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

all-water route, and the development of European commerce with

America, enriched the Atlantic countries while helping to impoverish

Italy; German trade moved more and more down the Rhine to North Sea

outlets, less and less over the mountains to Italy; Germany became

commercially independent of Italy; a northward drift and pull of power

wrenched Germany from the Italian web of trade and religion, and

gave Germany the will and strength to stand alone.

The discovery of America had even more lasting effects upon Italy

than the new route to India. Gradually the Mediterranean nations

declined, left on a siding in the movement of men and goods; the

Atlantic nations came to the fore, enriched with American trade and

gold. This was a greater revolution in commercial routes than any that

history had recorded since Greece, by her victory at Troy, had

opened to her vessels the Black Sea route to Central Asia. It would be

equaled and surpassed only by the airplane transformation of trade

routes in the second half of the twentieth century.

The final factor in the fading of the Renaissance was the Counter

Reformation. To Italy's own political disorder and moral decay, to her

subjugation and desolation by foreign powers, to her loss of trade

to the Atlantic nations, to her forfeiture of revenue in the

Reformation, was now added a detrimental but natural change in the

mood and conduct of the Church. The unformulated, perhaps unconscious,

gentlemen's agreement by which the Church, while rich and apparently

secure, had permitted considerable freedom of thought in the

intellectual classes provided these made no attempt to disturb the

faith of the people- to whom that faith was the vital poetry,

discipline, and consolation of life- was ended by the German

Reformation, the English secession, and the Spanish hegemony. When the

people themselves began to reject the doctrines and authority of the

Church, and the Reformation made converts even in Italy, the whole

structure of Catholicism was threatened in its foundations, and the

Church, considering herself a state, and behaving like any state

imperiled in its very existence, reacted from tolerance and liberalism

to a frightened conservatism that laid severe restraints upon thought,

inquiry, publication, and speech. The Spanish domination affected

religion as well as politics; it shared in transforming the lenient

Catholicism of the Renaissance into the rigid orthodoxy of the

Church after the Council of Trent (1545-63). The popes who followed

Clement VII took over the Spanish system of uniting Church and state

in strict control of religious and intellectual life.

Just as a Spaniard had been instrumental in establishing the

Inquisition when, in the thirteenth century, the Albigensian revolt

had vitally challenged the Church in southern France, and new

religious orders had then been founded to serve the Church and renew

the fervor of the Christian faith, so now in the sixteenth century the

rigor of the Spanish Inquisition was imported into Italy, and a

Spaniard founded the Jesuits (1534)- that remarkable Society of

Jesus which would not only accept the old conventual vows of

poverty, chastity, and obedience, but would go forth into the world to

spread the orthodox faith, and to fight, everywhere in Christendom,

against religious heresy or revolt. The intensity of religious

debate in the age of the Reformation, the Calvinist intolerance, the

mutual persecutions in England, encouraged a corresponding dogmatism

in Italy; `05233 the urbane Catholicism of Erasmus gave place to the

militant orthodoxy of Ignatius Loyola. Liberalism is a luxury of

security and peace.

That censorship of publications which had begun under Pope Sixtus IV

was extended by the establishment of the Index librorum prohibitorum

in 1559 and the Congregation of the Index in 1571. Printing

facilitated censorship; it was easier to watch public printers than

private copyists. So in Venice, which had been so hospitable to

intellectual and political refugees, the state itself, feeling that

religious division would damage social unity and order, instituted

(1527) a censorship of the press, and joined with the Church in

suppressing Protestant publications. Italians here and there

resisted these policies; the Roman populace, on the death of Paul IV

(1559), cast his statue into the Tiber, and burned the headquarters of

the Inquisition to the ground. `05234 But such resistance was

sporadic, unorganized, and ineffectual. Authoritarianism triumphed,

and a somber pessimism and resignation fell upon the spirit of the

once joyous and exuberant Italian people. Even the dark Spanish dress-

black cap, black doublet, black hose, black shoes- became the

fashion in once colorful Italy, as if the people had put on mourning

for glory departed and liberty dead. `05235

Some moral advance accompanied the intellectual retreat. The conduct

of the clergy improved, now that competitive faiths put them on

their mettle; and the popes and the Council of Trent reformed many

ecclesiastical abuses. Whether a similar movement occurred in the

morals of the laity is hard to determine; apparently it is as easy

to gather instances of sexual irregularity, illegitimacy, incest,

obscene literature, political corruption, robbery, and brutal crime in

the Italy of 1534-76 as before. `05236 The Autobiography of

Benvenuto Cellini indicates that fornication, adultery, brigandage,

and murder tempered the orthodoxy of the age. Criminal law remained as

severe as before: torture was frequently applied to innocent witnesses

as well as to the accused, and murderers still had their flesh torn

away by red-hot pincers before being hanged. `05237 The restoration of

slavery as a major economic institution belongs to this period. When

Pope Paul III opened war upon England in 1535 he decreed that any

English soldiers captured might lawfully be enslaved. `05238 About

1550 the custom developed of using slaves and convicts to row the

galleys of trade and war.

Nevertheless the popes of this period were men of relatively high

morals in their personal life. Paul III was the greatest of them- that

same Alessandro Farnese who had obtained the cardinalate through the

effect of his sister's golden hair upon the spirits of Alexander VI.

It is true that Paul had begotten two bastards; `05239 but this had

been an accepted custom in his youth, and Guicciardini could still

describe him as "a man adorned with learning, and of unspotted

character." `052310 He had been trained as a humanist by Pomponius

Laetus; his letters rivaled those of Erasmus in the classic elegance

of their Latin; he was an accomplished conversationalist, and

surrounded himself with capable and distinguished men. However, he was

elected probably less for his talents and virtues than for his age and

infirmities; he was sixty-six, and the cardinals could reasonable rely

upon him to die soon and give them another chance to make bargains and

receive more lucrative benefices. `052311 He held them at bay for

fifteen years.

For Rome his pontificate was among the happiest in the history of

the city. Under his direction Latino Manetti, his maestro delle

strade, drained, leveled, and widened streets, opened up many new

public squares, replaced slum houses with handsome dwellings, and so

improved one avenue- the Corso- that it became the Champs Elysees of

Rome. As a diplomat Paul's greatest feat was to persuade Charles V and

Francis I to a ten years' truce (1538). He almost achieved a greater

aim- a reconciliation of the Church with the Protestants of Germany;

but his efforts came too late. He had the courage- so lacking in

Clement VII- to call a general council. Under his presidency and

with his approval the Council of Trent restated the orthodox faith,

reformed many ecclesiastical abuses, restored discipline and

morality among the clergy, and shared with the Jesuits in saving the

Latin nations for the Roman Church.

Paul's tragic failure was his nepotism. He gave Camerino to his

grandson Ottavio, and he invested his son Pierluigi with Piacenza

and Parma. Pierluigi was assassinated by discontented citizens, and

Ottavio joined in a conspiracy against his grandfather. Paul lost

his love of life, and died two years later of a heart stroke at

eighty-three (1549). He was mourned by the Romans as no other pope

since Pius II a century before.

II. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

-

In those sciences that did not affect theology Italy continued to

make such moderate progress as could come from a nation

predominantly disposed to art and literature, and in reaction

against an intellect that had discarded conscience. Varoli, Eustachio,

and Fallopio, whose names are imbedded in the terminology of modern

anatomy, date from this brief age. Niccolo Tartaglia found a way to

solve cubic equations; he confided his method to Jerome Cardan

(Geronimo Cardano), who published it as his own (1545). Tartaglia

challenged him to an algebraic duel, in which each was to propose

thirty-one problems to be solved by the other. Cardan accepted, but

disdainfully delegated one of his pupils to solve Tartaglia's

problems. The pupil failed, Tartaglia succeeded, but Cardan wrote a

strange and fascinating autobiography which has kept his head above

the Lethe of time.

It begins with the startling candor that characterizes it to the

end:

-

Although various abortive medicines, as I have heard, were tried

in vain, I was born on September 24, 1501.... Since Jupiter was in the

ascendant and Venus ruled the horoscope, I was not maimed save in

the genitals, so that from my twenty-first to my thirty-first year I

was unable to lie with women; and many a time I lamented my fate,

envying all other men their good fortune. `052312

-

This was only one of his disabilities. He stuttered, suffered all

his life from hoarseness and catarrh of the throat, frequently from

indigestion, palpitation of the heart, rupture, colic, dysentery,

hemorrhoids, gout, itching skin, a cancerous growth on the left

nipple, the plague, tertian fever, and "an annual period of

sleeplessness lasting about eighty days." "In 1536 I was overtaken

with an extraordinary discharge of urine; and although for nearly

forty years I have been afflicted with this trouble, giving from sixty

to a hundred ounces in a single day, I live well." `052313

Endowed with all this clinical experience, he became a successful

physician, cured himself of almost everything except vanity,

achieved the reputation of being the most sought-for physician in

Italy, and was called as far afield as Scotland to cure an incurable

archbishop, whom he cured. At thirty-four he gave public lectures in

Milan on mathematics, and at thirty-five on medicine. In 1545,

borrowing a title from Raymond Lully, he published a book, Ars

magna, wherein he made substantial contributions to algebra- which

still speaks of "Cardan's rule" for solving cubic equations. He was

apparently the first to perceive that quadratic equations might have

negative roots. With Tartaglia, and long before Descartes, he

considered the application of algebra to geometry. `052314 In De

subtilitate rerum (1551) he discussed painting and color; in De

rerum varietate (1557) he summarized the physical knowledge of his

time; both of these books owed much to Leonardo's unpublished

manuscripts. `052315 Amid sickness, travels, and devastating

tribulations, he wrote 230 books, of which 138 have been printed. Some

he had the courage to burn.

He taught medicine in the universities of Pavia and Bologna, but

so mingled his science with occultism and braggadocio that he

forfeited the respect of his colleagues. He devoted a large volume

to the relations between the planets and the human face. He was as

expert and absurd as Freud in interpreting dreams, and as firm a

believer in guardian angels as Fra Angelico. Yet he named, as the

ten greatest intellects in history, men not overwhelmingly

Christian: Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Apollonius of Perga,

Archytas of Tarentum, al-Khwarizmi, al-Kindi, Gebir, Duns Scotus,

and Richard Swineshead- all scientists except Duns. Cardan made a

hundred enemies, invited a thousand calumnies, married miserably,

and fought unsuccessfully to save his eldest son from being executed

for poisoning an unfaithful wife. In 1570 he moved to Rome. He was

arrested there for debt or heresy or both; but Gregory XIII released

and pensioned him.

At seventy-four he wrote De vita propria liber ( A Book of My

Own Life )- one of three remarkable autobiographies composed in this

period in Italy. With almost the garrulousness and fidelity of

Montaigne, he analyzes himself- body, mind, character, habits, likes

and dislikes, virtues and vices, honors and dishonors, errors and

prophecies, illnesses, eccentricities, and dreams. He accuses

himself of obstinacy, bitterness, unsociability, hasty judgment,

pugnacity, cheating at gambling, vengefulness, and mentions "the

debaucheries of the Sardanapalian life I led in the year when I was

rector of the University of Padua." `052316 He lists "things in

which I feel that I have failed"- especially the proper rearing of his

sons. But he lists also seventy-three books that mention him; tells of

his many successful cures and predictions, and his invincibility in

debate. He bemoans the persecutions to which he was subjected, and the

hazards "that beset me on account of my unorthodox views." `052317

He asks himself, "What animal do I find more treacherous, vile, and

deceitful than man?" and offers no reply. But he records many things

that give him happiness, including change, food, drink, sailing,

music, puppies, cats, continence, and sleep. "Of all ends that man may

attain, none seems more worthy or more pleasing than the recognition

of truth." `052318 His favorite pursuit was medicine, in which he

achieved many surprising cures.

Medicine was the only science that made any significant progress

in this period of Italy's decline. The greatest scientists of the

age spent many years in Italy as students and teachers- Copernicus

from 1496 to 1506, Vesalius from 1537 to 1546; but we must not steal

them from Poland and Flanders to further honor Italy. Realdo

Colombo, who succeeded Vesalius as professor of anatomy at Padua,

expounded the pulmonary circulation of the blood in De re

anatomica (1558), probably unaware that Servetus had proposed the

same theory twelve years before. Colombo practised the dissection of

human cadavers at Padua and Rome, apparently without ecclesiastical

opposition; `052319 he seems also to have vivisected dogs. Gabriele

Fallopio, a pupil of Vesalius, discovered and described the

semicircular canals and the chorda tympani of the ear, and the

tubes, now named after him, that bear the ova from the ovaries to

the uterus. Bartolommeo Eustachio described and gave his name to the

Eustachian tube of the ear and the Eustachian valve of the heart; to

him also we owe the discovery of the abducens nerve, the suprarenal

bodies, and the thoracic duct. Costanzo Varoli studied the pons

Varolii- a mass of nerves on the undersurface of the brain.

We have no figures as to the effects of medicine on human

longevity in the Renaissance. Varoli died at thirty-two, Fallopio at

forty, Colombo at forty-three, Eustachio at fifty; on the other hand

Michelangelo lived to eighty-nine, Titian to ninety-nine, Luigi

Cornaro to approximately a century. Born at Venice in 1467 or earlier,

Luigi was rich enough to indulge in every luxury of food, drink, and

love. These "excesses caused me to fall a prey to various ailments,

such as pains in the stomach, frequent pains in the side, symptoms

of gout... a low fever that was almost continuous... and an

unquenchable thirst. This evil condition left me nothing to hope for

except that death should terminate my troubles." When he was forty his

physicians abandoned all medicaments and advised him that his only

hope of recovery lay in "a temperate and orderly life.... I was not to

partake of any foods, either solid or liquid, save such as are

prescribed for invalids; and of these in small quantities only." He

was allowed to eat meat and drink wine, but always in moderation;

and he soon reduced his total daily intake to twelve ounces of food

and fourteen of wine. Within a year, he tells us, "I found myself

entirely cured of all my complaints.... I grew most healthy, and

have remained so from that time to this"- `052320 i.e., age

eighty-three. He found that this order and moderation of physical

habits made for similar qualities and health of mind and character;

his "brain remained constantly in a clear condition;.... melancholy,

hatred, and the other passions" left him; even his esthetic sense

was sharpened, and all lovely things seemed to him now more

beautiful than ever before.

He spent a quiet and comfortable old age at Padua, undertook and

financed public works, and wrote, at eighty-three, his

autobiographical Discorsi della vita sobria. Tintoretto has pictured

him for us in a delectable portrait: bald head but ruddy face, eyes

clear and penetrating, wrinkles spelling benevolence, white beard

thinned with years, hands still revealing, so near to death, an

aristocratic youth. His octogenarian vivacity encourages us as he

rallies those who thought life after seventy to be a meaningless

valetudinarian procrastination:

-

Let them come and see, and wonder at my good health, how I mount

on horseback without help, how I run upstairs and uphill, how

cheerful, amusing, and contented I am, how free from care and

disagreeable thoughts. Peace and joy never quit me.... All my senses

(thank God!) are in the best condition, including the sense of

taste; for I enjoy more the simple food that I now take in

moderation than all the delicacies that I ate in my years of

disorder.... When I come home I see before me not one or two but

eleven grandchildren.... I take delight in hearing them sing and

play on different musical instruments. I sing myself, and find my

voice better, clearer, and louder than ever.... My life, therefore, is

alive, not dead; nor would I exchange my old age for the youth of such

as live in the service of their passions. `052321

-

At eighty-six, "full of health and strength," he wrote a second

discourse, expressing his joy at the conversion of several friends

to his way of life. At ninety-one he added a third essay, and told how

"I constantly write, and with my own hand, eight hours a day, and...

in addition to this I walk and sing for many other hours.... For I

feel, when I leave the table, that I must sing.... Oh, how beautiful

and sonorous my voice has become!" At ninety-two he composed "A loving

exhortation... to all mankind to follow the orderly and temperate

life." `052322 He looked forward to completing a century, and to an

easy death through the gradual diminution of his senses, feelings, and

vital spirits. He died peacefully in 1566; some say at ninety-nine,

others at one hundred and three or four. His wife, we are told, obeyed

his precepts, lived to nearly a century, and died in "perfect ease

of body and security of soul." `052323

-

We must not expect to find a major philosopher in so small a span of

space and time. Iacopo Aconzio, an Italian Protestant, in a treatise

De methodo (1558), prepared part of the way for Descartes; and in

De stratagematibus Satanae (1565) he had the audacity to suggest

that all Christianity might be reduced to a few doctrines held by

all Christians, and not including the idea of the Trinity. `052324

Mario Nizzoli made a path for Francis Bacon by inveighing against

the continued reign of Aristotle in philosophy, appealing for direct

observation against deductive reasoning, and denouncing logic as the

art of proving the false to be true. `052325 Bernardino Telesio of

Cosenza, in De rerum natura (1565-86), joined Nizzoli and Pierre

La Ramee in the spreading revolt against the authority of Aristotle,

and called for empirical science: Nature must be explained in her

own terms through the experience of our senses. What we see, said

Telesio, is matter acted upon by two forces: heat coming from the sky,

cold rising from the earth; heat producing expansion and motion,

cold producing contraction and rest; in the conflict of these two

principles lies the inner essence of all physical phenomena. These

phenomena proceed according to natural causes and inherent laws,

without the intervention of deity. Nature, however, is not inert;

there is a soul in things as well as in man. Tommaso Campanella,

Giordano Bruno, and Francis Bacon would all take something from

these ideas. Some measure of liberalism must have survived in the

Church to let Telesio die a natural death (1588). Twelve years later

the Inquisition would burn Bruno at the stake.

III. LITERATURE

-

The great age of Italian scholarship was now ended: France took

the torch when Julius Caesar Scaliger migrated from Verona to Agen

in 1526. Note the effect of war upon the book trade: in the last

decade of the fifteenth century Florence published 179 books, Milan

228, Rome 460, Venice 1491; in the first decade of the sixteenth

century Florence published 47, Milan 99, Rome 41, Venice

536. `052326 The academies founded for classical scholarship- the

Platonic Academy at Florence, the Roman Academy of Pomponius Laetus,

the Neacademia at Venice, the Neapolitan Academy of Pontanus- died out

in this period; the study of pagan philosophy was frowned upon

except in a Scholastified Aristotle; and Latin gave place to Italian

as the language of literature. New academies sprang up, chiefly

devoted to literary and linguistic criticism, and serving as central

exchanges of ears for the poets of the town. So Florence had the Della

Crusca Academy (1572) and the Umidi; Venice had the Pellegrini,

Padua the Eretei; and each new society took a sillier name. These

academies encouraged talent and stifled genius; poets struggled to

obey the rules laid down by the purists, and inspiration fled to

airier haunts. Michelangelo belonged to no literary academy, and

though he, like the rest, indulged his Muse in trite conceits, and

forced his fire into cold Petrarchian molds, his sonnets, rough in

form but warm in feeling and thought, are the best Italian poetry of

the time. Luigi Alamanni fled from Florence to France, and composed

a poem on agriculture- La coltivazione - which did not fall far short

of Virgil's Georgics in combining tillage with poetry. *05059

Bernardo Tasso rehearsed, in the misfortunes of his life, the

vicissitudes of his famous son Torquato; his lyrics are among the

choicest artificialities of the age; his epic, Amadigi, versified

with heavy seriousness the chivalric romance, Amadis de Gaul. The

Italian public, missing in it Ariosto's leavening humor, gave it a

quiet burial.

The novella, or short story, had remained popular ever since

The Decameron had given it a classic form. Written in simple

language, and usually describing dramatic incidents or intimate scenes

of Italian life, the novelle were welcomed by all ranks. Often

they were read aloud to avid listeners, none more avid than the

letterless, so that their audience was all Italy. We may marvel

today at the broad tolerance of Renaissance women who heard these

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

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