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

for control of the city- its commerce, its government, its

benefices, its 40,000 souls. The Oddi and the Baglioni murdered one

another by stealth or openly in the streets; their conflicts

fertilized with blood the plain that smiled beneath their towers.

The Baglioni were noted for their handsome faces and physiques,

their courage and their ferocity. In the heart of pious Umbria they

scorned the Church, and gave themselves pagan names- Ercole, Troilo,

Ascanio, Annibale, Atalanta, Penelope, Lavinia, Zenobia. In 1445 the

Baglioni repelled an attempt of the Oddi to seize Perugia;

thereafter they ruled the city as despots, though formally

acknowledging it to be a papal fief. Let Perugia's own historian,

Francesco Matarazzo, describe the Baglioni government:

-

From the day the Oddi were expelled, our city went from bad to

worse. All the young men followed the trade of arms. Their lives

were disorderly, and every day divers excesses were divulged, and

the city had lost all reason and justice. Every man administered right

unto himself, by his own authority and with royal hand. The pope

sent many legates, if so be the city could be brought to order. But

all who came went back in dread of being hewn to pieces; for the

Baglioni threatened to throw some from the windows of the palace, so

that no cardinal or other legate durst approach Perugia unless he were

their friend. And the city was brought to such misery that the most

lawless men were most prized; and those who had slain two or three men

walked as they pleased through the palace, and went with sword or

poignard to speak to the podesta and other magistrates. Every man of

worth was trodden down by bravos whom the nobles favored, nor could

a citizen call his property his own. The nobles robbed first one and

then another of goods and land. All offices were sold or else

suppressed; and taxes and extortions were so grievous that everyone

cried out. `050811

-

What can be done, a cardinal asked of Pope Alexander VI, with "these

demons who have no fear of holy water"? `050812

Having disposed of the Oddi, the Baglioni divided into new factions,

and fought one of the bloodiest feuds of the Renaissance. Atalanta

Baglioni, being left a widow through the assassination of her husband,

consoled herself with the beauty of her son Grifonetto, whom Matarazzo

describes as another Ganymede. Her happiness seemed fully restored

when he married Zenobia Sforza, whose beauty matched his own. But a

minor branch of the Baglioni plotted to overthrow the ruling branch-

Astorre, Guido, Simonetto, and Gianpaolo. Valuing Grifonetto's

bravery, the conspirators won him to their plan by deluding him into

the belief that Gianpaolo had seduced his young wife. One night in the

year 1500, when the dominant Baglioni families had left their

castles and assembled in Perugia for the wedding of Astorre and

Lavinia, the conspirators attacked them in their beds, and killed

all but one of them. Gianpaolo escaped by clambering over roofs,

hiding through the night with some frightened university students,

disguising himself in a scholastic gown, and so passing out through

the city gates at dawn. Atalanta, horrified to learn that her son

had shared in these murders, drove him from her presence with

curses. The assassins dispersed, leaving Grifonetto homeless and alone

in the city. On the morrow Gianpaolo, with an armed escort, re-entered

Perugia, and came upon Grifonetto in a public square. He wished to

spare the youth, but the soldiers wounded Grifonetto mortally before

Gianpaolo could restrain them. Atalanta and Zenobia came from their

concealment to find son and husband dying in the street. Atalanta

knelt by him, took back her curses, gave him her blessing, and asked

him to forgive those who had slain him. Then, says Matarazzo, "the

noble youth extended his right hand to his young mother, pressing

her white hand, and forthwith he breathed his soul from his

beautiful body." `050813 Perugino and Raphael were painting in Perugia

at this time.

Gianpaolo had a hundred men massacred, in the streets or in the

cathedral, on suspicion of complicity in the plot; he had the

Palazzo Comunale decorated with the heads of the slain, and with their

portraits hung head downward; here was a substantial commission for

Perugian art. Thereafter he ruled the city unchallenged until he

yielded to Julius II (1506), and consented to govern as vicar of the

popes. But he did not know how to govern except by assassination. In

1520 Leo X, tired of his crimes, lured him to Rome with a

safe-conduct, and had him beheaded in the Castel Sant' Angelo; this

was one form of Renaissance diplomacy. Other Baglioni maintained

themselves in power for a time; but after Malatesta Baglioni had

murdered a papal legate Pope Paul III sent forces to take final

possession of the city as an appanage of the Church (1534).

V. PERUGINO

-

Under this cloak-and-dagger government literature and art

prospered surprisingly; the same passionate temperament that worshiped

the Virgin, flouted cardinals, and murdered close kin could feel the

fever of creative writing, or steel itself to the discipline of art.

Matarazzo's Cronaca della Citta di Perugia, describing the zenith of

the Baglioni, is one of the most vivid literary products of the

Renaissance. Commerce, before the Baglioni came to power, had

accumulated enough wealth to build the massive Gothic Palazzo Comunale

(1280-1333), and to adorn it and the adjoining Collegio del Cambio

(1452-6)- Chamber of Commerce- with some of the finest art in Italy.

The Collegio had a judicial throne and a moneychangers' bench so

exquisitely carved that no one could reproach the businessmen of

Perugia with lack of taste. The church of San Domenico had choir

stalls (1476) almost as elegant, and a celebrated chapel of the Rosary

designed by Agostino di Duccio. Agostino hesitated between sculpture

and architecture; usually he combined them, as in the oratorio or

prayer chapel of San Bernardino (1461), where he covered almost the

entire facade with statues, reliefs, arabesques, and other ornament.

An unadorned surface always aroused an Italian artist.

At least fifteen painters were busy meeting such challenges in

Perugia. Their leader in Perugino's youth was Benedetto Bonfigli.

Apparently through association with Domenico Veneziano or Piero

della Francesca, or through studying the frescoes painted by Benozzo

Gozzoli at Montefalco, Benedetto learned something of the new

techniques that Masolino, Masaccio, Uccello, and others had

developed in Florence. When he painted frescoes for the Palazzo

Comunale he displayed a knowledge of perspective new among Umbrian

artists, though his figures borrowed stereotyped faces and were

shrouded in shapeless drapery. A younger rival, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo,

equaled Benedetto in dullness of color, surpassed him in delicacy of

sentiment and occasional grace. Both Bonfigli and Fiorenzo, in

Perugian tradition, taught the two masters who brought Umbrian

painting to its culmination.

Bernardino Betti, called Pinturicchio, learned the arts of tempera

and fresco from Fiorenzo, but never adopted the oil technique that

came to Perugino from the Florentines. In 1481, aged twenty-seven,

he accompanied Perugino to Rome, and covered a panel in the Sistine

Chapel with a lifeless Baptism of Christ. But he improved; and

when Innocent VIII bade him decorate a loggia of the Belvedere

Palace he struck out on a new line by painting views of Genoa,

Milan, Florence, Venice, Naples, and Rome. His drawing was

imperfect, but there was a pleasant plein-air quality in his

painting that attracted Alexander VI. That genial Borgia, wishing to

adorn his own chambers in the Vatican, commissioned Pinturicchio and

some aides to paint the walls and ceilings with frescoes of

prophets, sibyls, musicians, scientists, saints, Madonnas, and perhaps

a mistress. These again so pleased the Pope that when an apartment was

designed for his use in the Castel Sant' Angelo he engaged the

artist to portray there some episodes in the Pope's conflict with

Charles VIII (1495). By this time Perugia had heard of

Pinturicchio's fame; it called him home; and the church of Santa Maria

de' Fossi asked him for an altarpiece. He responded with a Virgin,

Child, and St. John that satisfied all but the professionals. In

Siena, as we have seen, he made the Piccolomini Library radiant with a

vivid portrayal of the life and legend of Pius II; and despite many

technical faults, this pictorial narrative makes that room one of

the most delightful remains of Renaissance art. After spending five

years on this work Pinturicchio went to Rome, and shared in the

humiliation of Raphael's success. Thereafter he faded from the

artistic scene, perhaps through illness, perhaps because Perugino

and Raphael so obviously excelled him. A doubtful story reports that

he died of hunger in Siena, aged fifty-nine (1513). `050814

Pietro Perugino received that surname because he made Perugia his

home; Perugia itself always called him by his family name, Vannucci.

Born in nearby Citta della Pieve (1446), he was sent to Perugia at the

age of nine and was there apprenticed to an artist of uncertain

identity. According to Vasari his teacher ranked the painters of

Florence as the best in Italy, and advised the youth to go and study

there. Pietro went, carefully copied the frescoes of Masaccio, and

enrolled as an apprentice or assistant to Verrocchio. Leonardo entered

Verrocchio's studio about 1468; very probably Perugino met him, and,

though six years older, did not disdain to learn from him some

qualities of finish and grace, and a better handling of perspective,

coloring, and oils. These skills already appear in Perugino's St.

Sebastian (Louvre), together with a pretty architectural setting, and

a landscape as placid as the face of the perforated saint. After

leaving Verrocchio, Perugino returned to the Umbrian style of demure

and tender Madonnas; and through him the harder and more realistic

traditions of Florentine painting may have been softened into the

warmer idealism of Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto.

By 1481 Perugino, now thirty-five, had won sufficient repute to be

invited by Sixtus IV to Rome. In the Sistine Chapel he painted several

frescoes, of which the finest survivor is Christ Giving the Keys to

Peter. It is too formal and conventional in its symmetrical

composition; but here, for the first time in painting, the air, with

its subtle gradations of light, becomes a distinct and almost palpable

element in the picture; the drapery, so stereotyped in Bonfigli, is

here tucked and wrinkled into life; and a few of the faces are

finished to striking individuality- Jesus, Peter, Signorelli, and, not

least, the large, rotund, sensual, matter-of-fact countenance of

Perugino himself, transformed for the occasion into a disciple of

Christ.

In 1486 Perugino was again in Florence, for the archives of the city

record his arrest for criminal assault. He and a friend disguised

themselves, and, armed with clubs, waited in the dark of a December

night to waylay some chosen enemy. They were detected before they

could commit any injury. The friend was banished, Perugino was fined

ten florins. `050815 After another interlude in Rome he set up a

bottega in Florence (1492), hired assistants, and began to turn

out pictures, not always carefully finished, for customers near and

far. For the Gesuati brotherhood he made a Pieta whose melancholy

Virgin and pensive Magdalen were to be repeated by him and his aides

in a hundred variations for any prosperous institution or

individual. A Madonna and Saints found its way to Vienna, another to

Cremona, another to Fano, another- the Madonna in Glory - to Perugia,

another to the Vatican; another is in the Uffizi. Rivals charged him

with turning his studio into a factory; they thought it scandalous

that he should grow so rich and fat. He smiled and raised his

prices. When Venice invited him to paint two panels in the Ducal

Palace, offering 400 ducats ($5000?), he demanded 800; and when

these were not forthcoming he remained in Florence. He clung to

cash, and let the credit go. He made no pretense of despising

wealth; he was resolved not to starve when his brush began to tremble;

he bought property in Florence and Perugia, and was bound to land on

at least one foot after any overturn. His self-portrait in the

Cambio at Perugia (1500) is a remarkably honest confession. A pudgy

face, large nose, hair flowing carelessly from under a close red

cap, eyes quiet but penetrating, lips slightly contemptuous, heavy

neck and powerful frame: here was a man hard to deceive, ready for

battle, sure of himself, and holding no high opinion of the human

race. "He was not a religious man," says Vasari, "and would never

believe in the immortality of the soul." `050816

His skepticism and commercialism did not prevent him from occasional

generosity, `050817 or from producing some of the tenderest devotional

pictures of the Renaissance. He painted a lovable Madonna for the

Certosa di Pavia (now in London); and the Magdalen attributed to him

in the Louvre is so fair a sinner that one would not need divine mercy

to forgive her. For the nuns of Santa Clara at Florence he painted

an Entombment in which the women had a rare beauty of features,

and the faces of the old men summarized their lives, and the lines

of composition met on the bloodless corpse of Christ, and a

landscape of slender trees on rocky slopes, and distant town on a

quiet bay, shed an atmosphere of calm over the scene of death and

grief. The man could paint as well as sell.

His success in Florence finally convinced the Perugians of his

worth. When the merchants of the Cambio decided to adorn their

Collegio they emptied their pockets with tardy largesse and offered

the assignment to Pietro Vannucci. Following the mood of the age and

the suggestions of a local scholar, they asked that their hall of

audience should be decorated with a medley of Christian and pagan

subjects: on the ceiling the seven planets and the signs of the

zodiac; on one wall a Nativity and a Transfiguration; on another the

Eternal Father, the prophets, and six pagan sibyls, prefiguring

Michelangelo's; and on another wall the four classical virtues, each

illustrated by pagan heroes: Prudence by Numa, Socrates, and Fabius;

Justice by Pittacus, Furius, and Trajan, Fortitude by Lucius,

Leonidas, and Horatius Cocles; Temperance by Pericles, Cincinnatus,

and Scipio. All this, it seems, was accomplished by Perugino and his

aides- including Raphael- in the one year 1500, the very year when the

feuds of the Baglioni incarnadined the streets of Perugia. When the

blood had been washed away the citizens could stream in to see the new

beauty of the Cambio. Perhaps they found the pagan worthies a bit

wooden, and wished that Perugino had shown them not posing but engaged

in some action that would have given them life. But the David was

majestic, the Erythrean Sibyl almost as gracious as a Raphael

Madonna, and the Eternal Father a remarkably good conception for

an atheist. On those walls, in his sixtieth year, Perugino reached the

fullness of his powers. In 1501 the grateful city made him a municipal

prior.

From that zenith he rapidly declined. In 1502 he painted a Marriage

of the Virgin, which Raphael imitated two years later in the

Sposalizio. About 1503 he returned to Florence. He was not pleased

to find the city in much ado about Michelangelo's David; he was

among the artists summoned to consider where the figure should be

placed, and his opinion was overruled by the sculptor himself. The two

men, meeting shortly afterward, traded insults; Michelangelo, then a

lad of twenty-nine, called Perugino a blockhead, and informed him that

his art was "antiquated and absurd." `050818 Perugino sued him for

libel, and won nothing but ridicule. In 1505 he agreed to finish for

the Annunziata a Deposition that the late Filippino Lippi had begun,

and to add to it an Assumption of the Virgin. He completed

Filippino's work with skill and dispatch; but in the Assumption he

repeated so many figures that he had used in previous pictures that

the artists of Florence (still jealous of his quondam fees)

condemned him for dishonesty and sloth. He left the city in anger, and

took up his residence in Perugia.

The inevitable defeat of age by youth was repeated when he

accepted an invitation from Julius Il to decorate a room in the

Vatican (1507). When he had made some progress his former pupil,

Raphael, appeared, and swept everything before him. Perugino left Rome

with heavy heart. Back in Perugia, he prospected for commissions,

and kept on working to the end. He began (1514) and apparently

finished (1520) a complex altarpiece for the church of Sant' Agostino,

recounting again the story of Christ. For the church of the Madonna

delle Lagrime at Trevi he painted (1521) an Adoration of the Magi

which, despite some palsied drawing, is an astonishing product for a

man of seventy-five. In 1523, while he was painting at neighboring

Fontignano, he fell a victim to the plague, or perhaps died of old age

and weariness. According to tradition he refused the last

sacraments, saying that he preferred to see what would happen, in

the other world, to an obstinately impenitent soul. `050819 He was

buried in unhallowed ground.

Everyone knows the defects of Perugino's painting- the exaggerated

sentiment, the dolorous and artificial piety, the stereotyped oval

faces and ribboned hair, the heads regularly bent forward in

modesty, even those of stern Cato and bold Leonidas. Europe and

America can show a hundred Peruginos of this repetitious type; the

master was more fertile than inventive. His pictures want action and

vitality; they reflect the needs of Umbrian devotion rather than the

realities and significance of life. And yet there is much in them that

can please the soul mature enough to surmount its sophistication:

the living quality of their light, the modest loveliness of their

women, the bearded majesty of their old men, the soft and quiet

colors, the gracious landscapes covering all tragedies with peace.

When Perugino returned to Perugia in 1499, after long stays in

Florence, he brought into Umbrian painting the technical skill,

without the critical faculty, of the Florentines. When he died he

had faithfully passed down those skills to his associates and

pupils- to Pinturicchio, Francesco Ubertino "Il Bachiacca," Giovanni

di Pietro "Lo Spagna," and Raphael. The master had served his purpose:

he had enriched and transmitted his heritage, and had trained a

pupil to surpass him. Raphael is Perugino faultless, perfected, and

complete.

CHAPTER IX: Mantua: 1378-1540

I. VITTORINO DA FELTRE

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MANTUA was fortunate: throughout the Renaissance it had but one

ruling family, and was spared the turmoil of revolutions, court

murders, and coups d'etat. When Luigi Gonzaga became capitano del

popolo (1328) the ascendancy of his house was so well established

that he could occasionally leave his capital and hire himself out to

other cities as general- a custom followed by his successors through

several generations. His great-great-grandson Gianfrancesco I was

raised to the dignity of marquis (1432) by their theoretical sovereign

the Emperor Sigismund, and this title became hereditary in the Gonzaga

family until it was exchanged for the still loftier title of duke

(1530). Gian was a good ruler. He drained marshes, promoted

agriculture and industry, supported art, and brought to Mantua, to

tutor his children, one of the noblest figures in the history of

education.

Vittorino took his surname from his native town of Feltre, in

northeast Italy. Catching the itch for classical erudition that

swept like an epidemic through the Italy of the fifteenth century,

he went to Padua and studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, and rhetoric

under divers masters; he paid one of them by serving as his

domestic. After being graduated from the university he opened a school

for boys. He chose his pupils by their talent and eagerness rather

than by their pedigree or funds; he made the richer students pay

according to their means, and charged the poor students nothing. He

tolerated no idlers, exacted hard work, and maintained strict

discipline. As this proved difficult in the roistering atmosphere of a

university town, Vittorino transferred his school to Venice (1423). In

1425 he accepted the invitation of Gianfrancesco to come to Mantua and

teach a selected group of boys and girls. These included four sons and

a daughter of the Marquis, a daughter of Francesco Sforza, and some

other scions of Italian ruling families.

The Marquis provided for the school a villa known as Casa Zojosa, or

Joyous House. Vittorino turned it into a semimonastic establishment,

in which he and his students lived simply, ate sensibly, and devoted

themselves to the classic ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body.

Vittorino himself was an athlete as well as a scholar, an expert

fencer and horseman, so at home in weather that he wore similar

clothing winter and summer, and walked in nothing but sandals in the

severest cold. Inclined to sensuality and anger, he controlled his

flesh by periodic fasting and by flogging himself every day; his

contemporaries believed that he remained a virgin till his death.

To chasten the instincts and form sound character in his pupils,

he first of all required of them a regularity of religious

devotions, and instilled in them a strong religious feeling. He

sternly rebuked all profanity, obscenity, or vulgarity of language,

punished any lapse into angry dispute, and made lying almost a capital

crime. However, he did not have to be told, as Lorenzo's wife warned

Politian, that he was educating princes who might some day face the

tasks of administration or war. To make their bodies healthy and

strong he trained them in gymnastics of many kinds, in running,

riding, leaping, wrestling, fencing, and military exercises; he

accustomed them to bear hardships without injury or complaint;

though medieval in his ethics, he rejected the medieval scorn of the

body, and recognized with the Greeks the role of physical health in

the rounded excellence of man. And as he formed the bodies of his

pupils with athletics and toil, and their characters with religion and

discipline, so he trained their taste with instruction in painting and

music, and their minds with mathematics, Latin, Greek, and the ancient

classics; he hoped to unite in his pupils the virtues of Christian

conduct with the sharp clarity of the pagan intellect and the esthetic

sensitivity of Renaissance men. The Renaissance ideal of the

complete man- l'uomo universale - health of body, strength of

character, wealth of mind- reached its first formulation in

Vittorino da Feltre.

The fame of his methods spread through Italy and beyond. Many

visitors came to Mantua to see not its Marquis but its pedagogue.

Fathers begged from Gianfrancesco the privilege of enrolling their

sons in this "School of Princes." He agreed, and such later notables

as Federigo of Urbino, Francesco da Castiglione, and Taddeo Manfredi

came under Vittorino's formative hand. The most promising students

enjoyed the master's personal attention; they lodged with him under

his own roof, and received the priceless instruction of daily

contact with integrity and intelligence. Vittorino insisted that

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

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