The Renaissance

Despite the preservation of Seneca’s plays, and the recovery of the Greek drama, tragedy never acquired a standing on the Renaissance stage. Even the upper classes wished to be amused rather than deepened, and turned a cold eye upon Gian Trissino’s Sophonisba (1515), and Giovanni Rucellai’s Rosamunda, which in the same year was performed in the Rucellai gardens at Florence before Leo X.

It was the misfortune of Italian comedy that it took form when Italian morals were at nadir. That such plays as Bibbiena’s Calandra and Machiavelli’s Mandragola could satisfy the tastes of the Italian upper classes, even at refined Urbino, and could be performed before popes without arousing protest, reveals again how intellectual freedom can comport with moral deterioration. When the Counter Reformation came with the Council of Trent (1545f), the morals of clergy and laity were severely censored, and the comedy of the Renaissance was banished from the amusements of Italian society.

X. MUSIC

It was a redeeming feature of Italian comedy that ballets, pantomimes, and concerts were presented as intermezzi between the acts. For next to love itself, music was the chief recreation and consolation of every class in Italy. Montaigne, traveling in Tuscany in 1581, was “astounded to see peasants with lutes in their hands, and, beside them, shepherds reciting Ariosto by heart”; but this, he adds, “is what we may see in all of Italy.”⁹⁹ Renaissance painting has a thousand representations of people playing music, from the luting angels at the Madonna’s feet in so many Coronations, and Melozzo’s serenading seraphim, to the quiet exaltation of the man at the harpischord in The Concert; and note the boy—whom we can hardly believe to be the painter himself—in the center of Sebastiano del Piombo’s Three Ages of Man. The literature likewise conveys a picture of a people singing or playing music in their homes, at their work, on the street, in music academies, monasteries, nunneries, churches, in processions, masques, trionfi, and pageants, in religious or secular plays, in the lyric passages and interludes of dramas, in such outings as Boccaccio imagined in the Decameron. Rich men kept a variety of musical instruments in their homes, and arranged private musicales. Women organized clubs for the study and performance of music. Italy was—is—mad about music.

Folk song flourished at all times, and learned music periodically rejuvenated itself at that fount; popular melodies were adapted for complex madrigals, for hymns, even for passages in music for the Mass. “In Florence,” says Cellini, “people were wont to meet on the public streets of a summer night” to sing and dance.¹⁰⁰ Street singers—canton di piazza—strummed their sad or merry notes on handsome lutes; people gathered to sing laudes, hymns of praise, to the Virgin before her street or roadside shrines; and in Venice mating songs rose to the moon from a hundred gondolas, or throaty lovers hopefully serenaded hesitant lasses in the mystic shadows of labyrinthine canals. Almost every Italian could sing, and nearly as many could sing in simple vertical harmony. Hundreds of these popular part songs have come down to us under the picturesque name of frottole, little fruits; usually short, usually amorous; arranged for a dominant soprano supported by tenor, alto, and bass. Whereas in previous centuries the tenor voice had “held” the melody and so derived its name, now in the fifteenth the air was carried by the soprano—so called because its music was written above the rest. This part did not need a female voice; as often as not it was sung by a boy, or by the falsetto of an adult male. (Castrati did not appear in the papal choir till 1562.)¹⁰¹

Among the educated classes considerable knowledge of music was required. Castiglione demands of his courtier or gentleman some amateur proficiency in music, “which not only doth make sweet the minds of men, but also many times doth wild beasts tame.”¹⁰² Every person of culture was expected to read simple music at sight, accompany himself on some instrument, and take part in an impromptu musicale.¹⁰³ Sometimes people joined in a ballata that involved a union of singing, dancing, and instrumental music. Universities after 1400 offered courses and degrees in music; there were hundreds of music academies; Vittorino da Feltre founded a school of music at Mantua about 1425; our “conservatories” of music are called so because in Naples many orphanages (conservatori) were used as music schools.¹⁰⁴ Music was further spread by the adaptation of printing to musical notation; about 1476 Ulrich Hahn printed at Rome a complete missal with movable type for notes and lines; and in 1501 Ottaviano de’ Petrucci began at Venice the commercial printing of motets and frottole.

At the courts music was more prominent than any other art except those of personal adornment. Usually the ruler chose a favorite church, whose choir became the object of his care; he paid goodly sums to attract to it the finest available voices and instrumentalists from Italy, France, and Burgundy; he trained new singers from their childhood, as Federigo did at Urbino; and he expected the members of the choir to perform also for his state ceremonies and court festivities. Guillaume Dufay of Burgundy directed music at the court of the Malatestas in Rimini and Pesaro, and at the papal chapel in Rome, for a quarter of a century (1419–44). Galeazzo Maria Sforza about 1460 organized two chapel choirs, and brought to them from France Josquin Deprès, then the most famous composer in western Europe. When Lodovico Sforza welcomed Leonardo to Milan it was as a musician; and it is to be noted that Leonardo was accompanied, in going from Florence to Milan, by Atalante Migliorotti, a celebrated musician and maker of musical instruments. A still more famous maker of lyres, lutes, organs, and clavichords was Lorenzo Gusnasco of Pavia, who made Milan one of his homes. The court of Lodovico was flush with singers: Narcisso, Testagrossa, Cordier of Flanders, and Cristoforo Romano, chastely loved by Beatrice. Pedro Maria of Spain conducted concerts in the palace and for the public; and Franchino Gaffuri founded and taught in a famous private music school in Milan. Isabella d’Este was devoted to music, made it the chief theme of decoration in her inner sanctum, and herself played several instruments. When she ordered a clavichord from Lorenzo Gusnasco she specified that the keyboard should respond to a light touch, “for our hands are so delicate that we cannot play well if the keys are too stiff.”¹⁰⁵ At her court lived the leading lutanist of his day, Marchetto Cara, and Bartolommeo Tromboncino, who composed such alluring madrigals that when he killed his unfaithful wife no punishment was meted out to him, and the matter was passed over as a discord soon to be resolved.

Finally the cathedrals and the churches, the monasteries and the nunneries resounded with music. In Venice, Bologna, Naples, Milan, the nuns sang Vespers so movingly that crowds flocked to hear them. Sixtus IV organized the famous Sistine Chapel choir; Julius II added, in St. Peter’s, a capella lulia, or Julian chapel choir, which trained singers for the Sistine choir. This was the summit of the Latin world’s musical art in the Renaissance; to it came the greatest singers from all Roman Catholic countries. Plain chant was still the letter of canon law in church music; but here and there the ars nova of France—a form of complex counterpoint—made its way into the Roman choirs and prepared for Palestrina and Victoria. Once it had been held undignified to have any other musical instrument than the organ accompany a church choir; but in the sixteenth century a variety of instruments were brought in to give church music some of the grace and adornment of secular performances. At St. Mark’s in Venice the Flemish master, Adrian Willaert of Bruges, presided over the choirs for thirty-five years, and trained them to such performances as made Rome envious. At Florence Antonio Squarcialupi organized a School of Harmony, of which Lorenzo was a member. For a generation Antonio reigned over the cathedral choir, and the great duomo rang with music that stilled all philosophic doubt. Leon Battista Alberti was a doubter, but when the choir sang he believed:

All other modes of singing weary with repetition; only religious music never palls. I know not how others are affected; but for myself those hymns and psalms of the Church produce on me the very effect for which they were designed, soothing all disturbance of the soul, and inspiring a certain ineffable languor full of reverence toward God. What heart of man is so rude as not to be softened when he hears the rhythmic rise and fall of those voices, complete and true, in cadences so sweet and flexible? I assure you that I never listen… to the Greek words (Kyrie eleison) that call on God for aid against our human wretchedness, without weeping. Then, too, I ponder what power music brings with it to soften us and soothe.¹⁰⁶

Despite all this popularity, music was the one art in which Italy lagged behind France during most of the Renaissance. Shorn of papal revenues by the flight of the popes to Avignon, and with the courts of the despots still culturally immature in the fourteenth century, Italy lacked then the means and the spirit for the higher grades of music. She produced lovely madrigals (a word of uncertain derivation), but these songs, modeled on those of the Provençal troubadours, were set to a musical frame of such strictly regulated polyphony that the form died of its own rigidity.

The pride of trecento music in Italy was Francesco Landini, organist of San Lorenzo in Florence. Though blind from his childhood, he became one of the finest and most loved musicians of his time, honored as an organist, lutanist, composer, poet, and philosopher. But even he took his lead from France; his two hundred secular compositions applied to Italian lyrics the ars nova that had captured France a generation before. The “new art” was doubly new: it accepted binary rhythms as well as the triple time previously required in the music of the Church; and it devised a more complex and flexible musical notation. Pope John XXII, who hurled his thunderbolts in all directions, aimed one at the ars nova as fanciful and degenerate, and his prohibition had some effect in discouraging musical development in Italy. However, John XXII could not live forever, though at times it seemed possible; after his death at the age of ninety (1334) the new art triumphed in the learned music of France, and shortly thereafter in Italy.

At Avignon French and Flemish singers and composers constituted the papal choir. When the papacy returned to Rome it brought with it a large number of French, Flemish, and Dutch composers and singers; and for a century these alien musicians and their successors dominated the music of Italy. As late as Sixtus IV all the voices in the papal choir were from beyond the Alps; and a like foreign supremacy ruled in the music of the courts in the fifteenth century. When Squarcialupi died (c. 1475), Lorenzo chose a Dutchman, Heinrich Ysaac, to succeed him as organist in the cathedral at Florence. Heinrich wrote music for some of the canti carnascialeschi, and for Politian’s lyrics, and he taught the future Leo X to love—even to compose—French songs.¹⁰⁷ For a time the chansons of France were sung in Italy, as once Italy had recited the lays of the troubadours.

This invasion of Italy by French musicians, preceding by a century its invasion by French armies, produced toward 1520 a revolution in Italian music. For these men from the north—and the Italians whom they trained —were steeped in the ars nova, and applied it in setting to music the lyric poetry of Italy. In Petrarch, Ariosto, Sannazaro, and Bembo—later in Tasso and Guarini—they found delectable verses crying out for music; indeed, had not poetry always intended itself to be at least a recitative, if not a song? Petrarch’s canzoniere had already lured musicians; now every line of it was set to music, some stanzas a dozen times or more; Petrarch is the most completely musicked poet in world literature. Or there were little lyrics of unknown authorship but simple and viable sentiment, that touched the chords of every heart, and invited the strings of every instrument. E.g.:

One from the other borrowing leaves and flowers,

I saw fair maidens beneath summer trees,

Weaving bright garlands with low love ditties.

Mid that sweet sisterhood the loveliest

Turned her soft eyes to me and whispered, “Take!”

Love-lost I stood, and not a word I spake.

My heart she read, and her fair garland gave;

Therefore I am her servant to the grave.¹⁰⁸

To such verses the composers applied the full and complex music of the motet: polyphony in which all four parts—sung by four or eight voices-were of equal value, instead of three parts subserving one; and all the complex subtlety of counterpoint* and fugue wove the four independent rivulets of sound into a stream of harmony. So rose the Italian madrigal of the sixteenth century—one of the fairest flowers of Italian art. Whereas in Dante’s time music had been a handmaid to poetry, now it became a full-fledged partner, not obscuring the words, not slurring the sentiment, but uniting them with a music that made them doubly stir the soul, while delighting with its technical skill the educated mind.

Almost all the great composers of sixteenth-century Italy, even Palestrina, turned their art now and then to the madrigal. Philippe Verdelot, a Frenchman living in Italy, and Costanza Festa, an Italian, contest the honor of having first developed the new form, between 1520 and 1530; soon after them came the Arcadelt—a Fleming in Rome—mentioned by Rabelais.¹⁰⁹ In Venice Adrian Willaert relaxed from his duties as choir master at San Marco to compose the finest madrigals of his time.

Usually the madrigal was sung without instrumental accompaniment. Musical instruments were innumerable, but only the organ dared compete with the human voice. Instrumental music slowly developed in the early sixteenth century out of music forms originally intended for dances or choruses; so the pavane, the saltarello, and the saraband graduated from dance accompaniments to instrumental pieces, alone or in suite; and the music for a madrigal, played without song, became the instrumental canzone, the distant progenitor of the sonata,^109a and therefore of the symphony.

The organ was already in the fourteenth century almost as highly developed as today. The pedal board appeared in Germany and the Low Countries in that age, and was soon adopted in France and Spain; Italy delayed acceptance of it till the sixteenth century. By that time most large organs had two or three keyboards, with a variety of stops and couplers. Great church organs were themselves works of art, designed, carved, and painted by masters. The same love of form went into the making of other musical instruments. The lute—the favorite instrument of the home—was built of wood and ivory, shaped like a pear, pierced with sound holes in a graceful pattern, with a finger board divided by frets of silver or brass, and ending in a pegbox turned at a right angle to the neck. A pretty woman plucking the strings of a lute held in her lap made a picture that went to the head of many a sensitive Italian. Harps, citherns, psalters, dulcimers, and guitars were also favorites with musical fingers.

For those who preferred fiddling to plucking there were viols of diverse sizes, including the tenor viola da braccio, held on the arm, and the bass viola da gamba, resting against the leg. The latter became the later violoncello, and the viol, about 1540, became the violin. Wind instruments were less popular than the stringed; the Renaissance had the same objection that Alcibiades had raised to making music by puffing out the cheeks; nevertheless there were flutes and fifes (“pipes”), bagpipes, trumpets, horns, flageolets, and the shawm or oboe. Percussion instruments—drums, tabors, cymbals, tambourines, castanets—added their fury to the ensemble. All Renaissance musical instruments were of Oriental origin except for the keyboard that was added to other instruments besides the organ to indirectly strike or pluck the strings. The oldest of these keyboard instruments was the clavichord (clavis meaning key), which appeared in the twelfth century and had a sentimental resurrection in the days of Bach; here the strings were struck with little brass tangents operated by the keys. In the sixteenth century it was displaced by the clavicembalo or harpsichord, whose strings were plucked by points of quill or leather attached to wooden “jacks” that rose when the keys were depressed. The virginal was an English, the spinet an Italian, variant, of the harpsichord.

All these instruments were as yet subordinate to the voice; and the great virtuosos of the Renaissance were singers. But at the baptism of Alfonso of Ferrara in 1476 we hear of a feast in the Schifanoia Palace, at which a concert was given by a hundred trumpeters, pipers, and tambourine players. In the sixteenth century the Signory of Florence employed a regular band of musicians, of which Cellini was one. Performances by several instruments in concert were given in this period, but they were still for the aristocratic few. On the other hand solo instrumental performances were almost fanatically popular. Men went to church not always to pray but to hear a great organist like Squarcialupi or Orcagna. When Pietro Bono played the lute at the court of Borso in Ferrara the souls of the listeners, we are told, flew out of this world into another.¹¹⁰ The great executants were the happy favorites of a day, who asked no fame of posterity but received all their renown before their deaths.

Musical theory lagged a generation behind practice: performers innovated, professors denounced, then debated, then approved. Meanwhile the principles of polyphony, counterpoint, and fugue were formulated for easier instruction and transmission. The great musical feature of the Renaissance was not theory, nor even technical advances; it was the increasing secularization of music. In the sixteenth century it was no longer religious music that made the advances and experiments; it was the music of the madrigal and the courts. Side by side with philosophy and literature, and reflecting the pagan aspect of Renaissance art and the relaxation of morals, the music of sixteenth-century Italy escaped from ecclesiastical control, and sought inspiration in the poetry of love; the old conflict between religion and sex was resolved for a time in the triumph of Eros. The reign of the Virgin ended, the ascendancy of woman began. But under either rule music was the handmaid of the queen.

XI. PERSPECTIVE

Were the morals of Renaissance Italy really worse than those of other lands or times? It is difficult to make comparisons, since all evidence is a selection. The age of Alcibiades in Athens displayed much of the immorality of the Renaissance in sexual relations and political chicanery; it too practised abortion on a large scale, and cultivated erudite courtesans; it too liberated simultaneously the intellect and the instincts; and, anticipating Machiavelli, Sophists like Thrasybulus in Plato’s Republic attacked morality as weakness. Perhaps (for in these matters we are limited to vague impressions) there was less private violence in classic Greece than in Renaissance Italy, and a bit less of corruption in religion and politics. During an entire century of Roman history—from Caesar to Nero—we find greater corruption in government, and a worse breakdown of marriage, than in the Renaissance; but even in that epoch there remained many Stoic virtues in the Roman character; Caesar, with all his ambivalent capacity in bribery and love, was still the greatest general in a nation of generals.

The individualism of the Renaissance was another side of its intellectual vivacity, but compares unfavorably, in morals and politics, with the communal spirit of the Middle Ages. Political deceit, treachery, and crime were probably as rife in France, Germany, and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as in Italy, but those countries had the wisdom not to produce a Machiavelli to expound and expose the principles of their statecraft. Manners, not morals, were coarser north of the Alps than below them, except for a small class in France—exemplified by the Chevalier Bayard and Gaston de Foix—which still retained the better side of chivalry. Given equal opportunity, the French were as adept at adultery as the Italians; observe how readily they adopted syphilis; note the sexual melee in the fabliaux; count the twenty-four mistresses of Duke Philip of Burgundy, and the Agnès Sorels and Dianes de Poitiers of the French kings; read Brantôme.

Germany and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were too poor to rival Italy in immorality. Travelers from these countries were therefore astounded by the laxity of Italian life. Luther, visiting Italy in 1511, concluded that “if there is a hell, then Rome is built upon it; and this I have heard in Rome itself.”¹¹¹ Everyone knows the shocked judgment of Roger Ascham, the English scholar who visited Italy about 1550:

I was once in Italy myself; but I thank God my abode there was but nine days; and yet I saw in that little time, in one city, more liberty to sin than ever I heard tell in our noble city of London in nine years. I saw it was there as free to sin, not only without all punishment but also without any man’s marking, as it is free in the city of London to choose without all blame whether a man lust to wear shoe or pantocle.¹¹²

And he quotes as an established proverb the saying, Inglese Italianato è un diavolo incarnato: “An Englishman Italianate is a devil incarnate.”

We know the corruption of Italy better than that of transalpine Europe because we know more about Italy, and because the Italian laity made little effort to conceal its immorality, and sometimes wrote books defending it. However, Machiavelli, who wrote such a book, reckoned Italy as “more corrupt than all other countries; next come the French and the Spaniards”;¹¹³ he admired the Germans and the Swiss as still possessing many of the virile virtues of ancient Rome. We may diffidently conclude that Italy was more immoral because she was richer, weaker in government and the reign of law, and further advanced in that intellectual development which usually makes for a moral release.

The Italians made some laudable efforts to check license. The vainest of these efforts were the sumptuary regulations that in nearly every state forbade extravagance of immodesty of dress; the vanity of men and women overrode with sly persistence the occasional assiduity of the law. The popes inveighed against immorality, but were in some cases swept along with the stream; their attempts at reforming abuses in the Church were nullified by the inertia or vested interests of the clergy; they themselves were rarely as wicked as passionate history once painted them, but they were more concerned to re-establish the political power of the papacy than to restore the moral integrity of the Church. “In our corrupt times,” said Guicciardini, “the goodness of a pontiff is commended when it does not surpass the wickedness of other men.”¹¹⁴ Valiant attempts at reform were made by the great preachers of the time, men like St. Bernardino of Siena, Roberto da Lecce, San Giovanni da Capistrano, and Savonarola. Their sermons and their audiences were part of the color and character of the age. They denounced vice with a vivid detail that contributed to their popularity; they persuaded feudists to forswear revenge and live in peace; they induced governments to release insolvent debtors and let exiles return home; they brought hardened sinners back to long neglected sacraments.

Even these powerful preachers failed. The instincts formed through a hundred thousand years of hunting and savagery had re-emerged through the cracked shell of a morality that had lost the support of religious belief, of respected authority, and established law. The great Church that had once ruled kings could no longer govern or cleanse itself. The destruction of political liberty in state after state had dulled the civic sense that had enfranchised and ennobled the medieval communes; where there had been citizens there were now only individuals. Excluded from government and flush with wealth, men turned to the pursuit of pleasure, and foreign invasion surprised them in siren arms. The city-states had for two centuries directed their forces, their subtlety, and their treachery against one another; it was now impossible for them to unite against a common foe. Preachers like Savonarola, rebuffed in all pleas for reform, called down the judgment of heaven upon Italy, and predicted the destruction of Rome and the break-up of the Church.¹¹⁵ France, Spain, and Germany, weary of sending tribute to finance the wars of the Papal States and the luxuries of Italian life, looked with amazement and envy at a peninsula so shorn of will and power, so inviting in beauty and wealth. The birds of prey gathered to feast on Italy.

Fig. 47—RAPHAEL AND GIULIO ROMANO: The Transfiguration; Borghese Gallery, Rome PAGE 514

Fig. 48—MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: Tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici; New Sacristy, San Lorenzo, Florence PAGE 641

Fig. 49—TITIAN: Portrait of Aretino; Frick Gallery, New York PAGE 659

Fig. 50—TITIAN: Portrait of Pope Paul III; Museum, Naples PAGE 662

Fig. 51—TITIAN: Portrait of Pope Paul III; Museum, Naples PAGE 662

Fig. 52—TITIAN: Venus of Urbino; Pitti Palace, Florence PAGE 662

Fig. 53—TITIAN: Portrait of a Young Englishman; Pitti Palace, Florence PAGE 666

Fig. 54—TITIAN: Self-portrait; Prado, Madrid PAGE 666

Fig. 55—TINTORETTO: The Miracle of St. Mark; Academy, Venice PAGE 670

Fig. 56—TINTORETTO: Presentation of the Virgin; Santa Maria dell’ Orto, Venice PAGE 671

Fig. 57—PAOLO VERONESE: Self-portrait; Uffizi Gallery, Florence PAGE 681

Fig. 58—PAOLO VERONESE: Portrait of Daniele Barbaro; Pitti Palace, Florence PAGE 679

Fig. 59—PAOLO VERONESE: The Rape of Europa; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York PAGE 680

Fig. 60—PAOLO VERONESE: Mars and Venus; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York PAGE 680

Fig. 61—DANIELE DA VOLTERRA: Bust of Michelangelo Buonarroti; National Museum, Florence PAGE 721

CHAPTER XXI

The Political Collapse

1494–1534

I. FRANCE DISCOVERS ITALY: 1494–5¹

RECALL the situation of Italy in 1494. The city-states had grown through the rise of a middle class enriched by the development and management of commerce and industry. They had lost their communal freedom through the inability of semidemocratic governments to maintain order amid the feuds of families and the conflicts of classes. Their economy remained local in structure even while their fleets and products reached out to distant ports. They competed with one another more bitterly than with foreign states; they offered no concerted resistance to the expansion of French, German, and Spanish commerce into regions once dominated by Italy. Though Italy gave birth to the man who rediscovered America, it was Spain that financed him; trade followed in his wake, gold accompanied his return; the Atlantic nations flourished, and the Mediterranean ceased to be the favored home of the white man’s economic life. Portugal was sending ships around Africa to India and China, avoiding Moslem hindrances in the Near and Middle East; even the Germans were shipping through the mouths of the Rhine rather than over the Alps to Italy. Countries that had for a century bought Italian woolen products were now making their own; nations that had paid interest to Italian bankers were nursing their own financiers. Tithes, annates, Peter’s Pence, indulgence payments, and pilgrims’ coins were now the chief economic contribution of transalpine Europe to Italy; and soon a third of Europe would divert that flow. In this generation when the stored-up wealth of Italy raised her cities to their supreme brilliance and art, Italy was economically doomed.

She was also politically doomed. While she remained divided into warring economies and states, the development of a national economy was compelling and financing, in other European societies, the transition from feudal principalities to the monarchical state. France unified herself under Louis XI, reducing her barons to courtiers and her burghers to patriots; Spain unified herself by wedding Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile, and conquering Granada, and cementing religious unity with blood; England unified herself under Henry VII; and though Germany was almost as fragmentary as Italy, it acknowledged one king and emperor, and occasionally gave him money and soldiers to make war upon one or another of the Italian states. England, France, Spain, and Germany raised national armies out of their own people, and their aristocracies provided cavalry and leadership; the Italian cities had small forces of mercenaries inspired only by plunder, led by purchasable condottieri, and prejudiced against sustaining mortal injuries. It needed only one engagement to reveal to Europe the defenselessness of Italy.

Half the courts of Europe now seethed with diplomatic intrigue as to which should seize the plum. France claimed the first right, and with many reasons. Giangaleazzo Visconti had given his daughter Valentina in marriage (1387) to Louis, first Duke of Orléans, and, as the price of this comforting connection with a royal family, had recognized her right, and the right of her male issue, to succeed to the duchy of Milan in case his own direct male line should fail; which it did when Filippo Maria Visconti died (1447). His son-in-law, Francesco Sforza, then took Milan by right of his wife Bianca, Filippo Maria’s daughter; but Charles, Duke of Orléans, claimed Milan as Valentina’s son, denounced the Sforzas as usurpers, and proclaimed his resolve, when opportunity should offer, to appropriate the Italian principality.

Moreover, said the French, Charles, Duke of Anjou, had received the Kingdom of Naples from Pope Urban IV (1266) as reward for defending the papacy against the Hohenstaufen kings; Joanna II had bequeathed the Kingdom to René of Anjou (1435); Alfonso I of Aragon had claimed it through her temporary adoption of him as her son, and had by force established the house of Aragon on the Neapolitan throne. René tried and failed to recapture the kingdom; his legal right to it passed at his death to Louis XI, King of France; and in 1482 Sixtus IV, at odds with Naples, invited Louis to come and conquer Naples, “which,” said the Pope, “belongs to him.” About this time Venice, hard pressed in war by a league of Italian states, called in desperation to Louis to attack either Naples or Milan, preferably both. Louis was busy unifying France; but his son Charles VIII inherited his claim to Naples, listened to the Angevin-Neapolitan exiles at his court, noted that the crown of Naples was joined to that of Sicily, which carried with it the crown of Jerusalem; he conceived, or was sold, the grandiose idea of capturing Naples and Sicily, getting himself crowned King of Jerusalem, and then leading a crusade against the Turks. In 1489 Innocent VIII, quarreling with Naples, offered the Kingdom to Charles if he would come and take it. Alexander VI (1494) forbade Charles, on pain of excommunication, to cross the Alps; but Alexander’s enemy, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere—who later, as Julius II, would war to drive the French from Italy—came to Charles at Lyons, and urged him to invade Italy and depose Alexander. Savonarola added another invitation, hoping that Charles would depose Piero de’ Medici in Florence and Alexander in Rome; and many Florentines accepted the friar’s lead. Finally, Lodovico of Milan, fearing attack from Naples, offered Charles unimpeded passage through the territory of Milan whenever Charles should undertake a campaign against Naples.

So encouraged by half of Italy, Charles prepared to invade. To protect his flanks he ceded Artois and Franche-Comté to Maximilian of Austria, and Roussillon and Cerdagne to Ferdinand of Spain, and paid a large sum to Henry VII for renouncing English claims on Brittany. In March, 1494, he assembled his army at Lyons: 18,000 cavalry, 22,000 infantry. A fleet was sent to keep Genoa safe for France; on September 8 it recaptured Rapallo from a Neapolitan force that had landed there; and the unrestrained bloodiness of this first encounter shocked an Italy accustomed to reasonable slaughter. In that month Charles and his army crossed the Alps, and paused at Asti. Lodovico of Milan and Ercole of Ferrara went there to meet him, and Lodovico lent him funds. Charles disrupted the schedule by getting smallpox. Recovering, he led his troops through the Milanese into Tuscany. The Florentine frontier fortresses at Sarzana and Pietrasanta might have resisted him, but Piero de’ Medici came in person to surrender them, along with Pisa and Livorno. On November 17 Charles and half his army paraded through Florence; the populace admired the unprecedented cavalcade, grumbled at petty thefts by the soldiery, but noted with relief that they refrained from rape. In December Charles moved on toward Rome.

We have already looked at the meeting of King and Pope from Alexander’s point of view. Charles behaved with moderation: he asked only a free passage through Latium for his army, the custody of the papal prisoner Djem (who might be used as a pretender and ally in a campaign against the Turks), and Caesar Borgia’s company as a hostage. Alexander agreed; the army marched south (January 25, 1495), Borgia soon escaped, and Alexander was free to reform the lines of his diplomacy.

On February 22 Charles entered Naples in unresisted triumph, beneath a canopy of cloth of gold borne by four Neapolitan nobles, and acclaimed by the cheers of the populace. He showed his appreciation by reducing taxes and pardoning those who had opposed his coming; and at the request of the barons who ruled the hinterland he recognized the institution of slavery. Thinking himself secure, he relaxed to enjoy the climate and scenery; he wrote enthusiastically to the duke of Bourbon describing the gardens amid which he now lived, lacking only an Eve to be paradise; he marveled at the architecture, sculpture, and painting in the city, and planned to take a selection of Italian artists with him to France; meanwhile he dispatched to France a shipment of stolen art. Naples so charmed him that he forgot about Jerusalem and his crusade.

While he dallied in Naples, and his army enjoyed the women of the streets and the stews and caught or spread the “French disease,” trouble was organizing behind him. The Neapolitan nobles, instead of being rewarded for helping depose their king, were in many cases deprived of their estates for the benefit of former Angevin possessors, or to pay Charles’s debts to his servitors; all state offices were given to Frenchmen, and nothing could be obtained from them except by bribes offensively exceeding Neapolitan custom; the occupying army added insult to injury by their open contempt of the Italian people; in a few months the French had worn out their welcome, and earned a hatred that waited in fierce patience for a chance to expel the invaders.

On March 31, 1495, the resilient Alexander, the repentant Lodovico, the angry Ferdinand, the jealous Maximilian, the cautious Senate of Venice joined in a league for the united defense of Italy. King Charles, parading through Naples with a scepter in one hand and a ball—presumably the globe—in the other, took a month to realize that the new alliance was raising an army against him. On May 21 he left Naples in charge of his cousin the Count of Montpensier, and led half his army northward. At Fornovo, on the River Taro in the territory of Parma, his 10,000 troops found their passage blocked by an allied army of 40,000 men led by Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. There, on July 5, 1495, came the first real test of French vs. Italian arms and tactics. Gonzaga, though he himself fought bravely, mismanaged his forces, so that only half of them took part; the Italians were not mentally prepared to fight warriors who gave no quarter, and many of them fled; the Chevalier de Bayard, a lad of twenty, offered his men an inspiring example of reckless courage, and even the King fought valiantly. The battle was indecisive; both sides claimed victory; the French lost their baggage train, but remained masters of the field; and during the night they marched unimpeded to Asti, where Louis, third Duke of Orléans, awaited them with reinforcements. In October Charles, with damaged repute but a whole skin, was back in France.

The territorial results of the invasion were slight. Gonzalo, the “Great Captain,” drove the French out of Naples and Calabria, and restored the Aragonese dynasty in the person of Federigo III (1496). The indirect results of the invasion were endless. It proved the superiority of a national army to mercenary troops. The Swiss mercenaries were a temporary exception; armed with pikes eighteen feet long, and formed in solid battalions that presented a discouraging “hedgehog” to advancing cavalry, they were destined to many victories; but soon, at Marignano (1515), the invincibility of this revived Macedonian phalanx would be ended by improved artillery. It was probably in this war that cannon were first placed on carriages that allowed them to be readily manipulated for direction and range;² these carriages were drawn by horses, not (as hitherto in Italy) by oxen; and the French brought into action, says Guicciardini, such a number of “field pieces and battering cannon as Italy had never seen before.”³ The French knights, descendants of Froissart’s heroes, fought magnificently at Fornovo; but the knights too would soon yield to cannon. In the Middle Ages the arts of defense had outrun the means of attack, and had discouraged war; now attack was gaining on defense, and war became bloodier. The wars of Italy had heretofore hardly engaged the people, and had afflicted their fields rather than their lives; now they were to see all Italy ravaged and incarnadined. The Swiss learned in this year of war how fertile were the plains of Lombardy; they would hereafter invade them repeatedly. The French learned that Italy was divided into fragments that awaited a conqueror. Charles VIII lost himself in amours, and almost ceased to think of Naples, but his cousin and heir was of sterner stuff. Louis XII would try again.

II. THE ATTACK RENEWED: 1496–1505

Maximilian, “King of the Romans”—i.e., of the Germans—provided an interlude. He fretted at the thought that his great enemy, France, should be strengthened, and outflank him, by capturing Italy; he had heard how rich and fair and weak that land was, not yet a country but only a peninsula. He too had claims on Italy; technically the cities of Lombardy were still imperial fiefs, and he, head of the Holy Roman Empire, might legally give them to whomever he wished; indeed, had not Lodovico bribed him, with florins and another Bianca, to confer upon him the duchy of Milan? Moreover, many Italians invited him: both Lodovico and Venice were appealing to him (1496) to enter Italy and help them resist a threatened repetition of the French assault. Maximilian came, with a handful of troops; Venetian subtlety persuaded him to attack Livorno, the final outlet of Florence on the Mediterranean, and so weaken a Florence still allied with France and always competing with Venice. Maximilian’s campaign failed through inadequate co-ordination and support, and he returned to Germany only slightly a wiser man (December, 1496).

In 1498 the Duke of Orléans became Louis XII. As the grandson of Valentina Visconti he had not forgotten the claims of his family to Milan; and as a cousin of Charles VIII he inherited the claims of the Anjous to Naples. On the day of his coronation he assumed, among others, the titles of Duke of Milan, King of Naples and Sicily, and Emperor of Jerusalem. To clear his path he renewed a treaty of peace with England, and concluded another with Spain. By promising her Cremona and the lands east of the Adda, he lured Venice into signing an alliance with him “for the purpose of making war in common upon the Duke of Milan, Lodovico Sforza, and against everyone save the Lord Pope of Rome, for the purpose of restoring to the Most Christian King… the duchy of Milan as his rightful and olden patrimony.”⁴ A month later (March, 1499) he made an agreement with the Swiss cantons to supply him with soldiers in return for an annual subsidy of 20,000 florins. In May he brought Alexander VI into the alliance by giving to Caesar Borgia a French bride of royal blood, the duchy of Valentinois, and a pledge of aid in reconquering the Papal States for the papacy. Lodovico felt helpless against such a coalition; he fled to Austria; in three weeks his duchy disappeared into the realms of Venice and France; on October 6, 1499, Louis entered Milan in triumph, welcomed by nearly all Italy except Naples.

Indeed, all Italy but Venice and Naples was now under French domination or influence. Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna hastened to submit. Florence clung to her alliance with France as her only protection against Caesar Borgia. Ferdinand of Spain, though so closely kin to the Aragonese dynasty in Naples, entered into a secret compact at Granada (November 11, 1500) with the representatives of Louis, for the joint conquest of all Italy south of the Papal States. Alexander VI, needing French aid in reconquering these States, co-operated by issuing a bull that deposed Federigo III of Naples and confirmed the partition of the Kingdom between France and Spain.

In July, 1501, a French army under the Scot Stuart d’Aubigny, Caesar Borgia, and Lodovico’s traitorous favorite Francesco di San Severino marched through Italy to Capua, took and plundered it, and advanced upon Naples. Federigo, abandoned by all, yielded the city to the French in return for a comfortable refuge and annuity in France. Meanwhile el gran capitán, Gonzalo de Córdoba, won Calabria and Apulia for Ferdinand and Isabella; and Federigo’s son Ferrante, who surrendered Taranto after being promised his liberty by Gonzalo, was sent as a prisoner to Spain on Ferdinand’s demand. When the Spanish army came into contact with the French on the borders between Apulia and the Abruzzi, disputes arose over the boundary line between the two thefts; and to Alexander’s relief Spain and France went to war over the exact division of the spoils (July, 1502). “If the Lord had not put discord between France and Spain,” said the Pope to the Venetian ambassador, “where should we be?”⁵

For a time the fortunes of the new war favored the French. D’Aubigny’s forces overran almost all southern Italy, and Gonzalo shut up his troops in the fortified town of Barletta. There a medieval incident brightened a dismal war (February 13, 1503). Angered by the comment of a French officer that the Italians were an effeminate and dastardly people, the commander of an Italian regiment in the Spanish army challenged thirteen Frenchmen to fight thirteen Italians. It was agreed; the war was interrupted; and the hostile armies stood as spectators while the twenty-six combatants fought until all thirteen Frenchmen had been disabled by wounds and taken prisoner. Gonzalo, with the Spanish chivalry that often rivaled Spanish cruelty, paid from his own pocket the ransoms of the prisoners, and sent them back to their army.⁶

The incident restored the morale of the Great Captain’s troops; they issued from Barletta, defeated and dispersed the besiegers, and defeated the French again at Cerignola. On May 16, 1503, Gonzalo entered Naples unresisted, and was acclaimed by the populace, which can always be relied upon to applaud the victor. Louis XII sent another army against Gonzalo; he met it on the banks of the Garigliano, and routed it (December 29, 1503); in that rout Piero de’ Medici, fleeing with the French, was drowned. Gonzalo now laid siege to Gaeta, the last stronghold of the French in southern Italy. He offered them generous terms, which they soon accepted (January 1, 1504); and the fidelity with which he kept to these terms after the French had been disarmed led them—struck by so great a violation of precedents—to call him le gentil capitaine.⁷ By the treaty of Blois (1505) Louis saved a bit of face by assigning his Neapolitan rights to his relative Germaine de Foix, who was, however, to marry the widowed Ferdinand and bring Naples to him as her dowry. The crowns of Naples and Sicily were added to those already on Ferdinand’s insatiable head; and thereafter, till 1707, the Kingdom of Naples remained an appanage of Spain.

III. THE LEAGUE OF CAMBRAI: 1508–16

Italy was now half foreign: southern Italy was Spain’s; northwestern Italy from Genoa through Milan to the outskirts of Cremona was in the power of France; the minor principalities accepted French influence; only Venice and the papacy were comparatively independent, and they were intermittently at war for the cities of the Romagna. Venice longed for additional mainland markets and resources to replace those lost to the Turks or threatened by Atlantic routes to India; she took advantage of Alexander’s death, and Caesar Borgia’s illness, to seize Faenza, Ravenna, and Rimini; Julius II proposed to recapture them. In 1504 he persuaded Louis and Maximilian to stop their unchristian quarreling and join him in attacking Venice and dividing among them the Venetian possessions on the mainland.⁸ Maximilian’s spirit was willing, but his treasury was weak, and nothing came of the plot. Julius kept on trying.

On December 10, 1508, a grand conspiracy was hatched against Venice at Cambrai. The Emperor Maximilian joined it because Venice had taken from imperial control Goriza, Trieste, Pordenone, and Fiume, because Venice ignored his imperial rights in Verona and Padua, and because Venice had refused him and his little army free passage toward Rome for the papal coronation upon which he had set his heart. Louis XII joined the League because disputes had arisen between France and Venice as to the division of northern Italy. Ferdinand of Spain joined it because Venice insisted on retaining Brindisi, Otranto, and other Apulian ports which for centuries had been part of the Kingdom of Naples, but had been seized by Venice during Naples’ troubles in 1495. Julius joined the League (1509) because Venice not only refused to evacuate the Romagna, but made no secret of her ambition to acquire Ferrara—an acknowledged papal fief. The European powers now planned to absorb all the mainland holdings of Venice: Spain would recover her cities on the Adriatic; the Pope would regain the Romagna; Maximilian would get Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, Friuli, and Verona; Louis would receive Bergamo, Brescia, Crema, Cremona, and the valley of the Adda River. Had the plan succeeded, Italy would have ceased to exist; France and Germany would have reached down to the Po, Spain almost up to the Tiber; the Papal States would have been hemmed in helplessly; and the Venetian bulwark against the Turks would have been destroyed. In this crisis no Italian state offered Venice aid; she had provoked almost all of them by her rapacity; indeed, Ferrara, reasonably suspicious of her, joined the League. The noble Gonzalo, rudely retired by Ferdinand, offered his services as general to Venice; the Senate dared not accept, for its sole hope of survival lay in detaching one ally after another from the League.

Venice deserved sympathy now only because she stood alone against overwhelming power, and because her loyal rich and her conscripted poor alike fought with incredible pertinacity to a Pyrrhic victory. The Senate offered to restore Faenza and Rimini to the papacy, but the angry Julius responded with a blast of excommunication, and sent his troops to recapture the Romagna cities while the French advance compelled Venice to concentrate her forces in Lombardy. At Agnadello the French defeated the Venetians in one of the bloodiest battles of the Renaissance (May 14, 1509); six thousand men died there on that day. The desperate Signory recalled its remaining troops to Venice, allowed the French to occupy all Lombardy, evacuated Apulia and the Romagna, confessed to Verona, Vicenza, and Padua that she could no longer defend them, and gave them full freedom to surrender to the Emperor or resist him as they chose. Maximilian came down with the largest army—some 36,000 men—yet seen in those parts, and laid siege to Padua. The surrounding peasantry made all the trouble they could for his men; the Paduans fought with a bravery that attested the good government they had enjoyed under Venice. Maximilian, impatient and always pinched for funds, left in disgust for the Tirol; Julius suddenly ordered his troops to withdraw from the siege; Padua and Vicenza voluntarily returned to Venetian control. Louis XII, having obtained his share of the spoils, disbanded his army.

Julius had by this time realized that the full victory of the League would be a defeat for the papacy, since it would leave the popes at the mercy of northern powers among whom the Reformation was already beginning to find voice. When Venice again offered him all that he could ask, he, “vowing that he would ne’er consent, consented” (1510). Having reclaimed what he considered to be the just property of the Church, he was free to turn the fury of his spirit against the French who, controlling both Lombardy and Tuscany, were now unpleasant neighbors of the Papal States. At Mirándola he vowed never to shave till he had driven the French from Italy; so grew the majestic beard of Raphael’s portrait. Now the Pope gave to Italy, too late, a stirring motto, Fuori i barbari!—” Out with the barbarians!” In October, 1511, he formed a “League of Holy Union” with Venice and Spain; soon he won to it Switzerland and England. By the end of January, 1512, Venice had recaptured Brescia and Bergamo with the joyful co-operation of the inhabitants. France kept most of her troops at home to meet possible invasion from England and Spain.

One French force remained in Italy, under the command of a dashing and courtly youth of twenty-two years. Resenting inaction, Gaston de Foix led this army first to the relief of besieged Bologna, then to defeat the Venetians at Isola della Scala, then to retake Brescia, finally to win a brilliant but costly victory at Ravenna (April 11, 1512). Nearly 20,000 corpses fertilized that battlefield; and Gaston himself, fighting in the front, received mortal wounds.

Julius repaired with negotiation what had been lost by arms. He persuaded Maximilian to sign a truce with Venice, to join the Union against France, and to recall the 4000 German troops that had been part of the French army. On his urging, the Swiss marched down into Lombardy with 20,000 men. The French forces, decimated by victory and the loss of their German contingent, fell back before a converging mass of Swiss, Venetian, and Spanish soldiery, and retreated to the Alps, leaving ineffectual garrisons in Brescia, Cremona, Milan, and Genoa. Out of apparently complete disaster the “Holy Union” had in two months after the battle of Ravenna, through papal diplomacy, driven the French from Italian soil; and Julius was hailed as the liberator of Italy.

At the Congress of Mantua (August, 1512) the victors divided the spoils. On the insistence of Julius, Milan was given to Massimiliano Sforza, Lodovico’s sort; Switzerland received Lugano and the territory at the head of Lago Maggiore; Florence was forced to restore the Medici; the Pope regained all the Papal States won by the Borgias, and besides acquired Parma, Piacenza, Modena, and Reggio; only Ferrara still eluded the pontifical grasp. But Julius left many problems to his successor. He had not really driven out the foreigners: the Swiss held Milan as a guard for Sforza, the Emperor claimed Vicenza and Verona as his reward, and Ferdinand the Catholic, wiliest bargainer of them all, had consolidated the power of Spain in southern Italy. Only French power seemed finished in Italy. Louis XII sent another army to take Milan, out it was defeated by the Swiss at Novara with the loss of eight thousand Frenchmen (June Ó, 1513). When Louis died (1515), nothing remained of his once extensive Italian empire except a precarious foothold at Genoa.

But Francis I proposed to recapture it all. Moreover (Brantôme assures us), he had heard that Signora Clerice of Milan was the most beautiful woman in Italy, and he desired her consumingly.⁹ In August, 1515, he led over a new Alpine pass 40,000 men—the largest army yet seen in these campaigns. The Swiss came out to meet it; at Marignano, a few miles from Milan, a furious battle raged for two days (September 13–14, 1515); Francis himself fought like a Roland, and was knighted on the spot by the Chevalier de Bayard; the Swiss left 13,000 dead on the field; they and Sforza abandoned Milan, and the city became again a French prize.

The councilors of Leo X, vacillating, asked Machiavelli’s advice. He warned against neutrality between King and Emperor, on the ground that the papacy would be as helpless before the victor as if it had taken part; and he recommended an entente with France as the lesser of two evils.¹⁰ Leo so ordered; and on December 11, 1515, Francis and the Pope met at Bologna to arrange terms of concord. The Swiss signed a similar peace with France; the Spaniards retired to Naples; the Emperor, foiled again, surrendered Verona to Venice. So ended (1516) the wars of the League of Cambrai, in which the partners had changed as in a dance, and the last condition of affairs was essentially as the first, and nothing had been decided except that Italy was to be the battlefield on which the great powers would fight duel after duel for the mastery of Europe. The papacy yielded Parma and Piacenza to France; Venice rewon her possessions in northern Italy, but was financially exhausted. Italy was devastated; but art and literature continued to flourish, whether by the stimulus of tragic events, or by the impetus of a prosperous past. The worst was yet to come.

IV. LEO AND EUROPE: 1513–21

The conference at Bologna pitted prestige and diplomacy against audacity and power. The handsome young King, magnificent in goldbraided cloak and zibeline furs, came with victory in his plumes and armies at his back, eager to swallow all Italy, merely keeping the Pope as a policeman; against which Leo had nothing but the glamour of his office and the subtlety of a Medici. If Leo thereafter played King against Emperor, and veered from side to side elusively, and simultaneously signed treaties with each against the other, we mnst not be too righteous about it; he had no other weapons to wield, and he had the heritage of the Church to protect. His opponents also used those weapons, in addition to brandishing regiments and artillery.

The secret agreements made at this meeting have remained secret to this day. Apparently Francis tried to bring Leo into an alliance with him against Spain; Leo asked for time to think it over—diplomacy’s way of saying no; it was contrary to the age-long policy of the Church to let the Papal States be hemmed in by one power on both north and south.¹¹ The one definite result of the Concordat of 1516 was the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. This Sanction (1438) had asserted the superior authority of a general council over that of the popes, and had given the French king the right to appoint to all major ecclesiastical offices in France. Francis consented to annul the Sanction, provided the royal power of nomination remained; Leo agreed. It might seem a defeat for the Pope; but in so agreeing Leo was only accepting a custom centuries old in France; and without so planning it he was marrying Church and state in France in a way that left the French monarchy no fiscal reasons for supporting the Reformation. Meanwhile he ended the long conflict between France and the papacy over the relative power of councils and popes.

The conference concluded by the French leaders begging forgiveness of Leo for having warred against his predecessor. “Holy Father,” said Francis, “you must not be surprised that we were such enemies to Julius II, since he was always the greatest enemy to us; insomuch that in our times we have not met with a more formidable adversary. For he was in fact a most excellent commander, and would have made a much better general than a pope.”¹² Leo gave all these doughty penitents absolution and benediction, and they ended by almost kissing his feet away.¹³

Francis returned to France under a halo of glory, and for a time contented himself with Venus and mercury. When Ferdinand II died (1516) the French King planned again the conquest of Naples, perhaps as a glorious means of checking the excess population of France. Nevertheless he signed a treaty of peace with Ferdinand’s grandson Charles I, the new King of Aragon, Castile, Naples, and Sicily. But when Maximilian died (1519), and his grandson Charles was put forward to succeed him as head of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis thought himself fitter to be Emperor than the nineteen-year-old King of Spain, and actively sought election. Leo was again in a dangerous position. He would have preferred to support Francis, for he foresaw that the union of Naples, Spain, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands under one head would give that ruler such preponderance of territory, wealth, and men as would destroy the balance of power that had hitherto protected the Papal States. And yet the election of Charles over papal opposition would alienate the new emperor precisely when his aid was vitally needed to suppress the Protestant revolt. Leo hesitated too long to make his influence felt; Charles I was chosen emperor, and became Charles V. Still playing balance of power, the Pope offered Francis an alliance; when the King in turn hesitated, Leo abruptly signed an agreement with Charles (May 8, 1521). The young Emperor offered him almost everything: the return of Parma and Piacenza, aid against Ferrara and Luther, the reconquest of Milan for the Sforza family, and the protection of the Papal States and Florence from any attack.

In September, 1521, the duel was renewed. “My cousin Francis and I,” said the Emperor, “are in perfect accord; he wants Milan, and so do I.”¹⁴ The French forces in Italy were led by Odet de Foix, Vicomte de Lautrec; Francis had appointed him at the solicitation of Lautrec’s sister, who was for the moment the King’s mistress. Louise of Savoy, the King’s mother, resented the appointment, and secretly diverted to other uses the money provided for Lautrec’s army by Francis;¹⁵ and the Swiss in that army deserted for lack of pay. As a strong papal-imperial force—ably commanded by Prospero Colonna, the Marquis of Pescara, and the historian Guicciardini—approached Milan, the Ghibelline supporters of the Empire there raised a successful revolt of the overtaxed populace. Lautrec withdrew from the city into Venetian territory; the troops of Charles and Leo took Milan almost bloodlessly; Francesco Maria Sforza, another son of Lodovico, became Duke of Milan as an imperial vassal; and Leo could die (December 1, 1521) in the unction of victory.

V. ADRIAN VI: 1522–3

His successor was an anomaly in Renaissance Rome: a Pope who was resolved at all costs to be a Christian. Born of lowly folk in Utrecht (1459), Adrian Dedel imbibed piety and scholarship from the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer, Scholastic philosophy and theology at Louvain. At thirty-four he was chancellor of that University; at fortyseven he was appointed tutor of the future Charles V. In 1515 he was sent on a mission to Spain, and so impressed Ferdinand with his administrative ability and moral integrity that he was made bishop of Tortosa. After Ferdinand’s death Adrian helped Cardinal Ximenes to govern Spain in the absence of Charles; in 1520 he became regent of Castile. Through all this progress he remained modest in everything but certainty, lived simply, and pursued heretics with a zeal that endeared him to the people. The repute of his virtues reached Rome, and Leo made him a cardinal. In the conclave that met after Leo’s death his name was put forward as a candidate for the papacy, apparently without his knowledge, and probably through the influence of Charles V. On January 2, 1522, for the first time since 1378 a non-Italian—for the first time since 1161 a Teuton—was chosen pope.

How could the Romans, who had hardly heard of Adrian, forgive such an affront? The populace denounced the cardinals as madmen, as “betrayers of Christ’s blood”; pamphleteers demanded to know why the Vatican had been “surrendered to German fury.”¹⁶ Aretino composed a masterpiece of vituperation, termed the cardinals “filthy rabble,” and prayed that they might be buried alive.¹⁷ Pasquino’s statue was covered with lampoons. The cardinals feared to show themselves in public; they ascribed the election to the Holy Ghost, who, they said, had so inspired them.¹⁸ Many cardinals left Rome, fearing both the contumely of the people and the ax of ecclesiastical reform. For his part Adrian calmly completed his unfinished business in Spain, and notified the Curia that he could not reach Rome before August. Unaware of the splendor of the Vatican, he wrote to a Roman friend asking that a modest house and garden be rented for his residence. When at last he reached the city (which he had never seen before), his pale ascetic face and lean frame awed observers into some reverence; but when he spoke, and it appeared that he knew no Italian, and talked Latin with a guttural accent all the world away from Italian melody and grace, Rome fumed and despaired.

Adrian felt himself a prisoner in the Vatican, and pronounced it fit for the successors of Constantine rather than of Peter. He discontinued all further decoration of the Vatican chambers; the followers of Raphael, who had been working there, were dismissed. He sent away all but four of the hundred grooms that Leo had kept for his stable; he reduced his personal servants to two—both Dutch—and bade them bring his household expenses down to one ducat ($12.50) a day. He was horrified by the looseness of sex and tongue and pen in Rome, and agreed with Lorenzo and Luther that the capital of Christianity was a sink of iniquity. He cared nothing for the ancient art that the cardinals showed him; he denounced the statuary as relics of idolatry, and walled up the Belvedere Palace, which contained Europe’s first collection of classical sculpture.¹⁹ He had a mind to wall up the humanists too, and the poets, who seemed to him to live and write like pagans who had banished Christ. When Francesco Berni, in one of his bitterest capitoli, satirized him as a Dutch barbarian incapable of understanding the refinements of Italian art, literature, and life, Adrian threatened to have the whole tribe of satirists doused in the Tiber.²⁰

To lead the Church back from Leo to Christ became the devout passion of Adrian’s pontificate. He set himself with blunt directness to reform such ecclesiastical abuses as he could reach. He suppressed superfluous offices with sometimes inconsiderate and indiscriminate vigor. He canceled the contracts that Leo had signed to pay annuities to those who had bought church offices; 2550 persons who had purchased these as an investment lost, so to speak, both principal and interest; Rome resounded with their cries that they had been defrauded; and one of the victims tried to kill the Pope. Relatives who came to Adrian for sinecures were told to go back and earn an honest living. He put an end to simony and nepotism, scored the venality of the Curia, enacted severe penalties for bribery or embezzlement, and punished guilty cardinals with the same treatment as the humblest clerk. He bade bishops and cardinals go back to their sees, and read them lessons on the morality that he expected of them. The ill repute of Rome, he told them, was the talk of Europe. He would not accuse the cardinals themselves of vice, but he charged them with allowing vice to go unpunished in their palaces. He asked them to put an end to their luxuries, and to content themselves with a maximum income of 6000 ducats ($75,000) a year. All ecclesiastical Rome, wrote the Venetian ambassador, “is beside itself with terror, seeing what the Pope has done in the space of eight days.”²¹

But the eight days were not enough, nor the brief thirteen months of Adrian’s active pontificate. Vice hid its face for a while, but survived; reforms irked a thousand officials, and met with a sullen resistance and the hope for Adrian’s early death. The Pope mourned to see how little one man could do to better men; “how much does a man’s efficiency,” he often said, “depend upon the age in which his work is cast!”—and he remarked wistfully to his old friend Heeze: “Dietrich, how much better it went with us when we were living quietly in Louvain!”²²

Amid these domestic tribulations he faced as honorably as he could the critical problems of foreign policy. He restored Urbino to Francesco Maria della Rovere, and left Alfonso undisturbed in Ferrara. Ousted dictators took advantage of the pacific Pope and again seized power in Perugia, Rimini, and other Papal States. Adrian appealed to Charles and Francis to make peace, or at least accept a truce, and to join in repelling the Turks, who were preparing to attack Rhodes. Instead, Charles signed with Henry VIII of England the Treaty of Windsor (June 19, 1522), which pledged them to make a concerted assault upon France. On December 21 the Turks took Rhodes, the last Christian stronghold in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it was rumored that they were planning to land in Apulia and conquer disorganized Italy. When Turkish spies were captured in Rome the trepidation mounted to a point that recalled the city’s fear of invasion after Hannibal’s victory at Cannae in 216 B.C. To quite fill Adrian’s cup of gall, Cardinal Francesco Soderini, his chief minister and confidante, and a principal agent in his negotiations for a European peace, plotted with Francis a French attack upon Sicily. When Adrian discovered the plot, and learned that Francis was massing troops on the border of Italy, he abandoned neutrality and leagued the papacy with Charles V. Then, broken in body and spirit, he fell sick and died (September 14, 1523). His will left his property to the poor, and his last instructions were that he should be given a quiet and inexpensive funeral.

Rome greeted his death with more joy than if the city had been saved from capture by the Turks. Some believed that he had been poisoned for art’s sake, and a wag attached to the door of the Pope’s physician an inscription Liberatori patriae SPQR— expressing the gratitude of the “Senate and People of Rome to the Liberator of the Fatherland.” The dead pontiff was blackened by a hundred satires; he was accused of greed, drunkenness, and the grossest immorality, and every act of his career was transformed into wickedness by malice and ridicule; now the surviving freedom of the “press” in Rome prepared by its excesses its own unmourned demise. It was a pity that Adrian could not understand the Renaissance; but it was a greater crime and folly that the Renaissance could not tolerate a Christian pope.

VI. CLEMENT VII: THE FIRST PHASE

The conclave that met on October 1, 1523, fought for seven weeks over the selection of Adrian’s successor, and finally named a man who by universal opinion was the happiest possible choice. Giulio de’ Medici was the illegitimate son of that amiable Giuliano who had fallen a victim to the Pazzi conspiracy, and of a mistress, Fioretta, who soon disappeared from history. Lorenzo took the boy into his family and had him brought up with his sons. These included Leo, who, as pope, dispensed Giulio from the canonical impediment of bastardy, made him archbishop of Florence, then a cardinal, then the able administrator of Rome and the chief minister of his pontificate. Now forty-five, Clement was tall and handsome, rich and learned, well mannered and of moral life, an admirer and patron of literature, learning, music, and art. Rome greeted his elevation with joy as the return of Leo’s gulden age. Bembo prophesied that Clement VII would be the best and wisest ruler that the Church had ever known.²³

He began most graciously. He distributed among the cardinals all the benefices that he had enjoyed, entailing a yearly revenue of 60,000 ducats. He won the hearts and dedications of scholars and scribes by drawing them into his service or supporting them with gifts. He dealt out justice justly, gave audience freely, bestowed charity with less than Leonine, but with wiser, generosity, and charmed all by his courtesy to every person and class. No pope ever began so well, or ended so miserably.

The task of steering a safe course between Francis and Charles in a war almost to the death, while the Turks were overrunning Hungary, and one third of Europe was in full revolt against the Church, proved too much for Clement’s abilities, as for Leo’s too. The magnificent portrait of Clement in his early pontificate, by Sebastiano del Piombo, is deceptive: he did not show in his actions the hard resolution that there seems limned in his face; and even in that picture a certain weak weariness shows in the tired eyelids drooping upon sullen eyes. Clement made irresolution a policy. He carried thought to excess, and mistook it as a substitute for action instead of its guide. He could find a hundred reasons for a decision, and a hundred against it; it was as if Buridan’s ass sat on the papal throne. Berni satirized him in bitter lines prophetic of posterity’s judgment:

A papacy composed of compliment,

Debate, consideration, complaisance,

Of furthermore, then, but, yes, well, perchance,

Haply, and such like terms inconsequent.…

Of feet of lead, of tame neutrality….

To speak plain truth, you shall live to see

Pope Adrian sainted through this papacy.²⁴

He took as his chief counselors Gianmatteo Giberti who favored France, and Nikolaus von Schönberg who favored the Empire; he allowed his mind to be torn in two between them; and when he decided for France—only a few weeks before the French disaster at Pavia—he brought down upon his head and his city all the wiles and forces of Charles, and all the fury of a half-Protestant army unleashed upon Rome.

It was Clement’s excuse that he feared the power of an Emperor holding both Lombardy and Naples; and he hoped, by siding with Francis, to secure a French veto on Charles’s troublesome idea of a general council to adjudicate the affairs of the Church. When Francis came down over the Alps with a new army of 26,000 French, Italians, Swiss, and Germans, seized Milan, and besieged Pavia, Clement, while giving Charles assurances of loyalty and friendship, secretly signed an alliance with Francis (December 12, 1524), brought Florence and Venice into it, and reluctantly gave triumphant Francis permission to levy troops in the Papal States and to send an army through papal territory against Naples. Charles never forgave the deception. “I shall go into Italy,” he vowed, “and revenge myself on those who have injured me, especially on that poltroon the Pope. Some day, perhaps, Martin Luther will become a man of weight.”²⁵ At that moment some men thought that Luther would be made pope; and several of the Emperor’s entourage advised him to contest the election of Clement on the ground of illegitimate birth.²⁶

Charles sent a German army under Georg von Frundsberg and the Marquis of Pescara to attack the French outside Pavia. Poor tactics nullified the French artillery, while the hand firearms of the Spanish made a mockery of Swiss pikes; the French army was almost annihilated in one of the most decisive battles of history (February 24–5, 1525). Francis behaved gallantly: while his troops retreated he plunged forward into the enemy’s ranks, making royal slaughter; his horse was killed under him, but he kept on fighting; at last, thoroughly exhausted, he could resist no more, and was taken prisoner along with several of his captains. From a tent among the victors he wrote to his mother the message so often half-quoted: “All is lost save honor—and my skin, which is safe.” Charles, who was at this time in Spain, ordered him sent as a prisoner to a castle near Madrid.

Milan reverted to the Emperor. All Italy felt itself at his mercy, and one Italian state after another presented him with diverse bribes for permission to remain in existence. Clement, fearful of invasion by the imperial army, and of revolution against the Medici in Florence, abandoned his French alliance, and signed a treaty (April 1, 1525) with Charles de Lannoy, Viceroy of Naples for Charles, pledging Pope and Emperor to mutual aid; the Emperor would protect the Medici in Florence and accept Francesco Maria Sforza as imperial vicar in Milan; the Pope would pay Charles, for past affronts and future services, 100,000 ducats ($1,250,000?),²⁷ which were badly needed for the imperial troops. Shortly afterward Clement connived at a plot by Girolamo Morone to free Milan from the Emperor. The Marquis of Pescara revealed it to Charles, and Morone was jailed.

Charles treated captive Francis with feline procrastination. After softening him with almost eleven months of courteous imprisonment, he agreed to free him on the impossible conditions that the King should surrender all French rights, actual or alleged, to Genoa, Milan, Naples, Flanders, Artois, Tournai, Burgundy, and Navarre; that Francis should supply Charles with ships and troops for an expedition against Rome or the Turks; that Francis should marry Charles’s sister Eleonora; and that the King should surrender his eldest sons—Francis, ten, and Henry, nine years old—to Charles as hostages for the fulfillment of these terms. By the treaty of Madrid (January 14, 1526) Francis agreed to all these conditions with solemn oaths and mental reservations. On March 17 he was allowed to return to France, leaving his sons in his place as prisoners. Arrived in France, he announced that he had no intention of honoring promises made under duress; Clement, with the support of canonical law, absolved him from his oaths; and on May 22 Francis, Clement, Venice, Florence, and Francesco Maria Sforza signed the League of Cognac, pledging them to restore Asti and Genoa to France, to give Milan to Sforza as a French fief, to return to each Italian state all its prewar possessions, to ransom French prisoners for 2,000,000 crowns, and to bestow Naples upon an Italian prince who would pay a yearly tribute of 75,000 ducats to the king of France. The Emperor was cordially invited to sign this agreement; if he refused, the new League proposed to war upon him until he and all his forces were driven from Italy.²⁸

Charles denounced the League as violating Francis’ sacred oaths as well as the treaty that Clement had signed with Lannoy. Unable to go to Italy himself at this time, he commissioned Hugo de Moncada to win back Clement by diplomacy, and, that failing, to stir up against the Pope a revolution of the Colonna and the Roman populace. Moncada performed his mission nicely: he brought Clement into an amicable agreement with the Colonna, persuaded the Pope to disband the troops that were guarding him, and allowed the Colonna to continue organizing a conspiracy to capture Rome. While Christendom so exercised itself in treachery and war, the Turks under Suleiman the Magnificent overwhelmed the Hungarians at Mohacs (August 29, 1526), and captured Budapest (September 10). Clement, alarmed less Europe should become not merely Protestant but Mohammedan, announced to the cardinals that he was thinking of going to Barcelona in person to plead with Charles to make peace with Francis and join forces against the Turks. Charles at that time was equipping a fleet whose purpose, it was said in Rome, was to invade Italy and depose the Pope.²⁹

On September 20 the Colonna entered Rome with five thousand men, and, overriding feeble resistance, plundered the Vatican, St. Peter’s, and the neighboring Borgo Vecchio, while Clement fled to Castel Sant’ Angelo. The papal palace was completely stripped, including Raphael’s tapestries and the Pope’s tiara; sacred vessels, treasured relics, and costly papal vestments were stolen; an hilarious soldier went about in the white robe and red cap of the Pope, distributing papal benedictions with mock solemnity.³⁰ On the following day Moncada restored to Clement the papal tiara, assured him that the Emperor had only the best intentions toward the papacy, and compelled the frightened Pope to sign an armistice with the Empire for four months, and to pardon the Colonna.

Moncada had hardly retired to Naples when Clement raised a new papal force of seven thousand troops. At the end of October he ordered it to march against the Colonna strongholds. At the same time he appealed to Francis I and Henry VIII for aid; Francis sent dilatory excuses; Henry, absorbed in the difficult task of begetting a son, sent nothing. Another papal army, in the north, was kept inactive by the apparently treacherous Fabianism of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who could not forget that Leo X had ousted him from his duchy, and was not especially grateful that Adrian and Clement had let him return and stay. A braver leader was with that army—young Giovanni de’ Medici, handsome son of Caterina Sforza, heir of her dauntless spirit, and called Giovanni delle Bande Nere because he and his troops had worn black bands of mourning when Leo died.³¹ Giovanni was all for action against Milan, but Francesco Maria overruled him.

VII. THE SACK OF ROME: 1527

Charles, still remaining in Spain, and moving his pawns with magic remote control, commissioned his agents to raise a new army. They approached the Tirolese condottiere, Georg von Frundsberg, already famous for the exploits of the Landsknechte—German mercenaries—who fought under his lead. Charles could offer little money, but his agents promised rich plunder in Italy. Frundsberg was still nominally a Catholic, but he strongly sympathized with Luther, and hated Clement as a traitor to the Empire. He pawned his castle, his other possessions, even the adornments of his wife; with the 38,000 gulden so obtained he collected some 10,000 men eager for adventure and pillage and not averse to breaking a lance over a papal head; some of them, it was said, carried a noose to hang the Pope.³² In November, 1526, this impromptu army crossed the mountains and descended toward Brescia. Alfonso of Ferrara repaid the papacy for its many efforts to depose him, by sending Frundsberg four of his mightiest cannon. Near Brescia Giovanni delle Bande Nere was shot in a skirmish with the invaders; he died at Mantua on November 30, aged twenty-eight. No one remained to hinder the Duke of Urbino from doing nothing.

Frundsberg’s rabble crossed the Po as Giovanni died, and ravaged the fertile fields of Lombardy so effectively that three years later English ambassadors described that terrain as “the most pitiable country that ever was in Christendom.”³³ In Milan the imperial commander was now Charles, Duke of Bourbon; created constable of France for bravery at Marignano, he had turned against Francis when the King’s mother, as he felt, had cheated him of his proper lands; he went over to the Emperor, shared in defeating Francis at Pavia, and was made Duke of Milan. Now, to raise and pay another army for Charles, he taxed the Milanese literally to death. He wrote to the Emperor that he had drained the city of its blood. His soldiers, quartered upon the inhabitants, so abused them with theft, brutality, and rape that many Milanese hanged themselves, or threw themselves from high places into the streets.³⁴ Early in February, 1527, Bourbon led his army out of Milan, and united it with Frundsberg’s near Piacenza. The conglomerate horde, now numbering nearly 22,000 men, moved east along the Via Emilia, avoiding the fortified cities, but pillaging as it went, and leaving the countryside empty behind it.

When it became clear to Clement that he had no sufficient forces with which to stop these invaders, he appealed to Lannoy to arrange a truce. The Viceroy came up from Naples, and drew up terms for a truce of eight months: Clement and the Colonna ceased their war and exchanged their conquests, and the Pope provided 60,000 ducats with which to bribe Frundsberg’s army to stay out of the Papal States. Then, nearing the end of his funds, and supposing that Frundsberg and Bourbon would honor an agreement signed by the imperial Viceroy, Clement reduced his Roman army to three hundred men. But Bourbon’s brigands shrieked with fury when they heard the terms of the truce. For four months they had endured a thousand hardships only in the hope of plundering Rome; most of them were now in rags, many were shoeless, all were hungry, none was paid; they refused to be bought off with a miserable 60,000 ducats, of which they knew only a small part would trickle down to them. Fearing that Bourbon would sign the truce, they besieged his tent, crying, “Pay! pay!” He hid himself elsewhere, and they plundered his tent. Frundsberg tried to calm them, but was stricken with apoplexy in the course of his appeal; he played no further part in the campaign, and died a year later. Bourbon took command, but only by agreeing to march on Rome. On March 29 he sent messages to Lannoy and Clement that he could not hold back his men, and that the truce was perforce at an end.

Now at last Rome realized that it was the intended and helpless prey. On Holy Thursday (April 8), when Clement was giving his blessing to a crowd of 10,000 persons before St. Peter’s, a fanatic clad only in a leather apron mounted the statue of St. Paul and shouted to the Pope: “Thou bastard of Sodom! For thy sins Rome shall be destroyed. Repent and turn thee! If thou wilt not believe me, in fourteen days thou shalt see.” On Easter Eve this wild eremite—Bartolommeo Carosi, called Brandano—went through the streets crying, “Rome, do penance! They shall deal with thee as God dealt with Sodom and Gomorrah.”³⁵

Bourbon, perhaps hoping to satisfy his men with the enlarged sum, sent to Clement a demand for 240,000 ducats; Clement replied that he could not possibly raise such a ransom. The horde marched to Florence; but the Duke of Urbino, Guicciardini, and the Marquis of Saluzzo had brought in enough troops to man its fortifications effectively; the horde turned away baffled, and took the road to Rome. Clement, finding no salvation in truce, rejoined the League of Cognac against Charles, and implored the help of France. He appealed to the rich men of Rome to contribute to a fund for defense; they responded gingerly, and suggested that a better plan would be to sell red hats. Clement had not hitherto sold appointments to the college of cardinals, but when Bourbon’s army reached Viterbo, only forty-two miles from Rome, he yielded, and sold six nominations. Before the nominees could pay, the Pope could see, from the windows of the Vatican, the hungry swarm advancing across the Neronian Fields. He had now some 4000 soldiers to protect Rome from an attacking host of 20,000 men.

On May 6 Bourbon’s multitude approached the walls under cover of fog. They were repelled by a fusillade; Bourbon himself was hit, and died almost instantly. But the assailants could not be deterred from repeated attack; their alternatives were to capture Rome or starve. They found a weakly defended position; they broke through it, and poured into the city. The Roman militia and the Swiss Guards fought bravely, but were annihilated. Clement, most of the resident cardinals, and hundreds of officials fled to Sant’ Angelo, whence Cellini and others tried to stop the invasion with artillery fire. But the swarm entered from a confusing variety of directions; some were hidden by the fog; others so mingled with fugitives that the Castle cannon could not strike them without killing the demoralized populace. Soon the invaders had the city at their mercy.

As they rushed on through the streets they killed indiscriminately any man, woman, or child that crossed their path. Their bloodthirst aroused, they entered the hospital and orphanage of Santo Spirito, and slaughtered nearly all the patients. They marched into St. Peter’s and slew the people who had sought sanctuary there. They pillaged every church and monastery they could find, and turned some into stables; hundreds of priests, monks, bishops, and archbishops were killed. St. Peter’s and the Vatican were rifled from top to bottom, and horses were tethered in Raphael’s stanze.³⁶ Every dwelling in Rome was plundered, and many were burned, with two exceptions: the Cancelleria, occupied by Cardinal Colonna, and the Palazzo Colonna, in which Isabella d’ Este and some rich merchants had sought asylum; these paid 50,000 ducats to leaders of the mob for freedom from attack, and then took two thousand refugees within their walls. Every palace paid ransoms for protection, only to face later attacks from other packs, and pay ransom again. In most houses all the occupants were required to ransom their lives at a stated price; if they did not pay they were tortured; thousands were killed; children were flung from high windows to pry parental savings from secrecy; some streets were littered with dead. The millionaire Domenico Massimi saw his sons slain, his daughter raped, his house burned, and then was himself murdered. “In the whole city,” says one account, “there was not a soul above three years of age who had not to purchase his safety.”³⁷

Of the victorious mob half were Germans, of whom most had been convinced that the popes and cardinals were thieves, and that the wealth of the Church in Rome was a theft from the nations, and a scandal to the world. To reduce this scandal they seized all movable ecclesiastical valuables, including sacred vessels and works of art, and carried them off for melting or ransom or sale; relics, however, they left scattered on the floor. One soldier dressed himself as a pope; others put on cardinals’ hats and kissed his feet; a crowd at the Vatican proclaimed Luther pope. The Lutherans among the invaders took especial delight in robbing cardinals, exacting high ransoms from them as the price of their lives, and teaching them new rituals. Some cardinals, says Guicciardini, “were set upon scrubby beasts, riding with their faces backward, in the habits and ensigns of their dignity, and were led about all Rome with the greatest derision and contempt. Some, unable to raise all the ransom demanded, were so tortured that they died there and then, or within a few days.”³⁸ One cardinal was lowered into a grave and was told that he would be buried alive unless ransom were brought within a stated time; it came at the last moment.³⁹ Spanish and German cardinals, who thought themselves safe from their own countrymen, were treated like the rest. Nuns and respectable women were violated in situ, or were carried off to promiscuous brutality in the various shelters of the horde.⁴⁰ Women were assaulted before the eyes of their husbands or fathers. Many young women, despondent after being raped, drowned themselves in the Tiber.⁴¹

The destruction of books, archives, and art was immense. Philibert, Prince of Orange, who had succeeded to the quasi command of the undisciplined horde, saved the Vatican Library by making it his headquarters, but many monastic and private libraries went up in flames, and many precious manuscripts disappeared. The University of Rome was ransacked, and its staff was scattered. The scholar Colocci saw his house burned to the ground with his collections of manuscripts and art. Baldus, a professor, saw his newly written commentary on Pliny used to light a camp fire for the pillagers. The poet Marone lost his poems, but was comparatively fortunate; the poet Paolo Bombasi was killed. The scholar Cristoforo Marcello was tortured by having one fingernail after another pulled out; the scholars Francesco Fortuno and Juan Valdes slew themselves in despair.⁴² The artists Perino del Vaga, Marcantonio Raimondi, and many others were tortured and robbed of all that they had. The school of Raphael was finally dispersed.

The number of deaths cannot be calculated. Two thousand corpses were thrown into the Tiber from the Vatican side of Rome; 9800 dead were buried; there were unquestionably many more fatalities. A low estimate places the thefts at over a million ducats, the ransoms at three million; Clement judged the total loss at ten million ($125,000,000?).⁴³

The sack lasted eight days, while Clement looked on from the towers of Sant’ Angelo. He cried out to God like tortured Job: Quare de vulva eduxisti me? qui utinam consumptus essem, ne oculus videret— “Why didst Thou take me out of the womb? Would that I had been consumed, that no eye had seen me!”⁴⁴ He ceased to shave, and never shaved again. He remained a prisoner in the Castle from May 6 to December 7, 1527, hoping that rescue would come from the army of the Duke of Urbino, or from Francis I, or Henry VIII. Charles, still in Spain, was glad to hear that Rome had been taken, but was shocked when he heard of the savagery of the sack; he disclaimed responsibility for the excesses, but took full advantage of the Pope’s helplessness. On June 6 his representatives, possibly without his knowledge, compelled Clement to sign a humiliating peace. The Pope agreed to pay over to them and the imperialist army 400,000 ducats; to surrender to Charles the cities of Piacenza, Parma, and Modena, and the castles of Ostia, Cività Vecchia, Cività Castellana, and Sant’ Angelo itself; he was to remain a prisoner there until the first 150,000 ducats had been delivered, and was then to be removed to Gaeta or Naples until Charles should determine what to do with him. All those in Sant’ Angelo were allowed to depart except Clement and the thirteen cardinals who had accompanied him. Spanish and German soldiers were put in charge of the Castle, and kept the Pope nearly always confined in a narrow apartment. “They have not left him ten scudi worth of property,” wrote Guicciardini on June 21.⁴⁵ All the silver and gold that he had salvaged in his flight was surrendered to his captors, to make up 100,000 ducats of his ransom.

In the meantime Alfonso of Ferrara seized Reggio and Modena (to which Ferrara had age-long rights), and Venice took Ravenna. Florence expelled the Medici a third time, and proclaimed Jesus Christ king of the new republic. The whole edifice of the papacy, material and spiritual, seemed to be collapsing into a tragic ruin that awoke the pity even of those who felt that some punishment was deserved by the infidelities of Clement, the sins of the papacy, the greed and corruption of the Curia, the luxury of the hierarchy, and the iniquity of Rome. Sadoleto, peaceful in Carpentras, heard with horror of Rome’s fall, and mourned the passing of those halcyon days when Bembo and Castiglione and Isabella and a hundred scholars and poets and patrons had made the wicked city the home and summit of the thought and art of the age. And Erasmus wrote to Sadoleto: “Rome was not alone the shrine of the Christian faith, the nurse of noble souls, and the abode of the Muses, but the mother of nations. To how many was she not dearer and sweeter and more precious than their own land!… In truth this is not the ruin of one city, but of the whole world.”⁴⁶

VIII. CHARLES TRIUMPHANT: 1527–30

Plague had visited Rome in 1522, and had reduced its population to 55,000; murder, suicide, and flight must have reduced it below 40,000 in 1527; now, in July of that year, plague came back in the full heat of summer, and joined with famine and the continued presence of the ravaging horde to make Rome a city of horror, terror, and desolation. Churches and streets were littered anew with corpses; many of these were left to rot in the sun; the stench was so strong that the jailers and prisoners fled from the castle parapets to their rooms; even there many died of the infection, among them some servants of the Pope. The impartial plague struck the invaders too; 2500 Germans in Rome died by July 22, 1527; and malaria, syphilis, and malnutrition cut the horde in half.

The opponents of Charles began seriously to think of rescuing the Pope. Henry VIII, fearing that an imprisoned pontiff might not grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, sent Cardinal Wolsey to France to confer with Francis on measures to liberate Clement. Early in August the two kings offered Charles peace and 2,000,000 ducats on condition that the Pope and the French princes should be freed, and that the Papal States should be restored to the Church. Charles refused. By the treaty of Amiens (August 18) Henry and Francis pledged themselves to war against Charles; soon Venice and Florence joined this new league. French forces captured Genoa and Pavia, and sacked the latter city almost as thoroughly as the imperialist army had sacked Rome. Mantua and Ferrara, dreading the present French more than the distant Charles, now joined the league. Nevertheless Lautrec, the French commander, unable to pay his troops, dared not march upon Rome.

The Emperor, hoping to restore his grace in Catholic Christendom, and to cool the ardor of the growing league, agreed to release the Pope, on condition that Clement should give no aid to the league, should at once pay the imperialist army in Rome 112,000 ducats, and should give hostages for his good behavior. Clement raised the money by selling red hats, and by granting the Emperor a tenth of ecclesiastical revenues in the Kingdom of Naples. On December 7, after seven months of confinement, Clement left Sant’ Angelo, and, disguised as a servant, made his way humbly out of Rome to Orvieto, apparently a broken man.

At Orvieto he was lodged in a dilapidated palace whose roof had cavea in, whose walls were bare and cracked, whose floors admitted a hundred draughts. English ambassadors visiting him to get Henry a divorce found him huddled in bed, his pale emaciated face half lost in a long and unkempt beard. He spent the winter there, and then moved to Viterbo. On February 17 the imperialist horde, having received from Clement all that he could pay, and fearing further decimation by disease, evacuated Rome and moved south to Naples. Lautrec now brought his army down with the hope of besieging Naples; but his own troops were thinned out by malaria, he himself died, and his disordered forces retreated to the north (August 29, 1528). Losing all hope of aid from the league, Clement offered his full surrender to Charles; and on October 6 he was allowed to re-enter Rome. Four fifths of the houses had been abandoned, thousands of buildings were in ruins; men were amazed to see what nine months of invasion had done to the capital of Christendom.

Charles seems to have thought for a while of deposing Clement, annexing the Papal States to the Kingdom of Naples, making Rome the seat of his empire, and reducing the pope to his primeval role as bishop of Rome and subject to the emperor.⁴⁷ But this would drive Charles into the arms of the Lutherans in Germany, would court civil war in Spain, and would arouse France, England, Poland, and Hungary to resist him with their full and united power. He abandoned the scheme, and turned to the idea of making the papacy his dependent ally and spiritual aid in dividing Italy between them. By the treaty of Barcelona (June 29, 1529) he made substantial concessions to the Pope: the principalities taken from the Church were to be restored; the Medici relatives of the Pope were to be re-established in Florence by diplomacy or force; even Ferrara was now promised to the Pope. In return the Pope agreed to give Charles the formal investiture of Naples, to allow the imperial armies free passage through the Papal States, and to meet the Emperor at Bologna in the following year to settle between them the peace and organization of Italy.

Shortly thereafter Margaret, aunt of Charles and Regent of the Netherlands, met with Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis, and, with the aid of various ambassadors and legates, formulated the treaty of Cambrai (August 3, 1529) between Emperor and King. Charles released the French princes for a ransom of 1,200,000 ducats; Francis renounced for France all claims to Italy, Flanders, Artois, Arras, and Tournai.⁴⁸ The allies of France in Italy were left to the mercy of the Emperor.

Charles and Clement met at Bologna on November 5, 1529, each now convinced that he needed the other. Strange to say, this was Charles’s first visit to Italy; he had conquered it before seeing it. When he knelt before the Pope at Bologna, and kissed the foot of the man whom he had dragged in the dust, it was the first time that these two figures—the one representing the Church in decline, the other the rising and here victorious modern state—had ever seen each other. Clement swallowed all pride, forgave all offenses; he had to. He could no longer look to France; Charles had irresistible armies in both southern and northern Italy; Florence could not be recovered for the Medici without imperial troops; the aid of the Empire was needed against Luther in Germany, against Suleiman in the East. Charles was generous and prudent: he kept essentially to the terms of the Barcelona agreement made when he was not so unchallengeably strong. He forced Venice to restore all that she had taken from the Papal States. He allowed Francesco Maria Sforza, on paying a large indemnity, to keep ruined Milan under imperial watching; and he persuaded Clement to allow the cowardly or faithless Francesco Maria della Rovere to keep Urbino. He forgave Alfonso his recent association with France, and rewarded him for aiding the march on Rome by letting him retain his duchy as a papal fief, and giving him Modena and Reggio as imperial fiefs; in return Alfonso paid the Pope 100,000 badly needed ducats. To consolidate these settlements Charles summoned all the principalities to join in a union of Italy for common defense against foreign attack—except by Charles; that unity for which Dante had pled to the Emperor Henry VII, and Petrarch to the Emperor Charles IV, was now achieved through united subjection to a foreign power. Clement blessed it all, and crowned Charles Emperor with the iron crown of Lombardy and the imperial-papal crown of the Holy Roman Empire (February 22–24, 1530).

The alliance of Pope and Emperor was sealed with Florentine blood. Resolved to restore his family to power, Clement paid 70,000 ducats to Philibert, Prince of Orange (who had kept him prisoner), to organize an army and overturn the republic of rich men that had been set up there in 1527. Philibert sent on this mission 20,000 German and Spanish troops, many of whom had shared in the sack of Rome.⁴⁹ In December, 1529, this force occupied Pistoia and Prato, and laid siege to Florence. To expose the assailants to Florentine artillery the resolute burghers destroyed every house, garden, and wall for a mile around the city fortifications; and Michelangelo left his sculpture of the Medici tombs to build or rebuild the ramparts and forts. The siege continued mercilessly for eight months; food became so scarce in Florence that cats and rats brought some $12.50 apiece.⁵⁰ Churches surrendered their vessels, citizens their plate, women their jewelry, to be transformed into money for provisions or arms. Patriotic monks like Fra Benedetto da Foiano kept up the spirit of the people with fiery sermons. A courageous Florentine, Francesco Ferrucci, escaped from the city, organized a force of three thousand men, and attacked the besiegers. He was defeated with the loss of two thousand of his soldiers. He himself was captured and brought before Fabrizio Maramaldi, a Calabrian who commanded the imperial cavalry. Maramaldi had Ferrucci held helpless before him while he repeatedly drove a poignard into him until the hero died.⁵¹ Meanwhile the general whom Florence had hired to lead its defense, Malatesta Baglioni, entered into a treacherous agreement with the besiegers; he let them into the city, and turned his guns upon the Florentines. Starving and disorganized, the republic surrendered (August 12, 1530).

Alessandro de’ Medici became Duke of Florence, and disgraced his family by his rapacity and cruelty. Hundreds of those who had fought for the Republic were tortured, exiled, or slain. Fra Benedetto was sent to Clement, who ordered him imprisoned in Sant’ Angelo; there, said an uncertain report, the monk was starved to death.⁵² The Signory was disbanded; the Palazzo della Signoria now began to be called Palazzo Vecchio; and the great eleven-ton bell, La Vacca—the Cow—that had from the lovely tower called so many generations to parlamento, was taken down and broken to pieces, “in order,” said a contemporary diarist, “that we should no more hear the sweet sound of liberty.”⁵³

IX. CLEMENT VII AND THE ARTS

The Pope’s treatment of Florence confirmed the degeneration of the Medici; his efforts to restore Rome revealed a spark of the administrative genius and esthetic appreciation that had made the family great. Sebastiano del Piombo, who had portrayed him in maturity, painted him now as an old man, somber, deep-eyed, white-bearded, giving benediction; apparently suffering had chastened and in some measure strengthened him. He took vigorous action to protect Italy from the Turkish fleets that now commanded the Eastern Mediterranean; he fortified Ancona, Ascoli, and Fano, and paid the costs by persuading the consistory of June 21, 1532—over the opposition of the cardinals—to impose a levy of fifty per cent upon the incomes of the Italian clergy, including the cardinals.⁵⁴ Partly by selling ecclesiastical offices, he raised funds to rebuild the property of the Church, to restore the University of Rome, and to resume the patronage of scholarship and art. He took measures to ensure a proper supply of grain despite the raids of Barbary pirates upon shipping near Sicily. In a remarkably short time Rome was functioning again as the capital of the Western world.

The city was still rich in artists. Caradosso had come from Milan, Cellini from Florence, to raise the art of the goldsmith to its Renaissance zenith; they and many more were kept busy making gold roses and swords of honor as papal gifts, vessels for the altars, silver staffs for Church authorities and processions, seals for cardinals, tiaras and rings for the popes. Valerio Belli of Vicenza made for Clement a magnificent casket of rock crystal, engraved with scenes from the life of Christ. This, now one of the most precious objects in the Pitti Palace, was presented to Francis I at the marriage of his son to Catherine de’ Medici.

The decoration of the Vatican stanze had been resumed in 1526. The greatest painting of Clement’s pontificate was done in the Hall of Constantine: there Giulio Romano pictured The Apparition of the Cross and The Battle of the Milvian Bridge; Francesco Penni painted The Baptism of Constantine, and Raffaello del Colle portrayed Rome Presented to Pope Sylvester by Constantine.

After Michelangelo—and now that Giulio Romano had migrated to Mantua—the ablest painter in Rome was Sebastiano Luciano, who acquired his sobriquet del Piombo when he was appointed keeper and designer of the papal seals (1531). Born in Venice (c. 1485), he had the luck to be taught by Gian Bellini, Giorgione, and Cima. One of his earliest and finest pictures—The Three Ages of Ages—shows him as a delectable youth between two famous foreign composers then in Venice—Jacob Obrecht and Philippe Verdelot. For the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo he painted —or finished for Giorgione—a vivid representation of that saint in the fever of composition; and about the same time (1510) he copied Giorgione’s most voluptuous manner in a Venus and Adonis whose generous women seem to belong to a golden age before the birth of sin. Probably in Venice also Sebastiano painted his renowned Portrait of a Lady, long ascribed to Raphael as La Fornarina.

In 1511 Agostino Chigi invited Sebastiano to come to Rome and help adorn the Villa Chigi. There the young artist met Raphael, and for a time imitated his style of pagan ornament; in return he taught Raphael the Venetian secrets of warm coloring. Soon Sebastian became a devoted friend of Michelangelo, imbibed the Titan’s muscular conception of man, and announced the aim of wedding Venetian color to Michelangelesque design. He had a chance to do this when Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici asked him for a picture. Sebastiano chose as his subject The Raising of Lazarus, in deliberate competition with the Transfiguration that Raphael was painting at the time (1518). Critics did not unanimously contradict his judgment that he had equaled Leo’s favorite.

He might have progressed further had he not been too readily content with his excellence. A passion for leisure kept him this side of genius. He was a jovial fellow who could not see why one should wear himself out either for superfluous gold or for such a will-o’-the-wisp as posthumous fame. After he had received his sinecure in the Vatican from his patron made pope, he confined himself for the most part to portraits, in which few painters have surpassed him.

Baldassare Peruzzi was more ambitious, and made his sonorous name ring for a generation across the mountains of Italy. He was the son of a weaver. (Artists are mostly of lowly stock: the middle classes seek utility first, hoping to have time for beauty in their senility; aristocrats, though they nourish art, prefer the art of life to the life of art.) Born in Siena (1481), Baldassare learned painting under Sodoma and Pinturicchio, and soon went off to Rome. Apparently it was he who painted the ceiling of the Stanza d’Eliodoro in the Vatican, and Raphael thought the work good enough to leave much of it unchanged. Meanwhile, like Bramante, he fell in love with the classic ruins, measured the ground plans of the ancient temples and palaces, and studied the diverse forms and arrangements of columns and capitals. He became a specialist in the application of perspective to architecture.

When Agostino Chigi decided to build the Villa Chigi, Peruzzi was invited to design it (1508). The banker was pleased with the result—the stately crowning of a Renaissance façade with classic moldings and cornices; and finding that Peruzzi could also paint, he gave the young artist freedom to decorate several rooms of the interior in competition with Sebastiano del Piombo and Raphael. In the entrance hall and the loggia Baldassare pictured Venus combing her hair, Leda and her swan, Europa and her bull, Danaë and her golden shower, Ganymede and his eagle, and other scenes calculated to raise the tired moneylender from the prose of his days to the poetry of his dreams. Peruzzi set off his frescoes with borders painted in such tricks of perspective that Titian thought them to be veritable reliefs in stone.⁵⁵ In the hall of the upper floor Baldassare made illusory architecture with his brush: cornices sustained by pictured caryatids, friezes supported by pictured pilasters, mimic windows opening upon pictured fields. Peruzzi had fallen in love with architecture, and made painting its handmaid, obeying all the builder’s rules, but spiritless. Let us make an exception here for the Biblical scenes that he painted in a semidome of Santa Maria della Pace (1517), where Raphael had painted sibyls three years before. Baldassare’s frescoes stood the comparison well, for these are his finest paintings, while Raphael’s there were not his best.

Leo X must have been impressed by Peruzzi’s versatility, for he appointed him to succeed Raphael as chief architect at St. Peter’s (1520), and engaged him to paint the scenery for Bibbiena’s comedy, La Calandra (1521). All that remains of Peruzzi’s work on San Pietro is the ground plan that he drew; Symonds pronounced it “by far the most beautiful and interesting of those laid down for St. Peter’s.”⁵⁶ Leo’s death, and the accession of a pope allergic to art, drove Peruzzi back to Siena, then to Bologna. There he designed the lovely Palazzo Albergati, and made a model for the never finished façade of San Petronio. He hurried back to Rome when Clement VII reopened the paradise of the arts, and resumed his work at St. Peter’s. He was still there when the imperial mob sacked Rome. He suffered special tribulations, says Vasari, because “he was grave and noble of aspect, and they thought him some great prelate in disguise.” They held him for a lordly ransom; but when he proved his lowly status by painting a masterly portrait, they contented themselves with taking from him all but the shirt on his back, and let him go. He made his way to Siena, and arrived there almost naked. The Sienese government, proud to recapture its prodigal son, engaged him to design fortifications; and the church of Fontegiusta commissioned him to paint a mural which was acclaimed by generous critics as his chef-d’oeuvre—a Sibyl announcing to a frightened Augustus the coming birth of Christ.

But Peruzzi’s greatest success was the Palazzo Massimi delle Colonne, which he designed on his return to Rome (1530). The Massimi claimed descent, and derived their name, from Fabius Maximus, who had earned immortality by idling; they took their surname from the columned porch of their previous dwelling, which had been destroyed in the sack. It was Peruzzi’s good fortune that the curved irregularity of the site forbade the usual dreary rectangular plan. He chose an oval form, with a Renaissance façade and a Doric portico; and while keeping the exterior simple, he gave the interior all the ornament and splendor of a Roman palace of Imperial days, with Greek refinements of proportion and decoration.

Despite his multiform ability Peruzzi died poor, not having had the heart to haggle with popes, cardinals, and bankers for fees commensurate with his skill. When Pope Paul III heard that he was dying he bethought himself that only Peruzzi and Michelangelo remained to raise St. Peter’s from walls to dome. He sent the artist a hundred crowns ($1250?). Baldassare thanked him, and died nevertheless, at the age of fifty-four (1535). Vasari, after suggesting that a rival had poisoned him, relates that “all the painters, sculptors, and architects in Rome followed his body to the grave.”

X. MICHELANGELO AND CLEMENT VII: 1520–34

It is one of the credits in Clement’s account that through all his own misfortunes he bore with kindly patience the moods and revolts of Michelangelo, plied him with commissions, and accorded him all the privileges of genius. “When Buonarroti comes to see me,” he said, “I always take a seat and bid him be seated, feeling sure that he will do so without leave.”⁵⁷ Even before becoming pope he proposed (1519) what proved to be the artist’s culminating sculptural assignment: to add to the church of San Lorenzo in Florence a “New Sacristy” as a mausoleum for famous Medici, to design their tombs, and to adorn these with appropriate statuary. Confident in the Titan’s versatility, Clement also asked him to draw up architectural plans for the Laurentian Library, strong and spacious enough to safely house the literary collections of the Medici family. The stately stairway and pillared vestibule of this Biblioteca Laurenziana were completed (1526–7) under Angelo’s supervision; the remainder of the building was later put up by Vasari and others from Buonarroti’s designs.

The Nuova Sagrestia was hardly an architectural masterpiece. It was planned as a simple quadrangle, divided with pilasters and surmounted by a modest dome; its prime function was to receive statuary in the recesses left in the walls. This “Medici Chapel” was finished in 1524; and in 1525 Angelo began work on the tombs. Clement wrote to him in the latter year a gently impatient letter:

Thou knowest that popes have no long life; and we cannot yearn more than we do to behold the chapel with the tombs of our kinsmen, or at any rate to hear that it is finished. And likewise as regards the Library. Wherefore we recommend both to thy diligence. Meanwhile we will betake us (in accord with your words) to a wholesome patience, praying God that He may put it into thy heart to push the whole enterprise forward together. Fear not that either commissions or rewards shall fail thee while we live. Farewell, with God’s blessing and ours.—Giulio.⁵⁸

There were to be six tombs: for Lorenzo the Magnificent, his assassinated brother Giuliano, Leo X, Clement VII, the younger Giuliano “too good to govern a state” (d. 1516), and the younger Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519). Only the tombs of the last two were completed, and even these not quite. Nevertheless they are the apogee of Renaissance sculpture, as the Sistine Chapel is the summit of Renaissance painting, and St. Peter’s dome is the architectural pinnacle of the Renaissance. The tombs show the dead men in the prime of life, with no attempt to reproduce their real forms or features: Giuliano in the garb of a Roman commander, Lorenzo as il Penseroso the thinker. When some incautious observer remarked this lack of realism, Michelangelo answered with words that revealed his sublime confidence in his artistic immortality: “Who will care, a thousand years hence, whether these are their features or not?”⁵⁹ Reclining on the sarcophagus of Giuliano are two nude figures: at the right a man allegedly symbolizing Day, at the left a woman supposedly representing Night. Similar recumbent figures on the tomb of Lorenzo have been named Twilight and Dawn. These interpretations are hypothetical, perhaps fanciful; probably the sculptor’s aim was merely to carve again his secret fetish, the human body, in all the splendor of male strength and all the comely contours of the female form. As usual, he succeeded better with the male; the unfinished figure of Twilight, slowly surrendering an active and exhausting day to night, matches the noblest gods of the Parthenon.

War intervened upon art. When Rome fell to the Landsknechte (1527), Clement could no longer play patron, and Michelangelo’s papal pension of fifty crowns ($625) a month ceased. Meanwhile Florence enjoyed two years of republican liberty. When Clement made up with Charles, and a German-Spanish army was despatched to overthrow the republic and reinstall the Medici, Florence appointed Angelo (April 6, 1529) to a Committee of Nine—Nove di Milizia—for the defense of the city. The Medicean artist became, by the hazard of circumstance, the anti-Medicean engineer feverishly engaged in designing and building forts and walls.

But as these works proceeded, Michelangelo became more and more convinced that the city could not be successfully defended. What single town, divided as Florence then was in heart and loyalties, could withstand the artillery and excommunications of Empire and papacy combined? On September 21, 1529, in a mood of panic, he fled from Florence, hoping to escape to France and its amiable King. Finding his way blocked by German-held terrain, he took temporary refuge in Ferrara, then in Venice. Thence he sent a message to his friend Battista della Palla, art agent of Francis I in Florence: Would he join Angelo in flight to France?⁶⁰ Battista refused to leave the post that had been assigned to him in the defense of the city; instead he wrote to Angelo a stirring appeal to return to his duty, warning him that otherwise the government would confiscate his property, leaving his impecunious relatives destitute. About November 20 the artist was back at his work on the Florentine fortifications.

According to Vasari he found time, even in those excited months, to continue work secretly on the tombs of the Medici, and also to paint, for Alfonso of Ferrara, the least characteristic of his works, Leda and the Swan. It was a strange product for a man so slightly sexual and so generally puritan; and perhaps it came from a temporarily disordered mind. It showed the swan copulating with Leda. Alfonso was something of a lecher between wars, but apparently he had not chosen the subject. The messenger whom he sent to secure the promised work expressed disappointment when he saw it, saying, “This is a mere trifle,” and made no effort to secure it for the Duke. Angelo gave the picture to his servant Antonio Mini, who took it with him to France, where it passed into the collection of the omnivorous Francis I. It remained at Fontainebleau until the reign of Louis XIII, when a high official ordered it destroyed because of its indecency. How far this order was carried out, and what was the later history of this original, is unknown. A copy remains in the vaults of the London National Gallery.⁶¹

When Florence fell to the returning Medici, Battista della Palla and other republican leaders were put to death. Michelangelo hid himself for two months in the house of a friend, expecting at any moment a like fate. But Clement thought him worth more alive than dead. The Pope wrote to his ruling relatives in Florence bidding them seek out the artist, treat him with courtesy, and offer him the renewal of his pension if he would resume work on the tombs. Michael agreed. But again, as with the mausoleum of Julius, the mind of pontiff and artist had conceived more than the hand could execute, and the Pope could not live long enough to see the enterprise through. When Clement died (1534) Michelangelo, fearful that Alessandro de’ Medici would do him harm now that his protector was gone, took the first opportunity to slip off to Rome.

A profound and somber sadness marks the tombs, and the solemn Madonna de’ Medici that Angelo also carved for the Sacristy. Historians fond of democracy (and exaggerating its scope in Florence) have generally assumed that the recumbent figures symbolize a city mourning its forced surrender to tyranny. But this interpretation is probably fanciful: after all, they had been designed while the Medici ruled Florence reasonably well; they had been carved for a Medici Pope unfailingly kind to Angelo, and by an artist indebted to Medici from his youth; it is not clear that he intended to condemn the family whose tombs he was preparing; and his representations of Giuliano and Lorenzo have nothing derogatory about them. No, these figures express something deeper than the love of liberty by the rich few to rule the poor unhindered by a Medici house usually popular with the people. They express rather Michelangelo’s weariness with life, the fatigue of a man all nerves and titanic uncompassable dreams, who found himself buffeted by a thousand tribulations, harassed in almost every enterprise by the dull recalcitrance of matter, the obtuseness of power, and the called-in loans of borrowed time. Angelo had enjoyed but few of life’s delights: he had no friends on a par with his mind; woman seemed to him only a smooth anatomy threatening peace; and even his most majestic triumphs were the issue of exhausting toil and pain, the unfinishable symphonies of melancholy meditation and inescapable defeat.

But when Florence had fallen to her worst tyrants, and terror ruled where once Lorenzo had governed happily, the artist who had carved a criticism of life, and no mere theory of government, in the marbles of the Medici shrine, felt that those melancholy figures expressed, as well, the glory gone of the city that had nursed the Renaissance. On the unveiling of the statue of Night the poet Gianbattista Strozzi wrote a quatrain of literary exposition:

The Night thous seest here, posed gracefully

In act of slumber, was by an angel wrought

Out of this stone. Sleeping, with life she’s fraught.

Wake her, incredulous wight; she’ll speak to thee.

Michelangelo pardoned the complimentary pun on his name, but rejected the interpretation. He gave his own in four lines that are the most revealing in his poetry:

Caro m’è il sonno, e più l’esser di sasso

Mentre che ‘l danno e la vergogna dura.

Non veder, non sentir m’è gran ventura;

Però non mì destar; deh! parla basso.—

Dear is my sleep, but more to be mere stone,

So long as ruin and dishonor reign.

To see naught, to feel naught, is my great gain;

Then wake me not; speak in an undertone.⁶²

XI. THE END OF AN AGE: 1528–34

Clement did not die until he had made one more reversal of policy, and had crowned his disasters by losing England for the Church (1531). The spread of the Lutheran revolt in Germany had created for Charles V difficulties and dangers that might, he hoped, be eased by a general council. He urged this upon the Pope, and was angered by repeated excuses and delays. Irritated in turn by the Emperor’s award of Reggio and Modena to Ferrara, Clement veered again toward France. He accepted a proposal of Francis that Caterina de’ Medici should marry the King’s second son Henry, and he signed secret articles binding himself to help Francis recover Milan and Genoa (1531).⁶³ At a second conference in Bologna (1532) between Pope and Emperor, Charles again proposed a general council at which Catholics and Protestants might meet and find some formula of reconciliation; he was again rebuffed. He suggested a marriage of Catherine with Francesco Maria Sforza, imperial vicar in Milan; he found that the proposal came too late; Catherine was already sold. On October 12, 1533, Clement met Francis at Marseille, and there married his niece to Henry, Duke of Orléans. It was a prime defect of the Medici as popes that they thought of themselves as a royal dynasty, and sometimes rated the glory of their family above the fate of Italy or the Church. Clement tried to persuade Francis to make peace with Charles; Francis refused, and had the audacity to ask papal acquiescence to a temporary alliance of France with the Protestants and the Turks against the Emperor.⁶⁴ Clement thought that this was going a bit too far.

“Under these circumstances,” says Pastor, “it must be considered fortunate for the Church that the Pope’s days were numbered.”⁶⁵ He had already lived too long. At his accession Henry VIII was still Defensor fidei, defender of the orthodox faith against Luther; and the Protestant revolt had as yet proposed no vital doctrinal changes, but only such ecclesiastical reforms as the Council of Trent would legislate for the Church in the next generation. At Clement’s death (September 25, 1534) England, Denmark, Sweden, half of Germany, part of Switzerland had definitely broken away from the Church, and Italy had submitted to a Spanish domination fatal to the free thought and life that had for good or evil marked the Renaissance. It was beyond doubt the most disastrous pontificate in the history of the Church. Everyone had rejoiced at Clement’s accession, everyone rejoiced at his death; and the rabble of Rome repeatedly defiled his tomb.⁶⁶

BOOK VI

FINALE

1534–76

CHAPTER XXII

Sunset in Venice

1534–76

I. VENICE REBORN

IT is something of a mystery that this age of thralldom and decline for the rest of Italy was for Venice a golden age. She had suffered severely from the wars of the League of Cambrai; she had lost many of her Eastern possessions to the Turks; her trade with the Eastern Mediterranean was repeatedly disturbed with war and piracy; her commerce with India was passing to Portugal. Why, then, could she support in this period architects like Sansovino and Palladio, writers like Aretino, painters like Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese? In this same age Andrea Gabrieli played the organ and led the choirs at San Marco, and wrote madrigals that sounded through Italy; music was a pampered passion of rich and poor; the palaces on the Grand Canal were rivaled in interior luxury and art only by those of bankers and cardinals in Rome; a hundred poets recited their verses in booths and taverns and public squares; a dozen companies of players performed comedies, permanent theaters were built, and Vittoria Piissimi, la bella maga d’amore, “the lovely sorceress of love,” was the toast of the city as an actress, singer, and dancer as women replaced boys in female parts, and the reign of divas began.

Only the lamest explanation of the mystery will be given here. Though deeply injured by war, Venice had never been invaded; her homes and shops remained intact. She had recovered her mainland possessions, and included populous cities like Padua, Vicenza, and Verona among her tributaries in education, economy, and genius (Colombo and Cornaro at Padua, Palladio at Vicenza, Veronese from Verona). She still dominated large areas of trade in and near the Adriatic. Her leading families had still unspent treasures of nursed and inherited wealth. Old industries continued to flourish, and found new markets in Christendom; it was now, for example, that Venetian glass reached its tenuous crystalline perfection. The Venetian leadership in luxury products was maintained, and in this age Venetian lace first acquired fame. Despite religious censorship, Venice still gave asylum to political refugees, and to intellectual refugees like Aretino, who fumigated his hilarious ribaldries with periodical contributions to the literature of piety.

Toward the end of this period Venice twice demonstrated her civic vigor and resilience. In 1571 she took a leading part, with Spain and the papacy, in equipping the armada of two hundred vessels that destroyed a Turkish fleet of 224 ships off Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth. That victory, which may have saved western Europe for Christendom, was celebrated by Venice with three days of mad rejoicing: the region of the Rialto was hung with cloths of turquoise or gold; every window made the canals colorful with flags or tapestries; a great triumphal arch rose at the Rialto bridge; and paintings by the Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and Michelangelo were displayed in the streets. The subsequent carnival was the wildest that Venice had ever known, setting the pace for many later carnivals; everyone masked and frolicked, laying a moratorium upon morality; and clowns like Pantalone and Zanni (i.e., Johnny) gave their names to a dozen languages.

And then, in 1574 and 1577, tragic fires in the Ducal Palace gutted several rooms; paintings by Gentile da Fabriano, the Bellini, the Vivarini, Titian, Pordenone, Tintoretto, and Veronese were destroyed; in two days the labor and art of a century disappeared. The spirit of the republic shone out in the rapidity and resolution with which the damaged interiors were restored. Giovanni da Ponte was commissioned to rebuild the chambers on their former lines; Cristoforo Sorte designed in twenty-nine divisions the marvelous ceiling of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio; and the walls were painted by Tintoretto, Veronese, Palma Giovane, and Francesco Bassano. In other rooms—the Collegio or meeting place of the Doge and his council, the Anticollegio or antechamber, the Sala de’ Pregadi or Senate Hallceilings and doors and windows were designed by the greatest architects of the age—Iacopo Sansovino, Palladio, Antonio Scarpagnino, Alessandro Vittoria.

Iacopo d’Antonio di Iacopo Tatti was by birth (1486) a Florentine. He “went very reluctantly to school,” says Vasari, but took eagerly to drawing. His mother encouraged this disposition; his father, who had hoped to make a merchant of him, was overruled. So Iacopo went to serve as apprentice to the sculptor Andrea Contucci di Monte San Savino, who loved the lad so well, and taught him so conscientiously, that Iacopo came to look upon him as a father, and adopted Andrea’s cognomen, Sansovino, as his own. The youth had also the good fortune to make a friend of Andrea del Sarto, and perhaps learned from him the secrets of graceful and animated design. While in Florence the young sculptor carved the Bacchus now in the Bargello, famous for its perfect balance, and for the skill with which arm, hand, and vase—lightly poised on the finger tips—were cut from one piece of marble. Everyone (except Michelangelo) was kind to Andrea, and helped him up the hill to excellence. Giuliano da Sangallo took him to Rome and gave him lodging. Bramante commissioned him to make a wax copy of the Laocoön; it was so well done that it was cast in bronze for Cardinal Grimani. Perhaps through Bramante’s influence Andrea turned from sculpture to architecture, and soon received lucrative commissions.

He was in Rome when the sack came, and, like many other artists, he lost all his possessions. He made his way to Venice, thinking to go to France; but the Doge Andrea Gritti begged him, instead, to strengthen the pillars and cupolas of St. Mark’s. His work so pleased the Senate that he was made state architect (1529). For six years he labored to improve the Piazza San Marco, banishing the butchers’ shops that had sullied the Piazzetta, opening new streets, and helping to make St. Mark’s Square the spacious delight that it is today.

In 1536 he built the Zecca or mint, and began his most celebrated building, the Libreria Vecchia, facing the Palace of the Doges. He designed the façade with a stately double portico of Doric and Ionic columns, handsome cornices and balconies, and decorative statuary. Some have rated this Old Library “the most beautiful profane edifice in Italy”;¹ but the multiplication of columns is excessive, and the structure can hardly compare with the Palace of the Doges. In any case the Procurators liked it, raised Sansovino’s salary, and exempted him from war taxes. In 1544 one of the main arches collapsed, and the vault crashed down. Sansovino was thrown into jail and heavily fined, but Aretino and Titian persuaded the Procurators to release and pardon him. The arch and vault were repaired, and the building was successfully completed in 1553. Meanwhile (1540) Sansovino had designed the pretty Loggetta, or vestibule for police, on the eastern side of the Campanile, and had adorned it with bronze and terra-cotta sculptures. In St. Mark’s he cast bronze doors for a sacristy, and took occasion to portray, among the reliefs, not only Aretino but Titian and himself.

The three men had now become firm friends, enviously known in Venetian art circles as “the Triumvirate.” Many an evening they spent together, talking shop, or entertaining such beauty as could be engaged for the time. Iacopo rivaled Aretino in popularity with women, and Titian in longevity. He remained strong and healthy, and (we are assured) enjoyed perfect eyesight, till his eighty-fourth year.² For fifty years he never consulted a physician; during summers he lived almost entirely on fruit. When Paul III invited him to succeed Antonio da Sangallo as chief architect at St. Peter’s, he refused, saying that he would not exchange his life in a republic for service under an absolute ruler.³ Ercole II of Ferrara and Duke Cosimo of Florence in vain offered him large stipends to take up residence at their courts. He died peacefully in 1570, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.

In that year appeared an epoch-making work—Four Books of Architecture—by Andrea Palladio, who gave his name to a style that endured here and there into our own time. Like so many others, Andrea went to Rome and was thrilled by the ruined grandeur of the Forum. He came to love those broken columns and capitals as the finest conceptions that architecture had ever reached; he almost memorized Vitruvius; and his own book strove to restore to Renaissance building all those principles which, he thought, had created the glory of classic Rome. It seemed to him that the finest architecture would avoid all ornament that did not spring spontaneously from the constructive style itself; it would pledge itself to a strict proportion, connection, and congruity of the parts in an organic whole; it would be classically noble and strong, as chaste as a vestal virgin, and as dignified as an emperor.

His first major work was his best, and is one of the outstanding structures of secular Italy. Around the Palazzo della Ragione or Town Hall of his native Vicenza he built (1549f) magnificent and powerful arcades, transforming an undistinguished Gothic core into a Basilica Palladiana that might vie with the Basilica Iulia of the Roman Forum itself: a tier of arches sustaining Doric columns and pilasters, a massive architrave, a railing and balcony elegantly carved, a second tier of arches, on Ionic columns, a classic cornice and railing, and—above each spandrel—a statue rising to oversee the city and give it an exemplar of greatness. “I do not question,” he wrote in his book twenty-one years later, “but that this fabric may be compared with the ancient edifices, and be looked upon as one of the most noble and beautiful buildings erected since the time of the ancients.”⁴ If he had confined his challenge to civic buildings the boast might stand.

Palladio became the hero of Vicenza, which felt that he had surpassed Sansovino’s Libreria Vecchia. Rich men plied him with commissions for palaces and villas, ecclesiastics for churches; before he died (1580) he had transformed his city almost into an ancient Roman municipality. He built a loggia for the city administration, a pretty museum, a splendid Teatro Olimpico. Venice called him, and there he designed two of her finest churches—San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore. Even before his death he had become a powerful influence in Italy. Early in the seventeenth century Inigo Jones brought the Palladian style into England; it spread through Western Europe, and came to America.

Perhaps it was a misfortune. It never really captured the dignity of Roman architecture; it confused its façades with a plethora of columns, capitals, cornices, moldings, and statuary; the details detract from the simple lines and clarity of a classic edifice. And by reverting so humbly to an ancient style, Palladio forgot that a living art should express its own epoch and mood, not those of another age. That is why, when we think of the Renaissance, we do not call to mind its architecture, nor even its sculpture, but above all its painting, which bore lightly the traditions of Alexandria and Rome, freed itself from cramping and uncongenial Byzantine molds, and made itself the authentic voice and color of the time.

II. ARETINO: 1492–1556⁵

To make sure that 1492 would be memorable, Pietro Aretino, Scourge of Princes and Prince of Blackmailers, came into the world on Good Friday of that year. His father was a poor shoemaker of Arezzo, known to us only as Luca. Like many other Italians, Pietro received in time the name of his birthplace, and became Aretino. His enemies insisted that his mother was a prostitute; he denied it, and claimed that his mother was a pretty girl named Tita, who posed as a Madonna for painters, but in a careless moment conceived Pietro while in the arms of a casual but noble lover, Luigi Bacci. Aretino did not mind being a bastard, having such distinguished company in that class; and Luigi’s legitimate sons, when Pietro became famous, did not mind his calling them brothers. But his father was Luca.

Having attained the maturity of twelve years, he set out to make his fortune. He found work as a bookbinder’s assistant in Perugia, and there he studied art sufficiently to become in later years an excellent critic and connoisseur. He himself did some painting. In the chief square of Perugia was a holy picture, fondly reverenced by the people, showing Magdalen fervent at the feet of Christ. One night Aretino painted a lute in the arms of the Magdalene, changing her prayer into a serenade. When the city seethed with anger at the prank, Pietro slipped out of Perugia and examined Italy. He earned his bread as a servant in Rome, as a street singer in Vicenza, as an innkeeper in Bologna. He served a term in the galleys, became a hired man in a monastery, was discharged for lechery, and returned to Rome (1516). There he labored as a lackey for Agostino Chigi. The banker was not unkindly, but Aretino had discovered his own peculiar genius, and fretted under servantry. He wrote a bitter satire describing a scullion’s life: “cleaning privies, polishing chamberpots… performing lewd offices for cooks and stewards who soon see to it that he is all pricked out and embroidered with the French disease.”⁶ He showed his poems to some of Chigi’s guests, and word went around that this Pietro was the sharpest and witties satirist in Rome. His pieces began to circulate. Pope Leo enjoyed them, sent for the author, laughed at his rough frank humor, and added him to the papal staff as a cross between poet and jester. For three years Pietro ate well.

Suddenly Leo died, and Aretino was afloat again. As the conclave dallied in choosing a successor, he wrote satires on the electors and the candidates, affixed the sheets to the statue of Pasquino, and poked fun at so many dignitaries that soon he had hardly a friend in the city. When Adrian VI was elected, and began a most unwelcome campaign of reform, Pietro fled to Florence, then to Mantua (1523), where Federigo took him on as court poet at a moderate salary. When the death of Adrian answered Rome’s prayers, and a rich Medici sat again on the throne of thrones, Pietro, like a thousand other poets, artists, rascals, and rakes, hurried back to the capital.

Almost at once he ended his welcome there. Giulio Romano had painted twenty pictures describing various erotic attitudes; Marcantonio Raimondi made engravings for them; for each engraving, says Vasari, “Messer Pietro Aretino wrote an extremely lewd sonnet, so that I cannot say which is worse, the drawings or the words.”⁷ The pictures and sonnets went the rounds of the intelligentsia; they reached Pope Clement’s datary, Giberti, who was known to be hostile to Aretino; Pietro heard of it, and took again to the road. At Pavia he charmed Francis I, who was on the verge of losing everything but honor. And now, by putting a different point on his pen, he turned a somersault that made Rome gasp. He wrote three laudatory poems—one about Clement, one about Giberti, one about Federigo. The Marquis said a good word for him to the Pope, Giberti relented, Clement sent for Aretino, and made him a pensioned Knight of Rhodes. Francesco Berni, his only rival among the satirists, described him at this period:

He walks through Rome dressed like a duke. He takes part in all the wild doings of the lords. He pays his way with insults couched in tricked up words. He talks well, and he knows every libelous anecdote in the city. The Estes and the Gonzagas walk arm in arm with him, and listen to his prattle. He treats them with respect, and is haughty to everyone else. He lives on what they give him. His gifts is a satirist make people afraid of him, and he revels in hearing himself called a cynical, impudent slanderer. All that he needed was a fixed pension. He got one by dedicating to the Pope a second-rate poem.⁸

Aretino would not have questioned any of this. As if to illustrate it, he asked the Mantuan ambassador to solicit for him from Federigo “two pairs of shirts worked with gold… two pairs worked in silk, together with two golden caps.” When these took too much time in coming he threatened to annihilate the Marquis with a diatribe. The ambassador warned Federigo: “Your Excellency knows his tongue; therefore I will say no more.” Soon four shirts worked in gold arrived, and four of silk, and two gold caps, and two silk hats. “Aretino,” wrote the ambassador, “is satisfied.” Pietro could now really dress like a duke.

This second period of Roman prosperity was ended by a cloak-and-dagger romance. Aretino composed an insulting sonnet on a young woman employed in the datary’s kitchen. Another of Giberti’s household, Achille della Volta, attacked Aretino in the street at two o’clock in the morning (1525), stabbed him twice in the chest, and so severely in the right hand that two fingers had to be cut off. The wounds were not mortal; Aretino healed rapidly. He demanded the arrest of Achille, but neither Clement nor his datary intervened. Pietro suspected the datary of planning to have him murdered, and he decided that the time had come for another Italian tour. He moved to Mantua, and resumed his service with Federigo (1525). A year later, hearing that Giovanni delle Bande Nere was marshaling a force to check Frundsberg’s invasion, a secret atom of nobility stirred in him; he rode a hundred miles to join Giovanni at Lodi. All the ink in his veins tingled at the thought that he, the poor poet, might become a man of action, might even carve out for himself a principality, and be himself a prince, and no mere literary menial of a prince. And, indeed, the young commander, as generous as Don Quixote, promised to make him a marquis at least. But brave Giovanni was killed, and Aretino, putting aside the helmet he had received, returned to Mantua and his pen.

He composed now a mock giudizio, or almanac, for 1527, predicting absurd or evil fates for those he disliked. Furious against Clement for giving Giovanni delle Bande Nere inadequate and vacillating support, Aretino included the Pope among the victims of his satire. Clement expressed surprise that Federigo should harbor so irreverent an enemy of the papacy. Federigo gave Aretino a hundred crowns, and advised him to get out of the papal reach. “I will go to Venice,” said Pietro; “only in Venice does justice hold the scales with an even balance.” He arrived in March, 1527, and took a house on the Grand Canal. He was fascinated by the views across the lagoon, and by the teeming traffic of what he called “the fairest highway in the world.” “I have determined,” he wrote, “to live in Venice forever.” He addressed a letter of lordly compliments to the Doge Andrea Gritti, praising the majestic beauty of Venice, the justice of her laws, the security of her people, the asylum she offered to political and intellectual refugees; and he added, magnificently: “I, who have stricken terror into kings… give myself to you, fathers of your people.”⁹ The Doge took him at his own estimate, assured him of protection, assigned him a pension, and interceded for him with the Pope. Though invitations were to come to Aretino from several foreign courts, he remained a loyal resident of Venice through-out his remaining twenty-nine years.

The furniture and art that he gathered into his new home attested the power of his pen, for they were given or made possible by the generosity or timidity of his patrons. Tintoretto himself painted the ceiling of Pietro’s private apartments. Soon the walls shone with pictures by Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giulio Romano, Bronzino, Vasari; there were statues by Iacopo Sansovino and Alessandro Vittoria. A rich ebony casket contained the letters received by Aretino from princes, prelates, captains, artists, poets, musicians, and noble dames; later he would publish these letters in two volumes totaling 875 closely printed pages. There were carved chests and chairs, and a walnut bed fit for Pietro’s now ample form. Amid that art and luxury Aretino lived and dressed literally like a lord, dispersing charity to the neighborhood poor, entertaining a host of friends and a succession of mistresses.

Where did he get the means to support so lavish a life? Partly from the sale of his writings to publishers, partly from gifts and pensions sent him by men and women who feared his scorn and sought his praise. The satires, poems, letters, and plays that rushed from his pen were bought by the most alert or important people in Italy, all eager to see what he had to say about personalities and events, and delighting in his blasts at the corruption, hypocrisy, oppression, and immorality of the times. Ariosto inserted into the 1532 edition of Orlando furioso two lines that added two titles to Pietro’s name:

Ecco il flagello

De’ principi, il divin Pietro Aretino—¹⁰

“Behold the Scourge of Princes, the divine Pietro Aretino”; soon it became the fashion to speak of the coarsest and most scurrilous major writer of the age as divine.

His renown was Continental. His satires were at once translated into French; a bookseller on the Rue St. Jacques in Paris made a fortune retailing them.¹¹ They were welcomed in England, Poland, Hungary; Aretino and Machiavelli, said a contemporary, were the only Italian authors read in Germany. In Rome, where his favorite victims lived, his writings were sold out on the day of their publication. If we may take his own estimate, his receipts from his various publications amounted to a thousand crowns ($12,500?) a year. Moreover, in eighteen years, “the alchemy of my pen has drawn over 25,000 gold crowns from the entrails of various princes.” Kings, emperors, dukes, popes, cardinals, sultans, pirates were among his tributaries. Charles V gave him a collar worth 300 crowns, Philip II another worth 400; Francis I a still more costly chain.¹² Francis and Charles competed for his favor with promises of fat pensions. Francis promised more than he gave; “I adored him,” said Aretino, “but never to get money from the stirring of his liberality is enough to cool the furnaces of Murano” (the suburb where the glass industry of Venice was concentrated).¹³ A knighthood was offered him, without income; he refused it, remarking that “a knighthood without revenue is like a wall without Forbidden signs; everybody commits nuisances there.”¹⁴ So Pietro pledged his pen to Charles, and served him with unwonted fidelity. He was invited to meet the Emperor at Padua; on reaching that city he was hailed by a crowd, like a modern celebrity. Charles, out of all those present, chose Aretino to ride beside him through the city, and told him: “Every gentleman in Spain knows all your writings; they read everything of yours as fast as it is printed.” That night, at a state banquet, the son of the shoemaker sat at the Emperor’s right hand. Charles invited him to Spain; Pietro refused, having discovered Venice. Sitting beside the conqueror of Italy, Aretino was the first example of what was later called the power of the press; nothing like his influence would appear again in literature until Voltaire.

His satires hardly hold our attention today, for their force lay mostly in pointed allusion to local events too tied to the time to have lasting significance. They were popular because it is hard for us not to enjoy the excoriation of others; because they exposed real abuses, and courageously attacked the great and powerful; and because they brought all the resources of the language of the streets to the uses of literature and gainful literary homicide. Aretino exploited the human interest in sex and sin by writing Ragionamenti—conversations—among prostitutes about the secrets and practices of nuns, wives, and courtesans. The title page announced the book as “The Dialogues of Nanna and Antonia… composed by the divine Aretino for his pet monkey Capricio, and for the correction of the three states of women. Given to the printer in this month of April, 1533, in the illustrious city of Venice.”¹⁵ Aretino here anticipates the rollicking ribaldry and epithetic frenzy of Rabelais; he revels in four-letter words, and achieves some startling phrases (“I’d wager my soul against a pistachio nut”); and he indites such lively descriptions as that of the pretty wife of seventeen—the “finest little piece of flesh that I think I ever saw”—who, married to a man of sixty, took to sleepwalking as a way of “jousting with the lances of the night.”¹⁶ The conclusions to which the dialogues come is that courtesans are the most praiseworthy of the three classes of women, for the wives and nuns are faithless to their vows, while the courtesans live up to their professions and give an honest night’s labor for their pay. Italy was not shocked; it laughed with delight.

Now, too, Aretino composed the most popular of his plays—La cortigiana, The Courtesan. Like most Italian comedies of the Renaissance, it followed the Plautine tradition of servants making fools of their masters, arranging intrigues for them, serving as their panders and their brains. But Aretino added something of his own: his burlesque and bawdy humor, his intimacy with prostitutes, his hatred of courts—above all, of the papal court —and his uninhibited transcript of life as he had seen it in the brothels and palaces of Rome. He laid bare the hypocrisies, timeserving, humiliations, flatteries required of the courtier; and in a famous line he defined slander as “telling the truth”; it was his pithy apologia for his life. In another Aretino comedy, Talanta, the title character is again a prostitute, and the story turns on the tricks she plays upon her four lovers, and her ways of squeezing money out of their agitation. Another play, Ipocrita, was an Italian Tartuffe; indeed, Molière is a French continuation of the Aretine comedies, deodorized and improved.

In the same year that produced these idyls of the stews, Aretino composed a long series of religious works—Tee Humanity of Christ, The Seven Penitential Psalms, The Life of the Virgin Mary, The Life of the Virgin Catherine, The Life of St. Thomas, Lord of Aquino, etc. They were largely compounded of fiction, and Pietro confessed that they were “poetical lies,” but they won him the plaudits of the pious, even of the virtuous Vittoria Colonna. In some quarters he was regarded as a pillar of the Church. There was talk of making him a cardinal.

It was probably his letters that sustained his fame as well as his fortune. Many of these were eulogies addressed to the eulogized, or to persons near them. They were frankly intended to elicit gifts, pensions, or other favors; sometimes they specified what was to be given, and when. Aretino published—printed—these letters almost as soon as he wrote them; this was necessary to their extractive power. Italy snapped them up because they provided an indirect intimacy with famous men and women, and because they were written with an originality, vivacity, and force unequaled by any other writer of the day. Aretino had style without seeking it. He laughed at the Bembos who polished their stanzas into perfect lifelessness; he ended the humanist idolatry of Latin, of correctness and grace. Pretending to be ignorant of literature, he felt free from cramping exemplars; he accepted in his writing one overruling rule: to enounce spontaneously, in direct and simple language, his experience and criticism of life, and the needs of his wardrobe and larder. Amid the mountain of hypocritical rubbish of these letters some diamonds can be found: tender epistles to a favorite ailing harlot, lusty accounts of his domestic history, a sunset described in a letter to Titian almost as brilliantly as Titian or Turner could paint it, and a letter to Michelangelo suggesting, for The Last Judgment, a design much more appropriate than that which the artist used.

Aretino’s understanding and appreciation of art were among the better qualities of his character. His most intimate male friends were Titian and Sansovino. Together they had many a feast, usually graced with feminine company usually venal; and there, when the talk turned on art, Aretino could hold his own. His letters sang the praises of Titian to a host of possible patrons, and won Vecelli several lucrative commissions, in which Pietro may have shared. It was Aretino who persuaded the Doge, the Emperor, and the Pope to sit to Titian for portraits. Titian painted Aretino twice, and each time made a masterpiece of mountainous and vulgar vitality. Sansovino, pretending to carve an Apostle, placed the old satyr’s head on a sacristy door in St. Mark’s; and perhaps Michelangelo, in The Last Judgment, portrayed him as St. Bartholomew.

He was both better and worse than he was painted. He had almost every vice, and was accused of sodomy. His hypocrisy made his own Ipocrita seem by comparison sincere. His language, when he set his mind to it, could be a cloaca maxima of filth. He could be brutal and unmanly, as when he gloated over the fallen Clement; but he had the grace to write, later: “I am ashamed that in censuring him I did so in the depth of his afflictions.”¹⁷ He was physically an unabashed coward; but he had the courage to denounce powerful persons and highly cherished abuses. His most visible virtue was generosity. He gave to his friends and the poor a large part of what he received in pensions, earnings, gifts, and bribes. He waived royalties on his published letters, so that they might be sold more cheaply, and acquire wider fame and higher value. He was annually near bankruptcy with Christmas giving. Giovanni delle Bande Nere said to Guicciardini: “I yield to no man in generosity, unless it be to Messer Pietro, when he has means.”¹⁸ He helped his friends to sell their pictures and (as in the case of Sansovino) to get release from jail. “Everybody comes to me,” he wrote, “as if I were a custodian of the royal treasury. Let a poor girl be confined, and my house pays the expenses. Let anyone be put into prison, and the cost falls upon me. Soldiers without equipment, strangers down on their luck, stray cavaliers without number, come to my house to refit.”¹⁹ If at times he had twenty-two women in his house, it was not that they constituted his harem; some were nursing unexpected infants, and found a refuge under his roof; we note that a bishop sent him shoes for one of these women. Many of the women whom he used or succored loved and honored him; six favorite courtesans proudly called themselves “Aretines.”

He had whatever virtue is implied by abundant animal spirits; in private he was a good-natured animal who had never learned a moral code. He thought—with some excuse in those times—that no person of any consequence had any real moral code. He told Vasari that he had never seen a maiden whose features did not betray a touch of sensuality.²⁰ His own sensuality was gross, but to his friends it appeared to be merely the spontaneous exuberance of life. Hundreds of people found him lovable; princes and priests delighted in his conversation. He had no education, but he seemed to know everybody and everything. He became human in his love for Giovanni delle Bande Nere, for Caterina and the two children she bore him, and for frail, consumptive, gracious, faithless Pierina Riccia.

She came into his household as the fourteen-year-old wife of his secretary. They lived with him, and he played father to her; soon he loved her with a consuming and solicitous paternal affection. He reformed his morals, kept, of his mistresses, only Caterina and their babe Adria. Then, just as he was simmering down to respectability, a Venetian nobleman, whose wife he had charmed, accused him in court of blasphemy and sodomy. He denied the charges, but dared not face the exposures and chances of trial; conviction would have meant long imprisonment or death. He fled from his house, and hid for weeks with friends. They persuaded the court to dismiss the charges; Aretino returned to his home in triumph, cheered by crowds on both sides of the Grand Canal. But he was heartbroken to find in Pierina’s eyes that she thought him guilty. Then Pierina’s husband deserted her. When she came to Pietro for consolation he made her his mistress. She developed tuberculosis, and for thirteen months was near death; he nursed her with anxious tenderness, and brought her back to health. At the height of his devotion she left him for a younger lover. He tried to convince himself that it was better so, but from that day his spirit was broken, and old age advanced upon him triumphantly.

He grew fat, but never ceased to vaunt his sexual powers. He frequented brothels, and became more and more religious, he who in his youth had laughed at resurrections as “nonsense” which “only the rabble takes seriously.”²¹ In 1554 he went to Rome hoping to be crowned with a red hat, but Julius III could only make him a Knight of St. Peter. In that year he was evicted from the Casa Aretino for failure to pay his rent. He took more modest quarters, away from the Grand Canal. Two years later he died of apoplexy, aged sixty-four. He had confessed some fraction of his sins, and had received the Eucharist and Extreme Unction; and he was buried in the church of San Luca as if he had not been the very paragon and apostle of lechery. A wit composed for him a possible epitaph:

Qui giace l’Aretin, poeta tosco,

Chi disse mal d’ognun fuorche Dio,

Scusandosi col dir, Non lo conosco;—

which is to say:

Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,

Who evil spoke of everyone but God,

Giving as his excuse, “I never knew him.”

III. TITIAN AND THE KINGS: 1530–76

In 1530, at Bologna, Aretino introduced Titian to Charles V. The Emperor, absorbed in reorganizing Italy, sat impatiently for a portrait, and paid the astonished artist a single ducat ($12.50). Federigo of Mantua, calling Titian “the best painter now living,” added out of his own pocket a princely 150 ducats to the fee. Gradually the Duke brought Charles to his own point of view. In 1532 artist and Emperor met again. During the next sixteen years Titian painted a dazzling sequence of Imperial portraits: Charles in full armor (1532, now lost); Charles in brocaded coat, embroidered doublet, white breeches, stockings and shoes, and black cap with an inappropriate white feather (1533?); Charles with the Empress Isabella (1538); Charles in shining armor on a prancing steed at the battle of Mühlberg (1548)—a glory of color and pride; Charles in somber black, seated meditative on a balcony (1548). It is a credit to painter and King that these portraits make no attempt to idealize their subject, except in costume; they show Charles’s unprepossessing features, his bad skin, his gloomy spirit, and a certain capacity for cruelty; and yet they reveal the Emperor, a man of burdens and authority, a cold, hard mind that had brought half of western Europe under its rule. He could be kind nevertheless, and atone handsomely for his initial miserliness. In 1533 he sent Titian a patent making him a count palatine, and a Knight of the Golden Spur; and from that year Titian was officially court painter to the most powerful monarch in Christendom.

Meanwhile, presumably through Federigo, Titian had entered into correspondence with Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who had married Eleonora Gonzaga, Federigo’s sister and Isabella’s daughter. Since Francesco was now commander in chief of the Venetian armies, he and his Duchess were frequently in Venice. There Titian painted their portraits: a man nine tenths mail (for Titian liked its sheen), a woman pale and resigned after many illnesses. For them Titian painted on wood a Magdalen attractive only for the remarkable variations of light and hue that the artist gave to her auburn hair; and again for them a lovely portrait, in green and brown, known only as La Bella, and now in the Pitti Gallery. For Federigo’s successor, Duke Guidobaldo II, Titian made one of art’s most perfect nudes, the Venus of Urbino (c. 1538). Titian, we are told, had put some finishing touches on Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus; now he imitated that masterpiece in all but the accompaniments and the features. Here the face lacks the guileless peace of Giorgione’s version; and instead of a quiet landscape we see a rich interior of green curtain, brown drape, and red couch, while two maids search for robes gorgeous enough to fitly clothe the lady’s golden flesh.

From Duke and Emperor Titian passed on to paint the Pope. Paul III was also imperial: a man of virile character and subtle craft, with a face that recorded two generations of history; here was a better opportunity for Titian than he had found in the uncommunicative Emperor. At Bologna in 1535 Paul faced bravely the realism of Titian’s portraiture. Aged sixty-seven, tired but indomitable, he sat in his flowing papal robes, the long head and large beard bent over a once powerful frame, the ring of authority conspicuous on his aristocratic hand; this and Raphael’s Julius II contest the distinction of being the finest, deepest portrait of the Italian Renaissance. In 1545 the Pope invited Titian, himself now sixty-eight, to Rome. The artist was lodged in the Belvedere, and received all the honors of the city; Vasari acted as his cicerone in showing him the wonders of classic and Renaissance Rome; even Michelangelo welcomed him, and, in a moment of courtesy, concealed from him an opinion expressed to friends, that Titian would have been a greater painter had he learned to draw.²² There Titian painted Paul again, older, more bent, more harassed than before, between two obsequious grandsons who were soon to rebel against the Pope; this, too, is among Titian’s profoundest works. For one of these grandsons, Ottavio Farnese, he painted the voluptuous Danaë of the Naples Museum. After eight months in Rome he traveled slowly back via Florence to Venice (1546), hoping to spend his remaining days there in rest and peace.

But a year later the Emperor urgently called him over the Alps to Augsburg. There he stayed nine months, making two of the imperial portraits listed above, and immortalizing slim Spanish grandees and mountainous Teutons like the Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony. On a second visit to Augsburg (1550) Titian met the future Philip II of Spain, and made several pictures of him; one of these, in the Prado, is among the master portraits of the Renaissance. Lovelier still is the likeness that he painted of Charles’s Portuguese wife, the Empress Isabella. She had died in 1539, but the Emperor, four years later, gave Titian a middling representation of her by an obscure artist, and asked him to change it into a work of finished art. The result may not resemble the Empress, but even as an imaginary portrait this Isabella of Portugal must rank high among Titian’s pictures: a refined and melancholy face, a most royal costume, a book of prayers to console her premonition of an early death, a distant landscape providing overtones of green and brown and blue. Titian many times over earned his noble rank.

After his return from Augsburg (1552) Titian felt that he had traveled enough. He was seventy-five, and doubtless thought that he had not much longer to live. Perhaps his busyness made for his longevity; absorbed in painting after painting, he forgot to die. In a long succession of religious pictures (1522–70) he gave his own colorful and dramatic rendering of the Christian creed and story from Adam to Christ.* He commemorated with powerful images the Apostles and the saints. The best and most unpleasant of these is The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (1558, I Gesuiti, Venice): the saint is being roasted on a gridiron by Roman soldiers and slaves, who add to his discomfort with hot irons and flagellation. These religious pictures do not move us as deeply as the similar works of the Florentines; they excel in anatomy, but give no sense of piety; one look at the athletic figures of Christ and the Apostles makes it clear that Titian’s interest was purely technical, that he was thinking of splendid bodies, not of ascetic saints. In the interval between the Bellini and Titian Christianity, while still proposing topics, had lost its spiritual hold on Venetian art.²³

That sensual element which is one requisite of pictorial or plastic art remained strong in Titian for almost a century. He repeated his Farnese Danaë in several variations, and made many a Venus for defenders of the faith. Philip II of Spain was his best customer for these “mythologies”; the royal apartments in Madrid were adorned with a Danaë, Venus and Adonis, Perseus and Andromeda, Jason and Medea, Actaeon and Diana, The Rape of Europa, Tarquin and Lucretia, Diana and Callisto, and Jupiter and Antiope (also known as The Venus of Pardo); and all but the last of these were painted by Titian after 1553, when he was seventy-six or more. It is encouraging to find the Master’s imagination creating in his eighties female nudes as perfect as those that he had portrayed in his prime. The Dianas, with their upswept auburn hair, are of the type that Veronese was using—blonde Venuses almost lovelier than any Aphrodite of the Greeks. Perhaps the same lady, grown ampler, appears in Venus with the Mirror (c. 1555, Washington); she is again the Venus who clings to Adonis in the Prado picture, struggling to woo him from his dogs. Not even in Correggio is there so frankly sensual a riot of feminine flesh. And there are still other Venuses scattered in the galleries, but once peopling Titian’s brain: the Venus Anadyomene (c. 1520) of Bridgewater House, standing in the bath, and modestly concealed below the knees; the Venus and Cupid (c. 1545) of the Uffizi—a Germanic blonde with impeccable hands; the clothed Venus of The Education of Cupid (c. 1565) in the Borghese Gallery; the Prado Venus with the Organ Player (c. 1545), who cannot keep his mind on his music; and a Venus with the Lute Player (1560) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It must be said, however, that the women in these pictures are but part of their charm; Titian is interested in nature as well as women, and paints on several of these canvases splendid landscapes that are sometimes as lovely as the goddess herself.

Greater and deeper than these mythological pictures are the portraits. If the Venuses display a sense of form that never grew dull, the portraits reveal in Titian an ability to seize and convey human character with a force of art unequaled, in their total gallery, by the combined portraits of any other hand. What could be finer than the anonymous Man with the Glove (c. 1520, Louvre)?—whose gloved left hand and delicate white ruff about the neck harmonize so well with the sensitive spirit mirrored in the eyes. Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici (1533, Pitti) is a less searching portrayal, and yet in the face are the subtlety, the artistic sense, the love of power, that marked the Medici. The Francis I (c. 1538, Louvre) made the French King’s features famous, sending over the world, in a hundred thousand reproductions, the feathered hat and jolly eye and rapier nose and handsome beard and scarlet shirt of the man who lost Italy but won Leonardo and Cellini and a hundred women. Titian’s official post required him to paint portraits of various doges; nearly all these portraits are lost; three masterly figures remain: Niccolò Marcello (who died before Titan’s birth)—an ugly face and a gorgeous robe; Antonio Grimant (in the picture of Faith in the Doges’ Palace)—an ascetic face and a gorgeous robe; and Andrea Gritti—a less gorgeous robe, but a powerful face concentrating in itself all the resolute majesty of Venice. In an opposite vein is the delicate Clarice Strozzi, which Aretino praised too fully. The portraits of Aretino, in the Pitti Gallery at Florence and in the Frick Collection in New York, are merciless evocations of a fascinating scoundrel by his dearest friend. Tenderer is Titian’s commemoration of Bembo, the poet lover by this time (1542) become a cardinal. Among the greatest portraits in Titian’s gallery is The Jurist Ippolito Riminaldi (1542), once known as The Duke of Norfolk—disheveled brown hair, high forehead, scanty mustache and beard, firm lips, fine nose, piercing glance; we begin to understand Italy and Venice better when we see that they had such men, in whom fine bodies and fine clothes were but the outward form of strong wills ready for any challenge, and penetrating minds alert to every facet of experience and art.

Titian’s most interesting portraits were of himself. He pictured himself several times, finally at eighty-nine. Standing before this autoritratto in the Prado, we see a face lined and yet cleaned by the flow of countless days; a skullcap not quite enclosing the white hair; a red beard almost covering the face; a large nose breathing power; blue eyes a little somber, seeing death closer than it really was; the hand grasping a brush—the great artistic passion not yet spent. This—not the doges, not the senators, not the merchants—was the lord of Venice for half a century, giving immortality to transient aristocrats and kings, and raising his adopted city to a place beside Florence and Rome in the history of the Renaissance.

He was a rich man now, though the memory of early insecurity made him acquisitive to the end. Venice exempted him from certain taxes, “out of regard for his rare excellence.”²⁴ He wore elegant clothing, and lived in a comfortable home with a spacious garden that overlooked the lagoon; we picture him there entertaining poets, artists, blue bloods, cardinals, and kings. The mistress whom he had married in 1525, after having two sons by her, died in 1530, and he resumed the baccalaureate liberty that he had enjoyed for almost half a century before. His daughter Lavinia was a joy and pride, and he made fond portraits of her, even in her matronly amplitude; but she too died a few years after his marriage. One son, Pomponio, became a worthless wastrel, saddening the old man’s heart; the other, Orazio, painted some lost pictures, and probably shared in the works ascribed to his father’s final years. Perhaps another of Titian’s pupils—Domenico Theotocopoulos, “El Greco”—helped him then, though there is no sign of it in Titian’s buxom figures and joyous scenes.

Far into old age he painted almost every day, and found in his art his only secure happiness. There he knew that he was master, that all the world acclaimed him, and that his hand had not lost its cunning, nor his eye its keenness; even his intellect, as well as his imagination, seemed to keep its power to the end. Some purchasers complained that these final paintings were sent to them unfinished; even so, they were miracles. Probably no other painter—excepting Raphael—ever possessed such technical facility, such control of color and texture, such wizardry of variegated light. His faults were those of rapid execution, sometimes of careless drawing; most of his preliminary designs were tentative; yet, when he cared to take the time, he could produce such a marvel as the pen drawing of Medoro and Angelica in the Musée Bonnat at Bayonne. In portraiture he had to work rapidly, for his subjects were too impatient and occupied to give him long or frequent sittings; therefore he made a quick sketch and painted from that, perhaps putting more into the subject’s face and head than was really there. In paintings other than portraits he gave too much prominence to physical features, and seldom caught the spiritual essence; in depth of insight and feeling he could not match Leonardo or Michelangelo. But how healthy his art is compared with theirs! No abnormal introverted broodings, no volcanic grumblings at the nature of the world and man; Titian took the world as he found it, took men as he found them, took women when he found them, and enjoyed them all. He was a frank pagan, who contemplated the architecture of woman with delight through ninety years; even his Virgins are healthy, happy, and nubile. The poverty, grief, and insecurity of life found little room in Titian’s art; except for a few martyrdoms and crucifixions, all is beauty and joy.

He grew old while painting, and lived a quarter century after the normal span of life. In his eighty-eighth year he traveled to Brescia, and accepted an arduous commission to paint a ceiling in the palace of the commune. Vasari, visiting him in his ninetieth year, found him at work, brush in hand. At ninety-one he painted a portrait of Iacopo da Strada (Vienna), brilliant with color, strong with character. But now at last his hand began to tremble, his eyes grew weak, and he felt that the time had come for piety. In 1576, aged ninety-nine, he agreed to paint a Burial of Christ for the church of the Frari, in exchange for a burial place there, where already two of his greatest works were hung. He did not finish it, and he fell a year short of living out a century. In that year plague broke out in Venice; on each day two hundred died; a fourth of the population succumbed to the pestilence. Titian himself died during the plague, probably not of it but from old age (August 26, 1576). The government set aside its prohibition of public gatherings in order to give him a state funeral. He was buried in Santa Maria Gloriosa de’ Frari, as he had wished. It was the end of a magnificent life, and a wondrous age.

IV. TINTORETTO: 1518–94

It was not quite the end; for a power and spirit almost as great had still eighteen years to live, and had still to paint his Paradise.

Iacopo Robusti was the son of a dyer; hence the diminutive nickname by which the whimsical Italians have sent him down to history. He became indeed a tintor as a great colorist; but his family name fitted him well enough, for only a robust soul could have survived the long struggle that Iacopo had to fight for recognition.

Almost the first notice we have of him is that he was apprenticed to Titian at an unknown age, and was dismissed after a few days. Carlo Ridolfi, writing a century later, recounts the incident from the point of view of Tintoretto’s descendants:

When Titian came home and entered the place where his students were, he saw some papers sticking out from a desk; and seeing certain figures drawn on them, he asked who had done them. Iacopo said timidly that they were by his hand. Thereupon Titian, foreseeing from such beginnings that the lad would become a very able man, and would bring him some trouble in art, impatiently, as soon as he had gone upstairs and laid aside his mantle, bade Girolamo Dante, his chief pupil, to immediately forbid Iacopo the house. So a little tinge of jealousy works in human hearts.²⁵

We should like to reject this story, but Aretino, Titian’s bosom friend, alludes to the incident in a letter of 1549. The dismissal is a fact, the interpretation is problematic. It is hard to believe that Titian, who was already a painter to kings when Iacopo was only a lad of twelve, could be jealous of so hypothetical a competitor, or that he could see the future Tintoretto in the drawings of a student just admitted to his school. It is possible that the drawings offended Titian by their carelessness rather than by their excellence; careless drawing remained a fault in Tintoretto through many years. Iacopo throughout his life expressed great admiration for Titian, treasured a picture that Titian had given him, and put upon the wall of his studio a constant reminder of what he aspired to achieve in painting: “The design of Michelangelo and the color of Titian.”²⁶

According to Ridolfi and tradition, Iacopo had no instruction after leaving Titian, but taught himself by assiduous copying and experiment. He dissected bodies to learn anatomy. He observed almost every object in his experience with predatory eagerness, resolved to capture it in full detail in one or another of his paintings. He made models in wax, wood, or cardboard, dressed them, and drew them from every angle to find ways of portraying three dimensions in two. He had casts made and sent to him of ancient marbles in Florence and Rome, and of Michelangelo’s statuary; he set up these casts in his studio, and painted images of them in divers shadows and lights. He was fascinated by the variations produced in the appearance of objects by changes in the quantity, character, and incidence of light; he made a hundred pictures by lamp or candle illumination; he grew too fond of dim backgrounds and heavy shadows; he became a specialist in picturing the play of light and shade upon hands and face and drapes, buildings and landscapes and clouds. He left no pebble unturned in his struggle for excellence.

Nevertheless there was an impatient haste, and lack of finish, in his work —possibly a penalty of self-instruction—which deferred the public recognition of his art. For years after reaching manhood he had to solicit opportunities. He painted furniture, frescoed house fronts, begged builders to get him decorative jobs at low fees, and tried to sell his pictures by displaying them in St. Mark’s Square.²⁷ Everybody wanted Titian; and Titian and Aretino saw to it that nobody of extractable substance should get anyone but Titian, or, if Titian was busy, Bonifazio Veronese. Iacopo must have resented Aretino’s pictorial pandering, but later, when the great Scourge came to him for a portrait, the artist pulled an impressive pistol from his pocket, pretended to measure with it Aretino’s majestic dimensions, and enjoyed the mighty blackmailer’s fright;²⁸ thereafter Pietro’s pen was polite to Tintoretto. When Iacopo noted the vast unpainted walls—fifty feet high—of the choir in the church of the Madonna dell’ Orto, he offered to cover their nakedness with frescoes for a total fee of 100 ducats ($1250?); whereupon the Venetian painters complained that he was “injuring the trade” by underselling art. But Tintoretto was resolved to paint.

He was thirty before his first triumph came. The Scuola di San Marco opened a competition for a painting of St. Mark delivering a slave. The story was in Iacopo de Voragine’s Golden Legend: a Provençal servant had promised St. Mark to make a pilgrimage to his grave in Alexandria; his master refused him permission to go, but he went nevertheless. When he returned the master ordered his eyes to be gouged out, but the iron points pressed upon them failed to penetrate their surface. The master ordered the slave’s limbs to be broken, but the iron rods failed to make any impression upon them. The master, recognizing the intervention of St. Mark, pardoned the slave. Tintoretto’s picture told the tale with magnificent color, convincing realism, and dramatic intensity: the evangelist, clinging to his gospel, descends from heaven to rescue his devotee, who is about to be beheaded by a Moor, while a score of diverse figures look excitedly on. Iacopo seized every opportunity the story gave him: to limn powerful male and graceful female figures; to study the action of light upon Oriental velvets, silks, and turbans; to bathe the scene in colors learned from Giorgione and Titian. The directors of the Scuola were a bit frightened by the fleshly realism of the painting; they debated whether to place it on their walls; the impetuous Tintoretto proudly snatched it from their hands and took it home. They came and begged him to return it; he let them wait a chastening while, then yielded it. Aretino sent him a word of praise, and career was now open to his talent.

Soon commissions came in multitude. A dozen churches solicited him, a dozen lords, half a dozen princes and states. For these he told again, in a hundred paintings, the mighty epic of the Christian cosmology, theology, and eschatology, from the Creation to the Last Judgment. He was not a religious man; few artists were in this sixteenth-century Venice—half molded in soul and dominions by the heretical or Islamic East; art was his religion, to which he sacrificed night and day. But what finer subjects could a painter fancy than the legends of Adam and Eve, and the story of Mary and her Babe, and the tragedy of the God-man crucified, and the sufferings and marvels of the saints, and the awful climax of all history in the summoning of the quick and the dead to the judgment seat of Christ?* The best of this long series is The Presentation (c. 1556), which Tintoretto painted for the church of Madonna dell’ Orto: the Temple of Jerusalem pictured in classic splendor; a timid little Mary welcomed by the high priest with outstretched arms and beard; a woman, drawn with the majesty of Pheidias, pointing Mary out to her daughter; other women and their children, vividly realized; a prophet preaching enigmatic prophecies; beggars and cripples half naked, crouching on the Temple steps; this is a picture rivaling the best of Titian, one of the grand paintings of the Renaissance.

Tintoretto’s success was confirmed when (1564) the Scuola di San Rocco, or the Confraternity of St. Roch, named him to decorate their albergo or assembly rooms. To choose a painter for the vast wall surfaces, the directors invited artists to submit drawings for a picture to fit into a ceiling oval, showing St. Roch in glory. While Paolo Veronese, Andrea Schiavone, and others made sketches, Tintoretto painted a finished picture, flaming with color and alive with action; had the canvas secretly pasted in the assigned place and covered; and, on the day when the others presented their drawings, had this painting uncovered, to the consternation of judges and competitors. He excused this unorthodox strategy on the ground that he could work best in this impulsive way, instead of following a cartoon. The other artists cried foul; Tintoretto withdrew from the contest, but left the painting as a gift to the Fraternity. The Scuola finally accepted it, made Tintoretto a member, gave him a salary of a hundred ducats a year for life, and required of him, in return, to paint for them three pictures per year.

In the next eighteen years (1564–81) he placed fifty-six scenes upon the albergo walls. The rooms were poorly lighted; Tintoretto had to work in semidarkness; he worked rapidly, laying on his colors coarsely, as to be seen from twenty feet below. These paintings became the most famous one-man exhibition in Venetian history; and later artists came to study them almost as students in Florence went to study Masaccio. Rain and damp attacked the pictures through the years, but they are still impressive in their scope and power. “Twenty or thirty years ago,” wrote Ruskin a hundred years ago, “they were taken down to be restored; but the man to whom the task was committed providentially died, and only one of them was spoiled.”²⁹

In this astonishing museum Tintoretto told the Christian story once more, but as it had never been painted before, with an audacious realism that took the episodes out of the world of ideal sentiment and placed them in such natural surroundings that legend seemed transformed into the most indubitable history. The capacity to see, to note every detail of a scene, to feel these details as giving life, to dash them on to the wall with a stroke or two of the brush—like the water visible through the laurel roots in the Magdalen—these were sparks of Tintoretto’s fire. He devoted the lower floor of the albergo to Mary: her humble surprise in the Annunciation, her modest grace in the Visitation, her simple awe at the precious Oriental gifts in the Adoration of the Magi, her slow procession on donkeyback across a peaceful landscape in The Flight into Egypt, safe from that “massacre of the innocents” which provides the most powerful picture in this group. On the walls of the main upper room Tintoretto recounted events in the life of Christ: the baptism by John, the temptation by Satan, the miracles, the Last Supper; this last was so unconventionally realistic that Ruskin called it “the worst I know of Tintoretto”:³⁰ Christ at the farther end, the Apostles absorbed in eating or conversing, servants bustling about with food, a dog inquiring when he too may eat. In an inner room of the upper story Tintoretto painted two of his greatest paintings. Christ Before Pilate shows an unforgettable figure clad in a white robe as if in a shroud, standing quietly in weariness and resignation, and yet in dignity, before a Pilate trying to wash away the guilt of yielding to the bloodlust of a mob. And last of all—judged by Tintoretto to be his best work—The Crucifixion, challenging and surpassing Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in power and range of composition, in artistry of execution; forty feet of wall, and eighty figures, with horses, mountains, towers, trees, all with incredible fidelity to detail; Christ in visualized agony of body and soul; one robber being forced down upon a prostrate cross, and resisting to the last; another, a Titan of strength and desperation, being raised to his death by rough soldiers too angry at his weight to have a mind for pity; women huddled in terrified groups; spectators crowding eager to watch men suffer and die; and, in the distance, a lowering sky offering no answer to the human tragedy but thunder and lightning and an indifferent rain. Here Tintoretto has reached his zenith, and equaled the best.

To all these masterpieces in the albergo Tintoretto added eight pictures for the church of the same Fraternity, chiefly concerning St. Roch himself. One of these paintings stands out, if only through its terribilità—The Pool of Bethesda. The artist takes his text from the fifth chapter of the Fourth Gospel: “a crowd of invalids used to lie” there, “the blind, the lame, and folk with shriveled limbs,” waiting for a chance to bathe in the healing pool. Tintoretto sees not the miraculous healing of the cripple, but the variously diseased or stricken multitude, and he draws them unflinchingly as he sees them, in their malformations, their rags and filth, their hope and despair. It is a scene as from Dante’s Inferno or Zola’s Lourdes.

The same man who could so rage, with his art, against the ills that flesh is heir to, responded eagerly to the splendors of the flesh in the beauty of its health, and almost rivaled Titian and Correggio in portraying nudes. Though we might have expected his turbulent spirit and swift brush to fail in conveying the ancient sense of beauty in repose, we find, scattered over Europe, such delectable figures as the Danaë of the Lyons Museum, dressed in jewelry, the Leda and Swan of the Uffizi, the Venus and Vulcan of the Munich Pinacothek, the Dresden Deliverance of Arsinoë, the Mercury and Graces and Bacchus and Ariadne of the Doges’ Palace…. Symonds thought this last “if not the greatest, at any rate the most beautiful, oil painting in existence.”³¹ And yet more perfect is the London Gallery’s Origin of the Milky Way from Cupid’s pressure upon Juno’s breasts—as good an explanation as any. The Louvre, the Prado, Vienna, and the Washington Gallery have Susanna and the Elders in four Tintoretto versions. The Prado has a roomful of sensuous Tintorettos: A Young Venetian Woman drawing her robe aside to reveal her bosom; even in the Battle of the Turks and Christians two abstracting breasts appear amid the gleam of arms. And in the Verona Museum is a Concert of nine women musicians, three of them bare to the waist—as if ears could hear when eyes had so much to see. These pictures are not the best of Tintoretto; his forte was in the massive representation of virile life and heroic death; but they show that he too, like Giorgione and Titian, could turn a perilous curve with a steady hand. And in all his nudes there is no immodesty; there is a healthy sensualism; these gods and goddesses take nudity as natural, and are not conscious of it; it is divine of them to greet the sun “all face,” whole-bodily, and not be harassed and jailed with buttons and laces and bows.

After avoiding marriage for nearly forty years, Tintoretto took to wife Faustina de’ Vescovi, who found him so disorderly and helpless that she achieved happiness in mothering him. She gave him eight children, three of whom became pardonable painters. They lived in a modest house not far from the church of Madonna dell’ Orto; and the artist seldom wandered from that vicinity except to paint in a Venetian church, palace, or fraternity; consequently he can be appreciated in his variety and power only in the city of his birth. The Duke of Mantua offered him a place at his court; he refused. He was happy only in his studio, where he worked literally night and day. He was a good husband and father, but cared nothing for the social pleasures. He was almost as solitary, independent, moody, melancholy, nervous, vehement, and proud as the Michelangelo whom he ever worshiped and ever strove to surpass. There was no peace in his soul or his works. Like Angelo, he honored strength of body and mind and spirit above surface beauty; his Virgins are often as unprepossessing as the Doni Madonna. He has left us his own portrait (now in the Louvre), painted when he was seventy-two; it could have been the head and face of Angelo himself—a strong and somber face, profound and wondering, and bearing the marks of a hundred storms.

His own was his best portrait, but he painted some others that attest the depth of his insight and the integrity of his art. For there too he remained a realist, and no man dared sit for him who hoped to deceive posterity. Many a Venetian worthy has come down to us through Tintoretto’s brush: doges, senators, procurators, three proveditori of the mint, six treasurers; above all, in this group, Iacopo Soranzo—one of the great portraits in Venetian art; here too, are Sansovino the architect and Cornaro the centenarian. Surpassed in Tintoretto’s gallery of portraits only by the Soranzo are anonymous pictures of The Man in a Cuirass (Prado), the Portrait of an Old Man (Brescia), the Portrait of a Man (Hermitage, Leningrad) and A Moor in the Morgan Library in New York. In 1574 Tintoretto disguised himself as an attendant of Doge Alvise Mocenigo, secured entry to the Venetian flagship Bucentaur, and clandestinely made a pastel sketch of Henry III of France; later, in the corner of a chamber where Henry gave audience to notables, Tintoretto perfected the portrait. Henry liked it so much that he offered a knighthood to the artist, who begged to be excused.³²

His acquaintance with the Venetian aristocracy had begun about 1556, when, with Veronese, he received a commission to paint canvases in the Ducal Palace. In the Sala del Maggior Consiglio he pictured The Coronation of Frederick Barbarossa and Barbarossa Excommunicated by Alexander III; in the Sala del Scrutinio he covered an entire wall with a Last Judgment. These so pleased the Senate that it chose him in 1572 to commemorate the great victory at Lepanto. All four of these paintings were destroyed in the fire of 1577. In 1574 the Senate engaged Tintoretto to decorate the Anticollegio (or antechamber); here the artist inspired the solons with Mercury and the Graces, Ariadne and Bacchus, the Forge of Vulcan, and Mars Pursued by Minerva. In the Sala de’ Pregadi or Senate Hall Tintoretto painted (1574–85) a series of spacious panels celebrating the doges of his time, pictured against the background of the majestic Square: St. Mark’s and its sparkling cupolas, or the Clock Tower, or the Campanile, or the stately façade of the Libreria Vecchia, or the radiant arcades of the Doges’ Palace, or the misty or sunny vistas of the Grand Canal. Then, crowning this sequence to the taste of the proud government, he painted on the ceiling a triumphal picture of Venice Queen of the Seas, robed in splendor as a dogaressa, surrounded by circles of admiring divinities, and receiving from Tritons and Nereids the gifts of the waters—corals, shells, and pearls.

After the great fire the undiscourageable Senate called upon Tintoretto to redeem the ruined walls with pictures that would drown all memory of the loss. In the Hall of Scrutiny he painted a tremendous battle scene, The Capture of Zara. On a wall of the Great Council chamber he pictured the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa Receiving Envoys from the Pope and the Doge, and on the ceiling a masterpiece, The Doge Niccolò da Ponte Receiving the Homage of Conquered Cities.

When (1586) the Senate decided to cover the old fresco by Guariento on the east wall of the Council Chamber, they judged Tintoretto, then sixty-eight, to be too old for the task. They divided the assignment and the space between Paolo Veronese, then fifty-eight, and Francesco Bassano, thirty-seven. But Veronese died (1588) before the work was actually begun. Tintoretto offered to take his place, and proposed to cover the entire wall with one picture, The Glory of Paradise. The Senate agreed, and the old man, aided by his son Domenico and his daughter Marietta, laid out in the near-by Scuola della Misericordia the canvas sections that were to compose the picture. Many preliminary sketches were made; one, itself a chef-d’oeuvre, is in the Louvre. When all was set in place (1590) and Domenico had painted and concealed the seams, it constituted the largest oil painting that had yet been seen—seventy-two feet long by twenty-three feet high. The crowds that flocked to see it agreed with Ruskin that it was the culminating achievement of Venetian painting—“the most wonderful piece of pure, manly, and masterly oil painting in the world.”³³ The Senate offered Tintoretto so great a fee that he returned part of it, again to the scandal of his fellow artists.