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

dedicate a chapel to St. Cecilia in the church of San Giovanni del

Monte. A relative undertook to build the chapel, and asked his uncle

Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci to order from Raphael, for a thousand gold

scudi, an appropriate picture for the altar. Delegating to

Giovanni da Udine the representation of the musical instruments,

Raphael finished the painting in 1516, and sent it to Bologna, as we

have seen, with a kindly letter to Francia. We need not believe that

Francia was mortally stricken by its beauty to feel the splendor of

the work, its sense of music as something almost celestial, its St.

Paul in a "brown study," its St. John in almost girlish ecstasy, its

lovely Cecilia, its still lovelier Magdalen- here transformed into

charming innocence- and the living lights and shadows on the drapery

and on Magdalen's feet.

Now, too, came some masterly portraits. The Baldassare Castiglione

(Louvre) is one of Raphael's most conscientious efforts, endlessly

enticing, among his portraits second only to the Julius II. One sees

first the strange fluffy headdress, then the furry robe and profuse

beard, and imagines the man to be some Moslem poet or philosopher,

or a rabbi seen by Rembrandt; then the soft eyes and mouth and clasped

hands reveal the tender-minded, sentimental, bereaved minister of

Isabella at Leo's court; one should linger over this portrait before

reading The Courtier. The Bibbiena shows the Cardinal in his later

years, tired of his Venuses and reconciled to Christianity.

La donna velata is not incontestably Raphael's, yet it is almost

certainly the picture that Vasari describes as a portrait of Raphael's

mistress. Her features are those that he used for the Magdalen, even

the Cecilia, of St. Cecilia, perhaps for the Sistine Madonna - here

dark and demure, a long veil falling from her head, a circlet of

gems around her neck, and lucious robes wrapped loosely about her

form. Probably by Raphael, but not so clearly representing his

mistress as older views claimed, is La Fornarina in the Borghese

Gallery. The word means a woman baker, or a baker's wife or

daughter; but such names, like Smith or Carpenter, prove nothing of

the bearer's occupation. This lady is not especially attractive; one

misses in her the modest look that makes more charming such immodest

revelations. *05050 It seems incredible that the modest Veiled

Lady should be the same person as this bold dispenser of hurried

joys; but, after all, Raphael had more mistresses than one.

Yet he was more faithful to his mistress than artists- who are

more sensitive to beauty than to reason- can be expected to be. When

Cardinal Bibbiena urged him to marry Maria Bibbiena, the Cardinal's

niece, Raphael, indebted to him for rich commissions, gave unwilling

consent (1514); but he delayed from month to month and from year to

year the keeping of this troth; and tradition relates that Maria, so

repeatedly put off, died of a broken heart. `051887 Vasari suggests

that Raphael delayed in hope of being made a cardinal; to such an

elevation marriage was a major- a mistress a negligible- impediment.

Meanwhile the artist seems to have kept his mistress within close

reach of wherever he was working. When the distance between the

Villa Chigi, where Raphael was designing the History of Psyche,

and his mistress' dwelling led to much loss of time, the banker had

the lady installed in an apartment of the villa; "that," says

Vasari, "is why the work was finished." `051888 We do not know if it

was with this mistress that Raphael indulged in the "unusually wild

debauch" to which Vasari ascribes his death. `051889

His last picture was one of his supreme interpretations of the

Gospel story. In 1517 Cardinal Giulio de' Medici commissioned both

Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo to paint altarpieces for the

cathedral of Narbonne, of which Francis I had made him bishop.

Sebastiano had long felt that his talent was at least equal to

Raphael's though so much less recognized; here was his chance to prove

himself. He chose as subject the raising of Lazarus, and secured the

help of Michelangelo in making his design. Spurred by the competition,

Raphael rose to his final triumph. He took for his theme Matthew's

account of the episode on Mt. Tabor:

-

And after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother,

and brought them up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured

before them; and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was

white as the light. And behold, there appeared unto them Moses and

Elias talking with him.... And when they returned to the multitude

there came to him a certain man, kneeling down to him and saying,

Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic, and sore vexed; for

ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I

brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him. `051890

-

Raphael took both of these scenes and united them, with excessive

strain on the unities of time and place. Above the mountain top the

figure of Christ appears soaring in the air, His face transfigured

with ecstasy, His garments made shining white by light from heaven; on

one side of Him Moses, on the other Elias; and beneath them, lying

on a plateau, the three favored Apostles. At the foot of the

mountain a desperate father pushes forward his insane boy; the

mother and another woman, both of them classic in their beauty,

kneel beside the boy and beg a cure from the nine Apostles who are

gathered at the left. One of these is startled out of his

concentration on a book; another points to the transfigured Christ,

and suggests that only He can cure the boy. It is usual to praise

the splendor of the upper part of the picture, presumably finished

by Raphael, and to deprecate a certain coarseness and violence in

the lower group, which was painted by Giulio Romano; but two of the

finest figures are in the lower foreground- the disturbed reader,

and a kneeling woman with bare shoulder and gleaming drapery.

Raphael began work on the Transfiguration in 1517, but had not

finished it when he died. We cannot say how much truth there is in

Vasari's account, written some thirty years after the event:

-

Raphael continued his secret pleasures beyond all measure. After

an unusually wild debauch he returned home with a severe fever, and

the doctors believed him to have caught a chill. As he did not confess

the cause of his disorder, the doctors imprudently let blood, thus

enfeebling him when he needed restoratives. Accordingly he made his

will, first sending his mistress out of the house like a Christian,

leaving her the means to live honestly. He then divided his things

among his pupils, Giulio Romano, of whom he was always very fond,

Giovanni Francesco Penni of Florence, and some priest of Urbino, a

relation.... Having confessed and shown penitence, he finished the

course of his life on the day of his birth, Good Friday, at the age of

thirty-seven (April 6, 1520). `051891

-

The priest who had come to shrive him refused to enter the sick room

until Raphael's mistress had left the house; perhaps the priest felt

that her continued presence would suggest on Raphael's part a lack

of the contrition required before absolution. Driven away even from

the funeral cortege, she fell into a melancholy that threatened

insanity; and Cardinal Bibbiena persuaded her to become a nun. All the

artists of Rome followed the dead youth to his grave. Leo mourned

the loss of his beloved painter; and a papal secretary and poet, the

Bembo who could be so eloquent in both Latin and Italian, put aside

all rhetoric in writing an epitaph for Raphael's tomb in the Pantheon:

-

ILLE HIC EST RAPHAEL

-

-"He who is here is Raphael." It was enough.

-

In the opinion of his contemporaries he was the greatest painter

of his age. He produced nothing equal in sublimity to the Sistine

ceiling, but Michelangelo produced nothing equal in total beauty to

the fifty Madonnas of Raphael. Michelangelo was the greater artist,

because great in three fields, and deeper in thought and art. When

he said of Raphael, "He is an example of what profound study can bring

forth," `051892 he probably meant that Raphael had acquired by

imitation the excellences of many other painters, and had combined

them with assiduous talent into a perfected style; he did not feel, in

Raphael, the creative fury that soon throws off guidance and cuts a

path almost violently for its own way. Raphael appeared too happy to

be a genius in the traditional frenzied sense; he had so solved his

inner conflicts that he showed few signs of the demonic spirit or

force that moves the greatest souls to creation and tragedy. Raphael's

work was the product of finished skill, not of profound feeling or

conviction. He adjusted himself to the needs and moods of Julius, then

of Leo, then of Chigi, but remained always the guileless youth

cheerfully oscillating between Madonnas and mistresses; this was his

blithe way of reconciling paganism and Christianity.

As artist in the sense of technician, no one surpassed him; in the

arrangement of elements in a picture, the rhythm of masses, the smooth

flow of line, no one has equaled him. His life was a devotion to form.

Consequently he tended to remain on the surface of things. Except in

his portrait of Julius II, he did not probe into the mysteries or

contradictions of life or creed; Leonardo's subtlety and

Michelangelo's sense of tragedy were alike meaningless to him; the

lust and joy of life, the creation and possession of beauty, the

loyalty of friend and lover, were enough. Ruskin was right: there

was now and then in Gothic sculpture and the "Pre-Raphaelite" painting

of Italy and Flanders a simplicity, sincerity, and sublimity of

faith and hope that sink deeper into the soul than the pretty Madonnas

and voluptuous Venuses of Raphael. And yet the Julius II and the

Pearl Madonna are anything but superficial; they reach to the

heart of male ambition and female tenderness; the Julius is

greater and profounder than the Mona Lisa.

Leonardo puzzles us, Michelangelo frightens us, Raphael gives us

peace. He asks no questions, raises no doubts, evokes no terrors,

but offers us the loveliness of life like an ambrosial drink. He

admits no conflict between intellect and feeling, nor between body and

soul; everything in him is a harmony of opposites, making a

Pythagorean music. His art idealizes all that it touches: religion,

woman, music, philosophy, history, even war. Himself fortunate and

happy, he radiated serenity and grace. In the arbitrary analogies of

genius he finds his place just below the greatest, but with them:

Dante, Goethe, Keats; Beethoven, Bach, Mozart; Michelangelo, Leonardo,

Raphael.

X. LEO POLITICUS

-

It was a pity that amid all this art and literature Leo had to

play politics. But he was head of a state, and lived at a time when

the powers beyond the Alps had ambitious leaders, large armies, and

lusty generals; at any moment Louis XII of France and Ferdinand the

Catholic might agree to divide Italy as they had agreed to divide

the Kingdom of Naples. To meet these threats- and incidentally to

strengthen the Papal States and aggrandize his family- Leo planned

to combine Florence (which he already ruled through his brother

Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo) with Milan, Piacenza, Parma,

Modena, Ferrara, and Urbino into a new and powerful federation to be

ruled by loyal Medici; to unite these with the existing States of

the Church as a barrier to aggression from the north; if possible,

to secure by marriage, for some member of his house, the succession to

the throne of Naples; and, with an Italy so welded into strength, to

lead Europe in one more crusade against the ever threatening Turks.

Machiavelli, who had no prejudice in favor of Christianity or the

popes, warmly approved of this plan, at least so far as concerned

the unification and protection of Italy; this was the leading idea

of The Prince.

Pursuing these aims with very limited military means at his

disposal, Leo used all the methods of statecraft and diplomacy

employed by the princes of his day. It was inconvenient that the

head of a Christian Church should have to lie, break faith, steal, and

kill; but by the common consent of kings these procedures were

indispensable to the preservation of a state. Leo, a Medici first

and a pope afterward, played the game as well as his corpulence, his

fistula, his hunts, his liberalities, and his finances would allow.

All the kings denounced him, disappointed that he would not behave

like a saint; "Leo," said Guicciardini, "deceived the expectations

conceived of him at his accession, since he appeared to be endowed

with greater prudence, but with much less goodness, than all had

imagined." `051893 For a long time his enemies thought that his

Machiavellian subtlety was due to the influence of his cousin Giulio

(the future Clement VII), or to Cardinal Bibbiena; but as events

matured it became clear that they had to deal with Leo himself, not

a lion but a fox, suave and slippery, cunning and incalculable,

grasping and devious, sometimes frightened and often hesitant, but, in

the last resort, capable of decision, resolution, and persistent

policy.

Let us leave his relations with the transalpine states to a later

chapter, confine ourselves here to Italian affairs, and deal with

these summarily, for the art of Leo's time is a much more living thing

than its politics. He had a great advantage over his predecessors, for

Florence, which had opposed Alexander and Julius, was now happy to

be part of his realm, since he gave its citizens many papal plums; and

when he visited the city of his ancestors it raised a dozen artistic

arches to welcome him. From that point d'appui, and from Rome, he

deployed his diplomats and patronage and troops to swell his state. In

1514 he secured Modena. In 1515 Francis I prepared to invade Italy and

take Milan; Leo organized an army and an Italian alliance to resist

him, and ordered the Duke of Urbino, as a vassal of the Holy See and a

general in the service of the Church, to join him at Bologna with

all the forces he could muster. The Duke, Francesco Maria della

Rovere, flatly refused to come, though Leo had recently advanced him

money to pay his troops. The Pope with some reason suspected him of

having a secret understanding with France. `051894 As soon as his

hands were freed from foreign entanglements, Leo summoned Francesco to

Rome; the Duke instead fled to Mantua. Leo excommunicated him, and

listened unmoved to the entreaties and messages of Elisabetta

Gonzaga and Isabella d'Este, aunt and mother-in-law of the reckless

prince; papal troops took Urbino unresisted, Francesco was declared

deposed, and Leo's nephew Lorenzo became Duke of Urbino (1516). A year

later the people of the city rose and expelled Lorenzo; Francesco

organized an army and recaptured his duchy; Leo was hard put to it

to raise funds and forces to recapture it in turn; he succeeded

after eight months of war, but the cost exhausted the papal

treasury, and turned the good will of Italy against the Pope and his

grasping family.

Francis I took the opportunity to win the friendship of the Pope,

and proposed a marriage between Lorenzo, the restored Duke of

Urbino, and Madeleine de La Tour d'Auvergne, who had a charming income

of 10,000 crowns ($125,000?) a year. Leo agreed; Lorenzo went to

France (1518), like an echo of Borgia, and brought back Madeleine

and her dowry. A year later she died in giving birth to a daughter

Caterina, the future Queen Catherine de Medicis of France; and shortly

thereafter Lorenzo himself died, allegedly of a sexual disease

contracted in France. `051895 Leo now declared Urbino a papal state,

and sent a legate to govern it.

During these complications he had had to bear with two bitter

signs of his political weakness and growing unpopularity. One of his

generals, Gianpaolo Baglioni, ruler of Perugia by papal grace, had

gone over to Francesco Maria, taking Perugia with him; Leo later lured

Gianpaolo to Rome with a safe-conduct, and had him put to death

(1520). Baglioni had shared also in a conspiracy, led by Alfonso

Petrucci and other cardinals, to assassinate the Pope (1517). These

cardinals had made such demands upon Leo as even his generosity

could not meet; Petrucci, moreover, raged because his brother, with

Leo's connivance, had been ousted from the government of Siena. He

planned at first to kill Leo with his own hand, but was persuaded

instead to bribe Leo's physician to poison the Pope while treating his

fistula. The plot was discovered; the physician and Petrucci were

executed, and several accomplice cardinals were imprisoned and

deposed; some were released on paying enormous fines.

Leo's need for money was now souring his once happy reign. His gifts

to relatives, friends, artists, writers, and musicians, his lavish

maintenance of an unprecedented court, the insatiable demands of the

new St. Peter's, the expense of the Urbino war and the preparation for

a crusade, were leading him to bankruptcy. His regular revenue of

420,000 ducats ($5,250,000?) a year from fees, annates, and tithes was

completely inadequate, and yet was always more difficult to secure

from a Europe resentful of ecclesiastical collections flowing to Rome.

To replenish his treasury Leo created 1353 new and saleable offices,

for which the appointees paid a total of 889,000 ducats

($11,112,500?). We must not be too virtuous about this; most of the

offices were sinecures whose modest toil could be delegated to

subordinates; the sums paid for these appointments were in effect

loans to the papacy; the salaries, averaging ten per cent per year

on the initial payment, were interest on the loans; Leo was selling

what we would now designate as government bonds; `051896 and he

would doubtless have urged that he paid a much handsomer return than

governments pay today. However, he sold not only these sinecures,

but even the highest offices, like that of papal

chamberlain. `051897 In July, 1517, he named thirty-one new cardinals,

many of them men of ability, but most of them chosen frankly for their

capacity to pay for the honor and power. So Cardinal Ponzetti-

physician, scholar, author- paid 30,000 ducats; altogether Leo's pen

on this occasion brought half a million ducats into the

treasury. `051898 Even blase Italy was shocked; and in Germany the

story of the transaction shared in the anger of Luther's revolt

(October, 1517). When, in this momentous year, Sultan Selim

conquered Egypt for the Ottoman Turks, Leo appealed in vain for a

crusade. In his blind eagerness he sent agents throughout

Christendom to offer extraordinary indulgences in return for

contrition, confession, and contribution to the expenses of the

proposed crusade.

Sometimes he borrowed money at forty per cent from the bankers of

Rome, who charged him such rates because they feared that his careless

administration of papal finances would ensure bankruptcy. As

security for some of these loans he pledged his silver plate, his

tapestries, his jewels. He rarely thought of economizing, and when

he did it was by defaulting on the salaries of his Greek Academy and

the University of Rome; as early as 1517 the former was closed for

lack of funds. He continued his intemperate benevolence, sending

rich subsidies to monasteries, hospitals, and charitable

institutions throughout Christendom, heaping dignities and funds

upon the Medici, and feeding his guests Lucullanly while himself

eating and drinking in moderation. `051899 All in all he spent

during his pontificate 4,500,000 ducats ($56,250,000?), and died owing

400,000 more. A pasquinade expressed the opinion of Rome: "Leo has

eaten up three pontificates: the treasury of Julius II, the revenues

of Leo, and those of his successor." `0518100 When he died Rome

experienced one of the worst financial crashes in its history.

His final year was rife with war. Having regained Urbino and

Perugia, it seemed to him that control of Ferrara and the Po was

indispensable to the security of the Papal States, and their

capacity to check France at Milan. Duke Alfonso had given the

requisite casus belli by sending troops and artillery to Francesco

Maria for use against the Pope. Alfonso, though ill, and well-nigh

exhausted after a generation of papal hostility, fought on with his

usual courage, and was saved by Leo's death.

The Pope too was ill in August, 1521, partly from the pain of his

fistula, partly from the worries and excitement of war. He

recovered, but fell sick again in October. In November he was well

enough to be taken out to his country villa at Magliana. There the

news reached him that the papal-imperial army had captured Milan

from the French. On the 25th he returned to Rome, and was given the

wild reception accorded only to victors in war. He walked too much

that day, perspiring till his clothes were drenched. The next

morning he was put to bed with fever. Now he rapidly grew worse, and

realized that his end was near. On December 1 he was cheered by

intelligence that Piacenza and Parma had in their turn been taken by

the papal forces; once he had declared that he would gladly give his

life for the addition of those cities to the States of the Church.

At midnight, December 1-2, 1521, he died, ten days before completing

his forty-fifth year. Many of the attendants, and some members of

the Medici family, carried off from the Vatican everything they

could lay their hands on. Guicciardini, Giovio, and Castiglione

thought that he had been poisoned, perhaps at the instigation of

Alfonso or Francesco Maria; but apparently he died of malarial

fever, like Alexander VI. `0518101

Alfonso rejoiced at the news, and struck a new medal EX ORE

LEONIS, "from the jaws of the lion." Francesco Maria returned to

Urbino, and was once more restored to his throne. In Rome the

bankers despoiled themselves. The Bini firm had lent Leo 200,000

ducats, the Gaddi 32,000, the Ricasoli 10,000; moreover, Cardinal

Pucci had lent him 150,000, and Cardinal Salviati 80,000; `0518102 the

cardinals would have first claim on anything salvaged; and Leo had

died worse than bankrupt. Some others joined in condemning the dead

Pope as a maladministrator of great wealth. But nearly all Rome

mourned him as the most generous benefactor in its history. Artists,

poets, and scholars knew that the heyday of their good fortune had

passed, though they had no suspicion yet of the extent of their

disaster. Said Paolo Giovio: "Knowledge, art, the common well-being,

the joy of living- in a word, all good things- have gone down into the

grave with Leo." `0518103

He was a good man ruined by his virtues. Erasmus had rightly praised

his kindness and humanity, his magnanimity and learning, his love

and support of the arts, and had called Leo's pontificate an age of

gold. `0518104 But Leo was too habituated to gold. Raised in a palace,

he learned luxury as well as art; he never labored for his income,

though he faced perils bravely; and when the revenues of the papacy

were placed in his trust they slipped through his careless fingers

while he basked in the happiness of recipients, or planned expensive

wars. Proceeding on the lines laid down by Alexander and Julius, and

inheriting their achievements, he made the Papal States stronger

than ever, but he lost Germany by his extravagance and his

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

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