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

admirable democracy of genius- which appears in every rank- he made

his way almost to the top in a Venice teeming with talent. Coming from

Treviso to study under Titian, he matured so rapidly that at the age

of thirty-eight he was invited to Paris by Francis I. He turned out

some excellent religious pictures, like The Baptism of Christ

(Washington) and The Holy Family (Milan), and reached his high point

in The Fisherman Presenting St. Mark's Ring to the Doge (Venice);

but the painting that has ferried him over the years is his Venus and

Eros (Uffizi)- a stout blonde who uses a fine robe to reveal her

breasts, while Cupid clamors for her attention.- *05057 Iacopo da

Ponte, called il Bassano from his birthplace, reached a modest fame

and fortune when Titian bought his Animals Going into the Ark; he

painted some good portraits- e.g., The Bearded Man (Chicago)- and

managed to live to the age of eighty-two without leaving behind him

any pictured humans not clothed from head to foot.

About 1553 there came from Verona to Venice a youth of

twenty-five, Paolo Caliari, of a type contrasting sharply with

Tintoretto: tranquil, friendly, sociable, self-critical, and only

occasionally passionate. Like Tintoretto and nearly all educated

Italians, he loved and practised music. He was generous and honorable,

never offended a rival, never disappointed a patron. Venice called him

il Veronese, and so the world knows him, though he adopted Venice as

his home and one of his loves. He had many teachers in Verona,

including his uncle Antonio Badile, who later gave him a daughter to

wife; he was influenced by Giovanni Caroto and Brusasorci; but these

factors in the development of his style soon faded in the warm

brilliance of Venetian art and life. He never ceased to wonder at

the changing skies playing their colors upon the Grand Canal; he

marveled at the palaces and their tremulous reflections in the sea; he

envied the aristocratic world of secure incomes, and artistic

friendships, and gracious manners, and garments of silk and velvet

almost more tempting to the touch than the beautiful women they

enclosed. He wished himself an aristocrat; he dressed like one in lace

and furs, and imitated the high code of honor that he ascribed to

the Venetian upper class. He hardly ever painted poor people, or

poverty, or tragedy; his aim was to put this bright and fortunate

world of the Venetian rich upon immortal canvas, and make it fairer

and finer than wealth without art could ever be. The lords and ladies,

the bishops and abbots, the doges and senators, took to him fondly;

and soon he was working on a dozen commissions.

As early as 1553, when he was only twenty-five, he was asked to

paint a ceiling for the Council of Ten in the Ducal Palace. There,

likening the Council to Jove, he pictured Jupiter Overthrowing the

Vices, now in the Louvre. It was not especially successful; the heavy

figures cavorted precariously in the air; Paolo had not quite caught

the spirit of Venice. But two years later he found himself, and

touched mastery, in painting The Triumph of Mordecai on the

ceiling of San Sebastiano; the face and figure of the Jewish hero were

forcefully rendered, and the horses breathe reality. Titian himself

may have been impressed, for when the Procurators of St. Mark's

charged him to organize the decoration of the Libreria Vecchia with

pictured medallions, he allotted three to Veronese, one each to

other artists and himself. The Procurators offered a golden chain

for the best medallion; Paolo won it with a representation of Music in

the form of three young women- one playing a lute, another singing,

a third intent upon her viola da gamba- and a Cupid at a

harpsichord, and Pan puffing at his pipes. In some later pictures

Veronese portrays himself wearing his golden chain.

Having acquired high repute for decorative painting, Paolo now

received a lucrative assignment. The rich and lordly Barbaro family

built in 1560 a luxurious villa at Macer, near that same Asolo where

Caterina Cornaro played queen and Bembo played with Platonic love. The

Barbari chose none but leading artists to make this "the finest

pleasure house of the Renaissance": `052235 Andrea Palladio to

design it, Alessandro Vittoria to ornament it with sculptured

stucco, Veronese to fresco the ceilings and walls, spandrels and

lunettes with scenes from pagan and Christian mythology. On the

vault of the central dome he pictured Olympus- the gods who knew all

the joys of life but never grew old and never died. Amid ethereal

scenes the impish artist introduced a hunter, a monkey, and a dog so

perfect in its form and alert vitality as to be fit to be a hound of

heaven. On one wall a painted page looked across a distance at a

painted maid, and she at him, and for an immortal moment they too

fed on ambrosia. It was such a pleasure palace as only the more

refined taste of Kublai Khan's Chinese could have surpassed.

Inevitably, in this archipelago of Eros, Paolo received

commissions to paint nudes. They were not his forte; he preferred

rich, soft raiment covering semi-Rubensian forms topped with comely

characterless faces crowned with upswept coiffures of golden hair. The

Mars and Venus now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows a fat and

ungainly goddess with an unshapely dropsical leg. But she is lovely in

the Venus and Adonis of the Prado, outshone only by the dog at her

feet; without a dog Paolo could not paint. The finest of Veronese's

mythologies is The Rape of Europa in the Palace of the Doges: a

landscape of dark trees, winged putti dropping garlands, Europa (the

Phoenician princess) seating herself gaily upon the amorous bull,

who licks one of her pretty feet, and turns out to be none other

than Jupiter in a novel masquerade. The lucky Casanova of the skies

here showed divine taste, for Europa, half robed in queenly array,

is Veronese's most successful synthesis of feminine perfection,

worth leaving heaven for. The distant background continues the story

by showing the bull carrying Europa across the Sea to Crete, where,

says a pretty legend, she gave her name to a continent.

Paolo himself took his time before surrendering to woman. He

gathered samples till he was thirty-eight; then he married Elena

Badile. She bore him two sons, Carlo and Gabriele; he trained both

to be painters, and predicted, with more fondness than foresight,

Carletto mi vincera - "Charlie will surpass me." `052236 Like

Correggio he bought a farm- at Sant' Angelo di Treviso- and spent most

of his married years there, managing his finances thriftily, and

seldom straying from the Veneto. He was at forty (1568) the most

sought-for painter in Italy, with invitations coming even from foreign

lands. When Philip II asked him to decorate the Escorial he

appreciated the compliment, but resisted the lure.

Like his predecessors he was called upon to paint the sacred story

for churches and worshipers. *05058 After a thousand Madonnas we

find everything fresh and attractive in the Madonna of the Cuccino

Family (Dresden): the handsome black-bearded donors, the

disconcertingly natural children, and the white-shawled figure of

fate- a woman of such majestic beauty as even Venetian art seldom

equaled. The Marriage at Cana (Louvre) was just the scene that

Veronese liked to paint: Roman architecture for a background, a dog or

two in the foreground, and a hundred persons in a hundred attitudes.

He drew them all as if everyone were to be a major portrait, and

placed among them Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano, and himself, each

playing a stringed instrument. Paolo, unlike Tintoretto, cared nothing

for realism; instead of making his feasters such men and women as a

small Judean town might furnish, he made the host a Venetian

millionaire, gave him a palace worthy of Augustus, and guests and dogs

of pedigree, and provided the tables with delicate food and miraculous

wine. If one should judge from Veronese, Christ had many a feast

amid His tribulations: in the Louvre we see Him dining in the house of

Simon the Pharisee, with Magdalen washing His feet, and splendid

female figures moving about among Corinthian columns; in Turin He sups

in the house of Simon the leper, and in the Venice Academy He dines in

the house of Levi. But then, again, in Veronese's gallery, we see

Christ fainting under the weight of the cross (Dresden), and crucified

against a lowering sky, with the towers of Jerusalem dim in the

distance below (Louvre). The end of the great drama is subdued: simple

pilgrims supping with Christ at Emmaus, with charming children

fondling the inevitable dog.

Greater than these illustrations of the New Testament are

Veronese's

pictures from the lives and legends of the saints: St. Helena robed in

beauty, believing that she sees angels transporting the cross

(London); St. Anthony tortured by a muscular youth and an angelic

female (Caen); St. Jerome in the wilderness, comforted by his books

(Chicago); St. George ecstatically welcoming martyrdom (San Giorgio,

Venice); St. Anthony of Padua preaching to the fishes (Borghese)- a

magnificent vista of sea and sky; St. Francis receiving the stigmata

(Venice); St. Mennas brilliant in armor (Modena) and martyred (Prado);

St. Catherine of Alexandria mystically married to the infant Christ

(Santa Caterina, Venice); St. Sebastian flying the standard of faith

and hope as he is led to martyrdom (San Sebastiano, Venice); St.

Justina facing martyrdom with double jeopardy- in the Uffizi and in

her church at Padua: all these are pictures not to be compared with

the best of Titian or Tintoretto, but still meriting the name of

masterpieces. Perhaps finer than any of these is The Family of Darius

Before Alexander (London), with a somber queen and a lovely

princess kneeling at the feet of the handsome and generous conqueror.

As Paolo had begun his Venetian career with painting in the Ducal

Palace, so he ended it with grand murals there, fit to thrill every

patriotic Venetian soul. After the fires of 1574 and 1577, the

decoration of the rebuilt interiors was assigned chiefly to Tintoretto

and Veronese, and the theme was to be Venice herself, undaunted by

fire or war, Turks or Portuguese. In the Sala del Collegio (Audience

Chamber) Paolo and his assistants painted on the carved and gilded

ceiling eleven allegorical pictures of extraordinary elegance-

Meekness with her lamb... Dialectics looking through a web of her

own making... and Venice, a queen in ermine, with the Lion of St. Mark

lying quietly at her feet, and receiving honors from Justice and

Peace. In a great oval in the ceiling of the Sala del Maggior

Consiglio he painted The Triumph of Venice, picturing the

incomparable city as a goddess enthroned among pagan deities,

receiving a crown of glory from the sky; at her feet the leading lords

and ladies of the city, and some tributary Moors; and below these,

prancing warriors ready for her defense, and pages holding hounds in

leash. This was the zenith of Veronese.

In 1586 he was chosen to replace Guariento's faded fresco, The

Coronation of the Virgin, in that same Hall of the Great Council. His

sketch was made and approved, and he was preparing to paint the canvas

when he was stricken with fever. Venice was shocked to learn, in April

1588, that the still young painter of her glories was dead. The

fathers at San Sebastiano begged for his remains, and Paolo was buried

there, beneath the pictures by which he had made that church a home of

his religious art.

Time has reversed the judgment of his contemporaries, and ranks

him below his robust contemporary. Technically he surpassed

Tintoretto; in draftsmanship, composition, and color he was the

culmination of Venetian painting. His crowded pictures are not

confused; his scenes and episodes are clear, his backgrounds bright;

Tintoretto seems a prince of darkness beside this idolater of light.

Veronese was also the greatest decorative painter of the Italian

Renaissance, ever ready to conceive some delightful turn or surprise

of color and form, like the man suddenly stepping out from behind a

curtain half drawn across a classic portal in a fresco at the Villa

Macer. But he was too joyously intent upon surface melodies to hear

the subtle overtones, tragic discords, and deeper harmonies that

make the greatest paintings great. His eye was too quick, his art

too eager to picture all that it saw, and more that it merely

imagined- Turks at the baptism of Christ, Teutons in the house of

Levi, Venetians at Emmaus, dogs everywhere. He must have loved dogs,

he made so many of them. He wanted to portray the brightest aspects of

the world, and did so with unmatched radiance; he pictured Venice in a

sunset glow of the joy of life. In his world there are only handsome

nobles, stately matrons, bewitching princesses, voluptuous blondes;

and every second picture is a feast.

All the art world knows the story how the officers of the

Inquisition- pursuant to a decree of the Council of Trent that all

erroneous teaching must be avoided in art- summoned Veronese before

them (1573), and demanded to know why he had introduced so many

irreverent irrelevancies into The Feast in the House of Levi

(Venice)- parrots, dwarfs, Germans, buffoons, halberdiers.... Paolo

replied boldly that his "commission was to ornament the picture as

seemed good to me. It was big, and with room for many figures....

Whenever an empty space in a picture needs filling up, I put in

figures as the fancy takes me"- partly to balance the composition, and

also, doubtless, to feast the observant eye. The Inquisition ordered

him to amend the painting at his own cost, which he did. `052237

That inquest marked the passage, in Venetian art, from the Renaissance

to the Counter Reformation.

Veronese had no distinguished disciples, but his influence

overleaped generations to share in molding the art of Italy, Flanders,

and France. Tiepolo recaptured his decorative flair after a long

intermission; Rubens studied him carefully, learned the secrets of

Paolo's coloring, and inflated Veronese's plump females to Flemish

amplitude. Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain found in him a guide

to the use of architectural ornament in their landscapes, and

Charles Lebrun followed Veronese in designing vast murals. To Veronese

and Correggio the painters of eighteenth-century France looked for

inspiration in their idyls of fetes champetres and aristocratic

lovers playing at Arcadia; here stemmed Watteau and Fragonard; here

rose the rosy nudes of Boucher, the gracious children and women

conceived by Greuze. Here, perhaps, Turner found something of the

sunshine with which he illuminated London.

So, in Veronese's blaze of color, ended the Golden Age of the

Adriatic Queen. Art could hardly go further in the direction that it

had followed from Giorgione to Veronese. Technical perfection had been

reached; the heights had been scaled; now there would be a slow

descent until, in the eighteenth century, Tiepolo would rival Veronese

in decorative painting, and Goldoni would be the Aristophanes of

Venice in a last burst of splendor before the republic's death.

VI. PERSPECTIVE

-

As we look back across the heyday of Venetian art, and diffidently

seek to assess its role in our heritage, we may say at once that

only Florence and Rome rivaled it in excellence, splendor, and

scope. It is true that the Venetian painters, even Titian, probed less

deeply than the Florentines into the secret hopes and feelings, the

despairs and tragedies of men, that often they loved the raiment and

the flesh too keenly to reach the soul. Ruskin was right: after the

Bellini, and excepting Lotto, real religion fades from Venetian

art. `052238 The Venetians could not help it if the collapse of the

Crusades, the triumph and spread of Islam, the deterioration of the

papacy at Avignon and in the Papal Schism, the secularization of the

papacy under Sixtus IV and Alexander VI, and finally the secession

of Germany and England from the Roman Church, had weakened the faith

even of the faithful, and had left many vigorous spirits no better

philosophy than to eat and drink and mate and disappear. But never

elsewhere had Christian art and pagan art lived in such contented

harmony. The same brush that painted a Virgin painted a Venus next,

and no one effectively complained. Nor was it a sybaritic art or

life of luxury and ease; the artists worked themselves to

exhaustion, and the people whom they portrayed were often men who

fought battles and governed states, or women who ruled such men.

The Venetian painters were too enamored of color to match the

careful draftsmanship of the Florentine masters. But they were good

draftsmen none the less. A Frenchman once said that l'ete c'est un

coloriste, l'hiver c'est un dessinateur - "summer is a colorist,

winter is a designer"; `052239 the leafless trees reveal pure line.

But those lines are still there under the green of spring, the brown

of summer, and autumn's gold. Beneath the glory of color in Giorgione,

Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese there is line, but it is absorbed

by the color, as the structural form of a symphony is concealed by its

flow.

Venetian art and literature sang the glory of Venice even as her

economy sank to ruin in a Mediterranean dominated at one end by the

Turks and deserted at the other by a Europe seeking American gold. And

perhaps the artists and poets were justified. No vicissitudes of trade

or war could extinguish the proud memory of a marvelous century-

1480-1580- during which the Mocenigo and Priuli and Loredani had

made and saved imperial Venice, and the Lombardi and Leopardi had

adorned her with statuary, and Sansovino and Palladio had crowned

her waters with churches and palaces, and the Bellini and Giorgione

and Titian and Tintoretto and Veronese had lifted her to the art

leadership of Italy, and Bembo had sung impeccable songs, and Manutius

had poured forth, to all who cared, the literary heritage of Greece

and Rome, and the irredeemable, irrepressible, Mephistophelean Scourge

of Princes had sat enthroned on the Grand Canal, judging and milking

the world.

CHAPTER XXIII: The Waning of the Renaissance: 1534-76

I. THE DECLINE OF ITALY

-

THE wars of invasion were not yet at an end, but they had already

changed the face and character of Italy. The northern provinces had

been so devastated that English envoys advised Henry VIII to leave

them to Charles as a punishment. Genoa had been pillaged; Milan had

been taxed to death. Venice had been subdued by the League of

Cambrai and the opening of new trade routes. Rome, Prato, and Pavia

had suffered sack, Florence had been starved and financially bled,

Pisa had half destroyed herself in her struggle for freedom, Siena was

exhausted with revolutions. Ferrara had impoverished herself in her

long contest with the popes, and had dishonored herself by abetting

the irresponsible attack upon Rome. The Kingdom of Naples, like

Lombardy, had been ravaged and plundered by foreign armies, and had

long languished under alien dynasties. Sicily was already the

nursery of brigands. The only consolation of Italy was that its

conquest by Charles V had probably saved it from spoliation by the

Turks.

By the settlement of Bologna (1530) the control of Italy passed to

Spain with two exceptions: cautious Venice retained her

independence, and the chastened papacy was confirmed in its

sovereignty over the States of the Church. Naples, Sicily, Sardinia,

and Milan became Spanish dependencies, ruled by Spanish viceroys.

Savoy and Mantua, Ferrara and Urbino, which had usually supported or

connived with Charles, were allowed to keep their indigenous dukes

subject to their good behavior. Genoa and Siena retained their

republican forms, but as Spanish protectorates. Florence was compelled

to accept another line of Medici rulers, who survived by

co-operating with Spain.

The victory of Charles marked another triumph of the modern state

over the Church. What Philip IV of France had begun in 1303 was

completed by Charles and Luther in Germany, by Francis I in France, by

Henry VIII in England, and all in Clement's pontificate. The powers of

northern Europe had not only discovered the weakness of Italy, they

had lost their fear of the papacy. The humiliation of Clement

injured the respect that the transalpine populations had felt for

the popes, and prepared them mentally for their secession from

Catholic authority.

In some ways the Spanish hegemony was a boon to Italy. It put an end

for a time to the wars of the Italian states against one another;

and after 1559 it ended, till 1796, the battles of foreign powers on

Italian soil. It gave the people some continuity of political order,

and quieted the fierce individualism that had made and unmade the

Renaissance. Those who craved order accepted the subjugation with

relief; those who cherished freedom mourned. But soon the costs and

penalties of peace by subjection damaged the economy and broke the

spirit of Italy. The high taxes levied by the viceroys to sustain

their pomp and soldiery, the severity of their laws, the state

monopolies in grain and other necessaries, discouraged industry and

commerce; and the native princes, competing in vain luxury, followed

the same policy of taxing to frustration the economic activity that

supported them. Shipping declined to a point where the surviving

galleys could no longer protect themselves from Berber pirates, who

raided ships and coasts and carried Italians off to serve Moslem

dignitaries as slaves. Almost as irksome were the foreign troops

quartered on Italian homes, openly despising a once unrivaled people

and civilization, and contributing more than their share to the sexual

laxity of the age.

Another misfortune befell Italy, more enduringly disastrous than the

devastations of war and the subjection to Spain. The rounding of the

Cape of Good Hope (1488) and the opening of an all-water route to

India (1498) provided a cheaper means of transport between the

Atlantic nations and Central Asia and the Far East than the

troublesome route across the Alps to Genoa or Venice, thence to

Alexandria, overland to the Red Sea, and again by ship to India.

Moreover, the control of the eastern Mediterranean by the Turks made

that route hazardous, subject to tribute, piracy, and war; and this

was still more true of the route via Constantinople and the Black Sea.

After 1498 Venetian and Genoese trade, and Florentine finance,

declined. As early as 1502 the Portuguese bought so much of the

available pepper in India that the Egyptian-Venetian merchants there

found little left for export. `05231 The price of pepper rose one

third in a year on the Rialto, while in Lisbon it could be had for

half the price that merchants had to charge in Venice; `05232 the

German traders began to desert their Fondaco on the Grand Canal and

transfer their buying to Portugal. Venetian statesmanship almost

solved the problem in 1504 by proposing to the Mameluke government

of Egypt a united enterprise to restore the old canal system between

the Nile delta and the Red Sea; but the Turkish conquest of Egypt in

1517 blocked the plan.

In that year Luther pinned his rebel theses to the door of a

Wittenberg church. The Reformation was both a cause and a result of

the economic decline of Italy. It was a cause in so far as it

diminished the movement of pilgrims and ecclesiastical revenues from

the northern nations into Rome. It was an effect insomuch as the

replacement of the Mediterranean-Egyptian route to India by the

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

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