Renaissance in Italy Volume I Part 19

[1] Much might be written about the play of the imagination which gave a peculiar complexion to the profligacy, the jealousy, and the vengeance of the Italians. I shall have occasion elsewhere to maintain that in their literature at least the Italians were not a highly imaginative race; nor were they subject to those highly wrought conditions of the brooding fancy, termed by the northern nations Melancholy, which Durer has personified in his celebrated etching, and Burton has described in his _Anatomy._ But in their love and hatred, their l.u.s.t and their cruelty, the Italians required an intellectual element which brought the imaginative faculty into play.

It was due again in a great measure to their demand for imaginative excitement in all matters of the sense, to their desire for the extravagant and extraordinary as a seasoning of pleasure, that the Italians came to deserve so terrible a name among the nations for unnatural pa.s.sions.[1] This is a subject which can hardly be touched in pa.s.sing: yet the opinion may be recorded that it belongs rather to the science of psychopathy than to the chronicle of vulgar l.u.s.ts. English poets have given us the right key to the Italian temperament, on this as on so many other points. Sh.e.l.ley in his portrait of Francesco Cenci has drawn a man in whom cruelty and incest have become appet.i.tes of the distempered soul; the love of Giovanni and Annabella in Ford's tragedy is rightly depicted as more imaginative than sensual. It is no excuse for the Italians to say that they had spiritualized abominable vices.

What this really means is that their immorality was nearer that of devils than of beasts. But in seeking to distinguish its true character, we must take notice of the highly wrought fantasy which seasoned both their luxury and their jealousy, their vengeance and their l.u.s.t.

[1] Italian literature is loud-voiced on this topic. The concluding stanzas of Poliziano's _Orfeo_, recited before the Cardinal of Mantua, the Capitoli of Berni, Bronzino, La Casa, and some of the _Canti Carnasialeschi_, might be cited. We might add Varchi's express testimony as to the morals of Filippo Strozzi, Lorenzino de' Medici, Pier Luigi Farnese, and Clement VII. What Segni (lib. x. p. 409) tells us about the brave Giovanni Bandini is also very significant. In the Life of San Bernardino of Siena, Vespasiano (_Vite di Ill.u.s.tri Uomini_, p. 186) writes: 'L'Italia, ch' era piena di queste tenebre, e aveva lasciata ogni norma di buoni costumi, e non era piu chi conoscesse Iddio. Tanto erano sommersi e sepulti ne' maladetti e abbominevoli vizi nefandi! Gli avevano in modo messi in uso, che non temevano ne Iddio ne l'onore del mondo. Maladetta cecita! In tanto eccesso era venuto ogni cosa, che gli scellerati ed enormi vizi non era piu chi gli stima.s.se, per lo maladetto uso che n'avevano fatto ... ma.s.sime il maladetto e abominando e detestando peccato della sodomia. Erano in modo stracorsi in questa cecita, che bisognava che l'onnipotente Iddio facesse un' altra volta piovere dal cielo zolfo e fuoco come egli fece a Sodoma e Gomorra.' Compare Savonarola pa.s.sim, the inductions to the Sacre Rappresentazioni, the familiar letters of Machiavelli, and the statute of Cosimo against this vice (year 1542, Sabellii Summa. Venice, 1715; vol. v. p. 287).

The same is to some extent true of their cruelty. The really cruel nation of the Renaissance was Spain, not Italy.[1] The Italians, as a rule, were gentle and humane, especially in warfare.[2] No Italian army would systematically have tortured the whole population of a captured city day after day for months, as the Spaniards did in Rome and Milan, to satisfy their avarice and glut their stolid appet.i.te for blood. Their respect for human life again was higher than that of the French or Swiss. They gave quarter to their foes upon the battle-field, and were horrified with the ma.s.sacres in cold blood perpetrated at Fivizzano and Rapallo by the army of Charles VIII. But when the demon of cruelty possessed the imagination of an Italian, when, like Gian Maria Visconti, he came to relish the sight of torment for its own sake, or when he sought to inspire fear by the spectacle of pain, then no Spaniard surpa.s.sed him in the ingenuity of his devices. In gratifying his thirst for vengeance he was never contented with mere murder. To obtain a personal triumph at the expense of his enemy by the display of superior cunning, by rendering him ridiculous, by exposing him to mental as well as physical anguish, by wounding him through his affections or his sense of honor, was the end which he pursued. This is why so many acts of violence in Italy a.s.sumed fantastic forms. Even the country folk showed an infernal art in the execution of their _vendette_. To serve the flesh of children up to their fathers at a meal of courtesy is mentioned, for example, as one mode of wreaking vengeance in country villages. Thus the high culture and aesthetic temperament of the Italians gave an intellectual quality to their vices. Crude l.u.s.t and bloodshed were insipid to their palates: they required the pungent sauce of a melodramatic catastrophe.

[1] Those who wish to gain a lively notion of Spanish cruelty in Italy should read, besides the accounts of the Sacco di Roma by Guicciardini and Buonaparte, the narrative of the Sacco di Prato in the _Archivio Storico Italiano_, vol. i., and Cagnola's account of the Spanish occupation of Milan, ib. vol.

iii.

[2] De Comines more than once notices the humanity shown by the Italian peasants to the French army.

The drunkenness and gluttony of northern nations for a like reason found no favor in Italy. It disgusted the Romans beyond measure to witness the swinish excesses of the Germans. Their own sensuality prompted them to a refined Epicureanism in food and drink; on this point, however, it must be admitted that the prelates, here as elsewhere foremost in profligacy, disgraced the age of Leo with banquets worthy of Vitellius.[1] We trace the same play of the fancy, the same prompt.i.tude to quicken and intensify the immediate sense of personality at any cost of after-suffering, in another characteristic vice of the Italians.

Gambling among them was carried further and produced more harm than it did in the transalpine cities. This we gather from Savonarola's denunciations, from the animated pictures drawn by Alberti in his _Trattato della Famiglia_ and _Cena della Famiglia_ and also from the inductions to many of the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_.[2]

[1] See Gregorovius, _Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. p. 225: 'E li cardinali comenzarono a vomitar e cussi li altri,' quoted from Sanudo.

[2] One of the excellent characteristics of Alfonso the Great (_Vespasiano_, p. 49) was his abhorrence of gambling.

Another point which struck a northern visitor in Italy was the frequency of private and domestic murders.[1] The Italians had and deserved a bad reputation for poisoning and a.s.sa.s.sination. To refer to the deeds of violence in the history of a single family, the Baglioni of Perugia, as recorded by their chronicler Matarazzo; to cite the pa.s.sages in which Varchi relates the deaths by poison of Luisa Strozzi, Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, and Sanga; or to translate the pages of annalists, who describe the palaces of n.o.bles swarming with _bravi_, would be a very easy task.[2] But the sketch of Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, which will form part of my third volume, gives so lively a picture of this aspect of Italian life, that there is no reason to enlarge upon the topic now. It is enough to observe that, in their employment of poison and of paid a.s.sa.s.sins, the Italians were guided by those habits of calculation which distinguished their character.[3] They thought nothing of removing an enemy by craft or violence: but they took no pleasure in murder for its own sake.[4] The object which they had in view prompted them to take a man's life; the mere delight in brawls and bloodshed of Switzers, Germans, and Spaniards offended their taste.

[1] See Guicc. _St. Il._ vol. i. p. 101, for the impression produced upon the army of Charles by the murder by poison of Gian Galeazzo Sforza.

[2] A vivid ill.u.s.tration of the method adopted by hired a.s.sa.s.sins in tracking and hunting down their victims is presented by Frances...o...b..bboni's narrative of his murder of Lorenzino de' Medici at Venice. It casts much curious light, moreover, on the relations between paid _bravi_ and their employers, the esteem in which professional cutthroats were held, and their connection with the police of the Italian towns. It is published in a tract concerning Lorenzino, Milano, Daelli, 1862.

[3] See the instructions given by the Venetian government to their agents for the purchase of poison and the hiring of secret murderers. See also the Maxims laid down by Sarpi.

[4] This at least was accounted eccentric and barbarous in the extreme. See Pontano, _de Immanitate_, vol. i. p. 326, concerning Niccolo Fortibraccio, Antonio, Pontadera, and the Riccio Montechiaro, who stabbed and strangled for the pleasure of seeing men die. I have already discussed the blood-madness of some of the despots.

While the imagination played so important a part in the morality of the Italians, it must be remembered that they were deficient in that which is the highest imaginative safeguard against vice, a scrupulous sense of honor. It is true that the Italian authors talk much about _Onore_.

Pandolfini tells his sons that _Onore_ is one of the qualities which require the greatest thrift in keeping, and Machiavelli a.s.serts that it is almost as dangerous to attack men in their _Onore_ as in their property. But when we come to a.n.a.lyze the word, we find that it means something different from that mixture of conscience, pride, and self-respect which makes a man true to a high ideal in all the possible circ.u.mstances of life. The Italian _Onore_ consisted partly of the credit attaching to public distinction, and partly of a reputation for _Virtu_, understanding that word in its Machiavellian usage, as force, courage, ability, virility. It was not incompatible with craft and dissimulation, or with the indulgence of sensual vices. Statesmen like Guicciardini, who, by the way, has written a fine paragraph upon the very word in question,[1] did not think it unworthy of their honor to traffic in affairs of state for private profit. Machiavelli not only recommended breaches of political faith, but sacrificed his principles to his pecuniary interests with the Medici. It would be curious to inquire how far the obtuse sensibility of the Italians on this point was due to their freedom from vanity.[2] No nation is perhaps less influenced by mere opinion, less inclined to value men by their advent.i.tious advantages: the Italian has the courage and the independence of his personality. It is, however, more important to take notice that Chivalry never took a firm root in Italy; and honor, as distinguished from vanity, _amour propre_, and credit, draws its life from that ideal of the knightly character which Chivalry established.

The true knight was equally sensitive upon the point of honor, in all that concerned the maintenance of an unsullied self, whether he found himself in a king's court or a robber's den. Chivalry, as epitomized in the celebrated oath imposed by Arthur on his peers of the Round Table, was a northern, a Teutonic, inst.i.tution. The sense of honor which formed its very essence was further developed by the social atmosphere of a monarch's court. It became the virtue of the n.o.bly born and chivalrously nurtured, as appears very remarkably in this pa.s.sage from Rabelais[3]: 'En leur reigle n'estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras. Parce que gens liberes, bien nayz, bien instruictz, conversans en compaignies honnesties, ont par nature ung instinct et aguillon qui toujours les poulse a faitctz vertueux, et retire de vice: lequel ils nommoyent honneur.' Now in Italy not only was Chivalry as an inst.i.tution weak; but the feudal courts in which it produced its fairest flower, the knightly sense of honor, did not exist.[4] Instead of a circle of peers gathered from all quarters of the kingdom round the font of honor in the person of the sovereign, commercial republics, forceful tyrannies, and the Papal Curia gave the tone to society. In every part of the peninsula rich bankers who bought and sold cities, adventurers who grasped at princ.i.p.alities by violence or intrigue, and priests who sought the aggrandizement of a sacerdotal corporation, were brought together in the meshes of diplomacy. The few n.o.ble families which claimed a feudal origin carried on wars for pay by contract in the interest of burghers, popes, or despots. Of these conditions not one was conducive to the sense of honor as conceived in France or England. Taken altogether and in combination, they could not fail to be eminently unfavorable to its development. In such a society Bayard and Sir Walter Manny would have been out of place: the motto _n.o.blesse oblige_ would have had but little meaning.[5] Instead of Honor, Virtu ruled the world in Italy. The moral atmosphere again was critical and highly intellectualized. Mental ability combined with personal daring gave rank. But the very subtlety and force of mind which formed the strength of the Italians proved hostile to any delicate sentiment of honor. a.n.a.lysis enfeebles the tact and spontaneity of feeling which const.i.tute its strongest safeguard. All this is obvious in the ethics of the _Principe_. What most astounds us in that treatise is the a.s.sumption that no men will be bound by laws of honor when utility or the object in view require their sacrifice. In conclusion; although the Italians were not lacking in integrity, honesty, probity, or pride, their positive and highly a.n.a.lytical genius was but little influenced by that chivalrous honor which was an enthusiasm and a religion to the feudal nations, surviving the decay of chivalry as a preservative instinct more undefinable than absolute morality. Honor with the northern gentry was subjective; with the Italians _Onore_ was objective--an addition conferred from without, in the shape of reputation, glory, t.i.tles of distinction, or offices of trust.[6]

[1] Ricordi politici e civili, No. 118, _Op. Ined._ vol. i.

[2] See De Stendhal, _Histoire de la peinture en Italie_, pp.

285-91, for a curious catalogue of examples. The modern sense of honor is based, no doubt, to some extent on a delicate _amour propre_, which makes a man desirous of winning the esteem of his neighbors for its own sake. Granting that conscience, pride, vanity, and self-respect are all const.i.tuents of honor, we may, perhaps, find more pride in the Spanish, more _amour propre_ in the French, and more conscience in the English.

[3] Gargantua, lib. 1. ch. 57.

[4] See, however, what I have already said about Castiglione and his ideal of the courtier in Chapter III. We must remember that he represents a late period of the Renaissance.

[5] It is curious to compare, for example, the part played by Italians, especially by Venice, Pisa, Genoa, Amalfi, as contractors and merchants in the Crusades, with the enthusiasm of the northern nations.

[6] In confirmation of this view I may call attention to Giannotti's critique of the Florentine const.i.tution (Florence, 1850, vol. i. pp. 15 and 156), and to what Machiavelli says about Gianpaolo Baglioni (_Disc_. i. 27), 'Gli uomini non sanno essere _onorevolmente_ tristi'; men know not how to be bad with credit to themselves. The context proves that Gianpaolo failed to win the honor of a signal crime. Compare the use of the word _onore_ in Lorinzino de' Medici's 'Apologia.'

With the Italian conception of _Onore_ we may compare their view of _Onesta_ in the female s.e.x. This is set forth plainly by Piccolomini in _La Bella Creanza delle Donne_.[1] As in the case of _Onore_, we have here to deal, not with an exquisite personal ideal, but with something far more material and external. The _onesta_ of a married woman is compatible with secret infidelity, provided she does not expose herself to ridicule and censure by letting her amour be known. Here again, therefore, the proper translation of the word seems to be credit.

Finally, we may allude to the invective against honor which Ta.s.so puts into the mouths of his shepherds in _Aminta_[2] Though at this period the influence of France and Spain had communicated to aristocratic society in Italy an exotic sense of honor, yet a court poet dared to condemn it as unworthy of the _Bell' eta dell' oro_, because it interfered with pleasure and introduced disagreeable duties into life.

Such a tirade would not have been endured in the London of Elizabeth or in the Paris of Louis XIV. Ta.s.so himself, it may be said in pa.s.sing, was almost feverishly punctilious in matters that touched his reputation.

[1] _La Raffaella, ovvero Delia bella Creanza delle Donne_ (Milano, Daelli). Compare the statement of the author in his preface, p. 4, where he speaks in his own person, with the definition of _Onore_ given by Raffaella, pp. 50 and 51 of the Dialogue: 'l'onore non e riposto in altro, se non nella stimazione appresso agli uomini ... l'onor della donna non consiste, come t'ho detto, nel fare o non fare, che questo importa poco, ma nel credersi o non credersi.'

[2] This invective might be paralleled from one ot Masuccio's Novelle (ed. Napoli, pp. 389, 390), in which he almost cynically exposes the inconvenience of self-respect and delicacy. The situation of two friends, who agree that honor is a nuisance and share their wives in common, is a favorite of the Novelists.

An important consideration, affecting the whole question of Italian immorality, is this. Whereas the northern races had hitherto remained in a state of comparative poverty and barbarism, distributed through villages and country districts, the people of Italy had enjoyed centuries of wealth and civilization in great cities. Their towns were the centers of luxurious life. The superfluous income of the rich was spent in pleasure, nor had modern decorum taught them to conceal the vices of advanced culture beneath the cloak of propriety. They were at the same time both indifferent to opinion and self-conscious in a high degree. The very worst of them was seen at a glance and recorded with minute particularity. The depravity of less cultivated races remained unnoticed because no one took the trouble to describe mere barbarism.[1]

Vices of the same sort, but less widely dispersed, perhaps, throughout the people, were notorious in Italy, because they were combined with so much that was beautiful and splendid. In a word, the faults of the Italians were such as belong to a highly intellectualized society, as yet but imperfectly penetrated with culture, raised above the brutishness of barbarians, but not advanced to the self-control of civilization, hampered by the corruption of a Church that trafficked in crime, tainted by uncritical contact with pagan art and literature, and emasculated by political despotism. Their vices, bad as they were in reality, seemed still worse because they attacked the imagination instead of merely exercising the senses. As a correlative to their depravity, we find a sobriety of appet.i.te, a courtesy of behavior, a mildness and cheerfulness of disposition, a widely diffused refinement of sentiment and manners, a liberal spirit of toleration, which can nowhere else be paralleled in, Europe at that period. It was no small mark of superiority to be less ignorant and gross than England, less brutal and stolid than Germany, less rapacious than Switzerland, less cruel than Spain, less vain and inconsequent than France.

[1] Read, however, the Saxon Chronicles or the annals of Ireland in Froude.

Italy again was the land of emanc.i.p.ated individuality. What Mill in his Essay on Liberty desired, what seems every day more unattainable in modern life, was enjoyed by the Italians. There was no check to the growth of personality, no grinding of men down to match the average. If great vices emerged more openly than they did elsewhere in Europe, great qualities also had the opportunity of free development in heroes like Ferrucci, in saints like Savonarola, in artists like Michael Angelo.

While the social atmosphere of the Papal and despotic courts was unfavorable to the highest type of character, we find at least no external engine of repression, no omnipotent inquisition, no overpowering aristocracy.[1] False political systems and a corrupt Church created a malaria, which poisoned the n.o.ble spirits of Machiavelli, Ariosto, Guicciardini, Giuliano della Rovere. It does not, however, follow therefore that the humanities of the race at large, in spite of superst.i.tion and bad government, were vitiated.

[1] I am of course speaking of the Renaissance as distinguished from that new phase of Italian history which followed the Council of Trent and the Spanish despotism.

We have positive proofs to the contrary in the art of the Italians. The April freshness of Giotto, the piety of Fra Angelico, the virginal purity of the young Raphael, the sweet gravity of John Bellini, the philosophic depth of Da Vinci, the sublime elevation of Michael Angelo, the suavity of Fra Bartolommeo, the delicacy of the Della Robbia, the restrained fervor of Rosellini, the rapture of the Sienese and the reverence of the Umbrian masters, Francia's pathos, Mantegna's dignity, and Luini's divine simplicity, were qualities which belonged not only to these artists but also to the people of Italy from whom they sprang. If men not few of whom were born in cottages and educated in workshops could feel and think and fas.h.i.+on as they did, we cannot doubt that their mothers and their friends were pure and pious, and that the race which gave them to the world was not depraved. Painting in Italy, it must be remembered, was nearer to the people than literature: it was less a matter of education than instinct, a product of temperament rather than of culture.

Italian art alone suffices to prove to my mind that the immorality of the age descended from the upper stratum of society downwards. Selfish despots and luxurious priests were the ruin of Italy; and the bad qualities of the princes, secular and ecclesiastical, found expression in the literature of poets and humanists, their parasites. But in what other nation of the fifteenth century can we show the same of social urbanity and intellectual light diffused throughout all cla.s.ses from the highest to the lowest? It is true that the sixteenth century cast a blight upon their l.u.s.ter. But it was not until Italian taste had been impaired by the vices of Papal Rome and by contact with the Spaniards that the arts became either coa.r.s.e or sensual. Giulio Romano (1492-1546) and Benvenuto Cellini (1500-70) mark the beginning of the change. In Riberia, a Spaniard, in Caravaggio, and in the whole school of Bologna, it was accomplished. Yet never at any period did the native Italian masters learn to love ugliness with the devotion that reveals innate grossness. It remained for Durer, Rembrandt, and Hogarth to elevate the grotesque into the region of high art, for Rubens to achieve the apotheosis of pure animalism, for Teniers to devote distinguished genius to the service of the commonplace.

In any review of Italian religion and morality, however fragmentary it may be, as this indeed is, one feature which distinguishes the acute sensibility of the race ought not to be omitted. Deficient in profound intellectual convictions, incapable of a fixed and radical determination towards national holiness, devoid of those pa.s.sionate and imaginative intuitions into the mysteries of the world which generate religions and philosophies, the Italians were at the same time keenly susceptible to the beauty of the Christian faith revealed to them by inspired orators.

What we call Revivalism was an inst.i.tution in Italy, which the Church was too wise to discountenance or to suppress, although the preachers of repentance were often insubordinate and sometimes even hostile to the Papal system. The names of Arnold of Brescia, San Bernardino of Siena, John of Vicenza, Jacopo Bussolari, Alberto da Lecce, Giovanni Capistrano, Jacopo della Marca, Girolamo Savonarola, bring before the memory of those who are acquainted with Italian history innumerable pictures of mult.i.tudes commoved to tears, of tyrannies destroyed and const.i.tutions founded by tumultuous a.s.semblies, of hostile parties and vindictive n.o.bles locked in fraternal embraces, of cities clothed in sackcloth for their sins, of exhortations to peace echoing by the banks of rivers swollen with blood, of squares and hillsides resonant with sobs, of Lenten nights illuminated with bonfires of Vanity.[1] In the midst of these melodramatic scenes towers the single form of a Dominican or Franciscan friar: while one voice thundering woe or pleading peace dominates the crowd. Of the temporary effects produced by these preachers there can be no question. The changes which they wrought in states and cities prove that the enthusiasm they aroused was more than merely hysterical. Savonarola, the greatest of his cla.s.s, founded not only a transient commonwealth in Florence, but also a political party of importance, and left his lasting impress on the greatest soul of the sixteenth century in Italy--Michael Angelo Buonarroti. There was a real religious vigor in the people corresponding to the preacher's zeal. But the action of this earnest mood was intermittent and spasmodic. It coexisted with too much superst.i.tion and with pa.s.sions too vehemently restless to form a settled tone of character. In this respect the Italian nation stands not extravagantly pictured in the life of Cellini, whose violence, self-indulgence, keen sense of pleasure, and pagan delight in physical beauty were interrupted at intervals by inexplicable interludes of repentance, Bible-reading, psalm-singing, and visions. To delineate Cellini will be the business of a distant chapter. The form of the greatest of Italian preachers must occupy the foreground of the next.

[1] I have thrown into an appendix some of the princ.i.p.al pa.s.sages from the chronicles about revivals in mediaeval Italy.

Before closing the imperfect and scattered notices collected in this chapter, it will be well to attempt some recapitulation of the points already suggested. Without committing ourselves to the dogmatism of a theory, we are led to certain general conclusions on the subject of Italian society in the sixteenth century. The fierce party quarrels which closed the Middle Ages had accustomed the population to violence, and this violence survived in the too frequent occurrence of brutal crimes. The artificial sovereignty of the despots being grounded upon perfidy, it followed that guile and fraud came to be recognized in private no less than public life. With the emergence of the bourgeois cla.s.ses a self-satisfied positivism, vividly portrayed in the person of Cosimo de' Medici, superseded the pa.s.sions and enthusiasms of a previous age. Thus force, craft, and practical materialism formed the basis of Italian immorality. Vehement contention in the sphere of politics, restless speculation, together with the loosening of every tie that bound society together in the Middle Ages, emanc.i.p.ated personality and subst.i.tuted the freedom of self-centered vigor and virility (Virtu) for the prescriptions of civil or religions order. In the nation that had shaken off both Papal and Imperial authority no conception of law remained to control caprice. Instead of law men obeyed the instincts of their several characters, swayed by artistic taste or tyrannous appet.i.te, or by the splendid heroism of extinct antiquity. The Church had alienated the people from true piety. Yet no new form of religious belief arose; and partly through respect for the past, partly through the convenience of clinging to existing inst.i.tutions, Catholicism was indulgently tolerated. At the same time the humanists introduced an ideal antagonistic to Christianity of the monastic type. Without abruptly severing themselves from the communion of the Church, and while in form at least observing all its ordinances, they thought, wrote, spoke, felt, and acted like Pagans. To the hypocrisies of obsolete asceticism were added the affectations of anachronistic license.

Meanwhile, the national genius for art attained its fullest development, simultaneously with the decay of faith, the extinction of political liberty, and the anarchy of ethics. So strong was the aesthetic impulse that it seemed for a while capable of drawing all the forces of the nation to itself. A society that rested upon force and fraud, corroded with cynicism, cankered with hypocrisy recognizing no standard apart from success in action and beauty in form, so conscious of its own corruption that it produced no satirist among the many who laughed lightly at its vices, wore the external aspect of exquisite refinement, and was delicately sensitive to every discord. Those who understood the contradictions of the age most deeply were the least capable of rising above them Consequently we obtain in Machiavelli's works the ideal picture of personal character, moving to calculated ends by scientifically selected means, none of which are sanctioned by the unwritten code of law that governs human progress. Cosimo's positivism is reduced to theory. Fraud becomes a rule of conduct. Force is advocated, when the dagger or the poisoned draught or the extermination of a city may lead the individual straight forward to his object.

Religion is shown to be a political engine. Hypocrisy is a mask that must be worn. The sanct.i.ties of ancient use and custom controlling appet.i.te have no place a.s.signed them in the system. Action is a.n.a.lyzed as a branch of the fine arts; and the spirit of the age, of which the philosopher makes himself the hierophant, compels him to portray it as a sinister and evil art.

In the civilization of Italy, carried prematurely beyond the conditions of the Middle Ages, before the inst.i.tutions of mediaevalism had been destroyed or its prejudices had been overcome, we everywhere discern the want of a co-ordinating principle. The old religion has died; but there is no new faith. The Communes have been proved inadequate; but there is no nationality. Practical positivism has obliterated the virtues of a chivalrous and feudal past; but science has not yet been born. Scholars.h.i.+p floods the world with the learning of antiquity; but this knowledge is still undigested. Art triumphs; but the aesthetic instinct has invaded the regions of politics and ethics, owing to defective a.n.a.lysis in theory, and in practice to over-confident reliance on personal ability. The individual has attained to freedom; but he has not learned the necessity of submitting his volition to law. At all points the development of the Italians strikes us as precocious, with the weakness of precocity scarcely distinguishable from the decay of old age. A transition from the point attained in the Renaissance to some firmer and more solid ground was imperatively demanded. But the fatality of events precluded the Italians from making it. Their evolution, checked in mid career by the brilliant ambition of France and the cautious reactionary despotism of Spain, remained suspended. Students are left, face to face with the sixteenth century, to decipher an inscription that lacks its leading verb, to puzzle over a riddle whereof the solution is hidden from us by the ruin of a people. It must ever be an undecided question whether the Italians, undisturbed by foreign interference, could have pa.s.sed beyond the artificial and exceptional stage of the Renaissance to a sounder and more substantial phase of national vitality; or whether, as their inner conscience seems to have a.s.sured them, their disengagement from moral obligation and their mental ferment foreboded an inevitable catastrophe.

CHAPTER IX.

SAVONAROLA.

The Att.i.tude of Savonarola toward the Renaissance--His Parentage, Birth, and Childhood at Ferrara--His Poem on the Ruin of the World--Joins the Dominicans at Bologna--Letter to his Father--Poem on the Ruin of the Church--Begins to preach in 1482--First Visit to Florence--San Gemignano--His Prophecy--Brescia in 1486--Personal Appearance and Style of Oratory--Effect on his audience--The three Conclusions--His Visions--Savonarola's Shortcomings as a patriotic Statesman--His sincere Belief in his prophetic Calling--Friends.h.i.+p with Pico della Mirandola--Settles in Florence, 1490--Convent of San Marco--Savonarola's Relation to Lorenzo de' Medici--The death of Lorenzo--Sermons of 1493 and 1494--the Const.i.tution of 1495--Theocracy in Florence--Piagnoni, Bigi, and Arrabbiati--War between Savonarola and Alexander VI.--The Signory suspends him from preaching in the Duomo in 1498--Attempts to call a Council--The Ordeal by Fire--San Marco stormed by the Mob--Trial and Execution of Savonarola.

Nothing is more characteristic of the sharp contrasts of the Italian Renaissance than the emergence not only from the same society, but also from the bosom of the same Church, of two men so diverse as the Pope Alexander VI. and the Prophet Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola has been claimed as a precursor of the Lutheran Reformers, and as an inspired exponent of the spirit of the fifteenth century. In reality he neither shared the revolutionary genius of Luther, which gave a new vitality to the faiths of Christendom, nor did he sympathize with that free movement of the modern mind which found its first expression in the arts and humanistic studies of Renaissance Italy. Both toward Renaissance and Reform he preserved the att.i.tude of a monk, showing on the one hand an austere mistrust of pagan culture, and on the other no desire to alter either the creeds or the traditions of the Romish Church. Yet the history of Savonarola is not to be dissociated from that of the Italian Renaissance. He more clearly than any other man discerned the moral and political situation of his country. When all the states of Italy seemed sunk in peace and cradled in prosperity, he predicted war, and felt the imminence of overwhelming calamity. The purification of customs which he preached was demanded by the flagrant vices of the Popes and by the wickedness of the tyrants. The scourge which he prophesied did in fact descend upon Italy. In addition to this clairvoyance by right of which we call him prophet, the hold he took on Florence at a critical moment of Italian history is alone enough to ent.i.tle him to more than merely pa.s.sing notice.

Girolamo Savonarola was born at Ferrara in 1452.[1] His grandfather Michele, a Paduan of n.o.ble family, had removed to the capital of the Este princes at the beginning of the fifteenth century. There he held the office of court physician; and Girolamo was intended for the same profession. But early in his boyhood the future prophet showed signs of disinclination for a worldly life, and an invincible dislike of the court. Under the House of Este, Ferrara was famous throughout Italy for its gayety and splendor. No city enjoyed more brilliant and more frequent public shows. Nowhere did the aristocracy maintain so much of feudal magnificence and chivalrous enjoyment. The square castle of red brick, which still stands in the middle of the town, was thronged with poets, players, fools who enjoyed an almost European reputation, court flatterers, knights, pages, scholars and fair ladies. But beneath its cube of solid masonry, on a level with the moat, shut out from daylight by a sevenfold series of iron bars, lay dungeons in which the objects of the Duke's displeasure clanked chains and sighed their lives away.[2]

Within the precincts of this palace the young Savonarola learned to hate alike the worldly vices and the despotic cruelty against which in after-life he prophesied and fought unto the death.

[1] In this chapter on Savonarola I have made use of Villari's _Life_ (translated by Leonard Horner, Longmans, 1863, 2 vols.), Michelet's _Histoire de France_, vol. vii., Milman's article on Savonarola (John Murray, 1870), Nardi's _Istoria Fiorentina_, book ii., and the _Memoirs_ of De Comines.