Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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Bargello, famous for its perfect balance, and for the skill with which
arm, hand, and vase- lightly poised on the finger tips- were cut
from one piece of marble. Everyone (except Michelangelo) was kind to
Andrea, and helped him up the hill to excellence. Giuliano da Sangallo
took him to Rome and gave him lodging. Bramante commissioned him to
make a wax copy of the Laocoon; it was so well done that it was cast
in bronze for Cardinal Grimani. Perhaps through Bramante's influence
Andrea turned from sculpture to architecture, and soon received
lucrative commissions.
He was in Rome when the sack came, and, like many other artists,
he lost all his possessions. He made his way to Venice, thinking to go
to France; but the Doge Andrea Gritti begged him, instead, to
strengthen the pillars and cupolas of St. Mark's. His work so
pleased the Senate that he was made state architect (1529). For six
years he labored to improve the Piazza San Marco, banishing the
butchers' shops that had sullied the Piazzetta, opening new streets,
and helping to make St. Mark's Square the spacious delight that it
is today.
In 1536 he built the Zecca or mint, and began his most celebrated
building, the Libreria Vecchia, facing the Palace of the Doges. He
designed the facade with a stately double portico of Doric and Ionic
columns, handsome cornices and balconies, and decorative statuary.
Some have rated this Old Library "the most beautiful profane edifice
in Italy"; `05221 but the multiplication of columns is excessive,
and the structure can hardly compare with the Palace of the Doges.
In any case the Procurators liked it, raised Sansovino's salary, and
exempted him from war taxes. In 1544 one of the main arches collapsed,
and the vault crashed down. Sansovino was thrown into jail and heavily
fined, but Aretino and Titian persuaded the Procurators to release and
pardon him. The arch and vault were repaired, and the building was
successfully completed in 1553. Meanwhile (1540) Sansovino had
designed the pretty Loggetta, or vestibule for police, on the
eastern side of the Campanile, and had adorned it with bronze and
terra-cotta sculptures. In St. Mark's he cast bronze doors for a
sacristy, and took occasion to portray, among the reliefs, not only
Aretino but Titian and himself.
The three men had now become firm friends, enviously known in
Venetian art circles as "the Triumvirate." Many an evening they
spent together, talking shop, or entertaining such beauty as could
be engaged for the time. Iacopo rivaled Aretino in popularity with
women, and Titian in longevity. He remained strong and healthy, and
(we are assured) enjoyed perfect eyesight, till his eighty-fourth
year. `05222 For fifty years he never consulted a physician; during
summers he lived almost entirely on fruit. When Paul III invited him
to succeed Antonio da Sangallo as chief architect at St. Peter's, he
refused, saying that he would not exchange his life in a republic
for service under an absolute ruler. `05223 Ercole II of Ferrara and
Duke Cosimo of Florence in vain offered him large stipends to take
up residence at their courts. He died peacefully in 1570, in the
eighty-fifth year of his age.
In that year appeared an epoch-making work- Four Books of
Architecture - by Andrea Palladio, who gave his name to a style that
endured here and there into our own time. Like so many others,
Andrea went to Rome and was thrilled by the ruined grandeur of the
Forum. He came to love those broken columns and capitals as the finest
conceptions that architecture had ever reached; he almost memorized
Vitruvius; and his own book strove to restore to Renaissance
building all those principles which, he thought, had created the glory
of classic Rome. It seemed to him that the finest architecture would
avoid all ornament that did not spring spontaneously from the
constructive style itself; it would pledge itself to a strict
proportion, connection, and congruity of the parts in an organic
whole; it would be classically noble and strong, as chaste as a vestal
virgin, and as dignified as an emperor.
His first major work was his best, and is one of the outstanding
structures of secular Italy. Around the Palazzo della Ragione or
Town Hall of his native Vicenza he built (1549f) magnificent and
powerful arcades, transforming an undistinguished Gothic core into a
Basilica Palladiana that might vie with the Basilica Iulia of the
Roman Forum itself: a tier of arches sustaining Doric columns and
pilasters, a massive architrave, a railing and balcony elegantly
carved, a second tier of arches, on Ionic columns, a classic cornice
and railing, and- above each spandrel- a statue rising to oversee
the city and give it an exemplar of greatness. "I do not question," he
wrote in his book twenty-one years later, "but that this fabric may be
compared with the ancient edifices, and be looked upon as one of the
most noble and beautiful buildings erected since the time of the
ancients." `05224 If he had confined his challenge to civic
buildings the boast might stand.
Palladio became the hero of Vicenza, which felt that he had
surpassed Sansovino's Libreria Vecchia. Rich men plied him with
commissions for palaces and villas, ecclesiastics for churches; before
he died (1580) he had transformed his city almost into an ancient
Roman municipality. He built a loggia for the city administration, a
pretty museum, a splendid Teatro Olimpico. Venice called him, and
there he designed two of her finest churches- San Giorgio Maggiore and
the Redentore. Even before his death he had become a powerful
influence in Italy. Early in the seventeenth century Inigo Jones
brought the Palladian style into England; it spread through Western
Europe, and came to America.
Perhaps it was a misfortune. It never really captured the dignity of
Roman architecture; it confused its facades with a plethora of
columns, capitals, cornices, moldings, and statuary; the details
detract from the simple lines and clarity of a classic edifice. And by
reverting so humbly to an ancient style, Palladio forgot that a living
art should express its own epoch and mood, not those of another age.
That is why, when we think of the Renaissance, we do not call to
mind its architecture, nor even its sculpture, but above all its
painting, which bore lightly the traditions of Alexandria and Rome,
freed itself from cramping and uncongenial Byzantine molds, and made
itself the authentic voice and color of the time.
II. ARETINO: 1492-1556 `05225
-
To make sure that 1492 would be memorable, Pietro Aretino, Scourge
of Princes and Prince of Blackmailers, came into the world on Good
Friday of that year. His father was a poor shoemaker of Arezzo,
known to us only as Luca. Like many other Italians, Pietro received in
time the name of his birthplace, and became Aretino. His enemies
insisted that his mother was a prostitute; he denied it, and claimed
that his mother was a pretty girl named Tita, who posed as a Madonna
for painters, but in a careless moment conceived Pietro while in the
arms of a casual but noble lover, Luigi Bacci. Aretino did not mind
being a bastard, having such distinguished company in that class;
and Luigi's legitimate sons, when Pietro became famous, did not mind
his calling them brothers. But his father was Luca.
Having attained the maturity of twelve years, he set out to make his
fortune. He found work as a bookbinder's assistant in Perugia, and
there he studied art sufficiently to become in later years an
excellent critic and connoisseur. He himself did some painting. In the
chief square of Perugia was a holy picture, fondly reverenced by the
people, showing Magdalen fervent at the feet of Christ. One night
Aretino painted a lute in the arms of the Magdalene, changing her
prayer into a serenade. When the city seethed with anger at the prank,
Pietro slipped out of Perugia and examined Italy. He earned his
bread as a servant in Rome, as a street singer in Vicenza, as an
innkeeper in Bologna. He served a term in the galleys, became a
hired man in a monastery, was discharged for lechery, and returned
to Rome (1516). There he labored as a lackey for Agostino Chigi. The
banker was not unkindly, but Aretino had discovered his own peculiar
genius, and fretted under servantry. He wrote a bitter satire
describing a scullion's life: "cleaning privies, polishing
chamberpots... performing lewd offices for cooks and stewards who soon
see to it that he is all pricked out and embroidered with the French
disease." `05226 He showed his poems to some of Chigi's guests, and
word went around that this Pietro was the sharpest and wittiest
satirist in Rome. His pieces began to circulate. Pope Leo enjoyed
them, sent for the author, laughed at his rough frank humor, and added
him to the papal staff as a cross between poet and jester. For three
years Pietro ate well.
Suddenly Leo died, and Aretino was afloat again. As the conclave
dallied in choosing a successor, he wrote satires on the electors
and the candidates, affixed the sheets to the statue of Pasquino,
and poked fun at so many dignitaries that soon he had hardly a
friend in the city. When Adrian VI was elected, and began a most
unwelcome campaign of reform, Pietro fled to Florence, then to
Mantua (1523), where Federigo took him on as court poet at a
moderate salary. When the death of Adrian answered Rome's prayers, and
a rich Medici sat again on the throne of thrones, Pietro, like a
thousand other poets, artists, rascals, and rakes, hurried back to the
capital.
Almost at once he ended his welcome there. Giulio Romano had painted
twenty pictures describing various erotic attitudes; Marcantonio
Raimondi made engravings for them; for each engraving, says Vasari,
"Messer Pietro Aretino wrote an extremely lewd sonnet, so that I
cannot say which is worse, the drawings or the words." `05227 The
pictures and sonnets went the rounds of the intelligentsia; they
reached Pope Clement's datary, Giberti, who was known to be hostile to
Aretino; Pietro heard of it, and took again to the road. At Pavia he
charmed Francis I, who was on the verge of losing everything but
honor. And now, by putting a different point on his pen, he turned a
somersault that made Rome gasp. He wrote three laudatory poems- one
about Clement, one about Giberti, one about Federigo. The Marquis said
a good word for him to the Pope, Giberti relented, Clement sent for
Aretino, and made him a pensioned Knight of Rhodes. Francesco Berni,
his only rival among the satirists, described him at this period:
-
He walks through Rome dressed like a duke. He takes part in all
the wild doings of the lords. He pays his way with insults couched
in tricked up words. He talks well, and he knows every libelous
anecdote in the city. The Estes and the Gonzagas walk arm in arm
with him, and listen to his prattle. He treats them with respect,
and is haughty to everyone else. He lives on what they give him. His
gifts as a satirist make people afraid of him, and he revels in
hearing himself called a cynical, impudent slanderer. All that he
needed was a fixed pension. He got one by dedicating to the Pope a
second-rate poem. `05228
-
Aretino would not have questioned any of this. As if to illustrate
it, he asked the Mantuan ambassador to solicit for him from Federigo
"two pairs of shirts worked with gold... two pairs worked in silk,
together with two golden caps." When these took too much time in
coming he threatened to annihilate the Marquis with a diatribe. The
ambassador warned Federigo: "Your Excellency knows his tongue;
therefore I will say no more." Soon four shirts worked in gold
arrived, and four of silk, and two gold caps, and two silk hats.
"Aretino," wrote the ambassador, "is satisfied." Pietro could now
really dress like a duke.
This second period of Roman prosperity was ended by a
cloak-and-dagger romance. Aretino composed an insulting sonnet on a
young woman employed in the datary's kitchen. Another of Giberti's
household, Achille della Volta, attacked Aretino in the street at
two o'clock in the morning (1525), stabbed him twice in the chest, and
so severely in the right hand that two fingers had to be cut off.
The wounds were not mortal; Aretino healed rapidly. He demanded the
arrest of Achille, but neither Clement nor his datary intervened.
Pietro suspected the datary of planning to have him murdered, and he
decided that the time had come for another Italian tour. He moved to
Mantua, and resumed his service with Federigo (1525). A year later,
hearing that Giovanni delle Bande Nere was marshaling a force to check
Frundsberg's invasion, a secret atom of nobility stirred in him; he
rode a hundred miles to join Giovanni at Lodi. All the ink in his
veins tingled at the thought that he, the poor poet, might become a
man of action, might even carve out for himself a principality, and be
himself a prince, and no mere literary menial of a prince. And,
indeed, the young commander, as generous as Don Quixote, promised to
make him a marquis at least. But brave Giovanni was killed, and
Aretino, putting aside the helmet he had received, returned to
Mantua and his pen.
He composed now a mock giudizio, or almanac, for 1527,
predicting absurd or evil fates for those he disliked. Furious against
Clement for giving Giovanni delle Bande Nere inadequate and
vacillating support, Aretino included the Pope among the victims of
his satire. Clement expressed surprise that Federigo should harbor
so irreverent an enemy of the papacy. Federigo gave Aretino a
hundred crowns, and advised him to get out of the papal reach. "I will
go to Venice," said Pietro; "only in Venice does justice hold the
scales with an even balance." He arrived in March, 1527, and took a
house on the Grand Canal. He was fascinated by the views across the
lagoon, and by the teeming traffic of what he called "the fairest
highway in the world." "I have determined," he wrote, "to live in
Venice forever." He addressed a letter of lordly compliments to the
Doge Andrea Gritti, praising the majestic beauty of Venice, the
justice of her laws, the security of her people, the asylum she
offered to political and intellectual refugees; and he added,
magnificently: "I, who have stricken terror into kings... give
myself to you, fathers of your people." `05229 The Doge took him at
his own estimate, assured him of protection, assigned him a pension,
and interceded for him with the Pope. Though invitations were to
come to Aretino from several foreign courts, he remained a loyal
resident of Venice throughout his remaining twenty-nine years.
The furniture and art that he gathered into his new home attested
the power of his pen, for they were given or made possible by the
generosity or timidity of his patrons. Tintoretto himself painted
the ceiling of Pietro's private apartments. Soon the walls shone
with pictures by Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giulio Romano,
Bronzino, Vasari; there were statues by Iacopo Sansovino and
Alessandro Vittoria. A rich ebony casket contained the letters
received by Aretino from princes, prelates, captains, artists,
poets, musicians, and noble dames; later he would publish these
letters in two volumes totaling 875 closely printed pages. There
were carved chests and chairs, and a walnut bed fit for Pietro's now
ample form. Amid that art and luxury Aretino lived and dressed
literally like a lord, dispersing charity to the neighborhood poor,
entertaining a host of friends and a succession of mistresses.
Where did he get the means to support so lavish a life? Partly
from the sale of his writings to publishers, partly from gifts and
pensions sent him by men and women who feared his scorn and sought his
praise. The satires, poems, letters, and plays that rushed from his
pen were bought by the most alert or important people in Italy, all
eager to see what he had to say about personalities and events, and
delighting in his blasts at the corruption, hypocrisy, oppression, and
immorality of the times. Ariosto inserted into the 1532 edition of
Orlando furioso two lines that added two titles to Pietro's name:
-
Ecco il flagello
De' principi, il divin Pietro Aretino- `052210
-
"Behold the Scourge of Princes, the divine Pietro Aretino"; soon
it became the fashion to speak of the coarsest and most scurrilous
major writer of the age as divine.
His renown was Continental. His satires were at once translated into
French; a bookseller on the Rue St. Jacques in Paris made a fortune
retailing them. `052211 They were welcomed in England, Poland,
Hungary; Aretino and Machiavelli, said a contemporary, were the only
Italian authors read in Germany. In Rome, where his favorite victims
lived, his writings were sold out on the day of their publication.
If we may take his own estimate, his receipts from his various
publications amounted to a thousand crowns ($12,500?) a year. More
over, in eighteen years, "the alchemy of my pen has drawn over
25,000 gold crowns from the entrails of various princes." Kings,
emperors, dukes, popes, cardinals, sultans, pirates were among his
tributaries. Charles V gave him a collar worth 300 crowns, Philip II
another worth 400; Francis I a still more costly chain. `052212
Francis and Charles competed for his favor with promises of fat
pensions. Francis promised more than he gave; "I adored him," said
Aretino, "but never to get money from the stirring of his liberality
is enough to cool the furnaces of Murano" (the suburb where the
glass industry of Venice was concentrated). `052213 A knighthood was
offered him, without income; he refused it, remarking that "a
knighthood without revenue is like a wall without Forbidden signs;
everybody commits nuisances there." `052214 So Pietro pledged his
pen to Charles, and served him with unwonted fidelity. He was
invited to meet the Emperor at Padua; on reaching that city he was
hailed by a crowd, like a modern celebrity. Charles, out of all
those present, chose Aretino to ride beside him through the city,
and told him: "Every gentleman in Spain knows all your writings;
they read everything of yours as fast as it is printed." That night,
at a state banquet, the son of the shoemaker sat at the Emperor's
right hand. Charles invited him to Spain; Pietro refused, having
discovered Venice. Sitting beside the conqueror of Italy, Aretino
was the first example of what was later called the power of the press;
nothing like his influence would appear again in literature until
Voltaire.
His satires hardly hold our attention today, for their force lay
mostly in pointed allusion to local events too tied to the time to
have lasting significance. They were popular because it is hard for us
not to enjoy the excoriation of others; because they exposed real
abuses, and courageously attacked the great and powerful; and
because they brought all the resources of the language of the
streets to the uses of literature and gainful literary homicide.
Aretino exploited the human interest in sex and sin by writing
Ragionamenti - conversations- among prostitutes about the secrets and
practices of nuns, wives, and courtesans. The title page announced the
book as "The Dialogues of Nanna and Antonia... composed by the
divine Aretino for his pet monkey Capricio, and for the correction
of the three states of women. Given to the printer in this month of
April, 1533, in the illustrious city of Venice." `052215 Aretino
here anticipates the rollicking ribaldry and epithetic frenzy of
Rabelais; he revels in four-letter words, and achieves some
startling phrases ("I'd wager my soul against a pistachio nut"); and
he indites such lively descriptions as that of the pretty wife of
seventeen- the "finest little piece of flesh that I think I ever saw"-
who, married to a man of sixty, took to sleepwalking as a way of
"jousting with the lances of the night." `052216 The conclusions to
which the dialogues come is that courtesans are the most
praiseworthy of the three classes of women, for the wives and nuns are
faithless to their vows, while the courtesans live up to their
professions and give an honest night's labor for their pay. Italy
was not shocked; it laughed with delight.
Now, too, Aretino composed the most popular of his plays- La
cortigiana, The Courtesan. Like most Italian comedies of the
Renaissance, it followed the Plautine tradition of servants making
fools of their masters, arranging intrigues for them, serving as their
panders and their brains. But Aretino added something of his own:
his burlesque and bawdy humor, his intimacy with prostitutes, his
hatred of courts- above all, of the papal court- and his uninhibited
transcript of life as he had seen it in the brothels and palaces of
Rome. He laid bare the hypocrisies, timeserving, humiliations,
flatteries required of the courtier; and in a famous line he defined
slander as "telling the truth"; it was his pithy apologia for his
life. In another Aretino comedy, Talanta, the title character is
again a prostitute, and the story turns on the tricks she plays upon
her four lovers, and her ways of squeezing money out of their
agitation. Another play, Ipocrita, was an Italian Tartuffe;
indeed, Moliere is a French continuation of the Aretine comedies,
deodorized and improved.
In the same year that produced these idyls of the stews, Aretino
composed a long series of religious works- The Humanity of Christ,
The Seven Penitential Psalms, The Life of the Virgin Mary, The Life of
the Virgin Catherine, The Life of St. Thomas, Lord of Aquino, etc.
They were largely compounded of fiction, and Pietro confessed that
they were "poetical lies," but they won him the plaudits of the pious,
even of the virtuous Vittoria Colonna. In some quarters he was
regarded as a pillar of the Church. There was talk of making him a
cardinal.
It was probably his letters that sustained his fame as well as his
fortune. Many of these were eulogies addressed to the eulogized, or to
persons near them. They were frankly intended to elicit gifts,
pensions, or other favors; sometimes they specified what was to be
given, and when. Aretino published- printed- these letters almost as
soon as he wrote them; this was necessary to their extractive power.
Italy snapped them up because they provided an indirect intimacy
with famous men and women, and because they were written with an
originality, vivacity, and force unequaled by any other writer of
the day. Aretino had style without seeking it. He laughed at the
Bembos who polished their stanzas into perfect lifelessness; he
ended the humanist idolatry of Latin, of correctness and grace.
Pretending to be ignorant of literature, he felt free from cramping
exemplars; he accepted in his writing one overruling rule: to
enounce spontaneously, in direct and simple language, his experience
and criticism of life, and the needs of his wardrobe and larder.
Amid the mountain of hypocritical rubbish of these letters some
diamonds can be found: tender epistles to a favorite ailing harlot,
lusty accounts of his domestic history, a sunset described in a letter
to Titian almost as brilliantly as Titian or Turner could paint it,
and a letter to Michelangelo suggesting, for The Last Judgment, a
design much more appropriate than that which the artist used.
Aretino's understanding and appreciation of art were among the
better qualities of his character. His most intimate male friends were