Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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Venetians in color and Correggio in grace; and his mastery of tones-
in their depth and modulation and transparency- might well be
preferred to the lavishment of color in Titian, Tintoretto, and
Veronese. We miss variety in Andrea; his paintings move within too
small a circle of subject and sentiment; his hundred Madonnas are
always the same young Italian mother, modest and lovely and at last
cloyingly sweet. But no one has surpassed him in composition, few in
anatomy, modeling, and design. "There is a little fellow in Florence,"
said Michelangelo to Raphael, "who will bring sweat to your brow if
ever he is engaged in great works." `050537
Andrea himself never lived to reach full maturity. The victorious
Germans, capturing Florence in 1530, infected it with plague, and
Andrea was one of its victims. His wife, who had aroused in him all
the heartaches of jealousy that beauty brings to marriage, shunned his
room in those last fevered days; and the artist who had given her an
almost deathless life died with no one by his side, at the age of
forty-four. About 1570 Iacopo da Empoli went to the court of the
Annunziata to copy del Sarto's Nativity. An old lady who had come to
Mass stopped beside him and pointed to a figure in the foreground of
the painting. "It is I," she said. Lucrezia had outlived herself by
forty years.
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The few artists whom we have here commemorated must be viewed not as
a record but as representatives of the plastic and graphic genius of
this period. There were other sculptors and painters of the time,
who still lead a ghostly existence in the museums- Benedetto da
Rovezzano, Franciabigio, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, and hundreds more. There
were half-secluded artists, monastic and secular, who still
practised the intimate art of illuminating manuscripts, like Fra
Eustachio and Antonio di Girolamo; there were calligraphers whose
handwriting might excuse Federigo of Urbino for regretting the
invention of print; there were mosaicists who despised painting as the
perishable pride of a day; wood carvers like Baccio d'Agnolo, whose
carved chairs, tables, chests, and beds were the glory of Florentine
homes; and nameless other workers in the minor arts. Florence was so
rich in art that she could bear the depredations of invaders,
pontiffs, and millionaires from Charles VIII to our own times, and
still retain so much of delicate workmanship that no man has ever
compassed all the treasures deposited in that one city by the two
centuries of the Renaissance. Or by one century; for just as the great
age of Florence in art had begun with Cosimo's return from exile in
1434, so it ended with Andrea del Sarto's death in 1530. Civil strife,
Savonarola's puritan regime, siege and defeat and plague, had
destroyed the joyful spirit of Lorenzo's day, had broken the frail
lyre of art.
But the great chords had been struck, and their music echoed
throughout the peninsula. Orders came to Florentine artists from other
Italian cities, even from France, Spain, Hungary, Germany, and Turkey.
To Florence flocked a thousand artists to learn her lore and form
their styles- Piero della Francesca, Perugino, Raphael.... From
Florence a hundred artists took the gospel of art to half a hundred
Italian cities and to foreign lands. In those half-hundred cities
the spirit and taste of the age, the generosity of wealth, the
heritage of technique worked together with the Florentine stimulus.
Presently all Italy, from the Alps to Calabria, was painting, carving,
building, composing, singing, in a creative frenzy that seemed to
know, in the fever of its haste, that soon the wealth would vanish
in war, and the pride of Italy would be humbled under an alien
tyranny, and the prison doors of dogma would close again upon the
marvelous exuberant mind of Renaissance man.
BOOK III: ITALIAN PAGEANT: 1378-1534
CHAPTER VI: Milan
I. BACKGROUND
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WE do injustice to the Renaissance when we concentrate our study
on Florence, Venice, and Rome. For a decade it was more brilliant in
Milan, under Lodovico and Leonardo, than in Florence. Its liberation
and exaltation of woman found their best embodiment in Isabella d'Este
at Mantua. It glorified Parma with Correggio, Perugia with Perugino,
Orvieto with Signorelli. Its literature reached an apex with Ariosto
at Ferrara, and its cultivation of manners at Urbino in the days of
Castiglione. It gave name to a ceramic art at Faenza, and to the
Palladian architectural style at Vicenza. It revived Siena with
Pinturicchio and Sassetta and Sodoma, and made Naples a home and
symbol of joyous living and idyllic poetry. We must pass leisurely
through the incomparable peninsula from Piedmont to Sicily, and let
the varied voices of the cities merge in the polyphonic chorus of
the Renaissance.
The economic life of the Italian states in the fifteenth century was
as diverse as their climate, dialects, and costumes. The north-
i.e., above Florence- could have severe winters, sometimes freezing
the Po from end to end; yet the coastal region around Genoa, sheltered
by the Ligurian Alps, enjoyed mild weather in almost every month.
Venice could shroud its palaces and towers and liquid streets in
clouds and mist; Rome was sunny but miasmic; Naples was a climatic
paradise. Everywhere, at one time or another, the cities and their
countryside suffered those earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes,
famines, plagues, and wars that a Malthusian Nature sedulously
provides to compensate for the reproductive ecstasies of mankind. In
the towns the old handicrafts supplied the poor with a living and
the rich with superfluities. Only the textile industry had reached the
factory and capitalist stage; one silk mill at Bologna contracted with
the city authorities to do "the work of 4000 spinning women." `05061
Petty tradesmen, merchants of import and export, teachers, lawyers,
physicians, administrators, politicians, made up a complex middle
class; a wealthy and worldly clergy added their color and grace to the
courts and the streets; and monks and friars, somber or jovial,
wandered about seeking alms or romance. The aristocracy of
landowners and financiers lived for the most part within the city
walls, occasionally in rural villas. At the top a banker,
condottiere, marquis, duke, doge, or king, with his wife or
mistress, presided over a court hampered with luxuries and gilded with
art. In the countryside the peasant tilled his modest acres or some
lord's domain, and lived in a poverty so traditional that it seldom
entered his thoughts.
Slavery existed on a minor scale, chiefly in domestic service
among the rich; occasionally as a supplement and corrective to free
labor on large estates, especially in Sicily; but here and there
even in northern Italy. `05062 From the fourteenth century onward
the slave trade grew; Venetian and Genoese merchants imported them
from the Balkans, southern Russia, and Islam; male or female Moorish
slaves were considered a shining ornament of Italian courts. `05063 In
1488 Pope Innocent VIII received a hundred Moorish slaves as a present
from Ferdinand the Catholic, and distributed them as gratuities
among his cardinals and other friends. `05064 In 1501, after the
capture of Capua, many Capuan women were sold as slaves in
Rome. `05065 But these stray facts illustrate the morals rather than
the economy of the Renaissance; slavery rarely played a significant
role in the production or transport of goods.
Transport was chiefly on muleback or by cart, or by river, canal, or
sea. The well-to-do traveled on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages.
Speed was moderate but exciting; it took two days and a good spine
to ride from Perugia to Urbino- sixty-four miles; a boat might take
fourteen days from Barcelona to Genoa. Inns were numerous, noisy,
dirty, and uncomfortable. One at Padua could house 200 guests and
stable 200 horses. Roads were rough and perilous. The main streets
of the cities were paved with flagstones, but were only
exceptionally lighted at night. Good water was brought in from the
mountains, rarely to individual homes, usually to public fountains
artistically designed, by whose cooling flow simple women and idle men
gathered and distributed the news of the day.
The city-states that divided the peninsula were ruled in some cases-
Florence, Siena, Venice- by mercantile oligarchies; more often by
"despots" of diverse degree, who had superseded republican or communal
institutions vitiated by class exploitation and political violence.
Out of the competition of strong men one emerged- almost always of
humble birth- who subdued and destroyed or hired the rest, made
himself absolute ruler, and in some cases transmitted his power to his
heir. So the Visconti or Sforzas ruled in Milan, the Scaligeri in
Verona, the Carraresi in Padua, the Gonzagas in Mantua, the Estensi in
Ferrara. Such men enjoyed a precarious popularity because they laid
a lid upon faction, and made life and property safe within their
whim and the city's walls. The lower classes accepted them as a last
refuge from the dictatorship of ducats; the surrounding peasantry
reconciled itself to them because the commune had given it neither
protection nor justice nor freedom.
The despots were cruel because they were insecure. With no tradition
of legitimacy to support them, subject at any moment to
assassination or revolt, they surrounded themselves with guards, ate
and drank in fear of poison, and hoped for a natural death. In their
earlier decades they governed by craft, corruption, and quiet
murder, and practised all the arts of Machiavelli before he was
born; after 1450 they felt more secure through sanctification by time,
and contented themselves with pacific means in domestic government.
They suppressed criticism and dissent, and maintained a horde of
spies. They lived luxuriously, and affected an impressive pomp.
Nevertheless they earned the tolerance and respect, even, in Ferrara
and Urbino, the devotion, of their subjects, by improving
administration, executing impartial justice where their own
interests were not involved, helping the people in famine and other
emergencies, relieving unemployment with public works, building
churches and monasteries, beautifying their cities with art, and
supporting scholars, poets, and artists who might polish their
diplomacy, brighten their aura, and perpetuate their name.
They waged frequent but usually petty war, seeking the mirage of
security through the advancement of their frontiers, and having an
expansive appetite for taxable terrain. They did not send their own
people to war, for then they would have had to arm them, which might
be suicidal; instead they hired mercenaries, and paid them with the
proceeds of conquests, ransoms, confiscations, and pillage. Dashing
adventurers came down over the Alps, often with bands of hungry
soldiers in their train, and sold their services as condottieri to
the highest bidder, changing sides with the fluctuations of the fee. A
tailor from Essex, known in England as Sir John Hawkwood and in
Italy as Acuto, fought with strategic subtlety and tactical skill
against and for Florence, amassed several hundred thousand florins,
died as a gentleman farmer in 1394, and was buried with honors and art
in Santa Maria del Fiore.
The despot financed education as well as war, built schools and
libraries, supported academies and universities. Every town in Italy
had a school, usually provided by the Church; every major city had a
university. Under the schooling of humanists, universities, and
courts, public taste and manners improved, every second Italian became
a judge of art, every important center had its own artists and its own
architectural style. The joy of life spread, for the educated classes,
from one end of Italy to the other; manners were relatively refined,
and yet instincts were unprecedentedly free. Never since the days of
Augustus had genius found such an audience, such stimulating
competition, and such liberty.
II. PIEDMONT AND LIGURIA
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In northwestern Italy and what is now southeastern France lay the
principality of Savoy-Piedmont, whose ruling house was till 1945 the
oldest royal family in Europe. Founded by Count Humbert I as a
dependency of the Holy Roman Empire, the proud little state expanded
to a moment of glory under the "Green Count" Amadeus VI (1343-83), who
annexed Geneva, Lausanne, Aosta, and Turin, which he made his capital.
No other ruler of his time enjoyed so fair a reputation for wisdom,
justice, and generosity. The Emperor Sigismund raised the counts to
dukes (1416), but the first duke, Amadeus VIII, lost his head when
he accepted nomination as Antipope Felix V (1439). A century later
Savoy was conquered by Francis I for France (1536). Savoy and Piedmont
became a battleground between France and Italy; Apollo surrendered
them to Mars; they remained in the backwater of the Italian torrent,
and never felt the full flow of the Renaissance. In the rich Turin
Gallery, and in his native Vercelli, are the pleasant but mediocre
paintings of Defendente Ferrari.
South of Piedmont, Liguria embraces all the glory of the Italian
Riviera: on the east the Riviera di Levante, or Coast of the Rising
(Sun); on the west the Riviera di Ponente, or Coast of the Setting;
and at their junction Genoa, almost as resplendent as Naples on a
throne of hills and a spreading pedestal of blue sea. To Petrarch it
had seemed "a city of Kings, the very temple of prosperity, the gate
of joy"; `05066 but that was before the Genoese debacle at Chioggia
(1378). While Venice recovered rapidly through the orderly and devoted
co-operation of all classes in restoring commerce and solvency,
Genoa continued its tradition of civil strife between noble and noble,
nobles and commoners. Oligarchic oppression provoked a minor
revolution (1383); the butchers, armed with the persuasive cutlery
of their trade, led a crowd to the palace of the doge, and compelled a
reduction of taxes and the exclusion of nobles from the government. In
five years (1390-4) Genoa had ten revolutions, ten doges rose and
fell; finally order seemed more precious than freedom, and the
harassed republic, fearing absorption by Milan, gave itself over, with
its Rivieras, to France (1396). Two years later the French were
expelled in a passionate revolt; five bloody battles were fought in
the streets; twenty palaces were burned, government buildings were
sacked and demolished, property to the value of a million florins
was destroyed. Genoa again found the chaos of freedom unbearable,
and surrendered itself to Milan (1421). The Milanese rule became
intolerable, revolution restored the republic (1435), and the strife
of factions was resumed.
The one element of stability amid these fluctuations was the Bank of
St. George. During the war with Venice the government had borrowed
money from its citizens, and had given them promissory notes. After
the war it was unable to redeem these pledges, but it turned over to
the lenders the customs dues of the port. The creditors organized
themselves into the Casa di San Giorgio, the House of St. George,
chose a directorate of eight governors, and received from the state
a palace for their use. The House or Company was well managed, being
the least corrupt institution in the republic. It was entrusted with
the collection of taxes; it lent some of its funds to the
government, and received in return substantial properties in
Liguria, Corsica, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. It
became both the state treasury and a private bank, accepting deposits,
discounting notes, making loans to commerce and industry. As all
factions were financially tied to it, all respected it, and left it
unharmed in revolution and war. Its magnificent Renaissance palace
still stands in the Piazza Caricamento.
The fall of Constantinople was an almost fatal blow to Genoa. The
rich Genoese settlement at Pera, near Constantinople, was taken over
by the Turks. When the impoverished republic once more submitted to
France (1458), Francesco Sforza financed a revolution that expelled
the French and made Genoa again a dependency of Milan (1464). The
confusion that weakened Milan after the assassination of Galeazzo
Maria Sforza (1476) allowed the Genoese a brief interlude of
freedom; but when Louis XII seized Milan (1499), Genoa too succumbed
to his power. At last, in the long conflict between Francis I and
Charles V, a Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, turned his ships against
the French, drove them out of Genoa, and established a new
republican constitution (1528). Like the governments of Florence and
Venice, it was a commercial oligarchy; only those families were
enfranchised whose names were inscribed in il libro d'oro ( The
Golden Book ). The new regime- a senate of 400, a council of 200, a
doge elected for two years- brought a disciplined peace to the
factions, and maintained the independence of Genoa till the coming
of Napoleon (1797).
Amid this passionate disorder the city contributed far less than her
due share to Italian letters, science, and art. Her captains
explored the seas avidly, but when her son Columbus appeared among
them Genoa was too timid or too poor to finance his dream. The
nobles were absorbed in politics, the merchants in gain; neither class
spared much for the adventures of the mind. The old cathedral of San
Lorenzo was remodeled in Gothic (1307) with a majestic interior; its
chapel of San Giovanni Battista (1451f) was adorned with a handsome
altar and canopy by Matteo Civitali and a somber statue of the Baptist
by Iacopo Sansovino. Andrea Doria effected almost as significant a
revolution in Genoese art as in government. He brought Fra Giovanni da
Montorsoli from Florence to remodel the Palazzo Doria (1529), and
Perino del Vaga from Rome to adorn it with frescoes and stucco
reliefs, grotesques, and arabesques; the result was one of the most
ornate residences in Italy. Leone Leoni, rival and foe of Cellini,
came from Rome to cast a fine medallion of the admiral, and Montorsoli
designed his tomb. In Genoa the Renaissance did not long antedate
Doria, and did not long survive his death.
III. PAVIA
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Between Genoa and Milan the ancient city of Pavia lay quietly
along the Ticino. Once it had been the seat of the Lombard kings; now,
in the fourteenth century, it was subject to Milan, and was used by
the Visconti and the Sforzas as a second capital. There Galeazzo
Visconti II began (1360), and Gian (i.e., Giovanni, John) Galeazzo
Visconti completed, the majestic Castello that served as a ducal
residence for its second founder, and as a pleasure palace for later
dukes of Milan. Petrarch called it "the noblest product of modern
art," and many contemporaries ranked it first among the royal
dwellings of Europe. The library contained one of the most precious
collections of books in Europe, including 951 illuminated manuscripts.
Louis XII, having taken Milan in 1499, carried off this Pavia
library among his spoils; and a French army destroyed the interior
of the castle with the latest artillery (1527). Nothing remains but
the walls.
Though the Castello is ruined, the finest jewel of the Visconti
and the Sforzas survives intact- the Certosa, or Carthusian monastery,
hidden off the highway between Pavia and Milan. Here, in a placid
plain, Giangaleazzo Visconti undertook to build cells, cloisters,
and a church in fulfillment of a vow made by his wife. From that
beginning until 1499 the dukes of Milan continued to develop and
embellish the edifice as the favorite embodiment of their piety and
their art. There is nothing more exquisite in Italy. The
Lombard-Romanesque facade of white Carrara marble was designed,
carved, and erected (1473f) by Cristoforo Mantegazza and Giovanni
Antonio Amadeo of Pavia sponsored by Galeazzo Maria Sforza and
Lodovico il Moro. It is too ornate, too fondly gifted with arches,
statues, reliefs, medallions, columns, pilasters, capitals,
arabesques, carved angels, saints, sirens, princes, fruits, and
flowers to convey a sense of unity and harmony; each part importunes
attention regardless of the whole. But each part is a labor of love
and skill; the four Renaissance windows by Amadeo would of
themselves entitle him to the remembrance of mankind. In some
Italian churches the facade is a brave front on an otherwise
undistinguished exterior; but in this Certosa di Pavia every
external feature and aspect is arrestingly beautiful: the stately
attached buttresses, the noble towers, arcades, and spires of the
north transept and the apse, the graceful columns and arches of the
cloisters. Within the court the eye rises from these slender columns
through three successive stories of arcades to the four superimposed
colonnades of the cupola; this is an ensemble harmoniously conceived
and admirably wrought. Within the church everything is of
unsurpassed excellence: columns rising in clusters and Gothic arches
to carved and coffered vaults; bronze and iron grilles as delicately
designed as royal lace; doors and archways of elegant form and
ornament; altars of marble studded with precious stones; paintings
by Perugino, Borgognone, and Luini; the magnificent inlaid choir
stalls; the luminous stained glass; the careful carving of pillars,
spandrels, archivolts, and cornices; the stately tomb of
Giangaleazzo Visconti by Cristoforo Romano and Benedetto Briosco; and,
as the last relic of a pathetic romance, the tomb and figures of
Lodovico il Moro and Beatrice d'Este, here united in exquisite marble,
though they died ten years and five hundred miles apart. In a like
union of diverse moods the Lombard, Gothic, and Renaissance styles are
here wedded in the most nearly perfect architectural product of the
Renaissance. For under Lodovico the Moor Milan had gathered fair women
to create an unrivaled court, and supreme artists like Bramante,
Leonardo, and Caradosso to snatch the leadership of Italy, for one
bright decade, from Florence, Venice and Rome.
IV. THE VISCONTI: 1378-1447
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Galeazzo II, dying in 1378, bequeathed his share of the Milanese
realm to his son Giangaleazzo Visconti, who continued to use Pavia
as a capital. Here was a man who would have warmed Machiavelli's
heart. Immersed in the great library of his palace, taking care of a
delicate constitution, winning his subjects by moderate taxation,
attending church with impressive piety, filling his court with priests
and monks, he was the last prince in Italy whom diplomats would have
suspected of planning to unite the entire peninsula under his rule.
Yet this was the ambition that seethed in his brain; he pursued it
to the end of his life, and almost realized it; and in its service
he used craft, treachery, and murder as if he had studied the
unwritten Prince with reverence, and had never heard of Christ.
Meanwhile his uncle Bernabo was ruling the other half of the
Visconti realm from Milan. Bernabo was a candid villain; he taxed
his subjects to the edge of endurance, compelled the peasantry to keep
and feed the five thousand hounds that he used in the chase, and