Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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tales without reported blushing. Love, seduction, violence, adventure,
humor, sentiment, descriptions of scenery, provided the material of
the stories, and every class furnished types and characters.
Almost every city had a skilled practitioner of the form. At Salerno
Tommaso de' Guardati, known as Masuccio, published in 1476 his
Novellino - fifty stories illustrating the generosity of princes, the
incontinence of women, the vices of monks, and the hypocrisy of
mankind. Less polished than Boccaccio's novelettes, they often surpass
them in sincerity, power, and eloquence. At Siena the novella took
on a highly sensuous quality, filling its pages with tales of
unlicensed love. Florence had four famous novellieri. Franco
Sacchetti, friend and imitator of Boccaccio, outwinded him by
writing three hundred novelle, whose vulgarity and obscenity made
them almost universally popular. Agnolo Firenzuola devoted many of his
stories to satirizing the sins of the clergy; he described the
goings-on in a dissolute convent, exposed the arts by which confessors
induced pious women to leave legacies to monasteries, and himself
became a monk of the Vallombrosan order. Antonfrancesco Grazzini,
known to Italy as il Lasca, the Roach, excelled in comic stories,
featuring the prankster Pilucca, but he could also season his dish
with sex and blood, as when a husband, finding his wife in adultery
with his son, cuts off their hands and feet, cuts out their eyes and
tongues, and lets them bleed to death on their bed of love.
Antonfrancesco Doni, a Servite monk and priest, was expelled from
the cloister of the Annunciation (1540), apparently for sodomy; at
Piacenza he joined a club of profligates devoted to Priapus; in Venice
he became a devoted enemy of Aretino, against whom he wrote a pamphlet
ominously entitled "Earthquake of Doni the Florentine, with the Ruin
of the Great Colossus and Bestial Antichrist of Our Age"; meanwhile
composing novelle noted for their pungent humor and style.
The best of the novellieri was Matteo Bandello, whose life spanned
half a continent and most of a century (1480-1562). Born near Tortona,
he was soon entered into the Dominican order, whose general was his,
uncle. He grew up in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in
Milan; he was presumably there when Leonardo painted The Last Supper
in the refectory, and when Beatrice d'Este was buried in the adjoining
church. He lived at Mantua for six years as tutor in the ruling
family, carried on a flirtation with Lucrezia Gonzaga, and saw
Isabella fight with all her arts the coming of old age. Returning to
Milan, he actively supported the French against the Spanish-German
forces in Italy; after the French disaster at Pavia his house was
burned and his library was almost totally destroyed, including a Latin
dictionary which he had almost completed. He fled to France, served
Cesare Fregoso, General of the Dominicans, well, and was made Bishop
of Agen (1550). In his leisure hours he gathered together the 214
stories that he had written during the years, gave them their finished
literary form, covered their mild indecency with his episcopal
absolution, and had them printed in three volumes at Lucca (1554), and
a fourth at Lyons (1573).
As in the other novellieri, so in Bandello the plots turn mostly
on love or violence, or the morals of friars, monks, and priests. A
sweet lass revenges herself upon a faithless lover by tearing him to
pieces with pincers; a husband forces his adulterous wife to
strangle her lover with her own hands; a convent abandoned to
debauchery is described with tolerant good humor. Some of Bandello's
stories provided material for exciting dramas, as when Webster took
from one of them the plot for The Duchess of Malfi. Bandello tells
with feeling and skill the romance of Romeo Montecchio and Giulietta
Capelletti, and vividly conveys the passion of their love. Shall we
sample him at his most romantic?
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Romeo, not daring to inquire who the damsel was, applied himself
to feed his eyes on her lovely sight, and minutely considering all her
movements, drank the sweet amorous poison, marvelously commending
her every part and gesture. He was seated in a corner wherein, when
dancing was toward, all passed before him. Giulietta (for so was the
damsel called) was the daughter of the master of the house and giver
of the feast. And she likewise, not knowing Romeo, but seeing withal
that he was the handsomest and sprightliest youth that might be found,
was marvelously pleased with his sight, and softly and furtively
eyeing him a while askance, felt I know not what sweetness at heart,
which all to-flooded her with exceeding delight; wherefore she would
fain have had him join the dance, so she might the better see him
and hear him speak, herseeming as much delight should issue from his
speech as she still drank in at his eyes, what while she gazed on him;
but he sat all alone and showed no wish to dance. All his study was to
ogle the fair damsel, and she thought of nothing but to look upon him,
and so they viewed each other on such wise that, their eyes bytimes
encountering, and the flashing rays of the one and the other's glances
mingling, they lightly perceived that they eyed each other
amorously; more by token that, whenassoever their eyes met, both
filled the air with amorous sighs, and it seemed they desired for
the nonce no otherwhat than to discover one to other by speech their
newborn flame. `052327
-
The climax in Bandello is subtler than in Shakespeare. Instead of
Romeo dying before Juliet emerges from her coma, she awakes before
Romeo feels the effect of the poison he has drunk in despair at her
apparent death. In his joy at her recovery he forgets the poison,
and the lovers have a few moments of delirious joy. When the poison
wreaks its force and Romeo dies, Juliet stabs herself with his
sword. *05060
IV. TWILIGHT IN FLORENCE: 1534-74
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It is easier to rule a state in its decline than in its youth;
diminished vitality almost welcomes subjugation. Florence, beaten down
again by the Medici (1530), submitted wearily to domination by Clement
VII; it rejoiced when the coarse tyrant Alessandro de' Medici was
slain by his remote relative Lorenzino (1537); and, instead of seizing
the opportunity to re-establish the republic, it accepted a second
Cosimo, in hopes that he might show the wisdom and statesmanship of
the first. The direct line of Cosimo Pater Patriae was now legally
extinct; the younger Cosimo was descended from his older namesake's
brother Lorenzo (1395-1440). Guicciardini manoeuvred the new ruler,
then eighteen, into lordship in the hope of being the power behind the
throne; but he forgot that the young Medici was the son of Giovanni
delle Bande Nere and the grandson of Caterina Sforza, and therefore
had at least two generations of iron in his blood. Cosimo took the
reins in his own hands, and held them firmly for twenty-seven years.
His character and government mingled evil and good. He was as severe
and cruel as unsentimental policy might dictate. He did not bother,
like earlier Medici, to maintain republican forms and facade. He
arranged a system of espionage that entered every family, and used
parish priests as spies. `052329 He enforced unanimity of professed
religious belief, and co-operated with the Inquisition. He was greedy
of wealth and power, exploited the state monopoly of grain, taxed his
subjects avidly, overthrew the semi-republic of Siena to make that
city, like Arezzo and Pisa, part of his dominions, and persuaded Pope
Pius V to give him the title of grand duke of Tuscany (1569).
In partial compensation for the absolutism of his rule, he organized
efficient administration, a reliable army and police, a competent
and incorruptible judiciary. He lived simply, avoided costly
ceremony and display, managed finances stringently, and left a full
treasury to his son and heir. The order and safety that were now
maintained on streets and highways revived the commerce and industry
that had ailed under repeated revolutions. Cosimo brought in new
manufactures, as of coral and glass; he invited and protected
Portuguese Jews as a stimulus to industrial development; he enlarged
Livorno (Leghorn) as a busy port. He had the marshes of the Maremma
drained in an effort to free that region, and nearby Siena, from
malaria. Under his conscientious despotism Siena, like Florence,
became more prosperous than ever before. He used part of his levied
wealth to support literature and art without extravagance and with
discrimination. He raised the Accademia degli Umidi to an official
position as the Accademia Fiorentina, and commissioned it to set norms
for proper Tuscan usage. He befriended Vasari and Cellini, tried
hard to win Michelangelo back to Florence, and founded, under his
absent presidency, an Arte del Disegno, or Academy of Design. He
established at Pisa (1544) a school of botany second only to Padua's
in age and excellence. Doubtless Cosimo would have argued that he
could not have accomplished this good had he not begun with a little
evil and an iron fist.
At forty-five this iron Duke was already worn out with the strains
of power and family tragedies. Within a few months, in 1562, his
wife and two of his sons died from malarial fever caught during his
efforts to drain the Maremma swamps. A year later he lost a
daughter. In 1564 he resigned the actual government to his son
Francesco. He tried to console himself with amours but found more
boredom in promiscuity than in marriage. He died in 1574, aged
fifty-five. He had lived up to the best and the worst in his ancestry.
Though Florence no longer produced Leonardos or Michelangelos, and
had no artists to compare in this period with the urbane and universal
Titian, the volcanic Tintoretto, or the festal Veronese, she
experienced under her second Cosimo as vigorous a revival as could
be expected from a generation that had grown up amid frustrated revolt
and unsuccessful war. Even so, Cellini judged the artists employed
by Cosimo to be "a band the like of which is not to be found at
present in the world"- `052330 which is a typically Florentine
understatement of Venetian art. Benvenuto thought the Duke a patron
with more taste than generosity, but perhaps this able governor
considered economic reconstruction and political order more vital than
the artistic decoration of his court. Vasari described Cosimo as
"loving and favoring all artists, and indeed all men of genius." It
was Cosimo who financed at Chiusi, Arezzo, and elsewhere the
excavations that revealed a remarkable Etruscan culture, and unearthed
the famous Etruscan bronze statues of The Chimera The Orator, and
Minerva. He bought back as many as he could locate of the art
treasures looted from the Medici palace in 1494 and 1527, added his
own collections to them, and housed the total in that
palace-fortress that Luca Pitti had begun a hundred years before.
Cosimo had this monstrous edifice enlarged by Bartolommeo Ammanati,
and made it his official dwelling (1553).
Ammanati and Vasari were in Florence the leading architects of the
age. It was Ammanati who laid out for Cosimo the famous Boboli Gardens
behind the Pitti Palace, and spanned the Arno with the beautiful Santa
Trinita Bridge (1567-70)- destroyed in the Second World War. He was
also a painter and sculptor of quality; he won sculptural competitions
from Cellini and Giovanni da Bologna, and carved the Juno that
adorns the Bargello court. In his old age he apologized for having
made many pagan figures. The Pagan Renaissance had now (1560) run
its course, and Christianity was regaining its hold on the Italian
mind.
Cosimo made Baccio Bandinelli his favorite sculptor, to the horror
of Cellini. One of Cosimo's recreations was in hearing Cellini
berate Bandinelli. Baccio was popular with himself; he proclaimed
his intention to surpass Michelangelo, and was so critical of other
artists that one of the gentlest, Andrea Sansovino, tried to kill him.
Nearly everybody hated him, but his many commissions in Florence and
Rome suggest that his talent was better than his character. When Leo X
wished to duplicate the complex Laocoon group of the Belvedere as
a gift to Francis I, Cardinal Bibbiena asked Bandinelli to undertake
the assignment; Baccio promised to make a copy superior to the
original. To the general dismay he almost succeeded. Clement VII was
so pleased with the result that he sent authentic antiques to
Francis and kept Baccio's copy for the Medici Palace in Florence,
whence it passed to the Uffizi Gallery. For Clement and Alessandro de'
Medici Bandinelli carved a gigantic group, Hercules and Cacus, which
was set up on the porch of the Palazzo Vecchio beside Michelangelo's
David. Cellini did not like it. "If your Hercules had his hair
cropped," he told Bandinelli in Cosimo's presence, "he would not
have skull enough to hold his brains.... His heavy shoulders remind
one of the two baskets of a donkey's packsaddle. His chest and muscles
are copied not from nature but from a bag of bad melons." `052331
Clement, however, thought the Hercules a masterpiece, and rewarded
the sculptor with a substantial property in addition to the promised
fee. Baccio repaid the compliment by giving the name Clement to a
bastard born to him soon after the Pope's death. His last work was a
tomb prepared by him for himself and his father; as soon as it was
finished he occupied it (1560). Probably he would have greater
renown today had he not been invidiously immortalized by two artists
who could write as well as design- Vasari and Cellini.
Giovanni da Bologna was a more genial competitor. Born at Douai,
he made his way in youth to Rome (1561), resolved to be a sculptor.
After a year of study there he brought a clay sample of his work to
the aged Michelangelo. The old sculptor took it in his hands,
pressed it here and there with his worn fingers and heavy thumbs,
and in a few moments molded it to greater significance. Giovanni never
forgot that visit; throughout the remainder of his eighty-four years
he labored with unrelaxing ambition to equal the Titan. He started
back to Flanders, but a Florentine nobleman advised him to study the
art collected in Florence, and for three years maintained him in his
palace. There were so many Italian artists in or near the city that it
took the Fleming five years to win acceptance for his work. Then
Francesco, son of Duke Cosimo, bought his Venus. He entered a
competition to design a fountain for the Piazza della Signoria; Cosimo
judged him too young for so responsible an assignment, but his model
was rated best by many artists, and probably it won him an
invitation to build a much larger fountain in Bologna. After that
Giovanni was brought back to Florence as official sculptor for the
Medici, and never lacked commissions. When he went to Rome again
Vasari introduced him to the Pope as "the prince of the sculptors of
Florence." `052332 In 1583 he modeled a group, now in the Loggia dei
Lanzi, and named in afterthought The Rape of the Sabines: a hero
virile and muscular holds in his grasp a ravishing woman whose soft
form is realistically compressed against his supporting hand, and
whose back is the loveliest in the bronze sculpture of the
Renaissance.
The sculptors surpassed the painters in Cosimo's galaxy and
regard. Ridolfo Ghirlandaio strove but failed to maintain his father's
excellence; we may sample him from his portrait of Lucrezia Summaria
in Washington. Francesco Ubertini, nicknamed il Bachiacca, liked to
paint historical scenes in great detail on a small scale. Iacopo
Carrucci, called Pontormo from his birthplace, had every advantage and
a good start; he received instruction from Leonardo, Piero di
Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto; and at nineteen (1513) he stirred the
art world with a painting, now lost, that aroused the admiration of
Michelangelo and was pronounced by Vasari "the finest fresco ever seen
till then." `052333 But soon afterward, to the disgust of the
Italians, Pontormo fell in love with the engravings of Durer,
abandoned the smooth lines and harmonies of the Italian style,
preferred crude and heavy Germanic forms, and pictured men and women
in poses of physical or mental disturbance. In frescoes at the Certosa
outside Florence Pontormo painted in this Teutonic style scenes from
the passion of Christ. Vasari resented this imitation: "Was not
Pontormo aware that Germans and Flemings come to learn the Italian
style, which he made such effort to shake off as if it were
bad?" `052334 Even so, Vasari confessed the power of these frescoes.
Pontormo further complicated his art by developing phobias. He never
allowed death to be mentioned in his presence; he avoided feasts and
crowds, lest he be crushed to death; though himself kind and gentle,
he distrusted nearly everyone except his beloved pupil Bronzino.
More and more he courted solitude, until he formed the habit of
sleeping in an upper-story room reachable only by a ladder which he
pulled up after him. On his final assignment- to fresco the main
chapel of San Lorenzo- he worked for eleven years in isolation,
boarding up the chapel and allowing none but himself to enter. He died
(1556) before finishing the task; and when the frescoes were
unveiled it was seen that the figures were badly disproportioned,
the faces excited or melancholy. Let us remember him by a work of
his saner maturity, the lovely portrait of Ugolino Martelli now in
Washington- soft feathered hat, pensive eyes, luminous raiment,
immaculate hands.
Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano, renamed Bronzino, distinguished himself
by a remarkable series of portraits, chiefly of the Medici. The Medici
Palace contains a gallery of them, from Cosimo Pater Patriae to Duke
Cosimo; and if we may judge from the pouchy face of his Leo X,
they were often truthful. The best of them is of Giovanni delle
Bande Nere (Uffizi)- a veritable Napoleon before Bonaparte-
handsome, proud, and breathing fire.
Probably Duke Cosimo's favorite artist was the man to whom this
and every book on the Italian Renaissance owes half its life-
Giorgio Vasari. The family into which he was born at Arezzo already
included several artists; he was distantly related to Luca Signorelli,
and he has told us how the old painter, seeing Giorgio's boyhood
drawings, encouraged him in studying design. In one of those
innumerable acts of magnanimous and clairvoyant patronage that
should be considered in judging the morals of the Renaissance,
Cardinal Passerini, who had been appointed guardian of Ippolito and
Alessandro de' Medici, took Giorgio to Florence; and there the lad
of twelve shared the studies of the young heirs to wealth and power.
He became a pupil of Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo, and to the end
of his life he revered Buonarroti- broken nose and all- as a god.
When the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1527, Giorgio
returned to Arezzo. At eighteen, his father having died of plague,
he found himself the chief support of his three sisters and two
young brothers. Again kindness rescued him. His former fellow pupil,
Ippolito de' Medici, invited him to Rome, where for three years Vasari
sedulously studied ancient and Renaissance art; and in 1530
Alessandro, master of Florence after another restoration, called him
to live and paint in the Palazzo Medici. There he made portraits of
the family, including Lorenzo the Magnificent in a somber study, and
the vivacious young Caterina- posing and opposing at whim, as if
already conscious that she would be queen of France. When Alessandro
was assassinated Vasari wandered for some time patronless. His
paintings are rudely dealt with by modern critics, but they must
have earned him some repute, for at Mantua he was housed by Giulio
Romano, and at Venice Aretino was his burly chaperone. Wherever he
went he carefully studied the local art, talked with artists or
their descendants, collected drawings and made notes. Back in Rome, he
painted for Bindo Altoviti a Deposition from the Cross, which, he
tells us, "had the good fortune not to displease the greatest
sculptor, painter, and architect that ever lived in our time."
It was this Michelangelo who introduced him to the second Cardinal
Alessandro Farnese; and it was this cultivated prelate who, in 1546,
suggested to Vasari that he should compose for the guidance of
posterity the lives of the artists who had so distinguished the
Italy of the preceding two hundred years. While busily serving as
painter and architect in Rome, Rimini, Ravenna, Arezzo, and
Florence, Giorgio devoted part of his time to the unremunerative labor
of the Lives, "moved by love for these our artists." In 1550 he
published the first edition of these Vite de' piu eccelenti
pittori, scultori, ed architetti Italiani, with an eloquent
dedication to Duke Cosimo.
From 1555 to 1572 he was Cosimo's chief artist. He remodeled the
interior of the Palazzo Vecchio and decorated many of its walls with
paintings more immense than magnificent; he raised the vast
administration building known from its governmental offices as the
Uffizi, and now one of the great art galleries of the world. He led in
completing the Laurentian Library, and he constructed the enclosed
corridor that enabled Cosimo to pass under cover from the Palazzo
Vecchio and the Uffizi across the Ponte Vecchio to the new ducal
residence in the Pitti Palace. In 1567 he spent several months in
travel and research, and a year later he brought out a new and much
enlarged edition of the Lives. He died in Florence in 1574, and
was buried with his ancestors in Arezzo.
He was not a great artist but he was a good man, an industrious
investigator, and (barring a few bites at Bandinelli) a generous as
well as intelligent critic. In simple, racy, almost colloquial Tuscan,
and occasionally with the vividness of the novelle, he gave us one
of the most interesting books of all time, from which a thousand other
volumes have been cribbed. It is rich in inaccuracies, anachronisms,
and contradictions, but richer still in fascinating information and
judicious interpretation. It did for the artists of Renaissance
Italy what Plutarch had done for the martial or civic heroes of Greece
and Rome. It will remain for centuries to come one of the classics
of the world's literature.
V. BENVENUTO CELLINI: 1500-71
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There was in this age at the court of Cosimo a man who united in his
character all the violence and sensitivity, all the mad pursuit of
beauty in life and art, all the exhilarating pride of health, skill,
or power, that distinguished the Renaissance; who, moreover, possessed
the spontaneous capacity to pour forth his thoughts and feelings,
vicissitudes and accomplishments, in one of the most engaging and
unforgettable of all autobiographies. Benvenuto was not- no one man
could be- completely typical of the Renaissance genius; he lacked
the piety of Angelico, the craft of Machiavelli, the modesty of
Castiglione, the blithe suavity of Raphael; and surely not all Italian
artists of the time took the law into their own hands as Benvenuto
did. Yet, as we read his turbulent narrative, we feel that his book,
more than any other, more even than Vasari's Lives, takes us
behind the scenes, and into the heart, of the Renaissance.
He begins disarmingly:
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All men, of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of
excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if
they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with
their own hand; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise