Renaissance in Italy.
Volume 2.
by John Addington Symonds.
PREFACE
[Footnote 1: To the original edition of this volume.]
This volume on the "Revival of Learning" follows that on the "Age of the Despots," published in 1875, and precedes that on the "Fine Arts,"
which is now also offered to the public. In dealing with the "Revival of Learning" and the "Fine Arts," I have tried to remember that I had not so much to write again the history of these subjects, as to treat their relation to the "Renaissance in Italy." In other words, I have regarded each section of my theme as subordinate to the general culture of a great historical period. The volume on "Italian Literature," still in contemplation, is intended to complete the work.
While handling the theme of the Italian Renaissance, I have selected such points, and emphasised such details, as I felt to be important for the biography of a nation at the most brilliant epoch of its intellectual activity. The historian of culture sacrifices much that the historian of politics will judge essential, and calls attention to matters that the general reader may sometimes find superfluous. He must submit to bear the reproach of having done at once too little and too much. He must be content to traverse at one time well-worn ground, and at another to engage in dry or abstruse inquiries. He must not shrink from seeming to affect the fame of a compiler; nor, unless his powers be of the highest, can he hope altogether to avoid repet.i.tions wearisome alike to reader and to writer. His main object is to paint the portrait of national genius identical through all varieties of manifestation; and in proportion as he has preserved this point of view with firmness, he may hope to have succeeded.
For the History of the Revival of Learning I have had continual recourse to Tiraboschi"s "Storia della Letteratura Italiana." That work is still the basis of all researches bearing on the subject. I owe besides particular obligations to Vespasiano"s "Vite di Uomini Ill.u.s.tri," to Comparetti"s "Virgilio nel Medio Evo," to Rosmini"s "Vita di Filelfo," "Vita di Vittorino da Feltre," and "Vita di Guarino da Verona," to Shepherd"s "Life of Poggio Bracciolini," to Dennistoun"s "Dukes of Urbino," to Schultze"s "Gemistos Plethon," to Didot"s "Alde Manuce," to Von Reumont"s "Lorenzo de" Medici," to Burckhardt"s "Cultur der Renaissance in Italien," to Voigt"s "Wiederbelebung des cla.s.sischen Alterthums," and to Gregorovius"s "Geschichte der Stadt Rom." To Voigt and Burckhardt, having perforce traversed the same ground that they have done, I feel that I have been in a special sense indebted. At the same time I have made it my invariable practice, as the notes to this volume will show, to found my own opinions on the study of original sources. To mention in detail all the editions of the works of humanists and scholars I have consulted, would be superfluous.
To me it has been a labour of love to record even the bare names of those Italian worthies who recovered for us in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries "the everlasting consolations" of the Greek and Latin cla.s.sics. The thought that I was tracing the history of an achievement fruitful of the weightiest results for modern civilisation has sustained me in a task that has been sometimes tedious. The collective greatness of the Revival has reconciled my mind to many trivialities of detail. The prosaic minutiae of obscure biographies and long-forgotten literary labours have been glorified by what appears to me the poetry and the romance of the whole theme. It lies not in my province or my power to offer my readers any adequate apology for such defects as my own want of skill in exposition, or the difficulty of transfiguring with vital light and heat a subject so remote from present interests, may have occasioned. I must leave this volume in their hands, hoping that some at least may be animated by the same feeling of grat.i.tude toward those past workers in the field of learning which has supported me.
CLIFTON: _March 1877_.
CHAPTER I
THE MEN OF THE RENAISSANCE
Formation of Conscious Personality in Italy -- Aristocracy of Intellect -- Self-culture as an Aim -- Want of National Architecture -- Want of National Drama -- Eminence of Sculpture and Painting -- Peculiar Capacity for Literature -- Scholarship -- Men of Many-sided Genius -- Their Relation to the Age -- Conflict between Mediaeval Tradition and Humanism -- Petrarch -- The Meaning of the Revival begun by him -- Cosmopolitan Philosophy -- Toleration -- An Intellectual Empire -- Worldliness -- Confusion of Impulses and Inspirations -- Copernicus and Columbus -- Christianity and the Cla.s.sics -- Italian Incapacity for Religious Reformation -- Free Thought takes the form of License -- Harmonies attempted between Christianity and Antique Philosophy -- Florentine Academy -- Physical Qualities of the Italians -- Portraits of Two Periods -- Physical Exercises -- Determination of the Race to Scholarship -- Ancient Memories of Rome -- The Cult of Antiquity -- Desire of Fame -- Fame to be found in Literature -- The Cult of Intellect -- The Cult of Character -- Preoccupation with Personal Details -- Biography -- Ideal Sketches -- Posthumous Glory -- Enthusiasm for Erudition -- Piero de"
Pazzi -- Florence and Athens -- Paganism -- Real Value of Italian Humanism -- Pico on the Dignity of Man.
The conditions, political, social, moral, and religious, described in the first volume of this work, produced among the Italians a type of character nowhere else observable in Europe. This character, highly self-conscious and mentally mature, was needed for the intellectual movement of the Renaissance. Italy had proved herself incapable of forming an united nation, or of securing the principle of federal coherence; of maintaining a powerful military system, or of holding her own against the French and Spaniards. For these defects her Communes and her Despots, the Papacy and the kingdom of Naples, the theories of the mediaeval doctrinaires and the enthusiasm of the humanists, were alike responsible; though the larger share belongs to Rome, resolutely hostile to the monarchical principle, and zealous, by espousing the Guelf faction, to maintain the discord of the nation. At the same time the very causes of political disunion were favourable to the intellectual growth of the Italians. Each State, whether republican or despotic, had, during the last years of the Middle Ages, formed a mixed society of n.o.bles, merchants, and artisans, enclosed within the circuit of the city walls, and strongly marked by the peculiar complexion of their native place. Every town was a centre of activity and industry, eagerly competing with its neighbours, proud of its local characteristics, anxious to confer distinction on citizens who rose to eminence by genius or practical ability. Party strife in the republics, while it disturbed their internal repose, sharpened the intellect and strengthened the personality of the burghers. Exile and proscription, the common climax of civic warfare, made them still more self-determined and self-reliant by driving each man back upon his own resources. The despots, again, through the illegal tenure of their authority, were forced to the utmost possible development of individual character: since all their fortunes depended on their qualities as men. The plots and counter-plots of subjects eager for a change of government, and of neighbours anxious to encroach upon their territory, kept the atmosphere of their Courts in a continual state of agitation. One type of ability was fostered by the diplomatic relations of the several cities, yielding employment to a mult.i.tude of secretaries and amba.s.sadors; another by the system of Condottiere warfare, offering a brilliant career to ambitious adventurers. In all departments open to a man of talent birth was of less importance than natural gifts; for the social barriers and grades of feudalism had either never existed in Italy, or had been shaken and confounded during the struggles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The ranks of the tyrants were filled with sons of Popes and captains risen from the proletariat. The ruling cla.s.s in the republics consisted of men self-made by commerce; and here the name at least of Popolo was sovereign. It followed that men were universally rated at what they proved themselves to be; and thus an aristocracy of genius and character grew up in Italy at a period when the rest of Europe presented but rare specimens of individuals emergent from the common herd. As in ancient Greece, the nation was of less importance than the city, and within the city personal ability carried overwhelming weight. The Italian history of the Renaissance resumes itself in the biography of men greater than their race, of mental despots, who absorbed its forces in themselves.
The intellectual and moral milieu created by mult.i.tudes of self-centred, cultivated personalities was necessary for the evolution of that spirit of intelligence, subtle, penetrative, and elastic, that formed the motive force of the Renaissance. The work achieved by Italy for the world in that age was less the work of a nation than that of men of power, less the collective and spontaneous triumph of a puissant people than the aggregate of individual efforts animated by one soul of free activity, a common striving after fame. This is noticeable at the very outset. The Italians had no national Epic: their Divine Comedy is the poem of the individual man. Petrarch erects self-culture to the rank of an ideal, and proposes to move the world from the standpoint of his study, darting his spirit"s light through all the void circ.u.mference, and making thought a power.
The success and the failure of the Italians are alike referable to their political subdivisions, and to this strong development of their personality. We have already seen how they fell short of national unity and of military greatness. Even in the realm of art and literature the same conditions were potent. Some of the chief productions of humanity seem to require the co-operation of whole peoples working sympathetically to a common end. Foremost among these are architecture and the drama. The most splendid triumphs of modern architecture in the French and English Gothic were achieved by the half-unconscious striving of the national genius through several centuries. The names of the builders of the cathedrals are unknown: the cathedrals themselves bear less the stamp of individual thought than of popular instinct; their fame belongs to the race that made them, to the spirit of the times that gave them birth. It is not in architecture, therefore, that we expect the Italians, divided into small and rival States, and distinguished by salient subjectivity, to show their strength. Men like Niccola Pisano, Arnolfo del Cambio, Alberti, Brunelleschi, and Bramante were gifted with an individuality too paramount for the creation of more than mighty experiments in architecture. They bowed to no tradition, but followed the dictates of their own inventive impulse, selecting the types that suited them, and dealing freely with the forms they found around them. Instead of seeking to carry on toward its accomplishment a style, not made, but felt and comprehended by their genius, they were eager to produce new and characteristic masterpieces--signs and symbols of their own peculiar quality of mind. Italy is full of splendid but imperfect monuments of personal ability, works of beauty displaying no unbroken genealogy of unknown craftsmen, but attesting the skill of famous artists. For the practical architect her palaces and churches may, for this reason, be less instructive and less attractive than the public buildings of France. Yet for the student of national and personal characteristics, who loves to trace the physiognomy of a people in its edifices, to discover the mind of the artist in his work, their interest is unrivalled. In each city the specific _genius loci_ meets us face to face: from each town-hall or cathedral the soul of a great man leans forth to greet our own. These advantages compensate for frequent extravagances, for audacities savouring of ignorance, and for awkwardness in the adoption and modification of incongruous styles. Moreover, it must always be remembered that in Italy the architect could not forget the monuments of Roman and Byzantine art around him. Cla.s.sic models had to be suited to the requirements of modern life and Christian ritual; and when the Germans brought their Gothic from beyond the Alps, it suffered from its adaptation to a southern climate. The result was that Italy arrived at no great national tradition in architecture, and that free scope was offered to the whims and freaks of individual designers. When at length, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Italians attained to uniformity of taste, it was by the sacrifice of their originality. The pedantry of the cla.s.sical revival did more harm to architecture than to letters, and pseudo-Roman purism superseded the genial caprices of the previous centuries.
If architecture may be said to have suffered in Italy from the supremacy of local characteristics and personal genius, overruling tradition and thwarting the evolution of a national style, the case was quite different with the other arts. Painting and sculpture demand the highest independence in the artist, and are susceptible of a far more many-sided treatment than architecture. They cannot be the common product of a people, but require the conscious application of a special ability to the task of translating thought and feeling into form. As painters, the Italians hold the first rank among civilised nations of the modern and the ancient world; and their inferiority as sculptors to the Greeks is mainly due to their mastery over painting, the essentially romantic art. The sensibilities of the new age craved a more emotional and agitated expression than is proper to sculpture.
As early as the days of Ghiberti and Donatello it became clear that the Italian sculptors were following the methods of the sister art in their designs, while Michael Angelo alone had force enough to make marble the vehicle of thoughts that properly belong to painting or to music. The converse probably held good with the Greeks. What remains of their work in fresco and mosaic seems to show that they were satisfied with groups and figures modelled upon bas-reliefs and statues; just as the Florentines carved pictures, with architecture and landscape, in stone. More need not here be said upon this topic, since the achievements of the Italians in painting and in sculpture will form a main part of my history.
As regards literature, the subdivision of Italy into numerous small States and the energetic self-a.s.sertion of the individual were distinctly favourable. Though the want of a great public, such as can alone be found in the capital of a free, united nation, may be reckoned among the many reasons which prevented the Italians from developing the drama, yet the rivalry of town with town and of burgher with burgher, Court life with its varied opportunities for the display of talent, and munic.i.p.al life with its restless compet.i.tion in commerce and public affairs, encouraged the activity of students, historians, statisticians, critics, and poets. Culture, in the highest and widest sense of the word, was what Renaissance Italy obtained and gave to Europe; and this culture implies a full-formed personality in the men who seek it. It was the highly perfected individuality of the Italians that made them first emerge from mediaeval bondage and become the apostles of humanism for the modern world. It may be regretted that their force was expended upon the diffusion of learning and the purification of style, instead of being concentrated on the creation of national masterpieces. We seek in vain for Dante"s equal among the poets of the Renaissance. The "Orlando Furioso" is but a poor second to the "Divina Commedia;" and all those works of scholarship, which seemed to our ancestors the _ne plus ultra_ of refinement, are now relegated to the lumber-room of erudition that has been superseded, or of literary ingenuity that has lost its point. Now that the boon of culture, so hardly won by the students of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, has become the common heritage of Europe, it is not always easy to explain the mental grandeur of the Italians in that age. Yet we should fail to recognise their merit, if we did not comprehend that, precisely by this absorption of their genius in the task of the Revival, they conferred the most enduring benefits upon humanity. What the modern world would have been, if the Italian nation had not devoted its energies to the restoration of liberal learning, cannot even be imagined. The history of that devotion will form the princ.i.p.al subject of my present volume.
The comprehensive and many-sided natures, frequent in Renaissance Italy, were specially adapted for the dissemination of the new spirit.
The appearance of such men as Leo Battista Alberti, Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo de" Medici, Brunelleschi and Buonarroti, Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, upon the stage of the Renaissance is not the least fascinating of its phenomena. We can only find their parallels by returning to the age of Pericles. But the problem for the Florentines differed from that which the Athenians had before them. In Greece, the morning-land of civilisation, men of genius, each perfect in his own capacity, were needed. Standards had to be created for the future guidance of the world in all the realms of art and thought. We are therefore less struck with the versatility than with the concentration of Pheidias, Pindar, Sophocles, Socrates. Italy, on the other hand, had for her task the reabsorption of a bygone culture. It was her vocation to resuscitate antiquity, to gather up afresh the products of the cla.s.sic past, and so to blend them with the mediaeval spirit as to generate what is specifically modern. It was indispensable that the men by whom this work was accomplished should be no less distinguished for largeness of intelligence, variety of acquirements, quickness of sympathy, and sensitive susceptibility, than for the complete development of some one faculty. The great characters of the Greek age were what Hegel calls plastic, penetrated through and through with a specific quality. Those of the Italian age were comprehensive and encyclopaedic; the intensity of their force in any one sphere is less remarkable than its suitableness to all. They were of a nature to synthesise, interpret, reproduce, and mould afresh--like Mr.
Browning"s Cleon, with the addition of the consciousness of young and potent energy within them. It consequently happens that, except in the sphere of the Fine Arts, we are tempted to underrate the heroes of the Renaissance. The impression they leave upon our minds at any one point is slight in comparison with the estimate we form of them when we consider each man as a whole. Nor can we point to monumental and colossal works in proof of their creative faculty.
The biographies of universal geniuses like Leo Battista Alberti or Lionardi [Transcriber"s Note: Lionardo] da Vinci, so multiform in their capacity and so creative in their intuitions, prompt us to ask what is the connection between the spirit of an age and the men in whom it is incorporated. Not without reason are we forced to personify the Renaissance as something external to its greatest characters.
There is an intellectual strength outside them in the century, a heritage of power prepared for them at birth. The atmosphere in which they breathe is so charged with mental vitality that the least stirring of their special energy brings them into relation with forces mightier than are the property of single natures. In feebler periods of retrospect and criticism we can but wonder at the combination of faculties so varied, and at miracles so easily accomplished. These times of clairvoyance and of intellectual magnetism, when individuals of genius appear to move like vibrios in a life-sustaining fluid specially adapted to their needs, are rare in the history of the world; nor has our science yet arrived at a.n.a.lysing their causes. They are not on that account the less real. To explain them by the hypothesis of a _Weltgeist_, the collective spirit of humanity proceeding in its evolution through successive phases, and making its advance from stage to stage by alternations of energy and repose, is simply to restore, in other terms, a mystery that finds its final and efficient cause in G.o.d.[2]
[Footnote 2: The a.n.a.logy of the individual might be quoted. We are aware within ourselves of times when thought is fertile and insight clear, times of conception and projection, followed by seasons of slow digestion, a.s.similation, and formation, when the creative faculty stagnates, and the whole force of the intellect is absorbed in mastering through years what it took minutes to divine.]
Gifted with the powerful individuality I am attempting to describe, the men of the Renaissance received their earliest education in the religion of the Middle Ages, their second in the schools of Greece and Rome. It was the many-sided struggle of personal character with time-honoured tradition on the one hand, and with new ideals on the other, that lent so much of inconsistency and contradiction to their aims. Dante remained within the pale of mediaeval thoughts, and gave them full poetical expression. To him, in a truer sense than to any other poet, belongs the double glory of immortalising in verse the centuries behind him, while he inaugurated the new age. The "Vita Nuova" and the "Divina Commedia" are modern, in so far as the one is the first complete a.n.a.lysis of personal emotion, and the other is the epic of the soul conceived as concrete personality. But the form and colour, the material and structure, the warp of thought and the woof of fancy, are not modern. Petrarch opens a new era. He is not satisfied with the body of mediaeval beliefs and intellectual conceptions. Antiquity presents a more fascinating ideal to his spirit, and he feels the subjectivity within him strong enough to a.s.similate what suits it in the present and the past. The Revival of Learning, begun by Petrarch, was no mere renewal of interest in cla.s.sic literature. It was the emanc.i.p.ation of the reason in a race of men, intolerant of control, ready to criticise accepted canons of conduct, enthusiastic in admiration of antique liberty, freshly awakened to the sense of beauty, and anxious above all things to secure for themselves free scope in spheres outside the region of authority. Men so vigorous and independent felt the joy of exploration. There was no problem they feared to face, no formula they were not eager to recast according to their new convictions. This liberty of judgment did not of necessity lead to lawlessness; nor in any case did it produce that insurgence against Catholic orthodoxy which marked the German Reformation. Yet it lent a characteristic quality to thought and action. Men were, and dared to be, themselves for good or evil without too much regard for what their neighbours thought of them. At the same time they were tolerant. The culture of the Renaissance implied a philosophical acceptance of variety in fashion, faith, and conduct; and this toleration was no doubt one reason why Italian scepticism took the form of cynicism, not of religious revolution. Contact with Islam in the south and east, diplomatic relations with the Turks, familiarity with the mixed races of Spain, and commerce with the nations of the north, had widened the sympathies of the Italians, and taught them to regard humanity as one large family. The liberal spirits of the Renaissance might have quoted Marcus Aurelius with slight alteration: "I will not say, dear City of St. Peter, but, dear City of Man!" And just as their moral and religious sensibilities were blunted, so patriotism with them ceased to be an instinct. Instead of patriotism, the Italians were inflamed with the zeal of cosmopolitan culture.
In proportion as Italy lost year by year the hope of becoming an united nation, in proportion as the military instincts died in her, and the political instincts were extinguished by despotism, in precisely the same ratio did she evermore acquire a deeper sense of her intellectual vocation. What was world-embracing in the spirit of the mediaeval Church pa.s.sed by trans.m.u.tation into the humanism of the fifteenth century. As though aware of the hopelessness of being Italians in the same sense as the natives of Spain were Spaniards, or the natives of France were Frenchmen, the giants of the Renaissance did their utmost to efface their nationality in order that they might the more effectually restore the cosmopolitan ideal of the human family. To this end both artists and scholars, the depositaries of the real Italian greatness at this epoch, laboured; the artists by creating an ideal of beauty with a message and a meaning for all Europe, the scholars by recovering for Europe the burghership of Greek and Roman civilisation. In spite of the invasions and convulsions that ruined Italy between the years 1494 and 1527, the painters and the humanists proceeded with their task, as though the fate of Italy concerned them not, as though the destinies of the modern world depended on their activity. After Venice had been desolated by the armies of the League of Cambray, Aldus Manutius presented the peace-gift of Plato to the foes of his adopted city; and when the Lutherans broke into Parmegiano"s workshop at Rome, even they were awed by the tranquil majesty of the Virgin on his easel. Stories like these remind us that Renaissance Italy met her doom of servitude and degradation in the spirit of ancient h.e.l.las, repeating as they do the tales told of Archimedes in his study, and of Paulus aemilius face to face with the Zeus of Pheidias.
As patriotism gave way to cosmopolitan enthusiasm, and toleration took the place of earnestness, in like manner the conflict of mediaeval tradition with revived Paganism in the minds of these self-reliant men, trained to indulgence by their large commerce with the world, and familiarised with impiety by the ever-present pageant of an anti-Christian Church, led, as I have hinted, to recklessness and worldly vices, rather than to reformed religion. Contented with themselves and their surroundings, they felt none of the unsatisfied cravings after the infinite, none of the mysterious intuitions and ascetic raptures, the self-abas.e.m.e.nts and transfigurations, stigmata and beatific visions, of the Middle Ages. The plenitude of life within them seemed to justify their instincts and their impulses, however varied and discordant these might be. The sonorous current of the world around them drowned the voice of conscience, the suggestion of religious scruples. It is only thus we can explain to ourselves the att.i.tude of such men as Sixtus and Alexander, serenely vicious in extreme old age. The gratification of their egotism was so complete as to exclude self-judgment by the rules and standards they professionally applied; their personality was too exacting to admit of hesitation when their instincts were concerned; in common with their age they had lost sight of all but mundane aims and interests. Three aphorisms, severally attributed to three representative Italians, may be quoted in ill.u.s.tration of these remarks. "You follow infinite objects; I follow the finite;" said Cosimo de" Medici; "you place your ladders in the heavens; I on earth, that I may not seek so high or fall so low." "If we are not ourselves pious," said Julius II., "why should we prevent other people from being so?" "Let us enjoy the Papacy," said Leo X., "now that G.o.d has given it to us."
It was only under the influence of some external terror--a plague, a desolating war, an imminent peril to the nation--that the religious sense, deadened by worldliness and selfish philosophy, made itself felt. At such seasons whole cities rushed headlong into fierce revivalism, while men of violent or profligate lives saw visions, and betook themselves to penance. Cellini"s Memoirs are, on this point, a valuable mirror of the age in which he lived. It is clear that his ecstasies of devotion in the dungeons of S. Angelo were as sincere as the fiery impulses he obeyed with so much complacency. Pa.s.sionate and worldly as men of Cellini"s stamp might be, they could not shake off the a.s.sociations that bound them to the past. The energy of their intense individuality took turn by turn the form and colour of ascetic piety and Pagan sensuality; and at times these strong contrasts of emotion seemed bordering upon insanity. Ungovernable natures, swayed by no fixed principle, and bent on moulding the world of thought afresh to suit their own desires, became the puppets of astrological superst.i.tion, the playthings of mad l.u.s.t. Much that appears unaccountable and contradictory in the Renaissance may be referred to this imperfect blending of ecclesiastical tradition and idealised Paganism in natures potent enough to be original and wilful, but not yet tamed from semi-savagery into acquiescence by experience.
Experience came to the Italians in servitude beneath the heel of Spain.
The confusion of influences, cla.s.sical and mediaeval, Christian and Pagan, in that age is not the least extraordinary of its phenomena.
Even the new thoughts that illuminated the minds of great discoverers, seemed to them like reflections from antiquity; and while they were opening fresh worlds, their hearts were turned toward the Holy Land of the Crusades. Columbus and Copernicus, the two men who did more than any others to revolutionise the mental att.i.tude of humanity, appealed to their contemporaries on the strength of texts from Aristotle and Philolaus. Conscious that the guesses of the Greek cosmographers had stimulated in themselves that curiosity whereby they made the motion of the earth a certainty, and found a way across the waves to a new continent, these mighty spirits forgot how slight in reality was their debt to the inert speculators of the cla.s.sic age.
The truth was that in them throbbed a force of enterprise and conquering discovery, a spirit of exploration resolute and hardy, denied to the ancients.
How far this new and fruitful temper of the modern mind was due to Christianity, is a problem for the deepest speculation. The conception of a G.o.d who had made no part of His world in vain, of a Christ who had bought with His blood the whole seed of Adam, and who imposed the preaching of the faith upon His followers as a duty, wrought powerfully on Columbus. The Crusades, again, had familiarised the nations with distant objects and ideal quests; while chivalry was essentially antagonistic to positive and selfish aims. The spirit of mankind had marched a long stage during the Middle Ages. It was not possible now to conceive of G.o.d as a tranquil thinking upon thought, with Aristotle. There was no Augustus to set arbitrary limits to the empire of the world in the interest of a conquering nation, or to make the two words _orbs_ and _urbs_ synonymous. When Strabo hazarded the opinion that there might be populous islands in the other hemisphere, he added, with the sublime indifference of a Roman, "But these speculations have nothing in common with practical geography; and if such islands exist, they cannot support peoples of like origin with us." Such language was impossible for a man educated in the Christian faith, and imbued with the instincts of romanticism. Therefore, though the study of Strabo and Ptolemy at Pavia impressed Columbus with the certainty of the new route across the ocean, he owed the courage that sustained him to the conviction that G.o.d was leading him to a great end. "When I first undertook to start for the discovery of the Indies," he says in his will, "I intended to beg the King and Queen to devote the whole of the money that might be drawn from these realms to Jerusalem." The religious yearning of the mediaeval pilgrim added fervour to the conviction of the student, who, by reasoning on antique texts, guessed the greatest secret of which the world has record. At the same time there was something more in Columbus than either antiquity or mediaevalism could provide. The modern spirit is distinct from both; and though, in the Renaissance, creation wore the garb of imitation, and the new forces used the organs they were destined to outlive and destroy, yet we must allow to native personality the lion"s share in such achievement as that of Columbus. It is the variety of spiritual elements in combination and solution, which he ill.u.s.trates, that makes the psychology of the Renaissance at once so fascinating and so difficult to a.n.a.lyse.
While so much liberty of thought prevailed in Italy, it may be wondered why the Renaissance, eminently fertile in the domains of art and culture, bore but meagre fruit in those of religion and philosophy. The German Reformation was the Renaissance of Christianity; and in this the Italians had no share, though it should be remembered that, without their previous labours in the field of scholarship, the band who led the Reformation could hardly have given that high intellectual character to the movement which made it a new starting-point in the history of the reason. To expect from Italy the ethical regeneration of the modern world would be to misapprehend her true vocation; art and erudition were sufficient to engage her spiritual energies. The Church again, though by no means adverse to laxity in morals, was jealous of heterodoxy. So long as freethinkers confined their audacity to such matters as form the topic of Poggio"s "Facetiae," Beccadelli"s "Hermaphroditus," or La Casa"s "Capitolo del Forno," the Roman Curia looked on and smiled approvingly. The most obscene books to be found in any literature escaped the Papal censure, and Aretino, notorious for ribaldry, aspired not wholly without reason to the scarlet of a cardinal. But even in the fifteenth century the taint of heresy was dangerous, and this peril was magnified when the Lutheran schism had roused the Papacy to a sense of its position.
Under the patronage, therefore, of ecclesiastics, in the depraved atmosphere of Rome, the free thought of the Italians turned to licentiousness; this suited the temper of the people, fascinated by Paganism and little inclined to raise debate upon matters of no practical utility. Those who reflected on religious topics kept their own counsel. How purely political were the views of profound thinkers in Italy upon all Church questions may be gathered from the observations of Guicciardini and Machiavelli; how little the most earnest antagonist of unG.o.dly ecclesiastics dreamed of disturbing the Catholic Church system is clear in the biography of Savonarola.[3] The first satire of Ariosto may be indicated as an epitome of the opinions entertained by sound and liberal intellects in Italy upon the relation of Papal Rome to the nation. There is not a trace in it of Teutonic revolt against authority, of pious yearning for a purer faith. The standpoint of the critic, though solid and sincere, is worldly.
[Footnote 3: See Vol. I., _Age of Despots_, pp. 239, 350-356, 415-420, where I have endeavoured to treat these topics more at length.]
True to culture as their main preoccupation, the Italian thinkers sought to philosophise faith by bringing Christianity into harmony with antique speculation, and forming for themselves a theism that should embrace the systems of the Platonists and Stoics, the Hebrew Cabbala and the Sermon on the Mount. There is much that strikes us as both crude and pedantic, at the same time infantine and pompous, in the systems elaborated by those pioneers of modern eclecticism. They lack the vigorous simplicity that gave its force to Luther"s intuition, the sublime unity of Spinoza"s deductions. The dross of erudition mingles with the pure gold of personal conviction; while Pagan phrases, ill suited to express Christian notions, lend an air of unreality to the sincerest efforts after rational theology. The Platonic Academy of Florence was the centre of this search after the faith of culture, whereof the real merit was originality, and the true force lay in the conviction that humanity is one and indivisible. Its apostles were Pico della Mirandola and Ficino. It found lyrical expression in verses like the following, translated by me from the Greek hexameters of Poliziano:--
O Father, Lord enthroned on gold, that dwellest in high heaven, O King of all things, deathless G.o.d, Thou Pan supreme, celestial!
That seest all, and movest all, and all with might sustainest, Older than oldest time, of all first, last, and without ending!
The firmament of blessed souls, of stars the heavenly splendour, The giant sun himself, the moon that in her circle shineth, And streams and fountains, earth and sea, are things of Thy creating, Thou givest life to all; all these Thou with Thy Spirit fillest.
The powers of earth, and powers of heaven, and they in pain infernal Who pine below the roots of earth, all these obey Thy bidding.
Behold, I call upon Thee now, Thy creature on earth dwelling, Poor, short of life, O G.o.d, of clay a mean unworthy mortal, Repenting sorely of my sins, and tears of sorrow shedding.
O G.o.d, immortal Father, hear! I cry to Thee; be gracious, And from my breast of this vain world the soul-enslaving pa.s.sion, The demon"s wiles, the wilful l.u.s.t, that d.a.m.ns the impious, banish!
Wash throughly all my heart with Thy pure Spirit"s rain abundant, That I may love Thee, Lord, alone, Thee, King of kings, for ever.
This is but a poor subst.i.tute for the Lord"s Prayer. h.e.l.l and purgatory are out of place in its theism. [Greek: Chrysothronos] and [Greek: aitheri naion] are tawdry epithets for "Our Father which art in heaven." Yet it is precisely in these contradictions and confusions that we trace the sincerity of the Renaissance spirit, seeking to fuse together the vitality of the old faith and the forms of novel culture, worshipping a Deity created in the image of its own mind, composite and incoherent.
Physically, the Italians of the Renaissance were equal to any task they chose to set themselves. No mistake is greater than to suppose that, because the summer climate of Italy is hotter than our own, therefore her children must be languid, pleasure-loving, and relaxed.
Twelve months spent in Tuscany would suffice to dissipate illusions about the enervating Italian air, even if the history of ancient Rome were not a proof that the hardiest race of combatants and conquerors the world has ever seen were nurtured between Soracte and the sea.
After the downfall of the Empire, what remained of native vigour in the Latin cities found a refuge in the lagoons of Venice and other natural strongholds. Walled towns in general retained a Roman population. The primitive Italic races still existed in the valleys of the Apennines, while the Ligurians held the Genoese Riviera; nor were the Etruscans extinct in Tuscany. It is true that Rome had fused these races into a people using the same language. Yet the ethnologist will hardly allow that the differences noticeable between the several districts of Italy were not connected with original varieties of stock. To the people, as Rome had made it, fresh blood was added by the Goths, Lombards, and Germans descending from the North. Greeks, Arabs, Normans, and, in course of time, Franks influenced the South.
During the Middle Ages a new and mighty breed of men sprang into being by the combination of these diverse elements, each district deriving specific quality from the varying proportions in which the chief const.i.tuents were mingled. It is noticeable that where the Roman-Etruscan blood was purest probably from mixture, in the valley of the Arno, the modern Italian genius found its home. Florence and her sister cities formed the language and the arts of Italy. To this race, in conjunction with the natives of Lombardy and Central Italy, was committed the civilisation of Europe in the fifteenth century. It was only south of Rome, where the brutalising traditions of the Roman _latifundia_ had never yielded to the burgh-creating impulse of the Middle Ages, that the Italians were unfit for their great duty. On these southern states the Empire of the East, Saracen marauders and Norman conquerors, the French and the Spanish dynasties, had successively exercised a pernicious influence; nor did the imperial policy of Frederick II. remain long enough in operation to effect a radical improvement in the people. Even at Naples culture was always an exotic. Elsewhere throughout the peninsula the Italians of the new age were a n.o.ble nation, gifted with physical, emotional, and mental faculties in splendid harmony. In some districts, notably in Florence, circ.u.mstance and climate had been singularly favourable to the production of such glorious human beings as the world has rarely seen.
Beauty of person, strength of body, and civility of manners were combined in the men of that favoured region with intellectual endowments of the highest order: nor were these gifts of nature confined to a caste apart; the whole population formed an aristocracy of genius.
In order to comprehend the greatness of this Italian type in the Renaissance, it is only needful to study the picture galleries of Florence or of Venice with special attention to the portraits they contain. When we compare those senators and sages with the subjects of Durer"s and of Cranach"s art, we feel the physical superiority of the Italians. In like manner a comparison of the men of the fifteenth century with those of the sixteenth shows how much of that physical grandeur had been lost. It is easy to wander astray while weaving subtle theories on this path of criticism. Yet it cannot be a mere accident that Vandyck"s portrait of the Cardinal de" Bentivogli in the Pitti Palace differs as it does from that of the Cardinal Ippolito de"
Medici by Pontormo or by t.i.tian. The Medici is an Italian of the Renaissance, with his imperious originality and defiance of convention. He has refused to be portrayed as an ecclesiastic. t.i.tian has painted him in Hungarian costume of dark red velvet, moustached, and sworded like a soldier; in Pontormo"s picture he wears a suit of mail, and rests his left hand on a large white hound. The Bentivoglio is an Italian of the type produced by the Counter-Reformation. His delicate lace ruffs, the coquetry of his scarlet robes, and the fine keen cut of his diplomatic features betray a new spirit.[4] Surely the physical qualities of a race change with the changes in their thought and feeling. The beauty of Ta.s.so is more feminine and melancholy than that of Ariosto, in whom the liberal genius of the Renaissance was yet alive. Among the scowling swordsmen of the seventeenth century you cannot find a face like Giorgione"s Gattamelata;[5] the n.o.bles who bear themselves so proudly on the canvases of Vandyck at Genoa lack the urbanity of Raphael"s Castiglione; Moroni"s black-robed students are more pinched and withered than the Pico of the Uffizzi. It will not do to strain such points. It is enough to suggest them. What remains, however, for certain is that the Italians of the fifteenth century--and among these must be included those who lived through the first half of the sixteenth--had physical force and character corresponding to their robust individuality. Until quite late in the Renaissance so much survived of feudal customs even in Italy that riding, the handling of the lance and sword, and all athletic exercises formed a part of education no less indispensable than mental training. Great cities had open places set apart for tournaments and games; in Tuscan burghs the _palio_ was run on feast days, and May mornings saw the prentice lads of Florence tilting beneath the smiles of girls who danced at nightfall on the square of Santa Trinita.
b.l.o.o.d.y battles in the streets were frequent. The least provocation caused a man to draw his dagger. Combats _a steccato chiuso_ were among the pastimes to which a Pope might lend his countenance. Skill in swordsmanship was therefore a necessity. For the rest, we learn from Castiglione that the perfect gentleman was bound to be an accomplished dancer, a bold rider, a skilled wrestler, a swift runner, to shoot well at the mark, to hurl the javelin and the quoit with grace, and to play at tennis and _pallone_. In addition he ought to affect some one athletic exercise in such perfection as to beat professors of the same on their own ground. Cesare Borgia took pride in felling an ox at a single blow, and exhibited his marksman"s cunning by shooting condemned criminals in a courtyard of the Vatican.
[Footnote 4: It would be easy to multiply these contrasts, comprising, for example, the Cardinals Inghirami and Bibbiena and the Leo of Raphael with the Farnesi portraits at Modena or the grave faces of Moroni"s patrons at Bergamo.]
[Footnote 5: Portrait in the Uffizzi, ascribed to Giorgione, but more probably by some pupil of Mantegna.]