Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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poor but qualified applicants should also be admitted; he persuaded
the Marquis to provide funds, facilities, and assistant teachers for
the education and maintenance of sixty poor scholars at a time; and
when such funds did not suffice, Vittorino made up the difference
out of his modest means. When he died (1446) it was found that he
had not left enough to pay for his funeral.
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Lodovico Gonzaga, who succeeded Gianfrancesco as marquis of Mantua
(1444), was a credit to his teacher. When Vittorino took him in hand
Lodovico was a lad of eleven years, fat and indolent. Vittorino taught
him to control his appetite and to make himself fit for all the
tasks of government. Lodovico performed these duties well, and left
his state flourishing at his death. Like a true Renaissance prince, he
used part of his wealth to nourish literature and art. He collected an
excellent library, largely of Latin classics; he employed miniaturists
to illuminate the Aeneid and The Divine Comedy; he established the
first printing press in Mantua. Politian, Pico della Mirandola,
Filelfo, Guarino da Verona, Platina were among the humanists who at
one time or another accepted his bounty and lived at his court. `05091
At his invitation Leon Battista Alberti came from Florence and
designed the Incoronata Chapel in the cathedral, and the churches of
Sant' Andrea and San Sebastiano. Donatello came too, and made a bronze
bust of Lodovico. And in 1460 the Marquis brought into his service one
of the greatest artists of the Renaissance.
II. ANDREA MANTEGNA: 1431-1506
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He was born at Isola di Cartura, near Padua, thirteen years before
Botticelli; we must here retrace our steps in time if we are to
appreciate Mantegna's achievement. He was enrolled in the painters'
guild in Padua when he was but ten years old. Francesco Squarcione was
then the most famous teacher of painting not only in Padua but in
Italy. Andrea entered his school, and progressed so rapidly that
Squarcione took him into his home and adopted him as a son. Inspired
by the humanists, Squarcione collected into his studio all the
significant remains of classic sculpture and architecture that he
could appropriate and transport, and bade his students copy them
over and over again as models of strong, restrained, and harmonious
design. Mantegna obeyed with enthusiasm; he fell in love with Roman
antiquity, idealized its heroes, and so admired its art that half
his pictures have Roman architectural backgrounds, and half his
figures, of whatever nation or time, bear a Roman stamp and garb.
His art profited and suffered through this youthful infatuation; he
learned from these exemplars a majestic dignity and a stern purity
of design, but he never fully emancipated his painting from the
petrified calm of sculptural forms. When Donatello came to Padua
Mantegna, still a lad of twelve, felt again the influence of
sculpture, together with a powerful impulse toward realism. At the
same time he was fascinated by the new science of perspective, so
recently developed in Florence by Masolino, Uccello, and Masaccio;
Andrea studied all its rules, and shocked his contemporaries with
foreshortenings ungracious in their truth.
In 1448 Squarcione received a commission to paint frescoes in the
church of the Eremitani friars at Padua. He assigned the work to two
favorite pupils: Niccolo Pizzolo and Mantegna. Niccolo finished one
panel in excellent style, then lost his life in a brawl. Andrea, now
seventeen, continued the work, and the eight panels that he painted in
the next seven years made him a name from one end of Italy to the
other. The themes were medieval, the treatment was revolutionary:
the backgrounds of classical architecture were carefully detailed, the
virile physique and gleaming armor of Roman soldiers were mingled with
the somber features of Christian saints; paganism and Christianity
were more vividly integrated in these frescoes than in all the pages
of the humanists. Drawing reached here a new accuracy and grace;
perspective appeared in painstaking perfection. Rarely had painting
seen a figure as splendid in form and bearing as that of the soldier
guarding the saint before the Roman judge; or anything so grimly
realistic as the executioner raising his club to beat out the martyr's
brains. Artists came from distant cities to study the technique of the
amazing Paduan youth.- All but two of these frescoes were destroyed in
the Second World War.
Iacopo Bellini, himself a painter of renown, and already (in 1454)
father of painters fated to eclipse his fame, saw these panels in
the making, took a fancy to Andrea, and offered him his daughter in
marriage. Mantegna accepted. Squarcione opposed the union, and
punished Mantegna's flight from his adoptive home by condemning the
Eremitani frescoes as stiff and pallid imitations of marble
antiques. More remarkable, the Bellinis succeeded in conveying to
Andrea a hint that there was some truth in the charge. `05092 Most
remarkable, the hot-tempered artist accepted the criticism, and
profited from it by turning from the study of statuary to the intent
observation of life in all its actuality and details. In the last
two panels of the Eremitani series he included ten portraits of
contemporaries; and one, squat and fat, was Squarcione.
Canceling his contract with his teacher, Mantegna was now free to
accept some of the invitations that besieged him. Lodovico Gonzaga
offered him a commission in Mantua (1456); Andrea held him off for
four years, and meanwhile, in Verona, he painted for the church of San
Zeno a polyptych that to this day makes that noble edifice a goal of
pilgrimage. In the central panel, amid a stately framework of Roman
columns, cornice, and pediment, the Virgin holds her Child, while
angel musicians and choristers envelop them; beneath this a powerful
Crucifixion shows Roman soldiers throwing dice for the garments of
Christ; and at the left the Garden of Olives presents a rugged
landscape that Leonardo may have studied for his Virgin of the
Rocks. This polyptych is one of the great paintings of the
Renaissance. *05026
After three years in Verona Mantegna finally agreed to go to
Mantua (1460); and there, except for brief stays in Florence and
Bologna, and two years in Rome, he remained till his death. Lodovico
gave him a home, fuel, corn, and fifteen ducats ($375) a month. Andrea
adorned the palaces, chapels, and villas of three successive
marquises. The sole survivors in Mantua of his labors there are the
famous frescoes in the Ducal Palace, specifically in the Sala degli
Sposi- the Hall of the Betrothed- named and decorated for the
engagement of Lodovico's son Federigo to Margaret of Bavaria. The
subject was simply the ruling family- the Marquis, his wife, his
children, some courtiers, and Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga welcomed by
his father Lodovico on the young prelate's return from Rome. Here
was a gallery of remarkably realistic portraits, among them Mantegna
himself, looking older than his forty-three years, with lines in his
face and pouches under his eyes.
Lodovico too was aging rapidly, and his last years were dark with
troubles. Two of his daughters were deformed; wars consumed his
revenues; in 1478 plague so devastated Mantua that economic life
almost stopped, state revenues fell, and Mantegna's salary was one
of many that went for a time unpaid. The artist wrote Lodovico a
letter of reproach; the Marquis answered with a gentle plea for
patience. The plague passed; Lodovico did not survive it. Under his
son Federigo (1478-84) Mantegna began, and under Federigo's son
Gianfrancesco (1484-1519) he completed, his finest work, The
Triumph of Caesar. These nine pictures, painted in tempera on canvas,
were designed for the Corte Vecchia of the Ducal Palace; they were
sold to Charles I of England by a needy duke of Mantua, and are now in
Hampton Court. The enormous frieze, eighty-eight feet long, depicts
a procession of soldiers, priests, captives, slaves, musicians,
beggars, elephants, bulls, standards, trophies, and spoils, all
escorting Caesar riding on a chariot and crowned by the Goddess of
Victory. Here Mantegna returns to his first love, classic Rome;
again he paints like a sculptor; nevertheless his figures move with
life and action; the eye is drawn along, despite a hundred picturesque
details, to the culminating coronation; all the painter's artistry
of composition, drawing, perspective, and meticulous observation
enters into the work, and makes it the master's masterpiece.
During the seven years that elapsed between the undertaking and
the completion of The Triumph of Caesar, Mantegna accepted a call
from Innocent VIII, and painted (1488-9) several frescoes that
vanished in the later vicissitudes of Rome. Complaining of the
Pope's parsimony- while the Pope complained of his impatience-
Mantegna returned to Mantua, and rounded out his prolific career
with a hundred pictures on religious themes; he was forgetting
Caesar and returning to Christ. The most famous and disagreeable of
these paintings is the Cristo morto (Brera), the dead Christ lying
on His back with His vast foreshortened feet toward the spectator, and
looking more like a sleeping condottiere than like an exhausted god.
A final pagan picture came from Mantegna's old age. In the
Parnassus of the Louvre he put aside his usual resolve to capture
reality rather than picture beauty; he surrendered himself for a
moment to an unmoral mythology, and portrayed a nude Venus throned
on Parnassus beside her soldier lover Mars, while at the mountain's
base Apollo and the Muses celebrate her loveliness in dance and
song. One of the Muses was probably the Marquis Gianfrancesco's
wife, the peerless Isabella d'Este, now the leading lady in the land.
It was Mantegna's last great painting. His final years were saddened
by ill health, bad temper, and mounting debts. He resented
Isabella's presumption to lay down the precise details of the pictures
she asked of him; he retired into an angry solitude, sold most of
his art collection, finally sold his house. In 1505 Isabella described
him as "tearful and agitated, and with so sunken a face that he seemed
to me more dead than alive." `05093 A year later he died, aged
seventy-five. Over his tomb, in Sant' Andrea, a bronze bust- perhaps
by Mantegna himself- portrayed with angry realism the bitterness
and exhaustion of a genius who had used himself up in his art for half
a century. Those who desire "immortality" must pay for it with their
lives.
III. THE FIRST LADY OF THE WORLD
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La prima donna del mondo - so the poet Niccolo da Correggio
called Isabella d'Este. `05094 The novelist Bandello considered her
"supreme among women"; `05095 and Ariosto did not know which to praise
most highly in "the liberal and magnanimous Isabella"- her gracious
beauty, her modesty, her wisdom, or her fostering of letters and arts.
She possessed most of the accomplishments and charms that made the
educated woman of the Renaissance one of the masterpieces of
history. She had a wide and varied culture without being an
"intellectual" or ceasing to be an attractive woman. She was not
extraordinarily beautiful; what men admired in her was her vitality,
her high spirits, the keenness of her appreciation, the perfection
of her taste. She could ride all day and then dance all night, and
remain every moment a queen. She could rule Mantua with a tact and
good sense alien to her husband; and in the debility of his later
years she held his little state together despite his blunders, his
wanderings, and his syphilis. She corresponded on equal terms with the
most eminent personalities of her time. Popes and dukes sought her
friendship, and rulers came to her court. She subpoenaed nearly
every artist to work for her, she inspired poets to sing of her;
Bembo, Ariosto, and Bernardo Tasso dedicated works to her, though they
knew that her purse was small. She collected books and art with the
judgment of a scholar and the discrimination of a connoisseur.
Wherever she went she remained the cultural focus and sartorial
exemplar of Italy.
She was one of the Estensi- the brilliant family that gave dukes
to Ferrara, cardinals to the Church, and a duchess to Milan. Isabella,
born in 1474, was a year older than her sister Beatrice. Their
father was Ercole I of Ferrara, their mother was Eleonora of Aragon,
daughter of King Ferrante I of Naples; they were well equipped with
lineage. While Beatrice was sent to Naples to learn vivacity at the
court of her grandfather, Isabella was brought up amid the scholars,
poets, dramatists, musicians, and artists that were making Ferrara for
a time the most brilliant of Italian capitals. At six she was an
intellectual prodigy who made diplomats gape; "though I had heard much
of her singular intelligence," wrote Beltramino Cusatro to Marquis
Federigo of Mantua in 1480, "I could never have imagined such a
thing to be possible." `05096 Federigo thought she would be a good
catch for his son Francesco, and so proposed to her father. Ercole,
needing the support of Mantua against Venice, agreed, and Isabella,
aged six, found herself engaged to a boy of fourteen. She remained for
ten years more at Ferrara, learning how to sew and sing, to write
Italian poetry and Latin prose, to play the clavichord and the lute,
and to dance with a sprightly grace that seemed to attest invisible
wings. Her complexion was clear and fair, her black eyes sparkled, her
hair was a mesh of gold. So, at sixteen, she left the haunts of her
happy childhood, and became, proudly and seriously, the Marchioness of
Mantua.
Gianfrancesco was swarthy, bushy-haired, fond of hunting,
impetuous in war and love. In those early years he attended
zealously to government, and faithfully maintained Mantegna and
several scholars at his court. He fought with more courage than wisdom
at Fornovo, and chivalrously or prudently sent to Charles VIII most of
the spoils that he had captured in the tent of the fleeing King. He
used the soldier's privilege of promiscuity, and began his
infidelities with the first confinement of his wife. Seven years after
his marriage he allowed his mistress Teodora to appear in almost regal
raiment at a tournament in Brescia, where he rode in the lists.
Isabella may have been partly to blame: she became a bit plump, and
went on long visits to Ferrara, Urbino, and Milan; but doubtless the
Marquis was not inclined to monogamy in any case. Isabella bore with
his adventures patiently, took no public notice of them, remained a
good wife, gave her husband excellent advice in politics, and
supported his interests by her diplomacy and her charm. But in 1506
she wrote to him- then leading papal troops- a few words warm with the
hurt she felt: "No interpreter is needed to make me aware that Your
Excellency has loved me little for some time past. Since this,
however, is a disagreeable subject, I will... say no more." `05097 Her
devotion to art, letters, and friendship was in part an attempt to
forget the bitter emptiness of her married life.
There is nothing more pleasant in all the rich diversity of the
Renaissance than the tender relations that bound together Isabella,
Beatrice, and Isabella's sister-in-law Elisabetta Gonzaga; and few
passages finer in Renaissance literature than the affectionate letters
they exchanged. Elisabetta was grave and weak, and often ill; Isabella
was merry, witty, brilliant, more interested in literature and art
than either Elisabetta or Beatrice; but these differences of character
were made complementary by good sense. Elisabetta loved to come to
Mantua, and Isabella worried more about her sister-in-law's health
than about her own, and took every measure to make her well. Yet there
was a selfishness in Isabella quite absent from Elizabeth. Isabella
could ask Caesar Borgia to give her Michelangelo's Cupid, which
Borgia had stolen after seizing Elisabetta's Urbino. After the fall of
Lodovico il Moro, the brother-in-law who had lavished every courtesy
upon her, she went to Milan and danced at a ball given by Lodovico's
conqueror, Louis XII; perhaps, however, it was her feminine way of
saving Mantua from the resentment aroused in Louis by the
injudicious candor of her husband. Her diplomacy accepted the
interstate amorality of that time and ours. Otherwise she was a good
woman, and there was hardly a man in Italy that would not have been
glad to serve her. Bembo wrote to her that he "desired to serve her
and please her as if she were pope." `05098
She spoke Latin better than any other woman of her time, but she
never mastered the language. When Aldus Manutius began to print his
choice editions of the classics she was among his most enthusiastic
customers. She employed scholars to translate Plutarch and
Philostratus, and a learned Jew to translate the Psalms from the
Hebrew so that she might assure herself of their original
magnificence. She collected Christian classics too, and read the
Fathers with courage. Probably she treasured books more as a collector
than as a reader or a student; she respected Plato, but really
preferred the chivalric romances that entertained even the Ariostos of
her generation and the Tassos of the next. She loved finery and
jewelry more than books and art; even in her later years the women
of Italy and France looked to her as the glass of fashion and the
queen of taste. It was part of her diplomacy to move ambassadors and
cardinals with the combined allure of her person, her dress, her
manners, and her mind; they thought they were admiring her erudition
or her wisdom when they were relishing her beauty, her costume, or her
grace. She was hardly profound, except perhaps in statesmanship.
Like practically all her contemporaries she listened to astrologers,
and timed her enterprises by the concurrence of the stars. She
amused herself with dwarfs, maintained them as part of her
entourage, and had six rooms and a chapel built to their measure for
them in the Castello. One of these favorites was so short (said a wit)
that if it had rained an inch more he would have been drowned. She was
fond, too, of dogs and cats, chose them with the finesse of a fancier,
and buried them with solemn funerals in which the surviving pets
joined with the ladies and gentlemen of the court.
The Castello- or Reggia, or Palazzo Ducale- over which she reigned
was a medley of buildings of various dates and authorship, but all
in that style of outer fortress and inner palace which raised
similar structures in Ferrara, Pavia, and Milan. Some components, like
the Palazzo del Capitano, went back to the Buonacolsi rulers in the
thirteenth century; the harmonious Castello San Giorgio was a creation
of the fourteenth; the Camera degli Sposi was the work of Lodovico
Gonzaga and Mantegna in the fifteenth; many rooms were rebuilt in
the seventeenth and eighteenth; some, like the sumptuous Sala degli
Specchi, or Hall of Mirrors, were redecorated during the rule of
Napoleon. All were elegantly fitted out; and the vast congeries of
residential chambers, reception halls, and administrative offices
looked out on courts, or gardens, or Virgil's meandering Mincio, or
the lakes that bordered Mantua. In this labyrinth Isabella occupied
different quarters at different times. In her later years she loved
best a little apartment of four rooms ( camerini ), known as il
Studiolo or il Paradiso; here, and in another room called il
Grotto, she gathered her books, her objets d'art, and her musical
instruments- themselves finished works of art.
Next to her care for the preservation of Mantua's independence and
prosperity, and sometimes above her friendships, the ruling passion of
her life was the collection of manuscripts, statues, paintings,
majolica, antique marbles, and little products of the goldsmith's art.
She used her friends, and employed special agents, in cities from
Milan to Rhodes, to bargain and buy for her, and to be on the alert
for "finds." She haggled because the treasury of her modest state
was too narrow for her ideas. Her collection was small, but every item
in it stood high in its class. She had statuary by Michelangelo,
paintings by Mantegna, Perugino, Francia; not content, she
importuned Leonardo da Vinci and Giovanni Bellini for a picture, but
they held her off as one who paid more in praise than in cash, and
doubtless, too, because she specified too immutably what each
picture should represent and contain. In some cases, as when she
paid 115 ducats ($2875) for Jan van Eyck's Passage of the Red Sea,
she borrowed heavily to satisfy her eagerness for a masterpiece. She
was not generous to Mantegna, but when that ogre of a genius died
she persuaded her husband to lure Lorenzo Costa to Mantua with a
handsome salary. Costa decorated Gianfrancesco Gonzaga's favorite
retreat, the palace of St. Sebastian, made portraits of the family,
and painted a mediocre Madonna for the church of Sant' Andrea.
In 1524 Giulio Pippi, called Romano, the greatest of Raphael's
pupils, settled at Mantua, and astonished the court with his skill
as architect and painter. Almost the entire Ducal Palace was
redecorated according to his designs, and by the brushes of himself
and his pupils- Francesco Primaticcio, Niccolo dell' Abbate, and
Michelangelo Anselmi. Federigo, Isabella's son, was ruler now; and
since he, like Romano, had acquired at Rome a taste for pagan subjects
and decorative nudes, he had the walls and ceilings of several rooms
in the Castello painted with inviting pictures of Aurora, Apollo,
the Judgment of Paris, the Rape of Helen, and other phases of
classic myth. In 1525, on the outskirts of the town, Giulio began to
build his most famous work, the Palazzo del Te. *05027 A vast
rectangle of one-storied structures, in a simple design of stone
blocks and Renaissance windows, surrounds what was once a pleasant
garden but is now a neglected waste in the impoverished aftermath of
war. The interior is a succession of surprises: rooms tastefully
adorned with pilasters, carved cornices, painted spandrels, and
coffered vaults; walls, ceilings, and lunettes picturing the story
of the Titans and the Olympians, Cupid and Psyche, Venus and Adonis
and Mars, Zeus and Olympia, all in a revel of splendid nudes, in the
amorous and reckless taste of the later Renaissance. To crown these
masterpieces of sexual license and gigantic strife, Primaticcio carved
in stucco a grand processional relief of Roman soldiers in the
manner of Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar, and almost with the chiseled
excellence of Pheidias. When Primaticcio and dell' Abbate were
summoned to Fontainebleau by Francis I they brought to the royal
palaces of France this style of decoration- with rosy nudes- which
Giulio Romano had brought to Mantua from his work with Raphael in
Rome. From the citadel of Christianity pagan art radiated to the
Christian world.
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The last years of Isabella mingled sweet and bitter in her cup.
She helped her invalid husband to govern Mantua. Her diplomacy saved
it from falling prey to Caesar Borgia, then to Louis XII, then to
Francis I, then to Charles V; one after another she humored,
flattered, charmed, when Gianfrancesco or Federigo seemed on the
edge of political disaster. Federigo, who succeeded his father in
1519, was an able general and ruler, but he allowed his mistress to
displace his mother as ruler of the Mantuan court. Perhaps
retreating from this indignity, Isabella went to Rome (1525) to seek a
red hat for her son Ercole. Clement VII was noncommittal, but the
cardinals welcomed her, made her suite in the Colonna Palace a
salon, and kept her there so long that she found herself imprisoned in
the palace during the sack of Rome (1527). She escaped with her