composition, and rivaled the masters in each. In a treatise on the art of war (L’arte della guerra, 1520) he announced to states and generals, from his ivory tower, the laws of military power and success. A nation that has lost the martial virtues is doomed. An army requires not gold but men; “gold alone will not procure good soldiers, but good soldiers will always procure gold”;⁸¹ gold will flow to the strong nation, but strength departs from the rich nation, for wealth makes for ease and decay. Consequently an army must be kept busy; a little war now and then will keep the martial muscles and apparatus in trim. Cavalry is beautiful, except when faced with sturdy pikes; the infantry must ever be regarded as the very nerve and foundation of an army.⁸² Mercenary armies are the shame and sloth and ruin of Italy; each state should have a citizen militia, constituted of men who would be fighting for their own country, their own lands.

Trying his hand at fiction, Machiavelli wrote one of Italy’s most popular novelle, Belfagor arcidiavolo, bursting with satiric wit on the institution of marriage. Turning to drama, he composed the outstanding comedy of the Italian Renaissance stage, Mandragola. The prologue struck a new note, making a novel curtsey to critics:

Should anyone seek to cow the author by evil-speaking, I warn you that he, too, knows how to speak evil, and indeed excels in the art; and that he has no respect for anyone in Italy, though he bows and scrapes to those better dressed than himself.⁸³

The play is an astounding revelation of Renaissance morals. The scene is laid in Florence. Callimaco, hearing an acquaintance praise the beauty of Lucrezia, wife of Nicias, decides—though he has never seen her—that he must seduce her if only to be able to sleep in peace. He is disturbed to learn that Lucrezia is as famous for her modesty as for her beauty; but he takes hope on being told that Nicias frets over her failure to conceive. He bribes a friend to introduce him to Nicias as a physician. He professes to have a potion that will make any woman fertile; but, alas, the first man who lies with her after she has taken it will soon afterward die. He offers to undertake this mortal adventure, and Nicias, with the traditional kindness of characters to their authors, consents to be replaced. But Lucrezia is obstinately virtuous; she hesitates to commit both adultery and murder in one night. All is not lost; her mother, lusting for progeny, bribes a friar to advise her in the confessional to go through with the plan. Lucrezia yields, drinks, lies with Callimaco, and becomes pregnant. The story ends with everybody happy: the friar purifies Lucrezia, Nicias rejoices in his vicarious parentage, and Callimaco can sleep. The play is excellent in structure, brilliant in dialogue, powerful in satire. What startles us is not the seductive theme, long hackneyed in classical comedy, nor even the merely physical interpretation of love, but the turn of the plot upon the readiness of a friar to counsel adultery for twenty-five ducats, and the fact that in 1520 the play was produced with great success before Leo X in Rome. The Pope was so pleased with it that he asked Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici to give Machiavelli some employment as a writer. Giulio suggested a history of Florence, and offered 300 ducats ($3,750?).

The resultant Stone Florentine (1520–5) was almost as decisive a revolution in historiography as The Prince in political philosophy. It is true that the book had vital defects: it was hastily inaccurate, it plagiarized substantial passages from previous historians, it was more interested in the strife of factions than in the development of institutions, and it totally ignored cultural history—as did nearly every historian before Voltaire. But it was the first major history written in Italian, and its Italian was clear, vigorous, and direct; it rejected the fables with which Florence had embellished her origins; it abandoned the usual chronicle year-by-year plan, and gave, instead, a smooth-flowing and logical narrative; it dealt not merely with events but with causes and effects; and it forced upon the chaos of Florentine politics a clarifying analysis of conflicting families, classes, and interests. It carried the tale along on two unifying themes: that the popes had kept Italy divided to preserve the temporal independence of the papacy; and that the great advances of Italy had come under princes like Theodoric, Cosimo, and Lorenzo. That a book with such tendencies should have been written by a man seeking papal ducats, and that Pope Clement VII accepted its dedication without complaint, illustrates the courage of the author and the mental and financial liberality of the Pope.

The History of Florence gave Machiavelli occupation for five years, but it did not satisfy his longing to swim again in the muddy stream of politics. When Francis I lost everything but honor and his skin at Pavia (1525), and Clement VII found himself helpless against Charles V, Machiavelli sent letters to the Pope and to Guicciardini, explaining what could yet be done against the imminent Spanish-German conquest of Italy; and perhaps his suggestion that the Pope should arm, empower, and finance Giovanni delle Bande Nere might have delayed destiny awhile. When Giovanni died, and the German horde advanced upon Florence as a rich and plunderable ally of the French, Machiavelli rushed to the city, and, at Clement’s request, prepared a report on how the walls might be restored to make it defensible. On May 18, 1526, he was chosen by the Medicean government to head a board of five “Curators of the Walls.” The Germans, however, by-passed Florence and headed for Rome. When that city was sacked, and Clement was a prisoner of the mob, the republican party in Florence once more expelled the Medici and restored the republic (May 16, 1527). Machiavelli rejoiced, and hopefully applied for his old post as secretary of the Ten for War. He was turned down (June 10, 1527); his dealings with the Medici had lost him the support of the republicans.

He did not long survive that blow. The vital spark of life and hope flickered out in him, and left the flesh spiritless. He fell ill, suffering violent spasms of the stomach. Wife, children, and friends gathered round his bedside. He confessed to a priest and died, twelve days after his rejection. He left his family in the utmost poverty, and the Italy that he had labored to unite was in ruins. He was buried in the church of Santa Croce, where a handsome monument, marked with the words, Tanto nomini nullum par elogium—”No eulogy would do justice to so great a name”—bears witness that an Italy at last united has forgiven his sins and remembered his dream.

3. The Philosopher

Let us examine the “Machiavellian” philosophy as impartially as we can. Nowhere else shall we find so much independent and fearless thinking on ethics and politics. Machiavelli was justified in claiming that he had opened new routes on relatively untraveled seas.

It is almost exclusively a political philosophy. There is no metaphysics here, no theology, no theism or atheism, no discussion of determinism or free will; and ethics itself is soon shoved aside as subordinate to, almost a tool of, politics. Politics he understands as the high art of creating, capturing, protecting, and strengthening a state. He is interested in states rather than in humanity. He sees individuals merely as members of a state; except as they help to determine its destiny, he pays no attention to the parade of egos across the landscape of time. He wishes to know why states rise and fall, and how they can be made to defer as long as possible their inevitable decay.

A philosophy of history, a science of government, are possible, he thinks, because human nature never changes.

Wise men say, not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions; and thus they must necessarily have the same results.⁸⁴… I believe that the world has always been the same, and has always contained as much good and evil, although variously distributed among the nations according to the times.⁸⁵

Among the most instructive regularities of history are the phenomena of growth and decay in civilizations and states. Here Machiavelli meets a very complex problem with a very simple formula. “Valor produces peace; peace, repose; repose, disorder; disorder, ruin. From disorder order springs; from order, valor (virtù ); and from this, glory and good fortune. Hence wise men have observed that the age of literary excellence is subsequent to that of distinction in arms; and that… great warriors are produced before philosophers.”⁸⁶ In addition to the general factors in growth or decay may be the action and influence of leading individuals; so the excessive ambition of a ruler, blinding him to the inadequacy of his resources for his aims, may ruin his state by leading it into war with a stronger power. Fortune or chance also enters into the rise and fall of states. “Fortune is the arbiter of one half our actions, but she still leaves us to direct the other half.”⁸⁷ The more virtù a man has, the less will he be subject to fortune or yield to it.

The history of a state follows general laws, determined by the natural wickedness of men. All men are by nature acquisitive, deceitful, pugnacious, cruel, and corrupt.

Whoever wishes to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature whenever they find occasion for it. If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time, it must be attributed to some unknown reason; and we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself; but time… does not fail to bring it to light…. The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always acquire when they can; and for this they will be praised, not blamed.⁸⁸

This being so, men can be made good—i.e., capable of living with order in a society—only by the application, in sequence, of force, deceit, and habit. This is the origin of a state: the organization of force through army and police, the establishment of rules and laws, and the gradual formation of habits, for the maintenance of leadership and order in a human group. The more developed a state, the less force will have to be used or visible in it; indoctrination and habit will suffice; for in the hands of a capable lawgiver or ruler the people are as soft clay in the hands of a sculptor.

The best means of habituating naturally wicked men to law and order is religion. Machiavelli, whom his admirer Paolo Giovio calls irrisor et atheos, a satirical atheist,⁸⁹ writes enthusiastically about religious institutions:

Although the founder of Rome was Romulus… yet the gods did not judge the laws of this prince sufficient… and therefore they inspired the Roman Senate to elect Numa Pompilius as his successor…. Numa, finding a very savage people, and wishing to reduce them to civil obedience by the arts of peace, had recourse to religion as the most necessary and assured support of any civil society; and he established it upon such foundations that for many centuries there was nowhere more fear of the gods than in that republic; which greatly facilitated all the enterprises which the Senate or its great men attempted…. Numa feigned that he held converse with a nymph, who dictated to him all that he wished to persuade the people to…. In truth there never was any remarkable lawgiver… who did not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would not have been accepted by the people; for there are many good laws the importance of which is known to the sagacious lawgiver, but the reasons for which are not sufficiently evident to enable him to persuade others to submit to them; and therefore do wise men, to remove this difficulty, resort to divine authority.⁹⁰… The observance of religious institutions is the cause of the greatness of republics; disregard of these institutions produces the ruin of states. For where the fear of God is wanting, there the country will be destroyed, unless it be sustained by fear of the prince, which may for a time supply the want of religion. But the lives of princes are short….

Princes and republics who wish to maintain themselves… must above all things preserve the purity of religious observances, and treat them with proper reverence.⁹²… Of all men who have been eulogized, those deserve it most who have been the authors and founders of religions. Next come such as have established republics or kingdoms. After these the most celebrated are those who have commanded armies and have extended the possessions of their country. To these may be added literary men…. Conversely, those men are doomed to infamy and universal execration who have destroyed religions, who have overturned republics and kingdoms, who are enemies of virtue or of letters.⁹³

Having accepted religion in general, Machiavelli turns upon Christianity and excoriates it as having failed to make good citizens. It diverted too much attention to heaven, and enfeebled men by preaching the feminine virtues:

The Christian religion makes us hold of small account the love of this world, and renders us more gentle. The ancients, on the contrary, found their highest delight in this world… Their religion beatified none but men crowned with worldly glory, such as leaders of armies and founders of republics; whereas our religion has rather glorified meek and contemplative men than men of action. It has placed the supreme good in humility and poorness of spirit, and in contempt for worldly things; whereas the other placed it in greatness of mind, in bodily strength, and in all that gives men daring.… Thus the world has fallen a prey to the wicked, who have found men readier, for the sake of going to paradise, to submit to blows rather than to resent them.⁹⁴…

Had the religion of Christianity been preserved according to the ordinances of its Founder, the states and commonwealths of Christendom would have been far more united and happy than they are. Nor can there be a greater proof of its decadence than the fact that the nearer people are to the Roman Church, the head of this religion, the less religious are they. And whoever examines the principles on which that religion is founded, and sees how widely different from those principles its present practice and application are, will judge that her ruin or chastisement is near at hand.⁹⁵… Possibly the Christian religion would have been entirely extinguished by its corruption, had not St. Francis and St. Dominic… restored it to its original principles.… To ensure a long existence to religious sects or republics, it is necessary frequently to bring them back to their original principles.⁹⁶

We do not know whether these words were written before news had reached Italy of the Protestant Reformation.

The rebellion of Machiavelli against Christianity is quite different from the rebellion of Voltaire, Diderot, Paine, Darwin, Spencer, Renan. These men rejected the theology of Christianity, but retained and admired the Christian moral code. This attitude continued till Nietzsche, and softened the “conflict between religion and science.” Machiavelli is not bothered by the incredibility of the dogmas; he takes that for granted, but accepts the theology with a good stomach on the ground that some system of supernatural belief is an indispensable support of social order. What he rejects most decisively in Christianity is its ethic, its conception of goodness as gentleness, humility, nonresistance; its love of peace and its denunciation of war; its assumption that states, as well as citizens, are bound by the one moral code. For his part he prefers the Roman ethic, based upon the principle that the safety of the people or state is the supreme law. “Where it is an absolute question of the welfare of our country, we must admit of no considerations of justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of praise or ignominy; but putting all else aside we must adopt whatever course will save the nation’s existence and liberty.”⁹⁷ Morality in general is a code of conduct given to the members of a society or state to maintain collective order, unity, and strength; the government of that state would fail in its duty if, in defending the state, it should allow itself to be restricted by the moral code that it must inculcate in its citizens. Hence a diplomat is not bound by the moral code of his people. “When the act accuses him the result should excuse him”;⁹⁸ the end justifies the means. “No good man will ever reproach another who endeavors to defend his country, whatever be his mode of doing so.”⁹⁹ Frauds, cruelties, and crimes committed in order to preserve one’s country are “honorable frauds,” “glorious crimes.”¹⁰⁰ So Romulus did right in killing his brother; the young government had to have unity, or it would be torn to pieces.¹⁰¹ There is no “natural law,” no “right” universally agreed upon; politics, in the sense of statesmanship, must be held completely independent of morality.

If we apply these considerations to the ethics of war, Machiavelli is sure that they make Christian pacifism ridiculous and treasonable. War violates practically all the commandments of Moses: it swears, lies, steals, kills, commits adultery by the thousands; nevertheless, if it preserves the society, or strengthens it, it is good. When a state ceases to expand it begins to decay; when it loses the will to war it is finished. Peace too long maintained is enervating and disruptive; an occasional war is a national tonic, restoring discipline, vigor, and unity. The Romans of the Republic kept themselves ever ready for war; when they saw that they would have trouble with another state, they did nothing to avoid the war, but sent an army to attack Philip V in Macedon and Antiochus III in Greece rather than wait for them to bring the evils of war to Italy.¹⁰² Virtue, to a Roman, was not humility or gentleness or peace, but virility, manliness, courage with energy and intelligence. This is what Machiavelli means by virtù.

From this point of view of a statesmanship quite freed of moral restraints, Machiavelli moves to meet what seems to him the basic problem of his time: to achieve for Italy the unity and strength indispensable to her collective liberty. He views with indignation the division, disorder, corruption, and weakness of his country; and here we find what in Petrarch’s day was so rare—a man who loved his city not the less because he loved his country more. Who was responsible for keeping Italy so divided, and therefore so helpless against the foreigner?

A nation can never be united and happy except when it obeys only one government, whether a republic or a monarchy, as is the case in France and Spain; and the one cause why Italy is not in the same condition is the Church. For having acquired, and holding, a temporal dominion, yet she has never had sufficient power or courage to enable her to seize the rest of the country and make herself sole sovereign of all Italy.*¹⁰³

We have a new idea here: Machiavelli condemns the Church not for protecting her temporal power, but for not having used all her resources to bring Italy under her political rule. So Machiavelli admired Caesar Borgia at Imola and Senigallia, because he thought he saw in that ruthless youth the conception and promise of a united Italy; and he was prepared to justify any means that the Borgias might use to accomplish this heroic consummation. When he turned against Caesar at Rome in 1503 it may have been through rage that his idol had allowed a cup of poison (as Machiavelli thought) to destroy the dream.

From two centuries of disunity Italy had fallen into such physical weakness and social decay that now (Machiavelli argued) only violent means could save her. Governments and people alike were corrupt. Sexual vice had come to replace military ardor and skill. As in the dying days of ancient Rome, the citizens had delegated to others—there to barbarians, here to mercenaries—the defense of their cities and their lands; but what did these mercenary bands, or their condottieri, care for the unity of Italy? They lived and thrived by its division. They had by mutual agreement made war a game almost as safe as politics; their soldiers had inconvenient objections to being killed; and when they met foreign armies they took to their heels and “brought Italy to slavery and contempt.”¹⁰⁵

Who, then, would make Italy one? How could it be done? Not by democratic suasion; men and cities were too individualistic, too partisan, and too corrupt, to accept union peaceably; it would have to be imposed upon them by all the methods of statecraft and war. Only a ruthless dictator could do it; one who would not let conscience make a coward of him, but would strike with an iron hand, letting his great aim justify all means.

We are not sure that The Prince was written in this mood. In the very year 1513 in which it was apparently begun, Machiavelli wrote to a friend that “the idea of Italian union is laughable. Even if the heads of the states could agree, we have no soldiers but the Spaniards that are worth a farthing. Moreover, the people would never agree with the leaders.”¹⁰⁶ But in that same 1513 Leo X, young and rich and clever, had reached the papacy; Florence and Rome, so long enemies, were united under the Medici. When Machiavelli transferred the dedication of the book to Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, that state too had fallen to the Medici. The new Duke was only twenty-four in 1516; he had shown ambition and courage; Machiavelli might forgivably look to this reckless spirit as one who, under the guidance and diplomacy of Leo (and the instruction of Machiavelli) could accomplish what Caesar Borgia, under Alexander VI, had begun—could lead the Italian states, at least north of Naples and omitting proud Venice, into a federation strong enough to discourage foreign invasion. There is evidence that this was also Leo’s hope. The dedication of The Prince to the Medici, though probably aiming first of all to win employment for the author, could sincerely think of that family as the possible creators of Italian unity.

The form of Il principe was traditional: it followed the outline and method of a hundred medieval treatises De regimine principum. But in content what a revolution! No idealistic charge here to a prince to be a saint, no appeal to him to apply the Sermon on the Mount to the problems of a throne. On the contrary:

It being my intention to write something that shall be useful to him who comprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the imagination of it. Many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, for how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with destruction amidst so much that is evil. Hence it is necessary for a prince who wishes to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.¹⁰⁷

The prince, therefore, must distinguish resolutely between morality and statesmanship, between his private conscience and the public good, and must be ready to do for the state what would be called wickedness in the relations of individuals. He must scorn half measures; enemies who cannot be won over must be crushed; contenders for his throne must be killed. He must have a strong army, for a statesman can speak no louder than his guns. He must keep his army in constant health, discipline, and equipment; and he must train himself for war by undertaking frequently the hardships and dangers of the hunt. At the same time he must study the arts of diplomacy, for sometimes cunning and deceit achieve more than force, and less expensively. Treaties are not to be honored when they have become a detriment to the nation; “a wise lord cannot, nor ought he, keep faith when such observance can be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it no longer exist.”¹⁰⁸

Some degree of public support is indispensable. But if a ruler must choose between being feared without love or being loved without fear, he must sacrifice the love.¹⁰⁹ On the other hand (say the Discorsi)“a multitude is more easily governed by humanity and gentleness than by haughtiness and cruelty….¹¹⁰ Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius did not require the pretorian guard nor the legions to defend them, because they were protected by their own good conduct, the good will of the people, and the love of the Senate.”¹¹¹ To secure popular support the prince should patronize art and learning, provide public spectacles and games, and honor the guilds, always, however, maintaining the majesty of his rank.¹¹² He should not give the people liberty, but should comfort them as far as possible with the appearances of liberty. Subject cities, like Pisa and Arezzo in the case of Florence, must be dealt with vigorously, even cruelly, at the outset; then, when obedience has been established, their submission may be made habitual by gentler means. Indiscriminate and prolonged cruelty is suicidal.¹¹³

The ruler should support religion, and should himself appear to be religious, whatever his private beliefs.¹¹⁴ Indeed, it is more important and profitable to the prince to seem to be virtuous than to be so.

Though a prince need not possess all the virtues, to seem to have them is useful; as, for example, to seem merciful, loyal, humane, religious, and sincere; it is also useful to be so, but with a mind so flexible that if the need arise he can be the contrary…. He should be careful to let nothing fall from his lips that is not instinct with the five qualities mentioned, and must appear to those who see and hear him all compassion, all faith, all humanity, all religion, all integrity…. One must color his conduct, and be a great dissembler; and men are so simple, so absorbed in present necessities, that they are easily deceived…. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few know what you are; and those few dare not oppose the opinion of the many.¹¹⁵

To these precepts Machiavelli adds examples. He notes the success of Alexander VI, and thinks it entirely due to marvelous lying. He admires Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain for always putting a religious front on his military enterprises. He praises the means—warlike courage and strategic skill mingled with diplomatic craft—by which Francesco Sforza rose to the throne of Milan. But above all he holds up as his supreme and almost perfect exemplar Caesar Borgia:

When all the actions of the Duke are recalled, I do not know how to blame him; but rather it appears to me that I ought to offer him for imitation to all those who are… raised to government…. He was considered cruel; nevertheless his cruelty reconciled all the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty…. Having a lofty spirit and far-reaching aims, he could not have regulated his conduct otherwise; and only the shortening of the life of Alexander, and his own sickness, frustrated his designs. Therefore he who considers it necessary to secure himself in his new principality, to gain friends, to overcome enemies by force or fraud, to make himself at once feared and loved by the people, to be followed and revered by the soldiers, to exterminate those who have power or reason to hurt him, to change the old order of things for new, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to destroy a disloyal soldiery and create new, to maintain friendship with kings and princes in such a way that they must help him with zeal and offend him with caution, cannot find a more lively example than the actions of this man.¹¹⁶

Machiavelli admired Borgia because he felt that his methods and character, had it not been for the simultaneous illness of Pope and son, would have gone far to unite Italy. Now, in concluding The Prince, he appeals to the young Duke Lorenzo, and through him to Leo and the Medici, to organize the union of the peninsula. He describes his countrymen as “more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, pillaged, and torn, and overrun by foreign powers.” “Italy, left as without life, waits for him who shall heal her wounds…. She entreats God to send some one who shall deliver her from these wrong and alien insolencies.”¹¹⁷ The situation is critical, but the opportunity is ripe. “Italy is ready and willing to follow a banner if only some one will raise it.” And who better than the Medici, the most famous family in Italy, and now heading the Church?

Who could express the love with which Italy would hail her liberator, with what thirst for revenge, what stubborn faith, what devotion, what tears? What door would be closed to him?—who would refuse him obedience? To all of us this barbarous dominion is a stench in the nostrils. Let therefore your illustrious house take up this charge, with that courage and hope with which all just enterprises are undertaken, so that under its standard our native country may be ennobled, and under its auspices may be verified those words of Petrarch:

Virtù contr’ al furore

Prendera l’arme e sia il combatter corto,

Che l’antico valore

Negl’ Italici cuor non è ancor morto—

“Manhood will take up arms against madness, and brief may the combat be, for the ancient valor is not yet dead in the veins of Italy.”

4. Considerations

So the cry that Dante and Petrarch had sent up to alien emperors was here raised to the Medici; and indeed, had Leo lived longer and played less, Machiavelli might have seen the liberation begin. But young Lorenzo died in 1519, Leo in 1521; and in 1527, the year of Machiavelli’s death, Italy’s subjection to a foreign power was complete. Liberation would have to wait 343 years until Cavour would effect it by Machiavellian statesmanship.

Philosophers have been well nigh unanimous in condemning The Prince, and statesmen in practising its precepts. A thousand books began to appear against it on the morrow of its publication (1532). But Charles V studied it carefully, Catherine de’ Medici brought it to France, Henry III and Henry IV of France had it with them at their death, Richelieu admired it, William of Orange kept it under his pillow as if to memorize it by osmosis.¹¹⁸ Frederick the Great of Prussia wrote an Anti-Machiavel as a prelude to outprincing The Prince. To most rulers, of course, these precepts were no revelation, except as revealing injudiciously the secrets of their guild. Dreamers who thought to turn Machiavelli into a Jacobin fancied that he had written The Prince not to express his own philosophy but, by sarcastic indirection, to expose the ways and wiles of rulers; however, the Discourses expound at greater length the same views. Francis Bacon ventured a condoning word: “Our thanks are due to Machiavelli and similar writers, who have openly and without dissimulation shown us what men are accustomed to do, not what they ought to do.”¹¹⁹ Hegel’s judgment was intelligent and generous:

The Prince has often been cast aside with horror as containing maxims of the most revolting tyranny; yet it was Machiavelli’s high sense of the necessity of constituting a state which caused him to lay down the principles on which alone states could be formed under the circumstances. The isolated lords and lordships had to be entirely suppressed; and though our idea of Freedom is incompatible with the means which he proposes… including, as these do, the most reckless violence, all kinds of deception, murder, and the like—yet we must confess that the despots who had to be subdued were assailable in no other way.¹²⁰

And Macaulay, in a famous essay, pictured the philosophy of Machiavelli as a natural reflex of an Italy brilliant and de-moral-ized, and long since accustomed, by her despots, to the principles of The Prince.

Machiavelli represents the ultimate challenge of a revived paganism to a weakened Christianity. In his philosophy religion becomes again, as in ancient Rome, the humble servant of a state which in effect is god. The only virtues honored are pagan Roman virtues—courage, endurance, self-reliance, intelligence; the only immortality is a fading fame. Perhaps Machiavelli exaggerated the enfeebling influence of Christianity; had he forgotten the lusty wars of medieval history, the campaigns of Constantine, Belisarius, Charlemagne, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, and Julius II of recent memory? The Christian morality emphasized the feminine virtues because men had the opposite qualities in ruinous abundance; some antidote and counterideal had to be preached to the sadistic Romans of the amphitheater, to the rough barbarians entering Italy, to lawless peoples striving to subside into civilization. The virtues that Machiavelli scorned made for orderly and peaceful societies; those that he admired (and, like Nietzsche, because he lacked them) made for strong and warlike states, and for dictators capable of murdering by the million to enforce conformity, and of incarnadining a planet to extend their rule. He confused the good of the ruler with the good of the nation; he thought too much of the preservation, seldom of the obligations, never of the corruption, of power. He ignored the stimulating rivalry and cultural fertility of the Italian citystates; he cared little for the magnificent art of his time, or even for that of ancient Rome. He was lost in idolatry of the state. He helped to free the state from the Church, but he shared in setting up for worship an atomistic nationalism not visibly superior to the medieval notion of states subject to an international morality represented by the pope. Each ideal has broken down under the natural selfishness of men; and a candid Christian must admit that in preaching and practising the principle that no faith need be kept with a heretic (as in violating the safe-conduct of Huss at Constance and of Alfonso of Ferrara in Rome), the Church herself was playing a Machiavellian game fatal to her mission as a moral power.

And yet there is something stimulating in Machiavelli’s forthrightness. Reading him, we are brought face to face, as nowhere else so vividly, with a question that few philosophers had dared discuss: is statesmanship bound by morality? We may come to at least one conclusion: that morality can exist only among the members of a society equipped to teach and enforce it; and that an interstate morality awaits the formation of an international organization dowered with the physical power and the public opinion to maintain an international law. Till then the nations will be as beasts in the jungle; and whatever principles their governments may profess, their practice will be that of The Prince.

Looking back upon two centuries of intellectual revolt in Italy from Petrarch to Machiavelli, we perceive that its essence and basis lay simply in lessened concern for another world, and a rising affirmation of life. Men were delighted to rediscover a pagan civilization whose citizens were not worried about original sin or a punitive hell, and in which the natural impulses were accepted as forgivable elements in a vibrant society. Asceticism, self-abnegation, and the sense of sin lost their hold, almost their meaning, in the upper strata of the Italian population; monasteries languished for lack of novices, and monks and friars and popes themselves sought the joys of the earth rather than the stigmata of Christ. The bonds of tradition and authority relaxed; the massive fabric of the Church weighed more lightly on the thoughts and purposes of men. Life became more extrovert, and though this often took the form of violence, it cleansed many souls of neurotic fears and disorders that had darkened the medieval mind. The unfettered intellect disported itself happily in every field but science; the exuberance of emancipation hardly comported, as yet, with the discipline of experiment and the patience of research; that would come in the constructive aftermath of liberation. Meanwhile, among the educated, the practices of piety made room for the worship of intellect and genius; the belief in immortality was commuted into the quest for enduring renown. Pagan ideals like Fortune, Fate, and Nature encroached upon the Christian conception of God.

For all this a price had to be paid. The brilliant enfranchisement of the mind sapped the supernatural sanctions of morality, and no others were found to effectually replace them. The result was such a repudiation of inhibitions, such a release of impulse and desire, so gay a luxuriance of immorality, as history had not known since the Sophists had shattered the myths, freed the mind, and loosened the morals, of ancient Greece.

CHAPTER XX

The Moral Release

1300–1534

V. THE FOUNTS AND FORMS OF IMMORALITY

NOWHERE are the prejudices of the historian so likely to mislead him as when he seeks to determine the moral level of an age—unless it be in the kindred inquiry into the decline of religious belief. In either case the dramatic exception will strike his eye and turn it from the unrecorded average. His vision will be further blurred if he approaches the problem with a thesis to prove—as, for example, that religious doubt brings moral decay. And the records themselves are ambivalent, capable, according to the selective bias, of proving almost anything. The works of Aretino, the autobiography of Cellini, the correspondence of Machiavelli and Vettori can be stressed to convey the odor of disintegration; the letters of Isabella and Beatrice d’Este, of Elisabetta Gonzaga and Alessandra Strozzi can be quoted to paint a picture of sisterly tenderness and ideal family life. The reader will have to be on his guard.

Many factors entered into the moral decline that accompanied the intellectual exaltation of the Renaissance. Probably the basic factor was the growth of wealth that resulted from Italy’s strategic position on the routes of trade between western Europe and the East, and from the flow of tithes and annates out of a thousand Christian communities into Rome. Sin became more prevalent as more funds were provided to meet its costs. The spread of wealth weakened the ascetic ideal: men and women came to resent an ethic that had been born of poverty and fear, and that now ran counter to both their impulses and their means. They heard with rising sympathy the view of Epicurus that life should be enjoyed, and that all pleasures are to be accounted innocent until proved guilty. The charms of woman triumphed over the prohibitions of theology.

Perhaps next to wealth the main source of immorality was the political unsettlement of the times. The strife of factions, the frequency of war, the influx of foreign mercenaries, and, later, the invasion of Italy by foreign armies recognizing no moral restraints on Italian soil, the repeated disruption of agriculture and trade by the ravages of war, the destruction of freedom by despots who replaced peaceful legitimacy with autocratic force: all these disordered Italian life, and cracked the “cake of custom” that normally conserves morality. Men found themselves unmoored in a sea of violence. Neither state nor Church seemed able to protect them; they protected themselves as best they could, by arms or craft; lawlessness became the law. The despots, placed above the law and dedicated to a short but stirring life, indulged themselves in every pleasure; and their example was followed by the moneyed minority.

In assessing the role of religious unbelief in releasing the natural immorality of mankind, we must begin by distinguishing the skepticism of the lettered few from the persistent piety of the many. Enlightenment is of minorities, and emancipation is individual; minds are not freed en masse. A few skeptics might protest against false relics and bogus miracles and indulgences offering promissory notes for cash; but the people accepted them with awe and hope. In 1462 the scholar-Pope Pius II and some cardinals went out to the Milvian Bridge to meet the head of the Apostle Andrew, which was arriving from Greece; and the scholar-Cardinal Bessarion pronounced a solemn oration when the precious figment was deposited in St. Peter’s. The people undertook pilgrimages to Loreto and Assisi, flocked to Rome in jubilee years, made the stations of the cross from church to church, and mounted on their knees the Scala Santa which, they were told, was the very stairway that Christ had climbed to the tribune of Pilate. Powerful characters might laugh at all this while their health was good, but rare was the Renaissance Italian who did not ask for the sacraments on his deathbed. Vitellozzo Vitelli, the rough condottiere who had fought Alexander VI and Caesar Borgia, begged a messenger to go to Rome and seek papal absolution for him before Caesar’s handy man tightened the noose around his neck. Women especially worshiped Mary; almost every village had a miracle-working icon of her; now (c. 1524) the Rosary became a favorite form of prayer. Every decent house had a crucifix and a holy picture or two; and before one or more of these, in many homes, a lamp was kept burning endlessly. Village squares and city streets might be adorned with a statue of Jesus or the Virgin, placed in a separate tabernacle or a niche in a wall. The festivals of the religious calendar were celebrated with a pomp and magnificence that gave the people thrilling interruptions to their toil; and every decade or so the coronation of a pope offered processions and games that to antiquarians recalled the spectacles of ancient Rome. Never was a religion more beautiful than when the artists of the Renaissance housed and carved its shrines, and painted its heroes and legends, and drama, music, poetry, and incense joined in the colorful, odorous, sumptuous worship of God.

But this, again, is but one side of a scene too diverse and contradictory to be briefly described. In the cities many of the churches were left relatively empty of men then as now.¹ As to the countryside hear Archbishop Antonino of Florence describing the peasants of his diocese about 1430:

In the churches themselves they sometimes dance and leap and sing with women. On holydays they spend little time on divine service or hearing the whole Mass, but most in games or taverns or contentions at the church doors. They blaspheme God and His saints on slender provocation. They are filled with lies and perjuries; they make no conscience of fornication, and of worse sins still. Very many of them do not confess even once a year; far fewer are those who take Communion…. They do little to instruct their families in the manner of faithful folk. They use enchantments for themselves and their beasts. Of God, or their own souls’ health, they think not at all…. Their parish priests, caring not for the flock committed to them, but only for its wool and milk, do not instruct them through preaching and the confessional, or by private admonitions, but walk in the same error as their flocks, following their corrupt ways.²

We may reasonably conclude, from the existence and natural deaths of such men as Pomponazzi and Machiavelli, that a large section of the educated classes in the Italy of 1500 had lost faith in Catholic Christianity; and we may more precariously assume that even among the letterless religion had lost some of its power to control the moral life. An increasing proportion of the population had ceased to believe in the divine origin of the moral code. Once the Commandments appeared to be man-made, and were shorn of their supernatural sanctions in heaven and hell, the code lost its terrors and its efficacy. Tabus fell away, and a calculus of expediency took their place. The sense of sin, the gloom of guilt, waned; conscience was left comparatively free; and each man did what seemed to him convenient, even if not traditionally right. Men no longer wished to be good, but to be strong; many private individuals took to themselves, long before Machiavelli, those privileges of force and fraud—that principle of the end justifying the means—which he conceded to the rulers of states; perhaps his ethic was an after-image of the morals he had seen around him. Platina attributed to Pius II the remark that “even if the Christian faith had not been confirmed by miracles, it ought to be received because of its morality.”³ But men did not reason so philosophically. They said, simply: If there is no hell or heaven, we must enjoy ourselves here, and we may indulge our appetites without fear of punishment after death. Only a strong and intelligent public opinion could have taken the place of the lost supernatural sanctions; but neither the clergy nor the humanists nor the universities rose to this task.

The humanists were as morally corrupt as the clergy they criticized. There were shining exceptions, scholars who found decency compatible with intellectual liberation—Ambrogio Traversari, Vittorino da Feltre, Marsilio Ficino, Aldus Manutius…. But an impressively large minority of the men who resurrected Greek and Roman literature lived like pagans who had never heard of Christianity. Their mobility deracinated them; they passed from city to city seeking laurels and fees, and sank no roots in stability. They were as fond of money as any moneylender or his wife. They were vain of their genius, their income, their features, their dress. They were coarse in their speech, ungenerous and disgraceful in their controversies, faithless in their friendships and transient in their loves. Ariosto, as we have noted, dared not trust his son to a humanist tutor for fear of moral contamination; probably he found it unnecessary to forbid the boy to read Orlando furioso, which was salted with melodious obscenity. Valla, Poggio, Beccadelli, Filelfo summarized in their loose lives one of the basic problems of ethics and civilization: must a moral code, to function effectively, have supernatural sanctions—the belief in another life, or in the divine origin of the moral code?

II. THE MORALS OF THE CLERGY

The Church might have sustained the supernatural sanctions provided by the Hebraic Scriptures and the Christian tradition, if her personnel had led lives of decency and devotion. But most of them accepted the bad as well as the good in the morals of the time, and reflected the antithetical facets of the laity. The parish priest was a simple ministrant, usually of slight education, but normally (pace the good Antonino) leading an exemplary life;⁴ ignored by the intelligentsia but welcomed by the people. Among the bishops and abbots there were some high livers, but many good men; and perhaps half the college of cardinals maintained a pious and Christian conduct that shamed the gay worldliness of their colleagues.⁵ All over Italy there were hospitals, orphan asylums, schools, almshouses, monti di pietà (loan offices), and other charitable institutions managed by the clergy. The Benedictine, Observantine, and Carthusian monks were honored for the relatively high moral level of their lives. Missionaries faced a thousand dangers to spread the faith in “heathen” lands and among the pagans of Christendom. Mystics hid themselves away from the violence of the times, and sought closer communion with God.

Amid this devotion there was so much laxity of morals among the clergy that a thousand testimonies could be adduced to prove it. The same Petrarch who remained faithful to Christianity to the end, and who drew a favorable picture of discipline and piety in the Carthusian monastery where his brother lived, repeatedly denounced the morals of the clergy in Avignon. From the novelle of Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, through those of Masuccio in the fifteenth, to those of Bandello in the sixteenth, the loose lives of the Italian clergy form a recurrent theme of Italian literature. Boccaccio speaks of “the lewd and filthy life of the clergy,” in sins “natural or sodomitical.”⁶ Masuccio described the monks and friars as “ministers of Satan,” addicted to fornication, homosexualism, avarice, simony, and impiety, and professed to have found a higher moral level in the army than in the clergy.⁷ Aretino, familiar with all filth, railed at the errors of printers as rivaling in number the sins of the clergy; “truly it would be easier to find Rome sober and chaste than a correct book.”⁸ Poggio almost exhausts his vocabulary of vituperation in exposing the immorality, hypocrisy, cupidity, ignorance, and arrogance of monks and priests;⁹ and Folengo’s Orlandino tells the same tale. Apparently the nuns, who today are angels and ministers of grace, shared in the revelry. They were especially lively in Venice, where monasteries and nunneries were sufficiently close to each other to allow their inmates, now and then, to share a bed; the archives of the Proveditori sopra monasteri contain twenty volumes of trials for the cohabitation of monks and nuns.¹⁰ Aretino speaks unquotably about the nuns of Venice.¹¹ And Guicciardini, usually temperate, loses his poise in describing Rome: “Of the Court of Rome it is impossible to speak with sufficient severity, for it is a standing infamy, an example of all that is most vile and shameful in the world.”¹²

These testimonies seem exaggerated, and may be prejudiced. But hear St. Catherine of Siena:

On whatever side you turn—whether to the secular clergy of priests and bishops, or to the religious orders, or to prelates small or great, old or young,… you see nothing but offenses; and all stink in my nostrils with a stench of mortal sin. Narrow, greedy, and avaricious… they have abandoned the care of souls.… Making a god of their belly, eating and drinking in disorderly feast, they fall thence forthwith into filth, living in lasciviousness… feeding their children with the substance of the poor…. They flee from choir service as from poison.¹³

Here again we must discount something, since no saint can be trusted to speak of human conduct without indignation. But we may accept the summing up of a candid Catholic historian:

It is not surprising, when the highest ranks of the clergy were in such a state, that among the regular orders and secular priests vice and irregularities of all sorts should have become more and more common. The salt of the earth had lost its savor.… It was such priests as these that gave occasion to the more or less exaggerated descriptions of the clergy by Erasmus and Luther, who visited Rome during the reign of Julius II. But it is a mistake to suppose that the corruption of the clergy was worse in Rome than elsewhere; there is documentary evidence of the immorality of the priests in almost every town in the Italian peninsula. In many places—Venice, for instance—matters were far worse than in Rome. No wonder, as contemporary writers sadly testify, the influence of the clergy had declined, and that in many places hardly any respect was shown for the priesthood. Their immorality was so gross that suggestions in favor of allowing priests to marry began to be heard…. Many of the monasteries were in a deplorable condition. The three essential vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were in some convents almost entirely disregarded…. The discipline of many convents of nuns was equally lax.¹⁴

Less forgivable than irregularities of sex and festivities of diet were the activities of the Inquisition. But these remarkably declined in Italy during the fifteenth century. In 1440 Amadeo de’ Landi, a mathematician, was tried on a charge of materialism, but was acquitted. In 1478 Galeotto Marcio was condemned to death for writing that any man who lived a good life would go to heaven whatever his religion might be; but Pope Sixtus IV saved him.¹⁶ In 1497 the physician Gabriele da Salò was protected from the Inquisition by his patients, though he maintained that Christ was not God, but was the son of Joseph and Mary, conceived in the usual ridiculous way; that Christ’s body was not in the consecrated wafer; and that His miracles had been performed not by divine power but through the influence of the stars;¹⁷ so one myth drives out another. In 1500 Giorgio da Novara was burnt to death at Bologna, apparently for denying the divinity of Christ without having influential friends. In the same year the bishop of Aranda declared with impunity that there is neither heaven nor hell, and that indulgences were merely a means of raising funds.¹⁸ In 1510, when Ferdinand the Catholic tried to introduce the Inquisition into Naples, he met with such determined resistance from all classes of the population that he had to abandon the attempt.¹⁹

Amid the ecclesiastical decay there were several centers of wholesome reform. Pius II deposed a general of the Dominicans, and disciplined lax monasteries in Venice, Brescia, Florence, and Siena. In 1517 Sadoleto, Giberti, Caraffa, and other churchmen founded the Oratory of the Divine Love as a center for pious men who desired some refuge from the pagan worldliness of Rome. In 1523 Caraffa organized the order of Theatines, in which secular priests lived under monastic rules of chastity, obedience, and poverty. Cardinal Caraffa resigned all his benefices and distributed his property among the poor; so did Saint Gaetano, another founder of the Theatines. These devotees, many of them men of noble lineage and great wealth, astonished Rome by strict adherence to their self-imposed rules, and their fearless visits to victims of the plague. In 1533 Antonio Maria Zacearia established at Milan a similar community of priests, first called the Regular Clerics of St. Paul, but soon to be known as Barnabites from the church of St. Barnabas. Caraffa drew up a helpful program of reform for the clergy of Venice, and Giberti essayed similar reforms in the diocese of Verona (1528–31). Egidio Canisio reformed the Augustinian eremites, and Gregorio Cortese effected a similar betterment among the Benedictines at Padua.

The outstanding effort at monastic reform in this age was the foundation of the Capuchin Order. Matteo di Bassi, a friar of the Franciscan Observantines at Montefalcone, thought that he saw St. Francis in a vision, and that he heard him say: “I wish my rule to be observed to the letter, to the letter, to the letter.” Learning that St. Francis had worn a four-cornered pointed hood, he adopted that headdress. Going to Rome, he secured from Clement VII (1528) permission to establish a new branch of the Franciscans, distinguished by the cappuccio or cowl, and by firm adherance to the final rule of St. Francis. They dressed in the coarsest cloth, went barefoot throughout the year, lived on bread, vegetables, fruit, and water, kept rigorous fasts, dwelt in narrow cells in poor cottages made of wood and loam, and never journeyed except on foot. The new order was not numerous, but it gave a stirring example and stimulus to the more widespread self-reform that came to the monastic and mendicant orders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.²⁰

Some of these reforms were undertaken in response to the Protestant Reformation. Many of them were of spontaneous generation, and indicated a saving vitality in Christianity and the Church.

III. SEXUAL MORALITY

Turning now to laic morals, and beginning with the relations of the sexes, we should remind ourselves at the outset that man is by nature polygamous, and that only the strongest moral sanctions, a helpful degree of poverty and hard work, and uninterrupted wifely supervision, can induce him to monogamy. It is not clear that adultery was less popular in the Middle Ages than in the Renaissance. And as medieval adultery was tempered with chivalry, so in the Renaissance it was softened, in the lettered classes, by an idealization of the refinement and spiritual charms of the educated woman. Greater equality of the sexes in education and social standing made possible a new intellectual comradeship between men and women. In Mantua, Milan, Urbino, Ferrara, and Naples life was graced and stirred by the prominence of attractive and cultivated women.

Girls of good family were kept in relative seclusion from men not of their own household. They were sedulously instructed in the advantages of premarital chastity; sometimes with such success that we hear of a young woman drowning herself after being raped. She was doubtless exceptional, for a bishop proposed to raise a statue to her.²¹ In the Roman catacombs a young gentlewoman strangled herself to avoid seduction; her body was borne in triumph through the streets of Rome, with a laurel crown on her head.²² Nevertheless there must have been considerable premarital adventure; otherwise it would be difficult to account for the extraordinary number of bastards to be found in any city of Renaissance Italy. Not to have bastards was a distinction; to have them was no serious disgrace; the man, on marrying, usually persuaded his wife to let his illegitimate progeny join the household and be brought up with her own children. To be a bastard was no great disability; the social stigma involved was almost negligible; legitimation could be obtained by lubricating an ecclesiastical hand. In default of legitimate and competent heirs bastard sons could succeed to an estate, even to a throne, as Ferrante I succeeded Alfonso I at Naples, and as Leonello d’Este succeeded Niccolò III at Ferrara. When Pius II came to Ferrara in 1459 he was received by seven princes, all illegitimate.²³ The rivalry of bastards with legitimate sons was a rich source of Renaissance violence. Half the novelle turn on seductions; and usually such stories were read or heard by women with only a momentary lowering of the eyes. Robert, Bishop of Aquino, toward the close of the fifteenth century, described the morals of the young men in his diocese as unashamedly corrupt; they explained to him, he tells us, that fornication was no sin, that chastity was an old-fashioned tabu, and that virginity was on the wane.²⁴ Even incest had its devotees.

As for homosexuality, it became almost an obligatory part of the Greek revival. The humanists wrote about it with a kind of scholarly affection, and Ariosto judged that they were all addicted to it. Politian, Filippo Strozzi, and the diarist Sanudo were reasonably suspected of it;²⁵ Michelangelo, Julius II, and Clement VII were less convincingly charged with it; San Bernardino found so much of it in Naples that he threatened the city with the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.²⁶ Aretino described the aberration as quite popular in Rome,²⁷ and he himself, between one mistress and another, asked the duke of Mantua to send him an attractive boy.²⁸ In 1455 the Venetian Council of Ten took official note “how the abominable vice of sodomy multiplies in this city”; and “to avert the wrath of God,” it appointed two men in each quarter of Venice to put down the practice.²⁹ The Council noted that some men had taken to wearing feminine garb, and that some women were adopting male attire, and it called this “a species of sodomy.”³⁰ In 1492 a noble and a priest, convicted of homosexual acts, were beheaded in the Piazzetta, and their bodies were publicly burned.³¹ These, of course, were exceptional cases, from which we must not generalize; but we may assume that homosexuality was more than normally present in Renaissance Italy until the Counter Reformation.

We may say likewise of prostitution. According to Infessura—who liked to load his statistics against papal Rome—there were 6,800 registered prostitutes in Rome in 1490, not counting clandestine practitioners, in a population of some 90,000.³² In Venice the census of 1509 reported 11,654 prostitutes in a population of some 300,000.³³ An enterprising printer published a “Catalogue of all the principal and most honored courtesans of Venice, their names, addresses, and fees.”³⁴ On the roads they frequented taverns; in the cities they were the favorite guests of young blades and fervent artists. Cellini recounts his night’s lodging with a courtesan as an incident of no moment, and describes a dinner of artists, including Giulio Romano and himself, in which each man was required to bring a woman of low resistance. At a higher level the banker Lorenzo Strozzi gave a banquet in 1519 to fourteen persons, including four cardinals and three women of the demimonde.³⁵

As wealth and refinement increased, a demand arose for courtesans with some education and social charm; and as in the Athens of Sophocles hetaerae rose to meet this demand, so in the Rome of the late fifteen century, and in the Venice of the sixteenth, a class of cortigiane oneste— genteel courtesans —developed, who rivaled the finest ladies in dress, manners, culture, even in hebdomadal piety. While the simpler prostitutes—cortigiane di candela—practised in brothels, these Roman hetaerae lived in their own homes, entertained lavishly, read and wrote poetry, sang and played music, and joined in educated conversation; some collected pictures and statuary, rare editions and the latest books; some maintained literary salons. To keep up with the humanists many of them took classical names—Camilla, Polyxena, Penthesilea, Faustina, Imperia, Tullia. One scandalous wit, in the pontificate of Alexander VI, wrote a series of epigrams beginning with a number in praise of the Virgin or the saints, and then, without a blush, continuing with several in honor of the distinguished courtesans of his time.³⁶ When one such, Faustina Mancina, died, half of Rome mourned her, and Michelangelo was one of many who wrote sonnets to her memory.³⁷

The most renowned of these cortigiane oneste was Imperia de Cugnatis. Made rich by her patron Agostino Chigi, she adorned her home with luxurious furniture and choice art, and gathered about her a bevy of scholars, artists, poets, and churchmen; even the pious Sadoleto sang her praise.³⁸ Probably it was Imperia whom Raphael took as his model for the Sappho of his Parnassus. She died in the flower of her beauty at the age of twenty-six (1511), and received honorable burial in the church of San Gregorio, with a marble tomb engraved in the finest lapidary style; and half a hundred poets lamented her in classic elegies.³⁹ (Her daughter killed herself rather than submit to seduction.⁴⁰) Almost as renowned was Tullia d’Aragona, illegitimate daughter of the Cardinal of Aragon. Admired for her golden hair and sparkling eyes, her generosity and carelessness with money, her grace of carriage and charm of conversation, she was received in Naples, Rome, Florence, and Ferrara like a visiting princess. The Mantuan ambassador at Ferrara described her entry in an undiplomatic letter to Isabella d’Este (1537):

I have to record the arrival among us of a gentle lady, so modest in behavior, so fascinating in manners, that we cannot help considering her something divine. She sings impromptu all kinds of airs and motets…. There is not one lady in Ferrara, not even Vittoria Colonna the Duchess of Pescara, who can stand comparison with Tullia.⁴¹

Moretto da Brescia painted a bewitching portrait of her, looking as innocent as a novice nun. She made the mistake of outliving her charms; she died in a wretched hut near the Tiber; and her total belongings, at auction, brought a dozen crowns ($150?). But in all her poverty she had kept her lute and harpsichord to the last. She left also a book that she had composed On the Infinity of Perfect Love.⁴²

Doubtless that title reflected the Renaissance fashion of talking and writing about Platonic love. If a woman could not commit adultery she might at least allow herself to arouse in a man a kind of poetic gallantry that made her the object of verses, courtesies, and dedications. The devotions of the troubadours, the Vita Nuova of Dante, and Plato’s discourses on spiritual love had begotten in a few circles a fine sentiment of adoration toward woman—usually another man’s wife. Most people paid no attention to the idea, preferring their love in a frankly sensual form; they might write sonnets, but their goal was coitus; and hardly once in a hundred cases, despite the novelists, did they marry the object of their love.

For marriage was an affair of property, and property could not be made dependent upon the passing whims of physical desire. Betrothals were arranged by family councils, and most young people accepted without effectual protest the mates so assigned to them. Girls could be betrothed at the age of three, though marriage had to be delayed till twelve. In the fifteenth century a daughter unmarried at fifteen was a family disgrace; in the sixteenth century the age of disgrace was deferred to seventeen, to allow time for higher education.⁴³ Men, who enjoyed all the privileges and facilities of promiscuity, could be lured into marriage only by brides bringing substantial dowries. In Savonarola’s day there were many marriageable girls who, for lack of dowries, had failed to find a husband. Florence established a kind of state dowry insurance—Monte delle fanciulle, or fund of the maidens—from which marriage portions were given to girls that had paid small yearly premiums.⁴⁴ In Siena there were so many bachelors that the laws had to inflict legal disabilities upon them; in Lucca a decree of 1454 debarred from public office all unmarried men between twenty and fifty. “The times are not favorable to matrimony,” wrote Alessandra Strozzi in 1455.⁴⁵ Raphael painted half a hundred Madonnas, but would not take a wife; and this was the one thing in which Michelangelo agreed with him. Weddings themselves consumed enormous sums; Leonardo Bruni complained that his matrimonium had squandered his patrimonium.⁴⁶ Kings and queens, princes and princesses spent half a million dollars on a wedding while famine raged among the people.⁴⁷ When Alfonso the Magnificent of Naples married, he set up tables for 30,000 diners on the shores of the Bay. Lovelier was the reception that Urbino gave to Duke Guidobaldo when he brought from Mantua his bride Elisabetta Gonzaga: ranged on a hill slope stood the ladies of the city, beautifully dressed; before them their children carried olive branches; mounted choristers, in graceful formation, sang a cantata that had been composed for the occasion; and an especially comely matron, impersonating a goddess, offered the new Duchess the loyalty and affection of the people.⁴⁸

After marriage the woman usually kept her own name; so Lorenzo’s wife continued to be called Donna Clarice Orsini; sometimes, however, the wife might add her husband’s name to her own—Maria Salviati de’ Medici. In the medieval theory of marriage it was expected that love would develop between man and wife through the varied partnerships of marriage in joy and sorrow, prosperity and adversity; and apparently the expectation was fulfilled in the majority of cases. No love of youth for maiden could be deeper or truer than that of Vittoria Colonna for the Marquis of Pescara, to whom she had been engaged from the age of four; no loyalty could have been greater than that of Elisabetta Gonzaga, accompanying her crippled husband through all his misfortunes and exiles, and faithful to his memory till her death.

Nevertheless adultery was rampant.⁴⁹ Since most marriages among the upper classes were diplomatic unions of economic or political interests, many husbands felt warranted in having a mistress; and the wife, though she might mourn, usually closed her eyes—or her lips—to the offense. Among the middle classes some men assumed that adultery was a legitimate diversion; Machiavelli and his friends seem to have thought nothing of exchanging notes about their infidelities. When, in such cases, the wife avenged herself by imitation, the husband was as like as not to ignore it, and wear his horns with grace.⁵⁰ But the influx of Spaniards into Italy, via Naples and Alexander VI and Charles V, brought the Spanish “point of honor” into Italian life, and in the sixteenth century the husband felt called upon to punish his wife’s adultery with death, while preserving his pristine privileges unimpaired. The husband might desert his wife and still prosper; the deserted wife had no remedy except to reclaim her dowry, return to her relatives, and live a lonely life; she was not allowed to marry again. She might enter a convent, but it would expect a donation of her dowry.⁵¹ In general, in the Latin countries, adultery is condoned as a substitute for divorce.

IV. RENAISSANCE MAN

The combination of intellectual enfranchisement and moral release produced “the man of the Renaissance.” He was not typical enough to merit that title; there were a dozen types of man in that age as in any other; he was merely the most interesting, perhaps because he was exceptional. The Renaissance peasant was what peasants have always been until machinery made agriculture an industry. The Italian proletaire of 1500 was like those of Rome under the Caesars or Mussolini; occupation makes the man. The Renaissance businessman was like his past and present peers. The Renaissance priest, however, was different from the medieval or modern priest; he believed less and enjoyed more; he could make love and war. Amid these types was an arresting mutation, a sport of the species and the time, the kind of man we think of when we recall the Renaissance, a type unique in history, except that Alcibiades, seeing him, would have felt reborn.

The qualities of this type revolved about two foci: intellectual and moral audacity. A mind sharp, alert, versatile, open to every impression and idea, sensitive to beauty, eager for fame. It was a recklessly individualistic spirit, set on developing all its potential capacities; a proud spirit, scorning Christian humility, despising weakness and timidity, defying conventions, morals, tabus, popes, even, occasionally, God. In the city such a man might lead a turbulent faction; in the state, an army; in the Church he would gather a hundred benefices under his cassock, and use his wealth to climb to power. In art he was no longer an artisan working anonymously with others on a collective enterprise, as in the Middle Ages; he was “a single and separate person,” who stamped his character upon his works, signed his name to his paintings, even, now and then, carved it on his statues, like Michelangelo on the Pietà. Whatever his achievements, this “Renaissance man” was always in motion and discontent, fretting at limits, longing to be a “universal man”—bold in conception, decisive in deed, eloquent in speech, skilled in art, acquainted with literature and philosophy, at home with women in the palace and with soldiers in the camp.

His immorality was part of his individualism. His goal being the successful expression of his personality, and his environment imposing upon him no standards of restraint either from the example of the clergy or from the terror of a supernatural creed, he allowed himself any means to his ends, and any pleasure on the way. None the less he had his own virtues. He was a realist, and seldom talked nonsense except to a reluctant woman. He had good manners when he was not killing, and even then he preferred to kill with grace. He had energy, force of character, direction and unity of will; he accepted the old Roman conception of virtue as manliness, but added to it skill and intelligence. He was not needlessly cruel, and he excelled the Romans in his capacity for pity. He was vain, but that was part of his sense of beauty and form. His appreciation of the beautiful in woman and nature, in art and crime, was a mainspring of the Renaissance. He replaced the moral with the esthetic sense; if his type had multiplied and prevailed, an irresponsible aristocracy of taste would have supplanted the aristocracies of birth or wealth.

But, again, he was only one of many kinds of Renaissance man. How different was the idealistic Pico, with his belief in the moral perfectibility of mankind—or the grim Savonarola, blind to beauty and absorbed in righteousness—or the gentle gracious Raphael, scattering beauty about him with an open hand—or the demonic Michelangelo, haunted with the Last Judgment long before he painted it—or the melodious Politian, who thought there would be pity even in hell—or the honest Vittorino da Feltre, so successfully binding Zeno to Christ—or the second Giuliano de’ Medici, so kindly just that his brother the Pope considered him unfit for government! We perceive, after every effort to abbreviate and formulate, that there was no “man of the Renaissance.” There were men, agreeing only in one thing: that life had never been lived so intensely before. The Middle Ages had said—or had pretended to say—No to life; the Renaissance, with all its heart and soul and might, said Yes.

V. RENAISSANCE WOMAN

The emergence of woman was one of the brightest phases of the period. Her status in European history has usually risen with wealth, though Periclean Greece, too near the Orient, was an exception. When hunger is no longer feared, the male quest turns to sex; and if man still despoils himself for gold, it is to lay it at a woman’s feet, or before the children she has given him. If she resists him he idealizes her. Usually she has the good sense to resist him, and to make him pay dearly for the boons whose contemplated splendor swells his veins. If, moreover, she adds graces of mind and character to her body’s charms, she gives man the highest satisfaction he can find this side of glory; and in return he raises her to an almost queenly dominance in his life.

We must not imagine that this was the pleasant role of the average woman in the Renaissance; it fell to a fortunate few, while the far greater number put off their bridal robes to carry domestic burdens and family headaches to their graves. Hear San Bernardino on the proper time for beating a wife:

And I say to you men, never beat your wives while they are great with child, for therein would lie great peril. I say not that you should never beat them; but choose your time…. I know men who have more regard for a hen that lays a fresh egg daily than for their own wives. Sometimes the hen will break a pot or a cup, but the man will not beat her, for fear of losing the egg that is her fruit. How stark mad, then, are many that cannot suffer a word from their own lady who bears such fair fruit! For if she speak a word more than he thinks fit, forthwith he seizes a staff and begins to chastise her; and the hen, which cackles all day without ceasing, you suffer patiently for her egg’s sake.⁵²

A girl of good family was carefully trained for success in getting and keeping a prosperous mate; this was the major subject of her curriculum. Till a few weeks before marriage she was kept in relative seclusion in a convent or in the home, and received from her tutors or nuns an education as thorough as that which came to all but the scholars among the men of her class. Usually she learned some Latin, and became distantly acquainted with the leading figures of Greek and Roman history, literature, and philosophy. She practised some form of music, and sometimes played at sculpture or painting. A few women became scholars, and publicly debated problems of philosophy with men, like the learned Cassandra Fedeli of Venice; but this was highly exceptional. Several women wrote good verse, like Costanza Varano, Veronica Gambara, and Vittoria Colonna. But the educated woman of the Renaissance retained her femininity, her Christianity, and its moral code; and this gave her a union of culture and character that made her irresistible to the higher Renaissance man.

For the lettered men of that age felt her attractiveness intensely, even to writing and reading books that analyzed her charms in scholarly detail. Agnolo Firenzuola, a Vallombrosan monk, composed a dialogue Sopra la bellezza delle donne, on the beauty of women, and carried off this difficult subject with a skill and erudition hardly becoming a monk. Beauty itself he defines after Plato and Aristotle as “an orderly concord, a harmony inscrutably resulting from the composition, union, and commission of divers members, each of which shall itself be well proportioned and in a certain sense beautiful, but which, before they combine to make one body, shall be different and discrepant among themselves.”⁵³ He proceeds to examine with finesse every part of the feminine frame, laying down the standard of beauty for each. The hair should be thick, long, and blonde—a soft yellow nearing brown; the skin bright and clear, but not pale white; the eyes dark, large, and full, with touches of blue in a white iris; the nose must not be aquiline, for that is especially disconcerting in a woman; the mouth should be small, but the lips full; the chin round and dimpled; the neck round and rather long—but let not Adam’s apple show; the shoulders should be broad, the bosom full—with a gentle fall and swell; the hands white and plump and soft; the legs long, the feet small.⁵⁴ We perceive that Firenzuola had spent much time contemplating his subject, and had discovered an admirable new topic for philosophy.

Not content with these gifts, Renaissance woman, like any other, dyed her hair—almost always to blonde—and added false locks to fill it out; peasant women, having spent their beauty, cut off their tresses and hung them out for sale.⁵⁵ Perfumes were a mania in sixteenth-century Italy: hair, hats, shirts, stockings, gloves, shoes, all had to be scented; Aretino thanks Duke Cosimo for perfuming the roll of money he had sent him; “some objects that date from that period have not yet lost their odor.”⁵⁶ A well-to-do woman’s dressing table was a wilderness of cosmetics, usually in fancy containers of ivory, silver, or gold. Rouge was applied not only to the face but to the breasts, which in the larger cities were left mostly bare.⁵⁷ Various preparations were used to remove blemishes, to polish the fingernails, to render the skin soft and smooth. Flowers were placed in the hair and on the dress. Pearls, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, agates, amethysts, beryls, topazes, or garnets adorned the fingers in rings, the arms in bracelets, the head in tiaras, and (after 1525) the ears in earrings; besides which jewelry might be studded into the headgear, the dress, the shoes, and the fan.

Feminine dress, if we may judge from the portraits, was rich, heavy, and uncomfortable. Velvets, silks, and furs hung in massive folds from the shoulders or—when the shoulders were bare—from fastenings over the breasts. Dresses were bound with a girdle at the waist, and swept the floor behind the feet. The shoes of the well-to-do woman were high of both sole and heel, to protect her feet from the filth of the streets; nevertheless the upper portion was often of delicate brocade. Handkerchiefs were now in use in the upper classes; they were made of fine linen, often striped with gold thread or fringed with lace. Petticoats and lingerie were trimmed with lace and embroidered with silk. Sometimes the dress reached up around the neck in a ruff stiffened with metal ribs, and occasionally rising above the head. The headdress of the women took a hundred forms: turbans, tiaras, kerchiefs or veils bound with pearls, hoods stiffly shaped with wire, caps like a boy’s or a forester’s…. Frenchmen visiting Mantua were delightfully shocked to find the Marchioness Isabella wearing a fancy cap with jeweled feathers, and, beneath, shoulders and bosom bare almost to the nipples.⁵⁸ Preachers complained about the amount of female bosom that invited the male eye. Now and then the flair for nudity went out of bounds, and Sacchetti observed of some women that if they took off their shoes they would be naked.⁵⁹ Most women imprisoned themselves in corsets that could be tightened by turning a key, so that Petrarch pitied “their bellies so cruelly squeezed that they suffer as much pain from vanity as the martyrs suffered for religion.”⁶⁰

Armed with all these weapons, the Renaissance woman of the upper classes raised her sex out of medieval bondage and monastic contempt to be almost the equal of man. She conversed on equal terms with him about literature and philosophy; she governed states with wisdom, like Isabella, or with all-too-masculine force, like Caterina Sforza; sometimes, clad in armor, she followed her mate to the battlefield, and bettered the instruction of his violence. She refused to leave the room when rough stories came up; she had a good stomach, and could hear realistic language without losing her modesty or her charm. The Italian Renaissance is rich in women who made a high place for themselves by their intelligence or their virtue: Bianca Maria Visconti who, in the absence of her husband Francesco Sforza, governed Milan so capably that he used to say he had more confidence in her than in his whole army, and who at the same time was known for her “piety, compassion, charity, and beauty of person”;⁶¹ or Emilia Pio, whose husband died in her youth, but who so cherished his memory that she was never known, through all her remaining years, to encourage the attentions of any man; or Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother and molder of Lorenzo the Magnificent; or Elisabetta Gonzaga, or Beatrice d’Este, or the maligned and gentle Lucrezia Borgia; or the Caterina Cornaro who made Asolo a school for poets, artists, and gentlemen; or Veronica Gambara, the poetess and salonnière of Correggio; or Vittoria Colonna, the untouched goddess of Michelangelo.

Vittoria recaptured, without proud display, all the quiet virtue of a Roman heroine of the Republic, and combined with it the noblest features of Christianity. She had distinguished ancestry: her father was Fabrizio Colonna, grand constable of the Kingdom of Naples; her mother, Agnese da Montefeltro, was a daughter of Federigo, the scholarly Duke of Urbino. Betrothed in childhood to Ferrante Francesco d’Ávalos, Marquis of Pescara, she married him at nineteen (1509); and the love that united them before and after marriage was a finer poem that any of the sonnets that they exchanged during his campaigns. At the battle of Ravenna (1512) he was wounded almost to death, and was taken prisoner; he took advantage of his captivity to compose A Book of Loves, which he dedicated to his wife. Meanwhile he had carried on a liaison with one of Isabella d’Este’s maids of honor.⁶² After his release he returned to Vittoria briefly, then sallied forth on one campaign after another, so that she seldom saw him again. He led the forces of Charles V at Pavia (1525), and won a decisive victory. Offered the crown of Naples if he would join a conspiracy against the Emperor, he thought it over for a while, then revealed the plot to Charles. When he died (November, 1525) he had not seen his wife for three years. Ignorant of, or ignoring, his infidelities, she spent her twenty-two years of widowhood in works of charity, piety, and devotion to his memory. When she was urged to marry again she replied: “My husband Ferdinand, who to you seems dead, is not dead to me.”⁶³ She lived in quiet retirement at Ischia, then in convents at Orvieto and Viterbo, then in semiconventual privacy in Rome. There, while herself remaining apparently orthodox, she befriended several Italians who sympathized with the Reformation. For a time she was placed under the surveillance of the Inquisition, and to be her friend was to risk indictment for heresy. Michelangelo took the risk, and developed for her an intense spiritual affection that never dared go beyond poetry.

The educated women of the Renaissance emancipated themselves without any propaganda of emancipation, purely by their intelligence, character, and tact, and by the heightened sensitivity of men to their tangible and intangible charms. They influenced their time in every field: in politics by their ability to govern states for their absent husbands; in morals by their combination of freedom, good manners, and piety; in art by developing a matronly beauty which modeled a hundred Madonnas; in literature by opening their homes and their smiles to poets and scholars. There were innumerable satires on women, as in every age; but for every bitter or sarcastic line there were litanies of devotion and praise. The Italian Renaissance, like the French Enlightenment, was bisexual; women moved into every sphere of life; men ceased to be coarse and crude, and were molded to finer manners and speech; and civilization, with all its laxity and violence, took on a grace and refinement such as it had not known in Europe for a thousand years.

VI. THE HOME

The rising refinement showed itself in the form and life of the home. While the dwellings of the populace remained as before—unadorned whitewashed stucco or plaster walls, flagstone floors, an inner court usually with a well, and around the court one or two stories of rooms furnished with the simple necessaries of life—the palaces of the nobles and nouveaux riches took on a splendor and luxury again recalling Imperial Rome. The wealth that in the Middle Ages had been concentrated on the cathedral now poured itself out into mansions equipped with such furniture, conveniences, delicacies, and ornaments as could hardly be found, north of the Alps, in the seats of princes and kings. The Villa Chigi and the Palazzo Massimi, both designed by Baldassare Peruzzi, enclosed a labyrinth of rooms, each ornate with columns and pilasters, or fretted cornice, or gilded coffered ceiling, or paintings on vault and walls, or sculptured chimney pieces, or stucco carvings and arabesques, or floors of marble or tile. Every mansion had elegant beds, tables, chairs, chests, and cabinets built for a century and cut to please the eye; its massive credences or buffets were loaded with silver plate and fancy pottery; it had soft and comfortable beds, fine carpets and handsome drapes, and linen abundant, enduring, and perfumed. Great fireplaces warmed the rooms, and lamps, torches, or chandeliers lighted them. All that was lacking in these palaces was children.

For family limitation rises as the means for supporting children mount. The Church and the Scriptures bade men increase and multiply, but comfort counseled infertility. Even in the countryside, where children were economic assets, families of six children were rare; in the city, where children were liabilities, families were small—the richer the smaller—and many homes had no children at all.⁶⁴ What lovely children Italian families could have appears in the bambini and putti of the artists, the cantorie of Donatello and Luca della Robbia, and such sculptural portraits as The Young St. John of Antonio Rossellino in the Washington National Gallery. The solidarity of the family, the mutual loyalty and love of parents and children, stand out all the more attractively amid the moral looseness of the times.

The family was still an economic, moral, and geographical unit. Usually the debts of one defaulting member were paid by the rest—a marked exception to the individualism of the age. Rarely did any member marry or leave the state without the family’s consent. Servants were freeborn free-spoken members of the family. Paternal authority was supreme, and was obeyed in all crises; but normally the mother ruled the household. Maternal love was as fond in the princesses as in the paupers. Beatrice d’Este writes about her baby boy to her sister Isabella: “I often wish that you could be here to see him, as I am quite sure that you would never be able to stop petting and kissing him.”⁶⁵ Most families of the middle class kept a register of births, marriages, deaths, and interesting events, interspersed here and there with intimate comments. In one such family record Giovanni Rucellai (ancestor of the dramatist of the same name) wrote, toward the end of his life (c. 1460), these proud words of a Florentine:

I thank God that he has created me a rational and immortal being; in a Christian country; close to Rome, the center of the Christian faith; in Italy, the noblest country in Christendom; and in Florence, the most beautiful city of the whole world…. I thank Our Lord for an excellent mother, who, though only in her twentieth year at the time of my father’s death, refused all offers of marriage, and devoted herself wholly to her children; and also for an equally excellent wife, who loved me truly, and cared most faithfully for both household and children; who was spared to me for many years, and whose death has been the greatest loss that ever has or could have befallen me. Recalling all these innumerable favors and benefits, I now in my old age desire to detach myself from all earthly things in order to devote my whole soul to giving praise and thanks to Thee, my Lord, the living source of my being.⁶⁶

Two men, who were perhaps one, wrote, about 1436, treatises on the family and its governance. Agnolo Pandolfini was probably the author of an eloquent Trattato del governo della famiglia; Leon Battista Alberti, soon afterward, composed a Trattato della famiglia, whose third book, “Economico,” is so largely similar to the earlier treatise that some have thought the two works were different forms of one essay by Alberti. Perhaps they are both genuine, so alike because they both based themselves upon Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Pandolfini’s performance is the better. Like the Rucellai, he was a man of means, serving Florence as diplomat, and contributing generously to public causes. He wrote his treatise toward the end of a long life, and cast it into the form of a dialogue with his three sons. They ask him should they seek public office; he advises against it, as necessitating acts of dishonesty, cruelty, and theft, and as exposing one to suspicion, envy, and abuse. The sources of a man’s happiness lie not in public office or fame, but in his wife and children, his economic success, his good repute, and his friends. A man should marry a wife sufficiently younger than himself to submit to his instruction and molding; and he should teach her, in the early years of their marriage, the obligations of motherhood and the arts of household management. A prosperous life comes from the economical and orderly use of health, talent, time, and money: of health through continence, exercise, and a moderate diet; of talent through study and the formation of honest character by religion and example; of time through shunning idleness; and of money through a careful accounting and balancing of income, expenditure, and savings. The wise man will invest first of all in a farm or estate, so arranged as to provide him and his family not only with a country residence, but with corn, wine, oil, fowl, wood, and as many as possible of the other necessaries of life. It is well also to have a house in the city, so that the children may use the educational facilities there, and learn some of the industrial arts.⁶⁷ But the family should spend as much of the year as possible in the villa and the country:

While every other possession causes work and danger, fear and disappointment, the villa brings a great and honorable advantage; the villa is always true and kind.… In spring the green trees and the song of the birds will make you joyful and hopeful; in autumn a moderate exertion will bring forth a hundredfold; all through the year melancholy will be banished from you. The villa is the spot where good and honest men love to congregate…. Hasten thither, and fly from the pride of the rich, and the dishonor of evil men.⁶⁸

To which one Giovanni Campano answered for a million million peasants: “Had I not been born a rustic, I should readily have been touched with pleasure” by these descriptions of rural happiness; however, having been a farmer, “what to you are delights are to me a bore.”⁶⁹

VII. PUBLIC MORALITY

Pandolfini was right in at least one judgment—that commercial and public morality was the least attractive side of Renaissance life. Then, as now, success, not virtue, was the standard by which men were judged; even the righteous Pandolfino prays for wealth rather than for immortal life. Then, as now, men itched for money, and stretched their consciences to grasp it. Kings and princes betrayed their allies, and broke their most solemn pledges, at the call of gold. Artists were no better: many of them took advance payments, failed to finish or begin the work, but kept the money just the same. The papal court itself gave a high example of money lust; hear again the greatest historian of the papacy:

A deep-rooted corruption had taken possession of nearly all the officials of the Curia…. The inordinate number of gratuities and exactions had passed all bounds. Moreover, on all sides deeds were dishonestly manipulated, and even falsified, by the officials. No wonder that there arose from all parts of Christendom the loudest complaints about the corruption and financial extortions of the papal officials. It was even said that in Rome everything had its price.⁷⁰

The Church still condemned all taking of interest as usury. Preachers inveighed against it; cities—Piacenza, for example—sometimes forbade it under pain of exclusion from the sacraments and from Christian burial. But the lending of money at interest went on, because such loans were indispensable in an expanding commercial and industrial economy. Laws were passed prohibiting a higher rate than twenty per cent, but we hear of cases where thirty per cent was charged. Christians competed with Jews in moneylending, and the town council of Verona complained that the Christians exacted harder terms than the Jews;⁷¹ public resentment, however, fell chiefly upon the Jews, and occasionally led to outbreaks of antisemitic violence. The Franciscans met the problem for the most helpless borrowers by establishing, through gifts and legacies, monti di pietà, funds (literally heaps) of charity, from which they made loans to the needy, at first without interest. The first of these was organized at Orvieto in 1463; soon every major city had one. Their growth involved expenditures of administration; and the Fifth Lateran Council (1515) granted the Franciscans the right to charge for each loan an amount necessary to cover the costs of management. Instructed by this experience, some theologians of the sixteenth century allowed a moderate interest on loans.⁷² Through the competition of the monti di pietà, and probably more through the increasing competence and rivalry of the professional bankers, the rate of interest fell rapidly during the sixteenth century.

Industry became more ruthless with its size, and with the disappearance of a personal relationship between employer and employed. Under feudalism the serf had enjoyed certain rights along with his burdensome dues: in sickness, economic depression, war, and old age his lord was expected to take care of him. In the cities of Italy the guilds performed something of this function for the better class of labor; but in general the “free” laborer was free to starve when he could find no work. When he found it he had to take it on the employer’s terms, and these were hard. Every invention and improvement in production and finance added to profits, rarely to wages. Businessmen were as severe with one another as with their employees; we hear of their many tricks in competition, their deceptive contracts, their innumerable frauds;⁷³ when they co-operated it was to ruin their competitors in another town. However, there were instances of a fine sense of honor among many Italian merchants; and the Italian financiers had the best reputation in Europe for integrity.⁷⁴

Social morality was a blend of violence and chastity. In the correspondence of the times we find many evidences of a tender and kindly spirit; and the Italians could not compete with the Spaniards in ferocity, or with the French soldiery in wholesale butchery. Yet no nation in Europe could match the endless merciless slander that swept around all prominent persons in Rome; and who but the Italians of the Renaissance could have called Aretino divine? Private violence flourished. Family feuds were refreshed by the breakdown of custom and belief, and the inadequate administration of the laws; men took vengeance into their own hands, and families murdered one another for generations. At Ferrara, as late as 1537, dueling to the death was legal and practised; even boys were allowed to fight each other with knives in these legal lists.⁷⁵ The strife of parties was bitterer than anywhere else in Europe. Crimes of violence were innumerable. Assassins could be bought almost as cheaply as indulgences. The palaces of Roman nobles swarmed with bravi, thugs ready to kill at a nod from their lords. Everyone had a dagger, and brewers of poison found many customers; at last the people of Rome could hardly believe in the natural death of any man of prominence or wealth. Important personages required that all food or drink served to them should first be tasted by another in their presence. Strange stories were told in Rome of a venenum atterminatum, a poison that took effect only after an interval long enough to cover up the trail of the poisoner. A man had to live on the alert in those days; any evening, if he left the house, he might be ambushed and robbed, and be lucky not to be killed; even in church he was not safe; and on the highways he had to be ready for brigands. The Renaissance mind, living amid these dangers, had to be as sharp as an assassin’s blade.

Sometimes cruelty was collective and contagious. At Arezzo, in 1502, a riot broke out against an oppressive Florentine commission; hundreds of Florentines in Arezzo were slain in the streets; whole families were wiped out. One victim was stripped naked and hanged, and a lighted torch was thrust between his buttocks; whereupon the jolly crowd nicknamed the corpse il sodomita.⁷⁶ Tales of violence, cruelty and lust were as popular as superstition. The court of Ferrara, brilliant with poetry and art, was ghastly with princely crimes and royal punishments. The irresponsibility of despots like the Visconti and the Malatestas provided a model and stimulus for the amateur violence of the people.

The morals of war worsened with time. In the early days of the Renaissance almost all battles were modest engagements of mercenaries, who fought without frenzy and knew when to stop; victory was judged won as soon as a few men had fallen; and a live ransomable prisoner was worth more than a dead enemy. As the condottieri became more powerful, and armies larger and more costly, troops were allowed to plunder captured cities in lieu of regular pay; resistance to plunder led to the massacre of the inhabitants, and ferocity grew at the smell of the blood it shed. Even so, the cruelty of the Italians in war was far exceeded by the invading Spanish and French. When the French took Capua in 1501, says Guicciardini, they “committed great slaughter… and women of all ranks and qualities, even such as were consecrated to the service of God… fell a sacrifice to their lust or avarice; many of these poor creatures were afterwards sold at Rome for a small price,”⁷⁷—apparently to Christians. The enslavement of prisoners of war increased as the wars of the Renaissance progressed.

There were instances of fine loyalty of man to man, of citizen to state; but by and large the development of cunning put a premium on deceit. Generals sold themselves to the highest bidder, and then, in mid-campaign, negotiated with the enemy for a higher price. Governments too changed sides in the middle of a war, and allies became foes by the scratch of a pen. Princes and popes violated safe-conducts given by them;⁷⁸ governments consented to the secret assassination of their enemies in other states.⁷⁹ Traitors could be found in any city or camp: instance Bernardino del Corte, who sold Lodovico’s Castello to France; the Swiss and Italians who betrayed Lodovico to the French; Francesco Maria della Rovere, who kept his papal troops from going to the rescue of the pope in 1527; Malatesta Baglioni, who sold out Florence in 1530…. As religious belief declined, the notion of right and wrong was replaced, in many minds, by that of practicality; and as governments seldom enjoyed the authority of legitimation by time, the habit of obedience to law lapsed, and custom had to be supplanted by force. Against the tyranny of governments the only recourse was tyrannicide.

Corruption ran through every department of administration. In Siena the bureau of finance had finally to be put into the hands of a saintly monk, since everybody else had embezzled. Except in Venice, the courts were notoriously venal. One of Sacchetti’s stories tells of a judge who was bribed with the gift of an ox; but the opponent sent the judge a cow and a calf, and won his case.⁸⁰ Justice was expensive; the poor had to get along without it, and found it cheaper to kill than to litigate. Law itself was making some progress, but chiefly in theory. At Padua and Bologna, Pisa and Perugia, there were famous jurists—Cino da Pistoia, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, Baldo degli Ubaldi—whose reinterpretation of Roman law dominated jurisprudence for two centuries. Nautical and commercial law expanded as foreign trade increased. Giovanni da Legnano opened a path for Grotius with a Tractatus de bello (1360), the earliest known work on the laws of war.

But the practice of law was less excellent than its theory. Though police protection of life and property was taking form, especially in Florence, it could not keep abreast of crime. Lawyers abounded. Torture continued to be used in the examination of witnesses as well as of the accused. Punishments were barbarous. In Bologna a convict might be suspended in a cage from one of the leaning towers, and left to fester in the sun;⁸¹ in Siena a condemned man was slowly torn to pieces with red-hot pincers while bound to a cart slowly moving through the streets;⁸² in Milan, under Petrarch’s host Giovanni Visconti, prisoners were subjected to piecemeal mutilation.⁸³ Early in the sixteenth century the custom began of condemning prisoners to pull the heavy oars of galleys; so the ships of Julius II were manned by galley slaves chained by the leg.⁸⁴

Against these barbarities we may place the high development of organized charity. Every man who made a will left a sum to be distributed among the poor of his parish. Since beggars were numberless, some churches provided the equivalent of modern “soup kitchens”; so the church of Santa Maria in Campo Santo, at Rome, fed thirteen beggars daily, and two thousand on Mondays and Fridays.⁸⁵ Hospitals, lazarettos, asylums for incurables, for the poor, for orphans, for destitute pilgrims, for reformed prostitutes, were numerous in Renaissance as in medieval Italy. Pistoia and Viterbo were celebrated for the scope of their charities. At Mantua Lodovico Gonzaga established the Ospedale Maggiore for the care of the poor and infirm, and gave it three thousand ducats a year of governmental funds.⁸⁶ At Venice a society known as the Pellegrini, including in its membership Titian and the two Sansovini, provided mutual aid to its members, dowered poor girls, and practised other charities. Florence in 1500 had seventy-three civic organizations devoted to works of charity. The Confraternità della Misericordia, founded in 1244 but allowed to decay, was restored in 1475; its members were laymen who visited the sick, practised other charities, and earned the love of the people by their courageous attendance upon victims of the plague; their silent black-robed processions are still among the most impressive sights of Florence.⁸⁷ Venice had a similar Confraternità di San Rocco; Rome had a Sodality of the Dolorosa, now 504 years old; and Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici founded in 1519 the Confraternità della Carità to take care of poor persons above the mendicant class, and to provide decent burial for the destitute. The private charity of unrecorded millions lent some mitigation to the struggle of man against man, nature, and death.

VIII. MANNERS AND AMUSEMENTS

Amid violence and dishonesty, and the boisterous life of university students, and the rough humor and kindliness of peasant and proletaire, good manners grew as one of the arts of the Renaissance. Italy now led Europe in personal and social hygiene, dress, table manners, cooking, conversation, and recreations; and in all of these except dress Florence claimed to lead Italy. Florence patriotically mourned the filth of other cities, and Italians made Tedesco, German, a synonym for coarseness of language and life.⁸⁸ The old Roman habit of frequent bathing continued in the educated classes; the well-to-do displayed their finery and “took the waters” at various spas, and drank sulphurous streams as an annual penance to purge digestive sins. Male dress was as ornate as female, except for jewelry: tight sleeves and colored hose, and such wondrous baggy bonnets as Raphael caught on Castiglione. Hose ran up the legs to the loins, splitting men into prancing absurdities; but above the hips a man could be elegant in velvet tunic and silk frills and ruffles of lace; even gloves and shoes sported wisps of lace. At a tournament given by Lorenzo de’ Medici his brother Giuliano wore garments costing 8000 ducats.⁸⁹

A revolution in table manners came in the fifteenth century with the increasing substitution of a fork for the fingers in carrying food to the mouth. Thomas Coryat, touring Italy about 1600, was struck by the novel custom, “which,” he wrote, “is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels”; and he shared in introducing the idea into England.⁹⁰ Knives, forks, and spoons were of brass, sometimes of silver—which was lent out to neighbors preparing banquets. Meals were modest except on such outstanding occasions or at state functions; then excess was compulsory. Spices—pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, juniper, ginger, etc.—were used in abundance to flavor food and stimulate thirst; hence every host offered his guests a variety of wines. The reign of garlic in Italy can be traced back to 1548, but doubtless had begun long before. There was very little drunkenness or gluttony; the Italians of the Renaissance, like the later French, were gourmets, not gourmands. When men ate apart from the women of their families they might invite a courtesan or two, as Aretino did when he entertained Titian. More careful people would grace the meal with music, poetic improvisations, and educated conversation.

The art of conversation—bel parlare—to speak with intelligence, urbanity, courtesy, clarity, and wit—was reinvented by the Renaissance. Greece and Rome had known it, and here and there in medieval Italy—as at the courts of Frederick II and Innocent III—it had been kept precariously alive. Now in Lorenzo’s Florence, in Elisabetta’s Urbino, in Leo’s Rome, it flourished again: nobles and their ladies, poets and philosophers, generals and scholars, artists and musicians met in the companionship of minds, quoted famous authors, made an occasional obeisance to religion, graced their language with a light fantastic touch, and basked in one another’s audience. Such conversation was so admired that many essays and treatises were cast in dialogue form to appropriate its elegance. In the end the game was carried to excess; language and thought became too precious and refined; an enervating dilettantism softened manliness. Urbino became Rambouillet in France, and Molière attacked les précieuses ridicules just in time to save the art of good converse for France.

Despite the preciosity of a few, Italian speech enjoyed a freedom of subject and epithet that would not be allowed by social manners today. Since general conversation was rarely heard by unmarried women of good character, it was assumed that sex might be openly discussed. But beyond this, and even in the highest male circles, there was a looseness of sexual jest, a gay freedom in poetry, a coarse obscenity in drama, that seem to us now among the less presentable aspects of the Renaissance. Educated men could scribble lewd verses on statuary, the refined Bembo wrote in praise of Priapus.⁹¹ Youths competed in obscenity and profanity to prove their maturity. Men of all classes swore great oaths and curses, often involving blasphemy of the most sacred names in the Christian faith. And yet the phrases of courtesy had never been so flowery, forms of address had never been so gracious; women kissed the hand of any intimate male friend on meeting or leaving him, and men kissed the hand of a woman; presents were ever passing from friend to friend; and tact of word and deed reached a development that seemed unattainable in northern Europe. Italian manuals of manners became favored texts beyond the Alps.

The same was true of Italian handbooks of dancing, fencing, and other recreations; in recreation, as in conversation and profanity, Italy led the Christian world. On summer evenings girls danced in the squares of Florence, and the most graceful won a silver garland; in the villages young men and women danced on the green. In homes and at formal balls women danced with women or men, and men with men or women; in any case the aim was grace. In the Renaissance the ballet flourished; the poetry of motion was added to the arts.

Cardplaying was even more popular than dancing; in the fifteenth century it became a mania in all classes; Leo X was an addict. Often it involved gambling; recall how Cardinal Raffaello Riario won 14,000 ducats in two games with the son of Innocent VIII. Men gambled also with dice, and sometimes loaded them.⁹² This too became a passion, which legislation vainly sought to moderate. In Venice gambling ruined so many noble families that the Council of Ten twice forbade the sale of cards or dice, and called upon servants to report masters violating these ordinances.⁹³ The monte di pietà established by Savonarola in 1495 required of borrowers a pledge to avoid gambling at least till the loan had been paid.⁹⁴ Sedate people brooded over chess, and fondled expensive sets; Giacomo Loredano at Venice had chessmen valued at 5000 ducats.

Young men had their special games, mostly in the open air. The upperclass Italian was trained to ride, wield sword and lance, and tilt in tournaments. For such contests the towns, on certain holidays, roped off space in a square, usually convenient to windows and balconies whence the ladies could encourage their knights. As these combats proved insufficiently mortal, some rash youths, in the Roman Colosseum in 1332, introduced the bullfight, with a man on foot armed only with a spear; on that occasion eighteen knights, all of old Roman families, were killed, and only eleven bulls.⁹⁵ Such contests were occasionally repeated in Rome and Siena, but never caught the Italian taste. Horse racing was more popular, and aroused the enthusiasm of Romans, Sienese, and Florentines alike. Hunting, falconry, foot races, boat regattas, tennis, and boxing rounded out the sports, and kept the Italians individually in form, while collectively the defense of the cities was left to mercenary aliens.

All in all it was a gay life despite its toils and risks, its natural and supernatural terrors. City folk had the pleasure of walking or riding out to the countryside, to the banks of the rivers or the shores of the sea; they cultivated flowers to adorn their homes and persons, and, by their villas, carved stately gardens into geometrical forms. The Church was generous with holydays, and the state added holidays of its own. Water festivals were held on the Venetian lagoons, on the Arno at Venice, the Mincio at Mantua, the Ticino at Milan. Or, on special days, great processions moved down the city streets, with floats and banners designed for the guilds by artists of international renown; bands played, pretty girls sang and danced, dignitaries marched; and in the evening fireworks shot their evanescent wonder into the sky. On Holy Saturday, in Florence, three flints brought from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem lit a taper that lit a candle that-carried along a wire by a mechanical dove—reached and set off the fireworks in the Carro or emblematic car of state in the piazza before the cathedral. On Corpus Christi the parade would be halted to hear a cantata sung by a choir of girls and boys, or see an episode of Scriptural history or pagan mythology enacted by some confraternity. If a great dignitary came to town he might be received with a trionfo, a procession arranged with chariots in the manner of a Roman triumph for a victorious general. When Leo X visited his beloved Florence in 1513, all the city turned out to watch his triumphal car—decorated and painted by Pontormo—pass under great arches that spanned the central street; seven other chariots moved in that cavalcade, bearing impersonations of famous figures in Roman history; on the last a naked boy, covered with gilt, represented the coming, with Leo, of the Golden Age; but the boy died shortly afterward from the effect of the gilt.⁹⁶

At carnival time the processional floats in Florence might symbolize some idea like Prudence, Hope, Fear, Death, or the elements, the winds, the seasons, or tell in pantomime a story like Paris and Helen, or Bacchus and Ariadne, with songs appropriate to each scene; for such a “masque” Lorenzo wrote his famous ode to youth and joy. On those carnival nights everyone from urchins to cardinals wore masks, played pranks, and made love, with a freedom that revenged itself in advance for the restraints of Lent. In 1512, when Florence seemed still prosperous, but unsuspected misfortunes were only a few months away, Piero di Cosimo and Francesco Granacci designed for a carnival pageant a “Masque of the Triumph of Death”: an enormous triumphal car, drawn by black buffaloes, was covered with a black cloth on which were painted skeletons and white crosses; in the car stood a colossal figure of Death with a scythe in his hand; around him were tombs, and lugubrious figures on whose black robes were painted white bones gleaming in the dark; and behind the car masked figures walked, whose black hoods were painted with death heads both in front and behind. From the tombs on the cars rose other figures, painted to seem only bones; and these skeletons chanted a song reminding men that all must die. Before and after the car came a cavalcade of decrepit horses, bearing the bodies of dead men.⁹⁷ So, at the height of carnival, Piero di Cosimo, echoing Savonarola, pronounced his judgment on the pleasures of Italy, and his prophecy of the doom to come.

IX. DRAMA

In such masques and carnival fetes the Italian drama had one of its progenitors. For often some scene, usually from sacred history, would be performed on one of the floats or cars, or on temporary stages at points on the procession route. But the primary source of the Italian drama was the divozione, an episode of the Christian story acted by the members of any guild, sometimes by professional players belonging to a confraternity that made a business of presenting such spectacles. The texts of several divozioni have come down through time, and show a surprising dramatic power; so the Virgin, finding Christ in Jerusalem and then again losing him, searches frantically for him, crying out: “O my so loving Son! O my Son, where have you gone? O my so gracious Son, through what gate have you gone? O my divine Son, you were so sorrowful when you left me! Tell me, for the love of God, where, where has my Son gone?”⁹⁸

In the fifteenth century, especially in Florence, a more developed form of drama, the sacra rappresentazione, was played in the oratory of a guild, or in the refectory of a convent, or in a field or public square. The scenic arrangements for these performances were often complex and ingenious: skies were simulated by vast awnings painted with stars; clouds were represented by masses of wool suspended and swaying in the air; angels were impersonated by boys supported aloft on metal frames concealed in waving draperies. The libretto was usually in poetic form, accompanied with music on the viol or the lute. Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Pulci were among the poets who wrote words for such religious plays. Politian, in his Orfeo, adapted the form of the sacra rappresentazione to a pagan theme.

Meanwhile other components of Italian life were sharing in the birth of Italian drama. The farse or farces that had long been played by passing mummers in the medieval towns contained the germ of Italian comedy. Some players excelled in improvising dialogue for simple scenarios or plots; this commedia dell’ arte was a favorite vehicle of the Italian genius for satire and burlesque. In such farces the traditional masks or characters of popular comedy took form and name: Pantalone, Arlecchino, Pulcinella or Punchinello.

The humanists played their part in the complex of factors leading to the drama by restoring the texts, and arranging performances, of ancient Roman comedies. Twelve plays of Plautus were discovered in 1427, and served as an additional stimulus. At Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Siena, Rome the comedies of Plautus and Terence were staged, and the old classic tradition soared over centuries to form again a secular theater. In 1486 the Menaechmi of Plautus was for the first time presented in Italian, and the transition from ancient to Renaissance drama was fully prepared. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the religious drama lost its hold on educated audiences in Italy; pagan subjects increasingly replaced Christian themes; and when native dramatists like Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Aretino wrote plays, it was in the ribald style of Plautus, a world away from the once-beloved stories of Mary and Christ. All the old scenes of Roman comedy, all the superficial plots turning on mistaken sex or identity or rank, all the stock characters, including panders and prostitutes, with which Plautus had pleased the groundlings, all the old plebian coarseness and rough play, reappeared in these Italian comedies.