Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
learning from the Moslems, they painted the surface with colored
enamel or gold. The glass artisans kept jealously in their families
the secret processes by which they achieved their miracles of
fragile beauty, and the Venetian government passed stern laws to
prevent these esoteric subtleties from becoming known in other
lands. In 1454 the Council of Ten decreed that
-
if a workman carry into another country any art or craft to the
detriment of the Republic, he will be ordered to return; if he
disobeys, his nearest relatives will be imprisoned, in order that
the solidarity of the family may persuade him to return; if he
persists in his disobedience, secret measures will be taken to have
him killed wherever he may be. `051142
-
The only known case of such an assassination was at Vienna in the
eighteenth century. Despite the law, Venetian artists and artisans
found their way over the Alps in the sixteenth century, and brought
their technique to France and Germany as gifts to the conquerors of
Italy.
Half the artisans of Venice were artists. The pewterers
embellished dishes, platters, beakers, and cups with graceful
borders and floral designs. The armorers were famous for damascened
cuirasses, helmets, shields, swords, and daggers, and sheaths chased
or engraved with elegant patterns; and other masters might make for
short weapons ivory handles studded with gems. In Venice, about
1410, Baldassare degli Embriachi, a Florentine, carved in bone the
great altarpiece, in thirty-nine sections, now in the Metropolitan
Museum in New York. The wood carvers not only made fine sculptural
figures and reliefs, like the Circumcision in the Louvre, or the
chest painted by Bartolommeo Montagna and formerly in the bombed
Poldi-Pezzoli Museum in Milan; they decorated the ceilings and doors
and furniture of Venetian aristocrats with carvings, bosses, and
intarsia, and chiseled the choir stalls of such churches as the
Frari and San Zaccaria. Venetian jewelers met a heavy foreign as
well as domestic demand, but took time to rise from quantity to
quality. The goldsmiths, now under German instead of Oriental
influence, turned out tons of plate, personal adornment, and
decorative fixtures for everything from cathedrals to shoes. The
illumination and calligraphy of manuscripts continued, slowly yielding
to print. French and Flemish influences entered into the designs of
Venetian textiles, but Venetian dyes and skills gave the products
their favored texture and hues. It was from Venice that the queen of
France ordered three hundred pieces of dyed satin (1532); and it was
in the soft and luxurious stuffs worked in Venetian shops, and in
the colors given them in Venetian vats, that the great painters of
Venice found models for the lordly and glowing robes that made half
the brilliance of their art. Venice almost realized Ruskin's ideal
of an economy in which every industry would be an art, and every
product would proudly express the personality and artistry of the
artisan.
VI. VENETIAN LETTERS
1. Aldus Manutius
-
Venice was in this period too busy living to care much for books;
and still its scholars, libraries, poets, and printers shared in
giving it a fair name. It took no prominent part in the humanist
movement; nevertheless humanism had here one of its noblest exemplars-
Ermolao Barbaro, who was crowned poet by an emperor at fourteen,
taught Greek, translated Aristotle, served his fellow men as a
physician, his country as a diplomat, and his Church as a cardinal,
and was killed by the plague at thirty-nine. Venetian women made as
yet little pretense to education; they were content to be physically
alluring, or maternally fertile, or finally venerable; but in 1530
Irene of Spilimbergo opened a salon for men of letters, studied
painting under Titian, sang sweetly, played well on viol, harpsichord,
and lute, and talked learnedly about ancient and modern literature.
Venice gave protection to intellectual refugees from the Turks in
the East and from the Christians in the West; here Aretino would laugh
securely at popes and kings, as, centuries later, Byron would here
celebrate their decay. Aristocrats and prelates formed clubs or
academies for the cultivation of music and letters, and opened their
homes and libraries to the assiduous, the melodious, and the
erudite. Monasteries, churches, and private families collected
books; Cardinal Domenico Grimani had eight thousand, which he gave
to Venice; Cardinal Bessarion did the same with his precious hoard
of manuscripts. To house these, and the remnants of Petrarch's
bequest, the government twice ordered the erection of a public
library; war and other distractions foiled the plan; at last (1536)
the Senate engaged Iacopo Sansovino to build the Libreria Vecchia,
architecturally the most handsome library in Europe.
Meanwhile Venetian printers were producing the finest printed
books of the age, perhaps of all time. They were not the first in
Italy. Sweynheim and Pannartz, once aides to Johann Fust in Mainz, set
up the first Italian press in a Benedictine monastery at Subiaco in
the Apennines (1464); in 1467 they transferred their equipment to
Rome, and published twenty-three books in the next three years. In
1469, or earlier, printing began in Venice and Milan. In 1471 Bernardo
Cennini opened a printing establishment in Florence, to the dismay
of Politian, who mourned that "now the most stupid ideas can in a
moment be transferred into a thousand volumes and spread
abroad." `051143 Copyists thrown out of work vainly denounced the
new gadget. By the end of the fifteenth century 4987 books had been
printed in Italy: 300 in Florence, 629 in Milan, 925 in Rome, 2835
in Venice. `051144
The superiority of Venice in this regard was due to Teobaldo
Manucci, who changed his name to Aldo Manuzio, and later Latinized
it into Aldus Manutius. Born at Bassiano in the Romagna (1450), he
learned Latin at Rome and Greek at Ferrara, both under Guarino da
Verona; and then himself lectured at Ferrara on the classics. Pico
della Mirandola, one of his pupils, invited him to come to Carpi and
tutor his two nephews, Lionello and Alberto Pio. Teacher and pupils
developed a lasting mutual affection; Aldus added the name Pio to
his own, and Alberto and his mother, Countess of Carpi, agreed to
finance the first large-scale adventure in publishing. Aldus' plan was
to collect, edit, print, and broadcast at nominal cost all the
significant Greek literature that had been salvaged from the storms of
time. It was a heady enterprise for a dozen reasons: manuscripts
were hard to get; different manuscripts of the same classic varied
dishearteningly in their text; nearly all manuscripts were heavy
with errors of transcription; editors would have to be found and
paid to collate and revise texts; fonts of Latin and Greek type
would have to be designed and cast; paper would have to be imported in
large quantities; typesetters and pressmen would have to be engaged
and trained; a machinery of distribution would need to be
improvised; a book-buying public would have to be coaxed into
existence on a wider base than ever before; and all this would have to
be financed without the protection of copyright laws.
Aldus chose Venice for his headquarters because its commercial
connections made it an excellent center for distribution; because it
was the richest city in Italy, and had many magnates who might want to
adorn their rooms with uncut books; and because it harbored scores
of refugee Greek scholars who would be glad to be employed as
editors or proofreaders. John of Speyer had already established the
first printing press in Venice (1469?); Nicholas Jensen of France, who
had learned the new art in Gutenberg's Mainz, set up another a year
later. In 1479 Jensen sold his press to Andrea Torresano. In 1490
Aldus Manutius settled in Venice, and in 1499 he married Torresano's
daughter.
In his home near the church of Sant' Agostino Aldus gathered Greek
scholars, fed them, bedded them, and set them to editing classic
texts. He talked Greek with them, and wrote in Greek his dedications
and prefaces. In his house the new type was molded and cast, the ink
was made, the books were printed and bound. His first publication
(1495) was a Greek and Latin grammar by Constantine Lascaris, and in
that same year he began to issue the works of Aristotle in the
original. In 1496 he published the Greek grammar of Theodorus Gaza,
and in 1497 a Greek-Latin dictionary compiled by himself. For he
continued to be a scholar even amid the hazards and tribulations of
publishing. So in 1502, after years of study, he printed his own
Rudimenta grammaticae linguae Latinae, with an introduction to
Hebrew for good measure.
From these technical beginnings he went on to publish one after
another of the Greek classics (1495f): Musaeus ( Hero and Leander ),
Hesiod, Theocritus, Theognis, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides,
Sophocles, Euripides, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Lysias, Plato, Pindar,
Plutarch's Moralia.... In those same years he put forth a large
number of Latin and Italian works, from Quintilian to Bembo, and the
Adagia of Erasmus, who, sensing the vital import of Aldo's
enterprise, came in person to live with him for a time, and edit not
only his own Adagia or Dictionary of Quotations, but Terence,
Plautus, and Seneca too. For the Latin books Aldus had a graceful
semiscript type designed, not, as legend said, from the handwriting of
Petrarch, but by Francesco da Bologna, an expert calligrapher; this is
the type that we now, from that origin, call italic. For the Greek
texts he cut a font based on the careful handwriting of his chief
Greek scholar, Marcus Musurus of Crete. He marked all his publications
with a motto, Festina lente - "Make haste slowly"- and accompanied it
with a dolphin symbolizing speed and an anchor standing for stability;
this symbol, along with the pictured tower that Torresano had used,
established the custom of the printer's or publisher's
colophon. *05031
Aldus worked at his enterprise quite literally night and day. "Those
who cultivate letters," he wrote, in his preface to Aristotle's
Organon, "must be supplied with the books necessary for their
purpose; and until this supply is secured I shall not rest." Over
the door of his study he placed a warning inscription: "Whoever thou
art, thou art earnestly requested by Aldus to state thy business
briefly, and to take thy departure promptly.... For this is a place of
work." `051145 He was so absorbed in his publishing campaign that he
neglected his family and his friends, and ruined his health. A
thousand tribulations sapped his energy: strikes disrupted his
schedule, war suspended it for a year during the Venetian struggle for
survival against the League of Cambrai; rival printers in Italy,
France, and Germany pirated the editions whose manuscripts had cost
him dearly, and whose texts he had paid scholars to revise. But the
sight of his small and handy volumes, clearly typed and neatly
bound, going forth to a widening public at a modest price (about two
dollars in the currency of today) gladdened his heart and repaid his
toil. Now, he told himself, the glory of Greece would shine upon all
who cared to receive it. `051146
Inspired by his devotion, Venetian scholars joined with him to found
the Neacademia, or New Academy (1500), dedicated to the acquisition,
editing, and publishing of Greek literature. The members, at their
meetings, spoke only Greek; they changed their names to Greek forms;
they shared the tasks of editing. Distinguished men labored in this
Academy- Bembo, Alberto Pio, Erasmus of Holland, Linacre of England.
Aldus gave them much credit for the success of his enterprise, but
it was his own energy and passion that carried it through. He died
exhausted and poor (1515), but fulfilled. His sons continued the work;
but when their son, Aldo the second, died (1597), the firm
dissolved. It had served its purpose faithfully. It had taken Greek
literature from the half-hidden shelves of rich collectors, and had
scattered it so widely that even the ravaging of Italy in the third
decade of the sixteenth century, and the desolation of northern Europe
by the Thirty Years' War, could lose that heritage as it had been so
largely lost in the dying ages of ancient Rome.
2. Bembo
-
Besides helping to revive the literature of Greece, the members of
the New Academy contributed vigorously to the literature of their
time. Antonio Coccio, called Sabellicus, chronicled Venetian history
in his Decades. Andrea Navagero composed Latin poems so nearly
perfect in form that his proud countrymen hailed him as having
snatched the leadership of letters from Florence to Venice. Marino
Sanudo kept a lively diary of current events in politics,
literature, art, manners, and morals; the fifty-eight volumes of these
Diarii picture the life of Venice more fully and vividly than any
history of any city in Italy.
Sanudo wrote in the racy language of daily speech; his friend
Bembo devoted half a long life to polishing an artificial style in
Latin and Italian. Pietro imbibed culture in his cradle, for he was
the child of rich and lettered Venetians. Moreover, as if to confirm
his literary purity, he was born in Florence, proud home of the Tuscan
dialect. He studied Greek in Sicily under Constantine Lascaris, and
philosophy at Padua under Pomponazzi. Perhaps, if we may judge from
his conduct- for he seldom took sin very seriously- he imbibed some
skepticism from Pomponazzi, who doubted the immortality of the soul;
but he was too much of a gentleman to disturb the consolations of
the faithful; and when the reckless professor was accused of heresy
Bembo persuaded Leo X to deal with him leniently.
Bembo's happiest days were spent at Ferrara, from his
twenty-eighth to his thirty-sixth year (1498-1506). There he fell in
love, if only in a literary way, with Lucrezia Borgia, queen of that
courtly court. He forgot her dubious background at Rome in the lure of
her quiet grace, the glow of her "Titian" hair, the fascination of her
fame; for fame too, like beauty, can intoxicate. He wrote her, in
scholarly diction, letters as tender as might comport with his
safety in the precincts of that excellent gunner, her husband Alfonso.
He dedicated to her an Italian dialogue on Platonic love, Gli
asolani (1505); and he composed in her praise Latin elegiacs as
elegant as any in Rome's Silver Age. She wrote to him carefully, and
may have sent him that tress of her hair which is preserved, with
her letters to him, in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. `051147
When Bembo moved from Ferrara to Urbino (1506) he was at the
height of his charm. He was tall and handsome, of noble birth and
breeding, of distinguished presence without obtrusive pride; he
could write poetry in three languages, and his letters were already
prized; his conversation was that of a Christian, a scholar, and a
gentleman. His Asolani, published during his stay at Urbino, fell in
with the spirit of that court. What topic could be more pleasant
than love?- what mise en scene fitter for such discourse than the
gardens of Caterina Cornaro at Asolo?- what occasion more suitable
than the wedding of one of her maids of honor?- who could better speak
of love, however Platonic, than the three youths and three maidens
into whose mouths Bembo put his savory mixture of philosophy and
poetry? Venice, whose artists took hints and scenes from the book,
Ferrara, whose Duchess received the adoring dedication, Rome, where
ecclesiastics were glad ragionar d'amore, Urbino, which boasted
the author in the flesh- all Italy acclaimed Bembo as a master of
delicate sentiment and polished style. When Castiglione idealized in
The Courtier the discussions he had heard or imagined in the Ducal
Palace at Urbino, he gave to Bembo the most distinguished role in
the dialogue, and chose him to phrase the famed concluding passages on
Platonic love.
In 1512 Bembo accompanied Giuliano de' Medici to Rome. A year
later Giuliano's brother became Leo X. Bembo was soon lodged in the
Vatican as a secretary to the Pope. Leo liked his wit, his
Ciceronian Latin, his easygoing ways. For seven years Bembo was an
ornament of the papal court, an idol of society, an intellectual
father to Raphael, a favorite with millionaires and generous women. He
was only in minor orders, and accepted the opinion current in Rome
that his trial marriage with the Church did not forbid a little
gracious venery. Vittoria Colonna, purest of the pure, doted on him.
Meanwhile, at Venice, Ferrara, Urbino, Rome, he wrote such Latin
poetry as Catullus or Tibullus might have penned- elegies, idyls,
epitaphs, odes; many frankly pagan, some, like his Priapus, in the
best vein of Renaissance licentiousness. The Latin of Bembo and
Politian was idiomatically perfect, but it came at the wrong time; had
they been born fourteen centuries earlier they would have been de
rigueur in the schools of modern Europe; writing in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, they could not be the voice of their country,
their epoch, even of their class. Bembo realized this, and in an essay
Della volgar lingua he defended the use of Italian for literary
purposes. He tried to show the way by composing canzoni in the
manner of Petrarch; but here his passion for polish devitalized his
verse, and turned his amours into poetic conceits. Nevertheless many
of these poems were set to music as madrigals, some by the great
Palestrina himself.
The sensitive Bembo found Rome a ghostly city after the death of his
friends Bibbiena, Chigi, and Raphael. He retired from his papal post
(1520), and, like Petrarch, sought health and ease in a rural home
near Padua. Now, at fifty, he fell in love in no mild Platonic way.
For the next twenty-two years he lived in a free union with Donna
Morosina, who gave him not only three children but such comforts and
consolations, such solicitude and care, as had never graced his
fame, and now came doubly welcome to his declining years. He still
enjoyed the income of several ecclesiastical benefices. He used his
wealth largely to collect fine paintings and sculptures, and among
them Venus and Jove held an honored place beside Mary and
Christ. `051148 His home became a goal of literary pilgrimage, a salon
of artists and wits; and from that throne he laid down the laws of
style for Italy. Even while papal secretary he had cautioned his
associate Sadoleto to avoid reading the Epistles of St. Paul, lest
their unpolished speech of the commonalty should mar his taste; "put
away these trifles," Bembo told him, "for such absurdities do not
become a man of dignity." `051149 All Latin, he told Italy, must be
modeled upon Cicero, all Italian upon Petrarch and Boccaccio. He
himself, in his old age, wrote histories of Florence and Venice;
they are beautiful and dead. But when his Morosina died the great
stylist forgot his rules, forgot Plato and Lucrezia and Castiglione,
and wrote to a friend a letter that, perhaps alone of all that
flowed from his pen, invites remembrance:
-
I have lost the dearest heart in the world, a heart which tenderly
watched over my life- which loved it and sustained it neglectful of
its own; a heart so much the master of itself, so disdainful of vain
embellishments and adornments, of silk and gold, of jewels and
treasures of price, that it was content with the single and (so she
assured me) supreme joy of the love I bore it. This heart, moreover,
had for vesture the softest, gracefulest, daintiest of limbs; it had
at its service pleasant features, and the sweetest, most graciously
endowed form that I have ever met in this land.
-
He can never forget her dying words:
-
"I commend our children to you, and beseech you to have care of
them, both for my sake and for yours. Be sure they are your own, for I
have never deceived you; that is why I could take Our Lord's body just
now with a soul at peace." Then, after a long pause, she added,
"Rest with God," and a few minutes afterward closed her eyes
forever, those eyes that had been the clear-shining faithful stars
of my weary pilgrimage through life. `051150
-
Four years later he was still mourning her. Losing his ties with
life, he became pious at last; and in 1539 Paul III could make him a
priest and a cardinal. For his remaining eight years he was a pillar
and exemplar of the Church.
VII. VERONA
-
If now, leaving the egregious Aretino to a later chapter, we move
out of Venice to her northern and western dependencies, we shall
find there too some radiance of the Golden Age. Treviso could boast
that it had begotten Lorenzo Lotto and Paris Bordone; and its
cathedral had an Annunciation by Titian and a fine choir designed by
the innumerable Lombardi. The little town of Pordenone gave its name
to Giovanni Antonio de' Sacchi, and still shows in its duomo one
of his chefs-d'oeuvre, a Madonna with Saints and Donor. Giovanni
was a man of buoyant energy and self-confidence, ready of wit and
sword, willing to undertake anything anywhere. We find him painting in
Udine, Spilimbergo, Treviso, Vicenza, Ferrara, Mantua, Cremona,
Piacenza, Genoa, Venice, forming his style on Giorgione's
landscapes, Titian's architectural backgrounds, and Michelangelo's
muscles. He gladly accepted an invitation to Venice (1527), anxious to
pit his brush against Titian's; his St. Martin and St.
Christopher, painted for the church of San Rocco, achieved an
almost sculptural effect by modeling with light and shade; Venice
hailed him as a worthy rival of Titian. Pordenone resumed his travels,
married thrice, was suspected of killing his brother, was knighted
by King John of Hungary (who had never seen any of his pictures),
and returned to Venice (1533) to resume his duel with Titian. Hoping
to prod Titian on to finishing his battle picture in the Ducal Palace,
the Signory engaged Pordenone to do a panel on the opposite wall.
The competition between Leonardo and Michelangelo was here repeated
(1538), with a dramatic supplement: Pordenone wore a sword at his
belt. His canvas- splendid in color, too violent in action- was
adjudged second best, and Pordenone moved on to Ferrara to design some
tapestries for Ercole II. Two weeks after arrival he died. His friends
said it was poisoning; his enemies said it was time.
Vicenza too had heroes. Bartolommeo Montagna founded a school of
painting rich in middling Madonnas. Montagna's best is the Madonna
Enthroned in the Brera; it cleaves safely to Antonello's model of two
saints on the right, two on the left, and angels making music at the
Virgin's feet; but these angels deserve their name, and the Virgin,
with comely features and graceful robe, is one of the finest figures
in the crowded gallery of Renaissance Madonnas. Vicenza's heyday,
however, awaited Palladio.