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

first to feel. Filippo understood, freed his prisoner, and bade him

Godspeed to Naples. After many battles and intrigues Alfonso won;

the rule of the house of Anjou at Naples (1268-1442) ended, that of

the house of Aragon (1442-1503) began. This usurpation provided the

legal basis for the French invasion of Italy in 1494, which was the

first act in the tragedy of Italy.

Alfonso was so pleased with his new royal seat that he left the rule

of Aragon and Sicily to his brother John II. He was not an easy ruler;

he taxed with a hard hand; allowed financiers to squeeze the people,

then squeezed them in turn; and extorted money from Jews by

threatening to baptize them. But most of his taxation fell upon the

merchant class; Alfonso reduced the taxes levied from the poor, and

helped the destitute. The Neapolitans thought him a good king; he

walked among them unarmed, unattended, and unafraid. Having no

children by his wife, he begot some on the ladies of his court; his

wife killed one of these rivals, and Alfonso never admitted the

Queen to his presence thereafter. He was a zealous church-goer, and

listened to sermons faithfully.

Nevertheless he caught the humanist fever, and supported classical

scholars with so open a hand that they named him il Magnanimo. He

welcomed Valla, Filelfo, Manetti, and other humanists to his table and

his treasury. He paid Poggio 500 crowns ($12,500?) for a translation

of Xenophon's Cyropaedia into Latin; paid Bartolommeo Fazio 500

ducats a year for writing an Historia Alfonsi, and 1500 more when it

was finished; in the one year 1458 he distributed 20,000 ducats

($500,000) among literary men. He carried some classic with him

wherever he went; at home and on campaigns he had a classic read to

him at meals; and students who wished to hear these readings were

admitted to them. When the supposed remains of Livy were discovered at

Padua, he sent Beccadelli to Venice to buy a bone, and he received

it with all the awe and devotion of a good Neapolitan watching the

flow of St. Januarius' blood. When Manetti orated to him in Latin

Alfonso was so fascinated by the Florentine scholar's idiomatic

style that he allowed a fly to feast on the royal nose till the

oration was complete. `05131 He gave his humanists full freedom of

speech, even to heresy and pornography, and protected them from the

Inquisition.

The most remarkable of the scholars at Alfonso's court was Lorenzo

Valla. Born in Rome (1407), he studied the classics with Leonardo

Bruni, and became an enthusiastic, even a fanatical, Latinist, among

whose many wars was a campaign to destroy Italian as a literary

language, and make good Latin live again. While teaching Latin and

rhetoric at Pavia he wrote a violent diatribe against the famous

jurist Bartolus, laughing at his laborious Latinity, and contending

that only a man skilled in Latin and in Roman history could understand

Roman law. The law students in the university defended Bartolus, the

art students rallied around Valla; the debate graduated into riots,

and Valla was asked to leave. Later, in Notes on the New Testament

( Adnotationes ad novum testamentum ), he applied his linguistic

learning and fury to Jerome's Latin translation of the Bible, and

revealed many an error in that heroic undertaking; Erasmus would later

praise, epitomize, and use Valla's critique. In another treatise,

Elegantiae linguae Latinae, Valla gave his rules for Latin

elegance and purity, ridiculed the Latin of the Middle Ages, and

joyfully exposed the bad Latin of many humanists. In an age that

adored Cicero he preferred Quintilian. He was left with hardly a

friend in the world.

To confirm his isolation he published (1431) a dialogue On Pleasure

and the True Good ( De voluptate et vero bono ), which expounded

the amoralism of the humanists with astonishing temerity. He used as

persons of the dialogue three men still living: Leonardo Bruni to

defend Stoicism, Antonio Beccadelli to vindicate Epicureanism, and

Niccolo de' Niccoli to reconcile Christianity and philosophy.

Beccadelli was made to speak with such force that readers rightly

assumed that his views were Valla's own. We must suppose, argued

Beccadelli, that human nature is good, for it was created by God;

indeed Nature and God are one. Consequently our instincts are good,

and our natural desire for pleasure and happiness is in itself a

justification of the pursuit of these as the proper object of human

life. All pleasures, whether of the senses or of the intellect, are to

be held legitimate until proved injurious. Now we have an imperious

instinct to mate, and certainly no instinct for lifelong chastity.

Such continence is therefore unnatural; it is an intolerable

torment, and should not be preached as virtue. Virginity, Beccadelli

was made to conclude, is a mistake and a waste; and a courtesan is

of more value to mankind than a nun. `05132

So far as his means allowed, Valla lived this philosophy. He was a

man of promiscuous passion, hot temper, and extreme speech. He

wandered from city to city, seeking literary employment. He asked

for a place in the papal secretariat, and was turned away. When

Alfonso took him up (1435), the King of Aragon and Sicily was fighting

for the throne of Naples, and counted among his foes Pope Eugenius

IV (1431-47), who claimed Naples as a lapsed papal fief. A reckless

scholar like Valla, learned in history, skilled in polemics, and

with nothing to lose, was a handy tool against the Pope. Under

Alfonso's protection Valla wrote (1440) his most famous treatise,

On the Falsely Believed and Lying Donation of Constantine ( De falso

credita et ementita Constantini donatione ). He assailed as a

ridiculous forgery the Constitutum Constantini by which the

first Christian emperor transferred to Pope Sylvester I (314-35)

full secular dominion over all Western Europe. Nicholas of Cusa had

recently (1433) exposed the falsity of the Donation in his De

concordantia Catholica, written for a Council of Basel also at odds

with Eugenius IV; but Valla's historical and linguistic criticism of

the document was so devastating (though he himself made many errors)

that the question was settled once and for all.

Valla and Alfonso were not content with scholarship; they waged war.

"I attack not only the dead but the living," said Valla; and he

excoriated the relatively decent Eugenius with the most idiomatic

abuse. "Even were the Donation authentic, it would be null and void,

for Constantine could have no power to make it, and in any case the

crimes of the papacy would already have annulled it." `05133 And if

the Donation was a forgery, Valla concluded (ignoring the

territorial donations of Pepin and Charlemagne to the papacy), then

the temporal power of the popes had been a thousand-year-long

usurpation. From that temporal power had come the corruption of the

Church, and the wars of Italy, and the "overbearing, barbarous,

tyrannical priestly domination." Valla appealed to the people of

Rome to rise and overthrow the papal government of their city, and

invited the princes of Europe to deprive the popes of all

territorial possessions. `05134 It sounded like the voice of Luther,

but it was Alfonso who inspired the pen; humanism had become a

weapon of war.

Eugenius fought back with the Inquisition. Valla was summoned before

its agents at Naples; he ironically professed his complete

orthodoxy, and refused to say more. Alfonso ordered the Inquisitors to

let him alone, and they dared not disobey. Valla continued his attacks

on the Church: he showed that the works attributed to Dionysius the

Areopagite were unauthentic; that the letter of Abgarus to Jesus,

published by Eusebius, was a forgery; and that the Apostles had had no

hand in composing the Apostles' Creed. However, when he surmised

that Alfonso was moving toward reconciliation with the papacy he

decided that he too had better make peace. He addressed an apology

to Eugenius, retracting his heresies, reaffirming his orthodoxy, and

asking pardon for his sins. The Pope made no answer. But when Nicholas

V ascended the papal throne, and sent out a call for scholars, Valla

was made a secretary to the Curia (1448), and was employed to make

Latin translations from the Greek. He ended his life as a canon of St.

John Lateran, and was buried in holy ground (1457).

His friendly rival, Antonio Beccadelli, illustrated the morals of

his time by writing an obscene book and receiving acclaim for it

from the leading men of Italy. Born at Palermo (1394), and therefore

nicknamed il Panormita, he imbibed his higher education, and perhaps

his ambiguous morals, in Siena. About 1425 he composed, under the

title of Hermaphroditus, a series of Latin elegies and epigrams

rivaling Martial in Latinity and pornography. Cosimo de' Medici

accepted the dedication, probably without reading the book; the

virtuous Guarino da Verona praised the eloquence of its language; a

hundred others added encomiums; finally the Emperor Sigismund placed a

poet's crown upon Beccadelli's head (1433). Priests denounced the

volume, Eugenius proclaimed the excommunication of all who read it,

friars publicly burned it at Ferrara, Bologna, Milan. Nevertheless

Beccadelli lectured summa cum laude in the universities of Bologna

and Pavia, received a stipend of eight hundred scudi from the

Visconti, and was invited to Naples as court historiographer. His

history Of the Memorable Words and Deeds of King Alfonso was written

in such idiomatic Latin that Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini- Pope Pius II-

himself no middling Latinist, considered it a model of Latin style.

Beccadelli lived to be seventy-seven, and died rich in honors and

property.

II. FERRANTE

-

Alfonso left his kingdom to his putative son Ferdinand (r. 1458-94).

Ferrante, as his people called him, was of dubious parentage. His

mother was Margaret of Hijar, who had other lovers besides the King;

Pontano, Ferrante's secretary, affirmed that the father was a

Valencian marrano- i.e., a Christianized Spanish Jew. Valla was his

tutor. Ferrante was not known for sexual profligacy, but he had most

of the vices that can come from a passionate nature untamed by a

firm moral code, and aroused by apparently unreasonable hostility.

Pope Calixtus III legitimated his birth but refused to recognize him

as king; he declared the Aragonese line in Naples extinct, and claimed

the Kingdom as a fief of the Church. Rene of Anjou made another

attempt to regain the throne bequeathed him by Joanna II. While he

landed forces on the Neapolitan coast, the feudal barons rose in

revolt against the house of Aragon, and allied themselves with the

foreign foes of the King. Ferrante confronted these simultaneous

challenges with angry courage, overcame them, and revenged himself

with somber ferocity. One by one he lured his enemies with pretended

reconciliation, gave them excellent dinners, killed some of them after

dessert, imprisoned others, let several starve to death in his

dungeons, kept some of them in cages for his occasional delectation,

and, when they died, had them embalmed and dressed in their favorite

costumes, and preserved them as mummies in his museum; `05135 these

stories, however, may be "war atrocities" manufactured by historians

in a hostile camp. It was this king who dealt so fairly with Lorenzo

de' Medici in 1479. Revolution nearly upset him in 1485, but he

recovered his footing, completed a long reign of thirty-six years, and

died amid general rejoicing. The rest of the story of Naples belongs

to the collapse of Italy.

Ferrante did not continue Alfonso's patronage of scholars, but he

engaged as his prime minister a man who was at once a poet, a

philosopher, and a skillful diplomat. Giovanni Pontano developed-

Beccadelli had founded- the Neapolitan Academy. Its members were men

of letters who met periodically to exchange verses and ideas. They

took Latin names (Pontano became Jovianus Pontanus), and loved to

think that they were continuing, after a long and cruel interlude, the

stately culture of Imperial Rome. Several of them wrote a Latin worthy

of the Silver Age. Pontanus composed Latin treatises on ethics,

praising the virtues that Ferrante allegedly ignored, and an

eloquent essay De principe, recommending to a ruler those amiable

qualities which Machiavelli's Prince, twenty years later, would

contemn. Giovanni dedicated this exemplary tract to his pupil,

Ferrante's son and heir Alfonso II (1494-5), who practised all that

Machiavelli preached. Pontano taught in verse as well as in prose, and

expounded in Latin hexameters the mysteries of astronomy and the

proper cultivation of oranges. In a series of pleasant poems he

celebrated every species of normal love: the mutual itching of healthy

youth, the tender attachment of newlyweds, the reciprocal

satisfactions of marriage, the joys and griefs of parental love, the

merger of mates into one being by the accumulation of the years. He

described in verses seemingly as spontaneous as Virgil's, and with a

surprising command of the Latin lexicon, the holiday life of the

Neapolitans: the workers sprawling on the grass, the athletes at their

games, the picnickers in their carts, the seductive girls dancing

the tarantella to the clash of their tambourines, the lads and

lasses flirting on the bayside promenade, the lovers keeping tryst,

the bluebloods taking the baths at Baiae as if fifteen centuries had

not passed since Ovid's raptures and despairs. Had Pontano written

in Italian with the same felicity and grace with which he composed

Latin verse, we should have ranked him with the bilingual Petrarch and

Politian, who had the good sense to march with the present as well

as roam in the past.

After Pontano the most prominent member of the Academy was Iacopo

Sannazaro. Like Bembo he could write Italian in the purest Tuscan

dialect- far different from the Neapolitan speech; like Politian and

Pontano he could mold Latin elegies and epigrams that would not have

shamed Tibullus or Martial. For one epigram praising Venice Venice

sent him six hundred ducats. `05136 Alfonso II, at war with

Alexander VI, took Sannazaro with him on his campaigns to shoot poetic

darts into Rome. When the lusty Pope, whose Borgia family carried a

Spanish bull on its coat of arms, took Giulia Farnese as his alleged

mistress, Sannazaro gored him with two lines that must have made

Alfonso's soldiers regret their ignorance of Latin:

-

Europen Tyrio quondam sedisse iuvenco

quis neget? Hispano Iulia vecta tauro est; `05137

-

which is to say:

-

That once on Tyrian bull Europa sat,

Who doubts? A Spanish bull bears Julia.

-

And when Caesar Borgia took the field against Naples, a barb went

his way:

-

Aut nihil aut Caesar vult dici Borgia; quidni?

cum simul et Caesar possit et esse nihil; `05138

-

i.e.,

-

Caesar or nothing Borgia would be called;

But why not both, since he is both at once?

-

Such sallies passed from mouth to ear in Italy, and shared in

forming the legend of the Borgias.

In a gentler mood Sannazaro composed (1526) a Latin epic On the

Virgin Birth ( De partu Virginis ). It was an astonishing tour de

force: it used the classical machinery of the pagan gods, but brought

them in as adjuncts to- eavesdroppers on- the Gospel narrative; and it

dared comparison with Virgil by quoting the famous Fourth Eclogue in

the body of the poem. It was excellent Latin, and delighted Clement

VII, but not even a pope will lose himself in it today.

The masterpiece of Sannazaro was written in the living tongue of his

people, in a medley of prose and verse- Arcadia (1504). Like

Theocritus in ancient Alexandria, the poet had grown tired of

cities, and had learned to love rural fragrance and peace. It was an

urban sentiment that Lorenzo and Politian had expressed, with

evident sincerity, some twenty years before. The landscapes in the

painting of the time marked a growing appreciation of the countryside;

and men of the world began to babble of woods and fields, limpid

streams, and virile shepherds piping amorous lays. Sannazaro's book

caught these fancies at their flow, and was carried to such fame and

popularity as favored no other book of the Italian Renaissance. He led

his readers into an imaginary world of strong men and beautiful women-

none of these old, and most of them nude; he described their splendor,

and that of natural scenes, in a poetic prose that set a fashion in

Italy, and later in France and England; and he interspersed his

prose with pardonable poetry. In this book the modern pastoral was

born, perhaps less graceful than the ancient, more elongated and

windy, but with interminable effect upon literature and art. Here

Giorgione, Titian, and a hundred artists after them would find

themes for their pigments; here Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney

would take impressions for their faery queens and an English

Arcadia. Sannazaro had rediscovered a continent more enchanting than

the New World of Columbus, a melodious Utopia where any soul might

enter at no other cost than literacy, and might build its castle to

its taste and whim without lifting a finger from the page.

The art of the Regno was more masculine than its poetry, though

there too the soft Italian touch showed its hand. Donatello and

Michelozzo came down from Florence and set the pace with an imposing

mausoleum for Cardinal Rinaldo Brancacci in the church of San Angelo a

Nilo. For the Castel Nuovo, begun by Charles I of Anjou (1283),

Alfonso the Magnanimous ordered a new gate (1443-70), which

Francesco Laurana designed, and for which Pietro di Martino, and

probably Giuliano da Maiano, carved handsome reliefs of the King's

achievements in war and peace. The church of Santa Chiara, built for

Robert the Wise (1310), still contains the lovely Gothic monument

set up by the brothers Giovanni and Pace da Firenze soon after the

King's death in 1343. The cathedral of San Gennaro (1272) received a

new Gothic interior in the fifteenth century. There, in the costly

Cappella del Tesoro, the blood of St. Januarius, protective patron

of Naples, flows three times a year, insuring the prosperity of a city

weary with commerce and burdened with centuries, but consoled by faith

and love.

-

Sicily remained aloof from the Renaissance. She produced a few

scholars like Aurispa, a few painters like Antonello da Messina, but

they soon migrated to the wider opportunities of the mainland.

Palermo, Monreale, Cefalu had great art, but only as the relic of

Byzantine, Moslem, or Norman days. The feudal lords who owned the land

preferred the eleventh to the fifteenth century, and lived in knightly

scorn or ignorance of letters. The people whom they exploited were too

poor to have any cultural expression beyond their colorful dress,

their religion of bright mosaics and somber hope, their songs and

simple poetry of love and violence. The lovely island enjoyed its

own Aragonese kings and queens from 1295 to 1409; thereafter, for

three centuries, it was a jewel in the crown of Spain.

-

Lengthy as this brief survey of non-Roman Italy has seemed, it has

done scant justice to the full and varied life of the passionate

peninsula. Consideration of morals and manners, of science and

philosophy, may be deferred till we have spent some chapters with

the Renaissance popes; but even in those cities that we have touched

how many precious byways of life and art have escaped our eyes! We

have said nothing of a whole branch of Italian literature, for the

greatest novelle belong to a later period. We have inadequately

visualized the major role that the minor arts played in the

adornment of Italian bodies, minds, and homes. What deformed or

inflated botches were majestically transformed by the textile arts!

What would some of the grandees and grand dames glorified by

Venetian painting have been without their velvets, satins, silks,

and brocades? They did well to cover their nakedness and brand

nudity as a sin. Wise it was of them, too, to cool their summers

with gardens, even though so formal; to beautify their homes with

colored tiles on roof and floor, with iron wrought into lacery and

arabesques, and copper vessels gleaming smooth, and figurines of

bronze or ivory reminding them how fair might men and women be, and

woodwork carved and marquetried and built to last a thousand years,

and lustrous pottery brightening table and cupboard and mantelpiece,

and the miraculous embroidery of Venetian glass offering its fragile

challenge to time, and the golden dies and silver clasps of leather

bindings around treasured classics illuminated by happy bondsmen of

the pen. Many painters, like Sano di Pietro, chose to ruin their

eyesight with drawing and coloring miniatures rather than spread their

subtle and intimate dreams of beauty crudely over panels and walls.

And sometimes, weary of walking through galleries, one could sit

gladly for hours over the illumination and calligraphy of such

manuscripts as still hide in the Schifanoia palace at Ferrara, or in

the Morgan Library at New York, or in the Ambrosiana at Milan.

All these, as well as the greater arts, and the labor and love,

chicanery and statesmanship, devotion and war, faith and philosophy,

science and superstition, poetry and music, hatreds and humor, of a

lovable and volcanic people combined to make the Italian

Renaissance, and to bring it to fulfillment and destruction in

Medicean Rome.

BOOK IV: THE ROMAN RENAISSANCE: 1378-1521

CHAPTER XIV: The Crisis in the Church: 1378-1447

I. THE PAPAL SCHISM: 1378-1417

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GREGORY XI had brought the papacy back to Rome; but would it stay

there? The conclave that met to name his successor was composed of

sixteen cardinals, only four of whom were Italians. The municipal

authorities petitioned them to choose a Roman, or at least an Italian;

and to support the suggestion a crowd of Romans gathered outside the

Vatican, threatening to kill all non-Italian cardinals unless a

Roman were made pope. The frightened conclave, by a vote of fifteen to

one, hastily elected (1378) Bartolommeo Prignano, Archbishop of

Bari, who took the name of Urban VI; then they fled in fear of their

lives. But Rome accepted the compromise. `05141

Urban VI ruled the city and the Church with impetuous and despotic

energy. He appointed senators and municipal magistrates, and reduced

the turbulent capital to obedience and order. He shocked the cardinals

by announcing that he proposed to reform the Church, and to begin at

the top. Two weeks later, preaching publicly in their presence, he

condemned the morals of the cardinals and the higher clergy in

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

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