Renaissance in Italy Volume II Part 12

What personal jealousies, what anxious compet.i.tion for the princely favour, such warfare concealed may be readily imagined; nor is it improbable that Fazio's attack on Valli was prompted by the covert spite of Beccadelli. Scarcely less close to the person of Alfonso than the students with whom we have been occupied, stood Giannantonio Porcello, a native of Naples. He was distinguished by his command of versification: the fluency with which he poured fourth Latin elegiacs and hexameters approached that of an improvisatore of the Molo.

Alfonso sent him to the camp of the Venetians during the war waged by their general Piccinino in 1452-3 with Sforza. Porcello, who shared the tent of Piccinino on this occasion, wrote a Latin history of the campaign in the style of Livy, with moral reflections, speeches, and all the apparatus of Roman rhetoric. Piccinino figured as Scipio aemilia.n.u.s; Sforza as Hannibal. The work was dedicated to Alfonso.[251]

[Footnote 251: It is printed in Muratori, vol. xx.]

With the exception of Lorenzo Valla,[252] the scholars of the Court of Naples were stylists and poets rather than men of erudition. Freedom both of speculation and of morals marked society in Southern Italy, where the protection of a powerful monarch at war with the Church, and the license of a luxurious capital, released the humanists from such slight restraints as public opinion and conventional decorum placed on them in Rome and Florence.

[Footnote 252: The protection extended to Manetti and to Filelfo ought, however, to be here mentioned. Nearly all the contemporary scholars of Italy dedicated works to Alfonso.]

Owing to the marked diversity exhibited by the different states of Italy, the forms a.s.sumed by art and literature are never exactly the same in any two cities. If the natives of the Two Sicilies were not themselves addicted to severe scholars.h.i.+p, the lighter kinds of writing flourished there abundantly, and Naples gave her own peculiar character to literature. This was not the case with Milan. Yet Milan, during the reigns of the last Visconti and the first Sforza, claims attention, owing to the accident of Filelfo's residence at the Ducal Court. Filippo Maria Visconti was one of the most repulsive tyrants who have ever disgraced a civilised country. Shut up within his palace walls among astrologers, minions, and monks, carefully protected from the public eye, and watched by double sets of mutually suspicious bodyguards, it was impossible that he should extend the free encouragement to learned men which we admire at Naples. Around despots of the stamp of the Visconti there must of necessity reign the solitude and silence of a desert, where arts and letters cannot flourish, though Pactolus be poured forth to feed their roots. The history of humanism at Milan has, therefore, less to do with the city or the Ducal circle than with the private labours of students allured to Lombardy by promise of high pay.

Piero Candido Decembrio began life as Filippo Maria's secretary. To his vigorous pen the student of Italian history owes the minutest and most vivid sketch now extant of the habits and the vices of a tyrant.

This remains the best t.i.tle of Decembrio to recollection, though his works, original and translated, if we may trust his epitaph in S.

Ambrogio, amounted to 127 books when he died in 1447. Contemporary with Decembrio, Gasparino da Barzizza, of whom mention has already been made,[253] occupied the place of Court orator and letter-writer.

This office he transmitted to his son, Guiniforte, who was also employed in the education of Francesco Sforza's children. None of these men, however, shed much splendour upon Milan; they were simply the instruments of ducal luxury, part of a prince's parade, at an epoch when even warlike sovereigns sought to crowd their Courts with pedagogues and rhetoricians.

[Footnote 253: Above, p. 78.]

With Filelfo the case was different. His singular abilities rendered him independent of local patronage, and drew universal attention to any place where he might choose to fix his residence. Of all the humanists he was the most restless in his humour and erratic in his movements. Still Milan, during a long period of his life, formed his headquarters; to Milan he returned when fortune frowned on him elsewhere; and with Milan his name will always be connected.

Francesco Filelfo was born in 1398 at Tolentino, in the March of Ancona. He studied grammar, rhetoric, and Latin literature at Padua, where he was appointed professor at the early age of eighteen. In 1417 he received an invitation to teach eloquence and moral philosophy at Venice. Here he remained two years, deriving much advantage from the society of Guarino da Verona and Vittorino da Feltre, and forming useful connections with the Venetian n.o.bility. Young as he was, Filelfo had already made his mark, and won the consideration which attaches to men of decided character and extraordinary powers. The proof of this is that, after being admitted citizen of Venice by public decree, he was appointed Secretary to the Baily (_Bailo_, or Consul-General) of Constantinople through the interest of his friend Lionardo Giustiniani. Giustiniani having also provided him with money for his voyage, Filelfo set off in 1419 for the capital of Greek learning. Of the three Italian teachers--Guarino, Aurispa, and Filelfo--who made this journey for the express purpose of acquiring the Greek language and collecting Greek books, Filelfo was by far the most distinguished. The history, therefore, of his adventures may be taken as a specimen of what befell them all. The time spent at sea between Venice and Byzantium was five months; Filelfo did not arrive till the year 1420 was already well advanced. He put himself at once under the tuition of John Chrysoloras, the brother of Manuel, whose influence at the Imperial Court brought Filelfo into favour with John Palaeologus. The young Italian student, having speedily acquired familiarity with the Greek tongue, received the t.i.tles of Secretary and Counsellor, and executed some important diplomatic missions for his Imperial master. We hear, for instance, of his being sent to Sigismund, the German Emperor, at Buda, and of his reciting an Epithalamial Oration at Cracow on the marriage of King Ladislaus. The Venetian Baily, again, despatched him to the Court of Amurath II., in order to negotiate terms of treaty between the Republic and the Turk.

The confidence extended alike by his Venetian and Greek patrons to Filelfo may well have inclined Chrysoloras to look with favour on the affection which now sprang up between the Italian stranger and his daughter Theodora. Theodora was but fourteen years of age; yet her youth probably suggested no impediment to marriage in the semi-Oriental society of the Greek capital. That she was connected by blood with the Imperial family made the alliance honourable to Filelfo; still there is no sufficient reason to conclude for certain that the match was so unequal as to justify the malignant suggestions thrown out at a later date by Poggio.[254] Of ancient blood there was enough and to spare at Constantinople; but wealth was wanting, while the talent which rendered Filelfo serviceable to great states and empires was itself sufficient guarantee for Theodora's maintenance in a becoming station.

[Footnote 254: 'Itaque Chrysoloras, moerore confectus, compulsus precibus, malo coactus, filiam tibi nuptui dedit a te corruptam, quae si ext.i.tisset integra, ne pilum quidem tibi abrasum ab illius natibus ostendisset. An tu illam unquam duxisses uxorem si virginitatem per te servare potuisset? Tibi pater illam dedisset profugo, ign.o.bili, impuro? Primariis suae civitatis viris servabatur virgo, non tibi, insulsae pecudi et asello bipedali, quem ille domi alebat tanquam canem aliquem solent senio et aetate confectum.'--_Poggii Opp._ p. 167. This is just one of the tales with which the invectives of that day abound, and with which it is almost impossible to deal. It may be true; for certainly Filelfo, by his immorality and grossness in after-life, justified the worst calumnies that his enemies could invent. Yet there is little but Poggio's word to prove it, while Rosmini has shown that Filelfo's position at Byzantium was very different from what his foe suggests. Tiraboschi accepts the charge as 'not proven;' but he clearly leans in private against Filelfo, moved by the following pa.s.sage from a letter of Ambrogio Traversari:--'Nuper a Guarino accepi litteras, quibus vehementer in fortunam invehitur quod filiam Joannis Chrysolorae clarissimi viri is acceperit, exterus, qui quantum libet h.o.m.o bono ingenio, longe tamen illis nuptiis impar esset, queriturque substomachans uxorem Chrysolorae venalem habuisse pudicitiam, moechumque ante habuisse quam socerum.' Vol. vi. lib. iii. cap. v.

21. All that can be said now is that Filelfo's own morality and the corruption of Byzantine society render a story believed by Guarino and Traversari, and openly told by Poggio, not improbable.]

Not long after their marriage Filelfo received an offer of the Chair of Eloquence at Venice, with a stipend of 500 sequins. In 1427, tempted by the prospect of good pay and growing fame, he landed with his wife, their infant son, four female slaves, and two men servants on the quay before S. Mark's.[255] The object of his journey to Constantinople had been amply attained. After an absence of seven and a half years, he returned to his native country with Greek learning, increased reputation, and a large supply of Greek books.[256] His proud boast, frequently repeated in after-life, that no man living but himself had mastered the whole literature of the ancients in both languages, that no one else could wield the prose of Cicero, the verse of Horace and of Virgil, and the Greek of Homer and of Xenophon with equal versatility, was not altogether an empty vaunt.[257] We may indeed smile at his pretension to have surpa.s.sed Virgil because he was an orator, and Cicero because he was a poet, and both of them together because he could write Greek as well as Latin.[258] We know that his Latin hexameters are such as not only Virgil but Cicero would have scorned to own, that his Latin orations would have been hissed before the Roman rostra, and that his Greek style is at the same time tame and tumid. Neither he nor his contemporaries were sufficiently critical to comprehend the force of these objections. They only saw that he possessed the keys to all the learning of the ancient world, and that, besides unlocking those treasures for modern students, he was also competent to give to current thoughts a form that aped the cla.s.sic masterpieces each in its own kind. Taken at their lowest valuation, the claims of Filelfo, well founded in fact, mark him out as the most universal scholar of his age. A genius he was not: for while his perceptions were coa.r.s.e, his intellect was receptive rather than originative. Of deep thought, true taste, penetrative criticism, or delicate fancy he knew nothing. The unimaginable bloom of style is nowhere to be found upon his work. Yet a man of his stamp was needed at that epoch to act as a focus for the streams of light which flooded Italy from divers sources, to collect them in himself, and to bequeath to students of a happier age the ideal of comprehensive scholars.h.i.+p which Poliziano and Erasmus realised.

[Footnote 255: This retinue shows that Filelfo was at least able to support a large household.]

[Footnote 256: The catalogue of his library, communicated by him in a letter to Ambrogio Traversari, shows so clearly what the most indefatigable student and omnivorous reader of the age, to whom all the museums and bookshops of Byzantium must have been open, could then collect, that I will transcribe it:--'Qui mihi nostri in Italiam libri gesti sunt, horum nomina ad te scribo: alios autem nonnullos per primas ex Byzantio Venetorum naves opperior. Hi autem sunt Plotinus, aelia.n.u.s, Aristides, Dionysius Halicarna.s.seus, Strabo Geographus, Hermogenes, Aristotelis Rhetorice, Dionysius Halicarna.s.seus de Numeris et Characteribus, Herodotus, Dio Chrysostomus, Appollonius Pergaeus, Thucydides, Plutarchi Moralia, Proclus in Platonem, Philo Judaeus, Ethica Aristotelis, Ejus magna Moralia et Eudemia, et Oeconomica et Politica, quaedam Theophrasti Opuscula, Homeri Ilias, Odyssea, Philostrati de Vita Appollonii, Orationes Libanii, et aliqui Sermones Luciani, Pindarus, Aratus, Euripidis Tragoediae Septem, Theocritus, Hesiodus, Suidas, Phalaridis, Hippocratis, Platonis et multorum ex veteribus Philosophis Epistolae, Demosthenes, aeschinis Orationes et Epistolae, Pleraque Xenophontis Opera, Una Lysiae Oratio, Orphei Argonautica et Hymni, Callimachus, Aristoteles de Historiis Animalium, Physica, et Metaphysica, et de Anima, de Partibus Animalium, et alia quaedam, Polybius, Nonnulli Sermones Chrysostomi, Dionysiaca, et alii Poetae plurimi. Habes qui mihi sint, et his utere aeque ac tuis.']

[Footnote 257: 'Unum Philelphus audet affirmare, vel insaniente Candido, neminem esse hac tempestate, nec fuisse unquam apud Latinos, quantum constat ex omni hominum memoria, qui praeter se unum idem unus tenuerit exercuitque et Graecam pariter et Latinam orationem in omni dicendi genere et prosa et versu. Tu si quidem habeas alterum, memora.

Quid taces, h.o.m.o miserrime?' Letter to Piero Candido Decembrio. Cf.

what P.C. Decembrio wrote to Poggio in 1453:--'Dixit (_i.e._ Philelphus) enim neminem litteras scire praeter ipsum, alios semilatinos et semigraecos esse, se autem princ.i.p.atum inter stultos obtinere.' Rosmini, vol. iii. p. 150.]

[Footnote 258:

'Quod si Virgilius superat me carminis ullis Laudibus, orator ille ego sum melior.

Sin Tulli eloquio praestat facundia nostro, Versibus ille meis cedit ubique minor.

Adde quod et lingua possum haec praestare Pelasga Et Latia. Talem quem mihi des alium?'

Lib. ix., _De Jocis et Seriis_. _Elegy to Alessandro Sforza._ Reported by Rosmini, vol. iii. p. 149. One specimen of these boasts may stand for thousands.]

Filelfo's reception at Venice by no means corresponded to the promises by which he had been tempted, or to the value which he set on his own services. The plague was in the city; the n.o.bles had taken flight to their country houses; and there was no one to attend his lectures. He therefore very readily accepted an offer sent him from Bologna, and early in the year 1428 we find him settled in that city as professor of eloquence and moral philosophy, with a stipend of 450 sequins. He was not destined to remain there long, however, for the disturbed state of the town rendered teaching impossible; and when flattering proposals arrived from the Florentines, he set off in haste and transferred his whole family across the Apennines from Imola.[259] The delight which he experienced in viewing the architectural monuments of Florence, and the enthusiasm he aroused by his stupendous learning in an audience of unprecedented variety and mult.i.tude, are expressed with almost childish emphasis in his correspondence. 'The whole State,' he writes,[260] 'is turned to look at me. All men love and honour me, and praise me to the skies. My name is on every lip. Not only the leaders of the city, but women also of the n.o.blest birth make way for me, paying me so much respect that I am ashamed of their wors.h.i.+p. My audience numbers every day four hundred persons, mostly men advanced in years and of the dignity of senators.' These were the halcyon days of Filelfo's residence at Florence,[261] when he was still enjoying the friends.h.i.+p of learned men, receiving new engagements from the University with augmentations of pay,[262] and when as yet he had not won the hatred of the Medicean faction. His industry at this epoch was amazing. He began the day by reading and explaining the 'Tusculans' and rhetorical treatises of Cicero; then he proceeded to Livy or Homer; after a brief rest at midday he resumed his labours with Terence and a Greek author, Thucydides or Xenophon.

On holidays he read Dante to an audience a.s.sembled in the Duomo, bestowing these lectures as a free gift on the people of Florence.

Amid these public labours, the weight of which may be estimated by remembering what was required of professors in the fifteenth century,[263] Filelfo still found leisure for private work. He translated two speeches of Lysias, the 'Rhetoric' of Aristotle, two Lives of Plutarch, and Xenophon's panegyrics of Agesilaus and the Spartan inst.i.tutions.

[Footnote 259: The invitation came from Niccoli, Lionardo Bruni, Ambrogio Traversari, and Palla Strozzi.]

[Footnote 260: Quoted by Cantu, p. 128.]

[Footnote 261: He stayed there from 1429 till the autumn of 1434.]

[Footnote 262: Engagement renewed October 17, 1431, for two years, with stipend of 350 sequins; again, in 1433, with stipend of 450 sequins.]

[Footnote 263: See above, pp. 90, 91.]

At the same time he had abundant energy for the prosecution of the feuds in which he soon found himself engaged with the Florentine scholars. So great was the arrogance displayed by Filelfo, his meanness in private life, and his imprudence in public,[264] that even the men who had invited him became his bitter foes. Niccolo de'

Niccoli, always jealous of superiority, and apt to take offence, was the first with whom he quarrelled; then followed Carlo Marsuppini and Ambrogio Traversari, until at last the whole of the Medicean party were inflamed against him. Filelfo on his side spared neither satires nor slanders; and when the political crisis, which for a time depressed the Medicean faction, was impending, he declared himself the public opponent of Cosimo. Already in the spring of 1433 he had been stabbed in the face while walking to the University one morning by Filippo, a cut-throat from Casale; nor does there seem any reason to doubt that, as Filelfo himself firmly believed, the man was paid to kill him by the Medici. When the same bravo afterwards followed him to Siena,[265] Filelfo hired a Greek, by name Antonio Maria, to retaliate upon his foes in Florence. It is not probable that a merely literary quarrel would have run to these extremities. Even the foulness of Poggio's invectives and the fury of Filelfo's satires fail to account for the intervention of a.s.sa.s.sins. We know, however, that Filelfo had not confined himself to calumnies and criticisms of his literary rivals. During Cosimo's imprisonment he urged the Signory in open terms to take his life; when he was living in exile at Venice, he pursued him with abominable slanders; and now, on Cosimo's return, though himself expelled from the city as a rebel and a proscript, he kept stirring up the burghers of Florence and the Courts of Italy against the tyrant.[266]

[Footnote 264: See Rosmini, vol. i. pp. 43, 48.]

[Footnote 265: _Ibid._ vol. i. p. 83, for the trial, torture, and confession of this bravo.]

[Footnote 266: The original source of information concerning Filelfo's quarrels with the Florentines is his Satires, divided into ten books or decades, each consisting of ten satires or hecatostichae of one hundred verses each. In the copy of this book, printed at Paris, 1508, by Robert and John Gourmont, these virulent libels are called 'Divinum Francisci Philelphi Poetae Christiani Satyrarum Opus.' As their motto the publishers give these sentences:--'Finis laus Deo, Spes mea Jesus.' For the abuse of the Medicean circle see Dec. i. Hec. 5; Dec.

i. Hec. 6; Dec. ii. Hec. 1, 3, 7; Dec. iii. Hec. 10; Dec. vi. 10; Dec.

viii. 5. For Filelfo's attack on Cosimo during his imprisonment, see Dec. iv. Hec. 1. For his invective against Cosimo on his return from exile, see Dec. iv. Hec. 9. For an appeal to Filippo Maria Visconti against Cosimo, see Dec. v. Hec. 1. For a similar appeal to Eugenius IV., see Dec. v. Hec. 2. For the episode of the a.s.sa.s.sin Filippo, see Dec. v. Hec. 6. A political attack on Cosimo addressed to Rinaldo Albizzi is contained in Dec. v. Hec. 8. A furious denunciation of Cosimo's tyranny, in Dec. v. Hec. 9. Palla degli Strozzi, as an opponent of Cosimo, is praised in Dec. iii. 1; Dec. vi. 4. In Dec.

vii. 8, Filelfo promises to moderate his fury. In addition to these sources see the MS. invectives mentioned in Rosmini, vol. i. p. 47.]

The occasion of Filelfo's removal to Siena was this:--When his position at Florence had become untenable, he received an invitation from Antonio Petrucci to lecture for two years, with a stipend of 350 florins. Filelfo replied that he preferred small pay and quiet to a larger income among the swords and poisons of his envious rivals.

Accordingly he took up his abode at Siena for four years in the Piccolomini Palace. Like many greater and more admirable men, he had a restless disposition, always pleased with what is new, yet always grumbling when the taste of bitter mounted to his lips. The most honourable invitations now began to shower upon him. The Council of Basle, the Venetian Senate, the Emperor of the East, Eugenius IV., the Universities of Perugia and Bologna, and the Duke of Milan applied for his services. It was not, however, until the year 1439 that his love of change, combined with the allurements of higher pay, induced him to close with the offers of the Senate of Bologna. Once more, then, he crossed the Apennines, and once more, after a brief sojourn of a few months, he again quitted Bologna, and transferred himself to Milan.

His reception by Filippo Maria Visconti was most flattering. Placing a diamond ring upon his finger, the Duke welcomed him among the n.o.bles of his Court on New Year's Day in 1440. Thus began Filelfo's connection with the Lombard capital, which, though often interrupted, was never wholly broken till his death.

The munificence of the Visconti exceeded that of any of Filelfo's patrons,[267] while the mode of life at Milan exactly suited his vainglorious temperament. He loved to throw his money about among lords, to appear at high Court festivals, and to take the lead on ceremonial occasions in his rank of orator. There was, moreover, no rival strong enough to threaten the blasting of his popularity.[268]

We find him, during his residence at Milan, continually engaged in the exercise of rhetoric. Public and private incidents of the most various character employed his skill, nor is there any doubt that his large professorial income was considerably increased by presents received from patrons and employers.[269] In addition to the labours of his chair, he engaged in various literary works. His Satires and Odes were gradually growing into ponderous volumes.[270] Other fugitive pieces in prose he put together under the t.i.tle of 'Convivia Mediolanensia.'

Meanwhile he carried on an active correspondence, both familiar and hortatory, with the scholars and the princes of his day.[271] There was no branch of letters with which, sustained by sublime self-approval, he was not willing and eager to meddle. As he had professed Dante at Florence, so here at Milan, by ducal command, he undertook to comment upon Petrarch, and actually composed a poem on S.

John the Baptist in _terza rima_. There is something ludicrous in the thought of this Visconti, would-be Herod as in truth he was, commissioning Filelfo, the outrageous Pagan, to versify the life of Christ's forerunner. If Filelfo despised anything more than sacred history, it was the Italian language; and if there was a task for which he was unfitted, it was the composition of poetry.

[Footnote 267: His professorial stipend was soon raised from 500 to 700 golden florins.]

[Footnote 268: Vespasiano says that the concourse of people to Carlo Aretino's lectures was the first cause of Filelfo's feuds at Florence.]

[Footnote 269: Here are the dates of some of these displays:--

1440. Funeral oration on Stefano Federigo Todeschini.

1441. Epithalamial on the Marriage of Giovanni Marliani.

1442. Discourse on Duties of a Magistrate.

1446. Panegyric of Filippo Maria Visconti, and oration on the Election of Jacopo Borromeo to the See of Pavia.

1450. Oration of Welcome to Francesco Sforza.

1455. Epithalamial on the Marriage of Tristano Sforza to Beatrice d'Este.

1458. Epithalamials for Antonio Crivelli and Teodoro Piatti.