Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

the regent of Milan. Pope Alexander VI was not only allied with

Naples, he was anxious to unite the town of Forli- then ruled by a

Sforza- with other cities in a powerful papal state. Lorenzo de'

Medici, who had been friendly to Lodovico, had died in 1492. Driven to

desperate measures to protect himself, Lodovico allied Milan with

France, and consented to give Charles VIII and the French army an

unhindered passage through northwestern Italy when Charles should

undertake to assert his rights to the Neapolitan throne.

So the French came. Lodovico played host to Charles, and bade him

Godspeed on his expedition against Naples. While the French marched

south Giangaleazzo Sforza died of a combination of ailments.

Lodovico was wrongly suspected of poisoning him, but gave some support

to the rumor by the haste with which he had himself invested with

the ducal title (1495). Meanwhile Louis, Duke of Orleans, invaded

Italy with a second French army, and announced that he would take

Milan as his rightful possession through his descent from Giangaleazzo

Visconti. Lodovico saw now that he had made a tragic error in

welcoming Charles. Swiftly reversing his policy, he helped to form,

with Venice, Spain, Alexander VI, and Maximilian, a "Holy League" to

expel the French from the peninsula. Charles hastily retraced his

steps, suffered an indecisive defeat at Fornovo (1495), and barely

managed to bring his battered army back to France. Louis of Orleans

decided to wait for a better day.

Lodovico prided himself on the apparent success of his tortuous

policy: he had taught Alfonso a lesson, had foiled Orleans, and had

led the League to victory. His position now seemed safe; he relaxed

the vigilance of his diplomacy, and again enjoyed the splendor of

his court and the liberties of his youth. When Beatrice became

pregnant a second time he freed her from marital obligations, and

formed a liaison with Lucrezia Crivelli (1496). Beatrice bore his

infidelity with impatient grief; she no longer spread song and

merriment about her, but immersed herself in her two sons. Lodovico

vacillated between his mistress and his wife, pleading that he loved

both. In 1497 Beatrice was a third time confined in childbirth. She

was delivered of a stillborn son; and half an hour later, after

great agony, she died, aged twenty-two.

From that moment everything changed in the city and the Duke. The

people, says a contemporary, "showed such grief as had never been

known before in Milan." The court put on mourning; Lucrezia Crivelli

fled into obscurity; Lodovico, overcome with remorse and sorrow,

passed days in solitude and prayer; and the strong man who had

hardly thought of religion now asked for only one boon- that he

might die, see Beatrice again, earn her forgiveness, and regain her

love. For two weeks he refused to receive officials, his envoys, or

his children; he attended three Masses daily, and daily visited the

tomb of his wife in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. He

commissioned Cristoforo Solari to carve a recumbent effigy of

Beatrice; and as he wished, when dead, to be buried with her in one

tomb, he asked that his own effigy should be placed beside hers. It

was so done; and that simple monument in the Certosa di Pavia still

commemorates the brief bright day that for Lodovico and Milan, as well

as for Beatrice and Leonardo, had now come to an end.

The tragedy ripened rapidly. In 1498 the Duke of Orleans became

Louis XII of France, and at once reaffirmed his intention of taking

Milan. Lodovico sought allies, but found none; Venice bluntly reminded

him of his invitation to Charles VIII. He gave command of his army

to Galeazzo di San Severino, who was too handsome for a general;

Galeazzo fled at sight of the enemy, and the French marched unhindered

upon Milan. Lodovico appointed his trusted friend Bernardino da

Corte to guard the well-fortified Castello, and bade him hold it

till Lodovico could secure aid from Maximilian. Then Lodovico, in

disguise and through a hundred vicissitudes, made his way (September

2, 1499) to Innsbruck and Maximilian. When Gian Trivulzio, a

Milanese general whom Lodovico had offended, led the French into

Milan, Bernardino surrendered the Castello and its treasures to him

without resistance for a bribe of 150,000 ducats ($1,875,000).

"Since Judas," mourned Lodovico, "there was no greater

treason," `050618 and all Italy agreed with him.

Louis bade Trivulzio make the conquered pay for the conquest; the

general levied heavy taxes; the French soldiers behaved with coarse

insolence; the people began to pray for Lodovico's return. He came,

with a small force of Swiss, German, and Italian mercenaries; the

French troops retired into the Castello, and Lodovico entered Milan in

triumph (February 5, 1500). During his brief stay there a

distinguished French prisoner was brought to him, the Chevalier

Bayard, renowned for courage and courtesy; Lodovico restored to him

his sword and horse, freed him, and sent him back under escort to

the French camp. The French did not return the courtesy; the

garrison in the Castello bombarded the streets of Milan until

Lodovico, to protect or appease the population, changed his

headquarters to Pavia. His funds began to run out, and he fell

behind in paying his troops. They proposed to compensate themselves by

pillaging the Italian towns, and fumed when he forbade them. He

engaged Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, husband of Beatrice's sister

Isabella, to lead his little army; Francesco agreed, but secretly

negotiated with the French. `050619 When the French appeared at

Novara, Lodovico led his motley force to battle; it turned at the

first shock and fled; its leaders arranged terms with the French;

and when Lodovico tried to escape in disguise his Swiss mercenaries

betrayed him to the enemy (April 10, 1500). He accepted his fate

quietly, merely asking that his copy of The Divine Comedy should

be brought to him from his library in Pavia. White-haired but still

proud, he was led through hostile mocking crowds in the streets of

Lyons, and was imprisoned in the castle of Lys-Saint-Georges in Berry.

Louis XII refused to see him, and ignored the pleas of the Emperor

Maximilian to set the broken captive free, but he allowed Lodovico

to stroll in the castle grounds, to fish in the moat, and to receive

friends. When Lodovico fell seriously ill Louis sent him his own

doctor, Maitre Salomon, and brought one of Lodovico's dwarfs from

Milan to amuse him. In 1504 he transferred Lodovico to the chateau

of Loches, and allowed him still wider liberty. In 1508 Lodovico tried

to escape; he made his way out of the castle precincts in a load of

straw; he lost himself in the woods, was tracked by bloodhounds, and

thereafter suffered a stricter imprisonment. He was deprived of

books and writing materials, and was confined in a subterranean

dungeon. There, on May 17, 1508, in a dark solitude all the world away

from the bright life of his once gay capital, Lodovico, aged

fifty-seven, died. `050620

He had sinned against man and woman and Italy, but he had loved

beauty, and had cherished the men who brought art and music, poetry

and learning to Milan. Said one of Italy's greatest historians,

Girolamo Tiraboschi, a century ago:

-

If we consider the immense number of learned men who flocked to

his court from all parts of Italy in the certainty of receiving

great honors and rich rewards; if we recall how many famous architects

and painters he invited to Milan, and how many noble buildings he

raised; how he built and endowed the magnificent University of

Pavia, and opened schools of every kind of science in Milan; if

besides all this we read the splendid eulogies and dedicatory epistles

addressed to him by scholars of every nationality, we feel inclined to

pronounce him the best prince that ever lived. `050621

VI. LETTERS

-

Lodovico and Beatrice gathered about them many poets, but life was

too pleasant at this court to inspire in a poet the arduous and

persevering devotion that produces a masterpiece. Serafino of Aquila

was short and ugly, but his lyrics, sung by himself to the lute he

played, were a delight to Beatrice and her friends. When she died he

slipped away from Milan, unable to bear the heavy silence of rooms

that had rung with her laughter and known the lightness of her feet.

Lodovico invited the Tuscan poets Camelli and Bellincione to his court

in the hope that they would refine the rude diction of Lombardy. The

result was a war of Tuscan vs. Lombard poets, in which venomous

sonnets ousted honest poetry. Bellincione was so quarrelsome that when

he died a rival wrote an inscription for his tomb, warning the

passer-by to tread quietly, lest the corpse should rise and bite

him. Therefore Lodovico made a Lombard, Gasparo Visconti, his court

poet. In 1496 Visconti presented to Beatrice 143 sonnets, and other

poems, written in letters of silver and gold on ivory vellum,

illuminated with delicate miniatures, and bound in silver-gilt

boards enameled with flowers. He was a real poet, but time has

withered him. He loved Petrarch, and engaged in an earnest but

friendly debate with Bramante, in verse, on the relative merits of

Petrarch and Dante, for the great architect loved to think himself a

poet as well. Such jousts of rhyme were a favorite amusement of

Renaissance courts; almost everybody took part in them, and even

generals became sonneteers. The best poems written under the Sforzas

were those of a polished courtier, Niccolo da Correggio; he had come

to Milan in Beatrice's bridal train, and had been detained there by

love for her and Lodovico; he served them as poet and diplomat, and

composed his noblest verses on Beatrice's death. Lodovico's

mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, herself a poetess, presided over a

distinguished salon of poets, scholars, statesmen, and philosophers.

All the refinements of life and culture that marked the eighteenth

century in France flourished in Lodovico's Milan.

Lodovico did not match Lorenzo's interest in scholarship, nor his

discrimination in patronage; he brought a hundred scholars to his

city, but their learned intercourse produced no outstanding native

savant. Francesco Filelfo, who made all Italy resound with his

erudition and vituperation, was born in Tolentino, studied at Padua,

became a professor there at eighteen, taught for a while at Venice,

and rejoiced at the opportunity to visit Constantinople as secretary

to the Venetian consulate (1419). There he studied Greek under John

Chrysoloras, married John's daughter, and served for years as a

minor official at the Byzantine court. When he returned to Venice he

was an expert Hellenist; he boasted, with some truth, that no other

Italian had so thorough a knowledge of classic letters and tongues; he

wrote poetry, and delivered orations, in Greek and Latin; and Venice

paid him, as professor of those languages and their literature, the

unusually high stipend of 500 sequins ($12,500) a year. A still fatter

fee lured him to Florence (1429), where he became a scholastic lion.

"The whole city," he assured a friend, "turns to look at me.... My

name is on every lip. Not only civic leaders, but women of the noblest

birth make way for me, paying me so much respect that I am ashamed

of their worship. My audience numbers every day four hundred

persons, mostly men advanced in years, and of the dignity of

senators." `050622 All this soon ended, for Filelfo had a flair for

quarreling, and alienated the very men- Niccolo de' Niccoli,

Ambrogio Traversari, and others- who had invited him to Florence. When

Cosimo de' Medici was imprisoned in the Palazzo Vecchio, Filelfo urged

the government to put him to death; when Cosimo triumphed Filelfo

fled. For six years he taught at Siena and Bologna; finally (1440)

Filippo Maria Visconti drew him to Milan with the unprecedented fee of

750 florins per year. There Filelfo spent the remainder of his long

and tempestuous career.

He was a man of awesome energy. He lectured four hours a day, in

Greek, Latin, or Italian, expounding the classics or Dante or

Petrarch; he delivered public orations for governmental ceremonies

or private celebrations; he wrote a Latin epic on Francesco Sforza,

ten "decades" of satires, ten "books" of odes, and twenty-four hundred

lines of Greek poetry. He composed ten thousand lines De seriis et

iocis (1465), which were never printed and are often unprintable.

He buried two wives, married a third, and had twenty-four children

in addition to the bastards that plagued his infidelities. Amid

these labors he found time to carry on gigantic literary wars with

poets, politicians, and humanists. Despite his handsome salary and

incidental fees, he pled intermittent poverty, and asked his

patrons, in classic couplets, for money, food, clothing, horses, and a

cardinal's hat. He. made the mistake of including Poggio among his

targets, and found that jolly scoundrel his master in

scurrility. *05022

Even so, his learning made him the most sought-for scholar of the

age. In 1453 Pope Nicholas V, receiving him in the Vatican, gave him a

purse of 500 ducats ($12,500); Alfonso I at Naples crowned him poet

laureate and knighted him; Duke Borso was his host at Ferrara, the

Marchese Lodovico Gonzaga at Mantua, the dictator Sigismondo Malatesta

at Rimini. When the death of Francesco Sforza, and the ensuing

chaos, made his position insecure in Milan, he had no difficulty

securing a post in the University of Rome. But the papal treasurer was

remiss in his payments, and Filelfo returned to Milan. Nevertheless he

longed to end his days near Lorenzo de' Medici, to be one of the

illustrious group that surrounded the grandson of the man whom he

had nominated for death. Lorenzo forgave him, and offered him the

chair of Greek literature in Florence. Filelfo was so poor now that

the government of Milan had to lend him money for the trip. He managed

to reach Florence, but died of dysentery a fortnight after his

arrival, aged eighty-three (1481). His career is one of a hundred

that, taken together, convey the unique aroma of the Italian

Renaissance, in which scholarship could be a passion, and literature

could be war.

VII. ART

-

Despotism was a boon to Italian art. A dozen rulers competed in

seeking architects, sculptors, and painters to adorn their capitals

and their memory; and in this rivalry they spent such sums as

democracy rarely spares to beauty, and such as would never have been

available to art had the proceeds of human labor and genius been

equitably shared. The result was, in Renaissance Italy, an art of

courtly distinction and aristocratic taste, but too often

circumscribed, in form and theme, to the needs of secular potentates

or ecclesiastical powers. The noblest art is that which, out of the

toil and contributions of multitudes, creates for them a common gift

and glory; such were the Gothic cathedrals and the temples of

classic Greece and Rome.

Every critic denounces the duomo of Milan as a plethora of

ornament confusing structural line; but the people of Milan have for

five centuries gathered fondly in its cool immensity, and, even in

this doubting day, cherish it as their collective achievement and

pride. Giangaleazzo Visconti began it (1386), and planned it on a

scale befitting the capital of the united Italy of his dreams;

40,000 people should find room there to worship God and admire Gian.

Tradition tells how, at that time, the women of Milan were afflicted

with a mysterious disease in their pregnancies, and many of their

babies died in infancy; Gian himself mourned three sons painfully born

and all soon dead; and he dedicated the great shrine as an offering

Mariae nascenti, "to Mary in her birth," praying that he might

have an heir, and that the mothers of Milan might bear a wholesome

progeny. He summoned architects from France and Germany as well as

from Italy; the northerners dictated the Gothic style, the Italians

lavished ornament; harmony of style and form faded in a conflict of

counsels and two centuries of delay; the mood and taste of the world

changed during the process; and those who finished the structure no

longer felt as those who had begun it. When Giangaleazzo died (1402)

only the walls had been built; then the work marked time for lack of

funds. Lodovico called in Bramante, Leonardo, and others to design a

cupola that should bring the proud wilderness of pinnacles to some

crowning unity; their ideas were rejected; finally (1490) Giovanni

Antonio Amadeo was drawn from his labors on the Certosa di Pavia,

and was given full charge of the whole cathedral enterprise. He and

most of his aides were rather sculptors than architects; they could

not bear that any surface should remain uncarved or unadorned. He

consumed in the task the last thirty years of his life (1490-1522);

even so the cupola was not finished till 1759; and the facade, begun

in 1616, was not completed till Napoleon made that consummation an

imperial command (1809).

In Lodovico's day it was the second largest church in the world,

covering 120,000 square feet; today it yields the specious honor of

size to St. Peter's and the cathedral of Seville; but it is still

proud of its length and breadth (486 by 289 feet), its height of 354

feet from the ground to the head of the Virgin on the spire of the

cupola, the 135 pinnacles that splinter its glory, and the 2300

statues that people its pinnacles, pillars, walls, and roof. All of

it- even the roof- was built of white marble laboriously transported

from a dozen quarries in Italy. The facade is too low for its width,

and yet hides the exquisite cupola. One must be poised in midair to

see this maze of praying stalagmites rising from the earth; or one

must travel again and again around the great dolmen, amid a shower

of buttresses, to feel the extravagant majesty of the mass; or one

must come through the narrow and swarming streets of the city, and

suddenly emerge into the vast open square of the Piazza del Duomo,

to catch the full splendor of facade and spire turning the sun of

Italy into a radiance of stone; or one must crowd with the people

through the portals on some holyday, and let all those spaces,

pillars, capitals, arches, vaults, statues, altars, and colored

panes convey without words the mystery of faith, hope, and adoration.

As the cathedral is the monument of Giangaleazzo Visconti, and the

Certosa of Pavia is the shrine of Lodovico and Beatrice, so the

Ospedale Maggiore, or Great Hospital, is the simple and stately

memorial of Francesco Sforza. To design it in a manner "worthy of

the ducal dominion and of so great and illustrious a city," Sforza

brought in from Florence (1456) Antonio Averulino, known as

Filarete, who chose for it a stately form of Lombard Romanesque.

Bramante, the probable architect of the inner court or cortile,

faced this with a double tier of round arches, each tier surmounted by

an elegant cornice. The Great Hospital remained one of Milan's chief

glories till the Second World War left most of it in ruins.

In the judgment of Lodovico and his court the supreme artist in

Milan was not Leonardo but Bramante, for Leonardo revealed only a part

of himself to his time. Born at Castel Durante near Urbino, Donato

d'Agnolo began his career as a painter, and received the nickname

Bramante as meaning one consumed with insatiable desires. He went to

Mantua to study with Mantegna; he learned enough to paint some

mediocre frescoes, and a splendid portrait of the mathematician Luca

Pacioli. Perhaps in Mantua he met Leon Battista Alberti, who was

designing the church of Sant' Andrea; in any case repeated experiments

in perspective led Bramante from painting to architecture. In 1472

he was in Milan, studying the cathedral with the intensity of a man

resolved to do great things. About 1476 he was given a chance to

show his mettle by designing the church of Santa Maria around the

little church of San Satiro. In this modest masterpiece he revealed

his peculiar architectural style- semicircular apses and sacristies,

octagonal cupolas, and circular domes, all crowned with elegant

cornices, and all crowded one upon another in an engaging ensemble.

Lacking space for an apse, Bramante, frolicking with perspective,

painted the wall behind the altar with a pictured apse whose

converging lines gave the full illusion of spatial depth. To the

church of Santa Maria delle Grazie he added an apse, a cupola, and the

handsome cloister porticoes that were another casualty of the Second

World War. After Lodovico fell Bramante went south, ready to tear down

and rebuild Rome.

The sculptors at Lodovico's court were not such giants as

Donatello and Michelangelo, but they carved for the Certosa, the

cathedral, and the palaces a hundred figures with fascinating grace.

Cristoforo Solari the hunchback ( il Gobbo ) will be remembered as

long as his tomb of Lodovico and Beatrice survives. Gian Cristoforo

Romano won all hearts by his gentle manner and beautiful singing; he

was a major sculptor at the Certosa, but after Beatrice died he

yielded to a year of urging and went to Mantua. There he carved for

Isabella the pretty doorway of her Paradiso study, and cut her

likeness in one of the finest medallions of the Renaissance. Then he

moved on to Urbino to work for the Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga, and

became a leading figure in Castiglione's Courtier. The greatest

medallion carver of Milan was Cristoforo Foppa, nicknamed Caradosso,

who cut the gleaming gems that Beatrice wore, and earned the envy of

Cellini.

There were good painters in Milan a generation before Leonardo came.

Vincenzo Foppa, born at Brescia and formed in Padua, worked chiefly in

Milan; his frescoes in Sant' Eustorgio were renowned in their day, and

his Martyrdom of St. Sebastian still adorns a Castello wall. His

follower Ambrogio Borgognone has left us a more pleasing legacy:

Madonnas in the Brera and Ambrosiana galleries at Milan, in Turin, and

Berlin, all in the pure tradition of warm piety; a delectable portrait

of Giangaleazzo Sforza as a child, in the Wallace Collection in

London; and, in the church of the Incoronata at Lodi, an

Annunciation which is one of the most successful renderings of

that difficult theme. Ambrogio de Predis was court painter to Lodovico

when Leonardo arrived; he seems to have had a brush in Leonardo's

Virgin of the Rocks; he may have painted the captivating angel

musicians in the London National Gallery; but his finest relics are

two portraits now in the Ambrosiana: one of a very serious young

man, identity unknown; *05023 the other of a young woman, now

generally identified with Lodovico's natural daughter Bianca. Rarely

has an artist caught the conflicting charms of a girl innocently

demure and yet proudly conscious of her simple beauty.

The cities subject to Milan suffered from the luring of their talent

to the capital, but several of them managed to earn a place in the

history of art. Como was not satisfied to be merely a Milanese gate to

the lake that gave it fame; it was proud, too, of its Torre del

Comune, its Broletto, above all of its majestic marble cathedral.

The superb Gothic facade rose under the Sforza rule (1457-87);

Bramante designed a pretty doorway on the south side, and on the

east Cristoforo Solari built a charming apse in Bramantean style. More

interesting than these features is a pair of statues adjoining the

main portal: on the left Pliny the Elder, on the right Pliny the

Younger, ancient citizens of Como, civilized pagans finding a place on

a Christian cathedral facade in the tolerant days of Lodovico the

Moor.

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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