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

exactions. He could see the beauty of a vase, but not the Protestant

Reformation taking shape beyond the Alps; he paid no attention to a

hundred warnings sent him, but asked for more gold from a nation

already in revolt. He was a glory and a disaster to the Church.

He was the most generous, but not the most enlightened, of

patrons. With all his patronage no great literature arose in his

reign. Ariosto and Machiavelli were beyond him, though he could

appreciate Bembo and Politian. His taste in art was not as sure and

lordly as that of Julius; it was not to him that we owe St. Peter's or

The School of Athens. He loved beautiful form too much, too little

the revealing significance that great art clothes in beautiful form.

He overworked Raphael, underestimated Leonardo, and could not, like

Julius, find a way through Michelangelo's temper to his genius. He

liked comfort too much to be great. It is a pity to judge him so

harshly, for he was lovable.

The age received his name, and perhaps rightly; for though he rather

took than gave its stamp, it was he who brought from Florence to

Rome the Medicean heritage of wealth and taste, the princely patronage

that he had seen in his father's house; and with that wealth, and

papal sanction, he provided an exciting stimulus to such literature

and art as excelled in style and form. His example stirred a hundred

other men to seek out talent, support it, and set northern Europe a

precedent and standard of appreciation and worth. He more than any

other pope protected the remains of classic Rome, and encouraged men

to rival them. He accepted the pagan enjoyment of life, and yet, in

his own conduct, remained remarkably continent in an uninhibited

age. His support of the Roman humanists helped to spread into France

their cultivation of classic literature and form. Under his aegis Rome

became the throbbing heart of European culture; thither the artists

flocked to paint or carve or build, the scholars came to study, the

poets to sing, the men of wit to sparkle. "Before I forget thee,

Rome," wrote Erasmus, "I must plunge into the river of Lethe....

What precious freedom, what treasures in the way of books, what depths

of knowledge among the learned, what beneficial social intercourse!

Where else could one find such literary society, or such versatility

of talent in one and the same place?" `0518105 The gentle Castiglione,

the polished Bembo, the learned Lascaris, Fra Giocondo, Raphael, the

Sansovini and Sangaili, Sebastiano and Michelangelo- where shall we

find again, in one city and decade, such a company?

BOOK V: DEBACLE

CHAPTER XIX: The Intellectual Revolt: 1300-1534

I. THE OCCULT

-

IN every age and nation civilization is the product, privilege,

and responsibility of a minority. The historian acquainted with the

pervasive pertinacity of nonsense reconciles himself to a glorious

future for superstition; he does not expect perfect states to arise

out of imperfect men; he perceives that only a small proportion of any

generation can be so freed from economic harassments as to have

leisure and energy to think their own thoughts instead of those of

their forebears or their environment; and he learns to rejoice if he

can find in each period a few men and women who have lifted

themselves, by the bootstraps of their brains, or by some boon of

birth or circumstance, out of superstition, occultism, and credulity

to an informed and friendly intelligence conscious of its infinite

ignorance.

So in Renaissance Italy civilization was of the few, by the few, and

for them. The simple common man, named legion, tilled and mined the

earth, pulled the carts or bore the burdens, toiled from dawn to dusk,

and at evening had no muscle left for thought. He took his opinions,

his religion, his answers to the riddles of life from the air about

him, or inherited them with the ancestral cottage; he let others think

for him because others made him work for them. He accepted not only

the fascinating, comforting, inspiring, terrifying marvels of the

traditional theology- which were daily reimpressed upon him by

contagion, inculcation, and art- but he added to them, in his mental

furniture, the demonology, sorcery, portents, magic, divination,

astrology, relic-worship, and miraclemongering that composed, so to

speak, a popular metaphysics unauthorized by the Church, which

deprecated them as a problem sometimes more troublesome then unbelief.

While the uncommon man in Italy was half a century or more ahead of

his class beyond the Alps in wealth and culture, the common man

south of the Alps shared equally with his transalpine peers the

superstitions of the time.

Often the humanists themselves surrendered to the genius or

stultus loci, and sprinkled their Ciceronian pages with the spirit

or foolishness of their surroundings. Poggio revels in portents and

prodigies like headless horsemen migrating from Como to Germany, or

bearded Tritons rising from the sea to snatch fair women from the

shore. `05191 Machiavelli, so skeptical of religion, suggested the

possibility that "the air is peopled with spirits," and declared his

belief that great events are heralded by prodigies, prophecies,

revelations, and signs in the sky. `05192 The Florentines, who liked

to think that the air they breathed made them clever beyond compare,

held that all important events happened on Saturday, and that it was a

sure misfortune to march out to war by certain streets. `05193

Politian was so upset by the Pazzi conspiracy that he attributed to it

a disastrous rainfall that followed it, and condoned the youths who,

to end the rain, exhumed the corpse of the chief conspirator,

paraded it through the city, and then flung it into the Arno. `05194

Marsilio Ficino wrote in defense of divination, astrology, and

demonology, and excused himself from visiting Pico della Mirandola

on the ground that the stars were in an unfavorable

conjunction- `05195 or was it a whimsy? If humanists could believe so,

how could the people, with no advantage of leisure or education, be

blamed for thinking of the natural world as the shell and instrument

of numberless supernatural powers?

The people of Italy reckoned so many objects as true relics of

Christ or the Apostles that one might have furnished from

Renaissance Roman churches alone all the scenes of the Gospels. One

church claimed to have a swaddling cloth of the Infant Jesus; another,

hay from the Bethlehem stall; another, fragments of the multiplied

loaves and fishes; another, the table used at the Last Supper;

another, the picture of the Virgin painted by angels for St.

Luke. `05196 Venetian churches displayed the body of St. Mark, an

arm of St. George, an ear of St. Paul, some roasted flesh of St.

Lawrence, some of the very stones that had killed St. Stephen. `05197

Nearly every object- every number and letter- was believed to have

some magic power. According to Aretino some Roman harlots fed to their

lovers, as an aphrodisiac, the rotting flesh of human corpses stolen

from the cemeteries. `05198 Incantations were used for a thousand

purposes; by the proper one, said Apulian peasants, you could

protect yourself from mad dogs. Spirits beneficent or malevolent

peopled the air; Satan often appeared, in person or by deputy, to

tempt or terrify, to seduce, empower or instruct; demons had a fund of

mystic knowledge that could be tapped if one should properly

propitiate them. Some Carmelite monks at Bologna (till Sixtus IV

condemned them in 1474) taught that there was no harm in seeking

knowledge from devils; `05199 and professional sorcerers offered their

expert charms in invoking the aid of demons for paying customers.

Witches- sorcerers usually female- were believed to have special

access to such helpful devils, whom they treated as lovers and gods;

by delegated demonic power these women, in the belief of the people,

could foresee the future, fly in a moment over long distances, pass

through closed gates and doors, and wreak dire evils upon persons

who offended them; they could induce love or hate, produce abortion,

manufacture poisons, and cause death by a spell or a glance.

In 1484 a bull of Innocent VIII ( Summis desiderantes ) forbade

resort to witches, took for granted the reality of some of their

claimed powers, ascribed to them some storms and plagues, and

complained that many Christians, falling away from orthodox worship,

had contracted carnal union with devils, and, by spells and magic

rhymes, curses and other diabolical arts, had done grievous harm to

men, women, children, and beasts. `051910 The Pope advised the

officers of the Inquisition to be on the alert against such practices.

The bull did not impose belief in witchcraft as the official

doctrine of the Church, nor did it inaugurate the prosecution of

witches; popular belief in witches, and occasional punishment of them,

long antedated the bull. The Pope was here faithful to the Old

Testament, which had commanded, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to

live." `051911 The Church had for centuries maintained the possibility

of demonic influences upon human beings; `051912 but the Pope's

assumption of the reality of witchcraft encouraged belief in it, and

his admonition to the inquisitors played some part in the witchcraft

persecution. `051913 In the year following the promulgation of the

bull forty-one women were burned for witchcraft in Como alone. `051914

In 1486 the inquisitors at Brescia condemned several alleged witches

to "the secular arm"- i.e., to death; but the government refused to

execute the sentence, whereat Innocent was much peeved. `051915

Matters went more harmoniously in 1510, when we hear of 140 persons

burned at Brescia for witchcraft; and in 1514, in the pontificate of

the gentle Leo, three hundred more were burned at Como. `051916

Whether through perverse stimulation by persecution, or from other

causes, the number of persons who believed themselves, or were

believed, to have practised witchcraft rapidly increased, especially

in subalpine Italy; it took on the nature and proportions of an

epidemic; popular report claimed that 25,000 persons had attended a

"witches' sabbath" on a plain near Brescia. In 1518 the inquisitors

burned seventy alleged witches from that region, and had thousands

of suspects in their prisons. The Signory of Brescia protested against

this wholesale detention, and interfered with further executions;

whereupon Leo X, in a bull Honestis (February 15, 1521), ordered the

excommunication of any officials, and the suspension of religious

services in any community, that refused to execute, without

examination or revision, the sentences of the inquisitors. The

Signory, ignoring the bull, appointed two bishops, two Brescian

physicians, and one inquisitor to supervise all further witchcraft

trials, and to inquire into the justice of previous condemnations;

only these men were to have the power to condemn the accused. The

Signory admonished the papal legate to put an end to the

condemnation of persons for the sake of confiscating their

property. `051916a It was a brave procedure; but ignorance and

sadism got the upper hand, and in the next two centuries, in

Protestant as well as Catholic lands, in the New World as well as

the old, burnings for witchcraft were to form the darkest spots in the

history of mankind.

The mania to know the future supported the usual variety of

fortunetellers- palmists, dream interpreters, astrologers; these

last were more numerous and powerful in Italy than in the rest of

Europe. Almost every Italian government had an official astrologer,

who determined the celestially propitious times when important

enterprises should commence. Julius II would not leave Bologna till

his astrologer marked the time as auspicious; Sixtus IV and Paul III

let their stargazers fix the hours of their major

conferences. `051916b So general was the belief that the stars

governed human character and affairs that many university professors

in Italy annually issued iudicia - predictions based on

astrology; `051916c it was one of Aretino's humorous devices to parody

these learned almanacs. When Lorenzo de' Medici re-established the

University of Pisa he made no arrangements for a course in

astrology, but the students clamored for it, and he had to

yield. `051916d In Lorenzo's erudite circle Pico della Mirandola wrote

a powerful attack upon astrology, but Marsilio Ficino, still more

learned, defended it. "How happy are the astrologers!" exclaimed

Guicciardini, "who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred

lies, while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a

hundred truths." `051916e Yet astrology had in it a certain groping

toward a scientific view of the universe; it escaped in some measure

from belief in a universe ruled by divine or demonic whim, and aimed

to find a co-ordinating and universal natural law.

II. SCIENCE

-

The superstitions of the people, rather than the opposition

of the Church, retarded the development of science. Censorship of

publications did not become a substantial hindrance to science until

the Counter Reformation that followed the Council of Trent (1545f).

Sixtus IV brought to Rome (1463) the most famous astronomer of the

fifteenth century, Johann Muller "Regiomontanus." During Alexander's

pontificate Copernicus taught mathematics and astronomy in the

University of Rome. Copernicus had not yet come to his world-shaking

theory of the earth's orbital revolution, but Nicholas of Cusa had

already suggested it; and both men were churchmen. Throughout the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Inquisition was relatively weak

in Italy, partly through the absence of the popes in Avignon, their

quarrels in the Schism, and their infection with the enlightenment

of the Renaissance. In 1440 the materialist Amadeo de' Landi was tried

by the Inquisition at Milan, and was acquitted; in 1497 Gabriele da

Salo, a freethinking physician, was protected from the Inquisition

by his patron, though "he was in the habit of maintaining that

Christ was not God but the son of Joseph." `051916f Despite the

Inquisition, thought was freer in Italy, and education more

advanced, than in any other country in the fifteenth and early

sixteenth centuries. Her schools of astronomy, law, medicine, and

literature were the goals of students from a dozen lands. Thomas

Linacre, English physician and scholar, after completing his

university courses in Italy, set up an altar in the Italian Alps as he

was returning to England, and, taking a last view of Italy,

dedicated the altar to her as Alma mater studiorum, the fostering

mother of studies, the postgraduate university of the Christian world.

If, in this atmosphere of superstition beneath and liberalism above,

science made only modest advances in the two centuries before Vesalius

(1514-64), it was largely because patronage and honor went to art,

scholarship, and poetry, and there was as yet no clear call, in the

economic or intellectual life of Italy, for scientific methods and

ideas. A man like Leonardo could take a sweeping cosmic view, and

touch a dozen sciences with eager curiosity; but there were no great

laboratories, dissection was only beginning, no microscope could

help biology or medicine, no telescope could yet enlarge the stars and

bring the moon to the edge of the earth. The medieval love of beauty

had matured into magnificent art; but there had been little medieval

love of truth to grow into science; and the recovery of ancient

literature stimulated a skeptical epicureanism idealizing antiquity

rather than a stoic devotion to scientific research aiming to mold the

future. The Renaissance gave its soul to art, leaving a little for

literature, less for philosophy, least for science. In this sense it

lacked the multiform mental activity of the Greek heyday from Pericles

and Aeschylus to Zeno the Stoic and Aristarchus the astronomer.

Science could not advance until philosophy had cleared the way.

Therefore it is natural that the same reader who knows by name a

dozen Renaissance artists will find it hard to recall one

Renaissance Italian scientist, barring Leonardo; even of Amerigo

Vespucci he will have to be reminded; and Galileo (1564-1642)

belongs to the seventeenth century. In truth there were no memorable

names except in geography and medicine. Oderic of Pordenone went to

India and China as a missionary (c. 1321), returned via Tibet and

Persia, and wrote an account of what he had seen, adding much of value

to what Marco Polo had reported a generation before. Paolo Toscanelli,

astronomer, physician, and geographer, noted Halley's comet in 1456,

and is reputed to have given Columbus knowledge and encouragement

for his Atlantic venture. `051916g Amerigo Vespucci of Florence made

four voyages to the New World (1497f), claimed to have been the

first to discover the mainland, and prepared maps of it; Martin

Waldseemuller, publishing them, suggested that the continent be called

America; the Italians liked the idea, and popularized it in their

writings. `051916h

The biological sciences were the last to develop, for the theory

of the special creation of man- almost universally accepted- made it

unnecessary and dangerous to inquire into his natural origin. For

the most part these sciences limited themselves to practical

pursuits and studies in medical botany, horticulture, floriculture,

and agriculture. Pietro de' Crescenzi, at the age of seventy-six

(1306), published Ruralia commoda, an admirable manual of

agriculture, except that it ignored the still better writings of

Spanish Moslems in this field. Lorenzo de' Medici had kept a

semipublic garden of rare plants at Careggi; the first public

botanical garden was founded by Luca Ghini at Pisa in 1544. Almost all

rulers of style had zoological gardens; and Cardinal Ippolito de'

Medici kept a human menagerie- a collection of barbarians of twenty

different nationalities, all of splendid physique.

III. MEDICINE

-

The most prosperous science was medicine, for men will sacrifice

anything but appetite for health. Physicians received a stimulating

share of Italy's new wealth. Padua paid one of them two thousand

ducats a year to serve as consultant, while leaving him free to charge

for his private practice. `051916i Petrarch, standing on his

benefices, indignantly denounced the high fees of physicians, their

robes of scarlet and their miniver hoods, `051916j their sparkling

rings and golden spurs. He earnestly warned the sick Pope Clement VI

against trusting physicians:

-

I know that your bedside is beleaguered by doctors, and naturally

this fills me with fear. Their opinions are always conflicting, and he

who has nothing new to say suffers the shame of limping behind the

others. As Pliny said, in order to make a name for themselves

through some novelty, they traffic with our lives. With them- not as

with other trades- it is sufficient to be called a physician to be

believed to the last word, and yet a physician's lie harbors more

danger than any other. Only sweet hope causes us not to think of the

situation. They learn their art at our expense, and even our death

brings them experience; the physician alone has the right to kill with

impunity. Oh, Most Gentle Father, look upon their band as an army of

enemies. Remember the warning epitaph which an unfortunate man had

inscribed on his tombstone: "I died of too many physicians." `051917

-

In all civilized lands and times physicians have rivaled women for

the distinction of being the most desirable and satirized of mankind.

The basis of progress in medicine was the renaissance of anatomy.

Ecclesiastics, co-operating with physicians as well as with artists,

sometimes provided corpses for dissection from the hospitals that they

controlled. Mondino de' Luzzi dissected cadavers at Bologna, and wrote

an Anatomia (1316) which remained a classic text for three

centuries. Nevertheless corpses were hard to get. In 1319 some medical

students at Bologna stole a corpse from a cemetery and brought it to a

teacher at the University, who dissected it for their instruction. The

students were prosecuted but acquitted, and from that time the civil

authorities winked an eye at the use of executed and unclaimed

criminals in "anatomies." `051918 Berengario da Carpi (1470-1550),

professor of anatomy at Bologna, was credited with having dissected

over a hundred corpses. `051919 Dissection was practised at the

University of Pisa at least as early as 1341; soon it was permitted in

all the medical schools of Italy, including the papal school of

medicine in Rome. Sixtus IV (1471-84) officially authorized such

dissections. `051920

Slowly Renaissance anatomy regained its forgotten classic

heritage. Men like Antonio Benivieni, Alessandro Achillini, Alessandro

Benedetti, and Marcantonio della Torre liberated anatomy from Arabic

tutelage, went back to Galen and Hippocrates, questioned even these

sacred authorities, and added, nerve by nerve, muscle by muscle, and

bone by bone, to the scientific knowledge of the body. Benivieni

directed his anatomies to finding the internal causes of disease;

his treatise On Several Hidden and Wonderful Causes of Disease and

Cures ( De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationum

causis, 1507) founded pathological anatomy, and made post-mortem

examinations a main factor in the development of modern medicine.

Meanwhile the new art of printing accelerated medical progress by

facilitating the diffusion and international exchange of medical

texts.

We may loosely estimate the medieval relapse of medical science in

Latin Christendom by noting that the most advanced anatomists and

physicians of this age had barely reached, by 1500, the knowledge

possessed by Hippocrates, Galen, and Soranus in the period from 450

B.C. to A.D. 200. Treatment was still based on the Hippocratic

theory of humors, and bloodletting was a panacea. The first known

transfusion of human blood was attempted by a Jewish physician in

the case of Pope Innocent VIII (1492); as we have seen, it failed.

Exorcists were still called in to treat impotence and amnesia by

religious incantations or the kissing of relics, perhaps because

such suggestive therapy was found occasionally helpful. Strange

pills and drugs were sold by apothecaries, who added to their

incomes by including stationery, varnish, confectionery, spices, and

jewelry among their wares. `051921 Michele Savonarola, father of the

fiery friar, wrote a Practica medicinae (c. 1440), and some

shorter treatises; one of these discussed the frequency of mental

pathology ( bizaria ) in great artists; another told of noted men

who had lived long by the daily use of alcoholic drinks.

Medical quacks were still numerous, but medical practice was now

more carefully regulated by law. Penalties were prescribed for persons

who practised medicine without a medical degree; and this presumed a

four-year medical course (1500). No physician was allowed to

prognose a grave disease except by consultation with a colleague.

Venetian legislation required physicians and surgeons to meet once a

month to exchange clinical notes, and to keep their knowledge up to

date by attending a course on anatomy at least once a year. The

graduating medical student had to swear that he would never protract

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

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