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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, by 
+Jacob Burckhardt
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
+
+Author: Jacob Burckhardt
+
+Translator: S. G. C. (Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore)
+
+Release Date: October 20, 2014 [EBook #2074]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CIVILISATION OF THE RENAISSANCE  ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  THE
+                          CIVILISATION OF THE
+                              RENAISSANCE
+                               IN ITALY
+
+                                  By
+                           JACOB BURCKHARDT
+                       AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY
+                          S. G. C. MIDDLEMORE
+
+                   LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
+                    NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+Dr. BURCKHARDT’S work on the Renaissance in Italy is too well known, not
+only to students of the period, but now to a wider circle of readers,
+for any introduction to be necessary. The increased interest which has
+of late years, in England, been taken in this and kindred subjects, and
+the welcome which has been given to the works of other writers upon
+them, encourage me to hope that in publishing this translation I am
+meeting a want felt by some who are either unable to read German at all,
+or to whom an English version will save a good deal of time and trouble.
+
+The translation is made from the third edition of the original, recently
+published in Germany, with slight additions to the text, and large
+additions to the notes, by Dr. LUDWIG GEIGER, of Berlin. It also
+contains some fresh matter communicated by Dr. BURCKHARDT to Professor
+DIEGO VALBUSA of Mantua, the Italian translator of the book. To all
+three gentlemen my thanks are due for courtesy shown, or help given to
+me in the course of my work.
+
+In a few cases, where Dr. GEIGER’S view differs from that taken by Dr.
+BURCKHARDT, I have called attention to the fact by bracketing Dr.
+GEIGER’S opinion and adding his initials.
+
+THE TRANSLATOR.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+_THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART_
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+Political condition of Italy in the thirteenth century                 4
+
+The Norman State under Frederick II.                                   5
+
+Ezzelino da Romano                                                     7
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+Finance and its relation to culture                                    8
+
+The ideal of the absolute ruler                                        9
+
+Inward and outward dangers                                            10
+
+Florentine estimate of the tyrants                                    11
+
+The Visconti                                                          12
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+Intervention and visits of the emperors                               18
+
+Want of a fixed law of succession. Illegitimacy                       20
+
+Founding of States by Condottieri                                     22
+
+Relations of Condottieri to their employers                           23
+
+The family of Sforza                                                  24
+
+Giacomo Piccinino                                                     25
+
+Later attempts of the Condottieri                                     26
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE PETTY TYRANNIES.
+
+The Baglioni of Perugia                                               28
+
+Massacre in the year 1500                                             31
+
+Malatesta, Pico, and Petrucci                                         33
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE GREATER DYNASTIES.
+
+The Aragonese at Naples                                               35
+
+The last Visconti at Milan                                            38
+
+Francesco Sforza and his luck                                         39
+
+Galeazzo Maria and Ludovic Moro                                       40
+
+The Gonzaga at Mantua                                                 43
+
+Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino                               44
+
+The Este at Ferrara                                                   46
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.
+
+The later Guelphs and Ghibellines                                     55
+
+The conspirators                                                      56
+
+Murders in church                                                     57
+
+Influence of ancient tyrannicide                                      57
+
+Catiline as an ideal                                                  59
+
+Florentine view of tyrannicide                                        59
+
+The people and tyrannicide                                            60
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.
+
+Venice in the fifteenth century                                       62
+
+The inhabitants                                                       63
+
+Dangers from the poor nobility                                        64
+
+Causes of the stability of Venice                                     65
+
+The Council of Ten and political trials                               66
+
+Relations with the Condottieri                                        67
+
+Optimism of Venetian foreign policy                                   68
+
+Venice as the home of statistics                                      69
+
+Retardation of the Renaissance                                        71
+
+Mediæval devotion to reliques                                         72
+
+Florence from the fourteenth century                                  73
+
+Objectivity of political intelligence                                 74
+
+Dante as a politician                                                 75
+
+Florence as the home of statistics: the two Villanis                  76
+
+Higher form of statistics                                             77
+
+Florentine constitutions and the historians                           82
+
+Fundamental vice of the State                                         82
+
+Political theorists                                                   83
+
+Macchiavelli and his views                                            84
+
+Siena and Genoa                                                       86
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.
+
+Envy felt towards Venice                                              88
+
+Relations to other countries: sympathy with France                    89
+
+Plan for a balance of power                                           90
+
+Foreign intervention and conquests                                    91
+
+Alliances with the Turks                                              92
+
+Counter-influence of Spain                                            94
+
+Objective treatment of politics                                       95
+
+Art of diplomacy                                                      96
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+WAR AS A WORK OF ART.
+
+Firearms                                                              98
+
+Professional warriors and dilettanti                                  99
+
+Horrors of war                                                       101
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.
+
+Relation of the Papacy to Italy and foreign countries                103
+
+Disturbances in Rome from the time of Nicholas V.                    104
+
+Sixtus IV. master of Rome                                            105
+
+States of the Nipoti in Romagna                                      107
+
+Cardinals belonging to princely houses                               107
+
+Innocent VIII. and his son                                           108
+
+Alexander VI. as a Spaniard                                          109
+
+Relations with foreign countries                                     110
+
+Simony                                                               111
+
+Cæsar Borgia and his relations to his father                         111
+
+Cæsar’s plans and acts                                               112
+
+Julius II. as Saviour of the Papacy                                  117
+
+Leo X. His relations with other States                               120
+
+Adrian VI.                                                           121
+
+Clement VII. and the sack of Rome                                    122
+
+Reaction consequent on the latter                                    123
+
+The Papacy of the Counter-Reformation                                124
+
+Conclusion. The Italian patriots                                     125
+
+
+PART II.
+
+_THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+The mediæval man                                                     129
+
+The awakening of personality                                         129
+
+The despot and his subjects                                          130
+
+Individualism in the Republics                                       131
+
+Exile and cosmopolitanism                                            132
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+The many-sided men                                                   134
+
+The universal men                                                    136
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME.
+
+Dante’s feeling about fame                                           139
+
+The celebrity of the Humanists: Petrarch                             141
+
+Cultus of birthplace and graves                                      142
+
+Cultus of the famous men of antiquity                                143
+
+Literature of local fame: Padua                                      143
+
+Literature of universal fame                                         146
+
+Fame given or refused by the writers                                 150
+
+Morbid passion for fame                                              152
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MODERN WIT AND SATIRE.
+
+Its connection with individualism                                    154
+
+Florentine wit: the novel                                            155
+
+Jesters and buffoons                                                 156
+
+Leo X. and his witticisms                                            157
+
+Poetical parodies                                                    158
+
+Theory of wit                                                        159
+
+Railing and reviling                                                 161
+
+Adrian VI. as scapegoat                                              162
+
+Pietro Aretino                                                       164
+
+
+PART III.
+
+_THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
+
+Widened application of the word ‘Renaissance’                        171
+
+Antiquity in the Middle Ages                                         172
+
+Latin poetry of the twelfth century in Italy                         173
+
+The spirit of the fourteenth century                                 175
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+ROME, THE CITY OF RUINS.
+
+Dante, Petrarch, Uberti                                              177
+
+Rome at the time of Poggio                                           179
+
+Nicholas V., and Pius II. as an antiquarian                          180
+
+Antiquity outside Rome                                               181
+
+Affiliation of families and cities on Rome                           182
+
+The Roman corpse                                                     183
+
+Excavations and architectural plans                                  184
+
+Rome under Leo X.                                                    184
+
+Sentimental effect of ruins                                          185
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE OLD AUTHORS.
+
+Their diffusion in the fourteenth century                            187
+
+Discoveries in the fifteenth century                                 188
+
+The libraries                                                        189
+
+Copyists and ‘Scrittori’                                             192
+
+Printing                                                             194
+
+Greek scholarship                                                    195
+
+Oriental scholarship                                                 197
+
+Pico’s view of antiquity                                             202
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+Its inevitable victory                                               203
+
+Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio                                       205
+
+Coronation of the poets                                              207
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS.
+
+Position of the Humanists at the Universities                        211
+
+Latin schools                                                        213
+
+Freer education: Vittorino da Feltre                                 213
+
+Guarino of Verona                                                    215
+
+The education of princes                                             216
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE FURTHERERS OF HUMANISM.
+
+Florentine citizens: Niccoli and Manetti                             217
+
+The earlier Medici                                                   220
+
+Humanism at the Courts                                               222
+
+The Popes from Nicholas V. onwards                                   223
+
+Alfonso of Naples                                                    225
+
+Frederick of Urbino                                                  227
+
+The Houses of Sforza and Este                                        227
+
+Sigismodo Malatesta                                                  228
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUITY. LATIN CORRESPONDENCE AND ORATIONS.
+
+The Papal Chancery                                                   230
+
+Letter-writing                                                       232
+
+The orators                                                          233
+
+Political, diplomatic, and funeral orations                          236
+
+Academic and military speeches                                       237
+
+Latin sermons                                                        238
+
+Form and matter of the speeches                                      239
+
+Passion for quotation                                                240
+
+Imaginary speeches                                                   241
+
+Decline of eloquence                                                 242
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+LATIN TREATISES AND HISTORY.
+
+Value of Latin                                                       243
+
+Researches on the Middle Ages: Blondus                               245
+
+Histories in Italian; their antique spirit                           246
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+GENERAL LATINISATION OF CULTURE.
+
+Ancient names                                                        250
+
+Latinised social relations                                           251
+
+Claims of Latin to supremacy                                         252
+
+Cicero and the Ciceronians                                           253
+
+Latin conversation                                                   254
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MODERN LATIN POETRY.
+
+Epic poems on ancient history: The ‘Africa’                          258
+
+Mythic poetry                                                        259
+
+Christian epics: Sannazaro                                           260
+
+Poetry on contemporary subjects                                      261
+
+Introduction of mythology                                            262
+
+Didactic poetry: Palingenius                                         263
+
+Lyric poetry and its limits                                          264
+
+Odes on the saints                                                   265
+
+Elegies and the like                                                 266
+
+The epigram                                                          267
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+FALL OF THE HUMANISTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+The accusations and the amount of truth they contained               272
+
+Misery of the scholars                                               277
+
+Type of the happy scholar                                            278
+
+Pomponius Laetus                                                     279
+
+The Academies                                                        280
+
+PART IV.
+
+_THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+JOURNEYS OF THE ITALIANS.
+
+Columbus                                                             286
+
+Cosmographical purpose in travel                                     287
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+NATURAL SCIENCE IN ITALY.
+
+Empirical tendency of the nation                                     289
+
+Dante and astronomy                                                  290
+
+Attitude of the Church towards natural science                       290
+
+Influence of Humanism                                                291
+
+Botany and gardens                                                   292
+
+Zoology and collections of foreign animals                           293
+
+Human menagerie of Ippolito Medici                                   296
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL BEAUTY.
+
+Landscapes in the Middle Ages                                        299
+
+Petrarch and his ascents of mountains                                301
+
+Uberti’s ‘Dittamondo’                                                302
+
+The Flemish school of painting                                       302
+
+Æneas Sylvius and his descriptions                                   303
+
+Nature in the poets and novelists                                    305
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF MAN.--SPIRITUAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY.
+
+Popular psychological ground-work. The temperaments                  309
+
+Value of unrhymed poetry                                             310
+
+Value of the Sonnet                                                  310
+
+Dante and the ‘Vita Nuova’                                           312
+
+The ‘Divine Comedy’                                                  312
+
+Petrarch as a painter of the soul                                    314
+
+Boccaccio and the Fiammetta                                          315
+
+Feeble development of tragedy                                        315
+
+Scenic splendour, the enemy of the drama                             316
+
+The intermezzo and the ballet                                        317
+
+Comedies and masques                                                 320
+
+Compensation afforded by music                                       321
+
+Epic romances                                                        321
+
+Necessary subordination of the descriptions of character             323
+
+Pulci and Bojardo                                                    323
+
+Inner law of their compositions                                      324
+
+Ariosto and his style                                                325
+
+Folengo and parody                                                   326
+
+Contrast offered by Tasso                                            327
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+BIOGRAPHY.
+
+Advance of Italy on the Middle Ages                                  328
+
+Tuscan biographers                                                   330
+
+Biography in other parts of Italy                                    332
+
+Autobiography; Æneas Sylvius                                         333
+
+Benvenuto Cellini                                                    333
+
+Girolamo Cardano                                                     334
+
+Luigi Cornaro                                                        335
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE DESCRIPTION OF NATIONS AND CITIES.
+
+The ‘Dittamondo’                                                     339
+
+Descriptions in the sixteenth century                                339
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTWARD MAN.
+
+Boccaccio on Beauty                                                  344
+
+Ideal of Firenzuola                                                  345
+
+His general definitions                                              345
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+DESCRIPTIONS OF LIFE IN MOVEMENT.
+
+Æneas Sylvius and others                                             349
+
+Conventional bucolic poetry from the time of Petrarch                350
+
+Genuine poetic treatment of country life                             351
+
+Battista Mantovano, Lorenzo Magnifico, Pulci                         352
+
+Angelo Poliziano                                                     353
+
+Man, and the conception of humanity                                  354
+
+Pico della Mirandola on the dignity of man                           354
+
+
+PART V.
+
+_SOCIETY AND FESTIVALS._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE EQUALISATION OF CLASSES.
+
+Contrast to the Middle Ages                                          359
+
+Common life of nobles and burghers in the cities                     359
+
+Theoretical criticism of noble birth                                 360
+
+The nobles in different parts of Italy                               362
+
+The nobility and culture                                             363
+
+Bad influence of Spain                                               363
+
+Knighthood since the Middle Ages                                     364
+
+The tournaments and the caricature of them                           365
+
+Noble birth as a requisite of the courtier                           367
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+OUTWARD REFINEMENT OF LIFE.
+
+Costume and fashions                                                 369
+
+The toilette of women                                                371
+
+Cleanliness                                                          374
+
+The ‘Galateo’ and good manners                                       375
+
+Comfort and elegance                                                 376
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LANGUAGE AS THE BASIS OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.
+
+Development of an ideal language                                     378
+
+Its wide diffusion                                                   379
+
+The Purists                                                          379
+
+Their want of success                                                382
+
+Conversation                                                         383
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE HIGHER FORMS OF SOCIETY.
+
+Rules and statutes                                                   384
+
+The novelists and their society                                      384
+
+The great lady and the drawing-room                                  385
+
+Florentine society                                                   386
+
+Lorenzo’s descriptions of his own circle                             387
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE PERFECT MAN OF SOCIETY.
+
+His love-making                                                      388
+
+His outward and spiritual accomplishments                            389
+
+Bodily exercises                                                     389
+
+Music                                                                390
+
+The instruments and the Virtuosi                                     392
+
+Musical dilettantism in society                                      393
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
+
+Their masculine education and poetry                                 396
+
+Completion of their personality                                      397
+
+The Virago                                                           398
+
+Women in society                                                     399
+
+The culture of the prostitutes                                       399
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+DOMESTIC ECONOMY.
+
+Contrast to the Middle Ages                                          402
+
+Agnolo Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti)                                    402
+
+The villa and country life                                           404
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE FESTIVALS.
+
+Their origin in the mystery and the procession                       406
+
+Advantages over foreign countries                                    408
+
+Historical representatives of abstractions                           409
+
+The Mysteries                                                        411
+
+Corpus Christi at Viterbo                                            414
+
+Secular representations                                              415
+
+Pantomimes and princely receptions                                   417
+
+Processions and religious Trionfi                                    419
+
+Secular Trionfi                                                      420
+
+Regattas and processions on water                                    424
+
+The Carnival at Rome and Florence                                    426
+
+
+PART VI.
+
+_MORALITY AND RELIGION._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MORALITY.
+
+Limits of criticism                                                  431
+
+Italian consciousness of demoralization                              432
+
+The modern sense of honour                                           433
+
+Power of the imagination                                             435
+
+The passion for gambling and for vengeance                           436
+
+Breach of the marriage tie                                           441
+
+Position of the married woman                                        442
+
+Spiritualization of love                                             445
+
+General emancipation from moral restraints                           446
+
+Brigandage                                                           448
+
+Paid assassination: poisoning                                        450
+
+Absolute wickedness                                                  453
+
+Morality and individualism                                           454
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.
+
+Lack of a reformation                                                457
+
+Relations of the Italian to the Church                               457
+
+Hatred of the hierarchy and the monks                                458
+
+The mendicant orders                                                 462
+
+The Dominican Inquisition                                            462
+
+The higher monastic orders                                           463
+
+Sense of dependence on the Church                                    465
+
+The preachers of repentance                                          466
+
+Girolamo Savonarola                                                  473
+
+Pagan elements in popular belief                                     479
+
+Faith in reliques                                                    481
+
+Mariolatry                                                           483
+
+Oscillations in public opinion                                       485
+
+Epidemic religious revivals                                          485
+
+Their regulation by the police at Ferrara                            487
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+RELIGION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
+
+Inevitable subjectivity                                              490
+
+Worldliness                                                          492
+
+Tolerance of Mohammedanism                                           492
+
+Equivalence of all religions                                         494
+
+Influence of antiquity                                               495
+
+The so-called Epicureans                                             496
+
+The doctrine of free will                                            497
+
+The pious Humanists                                                  499
+
+The less pronounced Humanists                                        499
+
+Codrus Urceus                                                        500
+
+The beginnings of religious criticism                                501
+
+Fatalism of the Humanists                                            503
+
+Their pagan exterior                                                 504
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITIONS.
+
+Astrology                                                            507
+
+Its extension and influence                                          508
+
+Its opponents in Italy                                               515
+
+Pico’s opposition and influence                                      516
+
+Various superstitions                                                518
+
+Superstition of the Humanists                                        519
+
+Ghosts of the departed                                               522
+
+Belief in dæmons                                                     523
+
+The Italian witch                                                    524
+
+Witches’ nest at Norcia                                              526
+
+Influence and limits of Northern witchcraft                          528
+
+Witchcraft of the prostitutes                                        529
+
+The magicians and enchanters                                         530
+
+The dæmons on the way to Rome                                        531
+
+Special forms of magic: the Telesmata                                533
+
+Magic at the laying of foundation-stones                             534
+
+The necromancer in poetry                                            535
+
+Benvenuto Cellini’s tale                                             536
+
+Decline of magic                                                     537
+
+Special branches of the superstition                                 538
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+GENERAL DISINTEGRATION OF BELIEF.
+
+Last confession of Boscoli                                           543
+
+Religious disorder and general scepticism                            543
+
+Controversy as to immortality                                        545
+
+The pagan heaven                                                     545
+
+The Homeric life to come                                             546
+
+Evaporation of Christian doctrine                                    547
+
+Italian Thei                                                         548
+
+
+
+
+_PART I._
+
+THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+This work bears the title of an essay in the strictest sense of the
+word. No one is more conscious than the writer with what limited means
+and strength he has addressed himself to a task so arduous. And even if
+he could look with greater confidence upon his own researches, he would
+hardly thereby feel more assured of the approval of competent judges. To
+each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilisation present a
+different picture; and in treating of a civilisation which is the mother
+of our own, and whose influence is still at work among us, it is
+unavoidable that individual judgment and feeling should tell every
+moment both on the writer and on the reader. In the wide ocean upon
+which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the
+same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other
+hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application,
+but lead also to essentially different conclusions. Such indeed is the
+importance of the subject, that it still calls for fresh investigation,
+and may be studied with advantage from the most varied points of view.
+Meanwhile we are content if a patient hearing be granted us, and if this
+book be taken and judged as a whole. It is the most serious difficulty
+of the history of civilisation that a great intellectual process must be
+broken up into single, and often into what seem arbitrary categories, in
+order to be in any way intelligible. It was formerly our intention to
+fill up the gaps in this book by a special work on the ‘Art of the
+Renaissance,’--an intention, however, which we have been able only to
+fulfil[1] in part.
+
+The struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen left Italy in a
+political condition which differed essentially from that of other
+countries of the West. While in France, Spain and England the feudal
+system was so organised that, at the close of its existence, it was
+naturally transformed into a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it
+helped to maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy
+had shaken it off almost entirely. The Emperors of the fourteenth
+century, even in the most favourable case, were no longer received and
+respected as feudal lords, but as possible leaders and supporters of
+powers already in existence; while the Papacy,[2] with its creatures and
+allies, was strong enough to hinder national unity in the future, not
+strong enough itself to bring about that unity. Between the two lay a
+multitude of political units--republics and despots--in part of long
+standing, in part of recent origin, whose existence was founded simply
+on their power to maintain it.[3] In them for the first time we detect
+the modern political spirit of Europe, surrendered freely to its own
+instincts, often displaying the worst features of an unbridled egoism,
+outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture.
+But, wherever this vicious tendency is overcome or in any way
+compensated, a new fact appears in history--the state as the outcome of
+reflection and calculation, the state as a work of art. This new life
+displays itself in a hundred forms, both in the republican and in the
+despotic states, and determines their inward constitution, no less than
+their foreign policy. We shall limit ourselves to the consideration of
+the completer and more clearly defined type, which is offered by the
+despotic states.
+
+The internal condition of the despotically governed states had a
+memorable counterpart in the Norman Empire of Lower Italy and Sicily,
+after its transformation by the Emperor Frederick II.[4] Bred amid
+treason and peril in the neighbourhood of the Saracens, Frederick, the
+first ruler of the modern type who sat upon a throne, had early
+accustomed himself, both in criticism and action, to a thoroughly
+objective treatment of affairs. His acquaintance with the internal
+condition and administration of the Saracenic states was close and
+intimate; and the mortal struggle in which he was engaged with the
+Papacy compelled him, no less than his adversaries, to bring into the
+field all the resources at his command. Frederick’s measures (especially
+after the year 1231) are aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal
+state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of
+will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree
+to the exchequer. He centralised, in a manner hitherto unknown in the
+West, the whole judicial and political administration by establishing
+the right of appeal from the feudal courts, which he did not, however,
+abolish, to the imperial judges. No office was henceforth to be filled
+by popular election, under penalty of the devastation of the offending
+district and of the enslavement of its inhabitants. Excise duties were
+introduced; the taxes, based on a comprehensive assessment, and
+distributed in accordance with Mohammedan usages, were collected by
+those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is
+impossible to obtain any money from Orientals. Here, in short, we find,
+not a people, but simply a disciplined multitude of subjects; who were
+forbidden, for example, to marry out of the country without special
+permission, and under no circumstances were allowed to study abroad. The
+University of Naples was the first we know of to restrict the freedom of
+study, while the East, in these respects at all events, left its youth
+unfettered. It was after the example of Mohammedan rulers that Frederick
+traded on his own account in all parts of the Mediterranean, reserving
+to himself the monopoly of many commodities, and restricting in various
+ways the commerce of his subjects. The Fatimite Caliphs, with all their
+esoteric unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of
+the differences in the religious faith of their people; Frederick, on
+the other hand, crowned his system of government by a religious
+inquisition, which will seem the more reprehensible when we remember
+that in the persons of the heretics he was persecuting the
+representatives of a free municipal life. Lastly, the internal police,
+and the kernel of the army for foreign service, was composed of Saracens
+who had been brought over from Sicily to Nocera and Luceria--men who
+were deaf to the cry of misery and careless of the ban of the Church. At
+a later period the subjects, by whom the use of weapons had long been
+forgotten, were passive witnesses of the fall of Manfred and of the
+seizure of the government by Charles of Anjou; the latter continued to
+use the system which he found already at work.
+
+At the side of the centralising Emperor appeared an usurper of the most
+peculiar kind: his vicar and son-in-law, Ezzelino da Romano. He stands
+as the representative of no system of government or administration, for
+all his activity was wasted in struggles for supremacy in the eastern
+part of Upper Italy; but as a political type he was a figure of no less
+importance for the future than his imperial protector Frederick. The
+conquests and usurpations which had hitherto taken place in the Middle
+Ages rested on real or pretended inheritance and other such claims, or
+else were effected against unbelievers and excommunicated persons. Here
+for the first time the attempt was openly made to found a throne by
+wholesale murder and endless barbarities, by the adoption, in short, of
+any means with a view to nothing but the end pursued. None of his
+successors, not even Cæsar Borgia, rivalled the colossal guilt of
+Ezzelino; but the example once set was not forgotten, and his fall led
+to no return of justice among the nations, and served as no warning to
+future transgressors.
+
+It was in vain at such a time that St. Thomas Aquinas, a born subject of
+Frederick, set up the theory of a constitutional monarchy, in which the
+prince was to be supported by an upper house named by himself, and a
+representative body elected by the people; in vain did he concede to
+the people the right of revolution.[5] Such theories found no echo
+outside the lecture-room, and Frederick and Ezzelino were and remain for
+Italy the great political phenomena of the thirteenth century. Their
+personality, already half legendary, forms the most important subject of
+‘The Hundred Old Tales,’ whose original composition falls certainly
+within this century.[6] In them Frederick is already represented as
+possessing the right to do as he pleased with the property of his
+subjects, and exercises on all, even on criminals, a profound influence
+by the force of his personality; Ezzelino is spoken of with the awe
+which all mighty impressions leave behind them. His person became the
+centre of a whole literature from the chronicle of eyewitnesses to the
+half-mythical tragedy[7] of later poets.
+
+Immediately after the fall of Frederick and Ezzelino, a crowd of tyrants
+appeared upon the scene. The struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline was
+their opportunity. They came forward in general as Ghibelline leaders,
+but at times and under conditions so various that it is impossible not
+to recognise in the fact a law of supreme and universal necessity. The
+means which they used were those already familiar in the party struggles
+of the past--the banishment or destruction of their adversaries and of
+their adversaries’ households.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+
+The tyrannies, great and small, of the fourteenth century afford
+constant proof that examples such as these were not thrown away. Their
+misdeeds cried forth loudly and have been circumstantially told by
+historians. As states depending for existence on themselves alone, and
+scientifically organised with a view to this object, they present to us
+a higher interest than that of mere narrative.
+
+The deliberate adaptation of means to ends, of which no prince out of
+Italy had at that time a conception, joined to almost absolute power
+within the limits of the state, produced among the despots both men and
+modes of life of a peculiar character.[8] The chief secret of government
+in the hands of the prudent ruler lay in leaving the incidence of
+taxation so far as possible where he found it, or as he had first
+arranged it. The chief sources of income were: a land tax, based on a
+valuation; definite taxes on articles of consumption and duties on
+exported and imported goods; together with the private fortune of the
+ruling house. The only possible increase was derived from the growth of
+business and of general prosperity. Loans, such as we find in the free
+cities, were here unknown; a well-planned confiscation was held a
+preferable means of raising money, provided only that it left public
+credit unshaken--an end attained, for example, by the truly Oriental
+practice of deposing and plundering the director of the finances.[9]
+
+Out of this income the expenses of the little court, of the body-guard,
+of the mercenary troops, and of the public buildings were met, as well
+as of the buffoons and men of talent who belonged to the personal
+attendants of the prince. The illegitimacy of his rule isolated the
+tyrant and surrounded him with constant danger; the most honourable
+alliance which he could form was with intellectual merit, without regard
+to its origin. The liberality of the northern princes of the thirteenth
+century was confined to the knights, to the nobility which served and
+sang. It was otherwise with the Italian despot. With his thirst of fame
+and his passion for monumental works, it was talent, not birth, which he
+needed. In the company of the poet and the scholar he felt himself in a
+new position, almost, indeed, in possession of a new legitimacy.
+
+No prince was more famous in this respect than the ruler of Verona, Can
+Grande della Scala, who numbered among the illustrious exiles whom he
+entertained at his court representatives of the whole of Italy.[10] The
+men of letters were not ungrateful. Petrarch, whose visits at the courts
+of such men have been so severely censured, sketched an ideal picture of
+a prince of the fourteenth century.[11] He demands great things from his
+patron, the lord of Padua, but in a manner which shows that he holds him
+capable of them. ‘Thou must not be the master but the father of thy
+subjects, and must love them as thy children; yea, as members of thy
+body.[12] Weapons, guards, and soldiers thou mayest employ against the
+enemy--with thy subjects goodwill is sufficient. By citizens, of course,
+I mean those who love the existing order; for those who daily desire
+change are rebels and traitors, and against such a stern justice may
+take its course.’
+
+Here follows, worked out in detail, the purely modern fiction of the
+omnipotence of the state. The prince is to be independent of his
+courtiers, but at the same time to govern with simplicity and modesty;
+he is to take everything into his charge, to maintain and restore
+churches and public buildings, to keep up the municipal police,[13] to
+drain the marshes, to look after the supply of wine and corn; he is to
+exercise a strict justice, so to distribute the taxes that the people
+can recognise their necessity and the regret of the ruler to be
+compelled to put his hands in the pockets of others; he is to support
+the sick and the helpless, and to give his protection and society to
+distinguished scholars, on whom his fame in after ages will depend.
+
+But whatever might be the brighter sides of the system, and the merits
+of individual rulers, yet the men of the fourteenth century were not
+without a more or less distinct consciousness of the brief and uncertain
+tenure of most of these despotisms. Inasmuch as political institutions
+like these are naturally secure in proportion to the size of the
+territory in which they exist, the larger principalities were constantly
+tempted to swallow up the smaller. Whole hecatombs of petty rulers were
+sacrificed at this time to the Visconti alone. As a result of this
+outward danger an inward ferment was in ceaseless activity; and the
+effect of the situation on the character of the ruler was generally of
+the most sinister kind. Absolute power, with its temptations to luxury
+and unbridled selfishness, and the perils to which he was exposed from
+enemies and conspirators, turned him almost inevitably into a tyrant in
+the worst sense of the word. Well for him if he could trust his nearest
+relations! But where all was illegitimate, there could be no regular law
+of inheritance, either with regard to the succession or to the division
+of the ruler’s property; and consequently the heir, if incompetent or a
+minor, was liable in the interest of the family itself to be supplanted
+by an uncle or cousin of more resolute character. The acknowledgment or
+exclusion of the bastards was a fruitful source of contest; and most of
+these families in consequence were plagued with a crowd of discontented
+and vindictive kinsmen. This circumstance gave rise to continual
+outbreaks of treason and to frightful scenes of domestic bloodshed.
+Sometimes the pretenders lived abroad in exile, and like the Visconti,
+who practised the fisherman’s craft on the Lake of Garda,[14] viewed the
+situation with patient indifference. When asked by a messenger of his
+rival when and how he thought of returning to Milan, he gave the reply,
+‘By the same means as those by which I was expelled, but not till his
+crimes have outweighed my own.’ Sometimes, too, the despot was
+sacrificed by his relations, with the view of saving the family, to the
+public conscience which he had too grossly outraged.[15] In a few cases
+the government was in the hands of the whole family, or at least the
+ruler was bound to take their advice; and here, too, the distribution of
+property and influence often led to bitter disputes.
+
+The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent hatred of the
+Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the pomp and display with which
+the despot was perhaps less anxious to gratify his own vanity than to
+impress the popular imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to
+an adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge Aguello
+of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden sceptre, and show
+himself at the window of his house, ‘as relics are shown.’ reclining on
+embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or emperor, by
+kneeling attendants.[16] More often, however, the old Florentines speak
+on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and
+characterised well the vulgarity and commonplace which mark the ambition
+of the new princes.[17] ‘What mean their trumpets and their bells,
+their horns and their flutes; but come, hangman--come, vultures?’ The
+castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is a lofty and
+solitary building, full of dungeons and listening-tubes,[18] the home of
+cruelty and misery. Misfortune is foretold to all who enter the service
+of the despot,[19] who even becomes at last himself an object of pity:
+he must needs be the enemy of all good and honest men; he can trust no
+one, and can read in the faces of his subjects the expectation of his
+fall. ‘As despotisms rise, grow, and are consolidated, so grows in their
+midst the hidden element which must produce their dissolution and
+ruin.’[20] But the deepest ground of dislike has not been stated;
+Florence was then the scene of the richest development of human
+individuality, while for the despots no other individuality could be
+suffered to live and thrive but their own and that of their nearest
+dependents. The control of the individual was rigorously carried out,
+even down to the establishment of a system of passports.[21]
+
+The astrological superstitions and the religious unbelief of many of the
+tyrants gave, in the minds of their contemporaries, a peculiar colour to
+this awful and God-forsaken existence. When the last Carrara could no
+longer defend the walls and gates of the plague-stricken Padua, hemmed
+in on all sides by the Venetians (1405), the soldiers of the guard heard
+him cry to the devil ‘to come and kill him.’
+
+The most complete and instructive type of the tyranny of the fourteenth
+century is to be found unquestionably among the Visconti of Milan, from
+the death of the Archbishop Giovanni onwards (1354). The family likeness
+which shows itself between Bernabò and the worst of the Roman Emperors
+is unmistakable;[22] the most important public object was the prince’s
+boar-hunting; whoever interfered with it was put to death with torture;
+the terrified people were forced to maintain 5,000 boar-hounds, with
+strict responsibility for their health and safety. The taxes were
+extorted by every conceivable sort of compulsion; seven daughters of the
+prince received a dowry of 100,000 gold florins apiece; and an enormous
+treasure was collected. On the death of his wife (1384) an order was
+issued ‘to the subjects’ to share his grief, as once they had shared his
+joy, and to wear mourning for a year. The _coup de main_ (1385) by which
+his nephew Giangaleazzo got him into his power--one of those brilliant
+plots which make the heart of even late historians beat more
+quickly[23]--was strikingly characteristic of the man. Giangaleazzo,
+despised by his relations on account of his religion and his love of
+science, resolved on vengeance, and, leaving the city under pretext of a
+pilgrimage, fell upon his unsuspecting uncle, took him prisoner, forced
+his way back into the city at the head of an armed band, seized on the
+government, and gave up the palace of Bernabò to general plunder.
+
+In Giangaleazzo that passion for the colossal which was common to most
+of the despots shows itself on the largest scale. He undertook, at the
+cost of 300,000 golden florins, the construction of gigantic dykes, to
+divert in case of need the Mincio from Mantua and the Brenta from Padua,
+and thus to render these cities defenceless.[24] It is not impossible,
+indeed, that he thought of draining away the lagoons of Venice. He
+founded that most wonderful of all convents, the Certosa of Pavia,[25]
+and the cathedral of Milan, ‘which exceeds in size and splendour all
+the churches of Christendom.’ The Palace in Pavia, which his father
+Galeazzo began and which he himself finished, was probably by far the
+most magnificent of the princely dwellings of Europe. There he
+transferred his famous library, and the great collection of relics of
+the saints, in which he placed a peculiar faith. King Winceslaus made
+him Duke (1395); he was hoping for nothing less than the Kingdom of
+Italy[26] or the Imperial crown, when (1402) he fell ill and died. His
+whole territories are said to have paid him in a single year, besides
+the regular contribution of 1,200,000 gold florins, no less than 800,000
+more in extraordinary subsidies. After his death the dominions which he
+had brought together by every sort of violence fell to pieces; and for a
+time even the original nucleus could with difficulty be maintained by
+his successors. What might have become of his sons Giovanni Maria (died
+1412) and Filippo Maria (died 1417), had they lived in a different
+country and among other traditions, cannot be said. But, as heirs of
+their house, they inherited that monstrous capital of cruelty and
+cowardice which had been accumulated from generation to generation.
+
+Giovanni Maria, too, is famed for his dogs, which were no longer,
+however, used for hunting, but for tearing human bodies. Tradition has
+preserved their names, like those of the bears of the Emperor
+Valentinian I.[27] In May, 1409, when war was going on, and the starving
+populace cried to him in the streets, _Pace! Pace!_ he let loose his
+mercenaries upon them, and 200 lives were sacrificed; under penalty of
+the gallows it was forbidden to utter the words _pace_ and _guerra_, and
+the priests were ordered, instead of _dona nobis pacem_, to say
+_tranquillitatem_! At last a band of conspirators took advantage of the
+moment when Facino Cane, the chief Condottiere of the insane ruler, lay
+ill at Pavia, and cut down Giovan Maria in the church of San Gottardo at
+Milan; the dying Facino on the same day made his officers swear to stand
+by the heir Filippo Maria, whom he himself urged his wife[28] to take
+for a second husband. His wife, Beatrice di Tenda, followed his advice.
+We shall have occasion to speak of Filippo Maria later on.
+
+And in times like these Cola di Rienzi was dreaming of founding on the
+rickety enthusiasm of the corrupt population of Rome a new state which
+was to comprise all Italy. By the side of rulers such as those whom we
+have described, he seems no better than a poor deluded fool.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+
+The despotisms of the fifteenth century show an altered character. Many
+of the less important tyrants, and some of the greater, like the Scala
+and the Carrara, had disappeared, while the more powerful ones,
+aggrandized by conquest, had given to their systems each its
+characteristic development. Naples for example received a fresh and
+stronger impulse from the new Arragonese dynasty. A striking feature of
+this epoch is the attempt of the Condottieri to found independent
+dynasties of their own. Facts and the actual relations of things, apart
+from traditional estimates, are alone regarded; talent and audacity win
+the great prizes. The petty despots, to secure a trustworthy support,
+begin to enter the service of the larger states, and become themselves
+Condottieri, receiving in return for their services money and impunity
+for their misdeeds, if not an increase of territory. All, whether small
+or great, must exert themselves more, must act with greater caution and
+calculation, and must learn to refrain from too wholesale barbarities;
+only so much wrong is permitted by public opinion as is necessary for
+the end in view, and this the impartial bystander certainly finds no
+fault with. No trace is here visible of that half-religious loyalty by
+which the legitimate princes of the West were supported; personal
+popularity is the nearest approach we can find to it. Talent and
+calculation are the only means of advancement. A character like that of
+Charles the Bold, which wore itself out in the passionate pursuit of
+impracticable ends, was a riddle to the Italian. ‘The Swiss were only
+peasants, and if they were all killed, that would be no satisfaction for
+the Burgundian nobles who might fall in the war. If the Duke got
+possession of all Switzerland without a struggle, his income would not
+be 5,000 ducats the greater.’[29] The mediæval features in the
+character of Charles, his chivalrous aspirations and ideals, had long
+become unintelligible to the Italian. The diplomatists of the South,
+when they saw him strike his officers and yet keep them in his service,
+when he maltreated his troops to punish them for a defeat, and then
+threw the blame on his counsellors in the presence of the same troops,
+gave him up for lost.[30] Louis XI., on the other hand, whose policy
+surpasses that of the Italian princes in their own style, and who was an
+avowed admirer of Francesco Sforza, must be placed in all that regards
+culture and refinement far below these rulers.
+
+Good and evil lie strangely mixed together in the Italian States of the
+fifteenth century. The personality of the ruler is so highly developed,
+often of such deep significance, and so characteristic of the conditions
+and needs of the time, that to form an adequate moral judgment on it is
+no easy task.[31]
+
+The foundation of the system was and remained illegitimate, and nothing
+could remove the curse which rested upon it. The imperial approval or
+investiture made no change in the matter, since the people attached
+little weight to the fact, that the despot had bought a piece of
+parchment somewhere in foreign countries, or from some stranger passing
+through his territory.[32] If the Emperor had been good for anything--so
+ran the logic of uncritical common sense--he would never have let the
+tyrant rise at all. Since the Roman expedition of Charles IV., the
+emperors had done nothing more in Italy than sanction a tyranny which
+had arisen without their help; they could give it no other practical
+authority than what might flow from an imperial charter. The whole
+conduct of Charles in Italy was a scandalous political comedy. Matteo
+Villani[33] relates how the Visconti escorted him round their territory,
+and at last out of it; how he went about like a hawker selling his wares
+(privileges, etc.) for money; what a mean appearance he made in Rome,
+and how at the end, without even drawing the sword, he returned with
+replenished coffers across the Alps. Nevertheless, patriotic enthusiasts
+and poets, full of the greatness of the past, conceived high hopes at
+his coming, which were afterwards dissipated by his pitiful conduct.
+Petrarch, who had written frequent letters exhorting the Emperor to
+cross the Alps, to give back to Rome its departed greatness, and to set
+up a new universal empire, now, when the Emperor, careless of these
+high-flying projects, had come at last, still hoped to see his dreams
+realized, strove unweariedly, by speech and writing, to impress the
+Emperor with them, but was at length driven away from him with disgust
+when he saw the imperial authority dishonoured by the submission of
+Charles to the Pope.[34] Sigismund came, on the first occasion at least
+(1414), with the good intention of persuading John XXIII. to take part
+in his council; it was on that journey, when Pope and Emperor were
+gazing from the lofty tower of Cremona on the panorama of Lombardy, that
+their host, the tyrant Gabino Fondolo, was seized with the desire to
+throw them both over. On his second visit Sigismund came as a mere
+adventurer, giving no proof whatever of his imperial prerogative, except
+by crowning Beccadelli as a poet; for more than half a year he remained
+shut up in Siena, like a debtor in gaol, and only with difficulty, and
+at a later period, succeeded in being crowned in Rome. And what can be
+thought of Frederick III.? His journeys to Italy have the air of
+holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the expense of those who wanted
+him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity it flattered to
+entertain an emperor. The latter was the case with Alfonso of Naples,
+who paid 150,000 florins for the honour of an imperial visit.[35] At
+Ferrara,[36] on his second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a
+whole day without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty
+titles; he created knights, counts, doctors, notaries--counts, indeed,
+of different degrees, as, for instance, counts palatine, counts with the
+right to create doctors up to the number of five, counts with the right
+to legitimatise bastards, to appoint notaries, and so forth. The
+Chancellor, however, expected in return for the patents in question a
+gratuity which was thought excessive at Ferrara.[37] The opinion of
+Borso, himself created Duke of Modena and Reggio in return for an annual
+payment of 4,000 gold florins, when his imperial patron was distributing
+titles and diplomas to all the little court, is not mentioned. The
+humanists, then the chief spokesmen of the age, were divided in opinion
+according to their personal interests, while the Emperor was greeted by
+some[38] of them with the conventional acclamations of the poets of
+imperial Rome. Poggio[39] confessed that he no longer knew what the
+coronation meant; in the old times only the victorious Inperator was
+crowned, and then he was crowned with laurel.[40]
+
+With Maximilian I. begins not only the general intervention of foreign
+nations, but a new imperial policy with regard to Italy. The first
+step--the investiture of Ludovico Moro with the duchy of Milan and the
+exclusion of his unhappy nephew--was not of a kind to bear good fruits.
+According to the modern theory of intervention, when two parties are
+tearing a country to pieces, a third may step in and take its share, and
+on this principle the empire acted. But right and justice were appealed
+to no longer. When Louis XII. was expected in Genoa (1502), and the
+imperial eagle was removed from the hall of the ducal palace and
+replaced by painted lilies, the historian, Senarega[41] asked what after
+all, was the meaning of the eagle which so many revolutions had spared,
+and what claims the empire had upon Genoa. No one knew more about the
+matter than the old phrase that Genoa was a _camera imperii_. In fact,
+nobody in Italy could give a clear answer to any such questions. At
+length, when Charles V. held Spain and the empire together, he was able
+by means of Spanish forces to make good imperial claims; but it is
+notorious that what he thereby gained turned to the profit, not of the
+empire, but of the Spanish monarchy.
+
+Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of
+the fifteenth century, was the public indifference to legitimate birth,
+which to foreigners--for example, to Comines--appeared so remarkable.
+The two things went naturally together. In northern countries, as in
+Burgundy, the illegitimate offspring were provided for by a distinct
+class of appanages, such as bishoprics and the like; in Portugal an
+illegitimate line maintained itself on the throne only by constant
+effort; in Italy, on the contrary, there no longer existed a princely
+house where, even in the direct line of descent, bastards were not
+patiently tolerated. The Aragonese monarchs of Naples belonged to the
+illegitimate line, Aragon itself falling to the lot of the brother of
+Alfonso I. The great Frederick of Urbino was, perhaps, no Montefeltro at
+all. When Pius II. was on his way to the Congress of Mantua (1459),
+eight bastards of the house of Este rode to meet him at Ferrara, among
+them the reigning duke Borso himself and two illegitimate sons of his
+illegitimate brother and predecessor Leonello.[42] The latter had also
+had a lawful wife, herself an illegitimate daughter of Alfonso I. of
+Naples by an African woman.[43] The bastards were often admitted to the
+succession where the lawful children were minors and the dangers of the
+situation were pressing; and a rule of seniority became recognised,
+which took no account of pure or impure birth. The fitness of the
+individual, his worth and his capacity, were of more weight than all the
+laws and usages which prevailed elsewhere in the West. It was the age,
+indeed, in which the sons of the Popes were founding dynasties. In the
+sixteenth century, through the influence of foreign ideas and of the
+counter-reformation which then began, the whole question was judged more
+strictly: Varchi discovers that the succession of the legitimate
+children ‘is ordered by reason, and is the will of heaven from
+eternity.’[44] Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici founded his claim to the
+lordship of Florence on the fact that he was perhaps the fruit of a
+lawful marriage, and at all events son of a gentlewoman, and not, like
+Duke Alessandro, of a servant girl.[45] At this time began those
+morganatic marriages of affection which in the fifteenth century, on
+grounds either of policy or morality, would have had no meaning at all.
+
+But the highest and the most admired form of illegitimacy in the
+fifteenth century was presented by the Condottiere, who, whatever may
+have been his origin, raised himself to the position of an independent
+ruler. At bottom, the occupation of Lower Italy by the Normans in the
+eleventh century was of this character. Such attempts now began to keep
+the peninsula in a constant ferment.
+
+It was possible for a Condottiere to obtain the lordship of a district
+even without usurpation, in the case when his employer, through want of
+money or troops, provided for him in this way;[46] under any
+circumstances the Condottiere, even when he dismissed for the time the
+greater part of his forces, needed a safe place where he could establish
+his winter quarters, and lay up his stores and provisions. The first
+example of a captain thus portioned is John Hawkwood, who was invested
+by Gregory XI. with the lordship of Bagnacavallo and Cotignola.[47] When
+with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian armies and leaders appeared upon the
+scene, the chances of founding a principality, or of increasing one
+already acquired, became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian
+outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan after the
+death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two sons was chiefly
+aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms founded by the
+Condottieri; and from the greatest of them, Facino Cane, the house of
+Visconti inherited, together with his widow, a long list of cities, and
+400,000 golden florins, not to speak of the soldiers of her first
+husband whom Beatrice di Tenda brought with her.[48] From henceforth
+that thoroughly immoral relation between the governments and their
+Condottieri, which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became
+more and more common. An old story[49]--one of those which are true and
+not true, everywhere and nowhere--describes it as follows: The citizens
+of a certain town (Siena seems to be meant) had once an officer in their
+service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took
+counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their
+power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At
+last one of them rose and said, ‘Let us kill him and then worship him as
+our patron saint.’ And so they did, following the example set by the
+Roman senate with Romulus. In fact, the Condottieri had reason to fear
+none so much as their employers; if they were successful, they became
+dangerous, and were put out of the way like Robert Malatesta just after
+the victory he had won for Sixtus IV. (1482); if they failed, the
+vengeance of the Venetians on Carmagnola[50] showed to what risks they
+were exposed (1432). It is characteristic of the moral aspect of the
+situation, that the Condottieri had often to give their wives and
+children as hostages, and notwithstanding this, neither felt nor
+inspired confidence. They must have been heroes of abnegation, natures
+like Belisarius himself, not to be cankered by hatred and bitterness;
+only the most perfect goodness could save them from the most monstrous
+iniquity. No wonder then if we find them full of contempt for all sacred
+things, cruel and treacherous to their fellows--men who cared nothing
+whether or no they died under the ban of the Church. At the same time,
+and through the force of the same conditions, the genius and capacity
+of many among them attained the highest conceivable development, and won
+for them the admiring devotion of their followers; their armies are the
+first in modern history in which the personal credit of the leader is
+the one moving power. A brilliant example is shown in the life of
+Francesco Sforza;[51] no prejudice of birth could prevent him from
+winning and turning to account when he needed it a boundless devotion
+from each individual with whom he had to deal; it happened more than
+once that his enemies laid down their arms at the sight of him, greeting
+him reverently with uncovered heads, each honouring in him ‘the common
+father of the men-at-arms.’ The race of the Sforza has this special
+interest, that from the very beginning of its history we seem able to
+trace its endeavours after the crown.[52] The foundation of its fortune
+lay in the remarkable fruitfulness of the family; Francesco’s father,
+Jacopo, himself a celebrated man, had twenty brothers and sisters, all
+brought up roughly at Cotignola, near Faenza, amid the perils of one of
+the endless Romagnole ‘vendette’ between their own house and that of the
+Pasolini. The family dwelling was a mere arsenal and fortress; the
+mother and daughters were as warlike as their kinsmen. In his thirteenth
+year Jacopo ran away and fled to Panicale to the Papal Condottiere
+Boldrino--the man who even in death continued to lead his troops, the
+word of order being given from the bannered tent in which the embalmed
+body lay, till at last a fit leader was found to succeed him. Jacopo,
+when he had at length made himself a name in the service of different
+Condottieri, sent for his relations, and obtained through them the same
+advantages that a prince derives from a numerous dynasty. It was these
+relations who kept the army together when he lay a captive in the Castel
+dell’Uovo at Naples; his sister took the royal envoys prisoners with her
+own hands, and saved him by this reprisal from death. It was an
+indication of the breadth and the range of his plans that in monetary
+affairs Jacopo was thoroughly trustworthy; even in his defeats he
+consequently found credit with the bankers. He habitually protected the
+peasants against the licence of his troops, and reluctantly destroyed or
+injured a conquered city. He gave his well-known mistress, Lucia, the
+mother of Francesco, in marriage to another in order to be free from a
+princely alliance. Even the marriages of his relations were arranged on
+a definite plan. He kept clear of the impious and profligate life of his
+contemporaries, and brought up his son Francesco to the three rules:
+‘Let other men’s wives alone; strike none of your followers, or, if you
+do, send the injured man far away; don’t ride a hard-mouthed horse, or
+one that drops his shoe.’ But his chief source of influence lay in the
+qualities, if not of a great general, at least of a great soldier. His
+frame was powerful, and developed by every kind of exercise; his
+peasant’s face and frank manners won general popularity; his memory was
+marvellous, and after the lapse of years could recall the names of his
+followers, the number of their horses, and the amount of their pay. His
+education was purely Italian: he devoted his leisure to the study of
+history, and had Greek and Latin authors translated for his use.
+Francesco, his still more famous son, set his mind from the first on
+founding a powerful state, and through brilliant generalship and a
+faithlessness which hesitated at nothing, got possession of the great
+city of Milan (1447-1450).
+
+His example was contagious. Æneas Sylvius wrote about this time:[53] ‘In
+our change-loving Italy, where nothing stands firm, and where no ancient
+dynasty exists, a servant can easily become a king.’ One man in
+particular, who styled himself ‘the man of fortune,’ filled the
+imagination of the whole country: Giacomo Piccinino, the son of Niccolò.
+It was a burning question of the day if he, too, would succeed in
+founding a princely house. The greater states had an obvious interest in
+hindering it, and even Francesco Sforza thought it would be all the
+better if the list of self-made sovereigns were not enlarged. But the
+troops and captains sent against him, at the time, for instance, when
+he was aiming at the lordship of Siena, recognised their interest in
+supporting him:[54] ‘If it were all over with him, we should have to go
+back and plough our fields.’ Even while besieging him at Orbetello, they
+supplied him with provisions; and he got out of his straits with honour.
+But at last fate overtook him. All Italy was betting on the result, when
+(1465), after a visit to Sforza at Milan, he went to King Ferrante at
+Naples. In spite of the pledges given, and of his high connections, he
+was murdered in the Castel dell’Uovo.[55] Even the Condottieri, who had
+obtained their dominions by inheritance, never felt themselves safe.
+When Roberto Malatesta and Frederick of Urbino died on the same day
+(1482), the one at Rome, the other at Bologna, it was found[56] that
+each had recommended his state to the care of the other. Against a class
+of men who themselves stuck at nothing, everything was held to be
+permissible. Francesco Sforza, when quite young, had married a rich
+Calabrian heiress, Polissena Russa, Countess of Montalto, who bore him a
+daughter; an aunt poisoned both mother and child, and seized the
+inheritance.[57]
+
+From the death of Piccinino onwards, the foundations of new States by
+the Condottieri became a scandal not to be tolerated. The four great
+Powers, Naples, Milan, the Papacy, and Venice, formed among themselves a
+political equilibrium which refused to allow of any disturbance. In the
+States of the Church, which swarmed with petty tyrants, who in part
+were, or had been, Condottieri, the nephews of the Popes, since the time
+of Sixtus IV., monopolised the right to all such undertakings. But at
+the first sign of a political crisis, the soldiers of fortune appeared
+again upon the scene. Under the wretched administration of Innocent
+VIII. it was near happening that a certain Boccalino, who had formerly
+served in the Burgundian army, gave himself and the town of Osimo, of
+which he was master, up to the Turkish forces;[58] fortunately, through
+the intervention of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he proved willing to be
+paid off, and took himself away. In the year 1495, when the wars of
+Charles VIII. had turned Italy upside down, the Condottiere Vidovero, of
+Brescia, made trial of his strength:[59] he had already seized the town
+of Cesena and murdered many of the nobles and the burghers; but the
+citadel held out, and he was forced to withdraw. He then, at the head of
+a band lent him by another scoundrel, Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, son
+of the Roberto already spoken of, and Venetian Condottiere, wrested the
+town of Castelnuovo from the Archbishop of Ravenna. The Venetians,
+fearing that worse would follow, and urged also by the Pope, ordered
+Pandolfo, ‘with the kindest intentions,’ to take an opportunity of
+arresting his good friend: the arrest was made, though ‘with great
+regret,’ whereupon the order came to bring the prisoner to the gallows.
+Pandolfo was considerate enough to strangle him in prison, and then show
+his corpse to the people. The last notable example of such usurpers is
+the famous Castellan of Musso, who during the confusion in the Milanese
+territory which followed the battle of Pavia (1525), improvised a
+sovereignty on the Lake of Como.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE PETTY TYRANNIES.
+
+
+It may be said in general of the despotisms of the fifteenth century
+that the greatest crimes are most frequent in the smallest states. In
+these, where the family was numerous and all the members wished to live
+in a manner befitting their rank, disputes respecting the inheritance
+were unavoidable. Bernardo Varano of Camerino put (1434) two of his
+brothers to death,[60] wishing to divide their property among his sons.
+Where the ruler of a single town was distinguished by a wise, moderate,
+and humane government, and by zeal for intellectual culture, he was
+generally a member of some great family, or politically dependent on it.
+This was the case, for example, with Alessandro Sforza,[61] Prince of
+Pesaro, brother of the great Francesco, and stepfather of Frederick of
+Urbino (d. 1473). Prudent in administration, just and affable in his
+rule, he enjoyed, after years of warfare, a tranquil reign, collected a
+noble library, and passed his leisure in learned or religious
+conversation. A man of the same class was Giovanni II., Bentivoglio of
+Bologna (1462-1506), whose policy was determined by that of the Este and
+the Sforza. What ferocity and bloodthirstiness is found, on the other
+hand, among the Varani of Camerino, the Malatesta of Rimini, the
+Manfreddi of Faenza, and above all among the Baglioni of Perugia. We
+find a striking picture of the events in the last-named family towards
+the close of the fifteenth century, in the admirable historical
+narratives of Graziani and Materazzo.[62]
+
+The Baglioni were one of those families whose rule never took the shape
+of an avowed despotism. It was rather a leadership exercised by means
+of their vast wealth and of their practical influence in the choice of
+public officers. Within the family one man was recognised as head; but
+deep and secret jealousy prevailed among the members of the different
+branches. Opposed to the Baglioni stood another aristocratic party, led
+by the family of the Oddi. In 1487 the city was turned into a camp, and
+the houses of the leading citizens swarmed with bravos; scenes of
+violence were of daily occurrence. At the burial of a German student,
+who had been assassinated, two colleges took arms against one another;
+sometimes the bravos of the different houses even joined battle in the
+public square. The complaints of the merchants and artisans were vain;
+the Papal Governors and _Nipoti_ held their tongues, or took themselves
+off on the first opportunity. At last the Oddi were forced to abandon
+Perugia, and the city became a beleaguered fortress under the absolute
+despotism of the Baglioni, who used even the cathedral as barracks.
+Plots and surprises were met with cruel vengeance; in the year 1491,
+after 130 conspirators, who had forced their way into the city, were
+killed and hung up at the Palazzo Comunale, thirty-five altars were
+erected in the square, and for three days mass was performed and
+processions held, to take away the curse which rested on the spot. A
+nephew of Innocent VIII. was in open day run through in the street. A
+nephew of Alexander VI., who was sent to smooth matters over, was
+dismissed with public contempt. All the while the two leaders of the
+ruling house, Guido and Ridolfo, were holding frequent interviews with
+Suor Colomba of Rieti, a Dominican nun of saintly reputation and
+miraculous powers, who under penalty of some great disaster ordered them
+to make peace--naturally in vain. Nevertheless the chronicle takes the
+opportunity to point out the devotion and piety of the better men in
+Perugia during this reign of terror. When in 1494 Charles VIII.
+approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and
+near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity, that every house in
+the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled, the
+peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the
+fresh-grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts
+grew fat on the bodies of the slain, on so-called ‘Christian flesh.’
+When Alexander VI. withdrew (1495) into Umbria before Charles VIII.,
+then returning from Naples, it occurred to him, when at Perugia, that he
+might now rid himself of the Baglioni once for all; he proposed to Guido
+a festival or tournament, or something else of the same kind, which
+would bring the whole family together. Guido, however, was of opinion,
+‘that the most impressive spectacle of all would be to see the whole
+military force of Perugia collected in a body,’ whereupon the Pope
+abandoned his project. Soon after, the exiles made another attack, in
+which nothing but the personal heroism of the Baglioni won them the
+victory. It was then that Simonetto Baglione, a lad of scarcely
+eighteen, fought in the square with a handful of followers against
+hundreds of the enemy: he fell at last with more than twenty wounds, but
+recovered himself when Astorre Baglione came to his help, and mounting
+on horseback in gilded armour with a falcon on his helmet, ‘like Mars in
+bearing and in deeds, plunged into the struggle.’
+
+At that time Raphael, a boy of twelve years of age, was at school under
+Pietro Perugino. The impressions of these days are perhaps immortalised
+in the small, early pictures of St. Michael and St. George: something of
+them, it may be, lives eternally in the great painting of St. Michael:
+and if Astorre Baglione has anywhere found his apotheosis, it is in the
+figure of the heavenly horseman in the Heliodorus.
+
+The opponents of the Baglioni were partly destroyed, partly scattered in
+terror, and were henceforth incapable of another enterprise of the kind.
+After a time a partial reconciliation took place, and some of the exiles
+were allowed to return. But Perugia became none the safer or more
+tranquil: the inward discord of the ruling family broke out in frightful
+excesses. An opposition was formed against Guido and Ridolfo and their
+sons Gianpaolo, Simonetto, Astorre, Gismondo, Gentile, Marcantonio and
+others, by two great-nephews, Grifone and Carlo Barciglia; the latter of
+the two was also nephew of Varano, Prince of Camerino, and brother of
+one of the former exiles, Ieronimo della Penna. In vain did Simonetto,
+warned by sinister presentiment, entreat his uncle on his knees to allow
+him to put Penna to death: Guido refused. The plot ripened suddenly on
+the occasion of the marriage of Astorre with Lavinia Colonna, at
+Midsummer 1500. The festival began and lasted several days amid gloomy
+forebodings, whose deepening effect is admirably described by Matarazzo.
+Varano fed and encouraged them with devilish ingenuity: he worked upon
+Grifone by the prospect of undivided authority, and by stories of an
+imaginary intrigue of his wife Zenobia with Gianpaolo. Finally each
+conspirator was provided with a victim. (The Baglioni lived all of them
+in separate houses, mostly on the site of the present castle.) Each
+received fifteen of the bravos at hand; the remainder were set on the
+watch. In the night of July 15 the doors were forced, and Guido,
+Astorre, Simonetto, and Gismondo were murdered; the others succeeded in
+escaping.
+
+As the corpse of Astorre lay by that of Simonetto in the street, the
+spectators, ‘and especially the foreign students,’ compared him to an
+ancient Roman, so great and imposing did he seem. In the features of
+Simonetto could still be traced the audacity and defiance which death
+itself had not tamed. The victors went round among the friends of the
+family, and did their best to recommend themselves; they found all in
+tears and preparing to leave for the country. Meantime the escaped
+Baglioni collected forces without the city, and on the following day
+forced their way in, Gianpaolo at their head, and speedily found
+adherents among others whom Barciglia had been threatening with death.
+When Grifone fell into their hands near S. Ercolono. Gianpaolo handed
+him over for execution to his followers. Barciglia and Penna fled to
+Varano, the chief author of the tragedy, at Camerino; and in a moment,
+almost without loss, Gianpaolo became master of the city.
+
+Atalanta, the still young and beautiful mother of Grifone, who the day
+before had withdrawn to a country house with the latter’s wife Zenobia
+and two children of Gianpaolo, and more than once had repulsed her son
+with a mother’s curse, now returned with her step-daughter in search of
+the dying man. All stood aside as the two women approached, each man
+shrinking from being recognised as the slayer of Grifone, and dreading
+the malediction of the mother. But they were deceived: she herself
+besought her son to pardon him who had dealt the fatal blow, and he died
+with her blessing. The eyes of the crowd followed the two women
+reverently as they crossed the square with blood-stained garments. It
+was Atalanta for whom Raphael afterwards painted the world-famed
+‘Deposition,’ with which she laid her own maternal sorrows at the feet
+of a yet higher and holier suffering.
+
+The cathedral, in the immediate neighbourhood of which the greater part
+of this tragedy had been enacted, was washed with wine and consecrated
+afresh. The triumphal arch, erected for the wedding, still remained
+standing, painted with the deeds of Astorre and with the laudatory
+verses of the narrator of these events, the worthy Matarazzo.
+
+A legendary history, which is simply the reflection of these atrocities,
+arose out of the early days of the Baglioni. All the members of this
+family from the beginning were reported to have died an evil
+death--twenty-seven on one occasion together; their houses were said to
+have been once before levelled to the ground, and the streets of Perugia
+paved with the bricks--and more of the same kind. Under Paul III. the
+destruction of their palaces really took place.[63]
+
+For a time they seem to have formed good resolutions, to have brought
+their own party into order, and to have protected the public officials
+against the arbitrary acts of the nobility. But the old curse broke out
+again like a smouldering fire. Gianpaolo was enticed to Rome under Leo
+X., and there beheaded; one of his sons, Orazio, who ruled in Perugia
+for a short time only, and by the most violent means, as the partisan of
+the Duke of Urbino (himself threatened by the Pope), once more repeated
+in his own family the horrors of the past. His uncle and three cousins
+were murdered, whereupon the Duke sent him word that enough had been
+done.[64] His brother, Malatesta Baglione, the Florentine general, has
+made himself immortal by the treason of 1530; and Malatesta’s son
+Ridolfo, the last of the house, attained, by the murder of the legate
+and the public officers in the year 1534, a brief but sanguinary
+authority.
+
+Here and there we meet with the names of the rulers of Rimini.
+Unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high culture, have been
+seldom so combined in one individual as in Sigismondo Malatesta (d.
+1467).[65] But the accumulated crimes of such a family must at last
+outweigh all talent, however great, and drag the tyrant into the abyss.
+Pandolfo, Sigismondo’s nephew, who has been mentioned already, succeeded
+in holding his ground, for the sole reason that the Venetians refused to
+abandon their Condottiere, whatever guilt he might be chargeable with;
+when his subjects (1497), after ample provocation,[66] bombarded him in
+his castle at Rimini, and afterwards allowed him to escape, a Venetian
+commissioner brought him back, stained as he was with fratricide and
+every other abomination. Thirty years later the Malatesta were penniless
+exiles. In the year 1527, as in the time of Cæsar Borgia, a sort of
+epidemic fell on the petty tyrants: few of them outlived this date, and
+none to their own good. At Mirandola, which was governed by
+insignificant princes of the house of Pico, lived in the year 1533 a
+poor scholar, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, who had fled from the sack of Rome
+to the hospitable hearth of the aged Giovanni Francesco Pico, nephew of
+the famous Giovanni; the discussions as to the sepulchral monument which
+the prince was constructing for himself gave rise to a treatise, the
+dedication of which bears the date of April in this year. The postscript
+is a sad one.[67]--‘In October of the same year the unhappy prince was
+attacked in the night and robbed of life and throne by his brother’s
+son; and I myself escaped narrowly, and am now in the deepest misery.’
+
+A pseudo-despotism without characteristic features, such as Pandolfo
+Petrucci exercised from the year 1490 in Siena, then torn by faction, is
+hardly worth a closer consideration. Insignificant and malicious, he
+governed with the help of a professor of jurisprudence and of an
+astrologer, and frightened his people by an occasional murder. His
+pastime in the summer months was to roll blocks of stone from the top of
+Monte Amiata, without caring what or whom they hit. After succeeding,
+where the most prudent failed, in escaping from the devices of Cæsar
+Borgia, he died at last forsaken and despised. His sons maintained a
+qualified supremacy for many years afterwards.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE GREATER DYNASTIES.
+
+
+In treating of the chief dynasties of Italy, it is convenient to discuss
+the Aragonese, on account of its special character, apart from the rest.
+The feudal system, which from the days of the Normans had survived in
+the form of a territorial supremacy of the Barons, gave a distinctive
+colour to the political constitution of Naples; while elsewhere in
+Italy, excepting only in the southern part of the ecclesiastical
+dominion, and in a few other districts, a direct tenure of land
+prevailed, and no hereditary powers were permitted by the law. The great
+Alfonso, who reigned in Naples from 1435 onwards (d. 1458), was a man of
+another kind than his real or alleged descendants. Brilliant in his
+whole existence, fearless in mixing with his people, mild and generous
+towards his enemies, dignified and affable in intercourse, modest
+notwithstanding his legitimate royal descent, admired rather than blamed
+even for his old man’s passion for Lucrezia d’Alagna, he had the one bad
+quality of extravagance,[68] from which, however, the natural
+consequence followed. Unscrupulous financiers were long omnipotent at
+Court, till the bankrupt king robbed them of their spoils; a crusade was
+preached, as a pretext for taxing the clergy; the Jews were forced to
+save themselves from conversion and other oppressive measures by
+presents and the payment of regular taxes; when a great earthquake
+happening in the Abruzzi, the survivors were compelled to make good the
+contributions of the dead. On the other hand, he abolished unreasonable
+taxes, like that on dice, and aimed at relieving his poorer subjects
+from the imposts which pressed most heavily upon them. By such means
+Alfonso was able to entertain distinguished guests with unrivalled
+splendour; he found pleasure in ceaseless expense, even for the benefit
+of his enemies, and in rewarding literary work knew absolutely no
+measure. Poggio received 500 pieces of gold for translating Xenophon’s
+‘Cyropædeia.’
+
+Ferrante,[69] who succeeded him, passed as his illegitimate son by a
+Spanish lady, but was not improbably the son of a half-caste Moor of
+Valentia. Whether it was his blood or the plots formed against his life
+by the barons which embittered and darkened his nature, it is certain
+that he was equalled in ferocity by none among the princes of his time.
+Restlessly active, recognised as one of the most powerful political
+minds of the day, and free from the vices of the profligate, he
+concentrated all his powers, among which must be reckoned profound
+dissimulation and an irreconcileable spirit of vengeance, on the
+destruction of his opponents. He had been wounded in every point in
+which a ruler is open to offence; for the leaders of the barons, though
+related to him by marriage, were yet the allies of his foreign enemies.
+Extreme measures became part of his daily policy. The means for this
+struggle with his barons, and for his external wars, were exacted in the
+same Mohammedan fashion which Frederick II. had introduced: the
+Government alone dealt in oil and wine; the whole commerce of the
+country was put by Ferrante into the hands of a wealthy merchant,
+Francesco Coppola, who had entire control of the anchorage on the coast,
+and shared the profits with the King. Deficits were made up by forced
+loans, by executions and confiscations, by open simony, and by
+contributions levied on the ecclesiastical corporations. Besides
+hunting, which he practised regardless of all rights of property, his
+pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him,
+either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in
+the costume which they wore in their lifetime.[70] He would chuckle in
+talking of the captives with his friends, and made no secret whatever of
+the museum of mummies. His victims were mostly men whom he had got into
+his power by treachery; some were even seized while guests at the royal
+table. His conduct to his first minister, Antonello Petrucci, who had
+grown sick and grey in his service, and from whose increasing fear of
+death he extorted present after present, was literally devilish. At
+length the suspicion of complicity with the last conspiracy of the
+barons gave the pretext for his arrest and execution. With him died
+Coppola. The way in which all this is narrated in Caracciolo and Porzio
+makes one’s hair stand on end. The elder of the King’s sons, Alfonso,
+Duke of Calabria, enjoyed in later years a kind of co-regency with his
+father. He was a savage, brutal profligate--described by Comines as ‘the
+cruelest, worst, most vicious and basest man ever seen’--who in point of
+frankness alone had the advantage of Ferrante, and who openly avowed his
+contempt for religion and its usages.[71] The better and nobler features
+of the Italian despotisms are not to be found among the princes of this
+line; all that they possessed of the art and culture of their time
+served the purposes of luxury or display. Even the genuine Spaniards
+seem to have almost always degenerated in Italy; but the end of this
+cross-bred house (1494 and 1503) gives clear proof of a want of blood.
+Ferrante died of mental care and trouble; Alfonso accused his brother
+Federigo, the only honest member of the family, of treason, and insulted
+him in the vilest manner. At length, though he had hitherto passed for
+one of the ablest generals in Italy, he lost his head and fled to
+Sicily, leaving his son, the younger Ferrante, a prey to the French and
+to domestic treason. A dynasty which had ruled as this had done must at
+least have sold its life dear, if its children were ever to hope for a
+restoration. But, as Comines one-sidedly, and yet on the whole rightly
+observes on this occasion, ‘_Jamais homme cruel ne fut hardi_.’
+
+The despotism of the Dukes of Milan, whose government from the time of
+Giangaleazzo onwards was an absolute monarchy of the most thorough-going
+sort, shows the genuine Italian character of the fifteenth century. The
+last of the Visconti, Filippo Maria (1412-1447), is a character of
+peculiar interest, and of which fortunately an admirable description[72]
+has been left us. What a man of uncommon gifts and high position can be
+made by the passion of fear, is here shown with what may be called a
+mathematical completeness. All the resources of the State were devoted
+to the one end of securing his personal safety, though happily his cruel
+egoism did not degenerate into a purposeless thirst for blood. He lived
+in the Citadel of Milan, surrounded by magnificent gardens, arbours, and
+lawns. For years he never set foot in the city, making his excursions
+only in the country, where lay several of his splendid castles; the
+flotilla which, drawn by the swiftest horses, conducted him to them
+along canals constructed for the purpose, was so arranged as to allow of
+the application of the most rigorous etiquette. Whoever entered the
+citadel was watched by a hundred eyes; it was forbidden even to stand at
+the window, lest signs should be given to those without. All who were
+admitted among the personal followers of the Prince were subjected to a
+series of the strictest examinations; then, once accepted, were charged
+with the highest diplomatic commissions, as well as with the humblest
+personal services--both in this Court being alike honourable. And this
+was the man who conducted long and difficult wars, who dealt habitually
+with political affairs of the first importance, and every day sent his
+plenipotentiaries to all parts of Italy. His safety lay in the fact that
+none of his servants trusted the others, that his Condottieri were
+watched and misled by spies, and that the ambassadors and higher
+officials were baffled and kept apart by artificially nourished
+jealousies, and in particular by the device of coupling an honest man
+with a knave. His inward faith, too, rested upon opposed and
+contradictory systems; he believed in blind necessity, and in the
+influence of the stars, and offering prayers at one and the same time to
+helpers of every sort;[73] he was a student of the ancient authors, as
+well as of French tales of chivalry. And yet the same man, who would
+never suffer death to be mentioned in his presence,[74] and caused his
+dying favourites to be removed from the castle, that no shadow might
+fall on the abode of happiness, deliberately hastened his own death by
+closing up a wound, and, refusing to be bled, died at last with dignity
+and grace.
+
+His step-son and successor, the fortunate Condottiere Francesco Sforza
+(1450-1466, see p. 24), was perhaps of all the Italians of the fifteenth
+century the man most after the heart of his age. Never was the triumph
+of genius and individual power more brilliantly displayed than in him;
+and those who would not recognise his merit were at least forced to
+wonder at him as the spoilt child of fortune. The Milanese claimed it
+openly as an honour to be governed by so distinguished a master; when he
+entered the city the thronging populace bore him on horseback into the
+cathedral, without giving him the chance to dismount.[75] Let us listen
+to the balance-sheet of his life, in the estimate of Pope Pius II., a
+judge in such matters:[76] ‘In the year 1459, when the Duke came to the
+congress at Mantua, he was 60 (really 58) years old; on horseback he
+looked like a young man; of a lofty and imposing figure, with serious
+features, calm and affable in conversation, princely in his whole
+bearing, with a combination of bodily and intellectual gifts unrivalled
+in our time, unconquered on the field of battle,--such was the man who
+raised himself from a humble position to the control of an empire. His
+wife was beautiful and virtuous, his children were like the angels of
+heaven; he was seldom ill, and all his chief wishes were fulfilled. And
+yet he was not without misfortune. His wife, out of jealousy, killed his
+mistress; his old comrades and friends, Troilo and Brunoro, abandoned
+him and went over to King Alfonso; another, Ciarpollone, he was forced
+to hang for treason; he had to suffer it that his brother Alessandro set
+the French upon him; one of his sons formed intrigues against him, and
+was imprisoned; the March of Ancona, which he had won in war, he lost
+again in the same way. No man enjoys so unclouded a fortune, that he has
+not somewhere to struggle with adversity. He is happy who has but few
+troubles.’ With this negative definition of happiness the learned Pope
+dismisses the reader. Had he been able to see into the future, or been
+willing to stop and discuss the consequences of an uncontrolled
+despotism, one prevading fact would not have escaped his notice--the
+absence of all guarantee for the future. Those children, beautiful as
+angels, carefully and thoroughly educated as they were, fell victims,
+when they grew up, to the corruption of a measureless egoism. Galeazzo
+Maria (1466-1476), solicitous only of outward effect, took pride in the
+beauty of his hands, in the high salaries he paid, in the financial
+credit he enjoyed, in his treasure of two million pieces of gold, in the
+distinguished people who surrounded him, and in the army and birds of
+chase which he maintained. He was fond of the sound of his own voice,
+and spoke well, most fluently, perhaps, when he had the chance of
+insulting a Venetian ambassador.[77] He was subject to caprices, such as
+having a room painted with figures in a single night; and, what was
+worse, to fits of senseless debauchery and of revolting cruelty to his
+nearest friends. To a handful of enthusiasts, at whose head stood Giov.
+Andrea di Lampugnano, he seemed a tyrant too bad to live; they murdered
+him,[78] and thereby delivered the State into the power of his brothers,
+one of whom, Ludovico il Moro, threw his nephew into prison, and took
+the government into his own hands. From this usurpation followed the
+French intervention, and the disasters which befell the whole of Italy.
+
+The Moor is the most perfect type of the despot of that age, and, as a
+kind of natural product, almost disarms our moral judgment.
+Notwithstanding the profound immorality of the means he employed, he
+used them with perfect ingenuousness; no one would probably have been
+more astonished than himself to learn, that for the choice of means as
+well as of ends a human being is morally responsible; he would rather
+have reckoned it as a singular virtue that, so far as possible, he had
+abstained from too free a use of the punishment of death. He accepted as
+no more than his due the almost fabulous respect of the Italians for his
+political genius.[79] In 1496 he boasted that the Pope Alexander was his
+chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his Condottiere, Venice his
+chamberlain, and the King of France his courier, who must come and go at
+his bidding.[80] With marvellous presence of mind he weighed, even in
+his last extremity, all possible means of escape, and at length decided,
+to his honour, to trust to the goodness of human nature; he rejected the
+proposal of his brother, the Cardinal Ascanio, who wished to remain in
+the Citadel of Milan, on the ground of a former quarrel: ‘Monsignore,
+take it not ill, but I trust you not, brother though you be;’ and
+appointed to the command of the castle, ‘that pledge of his return,’ a
+man to whom he had always done good, but who nevertheless betrayed
+him.[81] At home the Moor was a good and useful ruler, and to the last
+he reckoned on his popularity both in Milan and in Como. In former years
+(after 1496) he had overstrained the resources of his State, and at
+Cremona had ordered, out of pure expediency, a respectable citizen, who
+had spoken against the new taxes, to be quietly strangled. Since that
+time, in holding audiences, he kept his visitors away from his person by
+means of a bar, so that in conversing with him they were compelled to
+speak at the top of their voices.[82] At his court, the most brilliant
+in Europe, since that of Burgundy had ceased to exist, immorality of the
+worst kind was prevalent: the daughter was sold by the father, the wife
+by the husband, the sister by the brother.[83] The Prince himself was
+incessantly active, and, as son of his own deeds, claimed relationship
+with all who, like himself, stood on their personal merits--with
+scholars, poets, artists, and musicians. The academy which he
+founded[84] served rather for his own purposes than for the instruction
+of scholars; nor was it the fame of the distinguished men who surrounded
+him which he heeded, so much as their society and their services. It is
+certain that Bramante was scantily paid at first;[85] Lionardo, on the
+other hand, was up to 1496 suitably remunerated--and besides, what kept
+him at the court, if not his own free will? The world lay open to him,
+as perhaps to no other mortal man of that day; and if proof were wanting
+of the loftier element in the nature of Ludovico Moro, it is found in
+the long stay of the enigmatic master at his court. That afterwards
+Lionardo entered the service of Cæsar Borgia and Francis I. was probably
+due to the interest he felt in the unusual and striking character of the
+two men.
+
+After the fall of the Moor--he was captured in April 1500 by the French,
+after his return from his flight to Germany--his sons were badly brought
+up among strangers, and showed no capacity for carrying out his
+political testament. The elder, Massimiliano, had no resemblance to him;
+the younger, Francesco, was at all events not without spirit. Milan,
+which in those years changed its rulers so often, and suffered so
+unspeakably in the change, endeavoured to secure itself against a
+reaction. In the year 1512 the French, retreating before the arms of
+Maximilian and the Spaniards, were induced to make a declaration that
+the Milanese had taken no part in their expulsion, and, without being
+guilty of rebellion, might yield themselves to a new conqueror.[86] It
+is a fact of some political importance that in such moments of
+transition the unhappy city, like Naples at the flight of the Aragonese,
+was apt to fall a prey to gangs of (often highly aristocratic)
+scoundrels.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The house of Gonzaga at Mantua and that of Montefeltro of Urbino were
+among the best ordered and richest in men of ability during the second
+half of the fifteenth century. The Gonzaga were a tolerably harmonious
+family; for a long period no murder had been known among them, and their
+dead could be shown to the world without fear. The Marquis Francesco
+Gonzaga[87] and his wife, Isabella of Este, in spite of some few
+irregularities, were a united and respectable couple, and brought up
+their sons to be successful and remarkable men at a time when their
+small but most important State was exposed to incessant danger. That
+Francesco, either as statesman or as soldier, should adopt a policy of
+exceptional honesty, was what neither the Emperor, nor Venice, nor the
+King of France could have expected or desired; but certainly since the
+battle at Taro (1495), so far as military honour was concerned, he felt
+and acted as an Italian patriot, and imparted the same spirit to his
+wife. Every deed of loyalty and heroism, such as the defence of Faenza
+against Cæsar Borgia, she felt as a vindication of the honour of Italy.
+Our judgment of her does not need to rest on the praises of the artists
+and writers who made the fair princess a rich return for her patronage;
+her own letters show her to us as a woman of unshaken firmness, full of
+kindliness and humorous observation. Bembo, Bandello, Ariosto, and
+Bernardo Tasso sent their works to this court, small and powerless as it
+was, and empty as they found its treasury. A more polished and charming
+circle was not to be seen in Italy, since the dissolution (1508) of the
+old Court of Urbino; and in one respect, in freedom of movement, the
+society of Ferrara was inferior to that of Mantua. In artistic matters
+Isabella had an accurate knowledge, and the catalogue of her small but
+choice collection can be read by no lover of art without emotion.
+
+In the great Federigo (1444-1482), whether he were a genuine Montefeltro
+or not, Urbino possessed a brilliant representative of the princely
+order. As a Condottiere--and in this capacity he served kings and popes
+for thirty years after he became prince--he shared the political
+morality of soldiers of fortune, a morality of which the fault does not
+rest with them alone; as ruler of his little territory he adopted the
+plan of spending at home the money he had earned abroad, and taxing his
+people as lightly as possible. Of him and his two successors, Guidobaldo
+and Francesco Maria, we read: ‘They erected buildings, furthered the
+cultivation of the land, lived at home, and gave employment to a large
+number of people: their subjects loved them.’[88] But not only the
+state, but the court too, was a work of art and organization, and this
+in every sense of the word. Federigo had 500 persons in his service; the
+arrangements of the court were as complete as in the capitals of the
+greatest monarchs, but nothing was wasted; all had its object, and all
+was carefully watched and controlled. The court was no scene of vice and
+dissipation: it served as a school of military education for the sons of
+other great houses, the thoroughness of whose culture and instruction
+was made a point of honour by the Duke. The palace which he built, if
+not one of the most splendid, was classical in the perfection of its
+plan; there was placed the greatest of his treasures, the celebrated
+library.[89] Feeling secure in a land where all gained profit or
+employment from his rule, and where none were beggars, he habitually
+went unarmed and almost unaccompanied; alone among the princes of his
+time he ventured to walk in an open park, and to take his frugal meals
+in an open chamber, while Livy, or in time of fasting, some devotional
+work, was read to him. In the course of the same afternoon he would
+listen to a lecture on some classical subject, and thence would go to
+the monastery of the Clarisse and talk of sacred things through the
+grating with the abbess. In the evening he would overlook the martial
+exercises of the young people of his court on the meadow of St.
+Francesco, known for its magnificent view, and saw to it well that all
+the feats were done in the most perfect manner. He strove always to be
+affable and accessible to the utmost degree, visiting the artisans who
+worked for him in their shops, holding frequent audiences, and, if
+possible, attending to the requests of each individual on the same day
+that they were presented. No wonder that the people, as he walked along
+the street, knelt down and cried: ‘Dio ti mantenga, signore!’ He was
+called by thinking people ‘the light of Italy.’[90] His gifted son
+Guidobaldo,[91] visited by sickness and misfortune of every kind, was
+able at the last (1508) to give his state into the safe hands of his
+nephew Francesco Maria (nephew also of Pope Julius II.), who, at least,
+succeeded in preserving the territory from any permanent foreign
+occupation. It is remarkable with what confidence Guidobaldo yielded and
+fled before Cæsar Borgia and Francesco before the troops of Leo X.; each
+knew that his restoration would be all the easier and the more popular
+the less the country suffered through a fruitless defence. When Ludovico
+made the same calculation at Milan, he forgot the many grounds of hatred
+which existed against him. The court of Guidobaldo has been made
+immortal as the high school of polished manners by Baldassar
+Castiglione, who represented his eclogue Thyrsis before, and in honour
+of that society (1506), and who afterwards (1518) laid the scena of the
+dialogue of his ‘Cortigiano’ in the circle of the accomplished Duchess
+Elisabetta Gonzaga.
+
+The government of the family of Este at Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio
+displays curious contrasts of violence and popularity.[92] Within the
+palace frightful deeds were perpetrated; a princess was beheaded (1425)
+for alleged adultery with a step-son;[93] legitimate and illegitimate
+children fled from the court, and even abroad their lives were
+threatened by assassins sent in pursuit of them (1471). Plots from
+without were incessant; the bastard of a bastard tried to wrest the
+crown from the lawful heir, Hercules I.: this latter is said afterwards
+(1493) to have poisoned his wife on discovering that she, at the
+instigation of her brother Ferrante of Naples, was going to poison him.
+This list of tragedies is closed by the plot of two bastards against
+their brothers, the ruling Duke Alfonso I. and the Cardinal Ippolito
+(1506), which was discovered in time, and punished with imprisonment for
+life. The financial system in this State was of the most perfect kind,
+and necessarily so, since none of the large or second-rate powers of
+Italy were exposed to such danger and stood in such constant need of
+armaments and fortifications. It was the hope of the rulers that the
+increasing prosperity of the people would keep pace with the increasing
+weight of taxation, and the Marquis Niccolò (d. 1441) used to express
+the wish that his subjects might be richer than the people of other
+countries. If the rapid increase of the population be a measure of the
+prosperity actually attained, it is certainly a fact of importance that
+in the year 1497, notwithstanding the wonderful extension of the
+capital, no houses were to be let.[94] Ferrara is the first really
+modern city in Europe; large and well-built quarters sprang up at the
+bidding of the ruler: here, by the concentration of the official classes
+and the active promotion of trade, was formed for the first time a true
+capital; wealthy fugitives from all parts of Italy, Florentines
+especially, settled and built their palaces at Ferrara. But the indirect
+taxation, at all events, must have reached a point at which it could
+only just be borne. The Government, it is true, took measures of
+alleviation which were also adopted by other Italian despots, such as
+Galeazzo Maria Sforza: in time of famine corn was brought from a
+distance and seems to have been distributed gratuitously;[95] but in
+ordinary times it compensated itself by the monopoly, if not of corn, of
+many other of the necessaries of life--fish, salt meat, fruit, and
+vegetables, which last were carefully planted on and near the walls of
+the city. The most considerable source of income, however, was the
+annual sale of public offices, a usage which was common throughout
+Italy, and about the working of which at Ferrara we have more precise
+information. We read, for example, that at the new year 1502 the
+majority of the officials bought their places at ‘prezzi salati;’ public
+servants of the most various kinds, custom-house officers, bailiffs
+(massari), notaries, ‘podestà,’ judges, and even captains, _i.e._,
+lieutenant-governors of provincial towns, are quoted by name. As one of
+the ‘devourers of the people’ who paid dearly for their places, and who
+were ‘hated worse than the devil,’ Tito Strozza--let us hope not the
+famous Latin poet--is mentioned. About the same time every year the
+dukes were accustomed to make a round of visits in Ferrara, the so
+called ‘andar per ventura,’ in which they took presents from, at any
+rate, the more wealthy citizens. The gifts, however, did not consist of
+money, but of natural products.
+
+It was the pride of the duke[96] for all Italy to know that at Ferrara
+the soldiers received their pay and the professors of the University
+their salary not a day later than it was due; that the soldiers never
+dared lay arbitrary hands on citizen or peasant; that the town was
+impregnable to assault; and that vast sums of coined money were stored
+up in the citadel. To keep two sets of accounts seemed unnecessary; the
+Minister of Finance was at the same time manager of the ducal household.
+The buildings erected by Borso (1430-1471), by Hercules I. (till 1505),
+and by Alfonso I. (till 1534), were very numerous, but of small size:
+they are characteristic of a princely house which, with all its love of
+splendour--Borso never appeared but in embroidery and jewels--indulged
+in no ill-considered expense. Alfonso may perhaps have foreseen the fate
+which was in store for his charming little villas, the Belvedere with
+its shady gardens, and Montana with its fountains and beautiful
+frescoes.
+
+It is undeniable that the dangers to which these princes were constantly
+exposed developed in them capacities of a remarkable kind. In so
+artificial a world only a man of consummate address could hope to
+succeed; each candidate for distinction was forced to make good his
+claims by personal merit and show himself worthy of the crown he sought.
+Their characters are not without dark sides; but in all of them lives
+something of those qualities which Italy then pursued as its ideal. What
+European monarch of the time so laboured for his own culture as, for
+instance, Alfonso I.? His travels in France, England, and the
+Netherlands were undertaken for the purpose of study: by means of them
+he gained an accurate knowledge of the industry and commerce of these
+countries.[97] It is ridiculous to reproach him with the turner’s work
+which he practised in his leisure hours, connected as it was with his
+skill in the casting of cannon, and with the unprejudiced freedom with
+which he surrounded himself by masters of every art. The Italian princes
+were not, like their contemporaries in the North, dependent on the
+society of an aristocracy which held itself to be the only class worth
+consideration, and which infected the monarch with the same conceit. In
+Italy the prince was permitted and compelled to know and to use men of
+every grade in society; and the nobility, though by birth a caste, were
+forced in social intercourse to stand upon their personal qualifications
+alone. But this is a point which we shall discuss more fully in the
+sequel.
+
+The feeling of the Ferrarese towards the ruling house was a strange
+compound of silent dread, of the truly Italian sense of well-calculated
+interest, and of the loyalty of the modern subject: personal admiration
+was transformed into a new sentiment of duty. The city of Ferrara raised
+in 1451 a bronze equestrian statue to their Prince Niccolò, who had died
+ten years earlier; Borso (1454) did not scruple to place his own statue,
+also of bronze, but in a sitting posture, hard by in the market; in
+addition to which the city, at the beginning of his reign, decreed to
+him a ‘marble triumphal pillar.’ And when he was buried the whole people
+felt as if God himself had died a second time.[98] A citizen, who, when
+abroad from Venice, had spoken ill of Borso in public, was informed on
+his return home, and condemned to banishment and the confiscation of his
+goods; a loyal subject was with difficulty restrained from cutting him
+down before the tribunal itself, and with a rope round his neck the
+offender went to the duke and begged for a full pardon. The government
+was well provided with spies, and the duke inspected personally the
+daily list of travellers which the innkeepers were strictly ordered to
+present. Under Borso,[99] who was anxious to leave no distinguished
+stranger unhonoured, this regulation served a hospitable purpose;
+Hercules I.[100] used it simply as a measure of precaution. In Bologna,
+too, it was then the rule, under Giovanni II. Bentivoglio, that every
+passing traveller who entered at one gate must obtain a ticket in order
+to go out at another.[101] An unfailing means of popularity was the
+sudden dismissal of oppressive officials. When Borso arrested in person
+his chief and confidential counsellors, when Hercules I. removed and
+disgraced a tax-gatherer, who for years had been sucking the blood of
+the people, bonfires were lighted and the bells were pealed in their
+honour. With one of his servants, however, Hercules let things go too
+far. The director of the police, or by whatever name we should choose to
+call him (Capitano di Giustizia), was Gregorio Zampante of Lucca--a
+native being unsuited for an office of this kind. Even the sons and
+brothers of the duke trembled before this man; the fines he inflicted
+amounted to hundreds and thousands of ducats, and torture was applied
+even before the hearing of a case: bribes were accepted from wealthy
+criminals, and their pardon obtained from the duke by false
+representations. Gladly would the people have paid any sum to this ruler
+for sending away the ‘enemy of God and man.’ But Hercules had knighted
+him and made him godfather to his children; and year by year Zampante
+laid by 2,000 ducats. He dared only eat pigeons bred in his own house,
+and could not cross the street without a band of archers and bravos. It
+was time to get rid of him; in 1490 two students and a converted Jew
+whom he had mortally offended, killed him in his house while taking his
+siesta, and then rode through the town on horses held in waiting,
+raising the cry, ‘Come out! come out! we have slain Zampante!’ The
+pursuers came too late, and found them already safe across the frontier.
+Of course it now rained satires--some of them in the form of sonnets,
+others of odes.
+
+It was wholly in the spirit of this system that the sovereign imposed
+his own respect for useful servants on the court and on the people. When
+in 1469 Borso’s privy councillor Ludovico Casella died, no court of law
+or place of business in the city, and no lecture-room at the University,
+was allowed to be open: all had to follow the body to S. Domenico, since
+the duke intended to be present. And, in fact, ‘the first of the house
+of Este who attended the corpse of a subject’ walked, clad in black,
+after the coffin, weeping, while behind him came the relatives of
+Casella, each conducted by one of the gentlemen of the Court: the body
+of the plain citizen was carried by nobles from the church into the
+cloister, where it was buried. Indeed this official sympathy with
+princely emotion first came up in the Italian States.[102] At the root
+of the practice may be a beautiful, humane sentiment; the utterance of
+it, especially in the poets, is, as a rule, of equivocal sincerity. One
+of the youthful poems of Ariosto,[103] on the Death of Lionora of
+Aragon, wife of Hercules I., contains besides the inevitable graveyard
+flowers, which are scattered in the elegies of all ages, some thoroughly
+modern features: ‘This death had given Ferrara a blow which it would not
+get over for years: its benefactress was now its advocate in heaven,
+since earth was not worthy of her; truly, the angel of Death did not
+come to her, as to us common mortals, with blood-stained scythe, but
+fair to behold (onesta), and with so kind a face that every fear was
+allayed.’ But we meet, also, with a sympathy of a different kind.
+Novelists, depending wholly on the favour of their patrons, tell us the
+love-stories of the prince, even before his death, in a way which, to
+later times, would seem the height of indiscretion, but which then
+passed simply as an innocent compliment. Lyrical poets even went so far
+as to sing the illicit flames of their lawfully married lords, _e.g._
+Angelo Poliziano, those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Gioviano
+Pontano, with a singular gusto, those of Alfonso of Calabria. The poem
+in question[105] betrays unconsciously the odious disposition of the
+Aragonese ruler; in these things too, he must needs be the most
+fortunate, else woe be to those who are more successful! That the
+greatest artists, for example Lionardo, should paint the mistresses of
+their patrons was no more than a matter of course.
+
+But the house of Este was not satisfied with the praises of others; it
+undertook to celebrate them itself. In the Palazzo Schifanoja Borso
+caused himself to be painted in a series of historical representations,
+and Hercules kept the anniversary of his accession to the throne by a
+procession which was compared to the feast of Corpus Christi; shops were
+closed as on Sunday; in the centre of the line walked all the members of
+the princely house (bastards included) clad in embroidered robes. That
+the crown was the fountain of honour and authority, that all personal
+distinction flowed from it alone, had been long[106] expressed at this
+court by the Order of the Golden Spur--an order which had nothing in
+common with mediæval chivalry. Hercules I. added to the spur a sword, a
+gold-laced mantle, and a grant of money, in return for which there is no
+doubt that regular service was required.
+
+The patronage of art and letters for which this court has obtained a
+world-wide reputation, was exercised through the University, which was
+one of the most perfect in Italy, and by the gift of places in the
+personal or official service of the prince; it involved consequently no
+additional expense. Bojardo, as a wealthy country gentleman and high
+official, belonged to this class. At the time when Ariosto began to
+distinguish himself, there existed no court, in the true sense of the
+word, either at Milan or Florence, and soon there was none either at
+Urbino or at Naples. He had to content himself with a place among the
+musicians and jugglers of Cardinal Ippolito till Alfonso took him into
+his service. It was otherwise at a later time with Torquato Tasso, whose
+presence at court was jealously sought after.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.
+
+
+In face of this centralised authority, all legal opposition within the
+borders of the state was futile. The elements needed for the restoration
+of a republic had been for ever destroyed, and the field prepared for
+violence and despotism. The nobles, destitute of political rights, even
+where they held feudal possessions, might call themselves Guelphs or
+Ghibellines at will, might dress up their bravos in padded hose and
+feathered caps[107] or how else they pleased; thoughtful men like
+Macchiavelli[108] knew well enough that Milan and Naples were too
+‘corrupt’ for a republic. Strange judgments fall on these two so-called
+parties, which now served only to give an official sanction to personal
+and family disputes. An Italian prince, whom Agrippa of Nettesheim[109]
+advised to put them down, replied that their quarrels brought him in
+more than 12,000 ducats a year in fines. And when in the year 1500,
+during the brief return of Ludovico Moro to his States, the Guelphs of
+Tortona summoned a part of the neighbouring French army into the city,
+in order to make an end once for all of their opponents, the French
+certainly began by plundering and ruining the Ghibellines, but finished
+by doing the same to their hosts, till Tortona was utterly laid
+waste.[110] In Romagna, the hotbed of every ferocious passion, these two
+names had long lost all political meaning. It was a sign of the
+political delusion of the people that they not seldom believed the
+Guelphs to be the natural allies of the French and the Ghibellines of
+the Spaniards. It is hard to see that those who tried to profit by this
+error got much by doing so. France, after all her interventions, had to
+abandon the peninsula at last, and what became of Spain, after she had
+destroyed Italy, is known to every reader.
+
+But to return to the despots of the Renaissance. A pure and simple mind,
+we might think, would perhaps have argued that, since all power is
+derived from God, these princes, if they were loyally and honestly
+supported by all their subjects, must in time themselves improve and
+lose all traces of their violent origin. But from characters and
+imaginations inflamed by passion and ambition, reasoning of this kind
+could not be expected. Like bad physicians, they thought to cure the
+disease by removing the symptoms, and fancied that if the tyrant were
+put to death, freedom would follow of itself. Or else, without
+reflecting even to this extent, they sought only to give a vent to the
+universal hatred, or to take vengeance for some family misfortune or
+personal affront. Since the governments were absolute, and free from all
+legal restraints, the opposition chose its weapons with equal freedom.
+Boccaccio declares openly[111] ‘Shall I call the tyrant king or prince,
+and obey him loyally as my lord? No, for he is the enemy of the
+commonwealth. Against him I may use arms, conspiracies, spies, ambushes
+and fraud; to do so is a sacred and necessary work. There is no more
+acceptable sacrifice than the blood of a tyrant.’ We need not occupy
+ourselves with individual cases; Macchiavelli,[112] in a famous chapter
+of his ‘Discorsi,’ treats of the conspiracies of ancient and modern
+times from the days of the Greek tyrants downwards, and classifies them
+with cold-blooded indifference according to their various plans and
+results. We need make but two observations, first on the murders
+committed in church, and next on the influence of classical antiquity.
+So well was the tyrant guarded that it was almost impossible to lay
+hands upon him elsewhere than at solemn religious services; and on no
+other occasion was the whole family to be found assembled together. It
+was thus that the Fabrianese[113] murdered (1435) the members of their
+ruling house, the Chiavistelli, during high mass, the signal being given
+by the words of the Creed, ‘Et incarnatus est.’ At Milan the Duke Giovan
+Maria Visconti (1412) was assassinated at the entrance of the church of
+San Gottardo, Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476) in the church of Santo
+Stefano, and Ludovico Moro only escaped (1484) the daggers of the
+adherents of the widowed Duchess Bona, through entering the church of
+Sant’ Ambrogio by another door than that by which he was expected. There
+was no intentional impiety in the act; the assassins of Galeazzo did not
+fail to pray before the murder to the patron saint of the church, and to
+listen devoutly to the first mass. It was, however, one cause of the
+partial failure of the conspiracy of the Pazzi against Lorenzo and
+Guiliano Medici (1478), that the brigand Montesecco, who had bargained
+to commit the murder at a banquet, declined to undertake it in the
+Cathedral of Florence. Certain of the clergy ‘who were familiar with the
+sacred place, and consequently had no fear’ were induced to act in his
+stead.[114]
+
+As to the imitation of antiquity, the influence of which on moral, and
+more especially on political, questions we shall often refer to, the
+example was set by the rulers themselves, who, both in their conception
+of the state and in their personal conduct, took the old Roman empire
+avowedly as their model. In like manner their opponents, when they set
+to work with a deliberate theory, took pattern by the ancient
+tyrannicides. It may be hard to prove that in the main point--in forming
+the resolve itself--they consciously followed a classical example; but
+the appeal to antiquity was no mere phrase. The most striking
+disclosures have been left us with respect to the murderers of Galeazzo
+Sforza--Lampugnani, Olgiati, and Visconti.[115] Though all three had
+personal ends to serve, yet their enterprise may be partly ascribed to a
+more general reason. About this time Cola de’ Montani, a humanist and
+professor of eloquence, had awakened among many of the young Milanese
+nobility a vague passion for glory and patriotic achievements, and had
+mentioned to Lampugnani and Olgiati his hope of delivering Milan.
+Suspicion was soon aroused against him: he was banished from the city,
+and his pupils were abandoned to the fanaticism he had excited. Some ten
+days before the deed they met together and took a solemn oath in the
+monastery of Sant’ Ambrogio. ‘Then,’ says Olgiati, ‘in a remote corner I
+raised my eyes before the picture of the patron saint, and implored his
+help for ourselves and for all _his_ people.’ The heavenly protector of
+the city was called on to bless the undertaking, as was afterwards St.
+Stephen, in whose church it was fulfilled. Many of their comrades were
+now informed of the plot, nightly meetings were held in the house of
+Lampugnani, and the conspirators practised for the murder with the
+sheaths of their daggers. The attempt was successful, but Lampugnani was
+killed on the spot by the attendants of the duke; the others were
+captured: Visconti was penitent, but Olgiati through all his tortures
+maintained that the deed was an acceptable offering to God, and
+exclaimed while the executioner was breaking his ribs, ‘Courage,
+Girolamo! thou wilt long be remembered; death is bitter, but glory is
+eternal.’[116]
+
+But however idealistic the object and purpose of such conspiracies may
+appear, the manner in which they were conducted betrays the influence of
+that worst of all conspirators, Catiline--a man in whose thoughts
+freedom had no place whatever. The annals of Siena tells us expressly
+that the conspirators were students of Sallust, and the fact is
+indirectly confirmed by the confession of Olgiati.[117] Elsewhere, too,
+we meet with the name of Catiline, and a more attractive pattern of the
+conspirator, apart from the end he followed, could hardly be discovered.
+
+Among the Florentines, whenever they got rid of, or tried to get rid of,
+the Medici, tyrannicide was a practice universally accepted and
+approved. After the flight of the Medici in 1494, the bronze group of
+Donatello[118]--Judith with the dead Holofernes--was taken from their
+collection and placed before the Palazzo della Signoria, on the spot
+where the ‘David’ of Michael Angelo now stands, with the inscription,
+‘Exemplum salutis publicæ cives posuere 1495.’[119] No example was more
+popular than that of the younger Brutus, who, in Dante,[120] lies with
+Cassius and Judas Iscariot in the lowest pit of hell, because of his
+treason to the empire. Pietro Paolo Boscoli, whose plot against
+Guiliano, Giovanni, and Guilio Medici failed (1513), was an enthusiastic
+admirer of Brutus, and in order to follow his steps, only waited to find
+a Cassius. Such a partner he met with in Agostino Capponi. His last
+utterances in prison[121]--a striking evidence of the religious feeling
+of the time--show with what an effort he rid his mind of these classical
+imaginations, in order to die like a Christian. A friend and the
+confessor both had to assure him that St. Thomas Aquinas condemned
+conspirators absolutely; but the confessor afterwards admitted to the
+same friend that St. Thomas drew a distinction and permitted
+conspiracies against a tyrant who had forced himself on a people against
+their will. After Lorenzino Medici had murdered the Duke Alessandro
+(1537), and then escaped, an apology for the deed appeared,[122] which
+is probably his own work, and certainly composed in his interest, and in
+which he praises tyrannicide as an act of the highest merit; on the
+supposition that Alessandro was a legitimate Medici, and, therefore,
+related to him, if only distantly, he boldly compares himself with
+Timoleon, who slew his brother for his country’s sake. Others, on the
+same occasion, made use of the comparison with Brutus, and that Michael
+Angelo himself, even late in life, was not unfriendly to ideas of this
+kind, may be inferred from his bust of Brutus in the Uffizi. He left it
+unfinished, like nearly all his works, but certainly not because the
+murder of Cæsar was repugnant to his feeling, as the couplet beneath
+declares.
+
+A popular radicalism in the form in which it is opposed to the
+monarchies of later times, is not to be found in the despotic states of
+the Renaissance. Each individual protested inwardly against despotism,
+but was rather disposed to make tolerable or profitable terms with it,
+than to combine with others for its destruction. Things must have been
+as bad as at Camerino, Fabriano, or Rimini (p. 28), before the citizens
+united to destroy or expel the ruling house. They knew in most cases
+only too well that this would but mean a change of masters. The star of
+the Republics was certainly on the decline.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.
+
+
+The Italian municipalities had, in earlier days, given signal proof of
+that force which transforms the city into the state. It remained only
+that these cities should combine in a great confederation; and this idea
+was constantly recurring to Italian statesmen, whatever differences of
+form it might from time to time display. In fact, during the struggles
+of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great and formidable leagues
+actually were formed by the cities; and Sismondi (ii. 174) is of opinion
+that the time of the final armaments of the Lombard confederation
+against Barbarossa was the moment when a universal Italian league was
+possible. But the more powerful states had already developed
+characteristic features which made any such scheme impracticable. In
+their commercial dealings they shrank from no measures, however extreme,
+which might damage their competitors; they held their weaker neighbours
+in a condition of helpless dependence--in short, they each fancied they
+could get on by themselves without the assistance of the rest, and thus
+paved the way for future usurpation. The usurper was forthcoming when
+long conflicts between the nobility and the people, and between the
+different factions of the nobility, had awakened the desire for a strong
+government, and when bands of mercenaries ready and willing to sell
+their aid to the highest bidder had superseded the general levy of the
+citizens which party leaders now found unsuited to their purposes.[123]
+The tyrants destroyed the freedom of most of the cities; here and there
+they were expelled, but not thoroughly, or only for a short time; and
+they were always restored, since the inward conditions were favourable
+to them, and the opposing forces were exhausted.
+
+Among the cities which maintained their independence are two of deep
+significance for the history of the human race: Florence, the city of
+incessant movement, which has left us a record of the thoughts and
+aspirations of each and all who, for three centuries, took part in this
+movement, and Venice, the city of apparent stagnation and of political
+secrecy. No contrast can be imagined stronger than that which is offered
+us by these two, and neither can be compared to anything else which the
+world has hitherto produced.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Venice recognised itself from the first as a strange and mysterious
+creation--the fruits of a higher power than human ingenuity. The solemn
+foundation of the city was the subject of a legend. On March 25, 413, at
+mid-day the emigrants from Padua laid the first stone at the Rialto,
+that they might have a sacred, inviolable asylum amid the devastations
+of the barbarians. Later writers attributed to the founders the
+presentiment of the future greatness of the city; M. Antonio Sabellico,
+who has celebrated the event in the dignified flow of his hexameters,
+makes the priest, who completes the act of consecration, cry to heaven,
+‘When we hereafter attempt great things, grant us prosperity! Now we
+kneel before a poor altar; but if our vows are not made in vain, a
+hundred temples, O God, of gold and marble shall arise to Thee.’[124]
+The island city at the end of the fifteenth century was the jewel-casket
+of the world. It is so described by the same Sabellico,[125] with its
+ancient cupolas, its leaning towers, its inlaid marble façades, its
+compressed splendour, where the richest decoration did not hinder the
+practical employment of every corner of space. He takes us to the
+crowded Piazza before S. Giacometto at the Rialto, where the business of
+the world is transacted, not amid shouting and confusion, but with the
+subdued hum of many voices; where in the porticos round the square[126]
+and in those of the adjoining streets sit hundreds of money-changers and
+goldsmiths, with endless rows of shops and warehouses above their heads.
+He describes the great Fondaco of the Germans beyond the bridge, where
+their goods and their dwellings lay, and before which their ships are
+drawn up side by side in the canal; higher up is a whole fleet laden
+with wine and oil, and parallel with it, on the shore swarming with
+porters, are the vaults of the merchants; then from the Rialto to the
+square of St. Mark come the inns and the perfumers’ cabinets. So he
+conducts the reader from one quarter of the city to another till he
+comes at last to the two hospitals which were among those institutions
+of public utility nowhere so numerous as at Venice. Care for the people,
+in peace as well as in war, was characteristic of this government, and
+its attention to the wounded, even to those of the enemy, excited the
+admiration of other states.[127] Public institutions of every kind found
+in Venice their pattern; the pensioning of retired servants was carried
+out systematically, and included a provision for widows and orphans.
+Wealth, political security, and acquaintance with other countries, had
+matured the understanding of such questions. These slender fair-haired
+men,[128] with quiet cautious steps, and deliberate speech, differed but
+slightly in costume and bearing from one another; ornaments, especially
+pearls, were reserved for the women and girls. At that time the general
+prosperity, notwithstanding the losses sustained from the Turks, was
+still dazzling; the stores of energy which the city possessed and the
+prejudice in its favour diffused throughout Europe, enabled it at a much
+later time to survive the heavy blows which were inflicted by the
+discovery of the sea route to the Indies, by the fall of the Mamelukes
+in Egypt, and by the war of the League of Cambray.
+
+Sabellico, born in the neighbourhood of Tivoli, and accustomed to the
+frank loquacity of the scholars of his day, remarks elsewhere[129] with
+some astonishment, that the young nobles who came of a morning to hear
+his lectures could not be prevailed on to enter into political
+discussions: ‘When I ask them what people think, say, and expect about
+this or that movement in Italy, they all answer with one voice that they
+know nothing about the matter.’ Still, in spite of the strict
+inquisition of the state, much was to be learned from the more corrupt
+members of the aristocracy by those who were willing to pay enough for
+it. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there were traitors
+among the highest officials;[130] the popes, the Italian princes, and
+even second-rate Condottieri in the service of the government had
+informers in their pay, sometimes with regular salaries; things went so
+far that the Council of Ten found it prudent to conceal important
+political news from the Council of the Pregadi, and it was even supposed
+that Ludovico Moro had control of a definite number of votes among the
+latter. Whether the hanging of single offenders and the high
+rewards--such as a life-pension of sixty ducats paid to those who
+informed against them--were of much avail, it is hard to decide; one of
+the chief causes of this evil, the poverty of many of the nobility,
+could not be removed in a day. In the year 1492 a proposal was urged by
+two of that order, that the state should annually spend 70,000 ducats
+for the relief of those poorer nobles who held no public office; the
+matter was near coming before the Great Council, in which it might have
+had a majority, when the Council of Ten interfered in time and banished
+the two proposers for life to Nicosia in Cyprus.[131] About this time a
+Soranzo was hung, though not at Venice itself, for sacrilege, and a
+Contarini put in chains for burglary; another of the same family came in
+1499 before the Signory, and complained that for many years he had been
+without an office, that he had only sixteen ducats a year and nine
+children, that his debts amounted to sixty ducats, that he knew no trade
+and had lately been turned on to the streets. We can understand why some
+of the wealthier nobles built houses, sometimes whole rows of them, to
+provide free lodging for their needy comrades. Such works figure in
+wills among deeds of charity.[132]
+
+But if the enemies of Venice ever founded serious hopes upon abuses of
+this kind, they were greatly in error. It might be thought that the
+commercial activity of the city, which put within reach of the humblest
+a rich reward for their labour, and the colonies on the Eastern shores
+of the Mediterranean, would have diverted from political affairs the
+dangerous elements of society. But had not the political history of
+Genoa, notwithstanding similar advantages, been of the stormiest? The
+cause of the stability of Venice lies rather in a combination of
+circumstances which were found in union nowhere else. Unassailable from
+its position, it had been able from the beginning to treat of foreign
+affairs with the fullest and calmest reflection, and ignore nearly
+altogether the parties which divided the rest of Italy, to escape the
+entanglement of permanent alliances, and to set the highest price on
+those which it thought fit to make. The keynote of the Venetian
+character was, consequently, a spirit of proud and contemptuous
+isolation, which, joined to the hatred felt for the city by the other
+states of Italy, gave rise to a strong sense of solidarity within. The
+inhabitants meanwhile were united by the most powerful ties of interest
+in dealing both with the colonies and with the possessions on the
+mainland, forcing the population of the latter, that is, of all the
+towns up to Bergamo, to buy and sell in Venice alone. A power which
+rested on means so artificial could only be maintained by internal
+harmony and unity; and this conviction was so widely diffused among the
+citizens that the conspirator found few elements to work upon. And the
+discontented, if there were such, were held so far apart by the division
+between the noble and the burgher, that a mutual understanding was not
+easy. On the other hand, within the ranks of the nobility itself,
+travel, commercial enterprise, and the incessant wars with the Turks
+saved the wealthy and dangerous from that fruitful source of
+conspiracies--idleness. In these wars they were spared, often to a
+criminal extent, by the general in command, and the fall of the city was
+predicted by a Venetian Cato, if this fear of the nobles ‘to give one
+another pain’ should continue at the expense of justice.[133]
+Nevertheless this free movement in the open air gave the Venetian
+aristocracy, as a whole, a healthy bias.
+
+And when envy and ambition called for satisfaction an official victim
+was forthcoming, and legal means and authorities were ready. The moral
+torture, which for years the Doge Francesco Foscari (d. 1457) suffered
+before the eyes of all Venice, is a frightful example of a vengeance
+possible only in an aristocracy. The Council of Ten, which had a hand in
+everything, which disposed without appeal of life and death, of
+financial affairs and military appointments, which included the
+Inquisitors among its number, and which overthrew Foscari, as it had
+overthrown so many powerful men before,--this Council was yearly chosen
+afresh from the whole governing body, the Gran Consilio, and was
+consequently the most direct expression of its will. It is not probable
+that serious intrigues occurred at these elections, as the short
+duration of the office and the accountability which followed rendered it
+an object of no great desire. But violent and mysterious as the
+proceedings of this and other authorities might be, the genuine Venetian
+courted rather than fled their sentence, not only because the Republic
+had long arms, and if it could not catch him might punish his family,
+but because in most cases it acted from rational motives and not from a
+thirst for blood.[134] No state, indeed, has ever exercised a greater
+moral influence over its subjects, whether abroad or at home. If
+traitors were to be found among the Pregadi, there was ample
+compensation for this in the fact that every Venetian away from home was
+a born spy for his government. It was a matter of course that the
+Venetian cardinals at Rome sent home news of the transactions of the
+secret papal consistories. The Cardinal Domenico Grimani had the
+despatches intercepted in the neighbourhood of Rome (1500) which Ascanio
+Sforza was sending to his brother Ludovico Moro, and forwarded them to
+Venice; his father, then exposed to a serious accusation, claimed public
+credit for this service of his son before the Gran Consilio; in other
+words, before all the world.[135]
+
+The conduct of the Venetian government to the Condottieri in its pay has
+been spoken of already. The only further guarantee of their fidelity
+which could be obtained lay in their great number, by which treachery
+was made as difficult as its discovery was easy. In looking at the
+Venetian army list, one is only surprised that among forces of such
+miscellaneous composition any common action was possible. In the
+catalogue for the campaign of 1495 we find 15,526 horsemen, broken up
+into a number of small divisions.[136] Gonzaga of Mantua alone had as
+many as 1,200, and Gioffredo Borgia 740; then follow six officers with a
+contingent of 600 to 700, ten with 400, twelve with 400 to 200, fourteen
+or thereabouts with 200 to 100, nine with 80, six with 50 to 60, and so
+forth. These forces were partly composed of old Venetian troops, partly
+of veterans led by Venetian city or country nobles; the majority of the
+leaders were, however, princes and rulers of cities or their relatives.
+To these forces must be added 24,000 infantry--we are not told how they
+were raised or commanded--with 3,300 additional troops, who probably
+belonged to the special services. In time of peace the cities of the
+mainland were wholly unprotected or occupied by insignificant garrisons.
+Venice relied, if not exactly on the loyalty, at least on the good sense
+of its subjects; in the war of the League of Cambray (1509) it absolved
+them, as is well known, from their oath of allegiance, and let them
+compare the amenities of a foreign occupation with the mild government
+to which they had been accustomed. As there had been no treason in their
+desertion of St. Mark, and consequently no punishment was to be feared,
+they returned to their old masters with the utmost eagerness. This war,
+we may remark parenthetically, was the result of a century’s outcry
+against the Venetian desire for aggrandisement. The Venetians, in fact,
+were not free from the mistake of those over-clever people who will
+credit their opponents with no irrational and inconsiderate
+conduct.[137] Misled by this optimism, which is, perhaps, a peculiar
+weakness of aristocracies, they had utterly ignored not only the
+preparations of Mohammed II. for the capture of Constantinople, but even
+the armaments of Charles VIII., till the unexpected blow fell at
+last.[138] The League of Cambray was an event of the same character, in
+so far as it was clearly opposed to the interest of the two chief
+members, Louis XII. and Julius II. The hatred of all Italy against the
+victorious city seemed to be concentrated in the mind of the Pope, and
+to have blinded him to the evils of foreign intervention; and as to the
+policy of Cardinal Amboise and his king, Venice ought long before to
+have recognised it as a piece of malicious imbecility, and to have been
+thoroughly on its guard. The other members of the League took part in it
+from that envy which may be a salutary corrective to great wealth and
+power, but which in itself is a beggarly sentiment. Venice came out of
+the conflict with honour, but not without lasting damage.
+
+A power, whose foundations were so complicated, whose activity and
+interests filled so wide a stage, cannot be imagined without a
+systematic oversight of the whole, without a regular estimate of means
+and burdens, of profits and losses. Venice can fairly make good its
+claim to be the birthplace of statistical science, together, perhaps,
+with Florence, and followed by the more enlightened despotisms. The
+feudal state of the Middle Ages knew of nothing more than catalogues of
+signorial rights and possessions (Urbaria); it looked on production as a
+fixed quantity, which it approximately is, so long as we have to do with
+landed property only. The towns, on the other hand, throughout the West
+must from very early times have treated production, which with them
+depended on industry and commerce, as exceedingly variable; but, even in
+the most flourishing times of the Hanseatic League, they never got
+beyond a simple commercial balance-sheet. Fleets, armies, political
+power and influence fall under the debit and credit of a trader’s
+ledger. In the Italian States a clear political consciousness, the
+pattern of Mohammedan administration, and the long and active exercise
+of trade and commerce, combined to produce for the first time a true
+science of statistics.[139] The absolute monarchy of Frederick II. in
+Lower Italy was organised with the sole object of securing a
+concentrated power for the death-struggle in which he was engaged. In
+Venice, on the contrary, the supreme objects were the enjoyment of life
+and power, the increase of inherited advantages, the creation of the
+most lucrative forms of industry, and the opening of new channels for
+commerce.
+
+The writers of the time speak of these things with the greatest
+freedom.[140] We learn that the population of the city amounted in the
+year 1422 to 190,000 souls; the Italians were, perhaps, the first to
+reckon, not according to hearths, or men able to bear arms, or people
+able to walk, and so forth, but according to ‘animæ,’ and thus to get
+the most neutral basis for further calculation. About this time,[141]
+when the Florentines wished to form an alliance with Venice against
+Filippo Maria Visconti, they were for the moment refused, in the belief,
+resting on accurate commercial returns, that a war between Venice and
+Milan, that is, between seller and buyer, was foolish. Even if the duke
+simply increased his army, the Milanese, through the heavier taxation
+they must pay, would become worse customers. ‘Better let the Florentines
+be defeated, and then, used as they are to the life of a free city, they
+will settle with us and bring their silk and woollen industry with them,
+as the Lucchese did in their distress.’ The speech of the dying Doge
+Mocenigo (1423) to a few of the senators whom he had sent for to his
+bedside[142] is still more remarkable. It contains the chief elements of
+a statistical account of the whole resources of Venice. I cannot say
+whether or where a thorough elucidation of this perplexing document
+exists; by way of illustration, the following facts may be quoted. After
+repaying a war-loan of four million ducats, the public debt (‘il monte’)
+still amounted to six million ducats; the current trade reached (so it
+seems) ten millions, which yielded, the text informs us, a profit of
+four millions. The 3,000 ‘navigli,’ the 300 ‘navi,’ and the 45 galleys
+were manned respectively by 17,000, 8,000, and 11,000 seamen (more than
+200 for each galley). To these must be added 16,000 shipwrights. The
+houses in Venice were valued at seven millions, and brought in a rent of
+half a million.[143] There were 1,000 nobles whose income ranged from 70
+to 4,000 ducats. In another passage the ordinary income of the state in
+that same year is put at 1,100,000 ducats; through the disturbance of
+trade caused by the wars it sank about the middle of the century to
+800,000 ducats.[144]
+
+If Venice, by this spirit of calculation, and by the practical turn
+which she gave it, was the first fully to represent one important side
+of modern political life, in that culture, on the other hand, which
+Italy then prized most highly she did not stand in the front rank. The
+literary impulse, in general, was here wanting, and especially that
+enthusiasm for classical antiquity which prevailed elsewhere.[145] The
+aptitude of the Venetians, says Sabellico, for philosophy and eloquence
+was in itself not less remarkable than for commerce and politics; but
+this aptitude was neither developed in themselves nor rewarded in
+strangers as it was rewarded elsewhere in Italy. Filelfo, summoned to
+Venice not by the state, but by private individuals, soon found his
+expectations deceived; and George of Trebizond, who, in 1459, laid the
+Latin translation of Plato’s Laws at the feet of the Doge, and was
+appointed professor of philology with a yearly salary of 150 ducats, and
+finally dedicated his ‘Rhetoric’ to the Signoria,[146] soon left the
+city in dissatisfaction. Literature, in fact, like the rest at Venice,
+had mostly a practical end in view. If, accordingly, we look through the
+history of Venetian literature which Francesco Sansovino has appended to
+his well-known book,[147] we shall find in the fourteenth century almost
+nothing but history, and special works on theology, jurisprudence, and
+medicine; and in the fifteenth century, till we come to Ermolao Barbaro
+and Aldo Manucci, humanistic culture is, for a city of such importance,
+most scantily represented. Similarly we find comparatively few traces of
+the passion, elsewhere so strong, for collecting books and manuscripts;
+and the valuable texts which formed part of Petrarch’s legacies were so
+badly preserved that soon all traces of them were lost. The library
+which Cardinal Bessarion bequeathed to the state (1468) narrowly escaped
+dispersion and destruction. Learning was certainly cultivated at the
+University of Padua, where, however, the physicians and the jurists--the
+latter as the authors of legal opinions--received by far the highest
+pay. The share of Venice in the poetical creations of the country was
+long insignificant, till, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, her
+deficiences were made good.[148] Even the art of the Renaissance was
+imported into the city from without, and it was not before the end of
+the fifteenth century that she learned to move in this field with
+independent freedom and strength. But we find more striking instances
+still of intellectual backwardness. This Government, which had the
+clergy so thoroughly in its control, which reserved to itself the
+appointment to all important ecclesiastical offices, and which, one time
+after another, dared to defy the court of Rome, displayed an official
+piety of a most singular kind.[149] The bodies of saints and other
+reliques imported from Greece after the Turkish conquest were bought at
+the greatest sacrifices and received by the Doge in solemn
+procession.[150] For the coat without a seam it was decided (1455) to
+offer 10,000 ducats, but it was not to be had. These measures were not
+the fruit of any popular excitement, but of the tranquil resolutions of
+the heads of the Government, and might have been omitted without
+attracting any comment, and at Florence, under similar circumstances,
+would certainly have been omitted. We shall say nothing of the piety of
+the masses, and of their firm belief in the indulgences of an Alexander
+VI. But the state itself, after absorbing the Church to a degree unknown
+elsewhere, had in truth a certain ecclesiastical element in its
+composition, and the Doge, the symbol of the state, appeared in twelve
+great processions (‘andate’)[151] in a half-clerical character. They
+were almost all festivals in memory of political events, and competed in
+splendour with the great feasts of the Church; the most brilliant of
+all, the famous marriage with the sea, fell on Ascension Day.
+
+The most elevated political thought and the most varied forms of human
+development are found united in the history of Florence, which in this
+sense deserves the name of the first modern state in the world. Here the
+whole people are busied with what in the despotic cities is the affair
+of a single family. That wondrous Florentine spirit, at once keenly
+critical and artistically creative, was incessantly transforming the
+social and political condition of the state, and as incessantly
+describing and judging the change. Florence thus became the home of
+political doctrines and theories, of experiments and sudden changes, but
+also, like Venice, the home of statistical science, and alone and above
+all other states in the world, the home of historical representation in
+the modern sense of the phrase. The spectacle of ancient Rome and a
+familiarity with its leading writers were not without influence;
+Giovanni Villani[152] confesses that he received the first impulse to
+his great work at the jubilee of the year 1300, and began it immediately
+on his return home. Yet how many among the 200,000 pilgrims of that year
+may have been like him in gifts and tendencies and still did not write
+the history of their native cities! For not all of them could encourage
+themselves with the thought: ‘Rome is sinking; my native city is rising,
+and ready to achieve great things, and therefore I wish to relate its
+past history, and hope to continue the story to the present time, and
+as long as my life shall last.’ And besides the witness to its past,
+Florence obtained through its historians something further--a greater
+fame than fell to the lot of any other city of Italy.[153]
+
+Our present task is not to write the history of this remarkable state,
+but merely to give a few indications of the intellectual freedom and
+independence for which the Florentines were indebted to this
+history.[154]
+
+In no other city of Italy were the struggles of political parties so
+bitter, of such early origin, and so permanent. The descriptions of
+them, which belong, it is true, to a somewhat later period, give clear
+evidence of the superiority of Florentine criticism.
+
+And what a politician is the great victim of these crises, Dante
+Alighieri, matured alike by home and by exile! He uttered his scorn of
+the incessant changes and experiments in the constitution of his native
+city in verses of adamant, which will remain proverbial so long as
+political events of the same kind recur;[155] he addressed his home in
+words of defiance and yearning which must have stirred the hearts of his
+countrymen. But his thoughts ranged over Italy and the whole world; and
+if his passion for the Empire, as he conceived it, was no more than an
+illusion, it must yet be admitted that the youthful dreams of a new-born
+political speculation are in his case not without a poetical grandeur.
+He is proud to be the first who had trod this path,[156] certainly in
+the footsteps of Aristotle, but in his own way independently. His ideal
+emperor is a just and humane judge, dependent on God only, the heir of
+the universal sway of Rome to which belonged the sanction of nature, of
+right and of the will of God. The conquest of the world was, according
+to this view, rightful, resting on a divine judgment between Rome and
+the other nations of the earth, and God gave his approval to this
+empire, since under it he became Man, submitting at his birth to the
+census of the Emperor Augustus, and at his death to the judgment of
+Pontius Pilate. We may find it hard to appreciate these and other
+arguments of the same kind, but Dante’s passion never fails to carry us
+with him. In his letters he appears as one of the earliest
+publicists,[157] and is perhaps the first layman to publish political
+tracts in this form. He began early. Soon after the death of Beatrice he
+addressed a pamphlet on the state of Florence ‘to the Great ones of the
+Earth,’ and the public utterances of his later years, dating from the
+time of his banishment, are all directed to emperors, princes, and
+cardinals. In these letters and in his book ‘De Vulgari Eloquio’ the
+feeling, bought with such bitter pains, is constantly recurring that
+the exile may find elsewhere than in his native place an intellectual
+home in language and culture, which cannot be taken from him. On this
+point we shall have more to say in the sequel.
+
+To the two Villani, Giovanni as well as Matteo, we owe not so much deep
+political reflexion as fresh and practical observations, together with
+the elements of Florentine statistics and important notices of other
+states. Here too trade and commerce had given the impulse to economical
+as well as political science. Nowhere else in the world was such
+accurate information to be had on financial affairs. The wealth of the
+Papal court at Avignon, which at the death of John XXII. amounted to
+twenty-five millions of gold florins, would be incredible on any less
+trustworthy authority.[158] Here only, at Florence, do we meet with
+colossal loans like that which the King of England contracted from the
+Florentine houses of Bardi and Peruzzi, who lost to his Majesty the sum
+of 1,365,000 gold florins (1338)--their own money and that of their
+partners--and nevertheless recovered from the shock.[159] Most important
+facts are here recorded as to the condition of Florence at this
+time:[160] the public income (over 300,000 gold florins) and
+expenditure; the population of the city, here only roughly estimated,
+according to the consumption of bread, in ‘bocche,’ _i.e._ mouths, put
+at 90,000, and the population of the whole territory; the excess of 300
+to 500 male children among the 5,800 to 6,000 annually baptized;[161]
+the school-children, of whom 8,000 to 10,000 learned reading, 1,000 to
+1,200 in six schools arithmetic; and besides these, 600 scholars who
+were taught Latin grammar and logic in four schools. Then follow the
+statistics of the churches and monasteries; of the hospitals, which held
+more than a thousand beds; of the wool-trade, with its most valuable
+details; of the mint, the provisioning of the city, the public
+officials, and so on.[162] Incidentally we learn many curious facts;
+how, for instance, when the public funds (‘monte’) were first
+established, in the year 1353, the Franciscans spoke from the pulpit in
+favour of the measure, the Dominicans and Augustinians against it.[163]
+The economical results of the black death were and could be observed and
+described nowhere else in all Europe as in this city.[164] Only a
+Florentine could have left it on record how it was expected that the
+scanty population would have made everything cheap, and how instead of
+that labour and commodities doubled in price; how the common people at
+first would do no work at all, but simply give themselves up to
+enjoyment; how in the city itself servants and maids were not to be had
+except at extravagant wages; how the peasants would only till the best
+lands, and left the rest uncultivated; and how the enormous legacies
+bequeathed to the poor at the time of the plague seemed afterwards
+useless, since the poor had either died or had ceased to be poor.
+Lastly, on the occasion of a great bequest, by which a childless
+philanthropist left six ‘danari’ to every beggar in the city, the
+attempt is made to give a comprehensive statistical account of
+Florentine mendicancy.[165]
+
+This statistical view of things was at a later time still more highly
+cultivated at Florence. The noteworthy point about it is that, as a
+rule, we can perceive its connection with the higher aspects of history,
+with art, and with culture in general. An inventory of the year
+1422[166] mentions, within the compass of the same document, the
+seventy-two exchange offices which surrounded the ‘Mercato Nuovo;’ the
+amount of coined money in circulation (two million golden florins); the
+then new industry of gold spinning; the silk wares; Filippo Brunellesco,
+then busy in digging classical architecture from its grave; and Lionardo
+Aretino, secretary of the republic, at work at the revival of ancient
+literature and eloquence; lastly, it speaks of the general prosperity of
+the city, then free from political conflicts, and of the good fortune of
+Italy, which had rid itself of foreign mercenaries. The Venetian
+statistics quoted above (p. 70), which date from about the same year,
+certainly give evidence of larger property and profits and of a more
+extensive scene of action; Venice had long been mistress of the seas
+before Florence sent out its first galleys (1422) to Alexandria. But no
+reader can fail to recognise the higher spirit of the Florentine
+documents. These and similar lists recur at intervals of ten years,
+systematically arranged and tabulated, while elsewhere we find at best
+occasional notices. We can form an approximate estimate of the property
+and the business of the first Medici; they paid for charities, public
+buildings, and taxes from 1434 to 1471 no less than 663,755 gold
+florins, of which more than 400,000 fell on Cosimo alone, and Lorenzo
+Magnifico was delighted that the money had been so well spent.[167] In
+1472 we have again a most important and in its way complete view of the
+commerce and trades of this city,[168] some of which may be wholly or
+partly reckoned among the fine arts--such as those which had to do with
+damasks and gold or silver embroidery, with woodcarving and ‘intarsia,’
+with the sculpture of arabesques in marble and sandstone, with portraits
+in wax, and with jewellery and work in gold. The inborn talent of the
+Florentines for the systematisation of outward life is shown by their
+books on agriculture, business, and domestic economy, which are markedly
+superior to those of other European people in the fifteenth century. It
+has been rightly decided to publish selections of these works,[169]
+although no little study will be needed to extract clear and definite
+results from them. At all events, we have no difficulty in recognising
+the city, where dying parents begged the Government in their wills to
+fine their sons 1,000 florins if they declined to practise a regular
+profession.[170]
+
+For the first half of the sixteenth century probably no state in the
+world possesses a document like the magnificent description of Florence
+by Varchi.[171] In descriptive statistics, as in so many things besides,
+yet another model is left to us, before the freedom and greatness of the
+city sank into the grave.[172]
+
+This statistical estimate of outward life is, however, uniformly
+accompanied by the narrative of political events to which we have
+already referred.
+
+Florence not only existed under political forms more varied than those
+of the free states of Italy and of Europe generally, but it reflected
+upon them far more deeply. It is a faithful mirror of the relations of
+individuals and classes to a variable whole. The pictures of the great
+civic democracies in France and in Flanders, as they are delineated in
+Froissart, and the narratives of the German chroniclers of the
+fourteenth century, are in truth of high importance; but in
+comprehensiveness of thought and in the rational development of the
+story, none will bear comparison with the Florentines. The rule of the
+nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with the
+proletariate, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy, the
+primacy of a single house, the theocracy of Savonarola, and the mixed
+forms of government which prepared the way for the Medicean
+despotism--all are so described that the inmost motives of the actors
+are laid bare to the light.[173] At length Macchiavelli in his
+Florentine history (down to 1492) represents his native city as a living
+organism and its development as a natural and individual process; he is
+the first of the moderns who has risen to such a conception. It lies
+without our province to determine whether and in what points
+Macchiavelli may have done violence to history, as is notoriously the
+case in his life of Castruccio Castracane--a fancy picture of the
+typical despot. We might find something to say against every line of the
+‘Istorie Fiorentine,’ and yet the great and unique value of the whole
+would remain unaffected. And his contemporaries and successors, Jacopo
+Pitti, Guicciardini, Segni, Varchi, Vettori, what a circle of
+illustrious names! And what a story it is which these masters tell us!
+The great and memorable drama of the last decades of the Florentine
+republic is here unfolded. The voluminous record of the collapse of the
+highest and most original life which the world could then show may
+appear to one but as a collection of curiosities, may awaken in another
+a devilish delight at the shipwreck of so much nobility and grandeur, to
+a third may seem like a great historical assize; for all it will be an
+object of thought and study to the end of time. The evil, which was for
+ever troubling the peace of the city, was its rule over once powerful
+and now conquered rivals like Pisa--a rule of which the necessary
+consequence was a chronic state of violence. The only remedy, certainly
+an extreme one and which none but Savonarola could have persuaded
+Florence to accept, and that only with the help of favourable chances,
+would have been the well-timed resolution of Tuscany into a federal
+union of free cities. At a later period this scheme, then no more than
+the dream of a past age, brought (1548) a patriotic citizen of Lucca to
+the scaffold.[174] From this evil and from the ill-starred Guelph
+sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which familiarised it with
+foreign intervention, came all the disasters which followed. But who
+does not admire the people, which was wrought up by its venerated
+preacher to a mood of such sustained loftiness, that for the first time
+in Italy it set the example of sparing a conquered foe, while the whole
+history of its past taught nothing but vengeance and extermination? The
+glow which melted patriotism into one with moral regeneration may seem,
+when looked at from a distance, to have soon passed away; but its best
+results shine forth again in the memorable siege of 1529-30. They were
+‘fools,’ as Guicciardini then wrote, who drew down this storm upon
+Florence, but he confesses himself that they achieved things which
+seemed incredible; and when he declares that sensible people would have
+got out of the way of the danger, he means no more than that Florence
+ought to have yielded itself silently and ingloriously into the hands of
+its enemies. It would no doubt have preserved its splendid suburbs and
+gardens, and the lives and prosperity of countless citizens; but it
+would have been the poorer by one of its greatest and most ennobling
+memories.
+
+In many of their chief merits the Florentines are the pattern and the
+earliest type of Italians and modern Europeans generally; they are so
+also in many of their defects. When Dante compares the city which was
+always mending its constitution with the sick man who is continually
+changing his posture to escape from pain, he touches with the comparison
+a permanent feature of the political life of Florence. The great modern
+fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be manufactured by a
+combination of existing forces and tendencies,[175] was constantly
+cropping up in stormy times; even Macchiavelli is not wholly free from
+it. Constitutional artists were never wanting who by an ingenious
+distribution and division of political power, by indirect elections of
+the most complicated kind, by the establishment of nominal offices,
+sought to found a lasting order of things, and to satisfy or to deceive
+the rich and the poor alike. They naïvely fetch their examples from
+classical antiquity, and borrow the party names ‘ottimati,’
+‘aristocrazia,’[176] as a matter of course. The world since then has
+become used to these expressions and given them a conventional European
+sense, whereas all former party names were purely national, and either
+characterised the cause at issue or sprang from the caprice of accident.
+But how a name colours or discolours a political cause!
+
+But of all who thought it possible to construct a state, the greatest
+beyond all comparison was Macchiavelli.[177] He treats existing forces
+as living and active, takes a large and an accurate view of alternative
+possibilities, and seeks to mislead neither himself nor others. No man
+could be freer from vanity or ostentation; indeed, he does not write for
+the public, but either for princes and administrators or for personal
+friends. The danger for him does not lie in an affectation of genius or
+in a false order of ideas, but rather in a powerful imagination which he
+evidently controls with difficulty. The objectivity of his political
+judgment is sometimes appalling in its sincerity; but it is the sign of
+a time of no ordinary need and peril, when it was a hard matter to
+believe in right, or to credit others with just dealing. Virtuous
+indignation at his expense is thrown away upon us who have seen in what
+sense political morality is understood by the statesmen of our own
+century. Macchiavelli was at all events able to forget himself in his
+cause. In truth, although his writings, with the exception of very few
+words, are altogether destitute of enthusiasm, and although the
+Florentines themselves treated him at last as a criminal,[178] he was a
+patriot in the fullest meaning of the word. But free as he was, like
+most of his contemporaries, in speech and morals, the welfare of the
+state was yet his first and last thought.
+
+His most complete programme for the construction of a new political
+system at Florence is set forth in the memorial to Leo X.,[179] composed
+after the death of the younger Lorenzo Medici, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519),
+to whom he had dedicated his ‘Prince.’ The state was by that time in
+extremities and utterly corrupt, and the remedies proposed are not
+always morally justifiable; but it is most interesting to see how he
+hopes to set up the republic in the form of a moderate democracy, as
+heiress to the Medici. A more ingenious scheme of concessions to the
+Pope, to the Pope’s various adherents, and to the different Florentine
+interests, cannot be imagined; we might fancy ourselves looking into the
+works of a clock. Principles, observations, comparisons, political
+forecasts, and the like are to be found in numbers in the ‘Discorsi,’
+among them flashes of wonderful insight. He recognises, for example, the
+law of a continuous though not uniform development in republican
+institutions, and requires the constitution to be flexible and capable
+of change, as the only means of dispensing with bloodshed and
+banishments. For a like reason, in order to guard against private
+violence and foreign interference--‘the death of all freedom’--he wishes
+to see introduced a judicial procedure (‘accusa’) against hated
+citizens, in place of which Florence had hitherto had nothing but the
+court of scandal. With a masterly hand the tardy and involuntary
+decisions are characterised, which at critical moments play so important
+a part in republican states. Once, it is true, he is misled by his
+imagination and the pressure of events into unqualified praise of the
+people, which chooses its officers, he says, better than any prince, and
+which can be cured of its errors by ‘good advice.’[180] With regard to
+the government of Tuscany, he has no doubt that it belongs to his native
+city, and maintains, in a special ‘Discorso’ that the reconquest of Pisa
+is a question of life or death; he deplores that Arezzo, after the
+rebellion of 1502, was not razed to the ground; he admits in general
+that Italian republics must be allowed to expand freely and add to their
+territory in order to enjoy peace at home, and not to be themselves
+attacked by others, but declares that Florence had always begun at the
+wrong end, and from the first made deadly enemies of Pisa, Lucca, and
+Siena, while Pistoja, ‘treated like a brother,’ had voluntarily
+submitted to her.[181]
+
+It would be unreasonable to draw a parallel between the few other
+republics which still existed in the fifteenth century and this unique
+city--the most important workshop of the Italian, and indeed of the
+modern European spirit. Siena suffered from the gravest organic
+maladies, and its relative prosperity in art and industry must not
+mislead us on this point. Æneas Sylvius[182] looks with longing from his
+native town over to the ‘merry’ German imperial cities, where life is
+embittered by no confiscations of land and goods, by no arbitrary
+officials, and by no political factions.[183] Genoa scarcely comes
+within range of our task, as before the time of Andrea Doria it took
+almost no part in the Renaissance. Indeed, the inhabitant of the Riviera
+was proverbial among Italians for his contempt of all higher
+culture.[184] Party conflicts here assumed so fierce a character, and
+disturbed so violently the whole course of life, that we can hardly
+understand how, after so many revolutions and invasions, the Genoese
+ever contrived to return to an endurable condition. Perhaps it was owing
+to the fact that nearly all who took part in public affairs were at the
+same time almost without exception active men of business.[185] The
+example of Genoa shows in a striking manner with what insecurity wealth
+and vast commerce, and with what internal disorder the possession of
+distant colonies, are compatible.
+
+Lucca is of small significance in the fifteenth century.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.
+
+
+As the majority of the Italian states were in their internal
+constitution works of art, that is, the fruit of reflection and careful
+adaptation, so was their relation to one another and to foreign
+countries also a work of art. That nearly all of them were the result of
+recent usurpations, was a fact which exercised as fatal an influence in
+their foreign as in their internal policy. Not one of them recognised
+another without reserve; the same play of chance which had helped to
+found and consolidate one dynasty might upset another. Nor was it always
+a matter of choice with the despot whether to keep quiet or not. The
+necessity of movement and aggrandisement is common to all illegitimate
+powers. Thus Italy became the scene of a ‘foreign policy’ which
+gradually, as in other countries also, acquired the position of a
+recognised system of public law. The purely objective treatment of
+international affairs, as free from prejudice as from moral scruples,
+attained a perfection which sometimes is not without a certain beauty
+and grandeur of its own. But as a whole it gives us the impression of a
+bottomless abyss.
+
+Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption and treason make up the
+outward history of Italy at this period. Venice in particular was long
+accused on all hands of seeking to conquer the whole peninsula, or
+gradually so to reduce its strength that one state after another must
+fall into her hands.[186] But on a closer view it is evident that this
+complaint did not come from the people, but rather from the courts and
+official classes, which were commonly abhorred by their subjects, while
+the mild government of Venice had secured for it general confidence.
+Even Florence,[187] with its restive subject cities, found itself in a
+false position with regard to Venice, apart from all commercial jealousy
+and from the progress of Venice in Romagna. At last the League of
+Cambray actually did strike a serious blow at the state (p. 68), which
+all Italy ought to have supported with united strength.
+
+The other states, also, were animated by feelings no less unfriendly,
+and were at all times ready to use against one another any weapon which
+their evil conscience might suggest. Ludovico Moro, the Aragonese kings
+of Naples, and Sixtus IV.--to say nothing of the smaller powers--kept
+Italy in a state of constant and perilous agitation. It would have been
+well if the atrocious game had been confined to Italy; but it lay in the
+nature of the case that intervention and help should at last be sought
+from abroad--in particular from the French and the Turks.
+
+The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the side of
+France. Florence had never ceased to confess with shocking _naïveté_ its
+old Guelph preference for the French.[188] And when Charles VIII.
+actually appeared on the south of the Alps, all Italy accepted him with
+an enthusiasm which to himself and his followers seemed
+unaccountable.[189] In the imagination of the Italians, to take
+Savonarola for an example, the ideal picture of a wise, just, and
+powerful saviour and ruler was still living, with the difference that he
+was no longer the emperor invoked by Dante, but the Capetian king of
+France. With his departure the illusion was broken; but it was long
+before all understood how completely Charles VIII., Louis XII., and
+Francis I. had mistaken their true relation to Italy, and by what
+inferior motives they were led. The princes, for their part, tried to
+make use of France in a wholly different way. When the Franco-English
+wars came to an end, when Louis XI. began to cast about his diplomatic
+nets on all sides, and Charles of Burgundy to embark on his foolish
+adventures, the Italian Cabinets came to meet them at every point. It
+became clear that the intervention of France was only a question of
+time, even though the claims on Naples and Milan had never existed, and
+that the old interference with Genoa and Piedmont was only a type of
+what was to follow. The Venetians, in fact, expected it as early as
+1642.[190] The mortal terror of the Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan during
+the Burgundian war, in which he was apparently the ally of Charles as
+well as of Louis, and consequently had reason to dread an attack from
+both, is strikingly shown in his correspondence.[191] The plan of an
+equilibrium of the four chief Italian powers, as understood by Lorenzo
+the Magnificent, was but the assumption of a cheerful optimistic spirit,
+which had outgrown both the recklessness of an experimental policy and
+the superstitions of Florentine Guelphism, and persisted in hoping the
+best. When Louis XI. offered him aid in the war against Ferrante of
+Naples and Sixtus IV., he replied, ‘I cannot set my own advantage above
+the safety of all Italy; would to God it never came into the mind of the
+French kings to try their strength in this country! Should they ever do
+so, Italy is lost.’[192] For the other princes, the King of France was
+alternately a bugbear to themselves and their enemies, and they
+threatened to call him in whenever they saw no more convenient way out
+of their difficulties. The Popes, in their turn, fancied that they could
+make use of France without any danger to themselves, and even Innocent
+VIII. imagined that he could withdraw to sulk in the North, and return
+as a conqueror to Italy at the head of a French army.[193]
+
+Thoughtful men, indeed, foresaw the foreign conquest long before the
+expedition of Charles VIII.[194] And when Charles was back again on the
+other side of the Alps, it was plain to every eye that an era of
+intervention had begun. Misfortune now followed on misfortune; it was
+understood too late that France and Spain, the two chief invaders, had
+become great European powers, that they would be no longer satisfied
+with verbal homage, but would fight to the death for influence and
+territory in Italy. They had begun to resemble the centralised Italian
+states, and indeed to copy them, only on a gigantic scale. Schemes of
+annexation or exchange of territory were for a time indefinitely
+multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of
+Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held
+the Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the
+philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the
+barbarians all came to a bad end.
+
+Alliances were at the same time formed with the Turks too, with as
+little scruple or disguise; they were reckoned no worse than any other
+political expedients. The belief in the unity of Western Christendom had
+at various times in the course of the Crusades been seriously shaken,
+and Frederick II. had probably outgrown it. But the fresh advance of the
+Oriental nations, the need and the ruin of the Greek Empire, had revived
+the old feeling, though not in its former strength, throughout Western
+Europe. Italy, however, was a striking exception to this rule. Great as
+was the terror felt for the Turks, and the actual danger from them,
+there was yet scarcely a government of any consequence which did not
+conspire against other Italian states with Mohammed II. and his
+successors. And when they did not do so, they still had the credit of
+it; nor was it worse than the sending of emissaries to poison the
+cisterns of Venice, which was the charge brought against the heirs of
+Alfonso King of Naples.[195] From a scoundrel like Sigismondo Malatesta
+nothing better could be expected than that he should call the Turks
+into Italy.[196] But the Aragonese monarchs of Naples, from whom
+Mohammed--at the instigation, we read, of other Italian governments,
+especially of Venice[197]--had once wrested Otranto (1480), afterwards
+hounded on the Sultan Bajazet II. against the Venetians.[198] The same
+charge was brought against Ludovico Moro. ‘The blood of the slain, and
+the misery of the prisoners in the hands of the Turks, cry to God for
+vengeance against him,’ says the state historian. In Venice, where the
+government was informed of everything, it was known that Giovanni
+Sforza, ruler of Pesaro, the cousin of the Moor, had entertained the
+Turkish ambassadors on their way to Milan.[199] The two most respectable
+among the Popes of the fifteenth century, Nicholas V. and Pius II., died
+in the deepest grief at the progress of the Turks, the latter indeed
+amid the preparations for a crusade which he was hoping to lead in
+person; their successors embezzled the contributions sent for this
+purpose from all parts of Christendom, and degraded the indulgences
+granted in return for them into a private commercial speculation.[200]
+Innocent VIII. consented to be gaoler to the fugitive Prince Djem, for a
+salary paid by the prisoner’s brother Bajazet II., and Alexander VI.
+supported the steps taken by Ludovico Moro in Constantinople to further
+a Turkish assault upon Venice (1498), whereupon the latter threatened
+him with a Council.[201] It is clear that the notorious alliance
+between Francis I. and Soliman II. was nothing new or unheard of.
+
+Indeed, we find instances of whole populations to whom it seemed no
+particular crime to go over bodily to the Turks. Even if it were only
+held out as a threat to oppressive governments, this is at least a proof
+that the idea had become familiar. As early as 1480 Battista Mantovano
+gives us clearly to understand that most of the inhabitants of the
+Adriatic coast foresaw something of this kind, and that Ancona in
+particular desired it.[202] When Romagna was suffering from the
+oppressive government of Leo X., a deputy from Ravenna said openly to
+the Legate, Cardinal Guilio Medici: ‘Monsignore, the honourable Republic
+of Venice will not have us, for fear of a dispute with the Holy See; but
+if the Turk comes to Ragusa we will put ourselves into his hands.’[203]
+
+It was a poor but not wholly groundless consolation for the enslavement
+of Italy then begun by the Spaniards, that the country was at least
+secured from the relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it
+under the Turkish rule.[204] By itself, divided as it was, it could
+hardly have escaped this fate.
+
+If, with all these drawbacks, the Italian statesmanship of this period
+deserves our praise, it is only on the ground of its practical and
+unprejudiced treatment of those questions which were not affected by
+fear, passion, or malice. Here was no feudal system after the northern
+fashion, with its artificial scheme of rights; but the power which each
+possessed he held in practice as in theory. Here was no attendant
+nobility to foster in the mind of the prince the mediæval sense of
+honour, with all its strange consequences; but princes and counsellors
+were agreed in acting according to the exigencies of the particular case
+and to the end they had in view. Towards the men whose services were
+used and towards allies, come from what quarter they might, no pride of
+caste was felt which could possibly estrange a supporter; and the class
+of the Condottieri, in which birth was a matter of indifference, shows
+clearly enough in what sort of hands the real power lay; and lastly, the
+Government, in the hands of an enlightened despot, had an incomparably
+more accurate acquaintance with its own country and that of its
+neighbours, than was possessed by northern contemporaries, and estimated
+the economical and moral capacities of friend and foe down to the
+smallest particular. The rulers were, notwithstanding grave errors, born
+masters of statistical science. With such men negotiation was possible;
+it might be presumed that they would be convinced and their opinion
+modified when practical reasons were laid before them. When the great
+Alfonso of Naples was (1434) a prisoner of Filippo Maria Visconti, he
+was able to satisfy his gaoler that the rule of the House of Anjou
+instead of his own at Naples would make the French masters of Italy;
+Filippo Maria set him free without ransom and made an alliance with
+him.[205] A northern prince would scarcely have acted in the same way,
+certainly not one whose morality in other respects was like that of
+Visconti. What confidence was felt in the power of self-interest is
+shown by the celebrated visit which Lorenzo the Magnificent, to the
+universal astonishment of the Florentines, paid the faithless Ferrante
+at Naples--a man who would be certainly tempted to keep him a prisoner,
+and was by no means too scrupulous to do so.[206] For to arrest a
+powerful monarch, and then to let him go alive, after extorting his
+signature and otherwise insulting him, as Charles the Bold did to Louis
+XI. at Péronne (1468), seemed madness to the Italians;[207] so that
+Lorenzo was expected to come back covered with glory, or else not to
+come back at all. The art of political persuasion was at this time
+raised to a point--especially by the Venetian ambassadors--of which
+northern nations first obtained a conception from the Italians, and of
+which the official addresses give a most imperfect idea. These are mere
+pieces of humanistic rhetoric. Nor, in spite of an otherwise ceremonious
+etiquette, was there in case of need any lack of rough and frank
+speaking in diplomatic intercourse.[208] A man like Macchiavelli appears
+in his ‘Legazioni’ in an almost pathetic light. Furnished with scanty
+instructions, shabbily equipped, and treated as an agent of inferior
+rank, he never loses his gift of free and wide observation or his
+pleasure in picturesque description. From that time Italy was and
+remained the country of political ‘Istruzioni’ and ‘Relazioni.’ There
+was doubtless plenty of diplomatic ability in other states, but Italy
+alone at so early a period has preserved documentary evidence of it in
+considerable quantity. The long despatch on the last period of the life
+of Ferrante of Naples (January 17, 1494), written by the hand of Pontano
+and addressed to the Cabinet of Alexander VI., gives us the highest
+opinion of this class of political writing, although it is only quoted
+incidentally and as one of many written. And how many other despatches,
+as important and as vigorously written, in the diplomatic intercourse of
+this and later times, still remain unknown or unedited![209]
+
+A special division of this work will treat of the study of man
+individually and nationally, which among the Italians went hand in hand
+with the study of the outward conditions of human life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+WAR AS A WORK OF ART.
+
+
+It must here be briefly indicated by what steps the art of war assumed
+the character of a product of reflection.[210] Throughout the countries
+of the West the education of the individual soldier in the middle ages
+was perfect within the limits of the then prevalent system of defence
+and attack: nor was there any want of ingenious inventors in the arts of
+besieging and of fortification. But the development both of strategy and
+of tactics was hindered by the character and duration of military
+service, and by the ambition of the nobles, who disputed questions of
+precedence in the face of the enemy, and through simple want of
+discipline caused the loss of great battles like Crécy and Maupertuis.
+Italy, on the contrary, was the first country to adopt the system of
+mercenary troops, which demanded a wholly different organisation; and
+the early introduction of fire-arms did its part in making war a
+democratic pursuit, not only because the strongest castles were unable
+to withstand a bombardment, but because the skill of the engineer, of
+the gun-founder, and of the artillerist--men belonging to another class
+than the nobility--was now of the first importance in a campaign. It was
+felt, with regret, that the value of the individual, which had been the
+soul of the small and admirably-organised bands of mercenaries, would
+suffer from these novel means of destruction, which did their work at a
+distance; and there were Condottieri who opposed to the utmost the
+introduction at least of the musket, which had been lately invented in
+Germany.[211] We read that Paolo Vitelli,[212] while recognising and
+himself adopting the cannon, put out the eyes and cut off the hands of
+the captured ‘schioppettieri,’ of the enemy, because he held it unworthy
+that a gallant, and it might be noble, knight should be wounded and laid
+low by a common, despised foot soldier. On the whole, however, the new
+discoveries were accepted and turned to useful account, till the
+Italians became the teachers of all Europe, both in the building of
+fortifications and in the means of attacking them.[213] Princes like
+Federigo of Urbino and Alfonso of Ferrara acquired a mastery of the
+subject compared to which the knowledge even of Maximilian I. appears
+superficial. In Italy, earlier than elsewhere, there existed a
+comprehensive science and art of military affairs; here, for the first
+time, that impartial delight is taken in able generalship for its own
+sake, which might, indeed, be expected from the frequent change of party
+and from the wholly unsentimental mode of action of the Condottieri.
+During the Milano-Venetian war of 1451 and 1452, between Francesco
+Sforza and Jacopo Piccinino, the headquarters of the latter were
+attended by the scholar Gian Antonio Porcello dei Pandoni, commissioned
+by Alfonso of Naples to write a report of the campaign.[214] It is
+written, not in the purest, but in a fluent Latin, a little too much in
+the style of the humanistic bombast of the day, is modelled on Cæsar’s
+Commentaries, and interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like.
+Since for the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether
+Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater,[215] Piccinino through
+the whole book must needs be called Scipio and Sforza Hannibal. But
+something positive had to be reported too respecting the Milanese army;
+the sophist presented himself to Sforza, was led along the ranks,
+praised highly all that he saw, and promised to hand it down to
+posterity.[216] Apart from him the Italian literature of the day is rich
+in descriptions of wars and strategic devices, written for the use of
+educated men in general as well as of specialists, while the
+contemporary narratives of northerners, such as the ‘Burgundian War’ by
+Diebold Schelling, still retain the shapelessness and matter-of-fact
+dryness of a mere chronicle. The greatest _dilettante_ who has ever
+treated in that character[217] of military affairs, was then busy
+writing his ‘Arte della Guerra.’ But the development of the individual
+soldier found its most complete expression in those public and solemn
+conflicts between one or more pairs of combatants which were practised
+long before the famous ‘Challenge of Barletta’[218] (1503). The victor
+was assured of the praises of poets and scholars, which were denied to
+the Northern warrior. The result of these combats was no longer regarded
+as a Divine judgment, but as a triumph of personal merit, and to the
+minds of the spectators seemed to be both the decision of an exciting
+competition and a satisfaction for the honour of the army or the
+nation.[219]
+
+It is obvious that this purely rational treatment of warlike affairs
+allowed, under certain circumstances, of the worst atrocities, even in
+the absence of a strong political hatred, as, for instance, when the
+plunder of a city had been promised to the troops. After the four days’
+devastation of Piacenza, which Sforza was compelled to permit to his
+soldiers (1447), the town long stood empty, and at last had to be
+peopled by force.[220] Yet outrages like these were nothing compared
+with the misery which was afterwards brought upon Italy by foreign
+troops, and most of all by the Spaniards, in whom perhaps a touch of
+Oriental blood, perhaps familiarity with the spectacles of the
+Inquisition, had unloosed the devilish element of human nature. After
+seeing them at work at Prato, Rome, and elsewhere, it is not easy to
+take any interest of the higher sort in Ferdinand the Catholic and
+Charles V., who knew what these hordes were, and yet unchained them. The
+mass of documents which are gradually brought to light from the cabinets
+of these rulers will always remain an important source of historical
+information; but from such men no fruitful political conception can be
+looked for.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.
+
+
+The Papacy and the dominions of the Church[221] are creations of so
+peculiar a kind, that we have hitherto, in determining the general
+characteristics of Italian states, referred to them only occasionally.
+The deliberate choice and adaptation of political expedients, which
+gives so great an interest to the other states, is what we find least of
+all at Rome, since here the spiritual power could constantly conceal or
+supply the defects of the temporal. And what fiery trials did this state
+undergo in the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century,
+when the Papacy was led captive to Avignon! All, at first, was thrown
+into confusion; but the Pope had money, troops, and a great statesman
+and general, the Spaniard Alboronoz, who again brought the
+ecclesiastical state into complete subjection. The danger of a final
+dissolution was still greater at the time of the schism, when neither
+the Roman nor the French Pope was rich enough to reconquer the
+newly-lost state; but this was done under Martin V., after the unity of
+the Church was restored, and done again under Eugenius IV., when the
+same danger was renewed. But the ecclesiastical state was and remained a
+thorough anomaly among the powers of Italy; in and near Rome itself, the
+Papacy was defied by the great families of the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli,
+and Anguillara; in Umbria, in the Marches, and in Romagna, those civic
+republics had almost ceased to exist, for whose devotion the Papacy had
+showed so little gratitude; their place had been taken by a crowd of
+princely dynasties, great or small, whose loyalty and obedience
+signified little. As self-dependent powers, standing on their own
+merits, they have an interest of their own; and from this point of view
+the most important of them have been already discussed (pp. 28 sqq., 44
+sqq.).
+
+Nevertheless, a few general remarks on the Papacy can hardly be
+dispensed with. New and strange perils and trials came upon it in the
+course of the fifteenth century, as the political spirit of the nation
+began to lay hold upon it on various sides, and to draw it within the
+sphere of its action. The least of these dangers came from the populace
+or from abroad; the most serious had their ground in the characters of
+the Popes themselves.
+
+Let us, for this moment, leave out of consideration the countries beyond
+the Alps. At the time when the Papacy was exposed to mortal danger in
+Italy, it neither received nor could receive the slightest assistance
+either from France, then under Louis XI., or from England, distracted by
+the wars of the Roses, or from the then disorganized Spanish monarchy,
+or from Germany, but lately betrayed at the Council of Basel. In Italy
+itself there were a certain number of instructed and even uninstructed
+people, whose national vanity was flattered by the Italian character of
+the Papacy; the personal interests of very many depended on its having
+and retaining this character; and vast masses of the people still
+believed in the virtue of the Papal blessing and consecration;[222]
+among them notorious transgressors like that Vitellozzo Vitelli, who
+still prayed to be absolved by Alexander VI., when the Pope’s son had
+him slaughtered.[223] But all these grounds of sympathy put together
+would not have sufficed to save the Papacy from its enemies, had the
+latter been really in earnest, and had they known how to take advantage
+of the envy and hatred with which the institution was regarded.
+
+And at the very time when the prospect of help from without was so
+small, the most dangerous symptoms appeared within the Papacy itself.
+Living, as it now did, and acting in the spirit of the secular Italian
+principalities, it was compelled to go through the same dark experiences
+as they; but its own exceptional nature gave a peculiar colour to the
+shadows.
+
+As far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, small account was taken
+of its internal agitations, so many were the Popes who had returned
+after being expelled by popular tumult, and so greatly did the presence
+of the Curia minister to the interests of the Roman people. But Rome not
+only displayed at times a specific anti-papal radicalism,[224] but in
+the most serious plots which were then contrived, gave proof of the
+working of unseen hands from without. It was so in the case of the
+conspiracy of Stefano Porcaro against Nicholas V. (1453), the very Pope
+who had done most for the prosperity of the city, but who, by enriching
+the cardinals, and transforming Rome into a papal fortress, had aroused
+the discontent of the people.[225] Porcaro aimed at the complete
+overthrow of the papal authority, and had distinguished accomplices,
+who, though their names are not handed down to us,[226] are certainly
+to be looked for among the Italian governments of the time. Under the
+pontificate of the same man, Lorenzo Valla concluded his famous
+declamation against the gift of Constantine, with the wish for the
+speedy secularisation of the States of the Church.[227]
+
+The Catilinarian gang, with which Pius II. had to contend[228] (1460),
+avowed with equal frankness their resolution to overthrow the government
+of the priests, and its leader, Tiburzio, threw the blame on the
+soothsayers, who had fixed the accomplishment of his wishes for this
+very year. Several of the chief men of Rome, the Prince of Tarentum, and
+the Condottiere Jacopo Piccinino, were accomplices and supporters of
+Tiburzio. Indeed, when we think of the booty which was accumulated in
+the palaces of wealthy prelates--the conspirators had the Cardinal of
+Aquileia especially in view--we are surprised that, in an almost
+unguarded city, such attempts were not more frequent and more
+successful. It was not without reason that Pius II. preferred to reside
+anywhere rather than in Rome, and even Paul II.[229] was exposed to no
+small anxiety through a plot formed by some discharged abbreviators,
+who, under the command of Platina, besieged the Vatican for twenty days.
+The Papacy must sooner or later have fallen a victim to such
+enterprises, if it had not stamped out the aristocratic factions under
+whose protection these bands of robbers grew to a head.
+
+This task was undertaken by the terrible Sixtus IV. He was the first
+Pope who had Rome and the neighbourhood thoroughly under his control,
+especially after his successful attack on the House of Colonna, and
+consequently, both in his Italian policy and in the internal affairs of
+the Church, he could venture to act with a defiant audacity, and to set
+at nought the complaints and threats to summon a council which arose
+from all parts of Europe. He supplied himself with the necessary funds
+by simony, which suddenly grew to unheard-of proportions, and which
+extended from the appointment of cardinals down to the granting of the
+smallest favours.[230] Sixtus himself had not obtained the papal dignity
+without recourse to the same means.
+
+A corruption so universal might sooner or later bring disastrous
+consequences on the Holy See, but they lay in the uncertain future. It
+was otherwise with nepotism, which threatened at one time to destroy the
+Papacy altogether. Of all the ‘nipoti,’ Cardinal Pietro Riario enjoyed
+at first the chief and almost exclusive favour of Sixtus. He soon drew
+upon him the eyes of all Italy,[231] partly by the fabulous luxury of
+his life, partly through the reports which were current of his
+irreligion and his political plans. He bargained with Duke Galeazzo
+Maria of Milan (1473), that the latter should become King of Lombardy,
+and then aid him with money and troops to return to Rome and ascend the
+papal throne; Sixtus, it appears, would have voluntarily yielded it to
+him.[232] This plan, which, by making the Papacy hereditary, would have
+ended in the secularization of the papal state, failed through the
+sudden death of Pietro. The second ‘nipote,’ Girolamo Riario, remained a
+layman, and did not seek the Pontificate. From this time the ‘nipoti,’
+by their endeavours to found principalities for themselves, became a new
+source of confusion to Italy. It had already happened that the Popes
+tried to make good their feudal claims on Naples in favour of their
+relatives;[233] but since the failure of Calixtus III. such a scheme was
+no longer practicable, and Girolamo Riario, after the attempt to conquer
+Florence (and who knows how many other places) had failed, was forced to
+content himself with founding a state within the limits of the papal
+dominions themselves. This was, in so far, justifiable, as Romagna, with
+its princes and civic despots, threatened to shake off the papal
+supremacy altogether, and ran the risk of shortly falling a prey to
+Sforza or the Venetians, when Rome interfered to prevent it. But who, at
+times and in circumstances like these, could guarantee the continued
+obedience of ‘nipoti’ and their descendants, now turned into sovereign
+rulers, to Popes with whom they had no further concern? Even in his
+lifetime the Pope was not always sure of his own son or nephew, and the
+temptation was strong to expel the ‘nipote’ of a predecessor and replace
+him by one of his own. The reaction of the whole system on the Papacy
+itself was of the most serious character; all means of compulsion,
+whether temporal or spiritual, were used without scruple for the most
+questionable ends, and to these all the other objects of the Apostolic
+See were made subordinate. And when they were attained, at whatever cost
+of revolutions and proscriptions, a dynasty was founded which had no
+stronger interest than the destruction of the Papacy.
+
+At the death of Sixtus, Girolamo was only able to maintain himself in
+his usurped principality of Forli and Imola by the utmost exertions of
+his own, and by the aid of the House of Sforza. He was murdered in 1488.
+In the conclave (1484) which followed the death of Sixtus--that in which
+Innocent VIII. was elected--an incident occurred which seemed to furnish
+the Papacy with a new external guarantee. Two cardinals, who, at the
+same time, were princes of ruling houses, Giovanni d’Aragona, son of
+King Ferrante, and Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Moor, sold their votes
+with the most shameless effrontery;[234] so that, at any rate, the
+ruling houses of Naples and Milan became interested, by their
+participation in the booty, in the continuance of the papal system. Once
+again, in the following Conclave, when all the cardinals but five sold
+themselves, Ascanio received enormous sums in bribes, not without
+cherishing the hope that at the next election he would himself be the
+favoured candidate.[235]
+
+Lorenzo the Magnificent, on his part, was anxious that the House of
+Medici should not be sent away with empty hands. He married his daughter
+Maddalena to the son of the new Pope--the first who publicly
+acknowledged his children--Franceschetto Cybò, and expected not only
+favours of all kinds for his own son, Cardinal Giovanni, afterwards Leo
+X., but also the rapid promotion of his son-in-law.[236] But with
+respect to the latter, he demanded impossibilities. Under Innocent VIII.
+there was no opportunity for the audacious nepotism by which states had
+been founded, since Franceschetto himself was a poor creature who, like
+his father the Pope, sought power only for the lowest purpose of
+all--the acquisition and accumulation of money.[237] The manner,
+however, in which father and son practised this occupation must have led
+sooner or later to a final catastrophe--the dissolution of the state. If
+Sixtus had filled his treasury by the rule of spiritual dignities and
+favours, Innocent and his son, for their part, established an office for
+the sale of secular favours, in which pardons for murder and
+manslaughter were sold for large sums of money. Out of every fine 150
+ducats were paid into the papal exchequer, and what was over to
+Franceschetto. Rome, during the latter part of this pontificate, swarmed
+with licensed and unlicensed assassins; the factions, which Sixtus had
+begun to put down, were again as active as ever; the Pope, well guarded
+in the Vatican, was satisfied with now and then laying a trap, in which
+a wealthy misdoer was occasionally caught. For Franceschetto the chief
+point was to know by what means, when the Pope died, he could escape
+with well-filled coffers. He betrayed himself at last, on the occasion
+of a false report (1490) of his father’s death; he endeavoured to carry
+off all the money in the papal treasury, and when this proved
+impossible, insisted that, at all events, the Turkish prince, Djem,
+should go with him, and serve as a living capital, to be advantageously
+disposed of, perhaps to Ferrante of Naples.[238] It is hard to estimate
+the political possibilities of remote periods, but we cannot help asking
+ourselves the question, if Rome could have survived two or three
+pontificates of this kind. Even with reference to the believing
+countries of Europe, it was imprudent to let matters go so far that not
+only travellers and pilgrims, but a whole embassy of Maximilian, King of
+the Romans, were stripped to their shirts in the neighbourhood of Rome,
+and that envoys had constantly to turn back without setting foot within
+the city.
+
+Such a condition of things was incompatible with the conception of power
+and its pleasures which inspired the gifted Alexander VI. (1492-1503),
+and the first event that happened was the restoration, at least
+provisionally, of public order, and the punctual payment of every
+salary.
+
+Strictly speaking, as we are now discussing phases of Italian
+civilization, this pontificate might be passed over, since the Borgias
+are no more Italian than the House of Naples. Alexander spoke Spanish in
+public with Cæsar; Lucretia, at her entrance to Ferrara, where she wore
+a Spanish costume, was sung to by Spanish buffoons; their confidential
+servants consisted of Spaniards, as did also the most ill-famed company
+of the troops of Cæsar in the war of 1500; and even his hangman, Don
+Micheletto, and his poisoner, Sebastian Pinzon,[239] seem to have been
+of the same nation. Among his other achievements, Cæsar, in true Spanish
+fashion, killed, according to the rules of the craft, six wild bulls in
+an enclosed court. But the Roman corruption, which seemed to culminate
+in this family, was already far advanced when they came to the city.
+
+What they were and what they did has been often and fully
+described.[240] Their immediate purpose, which, in fact, they attained,
+was the complete subjugation of the pontifical state. All the petty
+despots,[241] who were mostly more or less refractory vassals of the
+Church, were expelled or destroyed; and in Rome itself the two great
+factions were annihilated, the so-called Guelph Orsini as well as the
+so-called Ghibelline Colonna. But the means employed were of so
+frightful a character, that they must certainly have ended in the ruin
+of the Papacy, had not the contemporaneous death of both father and son
+by poison suddenly intervened to alter the whole aspect of the
+situation. The moral indignation of Christendom was certainly no great
+source of danger to Alexander; at home he was strong enough to extort
+terror and obedience; foreign rulers were won over to his side, and
+Louis XII. even aided him to the utmost of his power. The mass of the
+people throughout Europe had hardly a conception of what was passing in
+Central Italy. The only moment which was really fraught with
+danger--when Charles VIII. was in Italy--went by with unexpected
+fortune, and even then it was not the Papacy as such that was in peril,
+but Alexander, who risked being supplanted by a more respectable
+Pope.[242] The great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy
+lay in Alexander himself, and, above all, in his son Cæsar Borgia.
+
+In the nature of the father, ambition, avarice, and sensuality were
+combined with strong and brilliant qualities. All the pleasures of power
+and luxury he granted himself from the first day of his pontificate in
+the fullest measure. In the choice of means to this end he was wholly
+without scruple; it was known at once that he would more than compensate
+himself for the sacrifices which his election had involved,[243] and
+that the simony of the seller would far exceed the simony of the buyer.
+It must be remembered that the vice-chancellorship and other offices
+which Alexander had formerly held had taught him to know better and turn
+to more practical account the various sources of revenue than any other
+member of the Curia. As early as 1494, a Carmelite, Adam of Genoa, who
+had preached at Rome against simony, was found murdered in his bed with
+twenty wounds. Hardly a single cardinal was appointed without the
+payment of enormous sums of money.
+
+But when the Pope in course of time fell under the influence of his son
+Cæsar Borgia, his violent measures assumed that character of devilish
+wickedness which necessarily reacts upon the ends pursued. What was done
+in the struggle with the Roman nobles and with the tyrants of Romagna
+exceeded in faithlessness and barbarity even that measure to which the
+Aragonese rulers of Naples had already accustomed the world; and the
+genius for deception was also greater. The manner in which Cæsar
+isolated his father, murdering brother, brother-in-law, and other
+relations or courtiers, whenever their favour with the Pope or their
+position in any other respect became inconvenient to him, is literally
+appalling. Alexander was forced to acquiesce in the murder of his
+best-loved son, the Duke of Gandia, since he himself lived in hourly
+dread of Cæsar.[244]
+
+What were the final aims of the latter? Even in the last months of his
+tyranny, when he had murdered the Condottieri at Sinigaglia, and was to
+all intents and purposes master of the ecclesiastical state (1503) those
+who stood near him gave the modest reply, that the Duke merely wished to
+put down the factions and the despots, and all for the good of the
+Church only; that for himself he desired nothing more than the lordship
+of the Romagna, and that he had earned the gratitude of all the
+following Popes by ridding them of the Orsini and Colonna.[245] But no
+one will accept this as his ultimate design. The Pope Alexander himself,
+in his discussions with the Venetian ambassador, went farther than this,
+when committing his son to the protection of Venice: ‘I will see to it,’
+he said, ‘that one day the Papacy shall belong either to him or to
+you.’[246] Cæsar certainly added that no one could become Pope without
+the consent of Venice, and for this end the Venetian cardinals had only
+to keep well together. Whether he referred to himself or not we are
+unable to say; at all events, the declaration of his father is
+sufficient to prove his designs on the pontifical throne. We further
+obtain from Lucrezia Borgia a certain amount of indirect evidence, in so
+far as certain passages in the poems of Ercole Strozza may be the echo
+of expressions which she as Duchess of Ferrara may easily have permitted
+herself to use. Here too Cæsar’s hopes of the Papacy are chiefly spoken
+of;[247] but now and then a supremacy over all Italy is hinted at,[248]
+and finally we are given to understand that as temporal ruler Cæsar’s
+projects were of the greatest, and that for their sake he had formerly
+surrendered his cardinalate.[249] In fact, there can be no doubt
+whatever that Cæsar, whether chosen Pope or not after the death of
+Alexander, meant to keep possession of the pontifical state at any cost,
+and that this, after all the enormities he had committed, he could not
+as Pope have succeeded in doing permanently. He, if anybody, could have
+secularised the States of the Church, and he would have been forced to
+do so in order to keep them.[250] Unless we are much deceived, this is
+the real reason of the secret sympathy with which Macchiavelli treats
+the great criminal; from Cæsar, or from nobody, could it be hoped that
+he ‘would draw the steel from the wound,’ in other words, annihilate the
+Papacy--the source of all foreign intervention and of all the divisions
+of Italy. The intriguers who thought to divine Cæsar’s aims, when
+holding out to him hopes of the kingdom of Tuscany, seem to have been
+dismissed with contempt.[251]
+
+But all logical conclusions from his premisses are idle, not because of
+the unaccountable genius which in fact characterized him as little as it
+did the Duke of Friedland, but because the means which he employed were
+not compatible with any large and consistent course of action. Perhaps,
+indeed, in the very excess of his wickedness some prospect of salvation
+for the Papacy may have existed even without the accident which put an
+end to his rule.
+
+Even if we assume that the destruction of the petty despots in the
+pontifical state had gained for him nothing but sympathy, even if we
+take as proof of his great projects the army, composed of the best
+soldiers and officers in Italy, with Lionardo da Vinci as chief
+engineer, which followed his fortunes in 1503, other facts nevertheless
+wear such a character of unreason that our judgment, like that of
+contemporary observers, is wholly at a loss to explain them. One fact of
+this kind is the devastation and maltreatment of the newly won state,
+which Cæsar still intended to keep and to rule over.[252] Another is
+the condition of Rome and of the Curia in the last decades of the
+pontificate. Whether it were that father and son had drawn up a formal
+list of proscribed persons,[253] or that the murders were resolved upon
+one by one, in either case the Borgias were bent on the secret
+destruction of all who stood in their way or whose inheritance they
+coveted. Of this money and movable goods formed the smallest part; it
+was a much greater source of profit for the Pope that the incomes of the
+clerical dignitaries in question were suspended by their death, and that
+he received the revenues of their offices while vacant, and the price of
+these offices when they were filled by the successors of the murdered
+men. The Venetian ambassador, Paolo Capello[254] announces in the year
+1500: ‘Every night four or five murdered men are discovered--bishops,
+prelates and others--so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being
+destroyed by the Duke (Cæsar).’ He himself used to wander about Rome in
+the night time with his guards,[255] and there is every reason to
+believe that he did so not only because, like Tiberius, he shrank from
+showing his now repulsive features by daylight, but also to gratify his
+insane thirst for blood, perhaps even on the persons of those unknown to
+him.
+
+As early as the year 1499 the despair was so great and so general that
+many of the Papal guards were waylaid and put to death.[256] But those
+whom the Borgias could not assail with open violence, fell victims to
+their poison. For the cases in which a certain amount of discretion
+seemed requisite, a white powder[257] of an agreeable taste was made use
+of, which did not work on the spot, but slowly and gradually, and which
+could be mixed without notice in any dish or goblet. Prince Djem had
+taken some of it in a sweet draught, before Alexander surrendered him to
+Charles VIII. (1495), and at the end of their career father and son
+poisoned themselves with the same powder by accidentally tasting a
+sweetmeat intended for a wealthy cardinal, probably Adrian of
+Corneto.[258] The official epitomiser of the history of the Popes,
+Onufrio Panvinio,[259] mentions three cardinals, Orsini, Ferrerio, and
+Michiel, whom Alexander caused to be poisoned, and hints at a fourth,
+Giovanni Borgia, whom Cæsar took into his own charge--though probably
+wealthy prelates seldom died in Rome at that time without giving rise to
+suspicions of this sort. Even tranquil students who had withdrawn to
+some provincial town were not out of reach of the merciless poison. A
+secret horror seemed to hang about the Pope; storms and thunderbolts,
+crushing in walls and chambers, had in earlier times often visited and
+alarmed him; in the year 1500,[260] when these phenomena were repeated,
+they were held to be ‘cosa diabolica.’ The report of these events seems
+at last, through the well-attended jubilee[261] of 1500, to have been
+carried far and wide throughout the countries of Europe, and the
+infamous traffic in indulgences did what else was needed to draw all
+eyes upon Rome.[262] Besides the returning pilgrims, strange white-robed
+penitents came from Italy to the North, among them disguised fugitives
+from the Papal State, who are not likely to have been silent. Yet none
+can calculate how far the scandal and indignation of Christendom might
+have gone, before they became a source of pressing danger to Alexander.
+‘He would,’ says Panvinio elsewhere,[263] ‘have put all the other rich
+cardinals and prelates out of the way, to get their property, had he
+not, in the midst of his great plans for his son, been struck down by
+death.’ And what might not Cæsar have achieved if, at the moment when
+his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sick-bed! What a
+conclave would that have been, in which, armed with all his weapons, he
+had extorted his election from a college whose numbers he had
+judiciously reduced by poison--and this at a time when there was no
+French army at hand! In pursuing such a hypothesis the imagination loses
+itself in an abyss.
+
+Instead of this followed the conclave in which Pius III. was elected,
+and, after his speedy death, that which chose Julius II.--both elections
+the fruits of a general reaction.
+
+Whatever may have been the private morals of Julius II. in all essential
+respects he was the saviour of the Papacy. His familiarity with the
+course of events since the pontificate of his uncle Sixtus had given him
+a profound insight into the grounds and conditions of the Papal
+authority. On these he founded his own policy, and devoted to it the
+whole force and passion of his unshaken soul. He ascended the steps of
+St. Peter’s chair without simony and amid general applause, and with him
+ceased, at all events, the undisguised traffic in the highest offices of
+the Church. Julius had favourites, and among them were some the reverse
+of worthy, but a special fortune put him above the temptation to
+nepotism. His brother, Giovanni della Rovere, was the husband of the
+heiress of Urbino, sister of the last Montefeltro Guidobaldo, and from
+this marriage was born, in 1491, a son, Francesco Maria della Rovere,
+who was at the same time Papal ‘nipote’ and lawful heir to the duchy of
+Urbino. What Julius elsewhere acquired, either on the field of battle or
+by diplomatic means, he proudly bestowed on the Church, not on his
+family; the ecclesiastical territory, which he found in a state of
+dissolution, he bequeathed to his successor completely subdued, and
+increased by Parma and Piacenza. It was not his fault that Ferrara too
+was not added to the dominions of the Church. The 700,000 ducats, which
+were stored up in the castle of St. Angelo, were to be delivered by the
+governor to none but the future Pope. He made himself heir of the
+cardinals, and, indeed, of all the clergy who died in Rome, and this by
+the most despotic means; but he murdered or poisoned none of them.[264]
+That he should himself lead his forces to battle was for him an
+unavoidable necessity, and certainly did him nothing but good at a time
+when a man in Italy was forced to be either hammer or anvil, and when
+personality was a greater power than the most indisputable right. If,
+despite all his high-sounding ‘Away with the barbarians!’ he
+nevertheless contributed more than any man to the firm settlement of the
+Spaniards in Italy, he may have thought it a matter of indifference to
+the Papacy, or even, as things stood, a relative advantage. And to whom,
+sooner than to Spain, could the Church look for a sincere and lasting
+respect,[265] in an age when the princes of Italy cherished none but
+sacrilegious projects against her? Be this as it may, the powerful,
+original nature, which could swallow no anger and conceal no genuine
+good-will, made on the whole the impression most desirable in his
+situation--that of the ‘Pontefice terribile.’ He could even, with a
+comparatively clear conscience, venture to summon a council to Rome, and
+so bid defiance to that outcry for a council which was raised by the
+opposition all over Europe. A ruler of this stamp needed some great
+outward symbol of his conceptions; Julius found it in the reconstruction
+of St. Peter’s. The plan of it, as Bramante wished to have it, is
+perhaps the grandest expression of power in unity which can be imagined.
+In other arts besides architecture the face and the memory of the Pope
+live on in their most ideal form, and it is not without significance
+that even the Latin poetry of those days gives proof of a wholly
+different enthusiasm for Julius than that shown for his predecessors.
+The entrance into Bologna, at the end of the ‘Iter Julii Secundi,’ by
+the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, has a splendour of its own, and Giovan
+Antonio Flaminio,[266] in one of the finest elegies, appealed to the
+patriot in the Pope to grant his protection to Italy.
+
+In a constitution of his Lateran Council, Julius had solemnly denounced
+the simony of the Papal elections.[267] After his death in 1513, the
+money-loving cardinals tried to evade the prohibition by proposing that
+the endowments and offices hitherto held by the chosen candidate should
+be equally divided among themselves, in which case they would have
+elected the best-endowed cardinal, the incompetent Rafael Riario.[268]
+But a reaction, chiefly arising from the younger members of the Sacred
+College, who, above all things, desired a liberal Pope, rendered the
+miserable combination futile; Giovanni Medici was elected--the famous
+Leo X.
+
+We shall often meet with him in treating of the noonday of the
+Renaissance; here we wish only to point out that under him the Papacy
+was again exposed to great inward and outward dangers. Among these we
+do not reckon the conspiracy of the Cardinals Petrucci, De Saulis,
+Riario, and Corneto (1517) which at most could have occasioned a change
+of persons, and to which Leo found the true antidote in the unheard-of
+creation of thirty-nine new cardinals, a measure which had the
+additional advantage of rewarding, in some cases at least, real
+merit.[269]
+
+But some of the paths which Leo allowed himself to tread during the
+first two years of his office were perilous to the last degree. He
+seriously endeavoured to secure, by negotiation, the kingdom of Naples
+for his brother Giuliano, and for his nephew Lorenzo a powerful North
+Italian state, to comprise Milan, Tuscany, Urbino, and Ferrara.[270] It
+is clear that the Pontifical State, thus hemmed in on all sides, would
+have become a mere Medicean appanage, and that, in fact, there would
+have been no further need to secularise it.
+
+The plan found an insuperable obstacle in the political conditions of
+the time. Giuliano died early. To provide for Lorenzo, Leo undertook to
+expel the Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino, but reaped from
+the war nothing but hatred and poverty, and was forced, when in 1519
+Lorenzo followed his uncle to the grave, to hand over the hardly-won
+conquests to the Church.[271] He did on compulsion and without credit
+what, if it had been done voluntarily, would have been to his lasting
+honour. What, partly alone, and partly in alternate negotiations with
+Francis I. and Charles V., he attempted against Alfonso of Ferrara, and
+actually achieved against a few petty despots and Condottieri, was
+assuredly not of a kind to raise his reputation. And this was at a time
+when the monarchs of the West were yearly growing more and more
+accustomed to political gambling on a colossal scale, of which the
+stakes were this or that province of Italy.[272] Who could guarantee
+that, since the last decades had seen so great an increase of their
+power at home, their ambition could stop short of the States of the
+Church? Leo himself witnessed the prelude of what was fulfilled in the
+year 1527; a few bands of Spanish infantry appeared--of their own
+accord, it seems--at the end of 1520, on the borders of the Pontifical
+territory, with a view of laying the Pope under contribution,[273] but
+were driven back by the Papal forces. The public feeling, too, against
+the corruptions of the hierarchy had of late years been drawing rapidly
+to a head, and men with an eye for the future, like the younger Pico
+della Mirandola, called urgently for reform.[274] Meantime Luther had
+already appeared upon the scene.
+
+Under Adrian VI. (1522-1523), the few and timid improvements, carried
+out in the face of the great German Reformation, came too late. He could
+do little more than proclaim his horror of the course which things had
+taken hitherto, of simony, nepotism, prodigality, brigandage, and
+profligacy. The danger from the side of the Lutherans was by no means
+the greatest; an acute observer from Venice, Girolamo Negro, uttered his
+fears that a speedy and terrible disaster would befall the city of Rome
+itself.[275]
+
+Under Clement VII. the whole horizon of Rome was filled with vapours,
+like that leaden veil which the scirocco draws over the Campagna, and
+which makes the last months of summer so deadly. The Pope was no less
+detested at home than abroad. Thoughtful people were filled with
+anxiety,[276] hermits appeared upon the streets and squares of Rome,
+foretelling the fate of Italy and of the world, and calling the Pope by
+the name of Antichrist;[277] the faction of the Colonna raised its head
+defiantly; the indomitable Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, whose mere
+existence[278] was a permanent menace to the Papacy, ventured to
+surprise the city in 1526, hoping with the help of Charles V., to become
+Pope then and there, as soon as Clement was killed or captured. It was
+no piece of good fortune for Rome that the latter was able to escape to
+the Castle of St. Angelo, and the fate for which himself was reserved
+may well be called worse than death.
+
+By a series of those falsehoods, which only the powerful can venture on,
+but which bring ruin upon the weak, Clement brought about the advance of
+the Germano-Spanish army under Bourbon and Frundsberg (1527). It is
+certain[279] that the Cabinet of Charles V. intended to inflict on him a
+severe castigation, and that it could not calculate beforehand how far
+the zeal of its unpaid hordes would carry them. It would have been vain
+to attempt to enlist men in Germany without paying any bounty, if it had
+not been well known that Rome was the object of the expedition. It may
+be that the written orders to Bourbon will be found some day or other,
+and it is not improbable that they will prove to be worded mildly. But
+historical criticism will not allow itself to be led astray. The
+Catholic King and Emperor owed it to his luck and nothing else, that
+Pope and cardinals were not murdered by his troops. Had this happened,
+no sophistry in the world could clear him of his share in the guilt. The
+massacre of countless people of less consequence, the plunder of the
+rest, and all the horrors of torture and traffic in human life, show
+clearly enough what was possible in the ‘Sacco di Roma.’
+
+Charles seems to have wished to bring the Pope, who had fled a second
+time to the Castle of St. Angelo, to Naples, after extorting from him
+vast sums of money, and Clement’s flight to Orvieto must have happened
+without any connivance on the part of Spain.[280] Whether the Emperor
+ever thought seriously of the secularisation of the States of the
+Church,[281] for which everybody was quite prepared, and whether he was
+really dissuaded from it by the representations of Henry VIII. of
+England, will probably never be made clear.
+
+But if such projects really existed, they cannot have lasted long: from
+the devastated city arose a new spirit of reform both in Church and
+State. It made itself felt in a moment. Cardinal Sadoleto, one witness
+of many, thus writes: ‘If through our suffering a satisfaction is made
+to the wrath and justice of God, if these fearful punishments again open
+the way to better laws and morals, then is our misfortune perhaps not of
+the greatest.... What belongs to God He will take care of; before us
+lies a life of reformation, which no violence can take from us. Let us
+so rule our deeds and thoughts as to seek in God only the true glory of
+the priesthood and our own true greatness and power.’[282]
+
+In point of fact, this critical year, 1527, so far bore fruit, that the
+voices of serious men could again make themselves heard. Rome had
+suffered too much to return, even under a Paul III., to the gay
+corruption of Leo X.
+
+The Papacy, too, when its sufferings became so great, began to excite a
+sympathy half religious and half political. The kings could not tolerate
+that one of their number should arrogate to himself the rights of Papal
+gaoler, and concluded (August 18, 1527) the Treaty of Amiens, one of the
+objects of which was the deliverance of Clement. They thus, at all
+events, turned to their own account the unpopularity which the deeds of
+the Imperial troops had excited. At the same time the Emperor became
+seriously embarrassed, even in Spain, where the prelates and grandees
+never saw him without making the most urgent remonstrances. When a
+general deputation of the clergy and laity, all clothed in mourning, was
+projected, Charles, fearing that troubles might arise out of it, like
+those of the insurrection quelled a few years before, forbad the
+scheme.[283] Not only did he not dare to prolong the maltreatment of the
+Pope, but he was absolutely compelled, even apart from all
+considerations of foreign politics, to be reconciled with the Papacy
+which he had so grievously wounded. For the temper of the German people,
+which certainly pointed to a different course, seemed to him, like
+German affairs generally, to afford no foundation for a policy. It is
+possible, too, as a Venetian maintains,[284] that the memory of the sack
+of Rome lay heavy on his conscience, and tended to hasten that expiation
+which was sealed by the permanent subjection of the Florentines to the
+Medicean family of which the Pope was a member. The ‘nipote’ and new
+Duke, Alessandro Medici, was married to the natural daughter of the
+Emperor.
+
+In the following years the plan of a Council enabled Charles to keep the
+Papacy in all essential points under his control, and at one and the
+same time to protect and to oppress it. The greatest danger of
+all--secularisation--the danger which came from within, from the Popes
+themselves and their ‘nipoti,’ was adjourned for centuries by the German
+Reformation. Just as this alone had made the expedition against Rome
+(1527) possible and successful, so did it compel the Papacy to become
+once more the expression of a world-wide spiritual power, to raise
+itself from the soulless debasement in which it lay, and to place itself
+at the head of all the enemies of this reformation. The institution thus
+developed during the latter years of Clement VII., and under Paul III.,
+Paul IV., and their successors, in the face of the defection of half
+Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which avoided all the great
+and dangerous scandals of former times, particularly nepotism, with its
+attempts at territorial aggrandisement,[285] and which, in alliance with
+the Catholic princes, and impelled by a new-born spiritual force, found
+its chief work in the recovery of what had been lost. It only existed
+and is only intelligible in opposition to the seceders. In this sense it
+can be said with perfect truth that, the moral salvation of the Papacy
+is due to its mortal enemies. And now its political position, too,
+though certainly under the permanent tutelage of Spain, became
+impregnable; almost without effort it inherited, on the extinction of
+its vassals, the legitimate line of Este and the house of Della Rovere,
+the duchies of Ferrara and Urbino. But without the Reformation--if,
+indeed, it is possible to think it away--the whole ecclesiastical State
+would long ago have passed into secular hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In conclusion, let us briefly consider the effect of these political
+circumstances on the spirit of the nation at large.
+
+It is evident that the general political uncertainty in Italy during the
+fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was of a kind to excite in the
+better spirits of the time a patriotic disgust and opposition. Dante and
+Petrarch,[286] in their day, proclaimed loudly a common Italy, the
+object of the highest efforts of all her children. It may be objected
+that this was only the enthusiasm of a few highly-instructed men, in
+which the mass of the people had no share; but it can hardly have been
+otherwise even in Germany, although in name at least that country was
+united, and recognised in the Emperor one supreme head. The first
+patriotic utterances of German Literature, if we except some verses of
+the ‘Minnesänger,’ belong to the humanists of the time of Maximilian
+I.[287] and after, and read like an echo of Italian declamations, or
+like a reply to Italian criticism on the intellectual immaturity of
+Germany. And yet, as a matter of fact, Germany had been long a nation in
+a truer sense than Italy ever was since the Roman days. France owes the
+consciousness of its national unity mainly to its conflicts with the
+English, and Spain has never permanently succeeded in absorbing
+Portugal, closely related as the two countries are. For Italy, the
+existence of the ecclesiastical State, and the conditions under which
+alone it could continue, were a permanent obstacle to national unity, an
+obstacle whose removal seemed hopeless. When, therefore, in the
+political intercourse of the fifteenth century, the common fatherland is
+sometimes emphatically named, it is done in most cases to annoy some
+other Italian State.[288] The first decades of the sixteenth century,
+the years when the Renaissance attained its fullest bloom, were not
+favourable to a revival of patriotism; the enjoyment of intellectual and
+artistic pleasures, the comforts and elegancies of life, and the supreme
+interests of self-development, destroyed or hampered the love of
+country. But those deeply serious and sorrowful appeals to national
+sentiment were not heard again till later, when the time for unity had
+gone by, when the country was inundated with Frenchmen and Spaniards,
+and when a German army had conquered Rome. The sense of local patriotism
+may be said in some measure to have taken the place of this feeling,
+though it was but a poor equivalent for it.
+
+
+
+
+_PART II._
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+
+In the character of these states, whether republics or despotisms, lies,
+not the only, but the chief reason for the early development of the
+Italian. To this it is due that he was the first-born among the sons of
+modern Europe.
+
+In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness--that which was
+turned within as that which was turned without--lay dreaming or half
+awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and
+childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen
+clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a
+race, people, party, family, or corporation--only through some general
+category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an _objective_
+treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this
+world became possible. The _subjective_ side at the same time asserted
+itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual
+_individual_,[289] and recognised himself as such. In the same way the
+Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian
+had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew
+themselves only as members of a race. It will not be difficult to show
+that this result was owing above all to the political circumstances of
+Italy.
+
+In far earlier times we can here and there detect a development of free
+personality which in Northern Europe either did not occur at all, or
+could not display itself in the same manner. The band of audacious
+wrongdoers in the sixteenth century described to us by Luidprand, some
+of the contemporaries of Gregory VII., and a few of the opponents of the
+first Hohenstaufen, show us characters of this kind. But at the close of
+the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality; the
+charm laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a thousand figures
+meet us each in its own special shape and dress. Dante’s great poem
+would have been impossible in any other country of Europe, if only for
+the reason that they all still lay under the spell of race. For Italy
+the august poet, through the wealth of individuality which he set forth,
+was the most national herald of his time. But this unfolding of the
+treasures of human nature in literature and art--this many-sided
+representation and criticism--will be discussed in separate chapters;
+here we have to deal only with the psychological fact itself. This fact
+appears in the most decisive and unmistakeable form. The Italians of the
+fourteenth century knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any
+shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and
+seeming[290] unlike his neighbours.[291]
+
+Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the highest degree the
+individuality not only of the tyrant or Condottiere himself,[292] but
+also of the men whom he protected or used as his tools--the secretary,
+minister, poet, and companion. These people were forced to know all the
+inward resources of their own nature, passing or permanent; and their
+enjoyment of life was enhanced and concentrated by the desire to obtain
+the greatest satisfaction from a possibly very brief period of power and
+influence.
+
+But even the subjects whom they ruled over were not free from the same
+impulse. Leaving out of account those who wasted their lives in secret
+opposition and conspiracies, we speak of the majority who were content
+with a strictly private station, like most of the urban population of
+the Byzantine empire and the Mohammedan states. No doubt it was often
+hard for the subjects of a Visconti to maintain the dignity of their
+persons and families, and multitudes must have lost in moral character
+through the servitude they lived under. But this was not the case with
+regard to individuality; for political impotence does not hinder the
+different tendencies and manifestations of private life from thriving in
+the fullest vigour and variety. Wealth and culture, so far as display
+and rivalry were not forbidden to them, a municipal freedom which did
+not cease to be considerable, and a Church which, unlike that of the
+Byzantine or of the Mohammedan world, was not identical with the
+State--all these conditions undoubtedly favoured the growth of
+individual thought, for which the necessary leisure was furnished by the
+cessation of party conflicts. The private man, indifferent to politics,
+and busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a
+_dilettante_, seems to have been first fully formed in these despotisms
+of the fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course, be
+required on such a point. The novelists, from whom we might expect
+information, describe to us oddities in plenty, but only from one point
+of view and in so far as the needs of the story demand. Their scene,
+too, lies chiefly in the republican cities.
+
+In the latter, circumstances were also, but in another way, favourable
+to the growth of individual character. The more frequently the governing
+party was changed, the more the individual was led to make the utmost of
+the exercise and enjoyment of power. The statesmen and popular leaders,
+especially in Florentine history,[293] acquired so marked a personal
+character, that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a parallel to
+them in contemporary history, hardly even in Jacob von Arteveldt.
+
+The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand, often came into
+a position like that of the subjects of the despotic States, with the
+difference that the freedom or power already enjoyed, and in some cases
+the hope of recovering them, gave a higher energy to their
+individuality. Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for
+instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446), whose work on domestic
+economy[294] is the first complete programme of a developed private
+life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the
+dangers and thanklessness of public life[295] is in its way a true
+monument of the age.
+
+Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the
+exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. ‘In all our more
+populous cities,’ says Giovanni Pontano,[296] ‘we see a crowd of people
+who have left their homes of their own free-will; but a man takes his
+virtues with him wherever he goes.’ And, in fact, they were by no means
+only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native
+place voluntarily, because they found its political or economical
+condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the
+Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.
+
+The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in
+itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as we have already said,
+finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond
+even this in the words, ‘My country is the whole world.’[297] And when
+his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote
+back: ‘Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars;
+everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing
+ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people. Even my
+bread will not fail me.’[298] The artists exult no less defiantly in
+their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. ‘Only he who has
+learned everything,’ says Ghiberti,[299] ‘is nowhere a stranger; robbed
+of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every
+country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.’ In the same
+strain an exiled humanist writes: ‘Wherever a learned man fixes his
+seat, there is home.[300]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+
+An acute and practised eye might be able to trace, step by step, the
+increase in the number of complete men during the fifteenth century.
+Whether they had before them as a conscious object the harmonious
+development of their spiritual and material existence, is hard to say;
+but several of them attained it, so far as is consistent with the
+imperfection of all that is earthly. It may be better to renounce the
+attempt at an estimate of the share which fortune, character, and talent
+had in the life of Lorenzo Magnifico. But look at a personality like
+that of Ariosto, especially as shown in his satires. In what harmony are
+there expressed the pride of the man and the poet, the irony with which
+he treats his own enjoyments, the most delicate satire, and the deepest
+goodwill!
+
+When this impulse to the highest individual development[301] was
+combined with a powerful and varied nature, which had mastered all the
+elements of the culture of the age, then arose the ‘all-sided
+man’--‘l’uomo universale’--who belonged to Italy alone. Men there were
+of encyclopædic knowledge in many countries during the Middle Ages, for
+this knowledge was confined within narrow limits; and even in the
+twelfth century there were universal artists, but the problems of
+architecture were comparatively simple and uniform, and in sculpture and
+painting the matter was of more importance than the form. But in Italy
+at the time of the Renaissance, we find artists who in every branch
+created new and perfect works, and who also made the greatest
+impression as men. Others, outside the arts they practised, were masters
+of a vast circle of spiritual interests.
+
+Dante, who, even in his lifetime, was called by some a poet, by others a
+philosopher, by others a theologian,[302] pours forth in all his
+writings a stream of personal force by which the reader, apart from the
+interest of the subject, feels himself carried away. What power of will
+must the steady, unbroken elaboration of the ‘Divine Comedy’ have
+required! And if we look at the matter of the poem, we find that in the
+whole spiritual or physical world there is hardly an important subject
+which the poet has not fathomed, and on which his utterances--often only
+a few words--are not the most weighty of his time. For the plastic arts
+he is of the first importance, and this for better reasons than the few
+references to contemporary artists--he soon became himself the source of
+inspiration.[303]
+
+The fifteenth century is, above all, that of the many-sided men. There
+is no biography which does not, besides the chief work of its hero,
+speak of other pursuits all passing beyond the limits of dilettantism.
+The Florentine merchant and statesman was often learned in both the
+classical languages; the most famous humanists read the ethics and
+politics of Aristotle to him and his sons;[304] even the daughters of
+the house were highly educated. It is in these circles that private
+education was first treated seriously. The humanist, on his side, was
+compelled to the most varied attainments, since his philological
+learning was not limited, as it now is, to the theoretical knowledge of
+classical antiquity, but had to serve the practical needs of daily life.
+While studying Pliny,[305] he made collections of natural history; the
+geography of the ancients was his guide in treating of modern geography,
+their history was his pattern in writing contemporary chronicles, even
+when composed in Italian; he not only translated the comedies of
+Plautus, but acted as manager when they were put on the stage; every
+effective form of ancient literature down to the dialogues of Lucian he
+did his best to imitate; and besides all this, he acted as magistrate,
+secretary, and diplomatist--not always to his own advantage.
+
+But among these many-sided men, some who may truly be called all-sided,
+tower above the rest. Before analysing the general phases of life and
+culture of this period, we may here, on the threshold of the fifteenth
+century, consider for a moment the figure of one of these giants--Leon
+Battista Alberti (b. 1404? d. 1472).[306] His biography,[307] which is
+only a fragment, speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no
+mention at all of his great significance in the history of architecture.
+We shall now see what he was, apart from these special claims to
+distinction.
+
+In all by which praise is won, Leon Battista was from his childhood the
+first. Of his various gymnastic feats and exercises we read with
+astonishment how, with his feet together, he could spring over a man’s
+head; how, in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the air till it was
+heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled
+under him. In three things he desired to appear faultless to others, in
+walking, in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a master,
+and yet his compositions were admired by professional judges. Under the
+pressure of poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many
+years, till exhaustion brought on a severe illness. In his
+twenty-fourth year, finding his memory for words weakened, but his sense
+of facts unimpaired, he set to work at physics and mathematics. And all
+the while he acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity,
+cross-examining artists, scholars, and artisans of all descriptions,
+down to the cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their
+craft. Painting and modelling he practised by the way, and especially
+excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was
+excited by his mysterious ‘camera obscura,’[308] in which he showed at
+one time the stars and the moon rising over rocky hills, at another wide
+landscapes with mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective, and
+with fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that which
+others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement
+which followed the laws of beauty for something almost divine.[309] To
+all this must be added his literary works, first of all those on art,
+which are landmarks and authorities of the first order for the
+Renaissance of Form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose
+writings--novels and other works--of which some have been taken for
+productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous
+dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life[310]
+in four books; various moral, philosophical, and historical works; and
+many speeches and poems, including a funeral oration on his dog.
+Notwithstanding his admiration for the Latin language, he wrote in
+Italian, and encouraged others to do the same; himself a disciple of
+Greek science, he maintained the doctrine, that without Christianity the
+world would wander in a labyrinth of error. His serious and witty
+sayings were thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many
+columns long, are quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew
+he imparted, as rich natures always do, without the least reserve,
+giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest spring of
+his nature has yet to be spoken of--the sympathetic intensity with which
+he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees
+and waving corn-fields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he
+honoured as ‘a delight of nature,’ and could never look at them enough.
+Perfectly-formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favoured by
+nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful
+landscape cured him.[311] No wonder that those who saw him in this close
+and mysterious communion with the world ascribed to him the gift of
+prophecy. He was said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the
+family of Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the Popes years
+before they happened, and to be able to read into the countenances and
+the hearts of men. It need not be added that an iron will pervaded and
+sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the
+Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will.’
+
+And Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as
+the master to the _dilettante_. Would only that Vasari’s work were here
+supplemented by a description like that of Alberti! The colossal
+outlines of Lionardo’s nature can never be more than dimly and distantly
+conceived.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME.
+
+
+To this inward development of the individual corresponds a new sort of
+outward distinction--the modern form of glory.[312]
+
+In the other countries of Europe the different classes of society lived
+apart, each with its own mediæval caste sense of honour. The poetical
+fame of the Troubadours and Minnesänger was peculiar to the knightly
+order. But in Italy social equality had appeared before the time of the
+tyrannies or the democracies. We there find early traces of a general
+society, having, as will be shown more fully later on, a common ground
+in Latin and Italian literature; and such a ground was needed for this
+new element in life to grow in. To this must be added that the Roman
+authors, who were now zealously studied, and especially Cicero, the most
+read and admired of all, are filled and saturated with the conception of
+fame, and that their subject itself--the universal empire of Rome--stood
+as a permanent ideal before the minds of Italians. From henceforth all
+the aspirations and achievements of the people were governed by a moral
+postulate, which was still unknown elsewhere in Europe.
+
+Here, again, as in all essential points, the first witness to be called
+is Dante. He strove for the poet’s garland[313] with all the power of
+his soul. As publicist and man of letters, he laid stress on the fact
+that what he did was new, and that he wished not only to be, but to be
+esteemed the first in his own walks.[314] But even in his prose writings
+he touches on the inconveniences of fame; he knows how often personal
+acquaintance with famous men is disappointing, and explains how this is
+due partly to the childish fancy of men, partly to envy, and partly to
+the imperfections of the hero himself.[315] And in his great poem he
+firmly maintains the emptiness of fame, although in a manner which
+betrays that his heart was not set free from the longing for it. In
+Paradise the sphere of Mercury is the seat of such blessed ones[316] as
+on earth strove after glory and thereby dimmed ‘the beams of true love.’
+It is characteristic that the lost souls in hell beg of Dante to keep
+alive for them their memory and fame on earth,[317] while those in
+Purgatory only entreat his prayers and those of others for their
+deliverance.[318] And in a famous passage,[319] the passion for
+fame--‘lo gran desio dell’eccellenza’--is reproved for the reason that
+intellectual glory is not absolute, but relative to the times, and may
+be surpassed and eclipsed by greater successors.
+
+The new race of poet-scholars which arose soon after Dante quickly made
+themselves masters of this fresh tendency. They did so in a double
+sense, being themselves the most acknowledged celebrities of Italy, and
+at the same time, as poets and historians, consciously disposing of the
+reputation of others. An outward symbol of this sort of fame was the
+coronation of the poets, of which we shall speak later on.
+
+A contemporary of Dante, Albertinus Musattus or Mussattus, crowned poet
+at Padua by the bishop and rector, enjoyed a fame which fell little
+short of deification. Every Christmas Day the doctors and students of
+both colleges at the University came in solemn procession before his
+house with trumpets and, as it seems, with burning tapers, to salute
+him[320] and bring him presents. His reputation lasted till, in 1318, he
+fell into disgrace with the ruling tyrant of the House of Carrara.
+
+This new incense, which once was offered only to saints and heroes, was
+given in clouds to Petrarch, who persuaded himself in his later years
+that it was but a foolish and troublesome thing. His letter ‘To
+Posterity’[321] is the confession of an old and famous man, who is
+forced to gratify the public curiosity. He admits that he wishes for
+fame in the times to come, but would rather be without it in his own
+day.[322] In his dialogue on fortune and misfortune,[323] the
+interlocutor, who maintains the futility of glory, has the best of the
+contest. But, at the same time, Petrarch is pleased that the autocrat of
+Byzantium[324] knows him as well by his writings as Charles IV.[325]
+knows him. And in fact, even in his lifetime, his fame extended far
+beyond Italy. And the emotion which he felt was natural when his
+friends, on the occasion of a visit to his native Arezzo (1350), took
+him to the house where he was born, and told him how the city had
+provided that no change should be made in it.[326] In former times the
+dwellings of certain great saints were preserved and revered in this
+way, like the cell of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Dominican convent at
+Naples, and the Portiuncula of St. Francis near Assisi; and one or two
+great jurists also enjoyed the half-mythical reputation which led to
+this honour. Towards the close of the fourteenth century the people at
+Bagnolo, near Florence, called an old building the ‘Studio’ of Accursius
+(b. about 1150), but, nevertheless, suffered it to be destroyed.[327] It
+is probable that the great incomes and the political influence which
+some jurists obtained as consulting lawyers made a lasting impression on
+the popular imagination.
+
+To the cultus of the birthplaces of famous men must be added that of
+their graves,[328] and, in the case of Petrarch, of the spot where he
+died. In memory of him Arquà became a favourite resort of the Paduans,
+and was dotted with graceful little villas.[329] At this time there were
+no ‘classic spots’ in Northern Europe, and pilgrimages were only made to
+pictures and relics. It was a point of honour for the different cities
+to possess the bones of their own and foreign celebrities; and it is
+most remarkable how seriously the Florentines, even in the fourteenth
+century--long before the building of Santa Croce--laboured to make their
+cathedral a Pantheon. Accorso, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the
+jurist Zanobi della Strada were to have had magnificent tombs there
+erected to them.[330] Late in the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Magnifico
+applied in person to the Spoletans, asking them to give up the corpse of
+the painter Fra Filippo Lippi for the cathedral, and received the answer
+that they had none too many ornaments to the city, especially in the
+shape of distinguished people, for which reason they begged him to spare
+them; and, in fact, he had to be contented with erecting a
+cenotaph.[331] And even Dante, in spite of all the applications to which
+Boccaccio urged the Florentines with bitter emphasis,[332] remained
+sleeping tranquilly by the side of San Francesco at Ravenna, ‘among
+ancient tombs of emperors and vaults of saints, in more honourable
+company than thou, O Home, couldst offer him.’ It even happened that a
+man once took away unpunished the lights from the altar on which the
+crucifix stood, and set them by the grave, with the words, ‘Take them;
+thou art more worthy of them than He, the Crucified One!’[333]
+
+And now the Italian cities began again to remember their ancient
+citizens and inhabitants. Naples, perhaps, had never forgotten its tomb
+of Virgil, since a kind of mythical halo had become attached to the
+name, and the memory of it had been revived by Petrarch and Boccaccio,
+who both stayed in the city.
+
+The Paduans, even in the sixteenth century, firmly believed that they
+possessed not only the genuine bones of their founder Antenor, but also
+those of the historian Livy.[334] ‘Sulmona,’ says Boccaccio,[335]
+‘bewails that Ovid lies buried far away in exile; and Parma rejoices
+that Cassius sleeps within its walls.’ The Mantuans coined a medal in
+1257 with the bust of Virgil, and raised a statue to represent him. In
+a fit of aristocratic insolence,[336] the guardian of the young Gonzaga,
+Carlo Malatesta, caused it to be pulled down in 1392, and was
+afterwards forced, when he found the fame of the old poet too strong
+for him, to set it up again. Even then, perhaps, the grotto, a couple of
+miles from the town, where Virgil was said to have meditated,[337] was
+shown to strangers, like the ‘Scuola di Virgilio’ at Naples. Como
+claimed both the Plinys[338] for its own, and at the end of the
+fifteenth century erected statues in their honour, sitting under
+graceful baldachins on the façade of the cathedral.
+
+History and the new topography were now careful to leave no local
+celebrity unnoticed. At the same period the northern chronicles only
+here and there, among the list of popes, emperors, earthquakes, and
+comets, put in the remark, that at such a time this or that famous man
+‘flourished.’ We shall elsewhere have to show how, mainly under the
+influence of this idea of fame, an admirable biographical literature was
+developed. We must here limit ourselves to the local patriotism of the
+topographers who recorded the claims of their native cities to
+distinction.
+
+In the Middle Ages, the cities were proud of their saints and of the
+bones and relics in their churches.[339] With these the panegyrist of
+Padua in 1440, Michele Savonarola,[340] begins his list; from them he
+passes to ‘the famous men who were no saints, but who, by their great
+intellect and force (_virtus_) deserve to be added (_adnecti_) to the
+saints’--just as in classical antiquity the distinguished man came close
+upon the hero.[341] The further enumeration is most characteristic of
+the time. First comes Antenor, the brother of Priam, who founded Padua
+with a band of Trojan fugitives; King Dardanus, who defeated Attila in
+the Euganean hills, followed him in pursuit, and struck him dead at
+Rimini with a chess-board; the Emperor Henry IV., who built the
+cathedral; a King Marcus, whose head was preserved in Monselice (_monte
+silicis arce_); then a couple of cardinals and prelates as founders of
+colleges, churches, and so forth; the famous Augustinian theologian, Fra
+Alberto; a string of philosophers beginning with Paolo Veneto and the
+celebrated Pietro of Albano; the jurist Paolo Padovano; then Livy and
+the poets Petrarch, Mussato, Lovato. If there is any want of military
+celebrities in the list, the poet consoles himself for it by the
+abundance of learned men whom he has to show, and by the more durable
+character of intellectual glory; while the fame of the soldier is buried
+with his body, or, if it lasts, owes its permanence only to the
+scholar.[342] It is nevertheless honourable to the city that foreign
+warriors lie buried here by their own wish, like Pietro de Rossi of
+Parma, Filippo Arcelli of Piacenza, and especially Gattamelata of Narni
+(d. 1642),[343] whose brazen equestrian statue, ‘like a Cæsar in
+triumph,’ already stood by the church of the Santo. The author then
+names a crowd of jurists and physicians, among the latter two friends of
+Petrarch, Johannes ab Horologio and Jacob de Dondis, nobles ‘who had not
+only, like so many others, received, but deserved, the honour of
+knighthood.’ Then follows a list of famous mechanicians, painters, and
+musicians, which is closed by the name of a fencing-master Michele
+Rosso, who, as the most distinguished man in his profession, was to be
+seen painted in many places.
+
+By the side of these local temples of fame, which myth, legend, popular
+admiration, and literary tradition combined to create, the poet-scholars
+built up a great Pantheon of worldwide celebrity. They made collections
+of famous men and famous women, often in direct imitation of Cornelius
+Nepos, the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (_Mulierum_
+_virtutes_), Hieronymus (_De Viris Illustribus_), and others: or they
+wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies, as was
+done by Petrarch in his ‘Trionfo della Fama,’ and Boccaccio in the
+‘Amorosa Visione,’ with hundreds of names, of which three-fourths at
+least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages.[344]
+By-and-by this new and comparatively modern element was treated with
+greater emphasis; the historians began to insert descriptions of
+character, and collections arose of the biographies of distinguished
+contemporaries, like those of Filippo Villani, Vespasiano Fiorentino,
+Bartolommeo Facio, Paolo Cortese,[345] and lastly of Paolo Giovio.[346]
+
+The North of Europe, until Italian influence began to tell upon its
+writers--for instance, on Trithemius, the first German who wrote the
+lives of famous men--possessed only either legends of the saints, or
+descriptions of princes and churchmen partaking largely of the character
+of legends and showing no traces of the idea of fame, that is, of
+distinction won by a man’s personal efforts. Poetical glory was still
+confined to certain classes of society, and the names of northern
+artists are only known to us at this period in so far as they were
+members of certain guilds or corporations.
+
+The poet-scholar in Italy had, as we have already said, the fullest
+consciousness that he was the giver of fame and immortality, or, if he
+chose, of oblivion.[347] Petrarch, notwithstanding all the idealism of
+his love to Laura, gives utterance to the feeling, that his sonnets
+confer immortality on his beloved as well as on himself.[348] Boccaccio
+complains of a fair one to whom he had done homage, and who remained
+hard-hearted in order that he might go on praising her and making her
+famous, and he gives her a hint that he will try the effect of a little
+blame.[349] Sannazaro, in two magnificent sonnets, threatens Alfonso of
+Naples with eternal obscurity on account of his cowardly flight before
+Charles VIII.[350] Angelo Poliziano seriously exhorts (1491) King John
+of Portugal[351] to think betimes of his immortality in reference to the
+new discoveries in Africa, and to send him materials to Florence, there
+to be put into shape (_operosius excolenda_), otherwise it would befall
+him as it had befallen all the others whose deeds, unsupported by the
+help of the learned, ‘lie hidden in the vast heap of human frailty.’ The
+king, or his humanistic chancellor, agreed to this, and promised that at
+least the Portuguese chronicles of African affairs should be translated
+into Italian, and sent to Florence to be done into Latin. Whether the
+promise was kept is not known. These pretensions are by no means so
+groundless as they may appear at first sight; for the form in which
+events, even the greatest, are told to the living and to posterity is
+anything but a matter of indifference. The Italian humanists, with their
+mode of exposition and their Latin style, had long the complete control
+of the reading world of Europe, and till last century the Italian poets
+were more widely known and studied than those of any other nation. The
+baptismal name of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci was given, on account
+of his book of travels--certainly at the proposal of its German
+translator into Latin, Martin Waldseemüller (Hylacomylus)[352]--to a new
+quarter of the globe, and if Paolo Giovio, with all his superficiality
+and graceful caprice, promised himself immortality,[353] his expectation
+has not altogether been disappointed.
+
+Amid all these preparations outwardly to win and secure fame, the
+curtain is now and then drawn aside, and we see with frightful evidence
+a boundless ambition and thirst after greatness, independent of all
+means and consequences. Thus, in the preface to Macchiavelli’s
+Florentine history, in which he blames his predecessors Lionardo Aretino
+and Poggio for their too considerate reticence with regard to the
+political parties in the city: ‘They erred greatly and showed that they
+understood little the ambition of men and the desire to perpetuate a
+name. How many who could distinguish themselves by nothing praiseworthy,
+strove to do so by infamous deeds! Those writers did not consider that
+actions which are great in themselves, as is the case with the actions
+of rulers and of states, always seem to bring more glory than blame, of
+whatever kind they are and whatever the result of them may be.’[354] In
+more than one remarkable and dreadful undertaking the motive assigned by
+serious writers is the burning desire to achieve something great and
+memorable. This motive is not a mere extreme case of ordinary vanity,
+but something demonic, involving a surrender of the will, the use of any
+means, however atrocious, and even an indifference to success itself. In
+this sense, for example, Macchiavelli conceives the character of Stefano
+Porcaro (p. 104);[355] of the murderers of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (p.
+57), the documents tell us about the same; and the assassination of Duke
+Alessandro of Florence (1537) is ascribed by Varchi himself to the
+thirst for fame which tormented the murderer Lorenzino Medici (p. 60).
+Still more stress is laid on this motive by Paolo Giovio.[356]
+Lorenzino, according to him, pilloried by a pamphlet of Molza on
+account of the mutilation of some ancient statues at Rome, broods over
+a deed whose novelty shall make his disgrace forgotten, and ends by
+murdering his kinsman and prince. These are characteristic features of
+this age of overstrained and despairing passions and forces, and remind
+us of the burning of the temple of Diana at Ephesus in the time of
+Philip of Macedon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MODERN WIT AND SATIRE.
+
+
+The corrective, not only of this modern desire for fame, but of all
+highly developed individuality, is found in ridicule, especially when
+expressed in the victorious form of wit.[357] We read in the Middle Ages
+how hostile armies, princes, and nobles, provoked one another with
+symbolical insult, and how the defeated party was loaded with symbolical
+outrage. Here and there, too, under the influence of classical
+literature, wit began to be used as a weapon in theological disputes,
+and the poetry of Provence produced a whole class of satirical
+compositions. Even the Minnesänger, as their political poems show, could
+adopt this tone when necessary.[358] But wit could not be an independent
+element in life till its appropriate victim, the developed individual
+with personal pretentions, had appeared. Its weapons were then by no
+means limited to the tongue and the pen, but included tricks and
+practical jokes--the so-called ‘burle’ and ‘beffe’--which form a chief
+subject of many collections of novels.
+
+The ‘Hundred Old Novels,’ which must have been composed about the end of
+the thirteenth century, have as yet neither wit, the fruit of contrast,
+nor the ‘burla,’ for their subject;[359] their aim is merely to give
+simple and elegant expression to wise sayings and pretty stories or
+fables. But if anything proves the great antiquity of the collection, it
+is precisely this absence of satire. For with the fourteenth century
+comes Dante, who, in the utterance of scorn, leaves all other poets in
+the world far behind, and who, if only on account of his great picture
+of the deceivers,[360] must be called the chief master of colossal
+comedy. With Petrarch[361] begin the collections of witty sayings after
+the pattern of Plutarch (Apophthegmata, etc.).
+
+What stores of wit were concentrated in Florence during this century, is
+most characteristically shown in the novels of Franco Sacchetti. These
+are, for the most part, not stories but answers, given under certain
+circumstances--shocking pieces of _naïveté_, with which silly folks,
+court-jesters, rogues, and profligate women make their retort. The
+comedy of the tale lies in the startling contrast of this real or
+assumed _naïveté_ with conventional morality and the ordinary relations
+of the world--things are made to stand on their heads. All means of
+picturesque representation are made use of, including the introduction
+of certain North Italian dialects. Often the place of wit is taken by
+mere insolence, clumsy trickery, blasphemy, and obscenity; one or two
+jokes told of Condottieri[362] are among the most brutal and malicious
+which are recorded. Many of the ‘burle’ are thoroughly comic, but many
+are only real or supposed evidence of personal superiority, of triumph
+over another. How much people were willing to put up with, how often the
+victim was satisfied with getting the laugh on his side by a retaliatory
+trick, cannot be said; there was much heartless and pointless malice
+mixed up with it all, and life in Florence was no doubt often made
+unpleasant enough from this cause.[363] The inventors and retailers of
+jokes soon became inevitable figures,[364] and among them there must
+have been some who were classical--far superior to all the mere
+court-jesters, to whom competition, a changing public, and the quick
+apprehension of the audience, all advantages of life in Florence, were
+wanting. Some Florentine wits went starring among the despotic courts of
+Lombardy and Romagna,[365] and found themselves much better rewarded
+than at home, where their talent was cheap and plentiful. The better
+type of these people is the amusing man (l’uomo piacevole), the worse is
+the buffoon and the vulgar parasite who presents himself at weddings and
+banquets with the argument, ‘If I am not invited, the fault is not
+mine.’ Now and then the latter combine to pluck a young
+spendthrift,[366] but in general they are treated and despised as
+parasites, while wits of higher position bear themselves like princes,
+and consider their talent as something sovereign. Dolcibene, whom
+Charles IV., ‘Imperator di Buem,’ had pronounced to be the ‘king of
+Italian jesters,’ said to him at Ferrara: ‘You will conquer the world,
+since you are my friend and the Pope’s; you fight with the sword, the
+Pope with his bulls, and I with my tongue.’[367] This is no mere jest,
+but a foreshadowing of Pietro Aretino.
+
+The two most famous jesters about the middle of the fifteenth century
+were a priest near Florence, Arlotto (1483), for more refined wit
+(‘facezie’), and the court-fool of Ferrara, Gonnella, for buffoonery.
+We can hardly compare their stories with those of the Parson of
+Kalenberg and Till Eulenspiegel, since the latter arose in a different
+and half-mythical manner, as fruits of the imagination of a whole
+people, and touch rather on what is general and intelligible to all,
+while Arlotto and Gonnella were historical beings, coloured and shaped
+by local influences. But if the comparison be allowed, and extended to
+the jests of the non-Italian nations, we shall find in general that the
+joke in the French _fabliaux_,[368] as among the Germans, is chiefly
+directed to the attainment of some advantage or enjoyment; while the wit
+of Arlotto and the practical jokes of Gonnella are an end in themselves,
+and exist simply for the sake of the triumph of production. (Till
+Eulenspiegel again forms a class by himself, as the personified quiz,
+mostly pointless enough, of particular classes and professions). The
+court-fool of the Este saved himself more than once by his keen satire
+and refined modes of vengeance.[369]
+
+The type of the ‘uomo piacevole’ and the ‘buffone’ long survived the
+freedom of Florence. Under Duke Cosimo flourished Barlacchia, and at the
+beginning of the seventeenth century Francesco Ruspoli and Curzio
+Marignolli. In Pope Leo X., the genuine Florentine love of jesters
+showed itself strikingly. This prince, whose taste for the most refined
+intellectual pleasures was insatiable, endured and desired at his table
+a number of witty buffoons and jack-puddings, among them two monks and a
+cripple;[370] at public feasts he treated them with deliberate scorn as
+parasites, setting before them monkeys and crows in the place of savoury
+meats. Leo, indeed, showed a peculiar fondness for the ‘burla’; it
+belonged to his nature sometimes to treat his own favourite
+pursuits--music and poetry--ironically, parodying them with his
+factotum, Cardinal Bibbiena.[371] Neither of them found it beneath him
+to fool an honest old secretary till he thought himself a master of the
+art of music. The Improvisatore, Baraballo of Gaeta, was brought so far
+by Leo’s flattery, that he applied in all seriousness for the poet’s
+coronation on the Capitol. On the anniversary of S. Cosmas and S.
+Damian, the patrons of the House of Medici, he was first compelled,
+adorned with laurel and purple, to amuse the papal guests with his
+recitations, and at last, when all were ready to split with laughter, to
+mount a gold-harnessed elephant in the court of the Vatican, sent as a
+present to Rome by Emanuel the Great of Portugal, while the Pope looked
+down from above through his eye-glass.[372] The brute, however, was so
+terrified by the noise of the trumpets and kettle-drums, and the cheers
+of the crowd, that there was no getting him over the bridge of S.
+Angelo.
+
+The parody of what is solemn or sublime, which here meets us in the case
+of a procession, had already taken an important place in poetry.[373] It
+was naturally compelled to choose victims of another kind than those of
+Aristophanes, who introduced the great tragedian into his plays. But the
+same maturity of culture which at a certain period produced parody among
+the Greeks, did the same in Italy. By the close of the fourteenth
+century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch’s sonnets and others of the
+same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this
+form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant
+invitation to parody was offered by the ‘Divine Comedy,’ and Lorenzo
+Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the
+‘Inferno’ (‘Simposio’ or ‘I Beoni’). Luigi Pulei obviously imitates the
+Improvisatori in his ‘Morgante,’ and both his poetry and Bojardo’s are
+in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of
+the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was deliberately undertaken by the
+great parodist Teofilo Folengo (about 1520). Under the name of Limerno
+Pitocco, he composed the ‘Orlandino,’ in which chivalry appears only as
+a ludicrous setting for a crowd of modern figures and ideas. Under the
+name of Merlinus Coccajus he described the journeys and exploits of his
+phantastic vagabonds (also in the same spirit of parody) in half-Latin
+hexameters, with all the affected pomp of the learned Epos of the day.
+(‘Opus Macaronicorum’). Since then caricature has been constantly, and
+often brilliantly, represented on the Italian Parnassus.
+
+About the middle period of the Renaissance a theoretical analysis of wit
+was undertaken, and its practical application in good society was
+regulated more precisely. The theorist was Gioviano Pontano.[374] In his
+work on speaking, especially in the third and fourth books, he tries by
+means of the comparison of numerous jokes or ‘facetiæ’ to arrive at a
+general principle. How wit should be used among people of position is
+taught by Baldassar Castiglione in his ‘Cortigiano.’[375] Its chief
+function is naturally to enliven those present by the repetition of
+comic or graceful stories and sayings; personal jokes, on the contrary,
+are discouraged on the ground that they wound unhappy people, show too
+much honour to wrong-doers, and make enemies of the powerful and the
+spoiled children of fortune;[376] and even in repetition, a wide reserve
+in the use of dramatic gestures is recommended to the gentleman. Then
+follows, not only for purposes of quotation, but as patterns for future
+jesters, a large collection of puns and witty sayings, methodically
+arranged according to their species, among them some that are admirable.
+The doctrine of Giovanni della Casa, some twenty years later, in his
+guide to good manners, is much stricter and more cautious;[377] with a
+view to the consequences, he wishes to see the desire of triumph
+banished altogether from jokes and ‘burle.’ He is the herald of a
+reaction, which was certain sooner or later to appear.
+
+Italy had, in fact, become a school for scandal, the like of which the
+world cannot show, not even in France at the time of Voltaire. In him
+and his comrades there was assuredly no lack of the spirit of negation;
+but where, in the eighteenth century, was to be found the crowd of
+suitable victims, that countless assembly of highly and
+characteristically-developed human beings, celebrities of every kind,
+statesmen, churchmen, inventors, and discoverers, men of letters, poets
+and artists, all of whom then gave the fullest and freest play to their
+individuality? This host existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, and by its side the general culture of the time had educated
+a poisonous brood of impotent wits, of born critics and railers, whose
+envy called for hecatombs of victims; and to all this was added the envy
+of the famous men among themselves. In this the philologists notoriously
+led the way--Filelfo, Poggio, Lorenzo Valla, and others--while the
+artists of the fifteenth century lived in peaceful and friendly
+competition with one another. The history of art may take note of the
+fact.
+
+Florence, the great market of fame, was in this point, as we have said,
+in advance of other cities. ‘Sharp eyes and bad tongues’ is the
+description given of the inhabitants.[378] An easy-going contempt of
+everything and everybody was probably the prevailing tone of society.
+Macchiavelli, in the remarkable prologue to his ‘Mandragola,’ refers
+rightly or wrongly the visible decline of moral force to the general
+habit of evil speaking, and threatens his detractors with the news that
+he can say sharp things as well as they. Next to Florence comes the
+Papal court, which had long been a rendezvous of the bitterest and
+wittiest tongues. Poggio’s ‘Facetiæ’ are dated from the Chamber of Lies
+(_bugiale_) of the apostolic notaries; and when we remember the number
+of disappointed place-hunters, of hopeless competitors and enemies of
+the favourites, of idle, profligate prelates there assembled, it is
+intelligible how Rome became the home of the savage pasquinade as well
+as of more philosophical satire. If we add to this the wide-spread
+hatred borne to the priests, and the well-known instinct of the mob to
+lay any horror to the charge of the great, there results an untold mass
+of infamy.[379] Those who were able protected themselves best by
+contempt both of the false and true accusations, and by brilliant and
+joyous display.[380] More sensitive natures sank into utter despair when
+they found themselves deeply involved in guilt, and still more deeply in
+slander.[381] In course of time calumny became universal, and the
+strictest virtue was most certain of all to challenge the attacks of
+malice. Of the great pulpit orator, Fra Egidio of Viterbo, whom Leo made
+a cardinal on account of his merits, and who showed himself a man of the
+people and a brave monk in the calamity of 1527,[382] Giovio gives us to
+understand that he preserved his ascetic pallor by the smoke of wet
+straw and other means of the same kind. Giovio is a genuine Curial in
+these matters.[383] He generally begins by telling his story, then adds
+that he does not believe it, and then hints at the end that perhaps
+after all there may be something in it. But the true scape-goat of Roman
+scorn was the pious and moral Adrian VI. A general agreement seemed to
+be made to take him only on the comic side. Adrian had contemptuously
+referred to the Laöcoon group as ‘idola antiquorum,’ had shut up the
+entrance to the Belvedere, had left the works of Raphael unfinished, and
+had banished the poets and players from the court; it was even feared
+that he would burn some ancient statues to lime for the new church of
+St. Peter. He fell out from the first with the formidable Francesco
+Berni, threatening to have thrown into the Tiber not, as people
+said,[384] the statue of Pasquino, but the writers of the satires
+themselves. The vengeance for this was the famous ‘Capitolo’ against
+Pope Adriano, inspired not exactly by hatred, but by contempt for the
+comical Dutch barbarian;[385] the more savage menaces were reserved for
+the cardinals who had elected him. The plague, which then was prevalent
+in Rome, was ascribed to him;[386] Berni and others[387] sketch the
+environment of the Pope--the Germans by whom he was governed[388]--with
+the same sparkling untruthfulness with which the modern _feuilletoniste_
+turns black into white, and everything into anything. The biography
+which Paolo Giovio was commissioned to write by the Cardinal of Tortosa,
+and which was to have been a eulogy, is for any one who can read between
+the lines an unexampled piece of satire. It sounds ridiculous--at least
+for the Italians of that time--to hear how Adrian applied to the Chapter
+of Saragossa for the jaw-bone of St. Lambert; how the devout Spaniards
+decked him out till he looked ‘like a right well-dressed Pope;’ how he
+came in a confused and tasteless procession from Ostia to Rome, took
+counsel about burning or drowning Pasquino, would suddenly break off the
+most important business when dinner was announced; and lastly, at the
+end of an unhappy reign, how he died of drinking too much
+beer--whereupon the house of his physician was hung with garlands by
+midnight revellers, and adorned with the inscription, ‘Liberatori Patriæ
+S. P. Q. R.’ It is true that Giovio had lost his money in the general
+confiscation of public funds, and had only received a benefice by way of
+compensation because he was ‘no poet,’ that is to say. no pagan.[389]
+But it was decreed that Adrian should be the last great victim. After
+the disaster which befell Rome in 1527, slander visibly declined along
+with the unrestrained wickedness of private life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But while it was still flourishing was developed, chiefly in Rome, the
+greatest railer of modern times, Pietro Aretino. A glance at his life
+and character will save us the trouble of noticing many less
+distinguished members of his class.
+
+We know him chiefly in the last thirty years of his life (1527-1557),
+which he passed in Venice, the only asylum possible for him. From hence
+he kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege, and
+here were delivered the presents of the foreign princes who needed or
+dreaded his pen. Charles V. and Francis I. both pensioned him at the
+same time, each hoping that Aretino would do some mischief to the other.
+Aretino flattered both, but naturally attached himself more closely to
+Charles, because he remained master in Italy. After the Emperor’s
+victory at Tunis in 1535, this tone of adulation passed into the most
+ludicrous worship, in observing which it must not be forgotten that
+Aretino constantly cherished the hope that Charles would help him to a
+cardinal’s hat. It is probable that he enjoyed special protection as
+Spanish agent, as his speech or silence could have no small effect on
+the smaller Italian courts and on public opinion in Italy. He affected
+utterly to despise the Papal court because he knew it so well; the true
+reason was that Rome neither could nor would pay him any longer.[390]
+Venice, which sheltered him, he was wise enough to leave unassailed. The
+rest of his relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar
+extortion.
+
+Aretino affords the first great instance of the abuse of publicity to
+such ends. The polemical writings which a hundred years earlier Poggio
+and his opponents interchanged, are just as infamous in their tone and
+purpose, but they were not composed for the press, but for a sort of
+private circulation. Aretino made all his profit out of a complete
+publicity, and in a certain sense may be considered the father of modern
+journalism. His letters and miscellaneous articles were printed
+periodically, after they had already been circulated among a tolerably
+extensive public.[391]
+
+Compared with the sharp pens of the eighteenth century, Aretino had the
+advantage that he was not burdened with principles, neither with
+liberalism nor philanthropy nor any other virtue, nor even with science;
+his whole baggage consisted of the well-known motto, ‘Veritas odium
+parit.’ He never, consequently, found himself in the false position of
+Voltaire, who was forced to disown his ‘Pucelle’ and conceal all his
+life the authorship of other works. Aretino put his name to all he
+wrote, and openly gloried in his notorious ‘Ragionamenti.’ His literary
+talent, his clear and sparkling style, his varied observation of men and
+things, would have made him a considerable writer under any
+circumstances destitute as he was of the power of conceiving a genuine
+work of art, such as a true dramatic comedy; and to the coarsest as well
+as the most refined malice he added a grotesque wit so brilliant that in
+some cases it does not fall short of that of Rabelais.[392]
+
+In such circumstances, and with such objects and means, he set to work
+to attack or circumvent his prey. The tone in which he appealed to
+Clement VII. not to complain or to think of vengeance,[393] but to
+forgive, at the moment when the wailings of the devastated city were
+ascending to the Castle of St. Angelo, where the Pope himself was a
+prisoner, is the mockery of a devil or a monkey. Sometimes, when he is
+forced to give up all hope of presents, his fury breaks out into a
+savage howl, as in the ‘Capitolo’ to the Prince of Salerno, who after
+paying him for some time refused to do so any longer. On the other
+hand, it seems that the terrible Pierluigi Farnese, Duke of Parma,
+never took any notice of him at all. As this gentleman had probably
+renounced altogether the pleasures of a good reputation, it was not easy
+to cause him any annoyance; Aretino tried to do so by comparing his
+personal appearance to that of a constable, a miller, and a baker.[394]
+Aretino is most comical of all in the expression of whining mendicancy,
+as in the ‘Capitolo’ to Francis I.; but the letters and poems made up of
+menaces and flattery cannot, notwithstanding all that is ludicrous in
+them, be read without the deepest disgust. A letter like that one of his
+written to Michelangelo in November 1545[395] is alone of its kind;
+along with all the admiration he expresses for the ‘Last Judgment’ he
+charges him with irreligion, indecency, and theft from the heirs of
+Julius II., and adds in a conciliating postscript, ‘I only want to show
+you that if you are “divino,” I am not “d’acqua.”’ Aretino laid great
+stress upon it--whether from the insanity of conceit or by way of
+caricaturing famous men--that he himself should be called divine, as one
+of his flatterers had already begun to do; and he certainly attained so
+much personal celebrity that his house at Arezzo passed for one of the
+sights of the place.[396] There were indeed whole months during which he
+never ventured to cross his threshold at Venice, lest he should fall in
+with some incensed Florentine like the younger Strozzi. Nor did he
+escape the cudgels and the daggers of his enemies,[397] although they
+failed to have the effect which Berni prophesied him in a famous sonnet.
+Aretino died in his house, of apoplexy.
+
+The differences he made in his modes of flattery are remarkable: in
+dealing with non-Italians he was grossly fulsome;[398] people like Duke
+Cosimo of Florence he treated very differently. He praised the beauty of
+the then youthful prince, who in fact did share this quality with
+Augustus in no ordinary degree; he praised his moral conduct, with an
+oblique reference to the financial pursuits of Cosimo’s mother Maria
+Salviati, and concluded with a mendicant whine about the bad times and
+so forth. When Cosimo pensioned him,[399] which he did liberally,
+considering his habitual parsimony--to the extent, at last, of 160
+ducats a year--he had doubtless an eye to Aretino’s dangerous character
+as Spanish agent. Aretino could ridicule and revile Cosimo, and in the
+same breath threaten the Florentine agent that he would obtain from the
+Duke his immediate recall; and if the Medicean prince felt himself at
+last to be seen through by Charles V. he would naturally not be anxious
+that Aretino’s jokes and rhymes against him should circulate at the
+Imperial court. A curiously qualified piece of flattery was that
+addressed to the notorious Marquis of Marignano, who as Castellan of
+Musso (p. 27) had attempted to found an independent state. Thanking him
+for the gift of a hundred crowns, Aretino writes: ‘All the qualities
+which a prince should have are present in you, and all men would think
+so, were it not that the acts of violence inevitable at the beginning of
+all undertakings cause you to appear a trifle rough (_aspro_).’[400]
+
+It has often been noticed as something singular that Aretino only
+reviled the world, and not God also. The religious belief of a man who
+lived as he did is a matter of perfect indifference, as are also the
+edifying writings which he composed for reasons of his own.[401] It is
+in fact hard to say why he should have been a blasphemer. He was no
+professor, or theoretical thinker or writer; and he could extort no
+money from God by threats or flattery, and was consequently never goaded
+into blasphemy by a refusal. A man like him does not take trouble for
+nothing.
+
+It is a good sign of the present spirit of Italy that such a character
+and such a career have become a thousand times impossible. But
+historical criticism will always find in Aretino an important study.
+
+
+
+
+_PART III._
+
+THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
+
+
+Now that this point in our historical view of Italian civilization has
+been reached, it is time to speak of the influence of antiquity, the
+‘new birth’ of which has been one-sidedly chosen as the name to sum up
+the whole period. The conditions which have been hitherto described
+would have sufficed, apart from antiquity, to upturn and to mature the
+national mind; and most of the intellectual tendencies which yet remain
+to be noticed would be conceivable without it. But both what has gone
+before and what we have still to discuss are coloured in a thousand ways
+by the influence of the ancient world; and though the essence of the
+phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival,
+it is only with and through this revival that they are actually
+manifested to us. The Renaissance would not have been the process of
+worldwide significance which it is, if its elements could be so easily
+separated from one another. We must insist upon it, as one of the chief
+propositions of this book, that it was not the revival of antiquity
+alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which
+achieved the conquest of the western world. The amount of independence
+which the national spirit maintained in this union varied according to
+circumstances. In the modern Latin literature of the period, it is very
+small, while in plastic art, as well as in other spheres, it is
+remarkably great; and hence the alliance between two distant epochs in
+the civilisation of the same people, because concluded on equal terms,
+proved justifiable and fruitful. The rest of Europe was free either to
+repel or else partly or wholly to accept the mighty impulse which came
+forth from Italy. Where the latter was the case we may as well be spared
+the complaints over the early decay of mediæval faith and civilisation.
+Had these been strong enough to hold their ground, they would be alive
+to this day. If those elegiac natures which long to see them return
+could pass but one hour in the midst of them, they would gasp to be back
+in modern air. That in a great historical process of this kind flowers
+of exquisite beauty may perish, without being made immortal in poetry or
+tradition is undoubtedly true; nevertheless, we cannot wish the process
+undone. The general result of it consists in this--that by the side of
+the Church which had hitherto held the countries of the West together
+(though it was unable to do so much longer) there arose a new spiritual
+influence which, spreading itself abroad from Italy, became the breath
+of life for all the more instructed minds in Europe. The worst that can
+be said of the movement is, that it was anti-popular, that through it
+Europe became for the first time sharply divided into the cultivated and
+uncultivated classes. The reproach will appear groundless when we
+reflect that even now the fact, though clearly recognised, cannot be
+altered. The separation, too, is by no means so cruel and absolute in
+Italy as elsewhere. The most artistic of her poets, Tasso, is in the
+hands of even the poorest.
+
+The civilisation of Greece and Rome, which, ever since the fourteenth
+century, obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life, as the source and
+basis of culture, as the object and ideal of existence, partly also as
+an avowed reaction against preceding tendencies--this civilisation had
+long been exerting a partial influence on mediæval Europe, even beyond
+the boundaries of Italy. The culture of which Charles the Great was a
+representative was, in face of the barbarism of the seventh and eighth
+centuries, essentially a Renaissance, and could appear under no other
+form. Just as in the Romanesque architecture of the North, beside the
+general outlines inherited from antiquity, remarkable direct imitations
+of the antique also occur, so too monastic scholarship had not only
+gradually absorbed an immense mass of materials from Roman writers, but
+the style of it, from the days of Eginhard onwards shows traces of
+conscious imitations.
+
+But the resuscitation of antiquity took a different form in Italy from
+that which it assumed in the North. The wave of barbarism had scarcely
+gone by before the people, in whom the former life was but half effaced,
+showed a consciousness of its past and a wish to reproduce it. Elsewhere
+in Europe men deliberately and with reflection borrowed this or the
+other element of classical civilisation; in Italy the sympathies both of
+the learned and of the people were naturally engaged on the side of
+antiquity as a whole, which stood to them as a symbol of past greatness.
+The Latin language, too, was easy to an Italian, and the numerous
+monuments and documents in which the country abounded facilitated a
+return to the past. With this tendency other elements--the popular
+character which time had now greatly modified, the political
+institutions imported by the Lombards from Germany, chivalry and other
+northern forms of civilisation, and the influence of religion and the
+Church--combined to produce the modern Italian spirit, which was
+destined to serve as the model and ideal for the whole western world.
+
+How antiquity began to work in plastic art, as soon as the flood of
+barbarism had subsided, is clearly shown in the Tuscan buildings of the
+twelfth and in the sculptures of the thirteenth centuries. In poetry,
+too, there will appear no want of similar analogies to those who hold
+that the greatest Latin poet of the twelfth century, the writer who
+struck the key-note of a whole class of Latin poems, was an Italian. We
+mean the author of the best pieces in the so-called ‘Carmina Burana.’ A
+frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, as whose patrons the gods of
+heathendom are invoked, while Catos and Scipios hold the place of the
+saints and heroes of Christianity, flows in full current through the
+rhymed verses. Reading them through at a stretch, we can scarcely help
+coming to the conclusion that an Italian, probably a Lombard, is
+speaking; in fact, there are positive grounds for thinking so.[402] To a
+certain degree these Latin poems of the ‘Clerici vagantes’ of the
+twelfth century, with all their remarkable frivolity, are, doubtless, a
+product in which the whole of Europe had a share; but the writer of the
+song ‘De Phyllide et Flora’[403] and the ‘Æstuans Interius’ can have
+been a northerner as little as the polished Epicurean observer to whom
+we owe ‘Dum Dianæ vitrea sero lampas oritur.’ Here, in truth, is a
+reproduction of the whole ancient view of life, which is all the more
+striking from the mediæval form of the verse in which it is set forth.
+There are many works of this and the following centuries, in which a
+careful imitation of the antique appears both in the hexameter and
+pentameter of the metre in the classical, often mythological, character
+of the subject, and which yet have not anything like the same spirit of
+antiquity about them. In the hexameter chronicles and other works of
+Gulielmus Apuliensis and his successors (from about 1100), we find
+frequent traces of a diligent study of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and
+Claudian; but this classical form is after all here a mere matter of
+archæology, as is the classical subject in collectors like Vincent of
+Beauvais, or in the mythological and allegorical writer, Alanus ab
+Insulis. The Renaissance is not a mere fragmentary imitation or
+compilation, but a new birth; and the signs of this are visible in the
+poems of the unknown ‘Clericus’ of the twelfth century.
+
+But the great and general enthusiasm of the Italians for classical
+antiquity did not display itself before the fourteenth century. For this
+a development of civic life was required, which took place only in
+Italy, and there not till then. It was needful that noble and burgher
+should first learn to dwell together on equal terms, and that a social
+world should arise (see p. 139) which felt the want of culture, and had
+the leisure and the means to obtain it. But culture, as soon as it freed
+itself from the fantastic bonds of the Middle Ages, could not at once
+and without help find its way to the understanding of the physical and
+intellectual world. It needed a guide, and found one in the ancient
+civilisation, with its wealth of truth and knowledge in every spiritual
+interest. Both the form and the substance of this civilisation were
+adopted with admiring gratitude; it became the chief part of the culture
+of the age.[404] The general condition of the country was favourable to
+this transformation. The mediæval empire, since the fall of the
+Hohenstaufen, had either renounced, or was unable to make good, its
+claims on Italy. The Popes had migrated to Avignon. Most of the
+political powers actually in existence owed their origin to violent and
+illegitimate means. The spirit of the people, now awakened to
+self-consciousness, sought for some new and stable ideal on which to
+rest. And thus the vision of the world-wide empire of Italy and Rome so
+possessed the popular mind, that Cola di Rienzi could actually attempt
+to put it in practice. The conception he formed of his task,
+particularly when tribune for the first time, could only end in some
+extravagant comedy; nevertheless, the memory of ancient Rome was no
+slight support to the national sentiment. Armed afresh with its culture,
+the Italian soon felt himself in truth citizen of the most advanced
+nation in the world.
+
+It is now our task to sketch this spiritual movement, not indeed in all
+its fulness, but in its most salient features, and especially in its
+first beginnings.[405]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+ROME, THE CITY OF RUINS.
+
+
+Rome itself, the city of ruins, now became the object of a wholly
+different sort of piety from that of the time when the ‘Mirabilia Romæ’
+and the collection of William of Malmesbury were composed. The
+imaginations of the devout pilgrim, or of the seeker after marvels[406]
+and treasures, are supplanted in contemporary records by the interests
+of the patriot and the historian. In this sense we must understand
+Dante’s words,[407] that the stones of the walls of Rome deserve
+reverence, and that the ground on which the city is built is more worthy
+than men say. The jubilees, incessant as they were, have scarcely left a
+single devout record in literature properly so called. The best thing
+that Giovanni Villani (p. 73) brought back from the jubilee of the year
+1300 was the resolution to write his history which had been awakened in
+him by the sight of the ruins of Rome. Petrarch gives evidence of a
+taste divided between classical and Christian antiquity. He tells us how
+often with Giovanni Colonna he ascended the mighty vaults of the Baths
+of Diocletian,[408] and there in the transparent air, amid the wide
+silence, with the broad panorama stretching far around them, they spoke,
+not of business, or political affairs, but of the history which the
+ruins beneath their feet suggested, Petrarch appearing in their
+dialogues as the partisan of classical, Giovanni of Christian antiquity;
+then they would discourse of philosophy and of the inventors of the
+arts. How often since that time, down to the days of Gibbon and Niebuhr,
+have the same ruins stirred men’s minds to the same reflections!
+
+This double current of feeling is also recognisable in the ‘Dittamondo’
+of Fazio degli Uberti, composed about the year 1360--a description of
+visionary travels, in which the author is accompanied by the old
+geographer Solinus, as Dante was by Virgil. They visit Bari in memory of
+St. Nicholas, and Monte Gargano of the archangel Michael, and in Rome
+the legends of Araceli and of Santa Maria in Trastevere are mentioned.
+Still, the pagan splendour of ancient Rome unmistakably exercises a
+greater charm upon them. A venerable matron in torn garments--Rome
+herself is meant--tells them of the glorious past, and gives them a
+minute description of the old triumphs;[409] she then leads the
+strangers through the city, and points out to them the seven hills and
+many of the chief ruins--‘che comprender potrai, quanto fui bella.’
+
+Unfortunately this Rome of the schismatic and Avignonese popes was no
+longer, in respect of classical remains, what it had been some
+generations earlier. The destruction of 140 fortified houses of the
+Roman nobles by the senator Brancaleone in 1257 must have wholly altered
+the character of the most important buildings then standing; for the
+nobles had no doubt ensconced themselves in the loftiest and
+best-preserved of the ruins.[410] Nevertheless, far more was left than
+we now find, and probably many of the remains had still their marble
+incrustation, their pillared entrances, and their other ornaments, where
+we now see nothing but the skeleton of brickwork. In this state of
+things, the first beginnings of a topographical study of the old city
+were made.
+
+In Poggio’s walks through Rome[411] the study of the remains themselves
+is for the first time more intimately combined with that of the ancient
+authors and inscriptions--the latter he sought out from among all the
+vegetation in which they were imbedded[412]--the writer’s imagination is
+severely restrained, and the memories of Christian Rome carefully
+excluded. The only pity is that Poggio’s work was not fuller and was not
+illustrated with sketches. Far more was left in his time than was found
+by Raphael eighty years later. He saw the tomb of Cæcilia Metella and
+the columns in front of one of the temples on the slope of the Capitol
+first in full preservation, and then afterwards half destroyed, owing to
+that unfortunate quality which marble possesses of being easily burnt
+into lime. A vast colonnade near the Minerva fell piecemeal a victim to
+the same fate. A witness in the year 1443 tells us that this manufacture
+of lime still went on; ‘which is a shame, for the new buildings are
+pitiful, and the beauty of Rome is in its ruins.’[413] The inhabitants
+of that day, in their peasants’ cloaks and boots, looked to foreigners
+like cowherds; and in fact the cattle were pastured in the city up to
+the Banchi. The only opportunities for social gatherings were the
+services at church, on which occasion it was possible to get a sight of
+the beautiful women.
+
+In the last years of Eugenius IV. (d. 1447) Blondus of Forli wrote his
+‘Roma Instaurata,’ making use of Frontinus and of the old ‘Libri
+Regionali,’ as well as, it seems, of Anastasius. His object is not only
+the description of what existed, but still more the recovery of what was
+lost. In accordance with the dedication to the Pope, he consoles himself
+for the general ruin by the thought of the precious relics of the saints
+in which Rome was so rich.[414]
+
+With Nicholas V. (1447-1455) that new monumental spirit which was
+distinctive of the age of the Renaissance appeared on the papal throne.
+The new passion for embellishing the city brought with it on the one
+hand a fresh danger for the ruins, on the other a respect for them, as
+forming one of Rome’s claims to distinction. Pius II. was wholly
+possessed by antiquarian enthusiasm, and if he speaks little of the
+antiquities of Rome,[415] he closely studied those of all other parts of
+Italy, and was the first to know and describe accurately the remains
+which abounded in the districts for miles around the capital.[416] It is
+true that, both as priest and cosmographer, he is interested alike in
+classical and Christian monuments and in the marvels of nature. Or was
+he doing violence to himself when he wrote that Nola was more highly
+honoured by the memory of St. Paulinus than by all its classical
+reminiscences and by the heroic struggle of Marcellus? Not, indeed, that
+his faith in relics was assumed; but his mind was evidently rather
+disposed to an inquiring interest in nature and antiquity, to a zeal for
+monumental works, to a keen and delicate observation of human life. In
+the last years of his Papacy, afflicted with the gout and yet in the
+most cheerful mood, he was borne in his litter over hill and dale to
+Tusculum, Alba, Tibur, Ostia, Falerii, and Ocriculum, and whatever he
+saw he noted down. He followed the line of the Roman roads and
+aqueducts, and tried to fix the boundaries of the old tribes who dwelt
+round the city. On an excursion to Tivoli with the great Federigo of
+Urbino the time was happily spent in talk on the military system of the
+ancients, and particularly on the Trojan war. Even on his journey to the
+Congress of Mantua (1459) he searched, though unsuccessfully, for the
+labyrinth of Clusium mentioned by Pliny, and visited the so-called villa
+of Virgil on the Mincio. That such a Pope should demand a classical
+Latin style from his abbreviators, is no more than might be expected. It
+was he who, in the war with Naples, granted an amnesty to the men of
+Arpinum, as countrymen of Cicero and Marius, after whom many of them
+were named. It was to him alone, as both judge and patron, that Blondus
+could dedicate his ‘Roma Triumphans,’ the first great attempt at a
+complete exposition of Roman antiquity.[417]
+
+Nor was the enthusiasm for the classical past of Italy confined at this
+period to the capital. Boccaccio[418] had already called the vast ruins
+of Baiæ ‘old walls, yet new for modern spirits;’ and since this time
+they were held to be the most interesting sight near Naples. Collections
+of antiquities of all sorts now became common. Ciriaco of Ancona (d.
+1457), who explained (1433) the Roman monuments to the Emperor
+Sigismund, travelled, not only through Italy, but through other
+countries of the old world, Hellas, and the islands of the Archipelago,
+and even parts of Asia and Africa, and brought back with him countless
+inscriptions and sketches. When asked why he took all this trouble, he
+replied, ‘To wake the dead.’[419] The histories of the various cities of
+Italy had from the earliest times laid claim to some true or imagined
+connection with Rome, had alleged some settlement or colonisation which
+started from the capital;[420] and the obliging manufacturers of
+pedigrees seem constantly to have derived various families from the
+oldest and most famous blood of Rome. So highly was the distinction
+valued, that men clung to it even in the light of the dawning criticism
+of the fifteenth century. When Pius II. was at Viterbo[421] he said
+frankly to the Roman deputies who begged him to return, ‘Rome is as much
+at home as Siena, for my House, the Piccolomini, came in early times
+from the capital to Siena, as is proved by the constant use of the names
+Æneas and Sylvius in my family.’ He would probably have had no objection
+to be held a descendant of the Julii. Paul II., a Barbo of Venice, found
+his vanity flattered by deducing his House, notwithstanding an adverse
+pedigree, according to which it came from Germany, from the Roman
+Ahenobarbus, who led a colony to Parma, and whose successors were driven
+by party conflicts to migrate to Venice.[421A] That the Massimi claimed
+descent from Q. Fabius Maximus, and the Cornaro from the Cornelii,
+cannot surprise us. On the other hand, it is a strikingly exceptional
+fact for the sixteenth century that the novellist Bandello tried to
+connect his blood with a noble family of Ostrogoths (i. nov. 23).
+
+To return to Rome. The inhabitants, ‘who then called themselves Romans,’
+accepted greedily the homage which was offered them by the rest of
+Italy. Under Paul II., Sixtus IV., and Alexander VI. magnificent
+processions formed part of the Carnival, representing the scene most
+attractive to the imagination of the time--the triumph of the Roman
+Imperator. The sentiment of the people expressed itself naturally in
+this shape and others like it. In this mood of public feeling, a report
+arose, that on April 15, 1485, the corpse of a young Roman lady of the
+classical period--wonderfully beautiful and in perfect preservation--had
+been discovered.[422] Some Lombard masons digging out an ancient tomb on
+an estate of the convent of Santa Maria Novella, on the Appian Way
+beyond the Cæcilia Metella, were said to have found a marble sarcophagus
+with the inscription, ‘Julia, daughter of Claudius.’ On this basis the
+following story was built. The Lombards disappeared with the jewels and
+treasure which were found with the corpse in the sarcophagus. The body
+had been coated with an antiseptic essence, and was as fresh and
+flexible as that of a girl of fifteen the hour after death. It was said
+that she still kept the colours of life, with eyes and mouth half open.
+She was taken to the palace of the ‘Conservatori’ on the Capitol; and
+then a pilgrimage to see her began. Among the crowd were many who came
+to paint her; ‘for she was more beautiful than can be said or written,
+and, were it said or written, it would not be believed by those who had
+not seen her.’ By the order of Innocent VIII. she was secretly buried
+one night outside the Pincian Gate; the empty sarcophagus remained in
+the court of the ‘Conservatori.’ Probably a coloured mask of wax or some
+other material was modelled in the classical style on the face of the
+corpse, with which the gilded hair of which we read would harmonise
+admirably. The touching point in the story is not the fact itself, but
+the firm belief that an ancient body, which was now thought to be at
+last really before men’s eyes, must of necessity be far more beautiful
+than anything of modern date.
+
+Meanwhile the material knowledge of old Rome was increased by
+excavations. Under Alexander VI. the so-called ‘Grotesques,’ that is,
+the mural decorations of the ancients, were discovered, and the Apollo
+of the Belvedere was found at Porto d’Anzo. Under Julius II. followed
+the memorable discoveries of the Laöcoon, of the Venus of the Vatican,
+of the Torso, of the Cleopatra.[423] The palaces of the nobles and the
+cardinals began to be filled with ancient statues and fragments. Raphael
+undertook for Leo X. that ideal restoration of the whole ancient city
+which his celebrated letter (1518 or 1519) speaks of.[424] After a
+bitter complaint over the devastations which had not even then ceased,
+and which had been particularly frequent under Julius II., he beseeches
+the Pope to protect the few relics which were left to testify to the
+power and greatness of that divine soul of antiquity whose memory was
+inspiration to all who were capable of higher things. He then goes on
+with penetrating judgment to lay the foundations of a comparative
+history of art, and concludes by giving the definition of an
+architectural survey which has been accepted since his time; he requires
+the ground plan, section, and elevation separately of every building
+that remained. How archæology devoted itself after his day to the study
+of the venerated city and grew into a special science, and how the
+Vitruvian Academy at all events proposed to itself great aims,[425]
+cannot here be related. Let us rather pause at the days of Leo X., under
+whom the enjoyment of antiquity combined with all other pleasures to
+give to Roman life a unique stamp and consecration.[426] The Vatican
+resounded with song and music, and their echoes were heard through the
+city as a call to joy and gladness, though Leo did not succeed thereby
+in banishing care and pain from his own life, and his deliberate
+calculation to prolong his days by cheerfulness was frustrated by an
+early death.[427] The Rome of Leo, as described by Paolo Giovio, forms a
+picture too splendid to turn away from, unmistakable as are also its
+darker aspects--the slavery of those who were struggling to rise; the
+secret misery of the prelates, who, notwithstanding heavy debts, were
+forced to live in a style befitting their rank; the system of literary
+patronage, which drove men to be parasites or adventurers; and, lastly,
+the scandalous maladministration of the finances of the state.[428] Yet
+the same Ariosto who knew and ridiculed all this so well, gives in the
+sixth satire a longing picture of his expected intercourse with the
+accomplished poets who would conduct him through the city of ruins, of
+the learned counsel which he would there find for his own literary
+efforts, and of the treasures of the Vatican library. These, he says,
+and not the long-abandoned hope of Medicean protection, were the real
+baits which attracted him, when he was asked to go as Ferrarese
+ambassador to Rome.
+
+But the ruins within and outside Rome awakened not only archæological
+zeal and patriotic enthusiasm, but an elegiac or sentimental melancholy.
+In Petrarch and Boccaccio we find touches of this feeling (pp. 177,
+181). Poggio (p. 181) often visited the temple of Venus and Rome, in the
+belief that it was that of Castor and Pollux, where the senate used so
+often to meet, and would lose himself in memories of the great orators
+Crassus, Hortensius, Cicero. The language of Pius II., especially in
+describing Tivoli, has a thoroughly sentimental ring,[429] and soon
+afterwards (1467) appeared the first pictures of ruins, with, a
+commentary by Polifilo.[430] Ruins of mighty arches and colonnades, half
+hid in plane-trees, laurels, cypresses, and brushwood, figure in his
+pages. In the sacred legends it became the custom, we can hardly say
+how, to lay the scene of the birth of Christ in the ruins of a
+magnificent palace.[431] That artificial ruins became afterwards a
+necessity of landscape gardening, is only a practical consequence of
+this feeling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE OLD AUTHORS.
+
+
+But the literary bequests of antiquity, Greek as well as Latin, were of
+far more importance than the architectural, and indeed than all the
+artistic remains which it had left. They were held in the most absolute
+sense to be the springs of all knowledge. The literary conditions of
+that age of great discoveries have been often set forth; no more can be
+here attempted than to point out a few less-known features of the
+picture.[432]
+
+Great as was the influence of the old writers on the Italian mind in the
+fourteenth century and before, yet that influence was due rather to the
+wide diffusion of what had long been known, than to the discovery of
+much that was new. The most popular Latin poets, historians, orators,
+and letter-writers, together with a number of Latin translations of
+single works of Aristotle, Plutarch, and a few other Greek authors,
+constituted the treasure from which a few favoured individuals in the
+time of Petrarch and Boccaccio drew their inspiration. The former, as is
+well known, owned and kept with religious care a Greek Homer, which he
+was unable to read. A complete Latin translation of the ‘Iliad’ and
+‘Odyssey,’ though a very bad one, was made at Petrarch’s suggestion and
+with Boccaccio’s help by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato.[433] But
+with the fifteenth century began the long list of new discoveries, the
+systematic creation of libraries by means of copies, and the rapid
+multiplication of translations from the Greek.[434]
+
+Had it not been for the enthusiasm of a few collectors of that age, who
+shrank from no effort or privation in their researches, we should
+certainly possess only a small part of the literature, especially that
+of the Greeks, which is now in our hands. Pope Nicholas V., when only a
+simple monk, ran deeply into debt through buying manuscripts or having
+them copied. Even then he made no secret of his passion for the two
+great interests of the Renaissance, books and buildings.[435] As Pope he
+kept his word. Copyists wrote and spies searched for him through half
+the world. Perotto received 500 ducats for the Latin translation of
+Polybius; Guarino, 1,000 gold florins for that of Strabo, and he would
+have been paid 500 more but for the death of the Pope. Filelfo was to
+have received 10,000 gold florins for a metrical translation of Homer,
+and was only prevented by the Pope’s death from coming from Milan to
+Rome. Nicholas left a collection of 5,000, or, according to another way
+of calculating, of 9,000 volumes,[436] for the use of the members of the
+Curia, which became the foundation of the library of the Vatican. It was
+to be preserved in the palace itself, as its noblest ornament, like the
+library of Ptolemy Philadelphus at Alexandria. When the plague (1450)
+drove him and his court to Fabriano, whence then, as now, the best paper
+was procured, he took his translators and compilers with him, that he
+might run no risk of losing them.
+
+The Florentine Niccolò Niccoli,[437] a member of that accomplished
+circle of friends which surrounded the elder Cosimo de Medici, spent his
+whole fortune in buying books. At last, when his money was all gone, the
+Medici put their purse at his disposal for any sum which his purpose
+might require. We owe to him the completion of Ammianus Marcellinus, of
+the ‘De Oratore’ of Cicero, the text of Lucretius which still has most
+authority, and other works; he persuaded Cosimo to buy the best
+manuscript of Pliny from a monastery at Lübeck. With noble confidence he
+lent his books to those who asked for them, allowed all comers to study
+them in his own house, and was ready to converse with the students on
+what they had read. His collection of 800 volumes, valued at 6,000 gold
+florins, passed after his death, through Cosimo’s intervention, to the
+monastery of San Marco, on the condition that it should be accessible to
+the public, and is now one of the jewels of the Laurentian library.
+
+Of the two great book-finders, Guarino and Poggio, the latter,[438] on
+the occasion of the Council of Constanz and acting partly as the agent
+of Niccoli, searched industriously among the abbeys of South Germany. He
+there discovered six orations of Cicero, and the first complete
+Quintilian, that of St. Gall, now at Zürich; in thirty-two days he is
+said to have copied the whole of it in a beautiful handwriting. He was
+able to make important additions to Silius Italicus, Manilius,
+Lucretius, Valerius, Flaccus, Asconius, Pedianus, Columella, Celsus,
+Aulus, Gellius, Statius, and others; and with the help of Lionardo
+Aretino he unearthed the last twelve comedies of Plautus, as well as the
+Verrine orations, the ‘Brutus’ and the ‘De Oratore’ of Cicero.
+
+The famous Greek, Cardinal Bessarion,[439] in whom patriotism was
+mingled with a zeal for letters, collected, at a great sacrifice (30,000
+gold florins), 600 manuscripts of pagan and Christian authors. He then
+looked round for some receptacle where they could safely lie until his
+unhappy country, if she ever regained her freedom, could reclaim her
+lost literature. The Venetian government declared itself ready to erect
+a suitable building, and to this day the library of St. Mark retains a
+part of these treasures.[440]
+
+The formation of the celebrated Medicean library has a history of its
+own, into which we cannot here enter. The chief collector for Lorenzo
+Magnifico was Johannes Lascaris. It is well known that the collection,
+after the plundering in the year 1494, had to be recovered piecemeal by
+the Cardinal Giovanni Medici, afterwards Leo X.
+
+The library of Urbino,[441] now in the Vatican, was wholly the work of
+the great Frederick of Montefeltro (p. 44 sqq.). As a boy he had begun
+to collect; in after years he kept thirty or forty ‘scrittori’ employed
+in various places, and spent in the course of time no less than 30,000
+ducats on the collection. It was systematically extended and completed,
+chiefly by the help of Vespasiano, and his account of it forms an ideal
+picture of a library of the Renaissance. At Urbino there were catalogues
+of the libraries of the Vatican, of St. Mark at Florence, of the
+Visconti at Pavia, and even of the library at Oxford. It was noted with
+pride that in richness and completeness none could rival Urbino.
+Theology and the Middle Ages were perhaps most fully represented. There
+was a complete Thomas Aquinas, a complete Albertus Magnus, a complete
+Buenaventura. The collection, however, was a many-sided one, and
+included every work on medicine which was then to be had. Among the
+‘moderns’ the great writers of the fourteenth century--Dante and
+Boccaccio, with their complete works--occupied the first place. Then
+followed twenty-five select humanists, invariably with both their Latin
+and Italian writings and with all their translations. Among the Greek
+manuscripts the Fathers of the Church far outnumbered the rest; yet in
+the list of the classics we find all the works of Sophocles, all of
+Pindar, and all of Menander. The last must have quickly disappeared from
+Urbino,[442] else the philologists would have soon edited it. There were
+men, however, in this book-collecting age who raised a warning voice
+against the vagaries of the passion. These were not the enemies of
+learning, but its friends, who feared that harm would come from a
+pursuit which had become a mania. Petrarch himself protested against the
+fashionable folly of a useless heaping up of books; and in the same
+century Giovanni Manzini ridiculed Andreolo de Ochis, a septuagenarian
+from Brescia, who was ready to sacrifice house and land, his wife and
+himself, to add to the stores of his library.
+
+We have, further, a good deal of information as to the way in which
+manuscripts and libraries were multiplied.[443] The purchase of an
+ancient manuscript, which contained a rare, or the only complete, or the
+only existing text of an old writer, was naturally a lucky accident of
+which we need take no further account. Among the professional copyists
+those who understood Greek took the highest place, and it was they
+especially who bore the honourable name of ‘scrittori.’ Their number was
+always limited, and the pay they received very large.[444] The rest,
+simply called ‘copisti,’ were partly mere clerks who made their living
+by such work, partly schoolmasters and needy men of learning, who
+desired an addition to their income, partly monks, or even nuns, who
+regarded the pursuit as a work pleasing to God. In the early stages of
+the Renaissance the professional copyists were few and untrustworthy;
+their ignorant and dilatory ways were bitterly complained of by
+Petrarch. In the fifteenth century they were more numerous, and brought
+more knowledge to their calling, but in accuracy of work they never
+attained the conscientious precision of the old monks. They seem to have
+done their work in a sulky and perfunctory fashion, seldom putting their
+signatures at the foot of the codices, and showed no traces of that
+cheerful humour, or of that proud consciousness of a beneficent
+activity, which often surprises us in the French and German manuscripts
+of the same period. This is more curious, as the copyists at Rome in the
+time of Nicholas V. were mostly Germans or Frenchmen[445]--‘barbarians’
+as the Italian humanists called them, probably men who were in search of
+favours at the papal court, and who kept themselves alive meanwhile by
+this means. When Cosimo de’ Medici was in a hurry to form a library for
+his favourite foundation, the Badia below Fiesole, he sent for
+Vespasiano, and received from him the advice to give up all thoughts of
+purchasing books, since those which were worth getting could not be had
+easily, but rather to make use of the copyists; whereupon Cosimo
+bargained to pay him so much a day, and Vespasiano, with forty-five
+writers under him, delivered 200 volumes in twenty-two months.[446] The
+catalogue of the works to be copied was sent to Cosimo by Nicholas
+V.[447] who wrote it with his own hand. Ecclesiastical literature and
+the books needed for the choral services naturally held the chief place
+in the list.
+
+The handwriting was that beautiful modern Italian which was already in
+use in the preceding century, and which makes the sight of one of the
+books of that time a pleasure. Pope Nicholas V., Poggio, Giannozzo
+Manetti, Niccolò Niccoli, and other distinguished scholars, themselves
+wrote a beautiful hand, and desired and tolerated none other. The
+decorative adjuncts, even when miniatures formed no part of them, were
+full of taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts,
+with the light and graceful scrolls which begin and end the lines. The
+material used to write on, when the work was ordered by great or wealthy
+people, was always parchment; the binding, both in the Vatican and at
+Urbino, was a uniform crimson velvet with silver clasps. Where there was
+so much care to show honour to the contents of a book by the beauty of
+its outward form, it is intelligible that the sudden appearance of
+printed books was greeted at first with anything but favour. The envoys
+of Cardinal Bessarion, when they saw for the first time a printed book
+in the house of Constantino Lascaris, laughed at the discovery ‘made
+among the barbarians in some German city,’ and Frederick of Urbino
+‘would have been ashamed to own a printed book.’[448]
+
+But the weary copyists--not those who lived by the trade, but the many
+who were forced to copy a book in order to have it--rejoiced at the
+German invention,[449] ‘notwithstanding the praises and encouragements
+which the poets awarded to caligraphy.’ It was soon applied in Italy to
+the multiplication first of the Latin and then of the Greek authors, and
+for a long period nowhere but in Italy, yet it spread with by no means
+the rapidity which might have been expected from the general enthusiasm
+for these works. After a while the modern relation between author and
+publisher began to develop itself,[450] and under Alexander VI., when it
+was no longer easy to destroy a book, as Cosimo could make Filelfo
+promise to do,[451] the prohibitive censorship made its appearance.
+
+The growth of textual criticism which accompanied the advancing study of
+languages and antiquity, belongs as little to the subject of this book
+as the history of scholarship in general. We are here occupied, not with
+the learning of the Italians in itself, but with the reproduction of
+antiquity in literature and life. One word more on the studies
+themselves may still be permissible.
+
+Greek scholarship was chiefly confined to Florence and to the fifteenth
+and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It was never so general as
+Latin scholarship, partly because of the far greater difficulties which
+it involved, partly and still more because of the consciousness of Roman
+supremacy and an instinctive hatred of the Greeks more than
+counterbalanced the attractions which Greek literature had for the
+Italians.[452]
+
+The impulse which proceeded from Petrarch and Boccaccio, superficial as
+was their own acquaintance with Greek, was powerful, but did not tell
+immediately on their contemporaries;[453] on the other hand, the study
+of Greek literature died out about the year 1520[454] with the last of
+the colony of learned Greek exiles, and it was a singular piece of
+fortune that northerners like Agricola, Reuchlin, Erasmus, the Stephani,
+and Budæus had meanwhile made themselves masters of the language. That
+colony had begun with Manuel Chrysoloras and his relation John, and with
+George of Trebizond. Then followed, about and after the time of the
+conquest of Constantinople, John Argyropulos, Theodore Gaza, Demetrios
+Chalcondylas, who brought up his sons Theophilos and Basilios to be
+excellent Hellenists, Andronikos Kallistos, Marcos Musuros and the
+family of the Lascaris, not to mention others. But after the subjection
+of Greece by the Turks was completed, the succession of scholars was
+maintained only by the sons of the fugitives and perhaps here and there
+by some Candian or Cyprian refugee. That the decay of Hellenistic
+studies began about the time of the death of Leo X. was owing partly to
+a general change of intellectual attitude,[455] and to a certain satiety
+of classical influences which now made itself felt; but its coincidence
+with the death of the Greek fugitives was not wholly a matter of
+accident. The study of Greek among the Italians appears, if we take the
+year 1500 as our standard, to have been pursued with extraordinary zeal.
+The youths of that day learned to speak the language, and half a century
+later, like the Popes Paul III. and Paul IV., they could still do so in
+their old age.[456] But this sort of mastery of the study presupposes
+intercourse with native Greeks.
+
+Besides Florence, Rome and Padua nearly always maintained paid teachers
+of Greek, and Verona, Ferrara, Venice, Perugia, Pavia and other cities
+occasional teachers.[457] Hellenistic studies owed a priceless debt to
+the press of Aldo Manucci at Venice, where the most important and
+voluminous writers were for the first time printed in the original. Aldo
+ventured his all in the enterprise; he was an editor and publisher whose
+like the world has rarely seen.[458]
+
+Along with this classical revival, Oriental studies now assumed
+considerable proportions.[459] Dante himself set a high value on Hebrew,
+though we cannot suppose that he understood it. From the fifteenth
+century onwards scholars were no longer content merely to speak of it
+with respect, but applied themselves to a thorough study of it. This
+scientific interest in the language was, however, from the beginning
+either furthered or hindered by religious considerations. Poggio, when
+resting from the labours of the Council of Constance, learnt Hebrew at
+that place and at Baden from a baptized Jew, whom he describes as
+‘stupid, peevish, and ignorant, like most converted Jews;’ but he had to
+defend his conduct against Lionardo Bruni, who endeavoured to prove to
+him that Hebrew was useless or even injurious. The controversial
+writings of the great Florentine statesman and scholar, Giannozzo
+Manetti[460] (d. 1459) against the Jews afford an early instance of a
+complete mastery of their language and science. His son Agnolo was from
+his childhood instructed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The father, at the
+bidding of Nicholas V., translated the Psalms, but had to defend the
+principles of his translation in a work addressed to Alfonso.
+Commissioned by the same Pope, who had offered a reward of 5,000 ducats
+for the discovery of the original Hebrew text of the Evangelist Matthew,
+he made a collection of Hebrew manuscripts, which is still preserved in
+the Vatican, and began a great apologetic work against the Jews.[461]
+The study of Hebrew was thus enlisted in the service of the Church. The
+Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari learnt the language,[462] and Pope
+Sixtus IV., who erected the building for the Vatican library, and added
+to the collection extensive purchases of his own, took into his service
+‘scrittori’ (_librarios_) for Hebrew as well as for Greek and
+Latin.[463] The study of the language now became more general; Hebrew
+manuscripts were collected, and in some libraries, like that of Urbino,
+formed a specially valuable part of the rich treasure there stored up;
+the printing of Hebrew books began in Italy in 1475, and made the study
+easier both to the Italians themselves and to the other nations of
+Europe, who for many years drew their supply from Italy. Soon there was
+no good-sized town where there were not individuals who were masters of
+the language and many anxious to learn it, and in 1488 a chair for
+Hebrew was founded at Bologna, and another in 1514 at Rome. The study
+became so popular that it was even preferred to Greek.[464][465]
+
+Among all those who busied themselves with Hebrew in the fifteenth
+century, no one was of more importance than Pico della Mirandola. He was
+not satisfied with a knowledge of the Hebrew grammar and Scriptures, but
+penetrated into the Jewish Cabbalah and even made himself familiar with
+the literature of the Talmud. That such pursuits, though they may not
+have gone very far, were at all possible to him, he owed to his Jewish
+teachers. Most of the instruction in Hebrew was in fact given by Jews,
+some of whom, though generally not till after conversion to
+Christianity, became distinguished University professors and
+much-esteemed writers.[466]
+
+Among the Oriental languages, Arabic was studied as well as Hebrew. The
+science of medicine, no longer satisfied with the older Latin
+translations of the great Arabian physicians, had constant recourse to
+the originals, to which an easy access was offered by the Venetian
+consulates in the East, where Italian doctors were regularly kept. But
+the Arabian scholarship of the Renaissance is only a feeble echo of the
+influence which Arabian civilisation in the Middle Ages exercised over
+Italy and the whole cultivated world--an influence which not only
+preceded that of the Renaissance, but in some respects was hostile to
+it, and which did not surrender without a struggle the place which it
+had long and vigorously asserted. Hieronimo Ramusio, a Venetian
+physician, translated a great part of Avicenna from the Arabic and died
+at Damascus in 1486. Andrea Mongajo of Belluno,[467] a disciple of the
+same Avicenna, lived long at Damascus, learnt Arabic, and improved on
+his master. The Venetian government afterwards appointed him as
+professor of this subject at Padua. The example set by Venice was
+followed by other governments. Princes and wealthy men rivalled one
+another in collecting Arabic manuscripts. The first Arabian
+printing-press was begun at Fano under Julius II. and consecrated in
+1514 under Leo X.[468]
+
+We must here linger for a moment over Pico della Mirandola, before
+passing on to the general effects of humanism. He was the only man who
+loudly and vigorously defended the truth and science of all ages against
+the one-sided worship of classical antiquity.[469] He knew how to value
+not only Averroes and the Jewish investigators, but also the scholastic
+writers of the Middle Ages, according to the matter of their writings.
+He seems to hear them say, ‘We shall live for ever, not in the schools
+of word-catchers, but in the circle of the wise, where they talk not of
+the mother of Andromache or of the sons of Niobe, but of the deeper
+causes of things human and divine; he who looks closely will see that
+even the barbarians had intelligence (_mercurium_), not on the tongue
+but in the breast.’ Himself writing a vigorous and not inelegant Latin,
+and a master of clear exposition, he despised the purism of pedants and
+the current over-estimate of borrowed forms, especially when joined, as
+they often are, with one-sidedness, and involving indifference to the
+wider truth of the things themselves. Looking at Pico, we can guess at
+the lofty flight which Italian philosophy would have taken had not the
+counter-reformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the
+people.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+
+Who now were those who acted as mediators between their own age and a
+venerated antiquity, and made the latter a chief element in the culture
+of the former?
+
+They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing one face
+to-day and another to-morrow; but they clearly felt themselves, and it
+was fully recognised by their time, that they formed a wholly new
+element in society. The ‘clerici vagantes’ of the twelfth century, whose
+poetry we have already referred to (p. 174), may perhaps be taken as
+their forerunner--the same unstable existence, the same free and more
+than free views of life, and the germs at all events of the same pagan
+tendencies in their poetry. But now, as competitor with the whole
+culture of the Middle Ages, which was essentially clerical and was
+fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilisation, founding
+itself on that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages. Its
+active representatives became influential[470] because they knew what
+the ancients knew, because they tried to write as the ancients wrote,
+because they began to think, and soon to feel, as the ancients thought
+and felt. The tradition to which they devoted themselves passed at a
+thousand points into genuine reproduction.
+
+Some modern writers deplore the fact that the germs of a far more
+independent and essentially national culture, such as appeared in
+Florence about the year 1300, were afterwards so completely swamped by
+the humanists.[471] There was then, we are told, nobody in Florence who
+could not read; even the donkey-men sang the verses of Dante; the best
+Italian manuscripts which we possess belonged originally to Florentine
+artisans; the publication of a popular encyclopædia, like the ‘Tesoro’
+of Brunette Latini, was then possible; and all this was founded on a
+strength and soundness of character due to the universal participation
+in public affairs, to commerce and travel, and to the systematic
+reprobation of idleness. The Florentines, it is urged, were at that time
+respected and influential throughout the whole world, and were called in
+that year, not without reason, by Pope Boniface VIII., ‘the fifth
+element.’ The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralysed
+native impulses. Henceforth men looked to antiquity only for the
+solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink
+into mere quotation. Nay, the very fall of civil freedom is partly to be
+ascribed to all this, since the new learning rested on obedience to
+authority, sacrificed municipal rights to Roman law, and thereby both
+sought and found the favour of the despots.
+
+These charges will occupy us now and then at a later stage of our
+inquiry, when we shall attempt to reduce them to their true value, and
+to weigh the losses against the gains of this movement. For the present
+we must confine ourselves to showing how the civilisation even of the
+vigorous fourteenth century necessarily prepared the way for the
+complete victory of humanism, and how precisely the greatest
+representatives of the national Italian spirit were themselves the men
+who opened wide the gate for the measureless devotion to antiquity in
+the fifteenth century.
+
+To begin with Dante. If a succession of men of equal genius had presided
+over Italian culture, whatever elements their natures might have
+absorbed from the antique, they still could not fail to retain a
+characteristic and strongly-marked national stamp. But neither Italy nor
+Western Europe produced another Dante, and he was and remained the man
+who first thrust antiquity into the foreground of national culture. In
+the ‘Divine Comedy’ he treats the ancient and the Christian worlds, not
+indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one another. Just as,
+at an earlier period of the Middle Ages types and antitypes were sought
+in the history of the Old and New Testaments, so does Dante constantly
+bring together a Christian and a pagan illustration of the same
+fact.[472] It must be remembered that the Christian cycle of history and
+legend was familiar, while the ancient was relatively unknown, was full
+of promise and of interest, and must necessarily have gained the upper
+hand in the competition for public sympathy when there was no longer a
+Dante to hold the balance between the two.
+
+Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a
+great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather to
+the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that
+he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavoured by his voluminous
+historical and philosophical writings not to supplant but to make known
+the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises on
+matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is
+unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without
+handbooks. Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his Latin writings
+would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and
+thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tell us, he
+would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in
+blotting them out from the memory of men.
+
+It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was
+known of the ‘Decameron’[473] north of the Alps, he was famous all over
+Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology,
+geography, and biography.[474] One of these, ‘De Genealogia Deorum,’
+contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in
+which he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with
+regard to the age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to
+‘poesia,’ as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole
+mental activity of the poet-scholars.[475] This it is whose enemies he
+so vigorously combats--the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for
+anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian, to whom Helicon,
+the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the
+greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to
+be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically,
+but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and
+immorality.[476] Then follows the defence of poetry, the proof that the
+poetry of the ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing
+mendacious, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and
+allegorical meanings which we must always attribute to it, and of that
+calculated obscurity which is intended to repel the dull minds of the
+ignorant.
+
+And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work,[477] the
+writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to paganism.
+The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the Early Church had to
+fight its way among the heathen. Now--praised be Jesus Christ!--true
+religion was strengthened, paganism destroyed, and the victorious Church
+in possession of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and
+study paganism almost (_fere_) without danger. Boccaccio, however, did
+not hold this liberal view consistently. The ground of his apostasy lay
+partly in the mobility of his character, partly in the still powerful
+and widespread prejudice that classical pursuits were unbecoming in a
+theologian. To these reasons must be added the warning given him in the
+name of the dead Pietro Petroni by the monk Gioacchino Ciani to give up
+his pagan studies under pain of early death. He accordingly determined
+to abandon them, and was only brought back from this cowardly resolve by
+the earnest exhortations of Petrarch, and by the latter’s able
+demonstration that humanism was reconcileable with religion.[478]
+
+There was thus a new cause in the world and a new class of men to
+maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to have stopped
+short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself deliberately,
+and conceded the first place to purely national elements of culture. No
+conviction was more firmly rooted in the popular mind, than that
+antiquity was the highest title to glory which Italy possessed.
+
+There was a symbolical ceremony familiar to this generation of
+poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it--the
+coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The origin of this
+system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of the ceremony
+never became fixed. It was a public demonstration, an outward and
+visible expression of literary enthusiasm,[479] and naturally its form
+was variable. Dante, for instance, seems to have understood it in the
+sense of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath
+in the baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other
+Florentine children, he had received baptism.[480] He could, says his
+biographer, have anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but
+desired it nowhere but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned.
+From the same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and
+was held to be inherited by the ancient Romans from the Greeks. The
+most recent source to which the practices could be referred is to be
+found in the Capitoline contests of musicians, poets, and other artists,
+founded by Domitian in imitation of the Greeks and celebrated every five
+years, which may possibly have survived for a time the fall of the Roman
+Empire; but as few other men would venture to crown themselves, as Dante
+desired to do, the question arises, to whom did this office belong?
+Albertino Mussato (p. 140) was crowned at Padua in 1310 by the bishop
+and the rector of the University. The University of Paris, the rector of
+which was then a Florentine (1341), and the municipal authorities of
+Rome, competed for the honour of crowning Petrarch. His self-elected
+examiner, King Robert of Anjou, would gladly have performed the ceremony
+at Naples, but Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the
+senator of Rome. This honour was long the highest object of ambition,
+and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian
+magistrate.[481] Then came the Italian journey of Charles IV., whom it
+amused to flatter the vanity of ambitious men, and impress the ignorant
+multitude by means of gorgeous ceremonies. Starting from the fiction
+that the coronation of poets was a prerogative of the old Roman
+emperors, and consequently was no less his own, he crowned (May 15,
+1355) the Florentine scholar, Zanobi della Strada, at Pisa, to the
+annoyance of Petrarch, who complained that ‘the barbarian laurel had
+dared adorn the man loved by the Ausonian Muses,’ and to the great
+disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognise this ‘laurea Pisana’ as
+legitimate.[482] Indeed it might be fairly asked with what right this
+stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in judgment on the merits
+of Italian poets. But from henceforth the emperors crowned poets
+wherever they went on their travels; and in the fifteenth century the
+popes and other princes assumed the same right, till at last no regard
+whatever was paid to place or circumstances. In Rome, under Sixtus IV.,
+the academy[483] of Pomponius Lætus gave the wreath on its own
+authority. The Florentines had the good taste not to crown their famous
+humanists till after death. Carlo Aretino and Lionardo Aretino were thus
+crowned; the eulogy of the first was pronounced by Matteo Palmieri, of
+the latter by Giannozzo Manetti, before the members of the council and
+the whole people, the orator standing at the head of the bier, on which
+the corpse lay clad in a silken robe.[484] Carlo Aretino was further
+honoured by a tomb in Santa Croce, which is among the most beautiful in
+the whole course of the Renaissance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS.
+
+
+The influence of antiquity on culture, of which we have now to speak,
+presupposes that the new learning had gained possession of the
+universities. This was so, but by no means to the extent and with the
+results which might have been expected.
+
+Few of the Italian universities[485] show themselves in their full
+vigour till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the increase
+of wealth rendered a more systematic care for education possible. At
+first there were generally three sorts of professorships--one for civil
+law, another for canonical law, the third for medicine; in course of
+time professorships of rhetoric, of philosophy, and of astronomy were
+added, the last commonly, though not always, identical with astrology.
+The salaries varied greatly in different cases. Sometimes a capital sum
+was paid down. With the spread of culture competition became so active
+that the different universities tried to entice away distinguished
+teachers from one another, under which circumstances Bologna is said to
+have sometimes devoted the half of its public income (20,000 ducats) to
+the university. The appointments were as a rule made only for a certain
+time,[486] sometimes for only half a year, so that the teachers were
+forced to lead a wandering life, like actors. Appointments for life
+were, however, not unknown. Sometimes the promise was exacted not to
+teach elsewhere what had already been taught at one place. There were
+also voluntary, unpaid professors.
+
+Of the chairs which have been mentioned, that of rhetoric was especially
+sought by the humanist; yet it depended only on his familiarity with the
+matter of ancient learning whether or no he could aspire to those of
+law, medicine, philosophy, or astronomy. The inward conditions of the
+science of the day were as variable as the outward conditions of the
+teacher. Certain jurists and physicians received by far the largest
+salaries of all, the former chiefly as consulting lawyers for the suits
+and claims of the state which employed them. In Padua a lawyer of the
+fifteenth century received a salary of 1,000 ducats,[487] and it was
+proposed to appoint a celebrated physician with a yearly payment of
+2,000 ducats, and the right of private practice,[488] the same man
+having previously received 700 gold florins at Pisa. When the jurist
+Bartolommeo Socini, professor at Pisa, accepted a Venetian appointment
+at Padua, and was on the point of starting on his journey, he was
+arrested by the Florentine government and only released on payment of
+bail to the amount of 18,000 gold florins.[489] The high estimation in
+which these branches of science were held makes it intelligible why
+distinguished philologists turned their attention to law and medicine,
+while on the other hand specialists were more and more compelled to
+acquire something of a wide literary culture. We shall presently have
+occasion to speak of the work of the humanists in other departments of
+practical life.
+
+Nevertheless, the position of the philologists, as such, even where the
+salary was large,[490] and did not exclude other sources of income, was
+on the whole uncertain and temporary, so that one and the same teacher
+could be connected with a great variety of institutions. It is evident
+that change was desired for its own sake, and something fresh expected
+from each new comer, as was natural at a time when science was in the
+making, and consequently depended to no small degree on the personal
+influence of the teacher. Nor was it always the case that a lecturer on
+classical authors really belonged to the university of the town where he
+taught. Communication was so easy, and the supply of suitable
+accommodation, in monasteries and elsewhere, was so abundant, that a
+private undertaking was often practicable. In the first decades of the
+fifteenth century,[491] when the University of Florence was at its
+greatest brilliance, when the courtiers of Eugenius IV., and perhaps
+even of Martin V. thronged to the lecture-rooms, when Carlo Aretino and
+Filelfo were competing for the largest audience, there existed, not only
+an almost complete university among the Augustinians of Santo Spirito,
+not only an association of scholars among the Camaldolesi of the Angeli,
+but individuals of mark, either singly or in common, arranged to provide
+philosophical and philological teaching for themselves and others.
+Linguistic and antiquarian studies in Rome had next to no connection
+with the university (Sapienza), and depended almost exclusively either
+on the favour of individual popes and prelates, or on the appointments
+made in the Papal chancery. It was not till Leo X. (1513) that the great
+reorganisation of the Sapienza took place, with its eighty-eight
+lecturers, among whom there were able men, though none of the first
+rank, at the head of the archæological department. But this new
+brilliancy was of short duration. We have already spoken briefly of the
+Greek and Hebrew professorships in Italy (pp. 195 sqq.).
+
+To form an accurate picture of the method of scientific instruction,
+then pursued, we must turn away our eyes as far as possible from our
+present academic system. Personal intercourse between the teachers and
+the taught, public disputations, the constant use of Latin and often of
+Greek, the frequent changes of lecturers and the scarcity of books, gave
+the studies of that time a colour which we cannot represent to
+ourselves without effort.
+
+There were Latin schools in every town of the least importance, not by
+any means merely as preparatory to higher education, but because, next
+to reading, writing, and arithmetic, the knowledge of Latin was a
+necessity; and after Latin came logic. It is to be noted particularly
+that these schools did not depend on the Church, but on the
+municipality; some of them, too, were merely private enterprises.
+
+This school system, directed by a few distinguished humanists, not only
+attained a remarkable perfection of organisation, but became an
+instrument of higher education in the modern sense of the phrase. With
+the education of the children of two princely houses in North Italy
+institutions were connected which may be called unique of their kind.
+
+At the court of Giovan Francesco Gonzaga at Mantua (reg. 1407 to 1444)
+appeared the illustrious Vittorino da Feltre[492] (b. 1397, d. 1446),
+otherwise Vittore dai Rambaldoni--he preferred to be called a Mantuan
+rather than a Feltrese--one of those men who devote their whole life to
+an object for which their natural gifts constitute a special vocation.
+He wrote almost nothing, and finally destroyed the few poems of his
+youth which he had long kept by him. He studied with unwearied industry;
+he never sought after titles, which, like all outward distinctions, he
+scorned; and he lived on terms of the closest friendship with teachers,
+companions, and pupils, whose goodwill he knew how to preserve. He
+excelled in bodily no less than in mental exercises, was an admirable
+rider, dancer, and fencer, wore the same clothes in winter as in summer,
+walked in nothing but sandals even during the severest frost, and lived
+so that till his old age he was never ill. He so restrained his
+passions, his natural inclination to sensuality and anger, that he
+remained chaste his whole life through, and hardly ever hurt any one by
+a hard word.
+
+He directed the education of the sons and daughters of the princely
+house, and one of the latter became under his care a woman of learning.
+When his reputation extended far and wide over Italy, and members of
+great and wealthy families came from long distances, even from Germany,
+in search of his instructions, Gonzaga was not only willing that they
+should be received, but seems to have held it an honour for Mantua to be
+the chosen school of the aristocratic world. Here for the first time
+gymnastics and all noble bodily exercises were treated along with
+scientific instruction as indispensable to a liberal education. Besides
+these pupils came others, whose instruction Vittorino probably held to
+be his highest earthly aim, the gifted poor, often as many as seventy
+together, whom he supported in his house and educated, ‘per l’amore di
+Dio,’ along with the high-born youths who here learned to live under the
+same roof with untitled genius. The greater the crowd of pupils who
+flocked to Mantua, the more teachers were needed to impart the
+instruction which Vittorino only directed--an instruction which aimed at
+giving each pupil that sort of learning which he was most fitted to
+receive. Gonzaga paid him a yearly salary of 240 gold florins, built him
+besides a splendid house, ‘La Giocosa,’ in which the master lived with
+his scholars, and contributed to the expenses caused by the poorer
+pupils. What was still further needed Vittorino begged from princes and
+wealthy people, who did not always, it is true, give a ready ear to his
+entreaties, and forced him by their hardheartedness to run into debt.
+Yet in the end he found himself in comfortable circumstances, owned a
+small property in town and an estate in the country, where he stayed
+with his pupils during the holidays, and possessed a famous collection
+of books which he gladly lent or gave away, though he was not a little
+angry when they were taken without leave. In the early morning he read
+religious books, then scourged himself and went to church; his pupils
+were also compelled to go to church, like him, to confess once a month,
+and to observe fast days most strictly. His pupils respected him, but
+trembled before his glance. When they did anything wrong, they were
+punished immediately after the offence. He was honoured by all
+contemporaries no less than by his pupils, and people took the journey
+to Mantua merely to see him.
+
+More stress was laid on pure scholarship by Guarino of Verona[493]
+(1370-1460), who in the year 1429 was called to Ferrara by Niccolò
+d’Este to educate his son Lionello, and who, when his pupil was nearly
+grown up in 1436, began to teach at the university as professor of
+eloquence and of the ancient languages. While still acting as tutor to
+Lionello, he had many other pupils from various parts of the country,
+and in his own house a select class of poor scholars, whom he partly or
+wholly supported. His evening hours till far into the night were devoted
+to hearing lessons or to instructive conversation. His house, too, was
+the home of a strict religion and morality. Guarino was a student of the
+Bible, and lived in friendly intercourse with pious contemporaries,
+though he did not hesitate to write a defence of pagan literature
+against them. It signified little to him or to Vittorino that most of
+the humanists of their day deserved small praise in the matter of morals
+or religion. It is inconceivable how Guarino, with all the daily work
+which fell upon him, still found time to write translations from the
+Greek and voluminous original works.[494] He was wanting in that wise
+self-restraint and kindly sweetness which graced the character of
+Vittorino, and was easily betrayed into a violence of temper which led
+to frequent quarrels with his learned contemporaries.
+
+Not only in these two courts, but generally throughout Italy, the
+education of the princely families was in part and for certain years in
+the hands of the humanists, who thereby mounted a step higher in the
+aristocratic world. The writing of treatises on the education of
+princes, formerly the business of theologians, fell now within their
+province.
+
+From the time of Pier Paolo Vergerio the Italian princes were well taken
+care of in this respect, and the custom was transplanted into Germany by
+Æneas Sylvius, who addressed detailed exhortations to two young German
+princes of the House of Habsburg[495] on the subject of their further
+education, in which they are both urged, as might be expected, to
+cultivate and nurture humanism, but are chiefly bidden to make
+themselves able rulers and vigorous, hardy warriors. Perhaps Æneas was
+aware that in addressing these youths he was talking in the air, and
+therefore took measures to put his treatise into public circulation. But
+the relations of the humanists to the rulers will be discussed
+separately.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE FURTHERERS OF HUMANISM.
+
+
+We have here first to speak of those citizens, mostly Florentines, who
+made antiquarian interests one of the chief objects of their lives, and
+who were themselves either distinguished scholars, or else distinguished
+_dilettanti_ who maintained the scholars. (Comp. pp. 193 sqq.) They were
+of peculiar significance during the period of transition at the
+beginning of the fifteenth century, since it was in them that humanism
+first showed itself practically as an indispensable element in daily
+life. It was not till after this time that the popes and princes began
+seriously to occupy themselves with it.
+
+Niccolò Niccoli and Giannozzo Manetti have been already spoken of more
+than once. Niccoli is described to us by Vespasiano[496] as a man who
+would tolerate nothing around him out of harmony with his own classical
+spirit. His handsome long-robed figure, his kindly speech, his house
+adorned with the noblest remains of antiquity, made a singular
+impression. He was scrupulously cleanly in everything, most of all at
+table, where ancient vases and crystal goblets stood before him on the
+whitest linen.[497] The way in which he won over a pleasure-loving young
+Florentine to intellectual interests is too charming not to be here
+described.[498] Piero de’ Pazzi, son of a distinguished merchant, and
+himself destined to the same calling, fair to behold, and much given to
+the pleasures of the world, thought about anything rather than
+literature. One day, as he was passing the Palazzo del Podestà,[499]
+Niccolò called the young man to him, and although they had never before
+exchanged a word, the youth obeyed the call of one so respected. Niccolò
+asked him who his father was. He answered, ‘Messer Andrea de’ Pazzi.’
+When he was further asked what his pursuit was, Piero replied, as young
+people are wont to do, ‘I enjoy myself’ (‘attendo a darmi buon tempo’).
+Niccolò said to him, ‘As son of such a father, and so fair to look upon,
+it is a shame that thou knowest nothing of the Latin language, which
+would be so great an ornament to thee. If thou learnest it not, thou
+wilt be good for nothing, and as soon as the flower of youth is over,
+wilt be a man of no consequence’ (_virtù_). When Piero heard this, he
+straightway perceived that it was true, and said that he would gladly
+take pains to learn, if only he had a teacher. Whereupon Niccolò
+answered that he would see to that. And he found him a learned man for
+Latin and Greek, named Pontano, whom Piero treated as one of his own
+house, and to whom he paid 100 gold florins a year. Quitting all the
+pleasures in which he had hitherto lived, he studied day and night, and
+became a friend of all learned men and a noble-minded statesman. He
+learned by heart the whole ‘Æneid’ and many speeches of Livy, chiefly on
+the way between Florence and his country house at Trebbio.[500]
+Antiquity was represented in another and higher sense by Giannozzo
+Manetti (1393-1459).[501] Precocious from his first years, he was
+hardly more than a child when he had finished his apprenticeship in
+commerce, and became book-keeper in a bank. But soon the life he led
+seemed to him empty and perishable, and he began to yearn after science,
+through which alone man can secure immortality. He then busied himself
+with books as few laymen had done before him, and became, as has been
+said (p. 209), one of the most profound scholars of his time. When
+appointed by the government as its representative magistrate and
+tax-collector at Pescia and Pistoja, he fulfilled his duties in
+accordance with the lofty ideal with which his religious feeling and
+humanistic studies combined to inspire him. He succeeded in collecting
+the most unpopular taxes which the Florentine state imposed, and
+declined payment for his services. As provincial governor he refused all
+presents, abhorred all bribes, checked gambling, kept the country well
+supplied with corn, required from his subordinates strict obedience and
+thorough disinterestedness, was indefatigable in settling law-suits
+amicably, and did wonders in calming inflamed passions by his goodness.
+The Pistojese loved and reverenced him as a saint, and were never able
+to discover to which of the two political parties he leaned; when his
+term of office was over, both sent ambassadors to Florence to beg that
+it might be prolonged. As if to symbolise the common rights and
+interests of all, he spent his leisure hours in writing the history of
+the city, which was preserved, bound in a purple cover, as a sacred
+relic in the town-hall.[502] When he took his leave the city presented
+him with a banner bearing the municipal arms and a splendid silver
+helmet. On diplomatic missions to Venice, Rome, and King Alfonso,
+Manetti represented, as at Pistoja, the interests of his native city,
+watching vigilantly over its honour, but declining the distinctions
+which were offered to him, obtained great glory by his speeches and
+negotiations, and acquired by his prudence and foresight the name of a
+prophet.
+
+For further information as to the learned citizens of Florence at this
+period the reader must all the more be referred to Vespasiano, who knew
+them all personally, because the tone and atmosphere in which he writes,
+and the terms and conditions on which he mixed in their society, are of
+even more importance than the facts which he records. Even in a
+translation, and still more in the brief indications to which we are
+here compelled to limit ourselves, this chief merit of his book is lost.
+Without being a great writer, he was thoroughly familiar with the
+subject he wrote on, and had a deep sense of its intellectual
+significance.
+
+If we seek to analyse the charm which the Medici of the fifteenth
+century, especially Cosimo the Elder (d. 1464) and Lorenzo the
+Magnificent (d. 1492) exercised over Florence and over all their
+contemporaries, we shall find that it lay less in their political
+capacity than in their leadership in the culture of the age. A man in
+Cosimo’s position--a great merchant and party leader, who also had on
+his side all the thinkers, writers, and investigators, a man who was the
+first of the Florentines by birth and the first of the Italians by
+culture--such a man was to all intents and purposes already a prince. To
+Cosimo belongs the special glory of recognising in the Platonic
+philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought,[503] of
+inspiring his friends with the same belief, and thus of fostering within
+humanistic circles themselves another and a higher resuscitation of
+antiquity. The story is known to us minutely.[504] It all hangs on the
+calling of the learned Johannes Argyropulos, and on the personal
+enthusiasm of Cosimo himself in his last years, which was such, that the
+great Marsilio Ficino could style himself, as far as Platonism was
+concerned, the spiritual son of Cosimo. Under Pietro Medici, Ficino was
+already at the head of a school; to him Pietro’s son and Cosimo’s
+grandson, the illustrious Lorenzo, came over from the Peripatetics.
+Among his most distinguished fellow-scholars were Bartolommeo Valori,
+Donato Acciajuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini. The enthusiastic teacher
+declares in several passages of his writings that Lorenzo had sounded
+all the depths of the Platonic philosophy, and had uttered his
+conviction that without Plato it would be hard to be a good Christian or
+a good citizen. The famous band of scholars which surrounded Lorenzo was
+united together, and distinguished from all other circles of the kind,
+by this passion for a higher and idealistic philosophy. Only in such a
+world could a man like Pico della Mirandola feel happy. But perhaps the
+best thing of all that can be said about it is, that, with all this
+worship of antiquity, Italian poetry found here a sacred refuge, and
+that of all the rays of light which streamed from the circle of which
+Lorenzo was the centre, none was more powerful than this. As a
+statesman, let each man judge him as he pleases; a foreigner will
+hesitate to pronounce what was due to human guilt and what to
+circumstances in the fate of Florence, but no more unjust charge was
+ever made than that in the field of culture Lorenzo was the protector of
+Mediocrity, that through his fault Lionardo da Vinci and the
+mathematician Fra Luca Pacciolo lived abroad, and that Toscanella,
+Vespucci, and others at least remained unsupported. He was not, indeed,
+a man of universal mind; but of all the great men who have striven to
+favour and promote spiritual interests, few certainly have been so
+many-sided, and in none probably was the inward need to do so equally
+deep.
+
+The age in which we live is loud enough in proclaiming the worth of
+culture, and especially of the culture of antiquity. But the
+enthusiastic devotion to it, the recognition that the need of it is the
+first and greatest of all needs, is nowhere to be found but among the
+Florentines of the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth
+centuries. On this point we have indirect proof which precludes all
+doubt. It would not have been so common to give the daughters of the
+house a share in the same studies, had they not been held to be the
+noblest of earthly pursuits; exile would not have been turned into a
+happy retreat, as was done by Palla Strozzi; nor would men who indulged
+in every conceivable excess have retained the strength and the spirit to
+write critical treatises on the ‘Natural History’ of Pliny like Filippo
+Strozzi.[505] Our business here is not to deal out either praise or
+blame, but to understand the spirit of the age in all its vigorous
+individuality.
+
+Besides Florence, there were many cities of Italy where individuals and
+social circles devoted all their energies to the support of humanism and
+the protection of the scholars who lived among them. The correspondence
+of that period is full of references to personal relations of this
+kind.[506] The feeling of the instructed classes set strongly and almost
+exclusively in this direction.
+
+But it is now time to speak of humanism at the Italian courts. The
+natural alliance between the despot and the scholar, each relying solely
+on his personal talent, has already been touched upon (p. 9); that the
+latter should avowedly prefer the princely courts to the free cities,
+was only to be expected from the higher pay which they there received.
+At a time when the great Alfonso of Aragon seemed likely to become
+master of all Italy, Æneas Sylvius wrote to another citizen of
+Siena:[507] ‘I had rather that Italy attained peace under his rule than
+under that of the free cities, for kingly generosity rewards excellence
+of every kind.[508] Too much stress has latterly been laid on the
+unworthy side of this relation, and the mercenary flattery to which it
+gave rise, just as formerly the eulogies of the humanists led to a too
+favourable judgment on their patrons. Taking all things together, it is
+greatly to the honour of the latter that they felt bound to place
+themselves at the head of the culture of their age and country,
+one-sided though this culture was. In some of the popes,[509] the
+fearlessness of the consequences to which the new learning might lead
+strikes us as something truly, but unconsciously, imposing. Nicholas V.
+was confident of the future of the Church, since thousands of learned
+men supported her. Pius II. was far from making such splendid sacrifices
+for humanism as were made by Nicholas, and the poets who frequented his
+court were few in number; but he himself was much more the personal head
+of the republic of letters than his predecessor, and enjoyed his
+position without the least misgiving. Paul II. was the first to dread
+and mistrust the culture of his secretaries, and his three successors,
+Sixtus, Innocent, and Alexander, accepted dedications and allowed
+themselves to be sung to the hearts’ content of the poets--there even
+existed a ‘Borgiad,’ probably in hexameters[510]--but were too busy
+elsewhere, and too occupied in seeking other foundations for their
+power, to trouble themselves much about the poet-scholars. Julius II.
+found poets to eulogise him, because he himself was no mean subject for
+poetry (p. 117), but he does not seem to have troubled himself much
+about them. He was followed by Leo X., ‘as Romulus by Numa’--in other
+words after the warlike turmoil of the first pontificate, a new one was
+hoped for wholly given to the muses. The enjoyment of elegant Latin
+prose and melodious verse was part of the programme of Leo’s life, and
+his patronage certainly had the result that his Latin poets have left us
+a living picture of that joyous and brilliant spirit of the Leonine
+days, with which the biography of Jovius is filled, in countless
+epigrams, elegies, odes, and orations.[511] Probably in all European
+history there is no prince who, in proportion to the few striking events
+of his life, has received such manifold homage. The poets had access to
+him chiefly about noon, when the musicians had ceased playing;[512] but
+one of the best among them[513] tells us how they also pursued him when
+he walked in his garden or withdrew to the privacy of his chamber, and
+if they failed to catch him there, would try to win him with a mendicant
+ode or elegy, filled, as usual, with the whole population of
+Olympus.[514] For Leo, prodigal of his money, and disliking to be
+surrounded by any but cheerful faces, displayed a generosity in his
+gifts which was fabulously exaggerated in the hard times that
+followed.[515] His reorganisation of the Sapienza (p. 212) has been
+already spoken of. In order not to underrate Leo’s influence on humanism
+we must guard against being misled by the toy-work that was mixed up
+with it, and must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the apparent
+irony with which he himself sometimes treated these matters (p. 157).
+Our judgment must rather dwell on the countless spiritual possibilities
+which are included in the word ‘stimulus,’ and which, though they cannot
+be measured as a whole, can still, on closer study, be actually followed
+out in particular cases. Whatever influence in Europe the Italian
+humanists have had since 1520 depends in some way or other on the
+impulse which was given by Leo. He was the Pope who in granting
+permission to print the newly found Tacitus,[516] could say that the
+great writers were a rule of life and a consolation in misfortune; that
+helping learned men and obtaining excellent books had ever been one of
+his highest aims; and that he now thanked heaven that he could benefit
+the human race by furthering the publication of this book.
+
+The sack of Rome in the year 1527 scattered the scholars no less than
+the artists in every direction, and spread the fame of the great
+departed Mæcenas to the furthest boundaries of Italy.
+
+Among the secular princes of the fifteenth century, none displayed such
+enthusiasm for antiquity as Alfonso the Great of Aragon, King of Naples
+(see p. 35). It appears that his zeal was thoroughly unaffected, and
+that the monuments and writings of the ancient world made upon him, from
+the time of his arrival in Italy, an impression deep and powerful enough
+to reshape his life. Possibly he was influenced by the example of his
+ancestor Robert, Petrarch’s great patron, whom he may have wished to
+rival or surpass. With strange readiness he surrendered the stubborn
+Aragon to his brother, and devoted himself wholly to his new
+possessions. He had in his service,[517] either successively or
+together, George of Trebizond, the younger Chrysoloras, Lorenzo Valla,
+Bartolommeo Facio and Antonio Panormita, of whom the two latter were his
+historians; Panormita daily instructed the King and his court in Livy,
+even during military expeditions. These men cost him yearly 20,000 gold
+florins. He gave Panormita 1,000 for his work: Facio received for the
+‘Historia Alfonsi,’ besides a yearly income of 500 ducats, a present of
+1,500 more when it was finished, with the words, ‘It is not given to pay
+you, for your work would not be paid for if I gave you the fairest of my
+cities; but in time I hope to satisfy you.’[518] When he took Giannozzo
+Manetti as his secretary on the most brilliant conditions, he said to
+him, ‘My last crust I will share with you.’ When Giannozzo first came to
+bring the congratulations of the Florentine government on the marriage
+of Prince Ferrante, the impression he made was so great, that the King
+sat motionless on the throne, ‘like a brazen statue, and did not even
+brush away a fly, which had settled on his nose at the beginning of the
+oration.’ In restoring the castle, he took Vitruvius as his guide;
+wherever he went, he had the ancient classics with him; he looked on a
+day as lost in which he had read nothing; when he was reading, he
+suffered no disturbance, not even the sound of music; and he despised
+all contemporary princes who were not either scholars or the patrons of
+learning. His favourite haunt seems to have been the library of the
+castle at Naples, which he opened himself if the librarian was absent,
+and where he would sit at a window overlooking the bay, and listen to
+learned debates on the Trinity. For he was profoundly religious, and had
+the Bible, as well as Livy and Seneca, read to him, till after fourteen
+perusals he knew it almost by heart. He gave to those who wished to be
+nuns the money for their entrance to the monastery, was a zealous
+churchgoer, and listened with great attention to the sermon. Who can
+fully understand the feeling with which he regarded the supposititious
+remains (p. 143) of Livy at Padua? When, by dint of great entreaties, he
+obtained an arm-bone of the skeleton from the Venetians, and received it
+with solemn pomp at Naples, how strangely Christian and pagan sentiment
+must have been blended in his heart! During a campaign in the Abruzzi,
+when the distant Sulmona, the birthplace of Ovid, was pointed out to
+him, he saluted the spot and returned thanks to its tutelary genius. It
+gladdened him to make good the prophecy of the great poet as to his
+future fame.[519] Once indeed, at his famous entry into the conquered
+city of Naples (1443), he himself chose to appear before the world in
+ancient style. Not far from the market a breach forty ells wide was made
+in the wall, and through this he drove in a gilded chariot like a Roman
+Triumphator.[520] The memory of the scene is preserved by a noble
+triumphal arch of marble in the Castello Nuovo. His Neapolitan
+successors (p. 37) inherited as little of this passion for antiquity as
+of his other good qualities.
+
+Alfonso was far surpassed in learning by Frederick of Urbino[521]--the
+great pupil of the great teacher Vittorino da Feltre--who had but few
+courtiers around him, squandered nothing, and in his appropriation of
+antiquity, as in all other things, went to work considerately. It was
+for him and for Nicholas V. that most of the translations from the
+Greek, and a number of the best commentaries and other such works, were
+written. He spent much on the scholars whose services he used, but spent
+it to good purpose. There were no traces of the official poet at Urbino,
+where the Duke himself was the most learned in the whole court.
+Classical antiquity, indeed, only formed a part of his culture. An
+accomplished ruler, captain, and gentleman, he had mastered the greater
+part of the science of the day, and this with a view to its practical
+application. As a theologian, he was able to compare Scotus with
+Aquinas, and was familiar with the writings of the old fathers of the
+Eastern and Western Churches, the former in Latin translations. In
+philosophy, he seems to have left Plato altogether to his contemporary
+Cosimo, but he knew thoroughly not only the ‘Ethics’ and ‘Politics’ of
+Aristotle but the ‘Physics’ and some other works. The rest of his
+reading lay chiefly among the ancient historians, all of whom he
+possessed; these, and not the poets, ‘he was always reading and having
+read to him.’
+
+The Sforza,[522] too, were all of them men of more or less learning and
+patrons of literature; they have been already referred to in passing
+(pp. 38 sqq.). Duke Francesco probably looked on humanistic culture as a
+matter of course in the education of his children, if only for
+political reasons. It was felt universally to be an advantage if the
+Prince could mix with the most instructed men of his time on an equal
+footing. Ludovico Moro, himself an excellent Latin scholar, showed an
+interest in intellectual matters which extended far beyond classical
+antiquity (p. 41 sqq.).
+
+Even the petty despots strove after similar distinctions, and we do them
+injustice by thinking that they only supported the scholars at their
+courts as a means of diffusing their own fame. A ruler like Borso of
+Ferrara (p. 49), with all his vanity, seems by no means to have looked
+for immortality from the poets, eager as they were to propitiate him
+with a ‘Borseid’ and the like. He had far too proud a sense of his own
+position as a ruler for that. But intercourse with learned men, interest
+in antiquarian matters, and the passion for elegant Latin correspondence
+were a necessity for the princes of that age. What bitter complaints are
+those of Duke Alfonso, competent as he was in practical matters, that
+his weakliness in youth had forced him to seek recreation in manual
+pursuits only![523] or was this merely an excuse to keep the humanists
+at a distance? A nature like his was not intelligible even to
+contemporaries.
+
+Even the most insignificant despots of Romagna found it hard to do
+without one or two men of letters about them. The tutor and secretary
+were often one and the same person, who sometimes, indeed, acted as a
+kind of court factotum.[524] We are apt to treat the small scale of
+these courts as a reason for dismissing them with a too ready contempt,
+forgetting that the highest spiritual things are not precisely matters
+of measurement.
+
+Life and manners at the court of Rimini must have been a singular
+spectacle under the bold pagan Condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta. He had
+a number of scholars around him, some of whom he provided for liberally,
+even giving them landed estates, while others earned at least a
+livelihood as officers in his army.[525] In his citadel--‘arx
+Sismundea’--they used to hold discussions, often of a very venomous
+kind, in the presence of the ‘rex,’ as they termed him. In their Latin
+poems they sing his praises and celebrate his amour with the fair
+Isotta, in whose honour and as whose monument the famous rebuilding of
+San Francesco at Rimini took place--‘Divæ Isottæ Sacrum.’ When the
+humanists themselves came to die, they were laid in or under the
+sarcophagi with which the niches of the outside walls of the church were
+adorned, with an inscription testifying that they were laid here at the
+time when Sigismundus, the son of Pandulfus, ruled.[526] It is hard for
+us nowadays to believe that a monster like this prince felt learning and
+the friendship of cultivated people to be a necessity of life; and yet
+the man who excommunicated him, made war upon him, and burnt him in
+effigy, Pope Pius II., says: ‘Sigismund knew history and had a great
+store of philosophy; he seemed born to all that he undertook.[527]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUITY: LATIN CORRESPONDENCE AND ORATIONS.
+
+
+There were two purposes, however, for which the humanist was as
+indispensable to the republics as to princes or popes, namely, the
+official correspondence of the state, and the making of speeches on
+public and solemn occasions.
+
+Not only was the secretary required to be a competent Latinist, but
+conversely, only a humanist was credited with the knowledge and ability
+necessary for the post of secretary. And thus the greatest men in the
+sphere of science during the fifteenth century mostly devoted a
+considerable part of their lives to serve the state in this capacity. No
+importance was attached to a man’s home or origin. Of the four great
+Florentine secretaries who filled the office between 1427 and 1465,[528]
+three belonged to the subject city of Arezzo, namely, Lionardo (Bruni),
+Carlo (Marsuppini), and Benedetto Accolti; Poggio was from Terra Nuova,
+also in Florentine territory. For a long period, indeed, many of the
+highest officers of state were on principle given to foreigners.
+Lionardo, Poggio, and Giannozzo Manetti were at one time or another
+private secretaries to the popes, and Carlo Aretino was to have been so.
+Blondus of Forli, and, in spite of everything, at last even Lorenzo
+Valla, filled the same office. From the time of Nicholas V. and Pius II.
+onwards,[529] the Papal chancery continued more and more to attract the
+ablest men, and this was still the case even under the last popes of
+the fifteenth century, little as they cared for letters. In Platina’s
+‘History of the Popes,’ the life of Paul II. is a charming piece of
+vengeance taken by a humanist on the one Pope who did not know how to
+behave to his chancery--to that circle ‘of poets and orators who
+bestowed on the Papal court as much glory as they received from it.’ It
+is delightful to see the indignation of these haughty and wealthy
+gentlemen, who knew as well as the Pope himself how to use their
+position to plunder foreigners,[530] when some squabble about precedence
+happened, when, for instance, the ‘Advocati consistoriales’ claimed
+equal or superior rank to theirs.[531] The Apostle John, to whom the
+‘Secreta cœlestia’ were revealed; the secretary of Porsenna, whom Mucius
+Scævola mistook for the king; Mæcenas, who was private secretary to
+Augustus; the archbishops, who in Germany were called chancellors, are
+all appealed to in turn.[532] ‘The apostolic secretaries have the most
+weighty business of the world in their hands. For who but they decide on
+matters of the Catholic faith, who else combat heresy, re-establish
+peace, and mediate between great monarchs? who but they write the
+statistical accounts of Christendom? It is they who astonish kings,
+princes, and nations by what comes forth from the Pope. They write
+commands and instructions for the legates, and receive their orders only
+from the Pope, on whom they wait day and night.’ But the highest summit
+of glory was only attained by the two famous secretaries and stylists of
+Leo X.: Pietro Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto.[533]
+
+All the chanceries did not turn out equally elegant documents. A
+leathern official style, in the impurest of Latin, was very common. In
+the Milanese documents preserved by Corio there is a remarkable contrast
+between this sort of composition and the few letters written by members
+of the princely house, which must have been written, too, in moments of
+critical importance.[534] They are models of pure Latinity. To maintain
+a faultless style under all circumstances was a rule of good breeding,
+and a result of habit. Besides these officials, private scholars of all
+kinds naturally had correspondence of their own. The object of
+letter-writing was seldom what it is nowadays, to give information as to
+the circumstances of the writer, or news of other people; it was rather
+treated as a literary work done to give evidence of scholarship and to
+win the consideration of those to whom it was addressed. These letters
+began early to serve the purpose of learned disquisition; and Petrarch,
+who introduced this form of letter-writing, revived the forms of the old
+epistolary style, putting the classical ‘thou’ in place of the ‘you’ of
+mediæval Latin. At a later period letters became collections of
+neatly-turned phrases, by which subjects were encouraged or humiliated,
+colleagues flattered or insulted, and patrons eulogised or begged
+from.[535]
+
+The letters of Cicero, Pliny, and others, were at this time diligently
+studied as models. As early as the fifteenth century a mass of forms and
+instructions for Latin correspondence had appeared, as accessory to the
+great grammatical and lexicographic works, the mass of which is
+astounding to us even now when we look at them in the libraries. But
+just as the existence of these helps tempted many to undertake a task to
+which they had no vocation, so were the really capable men stimulated to
+a more faultless excellence, till at length the letters of Politian, and
+at the beginning of the sixteenth century those of Pietro Bembo,
+appeared, and took their place as unrivalled masterpieces, not only of
+Latin style in general, but also of the more special art of
+letter-writing.
+
+Together with these there appeared in the sixteenth century the
+classical style of Italian correspondence, at the head of which stands
+Bembo again.[536] Its form is wholly modern, and deliberately kept free
+from Latin influence, and yet its spirit is thoroughly penetrated and
+possessed by the ideas of antiquity. These letters, though partly of a
+confidential nature, are mostly written with a view to possible
+publication in the future, and always on the supposition that they might
+be worth showing on account of their elegance. After the year 1530,
+printed collections began to appear, either the letters of miscellaneous
+correspondents in irregular succession, or of single writers; and the
+same Bembo whose fame was so great as a Latin correspondent won as high
+a position in his own language.[537]
+
+But, at a time and among a people where ‘listening’ was among the chief
+pleasures of life, and where every imagination was filled with the
+memory of the Roman senate and its great speakers, the orator occupied a
+far more brilliant place than the letter-writer.[538] Eloquence had
+shaken off the influence of the Church, in which it had found a refuge
+during the Middle Ages, and now became an indispensable element and
+ornament of all elevated lives. Many of the social hours which are now
+filled with music were then given to Latin or Italian oratory; and yet
+Bartolommeo Fazio complained that the orators of his time were at a
+disadvantage compared with those of antiquity; of three kinds of oratory
+which were open to the latter, one only was left to the former, since
+forensic oratory was abandoned to the jurists, and the speeches in the
+councils of the government had to be delivered in Italian.[539]
+
+The social position of the speaker was a matter of perfect indifference;
+what was desired was simply the most cultivated humanistic talent. At
+the court of Borso of Ferrara, the Duke’s physician, Jeronimo da
+Castello, was chosen to deliver the congratulatory address on the visits
+of Frederick III. and of Pius II.[540] Married laymen ascended the
+pulpits of the churches at any scene of festivity or mourning, and even
+on the feast-days of the saints. It struck the non-Italian members of
+the Council of Basel as something strange, that the Archbishop of Milan
+should summon Æneas Sylvius, who was then unordained, to deliver a
+public discourse at the feast of Saint Ambrogius; but they suffered it
+in spite of the murmurs of the theologians, and listened to the speaker
+with the greatest curiosity.[541]
+
+Let us glance for a moment at the most frequent and important occasions
+of public speaking.
+
+It was not for nothing, in the first place, that the ambassadors from
+one state to another received the title of orators. Whatever else might
+be done in the way of secret negotiation, the envoy never failed to make
+a public appearance and deliver a public speech, under circumstances of
+the greatest possible pomp and ceremony.[542] As a rule, however
+numerous the embassy might be, one individual spake for all; but it
+happened to Pius II., a critic before whom all were glad to be heard, to
+be forced to sit and listen to a whole deputation, one after
+another.[543] Learned princes who had the gift of speech were themselves
+fond of discoursing in Latin or Italian. The children of the House of
+Sforza were trained to this exercise. The boy Galeazzo Maria delivered
+in 1455 a fluent speech before the Great Council at Venice,[544] and his
+sister Ippolita saluted Pope Pius II. with a graceful address at the
+Congress of Mantua.[545] Pius himself through all his life did much by
+his oratory to prepare the way for his final elevation to the Papal
+chair. Great as he was both as scholar and diplomatist, he would
+probably never have become Pope without the fame and the charm of his
+eloquence. ‘For nothing was more lofty than the dignity of his
+oratory.’[546] Without doubt this was a reason why multitudes held him
+to be the fittest man for the office, even before his election.
+
+Princes were also commonly received on public occasions with speeches,
+which sometimes lasted for hours. This happened of course only when the
+prince was known as a lover of eloquence,[547] or wished to pass for
+such, and when a competent speaker was present, whether university
+professor, official, ecclesiastic, physician, or court-scholar.
+
+Every other political opportunity was seized with the same eagerness,
+and according to the reputation of the speaker, the concourse of the
+lovers of culture was great or small. At the yearly change of public
+officers, and even at the consecration of new bishops, a humanist was
+sure to come forward, and sometimes addressed his audience in hexameters
+or Sapphic verses.[548] Often a newly appointed official was himself
+forced to deliver a speech more or less relevant to his department, as
+for instance, on justice; and lucky for him if he were well up in his
+part! At Florence even the Condottieri, whatever their origin or
+education might be, were compelled to accommodate themselves to the
+popular sentiment, and on receiving the insignia of their office, were
+harangued before the assembled people by the most learned secretary of
+state.[549] It seems that beneath or close to the Loggia dei Lanzi--the
+porch where the government was wont to appear solemnly before the
+people--a tribune or platform (_rostra ringhiera_) was erected for such
+purposes.
+
+Anniversaries, especially those of the death of princes, were commonly
+celebrated by memorial speeches. Even the funeral oration strictly
+so-called was generally entrusted to a humanist, who delivered it in
+church, clothed in a secular dress; nor was it only princes, but
+officials, or persons otherwise distinguished, to whom this honour was
+paid.[550] This was also the case with the speeches delivered at
+weddings or betrothals, with the difference that they seem to have been
+made in the palace, instead of in church, like that of Filelfo at the
+betrothal of Anna Sforza with Alfonso of Este in the castle of Milan. It
+is still possible that the ceremony may have taken place in the chapel
+of the castle. Private families of distinction no doubt also employed
+such wedding orators as one of the luxuries of high life. At Ferrara,
+Guarino was requested on these occasions to send some one or other of
+his pupils.[551] The church simply took charge of the religious
+ceremonies at weddings and funerals.
+
+The academical speeches, both those made at the installation of a new
+teacher and at the opening of a new course of lectures,[552] were
+delivered by the professor himself, and treated as occasions of great
+rhetorical display. The ordinary university lectures also usually had an
+oratorical character.[553]
+
+With regard to forensic eloquence, the quality of the audience
+determined the form of speech. In case of need it was enriched with all
+sorts of philosophical and antiquarian learning.
+
+As a special class of speeches we may mention the addresses made in
+Italian on the battle-field, either before or after the combat.
+Frederick of Urbino[554] was esteemed a classic in this style; he used
+to pass round among his squadrons as they stood drawn up in order of
+battle, inspiring them in turn with pride and enthusiasm. Many of the
+speeches in the military historians of the fifteenth century, as for
+instance in Porcellius (p. 99), may be, in fact at least, imaginary, but
+may be also in part faithful representations of words actually spoken.
+The addresses again which were delivered to the Florentine Militia,[555]
+organised in 1506 chiefly through the influence of Macchiavelli, and
+which were spoken first at reviews, and afterwards at special annual
+festivals, were of another kind. They were simply general appeals to the
+patriotism of the hearers, and were addressed to the assembled troops in
+the church of each quarter of the city by a citizen in armour, sword in
+hand.
+
+Finally, the oratory of the pulpit began in the fifteenth century to
+lose its distinctive peculiarities. Many of the clergy had entered into
+the circle of classical culture, and were ambitious of success in it.
+The street-preacher Bernardino da Siena, who even in his lifetime passed
+for a saint and who was worshipped by the populace, was not above taking
+lessons in rhetoric from the famous Guarino, although he had only to
+preach in Italian. Never indeed was more expected from preachers than at
+that time--especially from the Lenten preachers; and there were not a
+few audiences which could not only tolerate, but which demanded a strong
+dose of philosophy from the pulpit.[556] But we have here especially to
+speak of the distinguished occasional preachers in Latin. Many of their
+opportunities had been taken away from them, as has been observed, by
+learned laymen. Speeches on particular saints’ days, at weddings and
+funerals, or at the installation of a bishop, and even the introductory
+speech at the first mass of a clerical friend, or the address at the
+festival of some religious order, were all left to laymen.[557] But at
+all events at the Papal court in the fifteenth century, whatever the
+occasion might be, the preachers were generally monks. Under Sixtus IV.,
+Giacomo da Volterra regularly enumerates these preachers, and criticises
+them according to the rules of the art.[558] Fedra Inghirami, famous as
+an orator under Julius II., had at least received holy orders and was
+canon at St. John Lateran; and besides him, elegant Latinists were now
+common enough among the prelates. In this matter, as in others, the
+exaggerated privileges of the profane humanists appear lessened in the
+sixteenth century--on which point we shall presently speak more fully.
+
+What now was the subject and general character of these speeches? The
+national gift of eloquence was not wanting to the Italians of the Middle
+Ages, and a so-called ‘rhetoric’ belonged from the first to the seven
+liberal arts; but so far as the revival of the ancient methods is
+concerned, this merit must be ascribed, according to Filippo
+Villani,[559] to the Florentine Bruno Casini, who died of the plague in
+1348. With the practical purpose of fitting his countrymen to speak with
+ease and effect in public, he treated, after the pattern of the
+ancients, invention, declamation, bearing, and gesticulation, each in
+its proper connection. Elsewhere too we read of an oratorical training
+directed solely to practical application. No accomplishment was more
+highly esteemed than the power of elegant improvisation in Latin.[560]
+The growing study of Cicero’s speeches and theoretical writings, of
+Quintilian and of the imperial panegyrists, the appearance of new and
+original treatises,[561] the general progress of antiquarian learning,
+and the stores of ancient matter and thought which now could and must
+be drawn from--all combined to shape the character of the new eloquence.
+
+This character nevertheless differed widely according to the individual.
+Many speeches breathe a spirit of true eloquence, especially those which
+keep to the matter treated of; of this kind is the mass of what is left
+to us of Pius II. The miraculous effects produced by Giannozzo
+Manetti[562] point to an orator the like of whom has not been often
+seen. His great audiences as envoy before Nicholas V. and before the
+Doge and Council of Venice were events not to be soon forgotten. Many
+orators, on the contrary, would seize the opportunity, not only to
+flatter the vanity of distinguished hearers, but to load their speeches
+with an enormous mass of antiquarian rubbish. How it was possible to
+endure this infliction for two and even three hours, can only be
+understood when we take into account the intense interest then felt in
+everything connected with antiquity, and the rarity and defectiveness of
+treatises on the subject at a time when printing was but little
+diffused. Such orations had at least the value which we have claimed (p.
+232) for many of Petrarch’s letters. But some speakers went too far.
+Most of Filelfo’s speeches are an atrocious patchwork of classical and
+biblical quotations, tacked on to a string of commonplaces, among which
+the great people he wishes to flatter are arranged under the head of the
+cardinal virtues, or some such category, and it is only with the
+greatest trouble, in his case and in that of many others, that we can
+extricate the few historical notices of value which they really contain.
+The speech, for instance, of a scholar and professor of Piacenza at the
+reception of the Duke Galeazzo Maria, in 1467, begins with Julius Cæsar,
+then proceeds to mix up a mass of classical quotations with a number
+from an allegorical work by the speaker himself, and concludes with
+some exceedingly indiscreet advice to the ruler.[563] Fortunately it was
+late at night, and the orator had to be satisfied with handing his
+written panegyric to the prince. Filelfo begins a speech at a betrothal
+with the words: ‘Aristotle, the peripatetic.’ Others start with P.
+Cornelius Scipio, and the like, as though neither they nor their hearers
+could wait a moment for a quotation. At the end of the fifteenth century
+public taste suddenly improved, chiefly through Florentine influence,
+and the practice of quotation was restricted within due limits. Many
+works of reference were now in existence, in which the first comer could
+find as much as he wanted of what had hitherto been the admiration of
+princes and people.
+
+As most of the speeches were written out beforehand in the study, the
+manuscripts served as a means of further publicity afterwards. The great
+extemporaneous speakers, on the other hand, were attended by shorthand
+writers.[564] We must further remember, that all the orations which have
+come down to us were not intended to be actually delivered. The
+panegyric, for example, of the elder Beroaldus on Ludovico Moro was
+presented to him in manuscript.[565] In fact, just as letters were
+written addressed to all conceivable persons and parts of the world as
+exercises, as formularies, or even to serve a controversial end, so
+there were speeches for imaginary occasions[566] to be used as models
+for the reception of princes, bishops, and other dignitaries.
+
+For oratory, as for the other arts, the death of Leo X. (1521) and the
+sack of Rome (1527) mark the epoch of decadence. Giovio,[567] but just
+escaped from the desolation of the eternal city, describes, not
+exhaustively, but on the whole truly, the causes of this decline.
+
+‘The plays of Plautus and Terence, once a school of Latin style for the
+educated Romans, are banished to make room for Italian comedies.
+Graceful speakers no longer find the recognition and reward which they
+once did. The Consistorial advocates no longer prepare anything but the
+introductions to their speeches, and deliver the rest--a confused
+muddle--on the inspiration of the moment. Sermons and occasional
+speeches have sunk to the same level. If a funeral oration is wanted for
+a cardinal or other great personage, the executors do not apply to the
+best orators in the city, to whom they would have to pay a hundred
+pieces of gold, but they hire for a trifle the first impudent pedant
+whom they come across, and who only wants to be talked of whether for
+good or ill. The dead, they say, is none the wiser if an ape stands in a
+black dress in the pulpit, and beginning with a hoarse, whimpering
+mumble, passes little by little into a loud howling. Even the sermons
+preached at great papal ceremonies are no longer profitable, as they
+used to be. Monks of all orders have again got them into their hands,
+and preach as if they were speaking to the mob. Only a few years ago a
+sermon at mass before the Pope, might easily lead the way to a
+bishopric.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+LATIN TREATISES AND HISTORY.
+
+
+From the oratory and the epistolary writings of the humanists, we shall
+here pass on to their other creations, which were all, to a greater or
+less extent, reproductions of antiquity.
+
+Among these must be placed the treatise, which often took the shape of a
+dialogue.[568] In this case it was borrowed directly from Cicero. In
+order to do anything like justice to this class of literature--in order
+not to throw it aside at first sight as a bore--two things must be taken
+into consideration. The century which escaped from the influence of the
+Middle Ages felt the need of something to mediate between itself and
+antiquity in many questions of morals and philosophy; and this need was
+met by the writer of treatises and dialogues. Much which appears to us
+as mere commonplace in their writings, was for them and their
+contemporaries a new and hardly-won view of things upon which mankind
+had been silent since the days of antiquity. The language too, in this
+form of writing, whether Italian or Latin, moved more freely and
+flexibly than in historical narrative, in letters, or in oratory, and
+thus became in itself the source of a special pleasure. Several Italian
+compositions of this kind still hold their place as patterns of style.
+Many of these works have been, or will be mentioned on account of their
+contents; we here refer to them as a class. From the time of Petrarch’s
+letters and treatises down to near the end of the fifteenth century, the
+heaping up of learned quotations, as in the case of the orators, is the
+main business oi most of these writers. The whole style, especially in
+Italian, was then suddenly clarified, till, in the ‘Asolani,’ of Bembo,
+and the ‘Vita Sobria,’ of Luigi Cornaro,[569] a classical perfection was
+reached. Here too the decisive fact was, that antiquarian matter of
+every kind had meantime begun to be deposited in encyclopædic works (now
+printed), and no longer stood in the way of the essayist.
+
+It was inevitable too that the humanistic spirit should control the
+writing of history. A superficial comparison of the histories of this
+period with the earlier chronicles, especially with works so full of
+life, colour, and brilliancy as those of the Villani, will lead us
+loudly to deplore the change. How insipid and conventional appear by
+their side the best of the humanists, and particularly their immediate
+and most famous successors among the historians of Florence, Lionardo
+Aretino and Poggio![570] The enjoyment of the reader is incessantly
+marred by the sense that, in the classical phrases of Facius,
+Sabellicus, Folieta, Senarega, Platina in the chronicles of Mantua,
+Bembo in the annals of Venice, and even of Giovio in his histories, the
+best local and individual colouring and the full sincerity of interest
+in the truth of events have been lost. Our mistrust is increased when we
+hear that Livy, the pattern of this school of writers, was copied just
+where he is least worthy of imitation--on the ground, namely,[571] ‘that
+he turned a dry and naked tradition into grace and richness.’ In the
+same place we meet with the suspicious declaration, that it is the
+function of the historian--just as if he were one with the poet--to
+excite, charm, or overwhelm the reader. We must further remember that
+many humanistic historians knew but little of what happened outside
+their own sphere, and this little they were often compelled to adapt to
+the taste of their patrons and employers. We ask ourselves finally,
+whether the contempt for modern things, which these same humanists
+sometimes avowed openly[572] must not necessarily have had an
+unfortunate influence on their treatment of them. Unconsciously the
+reader finds himself looking with more interest and confidence on the
+unpretending Latin and Italian annalists, like those of Bologna and
+Ferrara, who remained true to the old style, and still more grateful
+does he feel to the best of the genuine chroniclers who wrote in
+Italian--to Marin Sanudo, Corio, and Infessura--who were followed at the
+beginning of the sixteenth century by that new and illustrious band of
+great national historians who wrote in their mother tongue.
+
+Contemporary history, no doubt, was written far better in the language
+of the day than when forced into Latin. Whether Italian was also more
+suitable for the narrative of events long past, or for historical
+research, is a question which admits, for that period, of more answers
+than one. Latin was, at that time, the ‘Lingua franca’ of instructed
+people, not only in an international sense, as a means of intercourse
+between Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians, but also in an
+interprovincial sense. The Lombard, the Venetian, and the Neapolitan
+modes of writing, though long modelled on the Tuscan, and bearing but
+slight traces of the dialect, were still not recognised by the
+Florentines. This was of less consequence in local contemporary
+histories, which were sure of readers at the place where they were
+written, than in the narratives of the past, for which a larger public
+was desired. In these the local interests of the people had to be
+sacrificed to the general interests of the learned. How far would the
+influence of a man like Blondus of Forli have reached if he had written
+his great monuments of learning in the dialect of the Romagna? They
+would have assuredly sunk into neglect, if only through the contempt of
+the Florentines, while written in Latin they exercised the profoundest
+influence on the whole European world of learning. And even the
+Florentines in the fifteenth century wrote Latin, not only because their
+minds were imbued with humanism, but in order to be more widely read.
+
+Finally, there exist certain Latin essays in contemporary history, which
+stand on a level with the best Italian works of the kind. When the
+continuous narrative after the manner of Livy--that Procrustean bed of
+so many writers--is abandoned, the change is marvellous. The same
+Platina and Giovio, whose great histories we only read because and so
+far as we must, suddenly come forward as masters in the biographical
+style. We have already spoken of Tristan Caracciolo, of the biographical
+works of Facius and of the Venetian topography of Sabellico, and others
+will be mentioned in the sequel. Historical composition, like letters
+and oratory, soon had its theory. Following the example of Cicero, it
+proclaims with pride the worth and dignity of history, boldly claims
+Moses and the Evangelists as simple historians, and concludes with
+earnest exhortations to strict impartiality and love of truth.[573]
+
+The Latin treatises on past history were naturally concerned, for the
+most part, with classical antiquity. What we are more surprised to find
+among these humanists are some considerable works on the history of the
+Middle Ages. The first of this kind was the chronicle of Matteo Palmieri
+(449-1449), beginning where Prosper Aquitanus ceases, the style of which
+was certainly an offence to later critics like Paolo Cortese. On opening
+the ‘Decades’ of Blondus of Forli, we are surprised to find a universal
+history, ‘ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii,’ as in Gibbon, full of
+original studies on the authors of each century, and occupied, through
+the first 300 folio pages, with early mediæval history down to the death
+of Frederick II. And this when in Northern countries nothing more was
+wanted than chronicles of the popes and emperors, and the ‘Fasciculus
+temporum.’ We cannot here stay to show what writings Blondus made use
+of, and where he found his materials, though this justice will some day
+be done to him by the historians of literature. This book alone would
+entitle us to say that it was the study of antiquity which made the
+study of the Middle Ages possible, by first training the mind to habits
+of impartial historical criticism. To this must be added, that the
+Middle Ages were now over for Italy, and that the Italian mind could the
+better appreciate them, because it stood outside them. It cannot,
+nevertheless, be said that it at once judged them fairly, and still less
+that it judged them with piety. In art a fixed prejudice showed itself
+against all that those centuries had created, and the humanists date the
+new era from the time of their own appearance. ‘I begin,’ says
+Boccaccio,[574] ‘to hope and believe that God has had mercy on the
+Italian name, since I see that His infinite goodness puts souls into the
+breasts of the Italians like those of the ancients--souls which seek
+fame by other means than robbery and violence, but rather, on the path
+of poetry, which makes men immortal.’ But this narrow and unjust temper
+did not preclude investigation in the minds of the more gifted men, at a
+time, too, when elsewhere in Europe any such investigation would have
+been out of the question. A historical criticism[575] of the Middle Ages
+was practicable, just because the rational treatment of all subjects by
+the humanists had trained the historical spirit. In the fifteenth
+century this spirit had so far penetrated the history even of the
+individual cities of Italy, that the stupid fairy tales about the origin
+of Florence, Venice, and Milan vanished, while at the same time, and
+long after, the chronicles of the North were stuffed with this fantastic
+rubbish, destitute for the most part of all poetical value, and invented
+as late as the fourteenth century.
+
+The close connection between local history and the sentiment of glory
+has already been touched on in reference to Florence (part i. chap.
+vii.). Venice would not be behind-hand. Just as a great rhetorical
+triumph of the Florentines[576] would cause a Venetian embassy to write
+home post-haste for an orator to be sent after them, so too the
+Venetians felt the need of a history which would bear comparison with
+those of Lionardo Aretino and Poggio. And it was to satisfy this
+feeling that, in the fifteenth century, after negotiations with Giovanni
+Maria Filelfo and others had failed, the ‘Decades’ of Sabellico
+appeared, and in the sixteenth the ‘Historia rerum Venetarum’ of Pietro
+Bembo, both written at the express charge of the republic, the latter a
+continuation of the former.
+
+The great Florentine historians at the beginning of the sixteenth
+century (pp. 81 sqq.) were men of a wholly different kind from the
+Latinists Bembo and Giovio. They wrote Italian, not only because they
+could not vie with the Ciceronian elegance of the philologists, but
+because, like Macchiavelli, they could only record in a living tongue
+the living results of their own immediate observations--and we may add
+in the case of Macchiavelli, of his observation of the past--and
+because, as in the case of Guicciardini, Varchi, and many others, what
+they most desired was, that their view of the course of events should
+have as wide and deep a practical effect as possible. Even when they
+only write for a few friends, like Francesco Vettori, they feel an
+inward need to utter their testimony on men and events, and to explain
+and justify their share in the latter.
+
+And yet, with all that is characteristic in their language and style,
+they were powerfully affected by antiquity, and, without its influence,
+would be inconceivable. They were not humanists, but they had passed
+through the school of humanism, and they have in them more of the spirit
+of the ancient historians than most of the imitators of Livy. Like the
+ancients, they were citizens who wrote for citizens.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+GENERAL LATINISATION OF CULTURE.
+
+
+We cannot attempt to trace the influence of humanism in the special
+sciences. Each has its own history, in which the Italian investigators
+of this period, chiefly through their rediscovery of the results
+attained by antiquity,[577] mark a new epoch, with which the modern
+period of the science in question begins with more or less distinctness.
+With regard to philosophy, too, we must refer the reader to the special
+historical works on the subject. The influence of the old philosophers
+on Italian culture will appear at times immense, at times
+inconsiderable; the former, when we consider how the doctrines of
+Aristotle, chiefly drawn from the Ethics[578] and Politics--both widely
+diffused at an early period--became the common property of educated
+Italians, and how the whole method of abstract thought was governed by
+him;[579] the latter, when we remember how slight was the dogmatic
+influence of the old philosophies, and even of the enthusiastic
+Florentine Platonists, on the spirit of the people at large. What looks
+like such an influence is generally no more than a consequence of the
+new culture in general, and of the special growth and development of the
+Italian mind. When we come to speak of religion, we shall have more to
+say on this head. But in by far the greater number of cases, we have to
+do, not with the general culture of the people, but with the utterances
+of individuals or of learned circles; and here, too, a distinction must
+be drawn between the true assimilation of ancient doctrines and
+fashionable make-believe. For with many antiquity was only a fashion,
+even among very learned people.
+
+Nevertheless, all that looks like affectation to our age, need not then
+have been actually so. The giving of Greek and Latin names to children,
+for example, is better and more respectable than the present practice of
+taking them, especially the female names, from novels. When the
+enthusiasm for the ancient world was greater than for the saints, it was
+simple and natural enough that noble families called their sons
+Agamemnon, Tydeus, and Achilles,[580] and that a painter named his son
+Apelles and his daughter Minerva.[581] Nor will it appear unreasonable
+that, instead of a family name, which people were often glad to get rid
+of, a well-sounding ancient name was chosen. A local name, shared by all
+residents in the place, and not yet transformed into a family name, was
+willingly given up, especially when its religious associations made it
+inconvenient; Filippo da San Gemignano called himself Callimachus. The
+man, misunderstood and insulted by his family, who made his fortune as a
+scholar in foreign cities, could afford, even if he were a Sanseverino,
+to change his name to Julius Pomponius Laetus. Even the simple
+translation of a name into Latin or Greek, as was almost uniformly the
+custom in Germany, may be excused to a generation which spoke and wrote
+Latin, and which needed names that could be not only declined, but used
+with facility in verse and prose. What was blameworthy and ridiculous
+was, the change of half a name, baptismal or family, to give it a
+classical sound and a new sense. Thus Giovanni was turned into Jovianus
+or Janus, Pietro to Petreius or Pierius, Antonio to Aonius, Sannazzaro
+to Syncerus, Luca Grasso to Lucius Crassus. Ariosto, who speaks with
+such derision of all this,[582] lived to see children called after his
+own heroes and heroines.[583]
+
+Nor must we judge too severely the Latinisation of many usages of social
+life, such as the titles of officials, of ceremonies, and the like, in
+the writers of the period. As long as people were satisfied with a
+simple, fluent Latin style, as was the case with most writers from
+Petrarch to Æneas Sylvius, this practice was not so frequent and
+striking; it became inevitable when a faultless, Ciceronian Latin was
+demanded. Modern names and things no longer harmonised with the style,
+unless they were first artificially changed. Pedants found a pleasure in
+addressing municipal counsellors as ‘Patres Conscripti,’ nuns as
+‘Virgines Vestales,’ and entitling every saint ‘Divus’ or ‘Deus;’ but
+men of better taste, such as Paolo Giovio, only did so when and because
+they could not help it. But as Giovio does it naturally, and lays no
+special stress upon it, we are not offended if, in his melodious
+language, the cardinals appear as ‘Senatores,’ their dean as ‘Princeps
+Senatus,’ excommunication as ‘Dirae,’[584] and the carnival as
+‘Lupercalia.’ This example of this author alone is enough to warn us
+against drawing a hasty inference from these peculiarities of style as
+to the writer’s whole mode of thinking.
+
+The history of Latin composition cannot here be traced in detail. For
+fully two centuries the humanists acted as if Latin were, and must
+remain, the only language worthy to be written. Poggio[585] deplores
+that Dante wrote his great poem in Italian; and Dante, as is well known,
+actually made the attempt in Latin, and wrote the beginning of the
+‘Inferno’ first in hexameters. The whole future of Italian poetry hung
+on his not continuing in the same style,[586] but even Petrarch relied
+more on his Latin poetry than on the Sonnets and ‘Canzoni,’ and Ariosto
+himself was desired by some to write his poem in Latin. A stronger
+coercion never existed in literature;[587] but poetry shook it off for
+the most part, and it may be said, without the risk of too great
+optimism, that it was well for Italian poetry to have had both means of
+expressing itself. In both something great and characteristic was
+achieved, and in each we can see the reason why Latin or Italian was
+chosen. Perhaps the same may be said of prose. The position and
+influence of Italian culture throughout the world depended on the fact
+that certain subjects were treated in Latin[588]--‘urbi et orbi’--while
+Italian prose was written best of all by those to whom it cost an inward
+struggle not to write in Latin.
+
+From the fourteenth century Cicero was recognised universally as the
+purest model of prose. This was by no means due solely to a
+dispassionate opinion in favour of his choice of language, of the
+structure of his sentences, and of his style of composition, but rather
+to the fact that the Italian spirit responded fully and instinctively to
+the amiability of the letter-writer, to the brilliancy of the orator,
+and to the lucid exposition of the philosophical thinker. Even Petrarch
+recognised clearly the weakness of Cicero as a man and a statesman,[589]
+though he respected him too much to rejoice over them. After Petrarch’s
+time, the epistolary style was formed entirely on the pattern of Cicero;
+and the rest, with the exception of the narrative style, followed the
+same influence. Yet the true Ciceronianism, which rejected every phrase
+which could not be justified out of the great authority, did not appear
+till the end of the fifteenth century, when the grammatical writings of
+Lorenzo Valla had begun to tell on all Italy, and when the opinions of
+the Roman historians of literature had been sifted and compared.[590]
+Then every shade of difference in the style of the ancients was studied
+with closer and closer attention, till the consoling conclusion was at
+last reached, that in Cicero alone was the perfect model to be found,
+or, if all forms of literature were to be embraced, in ‘that immortal
+and almost heavenly age of Cicero.’[591] Men like Pietro Bembo and
+Pierio Valeriano now turned all their energies to this one object. Even
+those who had long resisted the tendency, and had formed for themselves
+an archaic style from the earlier authors,[592] yielded at last, and
+joined in the worship of Cicero. Longolius, at Bembo’s advice,
+determined to read nothing but Cicero for five years long, and finally
+took an oath to use no word which did not occur in this author. It was
+this temper which broke out at last in the great war among the scholars,
+in which Erasmus and the elder Scaliger led the battle.
+
+For all the admirers of Cicero were by no means so one-sided as to
+consider him the only source of language. In the fifteenth century,
+Politian and Ermolao Barbaro made a conscious and deliberate effort to
+form a style of their own,[593] naturally on the basis of their
+‘overflowing’ learning, though they failed to inspire their pupils with
+a similar desire for independence; and our informant of this fact, Paolo
+Giovio, pursued the same end. He first attempted, not always
+successfully, but often with remarkable power and elegance, and at no
+small cost of effort, to reproduce in Latin a number of modern,
+particularly of æsthetic, ideas. His Latin characteristics of the great
+painters and sculptors of his time contain a mixture of the most
+intelligent and of the most blundering interpretation.[594] Even Leo X.,
+who placed his glory in the fact, ‘ut lingua latina nostra pontificatu
+dicatur factu auctior,’[595] was inclined to a liberal and not too
+exclusive Latinity, which, indeed, was in harmony with his
+pleasure-loving nature. He was satisfied when the Latin which he had to
+read and hear was lively, elegant, and idiomatic. Then, too, Cicero
+offered no model for Latin conversation, so that here other gods had to
+be worshipped beside him. The want was supplied by representations of
+the comedies of Plautus and Terence, frequent both in and out of Rome,
+which for the actors were an incomparable exercise in Latin as the
+language of daily life. The impulse to the study of the old Latin
+comedies and to modern imitations of them was given by the discovery of
+plays by Plautus in the ‘Cod. Ursinianus,’ which was brought to Rome in
+1428 or 1429. A few years later, in the pontificate of Paul II., the
+learned Cardinal of Teano[596] (probably Niccolò Forteguerra of Pistoja)
+became famous for his critical labours in this branch of scholarship. He
+set to work upon the most defective plays of Plautus, which were
+destitute even of the list of the characters, and went carefully through
+the whole remains of this author, chiefly with an eye to the language.
+Possibly it was he who gave the first impulse for the public
+representations of these plays. Afterwards Pomponius Laetus took up the
+same subject, and acted as manager when Plautus was put on the stage in
+the houses of great churchmen.[597] That these representations became
+less common after 1520, is mentioned by Giovio, as we have seen (p.
+242), among the causes of the decline of eloquence.
+
+We may mention, in conclusion, the analogy between Ciceronianism in
+literature and the revival of Vitruvius by the architects in the sphere
+of art.[598] And here, too, the law holds good which prevails elsewhere
+in the history of the Renaissance, that each artistic movement is
+preceded by a corresponding movement in the general culture of the age.
+In this case, the interval is not more than about twenty years, if we
+reckon from Cardinal Hadrian of Corneto (1505?) to the first avowed
+Vitruvians.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MODERN LATIN POETRY.
+
+
+The chief pride of the humanists is, however, their modern Latin poetry.
+It lies within the limits of our task to treat of it, at least in so far
+as it serves to characterise the humanistic movement.
+
+How favourable public opinion was to that form of poetry, and how nearly
+it supplanted all others, has been already shown (p. 252). We may be
+very sure that the most gifted and highly developed nation then existing
+in the world did not renounce the use of a language such as the Italian
+out of mere folly and without knowing what they were doing. It must have
+been a weighty reason which led them to do so.
+
+This cause was the devotion to antiquity. Like all ardent and genuine
+devotion it necessarily prompted men to imitation. At other times and
+among other nations we find many isolated attempts of the same kind. But
+only in Italy were the two chief conditions present which were needful
+for the continuance and development of neo-Latin poetry: a general
+interest in the subject among the instructed classes, and a partial
+reawakening of the old Italian genius among the poets themselves--the
+wondrous echo of a far-off strain. The best of what is produced under
+these conditions is not imitation, but free production. If we decline to
+tolerate any borrowed forms in art, if we either set no value on
+antiquity at all, or attribute to it some magical and unapproachable
+virtue, or if we will pardon no slips in poets who were forced, for
+instance, to guess or to discover a multitude of syllabic quantities,
+then we had better let this class of literature alone. Its best works
+were not created in order to defy criticism, but to give pleasure to the
+poet and to thousands of his contemporaries.[599]
+
+The least success of all was attained by the epic narratives drawn from
+the history or legends of antiquity. The essential conditions of a
+living epic poetry were denied, not only to the Romans who now served as
+models, but even to the Greeks after Homer. They could not be looked for
+among the Latins of the Renaissance. And yet the ‘Africa’ of
+Petrarch[600] probably found as many and as enthusiastic readers and
+hearers as any epos of modern times. The purpose and origin of the poem
+are not without interest. The fourteenth century recognised with sound
+historical tact the time of the second Punic war as the noon-day of
+Roman greatness; and Petrarch could not resist writing of this time. Had
+Silius Italicus been then discovered, Petrarch would probably have
+chosen another subject; but, as it was, the glorification of Scipio
+Africanus the Elder was so much in accordance with the spirit of the
+fourteenth century, that another poet, Zanobi di Strada, also proposed
+to himself the same task, and only from respect for Petrarch withdrew
+the poem with which he had already made great progress.[601] If any
+justification were needed for the ‘Africa,’ it lies in the fact that in
+Petrarch’s time and afterwards Scipio was as much an object of public
+interest as if he were then alive, and that he was held by many to be a
+greater man than Alexander, Pompey, and Cæsar.[602] How many modern
+epics treat of a subject at once so popular, so historical in its basis,
+and so striking to the imagination? For us, it is true, the poem is
+unreadable. For other themes of the same kind the reader may be referred
+to the histories of literature.
+
+A richer and more fruitful vein was discovered in expanding and
+completing the Greco-Roman mythology. In this too Italian poetry began
+early to take a part, beginning with the ‘Teseide’ of Boccaccio, which
+passes for his best poetical work. Under Martin V. Maffeo Vegio wrote in
+Latin a thirteenth book to the Æneid; besides which we meet with many
+less considerable attempts, especially in the style of Claudian--a
+‘Meleagris,’ a ‘Hesperis,’ and so forth. Still more curious were the
+newly-invented myths, which peopled the fairest regions of Italy with a
+primæval race of gods, nymphs, genii, and even shepherds, the epic and
+bucolic styles here passing into one another. In the narrative or
+conversational eclogue after the time of Petrarch, pastoral life was
+treated in a purely conventional manner,[603] as a vehicle of all
+possible feelings and fancies; and this point will be touched on again
+in the sequel. For the moment, we have only to do with the new myths. In
+them, more clearly than anywhere else, we see the double significance of
+the old gods to the men of the Renaissance. On the one hand, they
+replace abstract terms in poetry, and render allegorical figures
+superfluous; and, on the other, they serve as free and independent
+elements in art, as forms of beauty which can be turned to some account
+in any and every poem. The example was boldly set by Boccaccio, with his
+fanciful world of gods and shepherds who people the country round
+Florence in his ‘Ninfale d’Ameto’ and ‘Ninfale Fiesolano.’ Both these
+poems were written in Italian. But the masterpiece in this style was the
+‘Sarca’ of Pietro Bembo,[604] which tells how the rivergod of that name
+wooed the nymph Garda; of the brilliant marriage feast in a cave of
+Monte Baldo; of the prophecies of Manto, daughter of Tiresias; of the
+birth of the child Mincius; of the founding of Mantua; and of the future
+glory of Virgil, son of Mincius and of Maia, nymph of Andes. This
+humanistic rococo is set forth by Bembo in verses of great beauty,
+concluding with an address to Virgil, which any poet might envy him.
+Such works are often slighted as mere declamation. This is a matter of
+taste on which we are all free to form our own opinion.
+
+Further, we find long epic poems in hexameters on biblical or
+ecclesiastical subjects. The authors were by no means always in search
+of preferment or of papal favour. With the best of them, and even with
+less gifted writers, like Battista Mantovano, the author of the
+‘Parthenice,’ there was probably an honest desire to serve religion by
+their Latin verses--a desire with which their half-pagan conception of
+Catholicism harmonised well enough. Gyraldus goes through a list of
+these poets, among whom Vida, with his ‘Christiad’ and Sannazaro, with
+his three books, ‘De partu Virginis,’[605] hold the first place.
+Sannazaro (b. 1458, d. 1530) is impressive by the steady and powerful
+flow of his verse, in which Christian and pagan elements are mingled
+without scruple, by the plastic vigour of his description, and by the
+perfection of his workmanship. He could venture to introduce Virgil’s
+fourth eclogue into his song of the shepherds at the manger (III. 200
+sqq.) without fearing a comparison. In treating of the unseen world, he
+sometimes gives proofs of a boldness worthy of Dante, as when King David
+in the Limbo of the Patriarchs rises up to sing and prophesy (I. 236
+sqq.), or when the Eternal, sitting on the throne clad in a mantle
+shining with pictures of all the elements, addresses the heavenly host
+(III. 17 sqq). At other times he does not hesitate to weave the whole
+classical mythology into his subject, yet without spoiling the harmony
+of the whole, since the pagan deities are only accessory figures, and
+play no important part in the story. To appreciate the artistic genius
+of that age in all its bearings, we must not refuse to notice such works
+as these. The merit of Sannazaro will appear the greater, when we
+consider that the mixture of Christian and pagan elements is apt to
+disturb us much more in poetry than in the plastic arts. The latter can
+still satisfy the eye by beauty of form and colour, and in general are
+much more independent of the significance of the subject than poetry.
+With them, the imagination is interested chiefly in the form, with
+poetry, in the matter. Honest Battista Mantovano in his calendar of the
+festivals,[606] tried another expedient. Instead of making the gods and
+demigods serve the purposes of sacred history, he put them, as the
+Fathers of the Church did, in active opposition to it. When the angel
+Gabriel salutes the Virgin at Nazareth, Mercury flies after him from
+Carmel, and listens at the door. He then announces the result of his
+eavesdropping to the assembled gods, and stimulates them thereby to
+desperate resolutions. Elsewhere,[607] it is true, in his writings,
+Thetis, Ceres, Æolus, and other pagan deities pay willing homage to the
+glory of the Madonna.
+
+The fame of Sannazaro, the number of his imitators, the enthusiastic
+homage which was paid to him by the greatest men--by Bembo, who wrote
+his epitaph, and by Titian, who painted his portrait--all show how dear
+and necessary he was to his age. On the threshold of the Reformation he
+solved for the Church the problem, whether it were possible for a poet
+to be a Christian as well as a classic; and both Leo and Clement were
+loud in their thanks for his achievements.
+
+And, finally, contemporary history was now treated in hexameters or
+distichs, sometimes in a narrative and sometimes in a panegyrical style,
+but most commonly to the honour of some prince or princely family. We
+thus meet with a Sforziad,[608] a Borseid, a Laurentiad, a Borgiad (see
+p. 223), a Triulziad, and the like. The object sought after was
+certainly not attained; for those who became famous and are now immortal
+owe it to anything rather than to this sort of poems, to which the world
+has always had an ineradicable dislike, even when they happen to be
+written by good poets. A wholly different effect is produced by smaller,
+simpler and more unpretentious scenes from the lives of distinguished
+men, such as the beautiful poem on Leo X.’s ‘Hunt at Palo,’[609] or the
+‘Journey of Julius II.’ by Hadrian of Corneto (p. 119). Brilliant
+descriptions of hunting-parties are found in Ercole Strozza, in the
+above-mentioned Hadrian, and in others; and it is a pity that the modern
+reader should allow himself to be irritated or repelled by the adulation
+with which they are doubtless filled. The masterly treatment and the
+considerable historical value of many of these most graceful poems,
+guarantee to them a longer existence than many popular works of our own
+day are likely to attain.
+
+In general, these poems are good in proportion to the sparing use of the
+sentimental and the general. Some of the smaller epic poems, even of
+recognised masters, unintentionally produce, by the ill-timed
+introduction of mythological elements, an impression that is
+indescribably ludicrous. Such, for instance, is the lament of Ercole
+Strozza[610] on Cæsar Borgia. We there listen to the complaint of Rome,
+who had set all her hopes on the Spanish Popes Calixtus III. and
+Alexander VI., and who saw her promised deliverer in Cæsar. His history
+is related down to the catastrophe of 1503. The poet then asks the Muse
+what were the counsels of the gods at that moment,[611] and Crato tells
+how, upon Olympus, Pallas took the part of the Spaniards, Venus of the
+Italians, how both then embrace the knees of Jupiter, how thereupon he
+kisses them, soothes them, and explains to them that he can do nothing
+against the fate woven by the Parcæ, but that the divine promises will
+be fulfilled by the child of the House of Este-Borgia.[612] After
+relating the fabulous origin of both families, he declares that he can
+confer immortality on Cæsar as little as he could once, in spite of all
+entreaties, on Memnon or Achilles; and concludes with the consoling
+assurance that Cæsar, before his own death, will destroy many people in
+war. Mars then hastens to Naples to stir up war and confusion, while
+Pallas goes to Nepi, and there appears to the dying Cæsar under the form
+of Alexander VI. After giving him the good advice to submit to his fate
+and be satisfied with the glory of his name, the papal goddess vanishes
+‘like a bird.’
+
+Yet we should needlessly deprive ourselves of an enjoyment, which is
+sometimes very great, if we threw aside everything in which classical
+mythology plays a more or less appropriate part. Here, as in painting
+and sculpture, art has often ennobled what is in itself purely
+conventional. The beginnings of parody are also to be found by lovers of
+that class of literature (pp. 159 sqq.) _e.g._ in the Macaroneid--to
+which the comic Feast of the Gods, by Giovanni Bellini, forms an early
+parallel.
+
+Many, too, of the narrative poems in hexameters are merely exercises, or
+adaptations of histories in prose, which latter the reader will prefer,
+where he can find them. At last, everything--every quarrel and every
+ceremony--came to be put into verse, and this even by the German
+humanists of the Reformation.[613] And yet it would be unfair to
+attribute this to mere want of occupation, or to an excessive facility
+in stringing verses together. In Italy, at all events, it was rather due
+to an abundant sense of style, as is further proved by the mass of
+contemporary reports, histories, and even pamphlets, in the ‘terza
+rima.’ Just as Niccolò da Uzzano published his scheme for a new
+constitution, Macchiavelli his view of the history of his own time, a
+third, the life of Savonarola, and a fourth, the siege of Piombino by
+Alfonso the Great,[614] in this difficult metre, in order to produce a
+stronger effect, so did many others feel the need of hexameters, in
+order to win their special public. What was then tolerated and demanded,
+in this shape, is best shown by the didactic poetry of the time. Its
+popularity in the fifteenth century is something astounding. The most
+distinguished humanists were ready to celebrate in Latin hexameters the
+most commonplace, ridiculous, or disgusting themes, such as the making
+of gold, the game of chess, the management of silkworms, astrology, and
+venereal diseases (_morbus gallicus_), to say nothing of many long
+Italian poems of the same kind. Nowadays this class of poems is
+condemned unread, and how far, as a matter of fact, they are really
+worth the reading, we are unable to say.[615] One thing is certain, that
+epochs far above our own in the sense of beauty--the Renaissance and the
+Greco-Roman world--could not dispense with this form of poetry. It may
+be urged in reply, that it is not the lack of a sense of beauty, but the
+greater seriousness and the altered method of scientific treatment which
+renders the poetical form inappropriate, on which point it is
+unnecessary to enter.
+
+One of these didactic works has of late years been occasionally
+republished[616]--the ‘Zodiac of Life,’ by Marcellus Palingenius (Pier
+Angello Manzolli), a secret adherent of Protestantism at Ferrara,
+written about 1528. With the loftiest speculations on God, virtue, and
+immortality, the writer connects the discussion of many questions of
+practical life, and is, on this account, an authority of some weight in
+the history of morals. On the whole, however, his work must be
+considered as lying outside the boundaries of the Renaissance, as is
+further indicated by the fact that, in harmony with the serious didactic
+purpose of the poem, allegory tends to supplant mythology.
+
+But it was in lyric, and more particularly in elegiac poetry, that the
+poet-scholar came nearest to antiquity; and next to this, in epigram.
+
+In the lighter style, Catullus exercised a perfect fascination over the
+Italians. Not a few elegant Latin madrigals, not a few little satires
+and malicious epistles, are mere adaptations from him; and the death of
+parrots and lapdogs is bewailed, even where there is no verbal
+imitation, in precisely the tone and style of the verses on Lesbia’s
+Sparrow. There are short poems of this sort, the date of which even a
+critic would be unable to fix,[617] in the absence of positive evidence
+that they are works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
+
+On the other hand, we can find scarcely an ode in the Sapphic or Alcaic
+metre, which does not clearly betray its modern origin. This is shown
+mostly by a rhetorical verbosity, rare in antiquity before the time of
+Statius, and by a singular want of the lyrical concentration which is
+indispensable to this style of poetry. Single passages in an ode,
+sometimes two or three strophes together, may look like an ancient
+fragment; but a longer extract will seldom keep this character
+throughout. And where it does so, as, for instance, in the fine Ode to
+Venus, by Andrea Navagero, it is easy to detect a simple paraphrase of
+ancient masterpieces.[618] Some of the ode-writers take the saints for
+their subject, and invoke them in verses tastefully modelled after the
+pattern of analogous odes of Horace and Catullus. This is the manner of
+Navagero, in the Ode to the Archangel Gabriel, and particularly of
+Sannazaro (p. 260), who goes still further in his appropriation of pagan
+sentiment. He celebrates above all his patron saint,[619] whose chapel
+was attached to his lovely villa on the shores of Posilippo, ‘there
+where the waves of the sea drink up the stream from the rocks, and surge
+against the walls of the little sanctuary.’ His delight is in the annual
+feast of S. Nazzaro, and the branches and garlands with which the chapel
+is hung on this day, seem to him like sacrificial gifts. Full of sorrow,
+and far off in exile, at St. Nazaire, on the banks of the Loire, with
+the banished Frederick of Aragon, he brings wreaths of box and oak
+leaves to his patron saint on the same anniversary, thinking of former
+years, when all the youth of Posilippo used to come forth to greet him
+on flower-hung boats, and praying that he may return home.[620]
+
+Perhaps the most deceptive likeness to the classical style is borne by a
+class of poems in elegiacs or hexameters, whose subject ranges from
+elegy, strictly so-called, to epigram. As the humanists dealt most
+freely of all with the text of the Roman elegiac poets, so they felt
+themselves most at home in imitating them. The elegy of Navagero
+addressed to the night, like other poems of the same age and kind, is
+full of points which remind us of his models; but it has the finest
+antique ring about it. Indeed Navagero[621] always begins by choosing a
+truly poetical subject, which he then treats, not with servile
+imitation, but with masterly freedom, in the style of the Anthology, of
+Ovid, of Catullus, or of the Virgilian eclogues. He makes a sparing use
+of mythology, only, for instance, to introduce a sketch of country life,
+in a prayer to Ceres and other rural divinities. An address to his
+country, on his return from an embassy to Spain, though left unfinished,
+might have been worthy of a place beside the ‘Bella Italia, amate
+sponde’ of Vincenzo Monti, if the rest had been equal to this beginning:
+
+    ‘Salve, cura Deûm, mundi felicior ora,
+     Formosae Veneris dulces salvete recessus;
+     Ut vos post tantos animi mentisque labores
+     Aspicio lustroque libens, ut munere vestro
+     Sollicitas toto depello e pectore curas!’[622]
+
+The elegiac or hexametral form was that in which all higher sentiment
+found expression, both the noblest patriotic enthusiasm (see p. 119, the
+elegy on Julius II.) and the most elaborate eulogies on the ruling
+houses,[623] as well as the tender melancholy of a Tibullus. Francesco
+Mario Molza, who rivals Statius and Martial in his flattery of Clement
+VII. and the Farnesi, gives us in his elegy to his ‘comrades,’ written
+from a sick-bed, thoughts on death as beautiful and genuinely antique as
+can be found in any of the poets of antiquity, and this without
+borrowing anything worth speaking of from them.[624] The spirit and
+range of the Roman elegy were best understood and reproduced by
+Sannazaro, and no other writer of his time offers us so varied a choice
+of good poems in this style as he. We shall have occasion now and then
+to speak of some of these elegies in reference to the matter they treat
+of.
+
+The Latin epigram finally became in those days an affair of serious
+importance, since a few clever lines, engraved on a monument or quoted
+with laughter in society, could lay the foundation of a scholar’s
+celebrity. This tendency showed itself early in Italy. When it was known
+that Guido della Polenta wished to erect a monument at Dante’s grave,
+epitaphs poured in from all directions,[625] ‘written by such as wished
+to _show themselves_, or to honour the dead poet, or to win the favour
+of Polenta.’ On the tomb of the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti (d. 1354),
+in the Cathedral at Milan, we read at the foot of 36 hexameters: ‘Master
+Gabrius de Zamoreis of Parma, Doctor of Laws, wrote these verses.’ In
+course of time, chiefly under the influence of Martial, and partly of
+Catullus, an extensive literature of this sort was formed. It was held
+the greatest of all triumphs, when an epigram was mistaken for a genuine
+copy from some old marble,[626] or when it was so good that all Italy
+learned it by heart, as happened in the case of some of Bembo’s. When
+the Venetian government paid Sannazaro 600 ducats for a eulogy in three
+distichs,[627] no one thought it an act of generous prodigality. The
+epigram was prized for what it was, in truth, to all the educated
+classes of that age--the concentrated essence of fame. Nor, on the other
+hand, was any man then so powerful as to be above the reach of a
+satirical epigram, and even the most powerful needed, for every
+inscription which they set before the public eye, the aid of careful and
+learned scholars, lest some blunder or other should qualify it for a
+place in the collections of ludicrous epitaphs.[628] The epigraph and
+the epigram were branches of the same pursuit; the reproduction of the
+former was based on a diligent study of ancient monuments.
+
+The city of epigrams and inscriptions was, above all others, Rome. In
+this state without hereditary honours, each man had to look after his
+own immortality, and at the same time found the epigram an effective
+weapon against his competitors. Pius II. counts with satisfaction the
+distichs which his chief poet Campanus wrote on any event of his
+government which could be turned to poetical account. Under the
+following popes satirical epigrams came into fashion, and reached, in
+the opposition to Alexander VI. and his family, the highest pitch of
+defiant invective. Sannazaro, it is true, wrote his verses in a place of
+comparative safety, but others in the immediate neighbourhood of the
+court ventured on the most reckless attacks (p. 112). On one occasion
+when eight threatening distichs were found fastened to the door of the
+library,[629] Alexander strengthened his guard by 800 men; we can
+imagine what he would have done to the poet if he had caught him. Under
+Leo X., Latin epigrams were like daily bread. For complimenting or for
+reviling the pope, for punishing enemies and victims, named or unnamed,
+for real or imaginary subjects of wit, malice, grief, or contemplation,
+no form was held more suitable. On the famous group of the Virgin with
+Saint Anna and the Child, which Andrea Sansovino carved for S. Agostino,
+no less than 120 persons wrote Latin verses, not so much, it is true,
+from devotion, as from regard for the patron who ordered the work.[630]
+This man, Johann Goritz of Luxemburg, papal referendary of petitions,
+not only held a religious service on the feast of Saint Anna, but gave a
+great literary dinner in his garden on the slopes of the Capitol. It was
+then worth while to pass in review, in a long poem ‘De poetis urbanis,’
+the whole crowd of singers who sought their fortune at the court of Leo.
+This was done by Franciscus Arsillus[631]--a man who needed the
+patronage neither of pope nor prince, and who dared to speak his mind,
+even against his colleagues. The epigram survived the pontificate of
+Paul III. only in a few rare echoes, while the epigraph continued to
+flourish till the seventeenth century, when it perished finally of
+bombast.
+
+In Venice, also, this form of poetry had a history of its own, which we
+are able to trace with the help of the ‘Venezia’ of Francesco Sansovino.
+A standing task for the epigram-writers was offered by the mottos
+(Brievi) on the pictures of the Doges in the great hall of the ducal
+palace--two or four hexameters, setting forth the most noteworthy facts
+in the government of each.[632] In addition to this, the tombs of the
+Doges in the fourteenth century bore short inscriptions in prose,
+recording merely facts, and beside them turgid hexameters or leonine
+verses. In the fifteenth century more care was taken with the style; in
+the sixteenth century it is seen at its best; and then soon after came
+pointless antithesis, prosopopœia, false pathos, praise of abstract
+qualities--in a word, affectation and bombast. A good many traces of
+satire can be detected, and veiled criticism of the living is implied in
+open praise of the dead. At a much later period we find a few instances
+of a deliberate recurrence to the old, simple style.
+
+Architectural works and decorative works in general were constructed
+with a view to receiving inscriptions, often in frequent repetition;
+while the Northern Gothic seldom, and with difficulty, offered a
+suitable place for them, and in sepulchral monuments, for example, left
+free only the most exposed parts--namely the edges.
+
+By what has been said hitherto we have, perhaps, failed to convince the
+reader of the characteristic value of this Latin poetry of the Italians.
+Our task was rather to indicate its position and necessity in the
+history of civilisation. In its own day, a caricature of it
+appeared[633]--the so-called maccaronic poetry. The masterpiece of this
+style, the ‘opus maccaronicorum,’ was written by Merlinus Coccaius
+(Teofilo Folengo of Mantua). We shall now and then have occasion to
+refer to the matter of this poem. As to the form--hexameter and other
+verses, made up of Latin words and Italian words with Latin endings--its
+comic effect lies chiefly in the fact that these combinations sound
+like so many slips of the tongue, or the effusions of an over-hasty
+Latin ‘improvisatore.’ The German imitations do not give the smallest
+notion of this effect.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+FALL OF THE HUMANISTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+
+After a brilliant succession of poet-scholars had, since the beginning
+of the fourteenth century, filled Italy and the world with the worship
+of antiquity, had determined the forms of education and culture, had
+often taken the lead in political affairs and had, to no small extent,
+reproduced ancient literature--at length in the sixteenth century,
+before their doctrines and scholarship had lost hold of the public mind,
+the whole class fell into deep and general disgrace. Though they still
+served as models to the poets, historians, and orators, personally no
+one would consent to be reckoned of their number. To the two chief
+accusations against them--that of malicious self-conceit, and that of
+abominable profligacy--a third charge of irreligion was now loudly added
+by the rising powers of the Counter-reformation.
+
+Why, it may be asked, were not these reproaches, whether true or false,
+heard sooner? As a matter of fact, they were heard at a very early
+period, but the effect they produced was insignificant, for the plain
+reason that men were far too dependent on the scholars for their
+knowledge of antiquity--that the scholars were personally the possessors
+and diffusers of ancient culture. But the spread of printed editions of
+the classics,[634] and of large and well-arranged hand-books and
+dictionaries, went far to free the people from the necessity of personal
+intercourse with the humanists, and, as soon as they could be but partly
+dispensed with, the change in popular feeling became manifest. It was a
+change under which the good and bad suffered indiscriminately.
+
+The first to make these charges were certainly the humanists
+themselves. Of all men who ever formed a class, they had the least sense
+of their common interests, and least respected what there was of this
+sense. All means were held lawful, if one of them saw a chance of
+supplanting another. From literary discussion they passed with
+astonishing suddenness to the fiercest and the most groundless
+vituperation. Not satisfied with refuting, they sought to annihilate an
+opponent. Something of this must be put to the account of their position
+and circumstances; we have seen how fiercely the age, whose loudest
+spokesmen they were, was borne to and fro by the passion for glory and
+the passion for satire. Their position, too, in practical life was one
+that they had continually to fight for. In such a temper they wrote and
+spoke and described one another. Poggio’s works alone contain dirt
+enough to create a prejudice against the whole class--and these ‘Opera
+Poggii’ were just those most often printed, on the north, as well as on
+the south, side of the Alps. We must take care not to rejoice too soon,
+when we meet among these men a figure which seems immaculate; on further
+inquiry there is always a danger of meeting with some foul charge,
+which, even when it is incredible, still discolours the picture. The
+mass of indecent Latin poems in circulation, and such things as the
+ribaldry on the subject of his own family, in Pontano’s dialogue,
+‘Antonius,’ did the rest to discredit the class. The sixteenth century
+was not only familiar with all these ugly symptoms, but had also grown
+tired of the type of the humanist. These men had to pay both for the
+misdeeds they had done, and for the excess of honour which had hitherto
+fallen to their lot. Their evil fate willed it that the greatest poet of
+the nation wrote of them in a tone of calm and sovereign contempt.[635]
+
+Of the reproaches which combined to excite so much hatred, many were
+only too well founded. Yet a clear and unmistakable tendency to
+strictness in matters of religion and morality was alive in many of the
+philologists, and it is a proof of small knowledge of the period, if the
+whole class is condemned. Yet many, and among them the loudest speakers,
+were guilty.
+
+Three facts explain, and perhaps diminish their guilt: the overflowing
+excess of favour and fortune, when the luck was on their side: the
+uncertainty of the future, in which luxury or misery depended on the
+caprice of a patron or the malice of an enemy; and finally, the
+misleading influence of antiquity. This undermined their morality,
+without giving them its own instead; and in religious matters, since
+they could never think of accepting the positive belief in the old gods,
+it affected them only on the negative and sceptical side. Just because
+they conceived of antiquity dogmatically--that is, took it as the model
+for all thought and action--its influence was here pernicious. But that
+an age existed, which idolised the ancient world and its products with
+an exclusive devotion, was not the fault of individuals. It was the work
+of a historical providence, and all the culture of the ages which have
+followed, and of the ages to come, rests upon the fact that it was so,
+and that all the ends of life but this one were then deliberately put
+aside.
+
+The career of the humanists was, as a rule, of such a kind that only the
+strongest characters could pass through it unscathed. The first danger
+came, in some cases, from the parents, who sought to turn a precocious
+child into a miracle of learning,[636] with an eye to his future
+position in that class which then was supreme. Youthful prodigies,
+however, seldom rise above a certain level; or, if they do, are forced
+to achieve their further progress and development at the cost of the
+bitterest trials. For an ambitious youth, the fame and the brilliant
+position of the humanists were a perilous temptation; it seemed to him
+that he too ‘through inborn pride could no longer regard the low and
+common things of life.’ He was thus led to plunge into a life of
+excitement and vicissitude, in which exhausting studies, tutorships,
+secretaryships, professorships, offices in princely households, mortal
+enmities and perils, luxury and beggary, boundless admiration and
+boundless contempt, followed confusedly one upon the other, and in which
+the most solid worth and learning were often pushed aside by superficial
+impudence. But the worst of all was, that the position of the humanist
+was almost incompatible with a fixed home, since it either made frequent
+changes of dwelling necessary for a livelihood, or so affected the mind
+of the individual that he could never be happy for long in one place. He
+grew tired of the people, and had no peace among the enmities which he
+excited, while the people themselves in their turn demanded something
+new (p. 211). Much as this life reminds us of the Greek sophists of the
+Empire, as described to us by Philostratus, yet the position of the
+sophists was more favourable. They often had money, or could more easily
+do without it than the humanists, and as professional teachers of
+rhetoric, rather than men of learning, their life was freer and simpler.
+But the scholar of the Renaissance was forced to combine great learning
+with the power of resisting the influence of ever-changing pursuits and
+situations. Add to this the deadening effect of licentious excess,
+and--since do what he might, the worst was believed of him--a total
+indifference to the moral laws recognised by others. Such men can hardly
+be conceived to exist without an inordinate pride. They needed it, if
+only to keep their heads above water, and were confirmed in it by the
+admiration which alternated with hatred in the treatment they received
+from the world. They are the most striking examples and victims of an
+unbridled subjectivity.
+
+The attacks and the satirical pictures began, as we have said, at an
+early period. For all strongly marked individuality, for every kind of
+distinction, a corrective was at hand in the national taste for
+ridicule. And in this case the men themselves offered abundant and
+terrible materials which satire had but to make use of. In the fifteenth
+century, Battista Mantovano, in discoursing of the seven monsters,[637]
+includes the humanists, with many others, under the head ‘Superbia.’ He
+describes how, fancying themselves children of Apollo, they walk along
+with affected solemnity and with sullen, malicious looks, now gazing at
+their own shadow, now brooding over the popular praise they hunted
+after, like cranes in search of food. But in the sixteenth century the
+indictment was presented in full. Besides Ariosto, their own historian
+Gyraldus[638] gives evidence of this, whose treatise, written under Leo
+X., was probably revised about the year 1540. Warning examples from
+ancient and modern times of the moral disorder and the wretched
+existence of the scholars meet us in astonishing abundance, and along
+with these accusations of the most serious nature are brought formally
+against them. Among these are anger, vanity, obstinacy, self-adoration,
+a dissolute private life, immorality of all descriptions, heresy,
+atheism; further, the habit of speaking without conviction, a sinister
+influence on government, pedantry of speech, thanklessness towards
+teachers, and abject flattery of the great, who first give the scholar a
+taste of their favours and then leave him to starve. The description is
+closed by a reference to the golden age, when no such thing as science
+existed on the earth. Of these charges, that of heresy soon became the
+most dangerous, and Gyraldus himself, when he afterwards republished a
+perfectly harmless youthful work,[639] was compelled to take refuge
+beneath the mantle of Duke Hercules II. of Ferrara,[640] since men now
+had the upper hand who held that people had better spend their time on
+Christian themes than on mythological researches. He justifies himself
+on the ground that the latter, on the contrary, were at such a time
+almost the only harmless branches of study, as they deal with subjects
+of a perfectly neutral character.
+
+But if it is the duty of the historian to seek for evidence in which
+moral judgment is tempered by human sympathy, he will find no authority
+comparable in value to the work so often quoted of Pierio
+Valeriano,[641] ‘On the Infelicity of the Scholar.’ It was written
+under the gloomy impressions left by the sack of Rome, which seems to
+the writer, not only the direct cause of untold misery to the men of
+learning, but, as it were, the fulfilment of an evil destiny which had
+long pursued them. Pierio is here led by a simple and, on the whole,
+just feeling. He does not introduce a special power, which plagued the
+men of genius on account of their genius, but he states facts, in which
+an unlucky chance often wears the aspect of fatality. Not wishing to
+write a tragedy or to refer events to the conflict of higher powers, he
+is content to lay before us the scenes of every-day life. We are
+introduced to men, who in times of trouble lose, first their incomes,
+and then their places; to others, who in trying to get two appointments,
+miss both; to unsociable misers, who carry about their money sewn into
+their clothes, and die mad when they are robbed of it; to others, who
+accept well-paid offices, and then sicken with a melancholy, longing for
+their lost freedom. We read how some died young of a plague or fever,
+and how the writings which had cost them so much toil were burnt with
+their bed and clothes; how others lived in terror of the murderous
+threats of their colleagues; how one was slain by a covetous servant,
+and another caught by highwaymen on a journey, and left to pine in a
+dungeon, because unable to pay his ransom. Many died of unspoken grief
+for the insults they received and the prizes of which they were
+defrauded. We are told of the death of a Venetian, because his son, a
+youthful prodigy, was dead; and the mother and brothers followed, as if
+the lost child drew them all after him. Many, especially Florentines,
+ended their lives by suicide;[642] others through the secret justice of
+a tyrant. Who, after all, is happy?--and by what means? By blunting all
+feeling for such misery? One of the speakers in the dialogue in which
+Pierio clothed his argument, can give an answer to these questions--the
+illustrious Gasparo Contarini, at the mention of whose name we turn with
+the expectation to hear at least something of the truest and deepest
+which was then thought on such matters. As a type of the happy scholar,
+he mentions Fra Urbano Valeriano of Belluno,[643] who was for years
+teacher of Greek at Venice, who visited Greece and the East, and towards
+the close of his life travelled, now through this country, now through
+that, without ever mounting a horse; who never had a penny of his own,
+rejected all honours and distinctions, and after a gay old age, died in
+his eighty-fourth year, without, if we except a fall from a ladder,
+having ever known an hour of sickness. And what was the difference
+between such a man and the humanists? The latter had more free will,
+more subjectivity, than they could turn to purposes of happiness. The
+mendicant friar, who had lived from his boyhood in the monastery, and
+never eaten or slept except by rule, ceased to feel the compulsion under
+which he lived. Through the power of this habit he led, amid all outward
+hardships, a life of inward peace, by which he impressed his hearers far
+more than by his teaching. Looking at him, they could believe that it
+depends on ourselves whether we bear up against misfortune or surrender
+to it. ‘Amid want and toil he was happy, because he willed to be so,
+because he had contracted no evil habits, was not capricious,
+inconstant, immoderate; but was always contented with little or
+nothing.’ If we heard Contarini himself, religious motives would no
+doubt play a part in the argument--but the practical philosopher in
+sandals speaks plainly enough. An allied character, but placed in other
+circumstances, is that of Fabio Calvi of Ravenna, the commentator of
+Hippocrates.[644] He lived to a great age in Rome, eating only pulse
+‘like the Pythagoreans,’ and dwelt in a hovel little better than the tub
+of Diogenes. Of the pension, which Pope Leo gave him, he spent enough to
+keep body and soul together, and gave the rest away. He was not a
+healthy man, like Fra Urbano, nor is it likely that, like him, he died
+with a smile on his lips. At the age of ninety, in the sack of Rome, he
+was dragged away by the Spaniards, who hoped for a ransom, and died of
+hunger in a hospital. But his name has passed into the kingdom of the
+immortals, for Raphael loved the old man like a father, and honoured him
+as a teacher, and came to him for advice in all things. Perhaps they
+discoursed chiefly of the projected restoration of ancient Rome (p.
+184), perhaps of still higher matters. Who can tell what a share Fabio
+may have had in the conception of the School of Athens, and in other
+great works of the master?
+
+We would gladly close this part of our essay with the picture of some
+pleasing and winning character. Pomponius Laetus, of whom we shall
+briefly speak, is known to us principally through the letter of his
+pupil Sabellicus,[645] in which an antique colouring is purposely given
+to his character. Yet many of its features are clearly recognisable. He
+was (p. 251) a bastard of the House of the Neapolitan Sanseverini,
+princes of Salerno, whom he nevertheless refused to recognise, writing,
+in reply to an invitation to live with them, the famous letter:
+‘Pomponius Laetus cognatis et propinquis suis, salutem. Quod petitis
+fieri non potest. Valete.’ An insignificant little figure, with small,
+quick eyes, and quaint dress, he lived during the last decades of the
+fifteenth century, as professor in the University of Rome, either in his
+cottage in a garden on the Esquiline hill, or in his vineyard on the
+Quirinal. In the one he bred his ducks and fowls; the other he
+cultivated according to the strictest precepts of Cato, Varro, and
+Columella. He spent his holidays in fishing or bird-catching in the
+Campagna, or in feasting by some shady spring or on the banks of the
+Tiber. Wealth and luxury he despised. Free himself from envy and
+uncharitable speech, he would not suffer them in others. It was only
+against the hierarchy that he gave his tongue free play, and passed,
+till his latter years, for a scorner of religion altogether. He was
+involved in the persecution of the humanists begun by Pope Paul II., and
+surrendered to this pontiff by the Venetians; but no means could be
+found to wring unworthy confessions from him. He was afterwards
+befriended and supported by popes and prelates, and when his house was
+plundered in the disturbances under Sixtus IV., more was collected for
+him than he had lost. No teacher was more conscientious. Before daybreak
+he was to be seen descending the Esquiline with his lantern, and on
+reaching his lecture-room found it always filled to overflowing with
+pupils who had come at midnight to secure a place. A stutter compelled
+him to speak with care, but his delivery was even and effective. His few
+works give evidence of careful writing. No scholar treated the text of
+ancient authors more soberly and accurately. The remains of antiquity
+which surrounded him in Rome touched him so deeply, that he would stand
+before them as if entranced, or would suddenly burst into tears at the
+sight of them. As he was ready to lay aside his own studies in order to
+help others, he was much loved and had many friends; and at his death,
+even Alexander VI. sent his courtiers to follow the corpse, which was
+carried by the most distinguished of his pupils. The funeral service in
+the Araceli was attended by forty bishops and by all the foreign
+ambassadors.
+
+It was Laetus who introduced and conducted the representations of
+ancient, chiefly Plautine, plays in Rome (p. 255). Every year, he
+celebrated the anniversary of the foundation of the city by a festival,
+at which his friends and pupils recited speeches and poems. Such
+meetings were the origin of what acquired, and long retained, the name
+of the Roman Academy. It was simply a free union of individuals, and was
+connected with no fixed institution. Besides the occasions mentioned, it
+met[646] at the invitation of a patron, or to celebrate the memory of a
+deceased member, as of Platina. At such times, a prelate belonging to
+the academy would first say mass; Pomponio would then ascend the pulpit
+and deliver a speech; some one else would then follow him and recite an
+elegy. The customary banquet, with declamations and recitations,
+concluded the festival, whether joyous or serious, and the academicians,
+notably Platina himself, early acquired the reputation of epicures.[647]
+At other times, the guests performed farces in the old Atellan style. As
+a free association of very varied elements, the academy lasted in its
+original form down to the sack of Rome, and included among its guests
+Angelus Coloccius, Joh. Corycius (p. 269) and others. Its precise value
+as an element in the intellectual life of the people is as hard to
+estimate as that of any other social union of the same kind; yet a man
+like Sadoleto[648] reckoned it among the most precious memories of his
+youth. A large number of other academies appeared and passed away in
+many Italian cities, according to the number and significance of the
+humanists living in them, and to the patronage bestowed by the great and
+wealthy. Of these we may mention the Academy of Naples, of which
+Jovianus Pontanus was the centre, and which sent out a colony to
+Lecce,[649] and that of Pordenone, which formed the court of the
+Condottiere Alviano. The circle of Ludovico Moro, and its peculiar
+importance for that prince, has been already spoken of (p. 42).
+
+About the middle of the sixteenth century, these associations seem to
+have undergone a complete change. The humanists, driven in other spheres
+from their commanding position, and viewed askance by the men of the
+Counter-reformation, lost the control of the academies: and here, as
+elsewhere, Latin poetry was replaced by Italian. Before long every town
+of the least importance had its academy, with some strange, fantastic
+name,[650] and its own endowment and subscriptions. Besides the
+recitation of verses, the new institutions inherited from their
+predecessors the regular banquets and the representation of plays,
+sometimes acted by the members themselves, sometimes under their
+direction by young amateurs, and sometimes by paid players. The fate of
+the Italian stage, and afterwards of the opera, was long in the hands of
+these associations.
+
+
+
+
+_PART IV._
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+JOURNEYS OF THE ITALIANS.
+
+
+Freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked
+progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and
+been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned
+to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of
+it in speech and in form.
+
+On the journeys of the Italians to distant parts of the world, we can
+here make but a few general observations. The crusades had opened
+unknown distances to the European mind, and awakened in all the passion
+for travel and adventure. It may be hard to indicate precisely the point
+where this passion allied itself with, or became the servant of, the
+thirst for knowledge; but it was in Italy that this was first and most
+completely the case. Even in the crusades the interest of the Italians
+was wider than that of other nations, since they already were a naval
+power and had commercial relations with the East. From time immemorial
+the Mediterranean sea had given to the nations that dwelt on its shores
+mental impulses different from those which governed the peoples of the
+North; and never, from the very structure of their character, could the
+Italians be adventurers in the sense which the word bore among the
+Teutons. After they were once at home in all the eastern harbours of the
+Mediterranean, it was natural that the most enterprising among them
+should be led to join that vast international movement of the
+Mohammedans which there found its outlet. A new half of the world lay,
+as it were, freshly discovered before them. Or, like Polo of Venice,
+they were caught in the current of the Mongolian peoples, and carried on
+to the steps of the throne of the Great Khan. At an early period, we
+find Italians sharing in the discoveries made in the Atlantic ocean; it
+was the Genoese who, in the 13th century, found the Canary
+Islands.[651] In the same year, 1291, when Ptolemais, the last remnant
+of the Christian East, was lost, it was again the Genoese who made the
+first known attempt to find a sea-passage to the East Indies.[652]
+Columbus himself is but the greatest of a long list of Italians who, in
+the service of the western nations, sailed into distant seas. The true
+discoverer, however, is not the man who first chances to stumble upon
+anything, but the man who finds what he has sought. Such a one alone
+stands in a link with the thoughts and interests of his predecessors,
+and this relationship will also determine the account he gives of his
+search. For which reason the Italians, although their claim to be the
+first comers on this or that shore may be disputed, will yet retain
+their title to be pre-eminently the nation of discoverers for the whole
+latter part of the Middle Ages. The fuller proof of this assertion
+belongs to the special history of discoveries.[653] Yet ever and again
+we turn with admiration to the august figure of the great Genoese, by
+whom a new continent beyond the ocean was demanded, sought and found;
+and who was the first to be able to say: ‘il mondo è poco’--the world is
+not so large as men have thought. At the time when Spain gave Alexander
+VI. to the Italians, Italy gave Columbus to the Spaniards. Only a few
+weeks before the death of that pope (July 7th, 1503), Columbus wrote
+from Jamaica his noble letter to the thankless Catholic kings, which the
+ages to come can never read without profound emotion. In a codicil to
+his will, dated Valladolid, May 4th, 1506, he bequeathed to ‘his beloved
+home, the Republic of Genoa, the prayer-book which Pope Alexander had
+given him, and which in prison, in conflict, and in every kind of
+adversity had been to him the greatest of comforts.’ It seems as if
+these words cast upon the abhorred name of Borgia one last gleam of
+grace and mercy.
+
+The development of geographical and the allied sciences among the
+Italians must, like the history of their voyages, be touched upon but
+very briefly. A superficial comparison of their achievements with those
+of other nations shows an early and striking superiority on their part.
+Where, in the middle of the fifteenth century, could be found, anywhere
+but in Italy, such an union of geographical, statistical, and historical
+knowledge as was found in Æneas Sylvius? Not only in his great
+geographical work, but in his letters and commentaries, he describes
+with equal mastery landscapes, cities, manners, industries and products,
+political conditions and constitutions, wherever he can use his own
+observation or the evidence of eye-witnesses. What he takes from books
+is naturally of less moment. Even the short sketch[654] of that valley
+in the Tyrolese Alps, where Frederick III. had given him a benefice, and
+still more his description of Scotland, leaves untouched none of the
+relations of human life, and displays a power and method of unbiassed
+observation and comparison impossible in any but a countryman of
+Columbus, trained in the school of the ancients. Thousands saw and, in
+part, knew what he did, but they felt no impulse to draw a picture of
+it, and were unconscious that the world desired such pictures.
+
+In geography[655] as in other matters, it is vain to attempt to
+distinguish how much is to be attributed to the study of the ancients,
+and how much to the special genius of the Italians. They saw and treated
+the things of this world from an objective point of view, even before
+they were familiar with ancient literature, partly because they were
+themselves a half-ancient people, and partly because their political
+circumstances predisposed them to it; but they would not so rapidly have
+attained to such perfection had not the old geographers showed them the
+way. The influence of the existing Italian geographies on the spirit and
+tendencies of the travellers and discoverers was also inestimable. Even
+the simple ‘dilettante’ of a science--if in the present case we should
+assign to Æneas Sylvius so low a rank--can diffuse just that sort of
+general interest in the subject which prepares for new pioneers the
+indispensable groundwork of a favourable predisposition in the public
+mind. True discoverers in any science know well what they owe to such
+mediation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+NATURAL SCIENCE IN ITALY.
+
+
+For the position of the Italians in the sphere of the natural sciences,
+we must refer the reader to the special treatises on the subject, of
+which the only one with which we are familiar is the superficial and
+depreciatory work of Libri.[656] The dispute as to the priority of
+particular discoveries concerns us all the less, since we hold that, at
+any time, and among any civilised people, a man may appear who, starting
+with very scanty preparation, is driven by an irresistible impulse into
+the path of scientific investigation, and through his native gifts
+achieves the most astonishing success. Such men were Gerbert of Rheims
+and Roger Bacon. That they were masters of the whole knowledge of the
+age in their several departments, was a natural consequence of the
+spirit in which they worked. When once the veil of illusion was torn
+asunder, when once the dread of nature and the slavery to books and
+tradition were overcome, countless problems lay before them for
+solution. It is another matter when a whole people takes a natural
+delight in the study and investigation of nature, at a time when other
+nations are indifferent, that is to say, when the discoverer is not
+threatened or wholly ignored, but can count on the friendly support
+of congenial spirits. That this was the case in Italy, is
+unquestionable.[657] The Italian students of nature trace with pride in
+the ‘Divine Comedy’ the hints and proofs of Dante’s scientific interest
+in nature.[658] On his claim to priority in this or that discovery or
+reference, we must leave the men of science to decide; but every layman
+must be struck by the wealth of his observations on the external world,
+shown merely in his pictures and comparisons. He, more than any other
+modern poet, takes them from reality, whether in nature or human life,
+and uses them, never as mere ornament, but in order to give the reader
+the fullest and most adequate sense of his meaning. It is in astronomy
+that he appears chiefly as a scientific specialist, though it must not
+be forgotten that many astronomical allusions in his great poem, which
+now appear to us learned, must then have been intelligible to the
+general reader. Dante, learning apart, appeals to a popular knowledge of
+the heavens, which the Italians of his day, from the mere fact that they
+were a nautical people, had in common with the ancients. This knowledge
+of the rising and setting of the constellations has been rendered
+superfluous to the modern world by calendars and clocks, and with it has
+gone whatever interest in astronomy the people may once have had.
+Nowadays, with our schools and hand-books, every child knows--what Dante
+did not know--that the earth moves round the sun; but the interest once
+taken in the subject itself has given place, except in the case of
+astronomical specialists, to the most absolute indifference.
+
+The pseudo-science, which also dealt with the stars, proves nothing
+against the inductive spirit of the Italians of that day. That spirit
+was but crossed, and at times overcome, by the passionate desire to
+penetrate the future. We shall recur to the subject of astrology when we
+come to speak of the moral and religious character of the people.
+
+The Church treated this and other pseudo-sciences nearly always with
+toleration; and showed itself actually hostile even to genuine science
+only when a charge of heresy or necromancy was also in question--which
+certainly was often the case. A point which it would be interesting to
+decide is this: whether, and in what cases, the Dominican (and also the
+Franciscan) Inquisitors in Italy, were conscious of the falsehood of the
+charges, and yet condemned the accused, either to oblige some enemy of
+the prisoner or from hatred to natural science, and particularly to
+experiments. The latter doubtless occurred, but it is not easy to prove
+the fact. What helped to cause such persecutions in the North, namely,
+the opposition made to the innovators by the upholders of the received
+official, scholastic system of nature, was of little or no weight in
+Italy. Pietro of Albano, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, is
+well known to have fallen a victim to the envy of another physician, who
+accused him before the Inquisition of heresy and magic;[659] and
+something of the same kind may have happened in the case of his Paduan
+contemporary, Giovannino Sanguinnacci, who was known as an innovator in
+medical practice. He escaped, however, with banishment. Nor must it be
+forgotten that the inquisitorial power of the Dominicans was exercised
+less uniformly in Italy than in the North. Tyrants and free cities in
+the fourteenth century treated the clergy at times with such sovereign
+contempt, that very different matters from natural science went
+unpunished.[660] But when, with the fifteenth century, antiquity became
+the leading power in Italy, the breach it made in the old system was
+turned to account by every branch of secular science. Humanism,
+nevertheless, attracted to itself the best strength of the nation, and
+thereby, no doubt, did injury to the inductive investigation of
+nature.[661] Here and there the Inquisition suddenly started into life,
+and punished or burned physicians as blasphemers or magicians. In such
+cases it is hard to discover what was the true motive underlying the
+condemnation. And after all, Italy, at the close of the fifteenth
+century, with Paolo Toscanelli, Luca Paccioli and Lionardo da Vinci,
+held incomparably the highest place among European nations in
+mathematics and the natural sciences, and the learned men of every
+country, even Regiomontanus and Copernicus, confessed themselves its
+pupils.[662]
+
+A significant proof of the wide-spread interest in natural history is
+found in the zeal which showed itself at an early period for the
+collection and comparative study of plants and animals. Italy claims to
+be the first creator of botanical gardens, though possibly they may have
+served a chiefly practical end, and the claim to priority may be itself
+disputed.[663] It is of far greater importance that princes and wealthy
+men in laying out their pleasure-gardens, instinctively made a point of
+collecting the greatest possible number of different plants in all their
+species and varieties. Thus in the fifteenth century the noble grounds
+of the Medicean Villa Careggi appear from the descriptions we have of
+them to have been almost a botanical garden,[664] with countless
+specimens of different trees and shrubs. Of the same kind was a villa of
+the Cardinal Triulzio, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the
+Roman Campagna towards Tivoli,[665] with hedges made up of various
+species of roses, with trees of every description--the fruit-trees
+especially showing an astonishing variety--with twenty different sorts
+of vines and a large kitchen-garden. This is evidently something very
+different from the score or two of familiar medicinal plants, which were
+to be found in the garden of any castle or monastery in Western Europe.
+Along with a careful cultivation of fruit for the purposes of the table,
+we find an interest in the plant for its own sake, on account of the
+pleasure it gives to the eye. We learn from the history of art at how
+late a period this passion for botanical collections was laid aside, and
+gave place to what was considered the picturesque style of
+landscape-gardening.
+
+The collections, too, of foreign animals not only gratified curiosity,
+but served also the higher purposes of observation. The facility of
+transport from the southern and eastern harbours of the Mediterranean
+and the mildness of the Italian climate, made it practicable to buy the
+largest animals of the south, or to accept them as presents from the
+Sultans.[666] The cities and princes were especially anxious to keep
+live lions, even when the lion was not, as in Florence, the emblem of
+the state.[667] The lions’ den was generally in or near the government
+palace, as in Perugia and Florence; in Rome, it lay on the slope of the
+Capitol. The beasts sometimes served as executioners of political
+judgments,[668] and no doubt, apart from this, they kept alive a certain
+terror in the popular mind. Their condition was also held to be ominous
+of good or evil. Their fertility, especially, was considered a sign of
+public prosperity, and no less a man than Giovanni Villani thought it
+worth recording that he was present at the delivery of a lioness.[669]
+The cubs were often given to allied states and princes, or to
+Condottieri, as a reward of valour.[670] In addition to the lions, the
+Florentines began very early to keep leopards, for which a special
+keeper was appointed.[671] Borso[672] of Ferrara used to set his lions
+to fight with bulls, bears, and wild boars.
+
+By the end of the fifteenth century, however, true menageries
+(serragli), now reckoned part of the suitable appointments of a court,
+were kept by many of the princes. ‘It belongs to the position of the
+great,’ says Matarazzo,[673] ‘to keep horses, dogs, mules, falcons, and
+other birds, court-jesters, singers, and foreign animals.’ The menagerie
+at Naples, in the time of Ferrante and others, contained a giraffe and a
+zebra, presented, it seems, by the ruler of Bagdad.[674] Filippo Maria
+Visconti possessed not only horses which cost him each 500 or 1,000
+pieces of gold, and valuable English dogs, but a number of leopards
+brought from all parts of the East; the expense of his hunting-birds
+which were collected from the countries of Northern Europe, amounted to
+3,000 pieces of gold a month.[675] ‘The Cremonese say that the Emperor
+Frederick II. brought an elephant into their city, sent him from India
+by Prester John,’ we read in Brunetto Latini; Petrarch records the dying
+out of the elephants in Italy.[676] King Emanuel the Great of Portugal
+knew well what he was about when he presented Leo X. with an elephant
+and a rhinoceros.[677] It was under such circumstances that the
+foundations of a scientific zoology and botany were laid.
+
+A practical fruit of these zoological studies was the establishment of
+studs, of which the Mantuan, under Francesco Gonzaga, was esteemed the
+first in Europe.[678] All interest in, and knowledge of the different
+breeds of horses is as old, no doubt, as riding itself, and the
+crossing of the European with the Asiatic must have been common from the
+time of the crusades. In Italy, a special inducement to perfect the
+breed was offered by the prizes at the horse-races held in every
+considerable town in the peninsula. In the Mantuan stables were found
+the infallible winners in these contests, as well as the best military
+chargers, and the horses best suited by their stately appearance for
+presents to great people. Gonzaga kept stallions and mares from Spain,
+Ireland, Africa, Thrace, and Cilicia, and for the sake of the last he
+cultivated the friendship of the Sultan. All possible experiments were
+here tried, in order to produce the most perfect animals.
+
+Even human menageries were not wanting. The famous Cardinal Ippolito
+Medici,[679] bastard of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, kept at his strange
+court a troop of barbarians who talked no less than twenty different
+languages, and who were all of them perfect specimens of their races.
+Among them were incomparable _voltigeurs_ of the best blood of the North
+African Moors, Tartar bowmen, Negro wrestlers, Indian divers, and Turks,
+who generally accompanied the Cardinal on his hunting expeditions. When
+he was overtaken by an early death (1535), this motley band carried the
+corpse on their shoulders from Itri to Rome, and mingled with the
+general mourning for the open-handed Cardinal their medley of tongues
+and violent gesticulations.[680]
+
+These scattered notices of the relations of the Italians to natural
+science, and their interest in the wealth and variety of the products of
+nature, are only fragments of a great subject. No one is more conscious
+than the author of the defects in his knowledge on this point. Of the
+multitude of special works in which the subject is adequately treated,
+even the names are but imperfectly known to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL BEAUTY.
+
+
+But, outside the sphere of scientific investigation, there is another
+way to draw near to nature. The Italians are the first among modern
+peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something
+beautiful.[681]
+
+The power to do so is always the result of a long and complicated
+development, and its origin is not easily detected, since a dim feeling
+of this kind may exist long before it shows itself in poetry and
+painting, and thereby becomes conscious of itself. Among the ancients,
+for example, art and poetry had gone through the whole circle of human
+interests, before they turned to the representation of nature, and even
+then the latter filled always a limited and subordinate place. And yet,
+from the time of Homer downwards, the powerful impression made by nature
+upon man is shown by countless verses and chance expressions. The
+Germanic races, which founded their states on the ruins of the Roman
+Empire, were thoroughly and specially fitted to understand the spirit of
+natural scenery; and though Christianity compelled them for a while to
+see in the springs and mountains, in the lakes and woods, which they had
+till then revered, the working of evil demons, yet this transitional
+conception was soon outgrown. By the year 1200, at the height of the
+Middle Ages, a genuine, hearty enjoyment of the external world was again
+in existence, and found lively expression in the minstrelsy of different
+nations,[682] which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the
+simple phenomena of nature--spring with its flowers, the green fields
+and the woods. But these pictures are all foreground without
+perspective. Even the crusaders, who travelled so far and saw so much,
+are not recognisable as such in these poems. The epic poetry, which
+describes armour and costumes so fully, does not attempt more than a
+sketch of outward nature; and even the great Wolfram von Eschenbach
+scarcely anywhere gives us an adequate picture of the scene on which his
+heroes move. From these poems it would never be guessed that their noble
+authors in all countries inhabited or visited lofty castles, commanding
+distant prospects. Even in the Latin poems of the wandering clerks (p.
+174), we find no traces of a distant view--of landscape properly so
+called--but what lies near is sometimes described with a glow and
+splendour which none of the knightly minstrels can surpass. What picture
+of the Grove of Love can equal that of the Italian poet--for such we
+take him to be--of the twelfth century?
+
+    ‘Immortalis fieret
+     Ibi manens homo;
+     Arbor ibi quaelibet
+     Suo gaudet pomo;
+     Viae myrrha, cinnamo
+     Fragrant, et amomo--
+     Conjectari poterat
+     Dominus ex domo,’[683] etc.
+
+To the Italian mind, at all events, nature had by this time lost its
+taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal powers. Saint
+Francis of Assisi, in his Hymn to the Sun, frankly praises the Lord for
+creating the heavenly bodies and the four elements.
+
+But the unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature on the human
+spirit begin with Dante. Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous
+lines the sense of the morning airs and the trembling light on the
+distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he
+makes the ascent of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of
+enjoying the view[684]--the first man, perhaps, since the days of
+antiquity who did so. In Boccaccio we can do little more than infer how
+country scenery affected him;[685] yet his pastoral romances show his
+imagination to have been filled with it. But the significance of nature
+for a receptive spirit is fully and clearly displayed by Petrarch--one
+of the first truly modern men. That clear soul--who first collected from
+the literature of all countries evidence of the origin and progress of
+the sense of natural beauty, and himself, in his ‘Ansichten der Natur,’
+achieved the noblest masterpiece of description--Alexander von Humboldt,
+has not done full justice to Petrarch; and, following in the steps of
+the great reaper, we may still hope to glean a few ears of interest and
+value.
+
+Petrarch was not only a distinguished geographer--the first map of Italy
+is said to have been drawn by his direction[686]--and not only a
+reproducer of the sayings of the ancients,[687] but felt himself the
+influence of natural beauty. The enjoyment of nature is, for him, the
+favourite accompaniment of intellectual pursuits; it was to combine the
+two that he lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that
+he from time to time fled from the world and from his age.[688] We
+should do him wrong by inferring from his weak and undeveloped power of
+describing natural scenery that he did not feel it deeply. His picture,
+for instance, of the lovely Gulf of Spezzia and Porto Venere, which he
+inserts at the end of the sixth book of the ‘Africa,’ for the reason
+that none of the ancients or moderns had sung of it,[689] is no more
+than a simple enumeration, but the descriptions in letters to his
+friends of Rome, Naples, and other Italian cities in which he willingly
+lingered, are picturesque and worthy of the subject. Petrarch is also
+conscious of the beauty of rock scenery, and is perfectly able to
+distinguish the picturesqueness from the utility of nature.[690] During
+his stay among the woods of Reggio, the sudden sight of an impressive
+landscape so affected him that he resumed a poem which he had long laid
+aside.[691] But the deepest impression of all was made upon him by the
+ascent of Mont Ventoux, near Avignon.[692] An indefinable longing for a
+distant panorama grew stronger and stronger in him, till at length the
+accidental sight of a passage in Livy, where King Philip, the enemy of
+Rome, ascends the Hæmus, decided him. He thought that what was not
+blamed in a grey-headed monarch, might be well _excused_ in a young man
+of private station. The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was
+unheard of, and there could be no thought of the companionship of
+friends or acquaintances. Petrarch took with him only his younger
+brother and two country people from the last place where he halted. At
+the foot of the mountain an old herdsman besought him to turn back,
+saying that he himself had attempted to climb it fifty years before, and
+had brought home nothing but repentance, broken bones, and torn clothes,
+and that neither before nor after had anyone ventured to do the same.
+Nevertheless, they struggled forward and upward, till the clouds lay
+beneath their feet, and at last they reached the top. A description of
+the view from the summit would be looked for in vain, not because the
+poet was insensible to it, but, on the contrary, because the impression
+was too over-whelming. His whole past life, with all its follies, rose
+before his mind; he remembered that ten years ago that day he had
+quitted Bologna a young man, and turned a longing gaze towards his
+native country; he opened a book which then was his constant companion,
+the ‘Confessions of St. Augustine,’ and his eye fell on the passage in
+the tenth chapter, ‘and men go forth, and admire lofty mountains and
+broad seas, and roaring torrents, and the ocean, and the course of the
+stars, and forget their own selves while doing so.’ His brother, to whom
+he read these words, could not understand why he closed the book and
+said no more.
+
+Some decades later, about 1360, Fazio degli Uberti describes in his
+rhyming geography[693] (p. 178), the wide panorama from the mountains of
+Auvergne, with the interest, it is true, of the geographer and
+antiquarian only, but still showing clearly that he himself had seen it.
+He must, however, have ascended far higher peaks, since he is familiar
+with facts which only occur at a height of 10,000 feet or more above the
+sea--mountain-sickness and its accompaniments--of which his imaginary
+comrade Solinus tries to cure him with a sponge dipped in an essence.
+The ascents of Parnassus and Olympus,[694] of which he speaks, are
+perhaps only fictions.
+
+In the fifteenth century, the great masters of the Flemish school,
+Hubert and Johann van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil from nature. Their
+landscapes are not merely the fruit of an endeavour to reflect the real
+world in art, but have, even if expressed conventionally, a certain
+poetical meaning--in short, a soul. Their influence on the whole art of
+the West is undeniable, and extended to the landscape-painting of the
+Italians, but without preventing the characteristic interest of the
+Italian eye for nature from finding its own expression.
+
+On this point, as in the scientific description of nature, Æneas Sylvius
+is again one of the most weighty voices of his time. Even if we grant
+the justice of all that has been said against his character, we must
+nevertheless admit that in few other men was the picture of the age and
+its culture so fully reflected, and that few came nearer to the normal
+type of the men of the early Renaissance. It may be added
+parenthetically, that even in respect to his moral character he will not
+be fairly judged, if we listen solely to the complaints of the German
+Church, which his fickleness helped to baulk of the Council it so
+ardently desired.[695]
+
+He here claims our attention as the first who not only enjoyed the
+magnificence of the Italian landscape, but described it with enthusiasm
+down to its minutest details. The ecclesiastical State and the south of
+Tuscany--his native home--he knew thoroughly, and after he became pope
+he spent his leisure during the favourable season chiefly in excursions
+to the country. Then at last the gouty man was rich enough to have
+himself carried in a litter through the mountains and valleys; and when
+we compare his enjoyments with those of the popes who succeeded him,
+Pius, whose chief delight was in nature, antiquity, and simple, but
+noble, architecture, appears almost a saint. In the elegant and flowing
+Latin of his ‘Commentaries’ he freely tells us of his happiness.[696]
+
+His eye seems as keen and practised as that of any modern observer. He
+enjoys with rapture the panoramic splendour of the view from the summit
+of the Alban Hills--from the Monte Cavo--whence he could see the shores
+of St. Peter from Terracina and the promontory of Circe as far as Monte
+Argentaro, and the wide expanse of country round about, with the ruined
+cities of the past, and with the mountain-chains of central Italy
+beyond; and then his eye would turn to the green woods in the hollows
+beneath and the mountain-lakes among them. He feels the beauty of the
+position of Todi, crowning the vineyards and olive-clad slopes, looking
+down upon distant woods and upon the valley of the Tiber, where towns
+and castles rise above the winding river. The lovely hills about Siena,
+with villas and monasteries on every height, are his own home, and his
+descriptions of them are touched with a peculiar feeling. Single
+picturesque glimpses charm him too, like the little promontory of Capo
+di Monte that stretches out into the Lake of Bolsena. ‘Rocky steps,’ we
+read, ‘shaded by vines, descend to the water’s edge, where the evergreen
+oaks stand between the cliffs, alive with the song of thrushes.’ On the
+path round the Lake of Nemi, beneath the chestnuts and fruit-trees, he
+feels that here, if anywhere, a poet’s soul must awake--here in the
+hiding-place of Diana! He often held consistories or received
+ambassadors under huge old chestnut-trees, or beneath the olives on the
+green sward by some gurgling spring. A view like that of a narrowing
+gorge, with a bridge arched boldly over it, awakens at once his artistic
+sense. Even the smallest details give him delight through something
+beautiful, or perfect, or characteristic in them--the blue fields of
+waving flax, the yellow gorse which covers the hills, even tangled
+thickets, or single trees, or springs, which seem to him like wonders of
+nature.
+
+The height of his enthusiasm for natural beauty was reached during his
+stay on Monte Amiata, in the summer of 1462, when plague and heat made
+the lowlands uninhabitable. Half-way up the mountain, in the old Lombard
+monastery of San Salvatore, he and his court took up their quarters.
+There, between the chestnuts which clothe the steep declivity, the eye
+may wander over all southern Tuscany, with the towers of Siena in the
+distance. The ascent of the highest peak he left to his companions, who
+were joined by the Venetian envoy; they found at the top two vast blocks
+of stone one upon the other--perhaps the sacrificial altar of a
+pre-historical people--and fancied that in the far distance they saw
+Corsica and Sardinia[697] rising above the sea. In the cool air of the
+hills, among the old oaks and chestnuts, on the green meadows where
+there were no thorns to wound the feet, and no snakes or insects to hurt
+or to annoy, the pope passed days of unclouded happiness. For the
+‘Segnatura,’ which took place on certain days of the week, he selected
+on each occasion some new shady retreat[698] ‘novas in convallibus
+fontes et novas inveniens umbras, quæ dubiam facerent electionem.’ At
+such times the dogs would perhaps start a great stag from his lair, who,
+after defending himself a while with hoofs and antlers, would fly at
+last up the mountain. In the evening the pope was accustomed to sit
+before the monastery on the spot from which the whole valley of the
+Paglia was visible, holding lively conversations with the cardinals. The
+courtiers, who ventured down from the heights on their hunting
+expeditions, found the heat below intolerable, and the scorched plains
+like a very hell, while the monastery, with its cool, shady woods,
+seemed like an abode of the blessed.
+
+All this is genuine modern enjoyment, not a reflection of antiquity. As
+surely as the ancients themselves felt in the same manner, so surely,
+nevertheless, were the scanty expressions of the writers whom Pius knew
+insufficient to awaken in him such enthusiasm.[699]
+
+The second great age of Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of
+the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, as well as
+the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful
+effect of nature on the human mind. The first glance at the lyric poets
+of that time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is
+true, of natural scenery, are very rare, for the reason that, in this
+energetic age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something
+else to deal with. Bojardo and Ariosto paint nature vigorously, but as
+briefly as possible, and with no effort to appeal by their descriptions
+to the feelings of the reader,[700] which they endeavour to reach solely
+by their narrative and characters. Letter-writers and the authors of
+philosophical dialogues are, in fact, better evidence of the growing
+love of nature than the poets. The novelist Bandello, for example,
+observes rigorously the rules of his department of literature; he gives
+us in his novels themselves not a word more than is necessary on the
+natural scenery amid which the action of his tales takes place,[701] but
+in the dedications which always precede them we meet with charming
+descriptions of nature as the setting for his dialogues and social
+pictures. Among letter-writers, Aretino[702] unfortunately must be named
+as the first who has fully painted in words the splendid effect of light
+and shadow in an Italian sunset.
+
+We sometimes find the feeling of the poets, also, attaching itself with
+tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito Strozza, about the
+year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy[703] the dwelling of his mistress.
+We are shown an old ivy-clad house, half hidden in trees, and adorned
+with weather-stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel, much
+damaged by the violence of the river Po, which flowed hard by; not far
+off, the priest ploughs his few barren roods with borrowed cattle. This
+is no reminiscence of the Roman elegists, but true modern sentiment; and
+the parallel to it--a sincere, unartificial description of country life
+in general--will be found at the end of this part of our work.
+
+It may be objected that the German painters at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century succeed in representing with perfect mastery these
+scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht Dürer, in his
+engraving of the Prodigal Son.[704] But it is one thing if a painter,
+brought up in a school of realism, introduces such scenes, and quite
+another thing if a poet, accustomed to an ideal or mythological
+framework, is driven by inward impulse into realism. Besides which,
+priority in point of time is here, as in the descriptions of country
+life, on the side of the Italian poets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF MAN. SPIRITUAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY.
+
+
+To the discovery of the outward world the Renaissance added a still
+greater achievement, by first discerning and bringing to light the full,
+whole nature of man.[705]
+
+This period, as we have seen, first gave the highest development to
+individuality, and then led the individual to the most zealous and
+thorough study of himself in all forms and under all conditions. Indeed,
+the development of personality is essentially involved in the
+recognition of it in oneself and in others. Between these two great
+processes our narrative has placed the influence of ancient literature,
+because the mode of conceiving and representing both the individual and
+human nature in general was defined and coloured by that influence. But
+the power of conception and representation lay in the age and in the
+people.
+
+The facts which we shall quote in evidence of our thesis will be few in
+number. Here, if anywhere in the course of this discussion, the author
+is conscious that he is treading on the perilous ground of conjecture,
+and that what seems to him a clear, if delicate and gradual, transition
+in the intellectual movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
+may not be equally plain to others. The gradual awakening of the soul of
+a people is a phenomenon which may produce a different impression on
+each spectator. Time will judge which impression is the most faithful.
+
+Happily the study of the intellectual side of human nature began, not
+with the search after a theoretical psychology--for that, Aristotle
+still sufficed--but with the endeavour to observe and to describe. The
+indispensable ballast of theory was limited to the popular doctrine of
+the four temperaments, in its then habitual union with the belief in the
+influence of the planets. Such conceptions may remain ineradicable in
+the minds of individuals, without hindering the general progress of the
+age. It certainly makes on us a singular impression, when we meet them
+at a time when human nature in its deepest essence and in all its
+characteristic expressions was not only known by exact observation, but
+represented by an immortal poetry and art. It sounds almost ludicrous
+when an otherwise competent observer considers Clement VII. to be of a
+melancholy temperament, but defers his judgment to that of the
+physicians, who declare the pope of a sanguine-choleric nature;[706] or
+when we read that the same Gaston de Foix, the victor of Ravenna, whom
+Giorgione painted and Bambaja carved, and whom all the historians
+describe, had the saturnine temperament.[707] No doubt those who use
+these expressions mean something by them; but the terms in which they
+tell us their meaning are strangely out of date in the Italy of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+As examples of the free delineation of the human spirit, we shall first
+speak of the great poets of the fourteenth century.
+
+If we were to collect the pearls from the courtly and knightly poetry of
+all the countries of the West during the two preceding centuries, we
+should have a mass of wonderful divinations and single pictures of the
+inward life, which at first sight would seem to rival the poetry of the
+Italians. Leaving lyrical poetry out of account, Godfrey of Strasburg
+gives us, in ‘Tristram and Isolt,’ a representation of human passion,
+some features of which are immortal. But these pearls lie scattered in
+the ocean of artificial convention, and they are altogether something
+very different from a complete objective picture of the inward man and
+his spiritual wealth.
+
+Italy, too, in the thirteenth century had, through the ‘Trovatori,’ its
+share in the poetry of the courts and of chivalry. To them is mainly due
+the ‘Canzone,’ whose construction is as difficult and artificial as that
+of the songs of any northern minstrel. Their subject and mode of thought
+represents simply the conventional tone of the courts, be the poet a
+burgher or a scholar.
+
+But two new paths at length showed themselves, along which Italian
+poetry could advance to another and a characteristic future. They are
+not the less important for being concerned only with the formal and
+external side of the art.
+
+To the same Brunetto Latini--the teacher of Dante--who, in his
+‘Canzoni,’ adopts the customary manner of the ‘Trovatori,’ we owe the
+first-known ‘Versi Sciolti,’ or blank hendecasyllabic verses,[708] and
+in his apparent absence of form, a true and genuine passion suddenly
+showed itself. The same voluntary renunciation of outward effect,
+through confidence in the power of the inward conception, can be
+observed some years later in fresco-painting, and later still in
+painting of all kinds, which began to cease to rely on colour for its
+effect, using simply a lighter or darker shade. For an age which laid so
+much stress on artificial form in poetry, these verses of Brunetto mark
+the beginning of a new epoch.[709]
+
+About the same time, or even in the first half of the thirteenth
+century, one of the many strictly-balanced forms of metre, in which
+Europe was then so fruitful, became a normal and recognised form in
+Italy--the sonnet. The order of rhymes and even the number of the lines
+varied for a whole century,[710] till Petrarch fixed them permanently.
+In this form all higher lyrical or meditative subjects, and at a later
+time subjects of every possible description, were treated, and the
+madrigals, the sestine, and even the ‘Canzoni’ were reduced to a
+subordinate place. Later Italian writers complain, half jestingly, half
+resentfully, of this inevitable mould, this Procrustean bed, to which
+they were compelled to make their thoughts and feelings fit. Others
+were, and still are, quite satisfied with this particular form of verse,
+which they freely use to express any personal reminiscence or idle
+sing-song without necessity or serious purpose. For which reason there
+are many more bad or insignificant sonnets than good ones.
+
+Nevertheless, the sonnet must be held to have been an unspeakable
+blessing for Italian poetry. The clearness and beauty of its structure,
+the invitation it gave to elevate the thought in the second and more
+rapidly moving half, and the ease with which it could be learned by
+heart, made it valued even by the greatest masters. In fact, they would
+not have kept it in use down to our own century, had they not been
+penetrated with a sense of its singular worth. These masters could have
+given us the same thoughts in other and wholly different forms. But when
+once they had made the sonnet the normal type of lyrical poetry, many
+other writers of great, if not the highest, gifts, who otherwise would
+have lost themselves in a sea of diffusiveness, were forced to
+concentrate their feelings. The sonnet became for Italian literature a
+condenser of thoughts and emotions such as was possessed by the poetry
+of no other modern people.
+
+Thus the world of Italian sentiment comes before us in a series of
+pictures, clear, concise, and most effective in their brevity. Had other
+nations possessed a form of expression of the same kind, we should
+perhaps have known more of their inward life; we might have had a number
+of pictures of inward and outward situations--reflexions of the national
+character and temper--and should not be dependent for such knowledge on
+the so-called lyrical poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
+who can hardly ever be read with any serious enjoyment. In Italy we can
+trace an undoubted progress from the time when the sonnet came into
+existence. In the second half of the thirteenth century the ‘Trovatori
+della transizione,’ as they have been recently named,[711] mark the
+passage from the Troubadours to the poets--that is, to those who wrote
+under the influence of antiquity. The simplicity and strength of their
+feeling, the vigorous delineation of fact, the precise expression and
+rounding off of their sonnets and other poems, herald the coming of a
+Dante. Some political sonnets of the Guelphs and Ghibellines (1260-1270)
+have about them the ring of his passion, and others remind us of his
+sweetest lyrical notes.
+
+Of his own theoretical view of the sonnet, we are unfortunately
+ignorant, since the last books of his work, ‘De vulgari eloquio,’ in
+which he proposed to treat of ballads and sonnets, either remained
+unwritten or have been lost. But, as a matter of fact, he has left us in
+his Sonnets and ‘Canzoni,’ a treasure of inward experience. And in what
+a framework he has set them! The prose of the ‘Vita Nuova,’ in which he
+gives an account of the origin of each poem, is as wonderful as the
+verses themselves, and forms with them a uniform whole, inspired with
+the deepest glow of passion. With unflinching frankness and sincerity he
+lays bare every shade of his joy and his sorrow, and moulds it
+resolutely into the strictest forms of art. Reading attentively these
+Sonnets and ‘Canzoni,’ and the marvellous fragments of the diary of his
+youth which lie between them, we fancy that throughout the Middle Ages
+the poets have been purposely fleeing from themselves, and that he was
+the first to seek his own soul. Before his time we meet with many an
+artistic verse; but he is the first artist in the full sense of the
+word--the first who consciously cast immortal matter into an immortal
+form. Subjective feeling has here a full objective truth and greatness,
+and most of it is so set forth that all ages and peoples can make it
+their own.[712] Where he writes in a thoroughly objective spirit, and
+lets the force of his sentiment be guessed at only by some outward fact,
+as in the magnificent sonnets ‘Tanto gentile,’ etc., and ‘Vedi
+perfettamente,’ etc., he seems to feel the need of excusing
+himself.[713] The most beautiful of these poems really belongs to this
+class--the ‘Deh peregrini che pensosi andate.’
+
+Even apart from the ‘Divine Comedy,’ Dante would have marked by these
+youthful poems the boundary between mediævalism and modern times. The
+human spirit had taken a mighty step towards the consciousness of its
+own secret life.
+
+The revelations in this matter which are contained in the ‘Divine
+Comedy’ itself are simply immeasurable; and it would be necessary to go
+through the whole poem, one canto after another, in order to do justice
+to its value from this point of view. Happily we have no need to do
+this, as it has long been a daily food of all the countries of the West.
+Its plan, and the ideas on which it is based, belong to the Middle Ages,
+and appeal to our interest only historically; but it is nevertheless the
+beginning of all modern poetry, through the power and richness shown in
+the description of human nature in every shape and attitude.[714]
+
+From this time forwards poetry may have experienced unequal fortunes,
+and may show, for half a century together, a so-called relapse. But its
+nobler and more vital principle was saved for ever; and whenever in the
+fourteenth, fifteenth, and in the beginning of the sixteenth centuries,
+an original mind devotes himself to it, he represents a more advanced
+stage than any poet out of Italy, given--what is certainly not always
+easy to settle satisfactorily--an equality of natural gifts to start
+with.
+
+Here, as in other things, in Italy, culture--to which poetry
+belongs--precedes the plastic arts and, in fact, gives them their chief
+impulse. More than a century elapsed before the spiritual element in
+painting and sculpture attained a power of expression in any way
+analogous to that of the ‘Divine Comedy.’ How far the same rule holds
+good for the artistic development of other nations,[715] and of what
+importance the whole question may be, does not concern us here. For
+Italian civilisation it is of decisive weight.
+
+The position to be assigned to Petrarch in this respect must be settled
+by the many readers of the poet. Those who come to him in the spirit of
+a cross-examiner, and busy themselves in detecting the contradictions
+between the poet and the man, his infidelities in love, and the other
+weak sides of his character, may perhaps, after sufficient effort, end
+by losing all taste for his poetry. In place, then, of artistic
+enjoyment, we may acquire a knowledge of the man in his ‘totality.’ What
+a pity that Petrarch’s letters from Avignon contain so little gossip to
+take hold of, and that the letters of his acquaintances and of the
+friends of these acquaintances have either been lost or never existed!
+Instead of Heaven being thanked when we are not forced to enquire how
+and through what struggles a poet has rescued something immortal from
+his own poor life and lot, a biography has been stitched together for
+Petrarch out of these so-called ‘remains,’ which reads like an
+indictment. But the poet may take comfort. If the printing and editing
+of the correspondence of celebrated people goes on for another
+half-century as it has begun in England and Germany, he will have
+illustrious company enough sitting with him on the stool of repentance.
+
+Without shutting our eyes to much that is forced and artificial in his
+poetry, where the writer is merely imitating himself and singing on in
+the old strain, we cannot fail to admire the marvellous abundance of
+pictures of the inmost soul--descriptions of moments of joy and sorrow
+which must have been thoroughly his own, since no one before him gives
+us anything of the kind, and on which his significance rests for his
+country and for the world. His verse is not in all places equally
+transparent; by the side of his most beautiful thoughts, stand at times
+some allegorical conceit, or some sophistical trick of logic, altogether
+foreign to our present taste. But the balance is on the side of
+excellence.
+
+Boccaccio, too, in his imperfectly-known Sonnets,[716] succeeds
+sometimes in giving a most powerful and effective picture of his
+feeling. The return to a spot consecrated by love (Son. 22), the
+melancholy of spring (Son. 33), the sadness of the poet who feels
+himself growing old (Son. 65), are admirably treated by him. And in the
+‘Ameto’ he has described the ennobling and transfiguring power of love
+in a manner which would hardly be expected from the author of the
+‘Decamerone.’[717] In the ‘Fiammetta’ we have another great and
+minutely-painted picture of the human soul, full of the keenest
+observation, though executed with anything but uniform power, and in
+parts marred by the passion for high-sounding language and by an unlucky
+mixture of mythological allusions and learned quotations. The
+‘Fiammetta,’ if we are not mistaken, is a sort of feminine counterpart
+to the ‘Vita Nuova’ of Dante, or at any rate owes its origin to it.
+
+That the ancient poets, particularly the elegists, and Virgil, in the
+fourth book of the Æneid, were not without influence[718] on the
+Italians of this and the following generation is beyond a doubt; but the
+spring of sentiment within the latter was nevertheless powerful and
+original. If we compare them in this respect with their contemporaries
+in other countries, we shall find in them the earliest complete
+expression of modern European feeling. The question, be it remembered,
+is not to know whether eminent men of other nations did not feel as
+deeply and as nobly, but who first gave documentary proof of the widest
+knowledge of the movements of the human heart.
+
+Why did the Italians of the Renaissance do nothing above the second rank
+in tragedy? That was the field on which to display human character,
+intellect, and passion, in the thousand forms of their growth, their
+struggles, and their decline. In other words: why did Italy produce no
+Shakespeare? For with the stage of other northern countries besides
+England the Italians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had no
+reason to fear a comparison; and with the Spaniards they could not enter
+into competition, since Italy had long lost all traces of religious
+fanaticism, treated the chivalrous code of honour only as a form, and
+was both too proud and too intelligent to bow down before its tyrannical
+and illegitimate masters.[719] We have therefore only to consider the
+English stage in the period of its brief splendour.
+
+It is an obvious reply that all Europe produced but one Shakespeare, and
+that such a mind is the rarest of Heaven’s gifts. It is further possible
+that the Italian stage was on the way to something great when the
+Counter-reformation broke in upon it, and, aided by the Spanish rule
+over Naples and Milan, and indirectly over the whole peninsula, withered
+the best flowers of the Italian spirit. It would be hard to conceive of
+Shakespeare himself under a Spanish viceroy, or in the neighbourhood of
+the Holy Inquisition at Rome, or even in his own country a few decades
+later, at the time of the English Revolution. The stage, which in its
+perfection is a late product of every civilisation, must wait for its
+own time and fortune.
+
+We must not, however, quit this subject without mentioning certain
+circumstances, which were of a character to hinder or retard a high
+development of the drama in Italy, till the time for it had gone by.
+
+As the most weighty of these causes we must mention without doubt that
+the scenic tastes of the people were occupied elsewhere, and chiefly in
+the mysteries and religious processions. Throughout all Europe dramatic
+representations of sacred history and legend form the origin of the
+secular drama; but Italy, as it will be shown more fully in the sequel,
+had spent on the mysteries such a wealth of decorative splendour as
+could not but be unfavourable to the dramatic element. Out of all the
+countless and costly representations, there sprang not even a branch of
+poetry like the ‘Autos Sagramentales’ of Calderon and other Spanish
+poets, much less any advantage or foundation for the legitimate
+drama.[720]
+
+And when the latter did at length appear, it at once gave itself up to
+magnificence of scenic effects, to which the mysteries had already
+accustomed the public taste to far too great an extent. We learn with
+astonishment how rich and splendid the scenes in Italy were, at a time
+when in the North the simplest indication of the place was thought
+sufficient. This alone might have had no such unfavourable effect on the
+drama, if the attention of the audience had not been drawn away from the
+poetical conception of the play partly by the splendour of the costumes,
+partly and chiefly by fantastic interludes (Intermezzi).
+
+That in many places, particularly in Rome and Ferrara, Plautus and
+Terence, as well as pieces by the old tragedians, were given in Latin or
+in Italian (pp. 242, 255), that the academies (p. 280) of which we have
+already spoken, made this one of their chief objects, and that the poets
+of the Renaissance followed these models too servilely, were all
+untoward conditions for the Italian stage at the period in
+question. Yet I hold them to be of secondary importance. Had not the
+Counter-reformation and the rule of foreigners intervened, these very
+disadvantages might have been turned into useful means of transition. At
+all events, by the year 1520 the victory of the mother-tongue in tragedy
+and comedy was, to the great disgust of the humanists, as good as
+won.[721] On this side, then, no obstacle stood in the way of the most
+developed people in Europe, to hinder them from raising the drama, in
+its noblest forms, to be a true reflexion of human life and destiny. It
+was the Inquisitors and Spaniards who cowed the Italian spirit, and
+rendered impossible the representation of the greatest and most sublime
+themes, most of all when they were associated with patriotic memories.
+At the same time, there is no doubt that the distracting ‘Intermezzi’
+did serious harm to the drama. We must now consider them a little more
+closely.
+
+When the marriage of Alfonso of Ferrara with Lucrezia Borgia was
+celebrated, Duke Hercules in person showed his illustrious guests the
+110 costumes which were to serve at the representation of five comedies
+of Plautus, in order that all might see that not one of them was used
+twice.[722] But all this display of silk and camlet was nothing to the
+ballets and pantomimes which served as interludes between the acts of
+the Plautine dramas. That in comparison, Plautus himself seemed mortally
+dull to a lively young lady like Isabella Gonzaga, and that while the
+play was going on everybody was longing for the interludes, is quite
+intelligible, when we think of the picturesque brilliancy with which
+they were put on the stage. There were to be seen combats of Roman
+warriors, who brandished their weapons to the sound of music,
+torch-dances executed by Moors, a dance of savages with horns of plenty,
+out of which streamed waves of fire--all as the ballet of a pantomime in
+which a maiden was delivered from a dragon. Then came a dance of fools,
+got up as punches, beating one another with pigs’ bladders, with more of
+the same kind. At the Court of Ferrara they never gave a comedy without
+‘its’ ballet (Moresca).[723] In what style the ‘Amphitryo’ of Plautus
+was there represented (1491, at the first marriage of Alfonso with Anna
+Sforza), is doubtful. Possibly it was given rather as a pantomime with
+music, than as a drama.[724] In any case, the accessories were more
+considerable than the play itself. There was a choral dance of ivy-clad
+youths, moving in intricate figures, done to the music of a ringing
+orchestra; then came Apollo, striking the lyre with the plectrum, and
+singing an ode to the praise of the House of Este; then followed, as an
+interlude within an interlude, a kind of rustic farce, after which the
+stage was again occupied by classical mythology--Venus, Bacchus and
+their followers--and by a pantomime representing the judgment of Paris.
+Not till then was the second half of the fable of Amphitryo performed,
+with unmistakable references to the future birth of a Hercules of the
+House of Este. At a former representation of the same piece in the
+courtyard of the palace (1487), ‘a paradise with stars and other
+wheels,’ was constantly burning, by which is probably meant an
+illumination with fireworks, that, no doubt, absorbed most of the
+attention of the spectators. It was certainly better when such
+performances were given separately, as was the case at other courts. We
+shall have to speak of the entertainments given by the Cardinal Pietro
+Riario, by the Bentivogli at Bologna, and by others, when we come to
+treat of the festivals in general.
+
+This scenic magnificence, now become universal, had a disastrous effect
+on Italian tragedy. ‘In Venice formerly,’ writes Francesco
+Sansovino,[725] ‘besides comedies, tragedies by ancient and modern
+writers were put on the stage with great pomp. The fame of the scenic
+arrangements (_apparati_) brought spectators from far and near.
+Nowadays, performances are given by private individuals in their own
+houses, and the custom has long been fixed of passing the carnival in
+comedies and other cheerful entertainments.’ In other words, scenic
+display had helped to kill tragedy.
+
+The various starts or attempts of these modern tragedians, among which
+the ‘Sofonisba’ of Trissino was the most celebrated, belong to the
+history of literature. The same may be said of genteel comedy, modelled
+on Plautus and Terence. Even Ariosto could do nothing of the first
+order in this style. On the other hand, popular prose-comedy, as treated
+by Macchiavelli, Bibiena, and Aretino, might have had a future, if its
+matter had not condemned it to destruction. This was, on the one hand,
+licentious to the last degree, and on the other, aimed at certain
+classes in society, which, after the middle of the sixteenth century,
+ceased to afford a ground for public attacks. If in the ‘Sofonisba’ the
+portrayal of character gave place to brilliant declamation, the latter,
+with its half-sister caricature, was used far too freely in comedy also.
+Nevertheless, these Italian comedies, if we are not mistaken, were the
+first written in prose and copied from real life, and for this reason
+deserve mention in the history of European literature.
+
+The writing of tragedies and comedies, and the practice of putting both
+ancient and modern plays on the stage, continued without intermission;
+but they served only as occasions for display. The national genius
+turned elsewhere for living interest. When the opera and the pastoral
+fable came up, these attempts were at length wholly abandoned.
+
+One form of comedy only was and remained national--the unwritten,
+improvised ‘Commedia dell’Arte.’ It was of no great service in the
+delineation of character, since the masks used were few in number and
+familiar to everybody. But the talent of the nation had such an affinity
+for this style, that often in the middle of written comedies the actors
+would throw themselves on their own inspiration,[726] so that a new
+mixed form of comedy came into existence in some places. The plays given
+in Venice by Burchiello, and afterwards by the company of Armonio, Val.
+Zuccato, Lod. Dolce, and others, were perhaps of this character.[727] Of
+Burchiello we know expressly that he used to heighten the comic effect
+by mixing Greek and Sclavonic words with the Venetian dialect. A
+complete ‘Commedia dell’Arte,’ or very nearly so, was represented by
+Angelo Beolco, known as ‘Il Ruzzante’ (1502-1542), who enjoyed the
+highest reputation as poet and actor, was compared as poet to Plautus,
+and as actor to Roscius, and who formed a company with several of his
+friends, who appeared in his pieces as Paduan peasants, with the names
+Menato, Vezzo, Billora, &c. He studied their dialect when spending the
+summer at the villa of his patron Luigi Cornaro (Aloysius Cornelius) at
+Codevico.[728] Gradually all the famous local masks made their
+appearance, whose remains still delight the Italian populace at our day:
+Pantalone, the Doctor, Brighella, Pulcinella, Arlecchino, and the rest.
+Most of them are of great antiquity, and possibly are historically
+connected with the masks in the old Roman farces; but it was not till
+the sixteenth century that several of them were combined in one piece.
+At the present time this is less often the case; but every great city
+still keeps to its local mask--Naples to the Pulcinella, Florence to the
+Stentorello, Milan to its often so admirable Meneghino.[729]
+
+This is indeed scanty compensation for a people which possessed the
+power, perhaps to a greater degree than any other, to reflect and
+contemplate its own highest qualities in the mirror of the drama. But
+this power was destined to be marred for centuries by hostile forces,
+for whose predominance the Italians were only in part responsible. The
+universal talent for dramatic representation could not indeed be
+uprooted, and in music Italy long made good its claim to supremacy in
+Europe. Those who can find in this world of sound a compensation for the
+drama, to which all future was denied, have, at all events, no meagre
+source of consolation.
+
+But perhaps we can find in epic poetry what the stage fails to offer us.
+Yet the chief reproach made against the heroic poetry of Italy is
+precisely on the score of the insignificance and imperfect
+representation of its characters.
+
+Other merits are allowed to belong to it, among the rest, that for three
+centuries it has been actually read and constantly reprinted, while
+nearly the whole of the epic poetry of other nations has become a mere
+matter of literary or historical curiosity. Does this perhaps lie in the
+taste of the readers, who demand something different from what would
+satisfy a northern public? Certainly, without the power of entering to
+some degree into Italian sentiment, it is impossible to appreciate the
+characteristic excellence of these poems, and many distinguished men
+declare that they can make nothing of them. And in truth, if we
+criticise Pulci, Bojardo, Ariosto, and Berni solely with an eye to their
+thought and matter, we shall fail to do them justice. They are artists
+of a peculiar kind, who write for a people which is distinctly and
+eminently artistic.
+
+The mediæval legends had lived on after the gradual extinction of the
+poetry of chivalry, partly in the form of rhyming adaptations and
+collections, and partly of novels in prose. The latter was the case in
+Italy during the fourteenth century; but the newly-awakened memories of
+antiquity were rapidly growing up to a gigantic size, and soon cast into
+the shade all the fantastic creations of the Middle Ages. Boccaccio, for
+example, in his ‘Visione Amorosa,’ names among the heroes in his
+enchanted palace Tristram, Arthur, Galeotto, and others, but briefly, as
+if he were ashamed to speak of them (p. 206); and following writers
+either do not name them at all, or name them only for purposes of
+ridicule. But the people kept them in its memory, and from the people
+they passed into the hands of the poets of the fifteenth century. These
+were now able to conceive and represent their subject in a wholly new
+manner. But they did more. They introduced into it a multitude of fresh
+elements, and in fact recast it from beginning to end. It must not be
+expected of them that they should treat such subjects with the respect
+once felt for them. All other countries must envy them the advantage of
+having a popular interest of this kind to appeal to; but they could not
+without hypocrisy treat these myths with any respect.[730]
+
+Instead of this, they moved with victorious freedom in the new field
+which poetry had won. What they chiefly aimed at seems to have been that
+their poems, when recited, should produce the most harmonious and
+exhilarating effect. These works indeed gain immensely when they are
+repeated, not as a whole, but piecemeal, and with a slight touch of
+comedy in voice and gesture. A deeper and more detailed portrayal of
+character would do little to enhance this effect; though the reader may
+desire it, the hearer, who sees the rhapsodist standing before him, and
+who hears only one piece at a time, does not think about it at all. With
+respect to the figures which the poet found ready made for him, his
+feeling was of a double kind; his humanistic culture protested against
+their mediæval character, and their combats as counterparts of the
+battles and tournaments of the poet’s own age exercised all his
+knowledge and artistic power, while at the same time they called forth
+all the highest qualities in the reciter. Even in Pulci,[731]
+accordingly, we find no parody, strictly speaking, of chivalry, nearly
+as the rough humour of his paladins at times approaches it. By their
+side stands the ideal of pugnacity--the droll and jovial Morgante--who
+masters whole armies with his bell-clapper, and who is himself thrown
+into relief by contrast with the grotesque and most interesting monster
+Margutte. Yet Pulci lays no special stress on these two rough and
+vigorous characters, and his story, long after they had disappeared from
+it, maintains its singular course. Bojardo[732] treats his characters
+with the same mastery, using them for serious or comic purposes as he
+pleases; he has his fun even out of supernatural beings, whom he
+sometimes intentionally depicts as louts. But there is one artistic aim
+which he pursues as earnestly as Pulci, namely, the lively and exact
+description of all that goes forward. Pulci recited his poem, as one
+book after another was finished, before the society of Lorenzo
+Magnifico, and in the same way Bojardo recited his at the court of
+Hercules of Ferrara. It may be easily imagined what sort of excellence
+such an audience demanded, and how little thanks a profound exposition
+of character would have earned for the poet. Under these circumstances
+the poems naturally formed no complete whole, and might just as well be
+half or twice as long as they now are. Their composition is not that of
+a great historical picture, but rather that of a frieze, or of some rich
+festoon entwined among groups of picturesque figures. And precisely as
+in the figures or tendrils of a frieze we do not look for minuteness of
+execution in the individual forms, or for distant perspectives and
+different planes, so we must as little expect anything of the kind from
+these poems.
+
+The varied richness of invention which continually astonishes us, most
+of all in the case of Bojardo, turns to ridicule all our school
+definitions as to the essence of epic poetry. For that age, this form of
+literature was the most agreeable diversion from archæological studies,
+and, indeed, the only possible means of re-establishing an independent
+class of narrative poetry. For the versification of ancient history
+could only lead to the false tracks which were trodden by Petrarch in
+his ‘Africa,’ written in Latin hexameters, and a hundred and fifty years
+later by Trissino in his ‘Italy delivered from the Goths,’ composed in
+‘versi sciolti’--a never-ending poem of faultless language and
+versification, which only makes us doubt whether an unlucky alliance has
+been most disastrous to history or to poetry.[733]
+
+And whither did the example of Dante beguile those who imitated him? The
+visionary ‘Trionfi’ of Petrarch were the last of the works written under
+this influence which satisfy our taste. The ‘Amorosa Visione’ of
+Boccaccio is at bottom no more than an enumeration of historical or
+fabulous characters, arranged under allegorical categories.[734] Others
+preface what they have to tell with a baroque imitation of Dante’s
+first canto, and provide themselves with some allegorical comparison, to
+take the place of Virgil. Uberti, for example, chose Solinus for his
+geographical poem--the ‘Dittamondo’--and Giovanni Santi, Plutarch for
+his encomium on Frederick of Urbino.[735] The only salvation of the time
+from these false tendencies lay in the new epic poetry which was
+represented by Pulci and Bojardo. The admiration and curiosity with
+which it was received, and the like of which will perhaps never fall
+again to the lot of epic poetry to the end of time, is a brilliant proof
+how great was the need of it. It is idle to ask whether that epic ideal
+which our own day has formed from Homer and the ‘Nibelungenlied’ is or
+is not realised in these works; an ideal of their own age certainly was.
+By their endless descriptions of combats, which to us are the most
+fatiguing part of these poems, they satisfied, as we have already said,
+a practical interest of which it is hard for us to form a just
+conception[736]--as hard, indeed, as of the esteem in which a lively and
+faithful reflection of the passing moment was then held.
+
+Nor can a more inappropriate test be applied to Ariosto than the degree
+in which his ‘Orlando Furioso’[737] serves for the representation of
+character. Characters, indeed, there are, and drawn with an affectionate
+care; but the poem does not depend on these for its effect, and would
+lose, rather than gain, if more stress were laid upon them. But the
+demand for them is part of a wider and more general desire which Ariosto
+fails to satisfy as our day would wish it satisfied. From a poet of such
+fame and such mighty gifts we would gladly receive something better than
+the adventures of Orlando. From him we might have hoped for a work
+expressing the deepest conflicts of the human soul, the highest thoughts
+of his time on human and divine things--in a word, one of those supreme
+syntheses like the ‘Divine Comedy’ or ‘Faust.’ Instead of which he goes
+to work like the plastic artists of his own day, not caring for
+originality in our sense of the word, simply reproducing a familiar
+circle of figures, and even, when it suits his purpose, making use of
+the details left him by his predecessors. The excellence which, in spite
+of all this, can nevertheless be attained, will be the more
+incomprehensible to people born without the artistic sense, the more
+learned and intelligent in other respects they are. The artistic aim of
+Ariosto is brilliant, living action, which he distributes equally
+through the whole of his great poem. For this end he needs to be
+excused, not only from all deeper expression of character, but also from
+maintaining any strict connection in his narrative. He must be allowed
+to take up lost and forgotten threads when and where he pleases; his
+heroes must come and go, not because their character, but because the
+story requires it. Yet in this apparently irrational and arbitrary style
+of composition he displays a harmonious beauty, never losing himself in
+description, but giving only such a sketch of scenes and persons as does
+not hinder the flowing movement of the narrative. Still less does he
+lose himself in conversation and monologue,[738] but maintains the lofty
+privilege of the true epos, by transforming all into living narrative.
+His pathos does not lie in the words,[739] not even in the famous
+twenty-third and following cantos, where Roland’s madness is described.
+That the love-stories in the heroic poem are without all lyrical
+tenderness, must be reckoned a merit, though from a moral point of view
+they cannot be always approved. Yet at times they are of such truth and
+reality, notwithstanding all the magic and romance which surrounds them,
+that we might think them personal affairs of the poet himself. In the
+full consciousness of his own genius, he does not scruple to interweave
+the events of his own day into the poem, and to celebrate the fame of
+the house of Este in visions and prophecies. The wonderful stream of his
+octaves bears it all forwards in even and dignified movement.
+
+With Teofilo Folengo, or, as he here calls himself, Limerno Pitocco, the
+parody of the whole system of chivalry attained the end it had so long
+desired.[740] But here comedy, with its realism, demanded of necessity a
+stricter delineation of character. Exposed to all the rough usage of
+the half-savage street-lads in a Roman country town, Sutri, the little
+Orlando grows up before our eyes into the hero, the priest-hater, and
+the disputant. The conventional world which had been recognised since
+the time of Pulci and had served as framework for the epos, falls here
+to pieces. The origin and position of the paladins is openly ridiculed,
+as in the tournament of donkeys in the second book, where the knights
+appear with the most ludicrous armament. The poet utters his ironical
+regrets over the inexplicable faithlessness which seems implanted in the
+house of Gano of Mainz, over the toilsome acquisition of the sword
+Durindana, and so forth. Tradition, in fact, serves him only as a
+substratum for episodes, ludicrous fancies, allusions to events of the
+time (among which some, like the close of cap. vi. are exceedingly
+fine), and indecent jokes. Mixed with all this, a certain derision of
+Ariosto is unmistakable, and it was fortunate for the ‘Orlando Furioso’
+that the ‘Orlandino,’ with its Lutheran heresies, was soon put out of
+the way by the Inquisition. The parody is evident when (cap. v. str. 28)
+the house of Gonzaga is deduced from the paladin Guidone, since the
+Colonna claimed Orlando, the Orsini Rinaldo, and the house of
+Este--according to Ariosto--Ruggiero as their ancestors. Perhaps
+Ferrante Gonzaga, the patron of the poet, was a party to this sarcasm on
+the house of Este.
+
+That in the ‘Jerusalem Delivered’ of Torquato Tasso the delineation of
+character is one of the chief tasks of the poet, proves only how far his
+mode of thought differed from that prevalent half a century before. His
+admirable work is a true monument of the Counter-reformation which had
+been meanwhile accomplished, and of the spirit and tendency of that
+movement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+BIOGRAPHY.
+
+
+Outside the sphere of poetry also, the Italians were the first of all
+European nations who displayed any remarkable power and inclination
+accurately to describe man as shown in history, according to his inward
+and outward characteristics.
+
+It is true that in the Middle Ages considerable attempts were made in
+the same direction; and the legends of the Church, as a kind of standing
+biographical task, must, to some extent, have kept alive the interest
+and the gift for such descriptions. In the annals of the monasteries and
+cathedrals, many of the churchmen, such as Meinwerk of Paderborn,
+Godehard of Kildesheim, and others, are brought vividly before our eyes;
+and descriptions exist of several of the German emperors, modelled after
+old authors--particularly Suetonius--which contain admirable features.
+Indeed these and other profane ‘vitae’ came in time to form a continuous
+counterpart to the sacred legends. Yet neither Einhard nor
+Radevicus[741] can be named by the side of Joinville’s picture of St.
+Louis, which certainly stands almost alone as the first complete
+spiritual portrait of a modern European nature. Characters like St.
+Louis are rare at all times, and his was favoured by the rare good
+fortune that a sincere and naïve observer caught the spirit of all the
+events and actions of his life, and represented it admirably. From what
+scanty sources are we left to guess at the inward nature of Frederick
+II. or of Philip the Fair. Much of what, till the close of the Middle
+Ages, passed for biography, is properly speaking nothing but
+contemporary narrative, written without any sense of what is individual
+in the subject of the memoir.
+
+Among the Italians, on the contrary, the search for the characteristic
+features of remarkable men was a prevailing tendency; and this it is
+which separates them from the other western peoples, among whom the same
+thing happens but seldom, and in exceptional cases. This keen eye for
+individuality belongs only to those who have emerged from the
+half-conscious life of the race and become themselves individuals.
+
+Under the influence of the prevailing conception of fame (p. 139, sqq.),
+an art of comparative biography arose which no longer found it
+necessary, like Anastasius,[742] Agnellus,[743] and their successors, or
+like the biographers of the Venetian doges, to adhere to a dynastic or
+ecclesiastical succession. It felt itself free to describe a man if and
+because he was remarkable. It took as models Suetonius, Nepos (the ‘viri
+illustres’), and Plutarch, so far as he was known and translated; for
+sketches of literary history, the lives of the grammarians,
+rhetoricians, and poets, known to us as the ‘Appendices’ to
+Suetonius,[744] seem to have served as patterns, as well as the
+widely-read life of Virgil by Donatus.
+
+It has been already mentioned that biographical collections--lives of
+famous men and famous women--began to appear in the fourteenth century
+(p. 146). Where they do not describe contemporaries, they are naturally
+dependent on earlier narratives. The first great original effort is the
+life of Dante by Boccaccio. Lightly and rhetorically written, and full,
+as it is, of arbitrary fancies, this work nevertheless gives us a lively
+sense of the extraordinary features in Dante’s nature.[745] Then follow,
+at the end of the fourteenth century, the ‘vite’ of illustrious
+Florentines, by Filippo Villani. They are men of every calling: poets,
+jurists, physicians, scholars, artists, statesmen, and soldiers, some of
+them then still living. Florence is here treated like a gifted family,
+in which all the members are noticed in whom the spirit of the house
+expresses itself vigorously. The descriptions are brief, but show a
+remarkable eye for what is characteristic, and are noteworthy for
+including the inward and outward physiognomy in the same sketch.[746]
+From that time forward,[747] the Tuscans never ceased to consider the
+description of man as lying within their special competence, and to them
+we owe the most valuable portraits of the Italians of the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries. Giovanni Cavalcanti, in the appendices to his
+Florentine history, written before the year 1450,[748] collects
+instances of civil virtue and abnegation, of political discernment and
+of military valour, all shown by Florentines. Pius II. gives us in his
+‘Commentaries’ valuable portraits of famous contemporaries; and not long
+ago a separate work of his earlier years,[749] which seems preparatory
+to these portraits, but which has colours and features that are very
+singular, was reprinted. To Jacob of Volterra we owe piquant sketches of
+members of the Curia[750] in the time of Sixtus IV. Vespasiano
+Fiorentino has been often referred to already, and as a historical
+authority a high place must be assigned to him; but his gift as a
+painter of character is not to be compared with that of Macchiavelli,
+Niccolò Valori, Guicciardini, Varchi, Francesco Vettori, and others, by
+whom European history has been probably as much influenced in this
+direction as by the ancients. It must not be forgotten that some of
+these authors soon found their way into northern countries by means of
+Latin translations. And without Giorgio Vasari of Arezzo and his
+all-important work, we should perhaps to this day have no history of
+northern art, or of the art of modern Europe, at all.[751]
+
+Among the biographers of North Italy in the fifteenth century,
+Bartolommeo Facio of Spezzia holds a high rank (p. 147). Platina, born
+in the territory of Cremona, gives us, in his ‘Life of Paul II.’ (p.
+231), examples of biographical caricatures. The description of the last
+Visconti,[752] written by Piercandido Decembrio--an enlarged imitation
+of Suetonius--is of special importance. Sismondi regrets that so much
+trouble has been spent on so unworthy an object, but the author would
+hardly have been equal to deal with a greater man, while he was
+thoroughly competent to describe the mixed nature of Filippo Maria, and
+in and through it to represent with accuracy the conditions, the forms,
+and the consequences of this particular kind of despotism. The picture
+of the fifteenth century would be incomplete without this unique
+biography, which is characteristic down to its minutest details. Milan
+afterwards possessed, in the historian Corio, an excellent
+portrait-painter; and after him came Paolo Giovio of Como, whose larger
+biographies and shorter ‘Elogia’ have achieved a world-wide reputation,
+and become models for future writers in all countries. It is easy to
+prove by a hundred passages how superficial and even dishonest he was;
+nor from a man like him can any high and serious purpose be expected.
+But the breath of the age moves in his pages, and his Leo, his Alfonso,
+his Pompeo Colonna, live and act before us with such perfect truth and
+reality, that we seem admitted to the deepest recesses of their nature.
+
+Among Neapolitan writers, Tristano Caracciolo (p. 36), so far as we are
+able to judge, holds indisputably the first place in this respect,
+although his purpose was not strictly biographical. In the figures which
+he brings before us, guilt and destiny are wondrously mingled. He is a
+kind of unconscious tragedian. That genuine tragedy which then found no
+place on the stage, ‘swept by’ in the palace, the street, and the public
+square. The ‘Words and Deeds of Alfonso the Great,’ written by Antonio
+Panormita[753] during the lifetime of the king, and consequently showing
+more of the spirit of flattery than is consistent with historical truth,
+are remarkable as one of the first of such collections of anecdotes and
+of wise and witty sayings.
+
+The rest of Europe followed the example of Italy in this respect but
+slowly,[754] although great political and religious movements had broken
+so many bands, and had awakened so many thousands to new spiritual life.
+Italians, whether scholars or diplomatists, still remained, on the
+whole, the best source of information for the characters of the leading
+men all over Europe. It is well known how speedily and unanimously in
+recent times the reports of the Venetian embassies in the sixteenth and
+seventeenth centuries have been recognised as authorities of the first
+order for personal description.[755] Even autobiography takes here and
+there in Italy a bold and vigorous flight, and puts before us, together
+with the most varied incidents of external life, striking revelations of
+the inner man. Among other nations, even in Germany at the time of the
+Reformation, it deals only with outward experiences, and leaves us to
+guess at the spirit within from the style of the narrative.[756] It
+seems as though Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova,’ with the inexorable truthfulness
+which runs through it, had shown his people the way.
+
+The beginnings of autobiography are to be traced in the family histories
+of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which are said to be not
+uncommon as manuscripts in the Florentine libraries--unaffected
+narratives written for the sake of the individual or of his family, like
+that of Buonaccorso Pitti.
+
+A profound self-analysis is not to be looked for in the ‘Commentaries’
+of Pius II. What we here learn of him as a man seems at first sight to
+be chiefly confined to the account which he gives of the different steps
+in his career. But further reflexion will lead us to a different
+conclusion with regard to this remarkable book. There are men who are by
+nature mirrors of what surrounds them. It would be irrelevant to ask
+incessantly after their convictions, their spiritual struggles, their
+inmost victories and achievements. Æneas Sylvius lived wholly in the
+interest which lay near, without troubling himself about the problems
+and contradictions of life. His Catholic orthodoxy gave him all the help
+of this kind which he needed. And at all events, after taking part in
+every intellectual movement which interested his age, and notably
+furthering some of them, he still at the close of his earthly course
+retained character enough to preach a crusade against the Turks, and to
+die of grief when it came to nothing.
+
+Nor is the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, any more than that of
+Pius II., founded on introspection. And yet it describes the whole
+man--not always willingly--with marvellous truth and completeness. It is
+no small matter that Benvenuto, whose most important works have perished
+half finished, and who, as an artist, is perfect only in his little
+decorative specialty, but in other respects, if judged by the works of
+him which remain, is surpassed by so many of his greater
+contemporaries--that Benvenuto as a man will interest mankind to the end
+of time. It does not spoil the impression when the reader often detects
+him bragging or lying; the stamp of a mighty, energetic, and thoroughly
+developed nature remains. By his side our northern autobiographers,
+though their tendency and moral character may stand much higher, appear
+incomplete beings. He is a man who can do all and dares do all, and who
+carries his measure in himself.[757] Whether we like him or not, he
+lives, such as he was, as a significant type of the modern spirit.
+
+Another man deserves a brief mention in connection with this subject--a
+man who, like Benvenuto, was not a model of veracity: Girolamo Cardano
+of Milan (b. 1500). His little book, ‘De propria vita’[758] will outlive
+and eclipse his fame in philosophy and natural science, just as
+Benvenuto’s life, though its value is of another kind, has thrown his
+works into the shade. Cardano is a physician who feels his own pulse,
+and describes his own physical, moral, and intellectual nature, together
+with all the conditions under which it had developed, and this, to the
+best of his ability, honestly and sincerely. The work which he avowedly
+took as his model--the ‘Confessions’ of Marcus Aurelius--he was able,
+hampered as he was by no stoical maxims, to surpass in this particular.
+He desires to spare neither himself nor others, and begins the narrative
+of his career with the statement that his mother tried, and failed, to
+procure abortion. It is worth remark that he attributes to the stars
+which presided over his birth only the events of his life and his
+intellectual gifts, but not his moral qualities; he confesses (cap. 10)
+that the astrological prediction that he would not live to the age of
+forty or fifty years did him much harm in his youth. But there is no
+need to quote from so well-known and accessible a book; whoever opens it
+will not lay it down till the last page. Cardano admits that he cheated
+at play, that he was vindictive, incapable of all compunction,
+purposely cruel in his speech. He confesses it without impudence and
+without feigned contrition, without even wishing to make himself an
+object of interest, but with the same simple and sincere love of fact
+which guided him in his scientific researches. And, what is to us the
+most repulsive of all, the old man, after the most shocking
+experiences[759] and with his confidence in his fellow-men gone, finds
+himself after all tolerably happy and comfortable. He has still left him
+a grandson, immense learning, the fame of his works, money, rank and
+credit, powerful friends, the knowledge of many secrets, and, best of
+all, belief in God. After this, he counts the teeth in his head, and
+finds that he has fifteen.
+
+Yet when Cardano wrote, Inquisitors and Spaniards were already busy in
+Italy, either hindering the production of such natures, or, where they
+existed, by some means or other putting them out of the way. There lies
+a gulf between this book and the memoirs of Alfieri.
+
+Yet it would be unjust to close this list of autobiographers without
+listening to a word from one man who was both worthy and happy. This is
+the well-known philosopher of practical life, Luigi Cornaro, whose
+dwelling at Padua, classical as an architectural work, was at the same
+time the home of all the muses. In his famous treatise ‘On the Sober
+Life,’[760] he describes the strict regimen by which he succeeded, after
+a sickly youth, in reaching an advanced and healthy age, then of
+eighty-three years. He goes on to answer those who despise life after
+the age of sixty-five as a living death, showing them that his own life
+had nothing deadly about it. ‘Let them come and see, and wonder at my
+good health, how I mount on horseback without help, how I run upstairs
+and up hills, how cheerful, amusing, and contented I am, how free from
+care and disagreeable thoughts. Peace and joy never quit me.... My
+friends are wise, learned, and distinguished people of good position,
+and when they are not with me I read and write, and try thereby, as by
+all other means, to be useful to others. Each of these things I do at
+the proper time, and at my ease, in my dwelling, which is beautiful and
+lies in the best part of Padua, and is arranged both for summer and
+winter with all the resources of architecture, and provided with a
+garden by the running water. In the spring and autumn, I go for a while
+to my hill in the most beautiful part of the Euganean mountains, where I
+have fountains and gardens, and a comfortable dwelling; and there I
+amuse myself with some easy and pleasant chase, which is suitable to my
+years. At other times I go to my villa on the plain;[761] there all the
+paths lead to an open space, in the middle of which stands a pretty
+church; an arm of the Brenta flows through the plantations--fruitful,
+well-cultivated fields, now fully peopled, which the marshes and the
+foul air once made fitter for snakes than for men. It was I who drained
+the country; then the air became good, and people settled there and
+multiplied, and the land became cultivated as it now is, so that I can
+truly say: “On this spot I gave to God an altar and a temple, and souls
+to worship Him.” This is my consolation and my happiness whenever I come
+here. In the spring and autumn, I also visit the neighbouring towns, to
+see and converse with my friends, through whom I make the acquaintance
+of other distinguished men, architects, painters, sculptors, musicians,
+and cultivators of the soil. I see what new things they have done, I
+look again at what I know already, and learn much that is of use to me.
+I see palaces, gardens, antiquities, public grounds, churches, and
+fortifications. But what most of all delights me when I travel, is the
+beauty of the country and the cities, lying now on the plain, now on the
+slopes of the hills, or on the banks of rivers and streams, surrounded
+by gardens and villas. And these enjoyments are not diminished through
+weakness of the eyes or the ears; all my senses (thank God!) are in the
+best condition, including the sense of taste; for I enjoy more the
+simple food which I now take in moderation, than all the delicacies
+which I ate in my years of disorder.’
+
+After mentioning the works he had undertaken on behalf of the republic
+for draining the marshes, and the projects which he had constantly
+advocated for preserving the lagunes, he thus concludes:--
+
+‘These are the true recreations of an old age which God has permitted to
+be healthy, and which is free from those mental and bodily sufferings to
+which so many young people and so many sickly older people succumb. And
+if it be allowable to add the little to the great, to add jest to
+earnest, it may be mentioned as a result of my moderate life, that in my
+eighty-third year I have written a most amusing comedy, full of
+blameless wit. Such works are generally the business of youth, as
+tragedy is the business of old age. If it is reckoned to the credit of
+the famous Greek that he wrote a tragedy in his seventy-third year, must
+I not, with my ten years more, be more cheerful and healthy than he ever
+was? And that no consolation may be wanting in the overflowing cup of my
+old age, I see before my eyes a sort of bodily immortality in the
+persons of my descendants. When I come home I see before me, not one or
+two, but eleven grandchildren, between the ages of two and eighteen, all
+from the same father and mother, all healthy, and, so far as can already
+be judged, all gifted with the talent and disposition for learning and a
+good life. One of the younger I have as my playmate (buffoncello), since
+children from the third to the fifth year are born to tricks; the elder
+ones I treat as my companions, and, as they have admirable voices, I
+take delight in hearing them sing and play on different instruments. And
+I sing myself, and find my voice better, clearer, and louder than ever.
+These are the pleasures of my last years. My life, therefore, is alive,
+and not dead; nor would I exchange my age for the youth of such as live
+in the service of their passions.
+
+In the ‘Exhortation’ which Cornaro added at a much later time, in his
+ninety-fifth year, he reckons it among the elements of his happiness
+that his ‘Treatise’ had made many converts. He died at Padua in 1565, at
+the age of over a hundred years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE DESCRIPTION OF NATIONS AND CITIES.
+
+
+This national gift did not, however, confine itself to the criticism and
+description of individuals, but felt itself competent to deal with the
+qualities and characteristics of whole peoples. Throughout the Middle
+Ages the cities, families, and nations of all Europe were in the habit
+of making insulting and derisive attacks on one another, which, with
+much caricature, contained commonly a kernel of truth. But from the
+first the Italians surpassed all others in their quick apprehension of
+the mental differences among cities and populations. Their local
+patriotism, stronger probably than in any other mediæval people, soon
+found expression in literature, and allied itself with the current
+conception of ‘Fame.’ Topography became the counterpart of biography (p.
+145); while all the more important cities began to celebrate their own
+praises in prose and verse,[762] writers appeared who made the chief
+towns and districts the subject partly of a serious comparative
+description, partly of satire, and sometimes of notices in which jest
+and earnest are not easy to be distinguished. Brunetto Latini must first
+be mentioned. Besides his own country, he knew France from a residence
+of seven years, and gives a long list of the characteristic differences
+in costume and modes of life between Frenchmen and Italians, noticing
+the distinction between the monarchical government of France and the
+republican constitution of the Italian cities.[763] After this, next to
+some famous passages in the ‘Divine Comedy,’ comes the ‘Dittamondo’ of
+Uberti (about 1360). As a rule, only single remarkable facts and
+characteristics are here mentioned: the Feast of the Crows at Sant’
+Apollinare in Ravenna, the springs at Treviso, the great cellar near
+Vicenza, the high duties at Mantua, the forest of towers at Lucca. Yet
+mixed up with all this, we find laudatory and satirical criticisms of
+every kind. Arezzo figures with the crafty disposition of its citizens,
+Genoa with the artificially blackened eyes and teeth (?) of its women,
+Bologna with its prodigality, Bergamo with its coarse dialect and
+hard-headed people.[764] In the fifteenth century the fashion was to
+belaud one’s own city even at the expense of others. Michele Savonarola
+allows that, in comparison with his native Padua, only Rome and Venice
+are more splendid, and Florence perhaps more joyous[765]--by which our
+knowledge is naturally not much extended. At the end of the century,
+Jovianus Pontanus, in his ‘Antonius,’ writes an imaginary journey
+through Italy, simply as a vehicle for malicious observations. But in
+the sixteenth century we meet with a series of exact and profound
+studies of national characteristics, such as no other people of that
+time could rival.[766] Macchiavelli sets forth in some of his valuable
+essays the character and the political condition of the Germans and
+French in such a way, that the born northerner, familiar with the
+history of his own country, is grateful to the Florentine thinker for
+his flashes of insight. The Florentines (p. 71 sqq.) begin to take
+pleasure in describing themselves;[767] and basking in the well-earned
+sunshine of their intellectual glory, their pride seems to attain its
+height when they derive the artistic pre-eminence of Tuscany among
+Italians, not from any special gifts of nature, but from hard patient
+work.[768] The homage of famous men from other parts of Italy, of which
+the sixteenth Capitolo of Ariosto is a splendid example, they accepted
+as a merited tribute to their excellence.
+
+An admirable description of the Italians, with their various pursuits
+and characteristics, though in few words and with special stress laid on
+the Lucchese, to whom the work was dedicated, was given by Ortensio
+Landi, who, however, is so fond of playing hide-and-seek with his own
+name, and fast-and-loose with historical facts, that even when he seems
+to be most in earnest, he must be accepted with caution and only after
+close examination.[769] The same Landi published an anonymous
+‘Commentario’ some ten years later,[770] which contains among many
+follies not a few valuable hints on the unhappy ruined condition of
+Italy in the middle of the century.[771] Leandro Alberti[772] is not so
+fruitful as might be expected in his description of the character of the
+different cities.
+
+To what extent this comparative study of national and local
+characteristics may, by means of Italian humanism, have influenced the
+rest of Europe, we cannot say with precision. To Italy, at all events,
+belongs the priority in this respect, as in the description of the world
+in general.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTWARD MAN.
+
+
+But the discoveries made with regard to man were not confined to the
+spiritual characteristics of individuals and nations; his outward
+appearance was in Italy the subject of an entirely different interest
+from that shown in it by northern peoples.[773]
+
+Of the position held by the great Italian physicians with respect to the
+progress of physiology, we cannot venture to speak; and the artistic
+study of the human figure belongs, not to a work like the present, but
+to the history of art. But something must here be said of that universal
+education of the eye, which rendered the judgment of the Italians as to
+bodily beauty or ugliness perfect and final.
+
+On reading the Italian authors of that period attentively, we are
+astounded at the keenness and accuracy with which outward features are
+seized, and at the completeness with which personal appearance in
+general is described.[774] Even to-day the Italians, and especially the
+Romans, have the art of sketching a man’s picture in a couple of words.
+This rapid apprehension of what is characteristic is an essential
+condition for detecting and representing the beautiful. In poetry, it is
+true, circumstantial description may be a fault, not a merit, since a
+single feature, suggested by deep passion or insight, will often awaken
+in the reader a far more powerful impression of the figure described.
+Dante gives us nowhere a more splendid idea of his Beatrice than where
+he only describes the influence which goes forth from her upon all
+around. But here we have not to treat particularly of poetry, which
+follows its own laws and pursues its own ends, but rather of the general
+capacity to paint in words real or imaginary forms.
+
+In this Boccaccio is a master--not in the ‘Decameron,’ where the
+character of the tales forbids lengthy description, but in the romances,
+where he is free to take his time. In his ‘Ameto’[775] he describes a
+blonde and a brunette much as an artist a hundred years later would have
+painted them--for here, too, culture long precedes art. In the account
+of the brunette--or, strictly speaking, of the less blonde of the
+two--there are touches which deserve to be called classical. In the
+words ‘la spaziosa testa e distesa’ lies the feeling for grander forms,
+which go beyond a graceful prettiness; the eyebrows with him no longer
+resemble two bows, as in the Byzantine ideal, but a single wavy line;
+the nose seems to have been meant to be aquiline;[776] the broad, full
+breast, the arms of moderate length, the effect of the beautiful hand,
+as it lies on the purple mantle--all both foretells the sense of beauty
+of a coming time, and unconsciously approaches to that of classical
+antiquity. In other descriptions Boccaccio mentions a flat (not
+mediævally rounded) brow, a long, earnest, brown eye, and round, not
+hollowed neck, as well as--in a very modern tone--the ‘little feet’ and
+the ‘two roguish eyes’ of a black-haired nymph.[777]
+
+Whether the fifteenth century has left any written account of its ideal
+of beauty, I am not able to say. The works of the painters and sculptors
+do not render such an account as unnecessary as might appear at first
+sight, since possibly, as opposed to their realism, a more ideal type
+might have been favoured and preserved by the writers.[778] In the
+sixteenth century Firenzuola came forward with his remarkable work on
+female beauty.[779] We must clearly distinguish in it what he had
+learned from old authors or from artists, such as the fixing of
+proportions according to the length of the head, and certain abstract
+conceptions. What remains, is his own genuine observation, illustrated
+with examples of women and girls from Prato. As his little work is a
+kind of lecture, delivered before the women of this city--that is to
+say, before very severe critics--he must have kept pretty closely to the
+truth. His principle is avowedly that of Zeuxis and of Lucian--to piece
+together an ideal beauty out of a number of beautiful parts. He defines
+the shades of colour which occur in the hair and skin, and gives to the
+‘biondo’ the preference, as the most beautiful colour for the hair,[780]
+understanding by it a soft yellow, inclining to brown. He requires that
+the hair should be thick, long, and locky; the forehead serene, and
+twice as broad as high; the skin bright and clear (candida), but not of
+a dead white (bianchezza); the eyebrows dark, silky, most strongly
+marked in the middle, and shading off towards the ears and the nose; the
+white of the eye faintly touched with blue, the iris not actually black,
+though all the poets praise ‘occhi neri’ as a gift of Venus, despite
+that even goddesses were known for their eyes of heavenly blue, and that
+soft, joyous, brown eyes were admired by everybody. The eye itself
+should be large and full, and brought well forward; the lids white, and
+marked with almost invisible tiny red veins; the lashes neither too
+long, nor too thick, nor too dark. The hollow round the eye should have
+the same colour as the cheek.[781] The ear, neither too large nor too
+small, firmly and neatly fitted on, should show a stronger colour in the
+winding than in the even parts, with an edge of the transparent
+ruddiness of the pomegranate. The temples must be white and even, and
+for the most perfect beauty ought not to be too narrow. The red should
+grow deeper as the cheek gets rounder. The nose, which chiefly
+determines the value of the profile, must recede gently and uniformly in
+the direction of the eyes; where the cartilage ceases, there may be a
+slight elevation, but not so marked as to make the nose aquiline, which
+is not pleasing in women; the lower part must be less strongly coloured
+than the ears, but not of a chilly whiteness, and the middle partition
+above the lips lightly tinted with red. The mouth, our author would have
+rather small, and neither projecting to a point, nor quite flat, with
+the lips not too thin, and fitting neatly together; an accidental
+opening, that is, when the woman is neither speaking nor laughing,
+should not display more than six upper teeth. As delicacies of detail,
+he mentions a dimple in the upper lip, a certain fulness of the under
+lip, and a tempting smile in the left corner of the mouth--and so on.
+The teeth should not be too small, regular, well marked off from one
+another, and of the colour of ivory; and the gums must not be too dark
+or even like red velvet. The chin is to be round, neither pointed nor
+curved outwards, and growing slightly red as it rises; its glory is the
+dimple. The neck should be white and round and rather long than short,
+with the hollow and the Adam’s apple but faintly marked; and the skin at
+every movement must show pleasing lines. The shoulders he desires broad,
+and in the breadth of the bosom sees the first condition of its beauty.
+No bone may be visible upon it, its fall and swell must be gentle and
+gradual, its colour ‘candidissimo.’ The leg should be long and not too
+hard in the lower parts, but still not without flesh on the shin, which
+must be provided with white, full calves. He likes the foot small, but
+not bony, the instep (it seems) high, and the colour white as alabaster.
+The arms are to be white, and in the upper parts tinted with red; in
+their consistence fleshy and muscular, but still soft as those of
+Pallas, when she stood before the shepherd on Mount Ida--in a word,
+ripe, fresh, and firm. The hand should be white, especially towards the
+wrist, but large and plump, feeling soft as silk, the rosy palm marked
+with a few, but distinct and not intricate lines; the elevations in it
+should be not too great, the space between thumb and forefinger brightly
+coloured and without wrinkles, the fingers long, delicate, and scarcely
+at all thinner towards the tips, with nails clear, even, not too long
+nor too square, and cut so as to show a white margin about the breadth
+of a knife’s back.
+
+Æsthetic principles of a general character occupy a very subordinate
+place to these particulars. The ultimate principles of beauty, according
+to which the eye judges ‘senza appello,’ are for Firenzuola a secret, as
+he frankly confesses; and his definitions of ‘Leggiadria,’ ‘Grazia,’
+‘Vaghezza,’ ‘Venustà,’ ‘Aria,’ ‘Maestà,’ are partly, as has been
+remarked, philological, and partly vain attempts to utter the
+unutterable. Laughter he prettily defines, probably following some old
+author, as a radiance of the soul.
+
+The literature of all countries can, at the close of the Middle Ages,
+show single attempts to lay down theoretic principles of beauty;[782]
+but no other work can be compared to that of Firenzuola. Brantome, who
+came a good half-century later, is a bungling critic by his side,
+because governed by lasciviousness and not by a sense of beauty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+DESCRIPTIONS OF LIFE IN MOVEMENT.
+
+
+Among the new discoveries made with regard to man, we must reckon, in
+conclusion, the interest taken in descriptions of the daily course of
+human life.
+
+The comical and satirical literature of the Middle Ages could not
+dispense with pictures of every-day events. But it is another thing,
+when the Italians of the Renaissance dwelt on this picture for its own
+sake--for its inherent interest--and because it forms part of that
+great, universal life of the world whose magic breath they felt
+everywhere around them. Instead of and together with the satirical
+comedy, which wanders through houses, villages, and streets, seeking
+food for its derision in parson, peasant, and burgher, we now see in
+literature the beginnings of a true _genre_, long before it found any
+expression in painting. That _genre_ and satire are often met with in
+union, does not prevent them from being wholly different things.
+
+How much of earthly business must Dante have watched with attentive
+interest, before he was able to make us see with our own eyes all that
+happened in his spiritual world.[783] The famous pictures of the busy
+movement in the arsenal at Venice, of the blind men laid side by side
+before the church door,[784] and the like, are by no means the only
+instances of this kind: for the art, in which he is a master, of
+expressing the inmost soul by the outward gesture, cannot exist without
+a close and incessant study of human life.
+
+The poets who followed rarely came near him in this respect, and the
+novelists were forbidden by the first laws of their literary style to
+linger over details. Their prefaces and narratives might be as long as
+they pleased, but what we understand by _genre_ was outside their
+province. The taste for this class of description was not fully awakened
+till the time of the revival of antiquity.
+
+And here we are again met by the man who had a heart for
+everything--Æneas Sylvius. Not only natural beauty, not only that which
+has an antiquarian or a geographical interest, finds a place in his
+descriptions (p. 248; ii. p. 28), but any living scene of daily
+life.[785] Among the numerous passages in his memoirs in which scenes
+are described which hardly one of his contemporaries would have thought
+worth a line of notice, we will here only mention the boat-race on the
+Lake of Bolsena.[786] We are not able to detect from what old
+letter-writer or story-teller the impulse was derived to which we owe
+such life-like pictures. Indeed, the whole spiritual communion between
+antiquity and the Renaissance is full of delicacy and of mystery.
+
+To this class belong those descriptive Latin poems of which we have
+already spoken (p. 262)--hunting-scenes, journeys, ceremonies, and so
+forth. In Italian we also find something of the same kind, as, for
+example, the descriptions of the famous Medicean tournament by Politian
+and Luca Pulci.[787] The true epic poets, Luigi Pulci, Bojardo, and
+Ariosto, are carried on more rapidly by the stream of their narrative;
+yet in all of them we must recognise the lightness and precision of
+their descriptive touch, as one of the chief elements of their
+greatness. Franco Sacchetti amuses himself with repeating the short
+speeches of a troop of pretty women caught in the woods by a shower of
+rain.[788]
+
+Other scenes of moving life are to be looked for in the military
+historians (p. 99). In a lengthy poem,[789] dating from an earlier
+period, we find a faithful picture of a combat of mercenary soldiers in
+the fourteenth century, chiefly in the shape of the orders, cries of
+battle, and dialogue with which it is accompanied.
+
+But the most remarkable productions of this kind are the realistic
+descriptions of country life, which are found most abundantly in Lorenzo
+Magnifico and the poets of his circle.
+
+Since the time of Petrarch,[790] an unreal and conventional style of
+bucolic poetry had been in vogue, which, whether written in Latin or
+Italian, was essentially a copy of Virgil. Parallel to this, we find the
+pastoral novel of Boccaccio (p. 259) and other works of the same kind
+down to the ‘Arcadia’ of Sannazaro, and later still, the pastoral comedy
+of Tasso and Guarini. They are works whose style, whether poetry or
+prose, is admirably finished and perfect, but in which pastoral life is
+only an ideal dress for sentiments which belong to a wholly different
+sphere of culture.[791]
+
+But by the side of all this there appeared in Italian poetry, towards
+the close of the fifteenth century, signs of a more realistic treatment
+of rustic life. This was not possible out of Italy; for here only did
+the peasant, whether labourer or proprietor, possess human dignity,
+personal freedom, and the right of settlement, hard as his lot might
+sometimes be in other respects.[792] The difference between town and
+country is far from being so marked here as in northern countries. Many
+of the smaller towns are peopled almost exclusively by peasants who, on
+coming home at nightfall from their work, are transformed into
+townsfolk. The masons of Como wandered over nearly all Italy; the child
+Giotto was free to leave his sheep and join a guild at Florence;
+everywhere there was a human stream flowing from the country into the
+cities, and some mountain populations seemed born to supply this
+current.[793] It is true that the pride and local conceit supplied poets
+and novelists with abundant motives for making game of the
+‘villano,’[794] and what they left undone was taken charge of by the
+comic improvisers (p. 320 sqq.). But nowhere do we find a trace of that
+brutal and contemptuous class-hatred against the ‘vilains’ which
+inspired the aristocratic poets of Provence, and often, too, the French
+chroniclers. On the contrary,[795] Italian authors of every sort gladly
+recognise and accentuate what is great or remarkable in the life of the
+peasant. Gioviano Pontano mentions with admiration instances of the
+fortitude of the savage inhabitants of the Abruzzi;[796] in the
+biographical collections and in the novelists we meet with the figure of
+the heroic peasant-maiden[797] who hazards her life to defend her family
+and her honour.[798]
+
+Such conditions made the poetical treatment of country-life possible.
+The first instance we shall mention is that of Battista Mantovano, whose
+eclogues, once much read and still worth reading, appeared among his
+earliest works about 1480. They are a mixture of real and conventional
+rusticity, but the former tends to prevail. They represent the mode of
+thought of a well-meaning village clergyman, not without a certain
+leaning to liberal ideas. As Carmelite monk, the writer may have had
+occasion to mix freely with the peasantry.[799]
+
+But it is with a power of a wholly different kind that Lorenzo
+Magnifico transports himself into the peasant’s world His ‘Nencia di
+Barberino’[800] reads like a crowd of genuine extracts from the popular
+songs of the Florentine country, fused into a great stream of octaves.
+The objectivity of the writer is such that we are in doubt whether the
+speaker--the young peasant Vallera, who declares his love to
+Nencia--awakens his sympathy or ridicule. The deliberate contrast to the
+conventional eclogue is unmistakable. Lorenzo surrenders himself
+purposely to the realism of simple, rough country-life, and yet his work
+makes upon us the impression of true poetry.
+
+The ‘Beca da Dicomano’ of Luigi Pulci[801] is an admitted counterpart to
+the ‘Nencia’ of Lorenzo. But the deeper purpose is wanting. The ‘Beca’
+is written not so much from the inward need to give a picture of popular
+life, as from the desire to win the approbation of the educated
+Florentine world by a successful poem. Hence the greater and more
+deliberate coarseness of the scenes, and the indecent jokes.
+Nevertheless, the point of view of the rustic lover is admirably
+maintained.
+
+Third in this company of poets comes Angelo Poliziano, with his
+‘Rusticus’[802] in Latin hexameters. Keeping clear of all imitation of
+Virgil’s Georgics, he describes the year of the Tuscan peasant,
+beginning with the late autumn, when the countryman gets ready his new
+plough and prepares the seed for the winter. The picture of the meadows
+in spring is full and beautiful, and the ‘Summer’ has fine passages; but
+the vintage-feast in autumn is one of the gems of modern Latin poetry.
+Politian wrote poems in Italian as well as Latin, from which we may
+infer that in Lorenzo’s circle it was possible to give a realistic
+picture of the passionate life of the lower classes. His gipsy’s
+love-song[803] is one of the earliest products of that wholly modern
+tendency to put oneself with poetic consciousness into the position of
+another class. This had probably been attempted for ages with a view to
+satire,[804] and the opportunity for it was offered in Florence at every
+carnival by the songs of the maskers. But the sympathetic understanding
+of the feelings of another class was new; and with it the ‘Nencia’ and
+this ‘Canzone zingaresca’ mark a new starting-point in the history of
+poetry.
+
+Here, too, we must briefly indicate how culture prepared the way for
+artistic development. From the time of the ‘Nencia,’ a period of eighty
+years elapses to the rustic genre-painting of Jacopo Bassano and his
+school.
+
+In the next part of this work we shall show how differences of birth had
+lost their significance in Italy. Much of this was doubtless owing to
+the fact that men and man were here first thoroughly and profoundly
+understood. This one single result of the Renaissance is enough to fill
+us with everlasting thankfulness. The logical notion of humanity was old
+enough--but here the notion became a fact.
+
+The loftiest conceptions on this subject were uttered by Pico della
+Mirandola in his speech on the dignity of man,[805] which may justly be
+called one of the noblest bequests of that great age. God, he tells us,
+made man at the close of the creation, to know the laws of the universe,
+to love its beauty, to admire its greatness. He bound him to no fixed
+place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no iron necessity, but gave
+him freedom to will and to move. ‘I have set thee,’ says the Creator to
+Adam, ‘in the midst of the world, that thou mayst the more easily behold
+and see all that is therein. I created thee a being neither heavenly nor
+earthly, neither mortal nor immortal only, that thou mightest be free to
+shape and to overcome thyself. Thou mayst sink into a beast, and be born
+anew to the divine likeness. The brutes bring from their mother’s body
+what they will carry with them as long as they live; the higher spirits
+are from the beginning, or soon after,[806] what they will be for ever.
+To thee alone is given a growth and a development depending on thine own
+free will. Thou bearest in thee the germs of a universal life.’
+
+
+
+
+_PART V._
+
+SOCIETY AND FESTIVALS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE EQUALISATION OF CLASSES.
+
+
+Every period of civilisation, which forms a complete and consistent
+whole, manifests itself not only in political life, in religion, art,
+and science, but also sets its characteristic stamp on social life. Thus
+the Middle Ages had their courtly and aristocratic manners and
+etiquette, differing but little in the various countries of Europe, as
+well as their peculiar forms of middle-class life.
+
+Italian customs at the time of the Renaissance offer in these respects
+the sharpest contrast to mediævalism. The foundation on which they rest
+is wholly different. Social intercourse in its highest and most perfect
+form now ignored all distinctions of caste, and was based simply on the
+existence of an educated class as we now understand the word. Birth and
+origin were without influence, unless combined with leisure and
+inherited wealth. Yet this assertion must not be taken in an absolute
+and unqualified sense, since mediæval distinctions still sometimes made
+themselves felt to a greater or less degree, if only as a means of
+maintaining equality with the aristocratic pretensions of the less
+advanced countries of Europe. But the main current of the time went
+steadily towards the fusion of classes in the modern sense of the
+phrase.
+
+The fact was of vital importance that, from certainly the twelfth
+century onwards, the nobles and the burghers dwelt together within the
+walls of the cities.[807] The interests and pleasures of both classes
+were thus identified, and the feudal lord learned to look at society
+from another point of view than that of his mountain-castle. The
+Church, too, in Italy never suffered itself, as in northern countries,
+to be used as a means of providing for the younger sons of noble
+families. Bishoprics, abbacies, and canonries were often given from the
+most unworthy motives, but still not according to the pedigrees of the
+applicants; and if the bishops in Italy were more numerous, poorer, and,
+as a rule, destitute of all sovereign rights, they still lived in the
+cities where their cathedrals stood, and formed, together with their
+chapters, an important element in the cultivated society of the place.
+In the age of despots and absolute princes which followed, the nobility
+in most of the cities had the motives and the leisure to give themselves
+up to a private life (p. 131) free from political danger and adorned
+with all that was elegant and enjoyable, but at the same time hardly
+distinguishable from that of the wealthy burgher. And after the time of
+Dante, when the new poetry and literature were in the hands of all
+Italy,[808] when to this was added the revival of ancient culture and
+the new interest in man as such, when the successful Condottiere became
+a prince, and not only good birth, but legitimate birth, ceased to be
+indispensable for a throne (p. 21), it might well seem that the age of
+equality had dawned, and the belief in nobility vanished for ever.
+
+From a theoretical point of view, when the appeal was made to antiquity,
+the conception of nobility could be both justified and condemned from
+Aristotle alone. Dante, for example,[809] adapts from the Aristotelian
+definition, ‘Nobility rests on excellence and inherited wealth,’ his own
+saying, ‘Nobility rests on personal excellence or on that of
+predecessors.’ But elsewhere he is not satisfied with this conclusion.
+He blames himself,[810] because even in Paradise, while talking with his
+ancestor Cacciaguida, he made mention of his noble origin, which is but
+as a mantle from which time is ever cutting something away, unless we
+ourselves add daily fresh worth to it. And in the ‘Convito’[811] he
+disconnects ‘nobile’ and ‘nobiltà’ from every condition of birth, and
+identifies the idea with the capacity for moral and intellectual
+eminence, laying a special stress on high culture by calling ‘nobiltà’
+the sister of ‘filosofia.’
+
+And as time went on, the greater the influence of humanism on the
+Italian mind, the firmer and more widespread became the conviction that
+birth decides nothing as to the goodness or badness of a man. In the
+fifteenth century this was the prevailing opinion. Poggio, in his
+dialogue ‘On nobility,’[812] agrees with his interlocutors--Niccolò
+Niccoli, and Lorenzo Medici, brother of the great Cosimo--that there is
+no other nobility than that of personal merit. The keenest shafts of his
+ridicule are directed against much of what vulgar prejudice thinks
+indispensable to an aristocratic life. ‘A man is all the farther removed
+from true nobility, the longer his forefathers have plied the trade of
+brigands. The taste for hawking and hunting savours no more of nobility
+than the nests and lairs of the hunted creatures of spikenard. The
+cultivation of the soil, as practised by the ancients, would be much
+nobler than this senseless wandering through the hills and woods, by
+which men make themselves liker to the brutes than to the reasonable
+creatures. It may serve well enough as a recreation, but not as the
+business of a lifetime.’ The life of the English and French chivalry in
+the country or in the woody fastnesses seems to him thoroughly ignoble,
+and worst of all the doings of the robber-knights of Germany. Lorenzo
+here begins to take the part of the nobility, but not--which is
+characteristic--appealing to any natural sentiment in its favour, but
+because Aristotle in the fifth book of the ‘Politics’ recognises the
+nobility as existent, and defines it as resting on excellence and
+inherited wealth. To this Niccoli retorts that Aristotle gives this not
+as his own conviction, but as the popular impression; in his ‘Ethics,’
+where he speaks as he thinks, he calls him noble who strives after that
+which is truly good. Lorenzo urges upon him vainly that the Greek word
+for nobility means good birth; Niccoli thinks the Roman word ‘nobilis’
+(_i.e._ remarkable) a better one, since it makes nobility depend on a
+man’s deeds.[813] Together with these discussions, we find a sketch of
+the condition of the nobles in various parts of Italy. In Naples they
+will not work, and busy themselves neither with their own estates nor
+with trade and commerce, which they hold to be discreditable; they
+either loiter at home or ride about on horseback.[814] The Roman
+nobility also despise trade, but farm their own property; the
+cultivation of the land even opens the way to a title;[815] ‘it is a
+respectable but boorish nobility.’ In Lombardy the nobles live upon the
+rent of their inherited estates; descent and the abstinence from any
+regular calling constitute nobility.[816] In Venice, the ‘nobili,’ the
+ruling caste, were all merchants. Similarly in Genoa the nobles and
+non-nobles were alike merchants and sailors, and only separated by their
+birth; some few of the former, it is true, still lurked as brigands in
+their mountain-castles. In Florence a part of the old nobility had
+devoted themselves to trade; another, and certainly by far the smaller
+part, enjoyed the satisfaction of their titles, and spent their time,
+either in nothing at all, or else in hunting and hawking.[817]
+
+The decisive fact was, that nearly everywhere in Italy, even those who
+might be disposed to pride themselves on their birth could not make good
+the claims against the power of culture and of wealth, and that their
+privileges in politics and at court were not sufficient to encourage any
+strong feeling of caste. Venice offers only an apparent exception to
+this rule, for there the ‘nobili’ led the same life as their
+fellow-citizens, and were distinguished by few honorary privileges. The
+case was certainly different at Naples, which the strict isolation and
+the ostentatious vanity of its nobility excluded, above all other
+causes, from the spiritual movement of the Renaissance. The traditions
+of mediæval Lombardy and Normandy, and the French aristocratic
+influences which followed, all tended in this direction; and the
+Aragonese government, which was established by the middle of the
+fifteenth century, completed the work, and accomplished in Naples what
+followed a hundred years later in the rest of Italy--a social
+transformation in obedience to Spanish ideas, of which the chief
+features were the contempt for work and the passion for titles. The
+effect of this new influence was evident, even in the smaller towns,
+before the year 1500. We hear complaints from La Cava that the place had
+been proverbially rich, as long at it was filled with masons and
+weavers; whilst now, since instead of looms and trowels nothing but
+spurs, stirrups and gilded belts was to be seen, since everybody was
+trying to become Doctor of Laws or of Medicine, Notary, Officer or
+Knight, the most intolerable poverty prevailed.[818] In Florence an
+analogous change appears to have taken place by the time of Cosimo, the
+first Grand Duke; he is thanked for adopting the young people, who now
+despise trade and commerce, as knights of his order of St. Stephen.[819]
+This goes straight in the teeth of the good old Florentine custom,[820]
+by which fathers left property to their children on the condition that
+they should have some occupation (p. 79). But a mania for title of a
+curious and ludicrous sort sometimes crossed and thwarted, especially
+among the Florentines, the levelling influence of art and culture. This
+was the passion for knighthood, which became one of the most striking
+follies of the day, at a time when the dignity itself had lost every
+shadow of significance.
+
+‘A few years ago,’ writes Franco Sacchetti,[821] towards the end of the
+fourteenth century, ‘everybody saw how all the work-people down to the
+bakers, how all the wool-carders, usurers, money-changers and
+blackguards of all descriptions, became knights. Why should an official
+need knighthood when he goes to preside over some little provincial
+town? What has this title to do with any ordinary bread-winning pursuit?
+How art thou sunken, unhappy dignity! Of all the long list of knightly
+duties, what single one do these knights of ours discharge? I wished to
+speak of these things that the reader might see that knighthood is
+dead.[822] And as we have gone so far as to confer the honour upon dead
+men, why not upon figures of wood and stone, and why not upon an ox?’
+The stories which Sacchetti tells by way of illustration speak plainly
+enough. There we read how Bernabò Visconti knighted the victor in a
+drunken brawl, and then did the same derisively to the vanquished; how
+German knights with their decorated helmets and devices were
+ridiculed--and more of the same kind. At a later period Poggio[823]
+makes merry over the many knights of his day without a horse and
+without military training. Those who wished to assert the privilege of
+the order, and ride out with lance and colours, found in Florence that
+they might have to face the government as well as the jokers.[824]
+
+On considering the matter more closely, we shall find that this belated
+chivalry, independent of all nobility of birth, though partly the fruit
+of an insane passion for title, had nevertheless another and a better
+side. Tournaments had not yet ceased to be practised, and no one could
+take part in them who was not a knight. But the combat in the lists, and
+especially the difficult and perilous tilting with the lance, offered a
+favourable opportunity for the display of strength, skill, and courage,
+which no one, whatever might be his origin, would willingly neglect in
+an age which laid such stress on personal merit.[825]
+
+It was in vain that from the time of Petrarch downwards the tournament
+was denounced as a dangerous folly. No one was converted by the pathetic
+appeal of the poet: ‘In what book do we read that Scipio and Cæsar were
+skilled at the joust?’[826] The practice became more and more popular
+in Florence. Every honest citizen came to consider his tournament--now,
+no doubt, less dangerous than formerly--as a fashionable sport. Franco
+Sacchetti[827] has left us a ludicrous picture of one of these holiday
+cavaliers--a notary seventy years old. He rides out on horseback to
+Peretola, where the tournament was cheap, on a jade hired from a dyer. A
+thistle is stuck by some wag under the tail of the steed, who takes
+fright, runs away, and carries the helmeted rider, bruised and shaken,
+back into the city. The inevitable conclusion of the story is a severe
+curtain-lecture from the wife, who is not a little enraged at these
+break-neck follies of her husband.[828]
+
+It may be mentioned in conclusion that a passionate interest in this
+sport was displayed by the Medici, as if they wished to show--private
+citizens as they were, without noble blood in their veins--that the
+society which surrounded them was in no respects inferior to a
+Court.[829] Even under Cosimo (1459), and afterwards under the elder
+Pietro, brilliant tournaments were held at Florence. The younger Pietro
+neglected the duties of government for these amusements, and would never
+suffer himself to be painted except clad in armour. The same practice
+prevailed at the Court of Alexander VI., and when the Cardinal Ascanio
+Sforza asked the Turkish Prince Djem (pp. 109, 115) how he liked the
+spectacle, the barbarian replied with much discretion that such combats
+in his country only took place among slaves, since then, in the case of
+accident, nobody was the worse for it. The oriental was unconsciously in
+accord with the old Romans in condemning the manners of the Middle Ages.
+
+Apart, however, from this particular prop of knighthood, we find here
+and there in Italy, for example at Ferrara (p. 46 sqq.), orders of court
+service, whose members had a right to the title.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But, great as were individual ambitions and the vanities of nobles and
+knights, it remains a fact that the Italian nobility took its place in
+the centre of social life, and not at the extremity. We find it
+habitually mixing with other classes on a footing of perfect equality,
+and seeking its natural allies in culture and intelligence. It is true
+that for the courtier a certain rank of nobility was required,[830] but
+this exigence is expressly declared to be caused by a prejudice rooted
+in the public mind--‘per l’oppenion universale’--and never was held to
+imply the belief that the personal worth of one who was not of noble
+blood was in any degree lessened thereby, nor did it follow from this
+rule that the prince was limited to the nobility for his society. It was
+meant simply that the perfect man--the true courtier--should not be
+wanting in any conceivable advantage, and therefore not in this. If in
+all the relations of life he was specially bound to maintain a
+dignified and reserved demeanour, the reason was not found in the blood
+which flowed in his veins, but in the perfection of manner which was
+demanded from him. We are here in the presence of a modern distinction,
+based on culture and on wealth, but on the latter solely because it
+enables men to devote their life to the former, and effectually to
+promote its interests and advancement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE OUTWARD REFINEMENT OF LIFE.
+
+
+But in proportion as distinctions of birth ceased to confer any special
+privilege, was the individual himself compelled to make the most of his
+personal qualities, and society to find its worth and charm in itself.
+The demeanour of individuals, and all the higher forms of social
+intercourse, became ends pursued with a deliberate and artistic purpose.
+
+Even the outward appearance of men and women and the habits of daily
+life were more perfect, more beautiful, and more polished than among the
+other nations of Europe. The dwellings of the upper classes fall rather
+within the province of the history of art; but we may note how far the
+castle and the city mansion in Italy surpassed in comfort, order, and
+harmony the dwellings of the northern noble. The style of dress varied
+so continually that it is impossible to make any complete comparison
+with the fashions of other countries, all the more because since the
+close of the fifteenth century imitations of the latter were frequent.
+The costumes of the time, as given us by the Italian painters, are the
+most convenient and the most pleasing to the eye which were then to be
+found in Europe; but we cannot be sure if they represent the prevalent
+fashion, or if they are faithfully reproduced by the artist. It is
+nevertheless beyond a doubt that nowhere was so much importance attached
+to dress as in Italy. The people was, and is, vain; and even serious men
+among it looked on a handsome and becoming costume as an element in the
+perfection of the individual. At Florence, indeed, there was a brief
+period, when dress was a purely personal matter, and every man set the
+fashion for himself (p. 130, note 1), and till far into the sixteenth
+century there were exceptional people who still had the courage to do
+so;[831] and the majority at all events showed themselves capable of
+varying the fashion according to their individual tastes. It is a
+symptom of decline when Giovanni della Casa warns his readers not to be
+singular or to depart from existing fashions.[832] Our own age, which,
+in men’s dress at any rate, treats uniformity as the supreme law, gives
+up by so doing far more than it is itself aware of. But it saves itself
+much time, and this, according to our notions of business, outweighs all
+other disadvantages.
+
+In Venice[833] and Florence at the time of the Renaissance there were
+rules and regulations prescribing the dress of the men and restraining
+the luxury of the women. Where the fashions were less free, as in
+Naples, the moralists confess with regret that no difference can be
+observed between noble and burgher.[834] They further deplore the rapid
+changes of fashion, and--if we rightly understand their words--the
+senseless idolatry of whatever comes from France, though in many cases
+the fashions which were received back from the French were originally
+Italian. It does not further concern us, how far these frequent changes,
+and the adoption of French and Spanish ways,[835] contributed to the
+national passion for external display; but we find in them additional
+evidence of the rapid movement of life in Italy in the decades before
+and after the year 1500. The occupation of different parts of Italy by
+foreigners caused the inhabitants not only to adopt foreign fashions,
+but sometimes to abandon all luxury in matters of dress. Such a change
+in public feeling at Milan is recorded by Landi. But the differences, he
+tells us, in costume continued to exist, Naples distinguishing itself by
+splendour, and Florence, to the eye of the writer, by absurdity.[836]
+
+We may note in particular the efforts of the women to alter their
+appearance by all the means which the toilette could afford. In no
+country of Europe since the fall of the Roman empire was so much trouble
+taken to modify the face, the colour of skin and the growth of the
+hair, as in Italy at this time.[837] All tended to the formation of a
+conventional type, at the cost of the most striking and transparent
+deceptions. Leaving out of account costume in general, which in the
+fourteenth century[838] was in the highest degree varied in colour and
+loaded with ornament, and at a later period assumed a character of more
+harmonious richness, we here limit ourselves more particularly to the
+toilette in the narrower sense.
+
+No sort of ornament was more in use than false hair, often made of white
+or yellow silk.[839] The law denounced and forbade it in vain, till some
+preacher of repentance touched the worldly minds of the wearers. Then
+was seen, in the middle of the public square, a lofty pyre (talamo), on
+which, beside lutes, dice-boxes, masks, magical charms, song-books, and
+other vanities, lay masses of false hair,[840] which the purging fires
+soon turned into a heap of ashes. The ideal colour sought for both in
+natural and artificial hair, was blond. And as the sun was supposed to
+have the power of making the hair of this colour,[841] many ladies would
+pass their whole time in the open air on sunshiny days.[842] Dyes and
+other mixtures were also used freely for the same purpose. Besides all
+these, we meet with an endless list of beautifying waters, plasters, and
+paints for every single part of the face--even for the teeth and
+eyelids--of which in our day we can form no conception. The ridicule of
+the poets,[843] the invectives of the preachers, and the experience of
+the baneful effects of these cosmetics on the skin, were powerless to
+hinder women from giving their faces an unnatural form and colour. It is
+possible that the frequent and splendid representations of
+Mysteries,[844] at which hundreds of people appeared painted and masked,
+helped to further this practice in daily life. It is certain that it was
+widely spread, and that the countrywomen vied in this respect with their
+sisters in the towns.[845] It was vain to preach that such decorations
+were the mark of the courtesan; the most honourable matrons, who all the
+year round never touched paint, used it nevertheless on holidays when
+they showed themselves in public.[846] But whether we look on this bad
+habit as a remnant of barbarism, to which the painting of savages is a
+parallel, or as a consequence of the desire for perfect youthful beauty
+in features and in colour, as the art and complexity of the toilette
+would lead us to think--in either case there was no lack of good advice
+on the part of the men.
+
+The use of perfumes, too, went beyond all reasonable limits. They were
+applied to everything with which human beings came into contact. At
+festivals even the mules were treated with scents and ointments,[847]
+Pietro Aretino thanks Cosimo I. for a perfumed roll of money.[848]
+
+The Italians of that day lived in the belief that they were more cleanly
+than other nations. There are in fact general reasons which speak rather
+for than against this claim. Cleanliness is indispensable to our modern
+notion of social perfection, which was developed in Italy earlier than
+elsewhere. That the Italians were one of the richest of existing
+peoples, is another presumption in their favour. Proof, either for or
+against these pretensions, can of course never be forthcoming, and if
+the question were one of priority in establishing rules of cleanliness,
+the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages is perhaps in advance of
+anything that Italy can produce. It is nevertheless certain that the
+singular neatness and cleanliness of some distinguished representatives
+of the Renaissance, especially in their behaviour at meals, was noticed
+expressly,[849] and that ‘German’ was the synonym in Italy for all that
+is filthy.[850] The dirty habits which Massimiliano Sforza picked up in
+the course of his German education, and the notice they attracted on his
+return to Italy, are recorded by Giovio.[851] It is at the same time
+very curious that, at least in the fifteenth century, the inns and
+hotels were left chiefly in the hands of Germans,[852] who probably,
+however, made their profit mostly out of the pilgrims journeying to
+Rome. Yet the statements on this point may refer rather to the country
+districts, since it is notorious that in the great cities Italian hotels
+held the first place.[853] The want of decent inns in the country may
+also be explained by the general insecurity of life and property.
+
+To the first half of the sixteenth century belongs the manual of
+politeness which Giovanni della Casa, a Florentine by birth, published
+under the title ‘Il Galateo.’ Not only cleanliness in the strict sense
+of the word, but the dropping of all the tricks and habits which we
+consider unbecoming, is here prescribed with the same unfailing tact
+with which the moralist discerns the highest ethical truths. In the
+literature of other countries the same lessons are taught, though less
+systematically, by the indirect influence of repulsive descriptions.[854]
+
+In other respects also, the ‘Galateo’ is a graceful and intelligent
+guide to good manners--a school of tact and delicacy. Even now it may be
+read with no small profit by people of all classes, and the politeness
+of European nations is not likely to outgrow its precepts. So far as
+tact is an affair of the heart, it has been inborn in some men from the
+dawn of civilization, and acquired through force of will by others; but
+the Italian first recognised it as a universal social duty and a mark of
+culture and education. And Italy itself had altered much in the course
+of two centuries. We feel at their close that the time for practical
+jokes between friends and acquaintances--for ‘burle’ and ‘beffe’ (p. 155
+sqq.)--was over in good society,[855] that the people had emerged from
+the walls of the cities and had learned a cosmopolitan politeness and
+consideration. We shall speak later on of the intercourse of society in
+the narrower sense.
+
+Outward life, indeed, in the fifteenth and the early part of the
+sixteenth centuries was polished and ennobled as among no other people
+in the world. A countless number of those small things and great things
+which combine to make up what we mean by comfort, we know to have first
+appeared in Italy. In the well-paved streets of the Italian cities,[856]
+driving was universal, while elsewhere in Europe walking or riding was
+the customs, and at all events no one drove for amusement. We read in
+the novelists of soft, elastic beds, of costly carpets and bedroom
+furniture, of which we hear nothing in other countries.[857] We often
+hear especially of the abundance and beauty of the linen. Much of all
+this is drawn within the sphere of art. We note with admiration the
+thousand ways in which art ennobles luxury, not only adorning the
+massive sideboard or the light brackets with noble vases and clothing
+the walls with the moving splendour of tapestry, and covering the
+toilet-table with numberless graceful trifles, but absorbing whole
+branches of mechanical work--especially carpentering--into its province.
+All western Europe, as soon as its wealth enabled it to do so, set to
+work in the same way at the close of the Middle Ages. But its efforts
+produced either childish and fantastic toy-work, or were bound by the
+chains of a narrow and purely Gothic art, while the Renaissance moved
+freely, entering into the spirit of every task it undertook and working
+for a far larger circle of patrons and admirers than the northern
+artist. The rapid victory of Italian decorative art over northern in the
+course of the sixteenth century is due partly to this fact, though
+partly the result of wider and more general causes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LANGUAGE AS THE BASIS OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.
+
+
+The higher forms of social intercourse, which here meet us as a work of
+art--as a conscious product and one of the highest products of national
+life--have no more important foundation and condition than language.
+
+In the most flourishing period of the Middle Ages, the nobility of
+Western Europe had sought to establish a ‘courtly’ speech for social
+intercourse as well as for poetry. In Italy, too, where the dialects
+differed so greatly from one another, we find in the thirteenth century
+a so-called ‘Curiale,’ which was common to the courts and to the poets.
+It is of decisive importance for Italy that the attempt was there
+seriously and deliberately made to turn this into the language of
+literature and society. The introduction to the ‘Cento Novelle Antiche,’
+which were put into their present shape before 1300, avow this object
+openly. Language is here considered apart from its uses in poetry; its
+highest function is clear, simple, intelligent utterance in short
+speeches, epigrams, and answers. This faculty was admired in Italy, as
+nowhere else but among the Greeks and Arabians: ‘how many in the course
+of a long life have scarcely produced a single “bel parlare.”’
+
+But the matter was rendered more difficult by the diversity of the
+aspects under which it was considered. The writings of Dante transport
+us into the midst of the struggle. His work on ‘the Italian
+language’[858] is not only of the utmost importance for the subject
+itself, but is also the first complete treatise on any modern language.
+His method and results belong to the history of linguistic science, in
+which they will always hold a high place. We must here content
+ourselves with the remark that long before the appearance of this book
+the subject must have been one of daily and pressing importance, that
+the various dialects of Italy had long been the objects of eager study
+and dispute, and that the birth of the one classical language was not
+accomplished without many throes.[859]
+
+Nothing certainly contributed so much to this end as the great poem of
+Dante. The Tuscan dialect became the basis of the new national
+speech.[860] If this assertion may seem to some to go too far, as
+foreigners we may be excused, in a matter on which much difference of
+opinion prevails, for following the general belief.
+
+Literature and poetry probably lost more than they gained by the
+contentious purism which was long prevalent in Italy, and which marred
+the freshness and vigour of many an able writer. Others, again, who felt
+themselves masters of this magnificent language, were tempted to rely
+upon its harmony and flow, apart from the thought which it expressed. A
+very insignificant melody, played upon such an instrument, can produce a
+very great effect. But however this may be, it is certain that socially
+the language had great value. It was, as it were, the crown of a noble
+and dignified behaviour, and compelled the gentleman, both in his
+ordinary bearing and in exceptional moments to observe external
+propriety. No doubt this classical garment, like the language of Attic
+society, served to drape much that was foul and malicious; but it was
+also the adequate expression of all that is noblest and most refined.
+But politically and nationally it was of supreme importance, serving as
+an ideal home for the educated classes in all the states of the divided
+peninsula.[861] Nor was it the special property of the nobles or of any
+one class, but the poorest and humblest might learn it if they would.
+Even now--and perhaps more than ever--in those parts of Italy where, as
+a rule, the most unintelligible dialect prevails, the stranger is often
+astonished at hearing pure and well-spoken Italian from the mouths of
+peasants or artisans, and looks in vain for anything analogous in France
+or in Germany, where even the educated classes retain traces of a
+provincial speech. There are certainly a larger number of people able to
+read in Italy than we should be led to expect from the condition of many
+parts of the country--as for instance, the States of the Church--in
+other respects; but what is of more importance is the general and
+undisputed respect for pure language and pronunciation as something
+precious and sacred. One part of the country after another came to adopt
+the classical dialect officially. Venice, Milan, and Naples did so at
+the noontime of Italian literature, and partly through its influences.
+It was not till the present century that Piedmont became of its own free
+will a genuine Italian province by sharing in this chief treasure of the
+people--pure speech.[862] The dialects were from the beginning of the
+sixteenth century purposely left to deal with a certain class of
+subjects, serious as well as comic,[863] and the style which was thus
+developed proved equal to all its tasks. Among other nations a conscious
+separation of this kind did not occur till a much later period.
+
+The opinion of educated people as to the social value of language, is
+fully set forth in the ‘Cortigiano.’[864] There were then persons, at
+the beginning of the sixteenth century, who purposely kept to the
+antiquated expressions of Dante and the other Tuscan writers of his
+time, simply because they were old. Our author forbids the use of them
+altogether in speech, and is unwilling to permit them even in writing,
+which he considers a form of speech. Upon this follows the admission
+that the best style of speech is that which most resembles good writing.
+We can clearly recognise the author’s feeling that people who have
+anything of importance to say must shape their own speech, and that
+language is something flexible and changing because it is something
+living. It is allowable to make use of any expression, however ornate,
+as long as it is used by the people; nor are non-Tuscan words, or even
+French and Spanish words forbidden, if custom has once applied them to
+definite purposes.[865] Thus care and intelligence will produce a
+language, which, if not the pure old Tuscan, is still Italian, rich in
+flowers and fruit like a well-kept garden. It belongs to the
+completeness of the ‘Cortigiano’ that his wit, his polished manners, and
+his poetry, must be clothed in this perfect dress.
+
+When style and language had once become the property of a living
+society, all the efforts of purists and archaists failed to secure their
+end. Tuscany itself was rich in writers and talkers of the first order,
+who ignored and ridiculed these endeavours. Ridicule in abundance
+awaited the foreign scholar who explained to the Tuscans how little they
+understood their own language.[866] The life and influence of a writer
+like Macchiavelli was enough to sweep away all these cobwebs. His
+vigorous thoughts, his clear and simple mode of expression wore a form
+which had any merit but that of the ‘Trecentisti.’ And on the other hand
+there were too many North Italians, Romans, and Neapolitans, who were
+thankful if the demand for purity of style in literature and
+conversation was not pressed too far. They repudiated, indeed, the forms
+and idioms of their dialect; and Bandello, with what a foreigner might
+suspect to be false modesty, is never tired of declaring: ‘I have no
+style; I do not write like a Florentine, but like a barbarian; I am not
+ambitious of giving new graces to my language; I am a Lombard, and from
+the Ligurian border into the bargain.’[867] But the claims of the
+purists were most successfully met by the express renunciation of the
+higher qualities of style, and the adoption of a vigorous, popular
+language in their stead. Few could hope to rival Pietro Bembo who,
+though born in Venice, nevertheless wrote the purest Tuscan, which to
+him was a foreign language, or the Neapolitan Sannazaro, who did the
+same. But the essential point was that language, whether spoken or
+written, was held to be an object of respect. As long as this feeling
+was prevalent, the fanaticism of the purists--their linguistic
+congresses and the rest of it[868]--did little harm. Their bad influence
+was not felt till much later, when the original power of Italian
+literature relaxed, and yielded to other and far worse influences. At
+last it became possible for the Accademia della Crusca to treat Italian
+like a dead language. But this association proved so helpless that it
+could not even hinder the invasion of Gallicism in the eighteenth
+century.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This language--loved, tended, and trained to every use--now served as
+the basis of social intercourse. In northern countries, the nobles and
+the princes passed their leisure either in solitude, or in hunting,
+fighting, drinking, and the like; the burghers in games and bodily
+exercises, with a mixture of literary or festive amusement. In Italy
+there existed a neutral ground, where people of every origin, if they
+had the needful talent and culture, spent their time in conversation and
+the polished interchange of jest and earnest. As eating and drinking
+formed a small part of such entertainments,[869] it was not difficult to
+keep at a distance those who sought society for these objects. If we are
+to take the writers of dialogues literally, the loftiest problems of
+human existence were not excluded from the conversation of thinking men,
+and the production of noble thoughts was not, as was commonly the case
+in the North, the work of solitude, but of society. But we must here
+limit ourselves to the less serious side of social intercourse--to the
+side which existed only for the sake of amusement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE HIGHER FORMS OF SOCIETY.
+
+
+This society, at all events at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
+was a matter of art; and had, and rested on, tacit or avowed rules of
+good sense and propriety, which are the exact reverse of all mere
+etiquette. In less polished circles, where society took the form of a
+permanent corporation, we meet with a system of formal rules and a
+prescribed mode of entrance, as was the case with those wild sets of
+Florentine artists of whom Vasari tells us that they were capable of
+giving representations of the best comedies of the day.[870] In the
+easier intercourse of society it was not unusual to select some
+distinguished lady as president, whose word was law for the evening.
+Everybody knows the introduction to Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron,’ and looks
+on the presidency of Pampinea as a graceful fiction. That it was so in
+this particular case is a matter of course; but the fiction was
+nevertheless based on a practice which often occurred in reality.
+Firenzuola, who nearly two centuries later (1523) prefaces his
+collection of tales in a similar manner, with express reference to
+Boccaccio, comes assuredly nearer to the truth when he puts into the
+mouth of the queen of the society a formal speech on the mode of
+spending the hours during the stay which the company proposed to make in
+the country. The day was to begin with a stroll among the hills passed
+in philosophical talk; then followed breakfast,[871] with music and
+singing, after which came the recitation, in some cool, shady spot, of
+a new poem, the subject of which had been given the night before; in the
+evening the whole party walked to a spring of water where they all sat
+down and each one told a tale; last of all came supper and lively
+conversation ‘of such a kind that the women might listen to it without
+shame and the men might not seem to be speaking under the influence of
+wine.’ Bandello, in the introductions and dedications to single novels,
+does not give us, it is true, such inaugural discourses as this, since
+the circles before which the stories are told are represented as already
+formed; but he gives us to understand in other ways how rich, how
+manifold, and how charming the conditions of society must have been.
+Some readers may be of opinion that no good was to be got from a world
+which was willing to be amused by such immoral literature. It would be
+juster to wonder at the secure foundations of a society which,
+notwithstanding these tales, still observed the rules of order and
+decency, and which knew how to vary such pastimes with serious and solid
+discussion. The need of noble forms of social intercourse was felt to be
+stronger than all others. To convince ourselves of it, we are not
+obliged to take as our standard the idealised society which Castiglione
+depicts as discussing the loftiest sentiments and aims of human life at
+the court of Guidobaldo of Urbino, and Pietro Bembo at the castle of
+Asolo. The society described by Bandello, with all the frivolities which
+may be laid to its charge, enables us to form the best notion of the
+easy and polished dignity, of the urbane kindliness, of the intellectual
+freedom, of the wit and the graceful dilettantism which distinguished
+these circles. A significant proof of the value of such circles lies in
+the fact that the women who were the centres of them could become famous
+and illustrious without in any way compromising their reputation. Among
+the patronesses of Bandello, for example, Isabella Gonzaga (born an
+Este, p. 44) was talked of unfavourably not through any fault of her
+own, but on account of the too free-lived young ladies who filled her
+court.[872] Giulia Gonzaga Colonna, Ippolita Sforza married to a
+Bentivoglio, Bianca Rangona, Cecilia Gallerana, Camilla Scarampa, and
+others were either altogether irreproachable, or their social fame threw
+into the shade whatever they may have done amiss. The most famous woman
+of Italia, Vittoria Colonna[873] (b. 1490, d. 1547), the friend of
+Castiglione and Michelangelo, enjoyed the reputation of a saint. It is
+hard to give such a picture of the unconstrained intercourse of these
+circles in the city, at the baths, or in the country, as will furnish
+literal proof of the superiority of Italy in this respect over the rest
+of Europe. But let us read Bandello,[874] and then ask ourselves if
+anything of the same kind would have been then possible, say, in France,
+before this kind of society was there introduced by people like himself.
+No doubt the supreme achievements of the human mind were then produced
+independently of the helps of the drawing-room. Yet it would be unjust
+to rate the influence of the latter on art and poetry too low, if only
+for the reason that society helped to shape that which existed in no
+other country--a widespread interest in artistic production and an
+intelligent and critical public opinion. And apart from this, society of
+the kind we have described was in itself a natural flower of that life
+and culture which then was purely Italian, and which since then has
+extended to the rest of Europe.
+
+In Florence society was powerfully affected by literature and politics.
+Lorenzo the Magnificent was supreme over his circle, not, as we might be
+led to believe, through the princely position which he occupied, but
+rather through the wonderful tact he displayed in giving perfect freedom
+of action to the many and varied natures which surrounded him.[875] We
+see how gently he dealt with his great tutor Politian, and how the
+sovereignty of the poet and scholar was reconciled, though not without
+difficulty, with the inevitable reserve prescribed by the approaching
+change in the position of the house of Medici and by consideration for
+the sensitiveness of the wife. In return for the treatment he received,
+Politian became the herald and the living symbol of Medicean glory.
+Lorenzo, after the fashion of a true Medici, delighted in giving an
+outward and artistic expression to his social amusements. In his
+brilliant improvisation--the Hawking Party--he gives us a humorous
+description of his comrades, and in the Symposium a burlesque of them,
+but in both cases in such a manner that we clearly feel his capacity for
+more serious companionship.[876] Of this intercourse his correspondence
+and the records of his literary and philosophical conversation give
+ample proof. Some of the social unions which were afterwards formed in
+Florence were in part political clubs, though not without a certain
+poetical and philosophical character also. Of this kind was the
+so-called Platonic Academy which met after Lorenzo’s death in the
+gardens of the Ruccellai.[877]
+
+At the courts of the princes, society naturally depended on the
+character of the ruler. After the beginning of the sixteenth century
+they became few in number, and these few soon lost their importance.
+Rome, however, possessed in the unique court of Leo X. a society to
+which the history of the world offers no parallel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE PERFECT MAN OF SOCIETY.
+
+
+It was for this society--or rather for his own sake--that the
+‘Cortigiano,’ as described to us by Castiglione, educated himself. He
+was the ideal man of society, and was regarded by the civilisation of
+that age as its choicest flower; and the court existed for him far
+rather than he for the court. Indeed, such a man would have been out of
+place at any court, since he himself possessed all the gifts and the
+bearing of an accomplished ruler, and because his calm supremacy in all
+things, both outward and spiritual, implied a too independent nature.
+The inner impulse which inspired him was directed, though our author
+does not acknowledge the fact, not to the service of the prince, but to
+his own perfection. One instance will make this clear.[878] In time of
+war the courtier refuses even useful and perilous tasks, if they are not
+beautiful and dignified in themselves, such as for instance the capture
+of a herd of cattle; what urges him to take part in war is not duty, but
+‘l’onore.’ The moral relation to the prince, as prescribed in the fourth
+book, is singularly free and independent. The theory of well-bred
+love-making, set forth in the third book, is full of delicate
+psychological observation, which perhaps would be more in place in a
+treatise on human nature generally; and the magnificent praise of ideal
+love, which occurs at the end of the fourth book, and which rises to a
+lyrical elevation of feeling, has no connection whatever with the
+special object of the work. Yet here, as in the ‘Asolani’ of Bembo, the
+culture of the time shows itself in the delicacy with which this
+sentiment is represented and analysed. It is true that these writers are
+not in all cases to be taken literally; but that the discourses they
+give us were actually frequent in good society, cannot be doubted, and
+that it was no affectation, but genuine passion, which appeared in this
+dress, we shall see further on.
+
+Among outward accomplishments, the so-called knightly exercises were
+expected in thorough perfection from the courtier, and besides these
+much that could only exist at courts highly organised and based on
+personal emulation, such as were not to be found out of Italy. Other
+points obviously rest on an abstract notion of individual perfection.
+The courtier must be at home in all noble sports, among them running,
+leaping, swimming, and wrestling; he must, above all things, be a good
+dancer and, as a matter of course, an accomplished rider. He must be
+master of several languages; at all events of Latin and Italian; he must
+be familiar with literature and have some knowledge of the fine arts. In
+music a certain practical skill was expected of him, which he was bound,
+nevertheless, to keep as secret as possible. All this is not to be taken
+too seriously, except what relates to the use of arms. The mutual
+interaction of these gifts and accomplishments results in the perfect
+man, in whom no one quality usurps the place of the rest.
+
+So much is certain, that in the sixteenth century the Italians had all
+Europe for their pupils both theoretically and practically in every
+noble bodily exercise and in the habits and manners of good society.
+Their instructions and their illustrated books on riding, fencing, and
+dancing served as the model to other countries. Gymnastics as an art,
+apart both from military training and from mere amusement, was probably
+first taught by Vittorino da Feltre (p. 213) and after his time became
+essential to a complete education.[879] The important fact is that they
+were taught systematically, though what exercises were most in favour,
+and whether they resembled those now in use, we are unable to say. But
+we may infer, not only from the general character of the people, but
+from positive evidence which has been left for us, that not only
+strength and skill, but grace of movement was one of the main objects of
+physical training. It is enough to remind the reader of the great
+Frederick of Urbino (p. 44) directing the evening games of the young
+people committed to his care.
+
+The games and contests of the popular classes did not differ essentially
+from those which prevailed elsewhere in Europe. In the maritime cities
+boat-racing was among the number, and the Venetian regattas were famous
+at an early period.[880] The classical game of Italy was and is the
+ball; and this was probably played at the time of the Renaissance with
+more zeal and brilliancy than elsewhere. But on this point no distinct
+evidence is forthcoming.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few words on music will not be out of place in this part of our
+work.[881] Musical composition down to the year 1500 was chiefly in the
+hands of the Flemish school, whose originality and artistic dexterity
+were greatly admired. Side by side with this, there nevertheless existed
+an Italian school, which probably stood nearer to our present taste.
+Half a century later came Palestrina, whose genius still works
+powerfully among us. We learn among other facts that he was a great
+innovator; but whether he or others took the decisive part in shaping
+the musical language of the modern world lies beyond the judgment of the
+unprofessional critic. Leaving on one side the history of musical
+composition, we shall confine ourselves to the position which music held
+in the social life of the day.
+
+A fact most characteristic of the Renaissance and of Italy is the
+specialisation of the orchestra, the search for new instruments and
+modes of sound, and, in close connection with this tendency, the
+formation of a class of ‘virtuosi,’ who devoted their whole attention to
+particular instruments or particular branches of music.
+
+Of the more complex instruments, which were perfected and widely
+diffused at a very early period, we find not only the organ, but a
+corresponding string-instrument, the ‘gravicembalo’ or ‘clavicembalo.’
+Fragments of these, dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century,
+have come down to our own days, adorned with paintings from the hands of
+the greatest masters. Among other instruments the first place was held
+by the violin, which even then conferred great celebrity on the
+successful player. At the court of Leo X., who, when cardinal, had
+filled his house with singers and musicians, and who enjoyed the
+reputation of a critic and performer, the Jew Giovan Maria and Jacopo
+Sansecondo were among the most famous. The former received from Leo the
+title of count and a small town;[882] the latter has been taken to be
+the Apollo in the Parnassus of Raphael. In the course of the sixteenth
+century, celebrities in every branch of music appeared in abundance, and
+Lomazzo (about the year 1580) names the then most distinguished masters
+of the art of singing, of the organ, the lute, the lyre, the ‘viola da
+gamba,’ the harp, the cithern, the horn, and the trumpet, and wishes
+that their portraits might be painted on the instruments
+themselves.[883] Such many-sided comparative criticism would have been
+impossible anywhere but in Italy, although the same instruments were to
+be found in other countries.
+
+The number and variety of these instruments is shown by the fact that
+collections of them were now made from curiosity. In Venice, which was
+one of the most musical cities of Italy,[884] there were several such
+collections, and when a sufficient number of performers happened to be
+on the spot, a concert was at once improvised. In one of these museums
+there were a large number of instruments, made after ancient pictures
+and descriptions, but we are not told if anybody could play them, or how
+they sounded. It must not be forgotten that such instruments were often
+beautifully decorated, and could be arranged in a manner pleasing to the
+eye. We thus meet with them in collections of other rarities and works
+of art.
+
+The players, apart from the professional performers, were either single
+amateurs, or whole orchestras of them, organised into a corporate
+Academy.[885] Many artists in other branches were at home in music, and
+often masters of the art. People of position were averse to
+wind-instruments, for the same reason[886] which made them distasteful
+to Alcibiades and Pallas Athene. In good society singing, either alone
+or accompanied with the violin, was usual; but quartettes of
+string-instruments were also common,[887] and the ‘clavicembalo’ was
+liked on account of its varied effects. In singing the solo only was
+permitted, ‘for a single voice is heard, enjoyed, and judged far
+better.’ In other words, as singing, notwithstanding all conventional
+modesty, is an exhibition of the individual man of society, it is better
+that each should be seen and heard separately. The tender feelings
+produced in the fair listeners are taken for granted, and elderly people
+are therefore recommended to abstain from such forms of art, even though
+they excel in them. It was held important that the effect of the song
+should be enhanced by the impression made on the sight. We hear nothing
+however of the treatment in these circles of musical composition as an
+independent branch of art. On the other hand it happened sometimes that
+the subject of the song was some terrible event which had befallen the
+singer himself.[888]
+
+This dilettantism, which pervaded the middle as well as the upper
+classes, was in Italy both more widely spread and more genuinely
+artistic than in any other country of Europe. Wherever we meet with a
+description of social intercourse, there music and singing are always
+and expressly mentioned. Hundreds of portraits show us men and women,
+often several together, playing or holding some musical instrument, and
+the angelic concerts represented in the ecclesiastical pictures prove
+how familiar the painters were with the living effects of music. We read
+of the lute-player Antonio Rota, at Padua (d. 1549), who became a rich
+man by his lessons, and published a handbook to the practice of the
+lute.[889]
+
+At a time when there was no opera to concentrate and monopolise musical
+talent, this general cultivation of the art must have been something
+wonderfully varied, intelligent, and original. It is another question
+how much we should find to satisfy us in these forms of music, could
+they now be reproduced for us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
+
+
+To understand the higher forms of social intercourse at this period, we
+must keep before our minds the fact that women stood on a footing of
+perfect equality with men.[890] We must not suffer ourselves to be
+misled by the sophistical and often malicious talk about the assumed
+inferiority of the female sex, which we meet with now and then in the
+dialogues of this time,[891] nor by such satires as the third of
+Ariosto,[892] who treats woman as a dangerous grown-up child, whom a man
+must learn how to manage, in spite of the great gulf between them.
+There is, indeed, a certain amount of truth in what he says. Just
+because the educated woman was on a level with the man, that communion
+of mind and heart which comes from the sense of mutual dependence and
+completion, could not be developed in marriage at this time, as it has
+been developed later in the cultivated society of the North.
+
+The education given to women in the upper classes was essentially the
+same as that given to men. The Italian, at the time of the Renaissance,
+felt no scruple in putting sons and daughters alike under the same
+course of literary and even philological instruction (p. 222). Indeed,
+looking at this ancient culture as the chief treasure of life, he was
+glad that his girls should have a share in it. We have seen what
+perfection was attained by the daughters of princely houses in writing
+and speaking Latin (p. 234).[893] Many others must at least have been
+able to read it, in order to follow the conversation of the day, which
+turned largely on classical subjects. An active interest was taken by
+many in Italian poetry, in which, whether prepared or improvised, a
+large number of Italian women, from the time of the Venetian Cassandra
+Fedele onwards (about the close of the fifteenth century), made
+themselves famous.[894] One, indeed, Vittoria Colonna, may be called
+immortal. If any proof were needed of the assertion made above, it would
+be found in the manly tone of this poetry. Even the love-sonnets and
+religious poems are so precise and definite in their character, and so
+far removed from the tender twilight of sentiment, and from all the
+dilettantism which we commonly find in the poetry of women, that we
+should not hesitate to attribute them to male authors, if we had not
+clear external evidence to prove the contrary.
+
+For, with education, the individuality of women in the upper classes
+was developed in the same way as that of men. Till the time of the
+Reformation, the personality of women out of Italy, even of the highest
+rank, comes forward but little. Exceptions like Isabella of Bavaria,
+Margaret of Anjou, and Isabella of Castille, are the forced result of
+very unusual circumstances. In Italy, throughout the whole of the
+fifteenth century, the wives of the rulers, and still more those of the
+Condottieri, have nearly all a distinct, recognisable personality, and
+take their share of notoriety and glory. To these came gradually to be
+added a crowd of famous women of the most varied kind (i. p. 147, note
+1); among them those whose distinction consisted in the fact that their
+beauty, disposition, education, virtue, and piety, combined to render
+them harmonious human beings.[895] There was no question of ‘woman’s
+rights’ or female emancipation, simply because the thing itself was a
+matter of course. The educated woman, no less than the man, strove
+naturally after a characteristic and complete individuality. The same
+intellectual and emotional development which perfected the man, was
+demanded for the perfection of the woman. Active literary work,
+nevertheless, was not expected from her, and if she were a poet, some
+powerful utterance of feeling, rather than the confidences of the novel
+or the diary, was looked for. These women had no thought of the
+public;[896] their function was to influence distinguished men, and to
+moderate male impulse and caprice.
+
+The highest praise which could then be given to the great Italian women
+was that they had the mind and the courage of men. We have only to
+observe the thoroughly manly bearing of most of the women in the heroic
+poems, especially those of Bojardo and Ariosto, to convince ourselves
+that we have before us the ideal of the time. The title ‘virago,’ which
+is an equivocal compliment in the present day, then implied nothing but
+praise. It was borne in all its glory by Caterina Sforza, wife and
+afterwards widow of Giroloma Riario, whose hereditary possession, Forli,
+she gallantly defended first against his murderers, and then against
+Cæsar Borgia. Though finally vanquished, she retained the admiration of
+her countrymen and the title ‘prima donna d’Italia.’[897] This heroic
+vein can be detected in many of the women of the Renaissance, though
+none found the same opportunity of showing their heroism to the world.
+In Isabella Gonzaga this type is clearly recognisable, and not less in
+Clarice, of the House of Medici, the wife of Filippo Strozzi.[898]
+
+Women of this stamp could listen to novels like those of Bandello,
+without social intercourse suffering from it. The ruling genius of
+society was not, as now, womanhood, or the respect for certain
+presuppositions, mysteries, and susceptibilities, but the consciousness
+of energy, of beauty, and of a social state full of danger and
+opportunity. And for this reason we find, side by side with the most
+measured and polished social forms, something our age would call
+immodesty,[899] forgetting that by which it was corrected and
+counterbalanced--the powerful characters of the women who were exposed
+to it.
+
+That in all the dialogues and treatises together we can find no absolute
+evidence on these points is only natural, however freely the nature of
+love and the position and capacities of women were discussed.
+
+What seems to have been wanting in this society were the young
+girls,[900] who, even when not brought up in the monasteries, were still
+carefully kept away from it. It is not easy to say whether their absence
+was the cause of the greater freedom of conversation, or whether they
+were removed on account of it.
+
+Even the intercourse with courtesans seems to have assumed a more
+elevated character, reminding us of the position of the Hetairae in
+Classical Athens. The famous Roman courtesan Imperia was a woman of
+intelligence and culture, had learned from a certain Domenico
+Campana the art of making sonnets, and was not without musical
+accomplishments.[901] The beautiful Isabella de Luna, of Spanish
+extraction, who was reckoned amusing company, seems to have been an odd
+compound of a kind heart with a shockingly foul tongue, which latter
+sometimes brought her into trouble.[902] At Milan, Bandello knew the
+majestic Caterina di San Celso,[903] who played and sang and recited
+superbly. It is clear from all we read on the subject that the
+distinguished people who visited these women, and from time to time
+lived with them, demanded from them a considerable degree of
+intelligence and instruction, and that the famous courtesans were
+treated with no slight respect and consideration. Even when relations
+with them were broken off, their good opinion was still desired,[904]
+which shows that departed passion had left permanent traces behind. But
+on the whole this intellectual intercourse is not worth mentioning by
+the side of that sanctioned by the recognised forms of social life, and
+the traces which it has left in poetry and literature are for the most
+part of a scandalous nature. We may well be astonished that among the
+6,800 persons of this class, who were to be found in Rome in
+1490[905]--that is, before the appearance of syphilis--scarcely a
+single woman seems to have been remarkable for any higher gifts. These
+whom we have mentioned all belong to the period which immediately
+followed. The mode of life, the morals and the philosophy of the public
+women, who with all their sensuality and greed were not always incapable
+of deeper passions, as well as the hypocrisy and devilish malice shown
+by some in their later years, are best set forth by Giraldi, in the
+novels which form the introduction to the ‘Hecatommithi.’ Pietro
+Aretino, in his ‘Ragionamenti,’ gives us rather a picture of his own
+depraved character than of this unhappy class of women as they really
+were.
+
+The mistresses of the princes, as has already been pointed out (p. 53),
+were sung by poets and painted by artists, and in consequence have been
+personally familiar to their contemporaries and to posterity. We hardly
+know more than the name of Alice Perrers and of Clara Dettin, the
+mistress of Frederick the Victorious, and of Agnes Sorel have only a
+half-legendary story. With the monarchs of the age of the
+Renaissance--Francis I. and Henry II.--the case is different.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+DOMESTIC ECONOMY.
+
+
+After treating of the intercourse of society, let us glance for a moment
+at the domestic life of this period. We are commonly disposed to look on
+the family life of the Italians at this time as hopelessly ruined by the
+national immorality, and this side of the question will be more fully
+discussed in the sequel. For the moment we must content ourselves with
+pointing out that conjugal infidelity has by no means so disastrous an
+influence on family life in Italy as in the North, so long at least as
+certain limits are not overstepped.
+
+The domestic life of the Middle Ages was a product of popular morals, or
+if we prefer to put it otherwise, a result of the inborn tendencies of
+national life, modified by the varied circumstances which affected them.
+Chivalry at the time of its splendour left domestic economy untouched.
+The knight wandered from court to court, and from one battle-field to
+another. His homage was given systematically to some other woman than
+his own wife, and things went how they might at home in the castle.[906]
+The spirit of the Renaissance first brought order into domestic life,
+treating it as a work of deliberate contrivance. Intelligent economical
+views (p. 77), and a rational style of domestic architecture served to
+promote this end. But the chief cause of the change was the thoughtful
+study of all questions relating to social intercourse, to education, to
+domestic service and organisation.
+
+The most precious document on this subject is the treatise on the
+management of the home by Agnolo Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti).[907] He
+represents a father speaking to his grown-up sons, and initiating them
+into his method of administration. We are introduced into a large and
+wealthy household, which if governed with moderation and reasonable
+economy, promises happiness and prosperity for generations to come. A
+considerable landed estate, whose produce furnishes the table of the
+house, and serves as the basis of the family fortune, is combined with
+some industrial pursuit, such as the weaving of wool or silk. The
+dwelling is solid and the food good. All that has to do with the plan
+and arrangement of the house is great, durable, and costly, but the
+daily life within it is as simple as possible. All other expenses, from
+the largest in which the family honour is at stake, down to the
+pocket-money of the younger sons, stand to one another in a rational,
+not a conventional relation. Nothing is considered of so much importance
+as education, which the head of the house gives not only to the
+children, but to the whole household. He first develops his wife from a
+shy girl, brought up in careful seclusion, to the true woman of the
+house, capable of commanding and guiding the servants. The sons are
+brought up without any undue severity,[908] carefully watched and
+counselled, and controlled ‘rather by authority than by force.’ And
+finally the servants are chosen and treated on such principles that
+they gladly and faithfully hold by the family.
+
+One feature of this book must be referred to, which is by no means
+peculiar to it, but which it treats with special warmth--the love of the
+educated Italian for country life.[909] In northern countries the nobles
+lived in the country in their castles, and the monks of the higher
+orders in their well-guarded monasteries, while the wealthiest burghers
+dwelt from one year’s end to another in the cities. But in Italy, so far
+as the neighbourhood of certain towns at all events was concerned,[910]
+the security of life and property was so great, and the passion for a
+country residence was so strong, that men were willing to risk a loss in
+time of war. Thus arose the villa, the country-house of the well-to-do
+citizen. This precious inheritance of the old Roman world was thus
+revived, as soon as the wealth and culture of the people were
+sufficiently advanced.
+
+One author finds at his villa a peace and happiness, for an account of
+which the reader must hear him speak himself: ‘While every other
+possession causes work and danger, fear and disappointment, the villa
+brings a great and honourable advantage; the villa is always true and
+kind; if you dwell in it at the right time and with love, it will not
+only satisfy you, but add reward to reward. In spring the green trees
+and the song of the birds will make you joyful and hopeful; in autumn a
+moderate exertion will bring forth fruit a hundredfold; all through the
+year melancholy will be banished from you. The villa is the spot where
+good and honest men love to congregate. Nothing secret, nothing
+treacherous, is done here; all see all; here is no need of judges or
+witnesses, for all are kindly and peaceably disposed one to another.
+Hasten hither, and fly away from the pride of the rich, and the
+dishonour of the bad. O blessed life in the villa, O unknown fortune!’
+The economical side of the matter is that one and the same property
+must, if possible, contain everything--corn, wine, oil, pasture-land and
+woods, and that in such cases the property was paid for well, since
+nothing needed then to be got from the market. But the higher enjoyment
+derived from the villa is shown by some words of the introduction:
+‘Round about Florence lie many villas in a transparent atmosphere, amid
+cheerful scenery, and with a splendid view; there is little fog, and no
+injurious winds; all is good, and the water pure and healthy. Of the
+numerous buildings many are like palaces, many like castles, costly and
+beautiful to behold.’ He is speaking of those unrivalled villas, of
+which the greater number were sacrificed, though vainly, by the
+Florentines themselves in the defence of their city in the year
+1529.[911]
+
+In these villas, as in those on the Brenta, on the Lombard hills, at
+Posilippo and on the Vomero, social life assumed a freer and more rural
+character than in the palaces within the city. We meet with charming
+descriptions of the intercourse of the guests, the hunting-parties, and
+all the open-air pursuits and amusements.[912] But the noblest
+achievements of poetry and thought are sometimes also dated from these
+scenes of rural peace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE FESTIVALS.
+
+
+It is by no arbitrary choice that in discussing the social life of this
+period, we are led to treat of the processions and shows which formed
+part of the popular festivals.[913] The artistic power of which the
+Italians of the Renaissance gave proof on such occasions,[914] was
+attained only by means of that free intercourse of all classes which
+formed the basis of Italian society. In Northern Europe the monasteries,
+the courts, and the burghers had their special feasts and shows as in
+Italy; but in the one case the form and substance of these displays
+differed according to the class which took part in them, in the other an
+art and culture common to the whole nation stamped them with both a
+higher and a more popular character. The decorative architecture, which
+served to aid in these festivals, deserves a chapter to itself in the
+history of art, although our imagination can only form a picture of it
+from the descriptions which have been left to us. We are here more
+especially concerned with the festival as a higher phase in the life of
+the people, in which its religious, moral, and poetical ideas took
+visible shape. The Italian festivals in their best form mark the point
+of transition from real life into the world of art.
+
+The two chief forms of festal display were originally here, as elsewhere
+in the West, the Mystery, or the dramatisation of sacred history and
+legend, and the Procession, the motive and character of which was also
+purely ecclesiastical.
+
+The performances of the Mysteries in Italy were from the first more
+frequent and splendid than elsewhere, and were most favourably affected
+by the progress of poetry and of the other arts. In the course of time
+not only did the farce and the secular drama branch off from the
+Mystery, as in other countries of Europe, but the pantomime also, with
+its accompaniments of singing and dancing, the effect of which depended
+on the richness and beauty of the spectacle.
+
+The Procession, in the broad, level, and well-paved streets of the
+Italian cities,[915] was soon developed into the ‘Trionfo,’ or train of
+masked figures on foot and in chariots, the ecclesiastical character of
+which gradually gave way to the secular. The processions at the Carnival
+and at the feast of Corpus Christi[916] were alike in the pomp and
+brilliancy with which they were conducted, and set the pattern
+afterwards followed by the royal or princely progresses. Other nations
+were willing to spend vast sums of money on these shows, but in Italy
+alone do we find an artistic method of treatment which arranged the
+procession as a harmonious and significative whole.
+
+What is left of these festivals is but a poor remnant of what once
+existed. Both religious and secular displays of this kind have abandoned
+the dramatic element--the costumes--partly from dread of ridicule, and
+partly because the cultivated classes, who formerly gave their whole
+energies to these things, have for several reasons lost their interest
+in them. Even at the Carnival, the great processions of masks are out of
+fashion. What still remains, such as the costumes adopted in imitation
+of certain religious confraternities, or even the brilliant festival of
+Santa Rosalia at Palermo, shows clearly how far the higher culture of
+the country has withdrawn from such interests.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The festivals did not reach their full development till after the
+decisive victory of the modern spirit in the fifteenth century,[917]
+unless perhaps Florence was here, as in other things, in advance of the
+rest of Italy. In Florence, the several quarters of the city were, in
+early times, organized with a view to such exhibitions, which demanded
+no small expenditure of artistic effort. Of this kind was the
+representation of Hell, with a scaffold and boats in the Arno, on the
+1st of May, 1304, when the Ponte alla Carraja broke down under the
+weight of the spectators.[918] That at a later time Florentines used to
+travel through Italy as directors of festivals (festaiuoli), shows that
+the art was early perfected at home.[919]
+
+In setting forth the chief points of superiority in the Italian
+festivals over those of other countries, the first that we shall have to
+remark is the developed sense of individual characteristics, in other
+words, the capacity to invent a given mask, and to act the part with
+dramatic propriety. Painters and sculptors not merely did their part
+towards the decoration of the place where the festival was held, but
+helped in getting up the characters themselves, and prescribed the
+dress, the paints (p. 373), and the other ornaments to be used. The
+second fact to be pointed out is the universal familiarity of the people
+with the poetical basis of the show. The Mysteries, indeed, were equally
+well understood all over Europe, since the biblical story and the
+legends of the saints were the common property of Christendom; but in
+all other respects the advantage was on the side of Italy. For the
+recitations, whether of religious or secular heroes, she possessed a
+lyrical poetry so rich and harmonious that none could resist its
+charm.[920] The majority, too, of the spectators--at least in the
+cities--understood the meaning of mythological figures, and could guess
+without much difficulty at the allegorical and historical, which were
+drawn from sources familiar to the mass of Italians.
+
+This point needs to be more fully discussed. The Middle Ages were
+essentially the ages of allegory. Theology and philosophy treated their
+categories as independent beings,[921] and poetry and art had but little
+to add, in order to give them personality. Here all the countries of the
+West were on the same level. Their world of ideas was rich enough in
+types and figures, but when these were put into concrete shape, the
+costume and attributes were likely to be unintelligible and unsuited to
+the popular taste. This, even in Italy, was often the case, and not only
+so during the whole period of the Renaissance, but down to a still later
+time. To produce the confusion, it was enough if a predicate of the
+allegorical figures was wrongly translated by an attribute. Even Dante
+is not wholly free from such errors,[922] and, indeed, he prides himself
+on the obscurity of his allegories in general.[923] Petrarch, in his
+‘Trionfi,’ attempts to give clear, if short, descriptions of at all
+events the figures of Love, of Chastity, of Death, and of Fame. Others
+again load their allegories with inappropriate attributes. In the
+Satires of Vinciguerra,[924] for example, Envy is depicted with rough,
+iron teeth, Gluttony as biting its own lips, and with a shock of tangled
+hair, the latter probably to show its indifference to all that is not
+meat and drink. We cannot here discuss the bad influence of these
+misunderstandings on the plastic arts. They, like poetry, might think
+themselves fortunate if allegory could be expressed by a mythological
+figure--by a figure which antiquity saved from absurdity--if Mars might
+stand for war, and Diana[925] for the love of the chase.
+
+Nevertheless art and poetry had better allegories than these to offer,
+and we may assume with regard to such figures of this kind as appeared
+in the Italian festivals, that the public required them to be clearly
+and vividly characteristic, since its previous training had fitted it to
+be a competent critic. Elsewhere, particularly at the Burgundian court,
+the most inexpressive figures, and even mere symbols, were allowed to
+pass, since to understand, or to seem to understand them, was a part of
+aristocratic breeding. On the occasion of the famous ‘Oath of the
+Pheasant’ in the year 1453,[926] the beautiful young horsewoman, who
+appears as ‘Queen of Pleasure,’ is the only pleasing allegory. The huge
+dishes, with automatic or even living figures within them, are either
+mere curiosities or are intended to convey some clumsy moral lesson. A
+naked female statue guarding a live lion was supposed to represent
+Constantinople and its future saviour, the Duke of Burgundy. The rest,
+with the exception of a Pantomime--Jason in Colchis--seems either too
+recondite to be understood or to have no sense at all. Olivier himself,
+to whom we owe the description of the scene, appeared costumed as ‘The
+Church,’ in a tower on the back of an elephant, and sang a long elegy on
+the victory of the unbelievers.[927]
+
+But although the allegorical element in the poetry, the art, and the
+festivals of Italy is superior both in good taste and in unity of
+conception to what we find in other countries, yet it is not in these
+qualities that it is most characteristic and unique. The decisive point
+of superiority[928] lay rather in the fact, that besides the
+personifications of abstract qualities, historical representatives of
+them were introduced in great number--that both poetry and plastic art
+were accustomed to represent famous men and women. The ‘Divine Comedy,’
+the ‘Trionfi’ of Petrarch, the ‘Amorosa Visione’ of Boccaccio--all of
+them works constructed on this principle--and the great diffusion of
+culture which took place under the influence of antiquity, had made the
+nation familiar with this historical element. These figures now appeared
+at festivals, either individualised, as definite masks, or in groups, as
+characteristic attendants on some leading allegorical figure. The art of
+grouping and composition was thus learnt in Italy at a time when the
+most splendid exhibitions in other countries were made up of
+unintelligible symbolism or unmeaning puerilities.
+
+Let us begin with that kind of festival which is perhaps the oldest of
+all--the Mysteries.[929] They resembled in their main features those
+performed in the rest of Europe. In the public squares, in the churches,
+and in the cloisters extensive scaffolds were constructed, the upper
+story of which served as a Paradise to open and shut at will, and the
+ground-floor often as a Hell, while between the two lay the stage
+properly so called, representing the scene of all the earthly events of
+the drama. In Italy, as elsewhere, the biblical or legendary play often
+began with an introductory dialogue between Apostles, Prophets, Sibyls,
+Virtues, and Fathers of the Church, and sometimes ended with a dance. As
+a matter of course the half-comic ‘Intermezzi’ of secondary characters
+were not wanting in Italy, yet this feature was hardly so broadly marked
+as in northern countries.[930] The artificial means by which figures
+were made to rise and float in the air--one of the chief delights of
+these representations--were probably much better understood in Italy
+than elsewhere; and at Florence in the fourteenth century the hitches
+in these performances were a stock subject of ridicule.[931] Soon after
+Brunellesco invented for the Feast of the Annunciation in the Piazza San
+Felice a marvellous apparatus consisting of a heavenly globe surrounded
+by two circles of angels, out of which Gabriel flew down in a machine
+shaped like an almond. Cecca, too, devised the mechanism for such
+displays.[932] The spiritual corporations or the quarters of the city
+which undertook the charge and in part the performance of these plays
+spared, at all events in the larger towns, no trouble and expense to
+render them as perfect and artistic as possible. The same was no doubt
+the case at the great court festivals, when Mysteries were acted as well
+as pantomimes and secular dramas. The court of Pietro Riario (p. 106),
+and that of Ferrara were assuredly not wanting in all that human
+invention could produce.[933] When we picture to ourselves the
+theatrical talent and the splendid costumes of the actors, the scenes
+constructed in the style of the architecture of the period, and hung
+with garlands and tapestry, and in the background the noble buildings of
+an Italian piazza, or the slender columns of some great courtyard or
+cloister, the effect is one of great brilliance. But just as the secular
+drama suffered from this passion for display, so the higher poetical
+development of the Mystery was arrested by the same cause. In the texts
+which are left we find for the most part the poorest dramatic
+groundwork, relieved now and then by a fine lyrical or rhetorical
+passage, but no trace of the grand symbolic enthusiasm which
+distinguishes the ‘Autos Sagramentales’ of Calderon.
+
+In the smaller towns, where the scenic display was less, the effect of
+these spiritual plays on the character of the spectators may have been
+greater. We read[934] that one of the great preachers of repentance of
+whom more will be said later on, Roberto da Lecce, closed his Lenten
+sermons during the plague of 1448, at Perugia, with a representation of
+the Passion. The piece followed the New Testament closely. The actors
+were few, but the whole people wept aloud. It is true that on such
+occasions emotional stimulants were resorted to which were borrowed from
+the crudest realism. We are reminded of the pictures of Matteo da Siena,
+or of the groups of clay-figures by Guido Mazzoni, when we read that the
+actor who took the part of Christ appeared covered with wales and
+apparently sweating blood, and even bleeding from a wound in the
+side.[935]
+
+The special occasions on which these mysteries were performed, apart
+from the great festivals of the Church, from princely weddings, and the
+like, were of various kinds. When, for example, S. Bernardino of Siena
+was canonised by the Pope (1450), a sort of dramatic imitation of the
+ceremony took place (rappresentazione), probably on the great square of
+his native city, and for two days there was feasting with meat and drink
+for all comers.[936] We are told that a learned monk celebrated his
+promotion to the degree of Doctor of Theology, by giving a
+representation of the legend about the patron saint of the city.[937]
+Charles VIII. had scarcely entered Italy before he was welcomed at Turin
+by the widowed Duchess Bianca of Savoy with a sort of half-religious
+pantomime,[938] in which a pastoral scene first symbolised the Law of
+Nature, and then a procession of patriarchs the Law of Grace.
+Afterwards followed the story of Lancelot of the Lake, and that ‘of
+Athens.’ And no sooner had the King reached Chieri, than he was received
+with another pantomime, in which a woman in childbed was shown,
+surrounded by distinguished visitors.
+
+If any church festival was held by universal consent to call for
+exceptional efforts, it was the feast of Corpus Christi, which in Spain
+(p. 413) gave rise to a special class of poetry. We possess a splendid
+description of the manner in which that feast was celebrated at Viterbo
+by Pius II. in 1482.[939] The procession itself, which advanced from a
+vast and gorgeous tent in front of S. Francesco along the main street to
+the Cathedral, was the least part of the ceremony. The cardinals and
+wealthy prelates had divided the whole distance into parts, over which
+they severally presided, and which they decorated with curtains,
+tapestry, and garlands.[940] Each of them had also erected a stage of
+his own, on which, as the procession passed by, short historical and
+allegorical scenes were represented. It is not clear from the account
+whether all the characters were living beings or some merely draped
+figures;[941] the expense was certainly very great. There was a
+suffering Christ amid singing cherubs, the Last Supper with a figure of
+St. Thomas Aquinas, the combat between the Archangel Michael and the
+devils, fountains of wine and orchestras of angels, the grave of Christ
+with all the scene of the Resurrection, and finally, on the square
+before the Cathedral, the tomb of the Virgin. It opened after High Mass
+and the benediction, and the Mother of God ascended singing to Paradise,
+where she was crowned by her Son, and led into the presence of the
+Eternal Father.
+
+Among these representations in the public street, that given by the
+Cardinal Vice-Chancellor Roderigo Borgia, afterwards Pope Alexander VI.,
+was remarkable for its splendour and obscure symbolism.[942] It offers
+an early instance of the fondness for salvos of artillery[943] which was
+characteristic of the house of Borgia.
+
+The account is briefer which Pius II. gives us of the procession held
+the same year in Rome on the arrival of the skull of St. Andrew from
+Greece. There, too, Roderigo Borgia distinguished himself by his
+magnificence; but this festival had a more secular character than the
+other, as, besides the customary choirs of angels, other masks were
+exhibited, as well as ‘strong men,’ who seemed to have performed various
+feats of muscular prowess.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such representations as were wholly or chiefly secular in their
+character were arranged, especially at the more important princely
+courts, mainly with a view to splendid and striking scenic effects. The
+subjects were mythological or allegorical, and the interpretation
+commonly lay on the surface. Extravagancies, indeed, were not
+wanting--gigantic animals from which a crowd of masked figures suddenly
+emerged, as at Siena[944] in the year 1465, when at a public reception a
+ballet of twelve persons came out of a golden wolf; living table
+ornaments, not always, however, showing the tasteless exaggeration of
+the Burgundian Court (p. 182)--and the like. Most of them showed some
+artistic or poetical feeling. The mixture of pantomime and the drama at
+the Court of Ferrara has been already referred to in the treating of
+poetry (p. 318). The entertainments given in 1473 by the Cardinal Pietro
+Riario at Rome when Leonora of Aragon, the destined bride of Prince
+Hercules of Ferrara, was passing through the city, were famous far
+beyond the limits of Italy.[945] The plays acted were mysteries on some
+ecclesiastical subject, the pantomimes on the contrary, were
+mythological. There were represented Orpheus with the beasts, Perseus
+and Andromeda, Ceres drawn by dragons, Bacchus and Ariadne by panthers,
+and finally the education of Achilles. Then followed a ballet of the
+famous lovers of ancient times, with a troop of nymphs, which was
+interrupted by an attack of predatory centaurs, who in their turn were
+vanquished and put to flight by Hercules. The fact, in itself a trifle,
+may be mentioned, as characteristic of the taste of the time, that the
+human beings who at all the festivals appeared as statues in niches or
+on pillars and triumphal arches, and then showed themselves to be alive
+by singing or speaking, wore their natural complexion and a natural
+costume, and thus the sense of incongruity was removed; while in the
+house of Riario there was exhibited a living child, gilt from head to
+foot, who showered water round him from a spring.[946]
+
+Brilliant pantomimes of the same kind were given at Bologna, at the
+marriage of Annibale Bentivoglio with Lucrezia of Este.[947] Instead of
+the orchestra, choral songs were sung, while the fairest of Diana’s
+nymphs flew over to the Juno Pronuba, and while Venus walked with a
+lion--which in this case was a disguised man--among a troop of savages.
+The decorations were a faithful representation of a forest. At Venice,
+in 1491, the princesses of the house of Este[948] were met and welcomed
+by the Bucentaur, and entertained by boat-races and a splendid
+pantomime, called ‘Meleager,’ in the court of the ducal palace. At Milan
+Lionardo da Vinci[949] directed the festivals of the Duke and of some
+leading citizens. One of his machines, which must have rivalled that of
+Brunellesco (p. 411), represented the heavenly bodies with all their
+movements on a colossal scale. Whenever a planet approached Isabella,
+the bride of the young Duke, the divinity whose name it bore stepped
+forth from the globe,[950] and sang some verses written by the
+court-poet Bellincioni (1489). At another festival (1493) the model of
+the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza appeared with other objects
+under a triumphal arch on the square before the castle. We read in
+Vasari of the ingenious automata which Lionardo invented to welcome the
+French kings as masters of Milan. Even in the smaller cities great
+efforts were sometimes made on these occasions. When Duke Borso came in
+1453 to Reggio[951] to receive the homage of the city, he was met at
+the door by a great machine, on which S. Prospero, the patron saint of
+the town, appeared to float, shaded by a baldachino held by angels,
+while below him was a revolving disc with eight singing cherubs, two of
+whom received from the saint the sceptre and keys of the city, which
+they then delivered to the Duke, while saints and angels held forth in
+his praise. A chariot drawn by concealed horses now advanced, bearing an
+empty throne, behind which stood a figure of Justice attended by a
+genius. At the corners of the chariot sat four grey-headed lawgivers,
+encircled by angels with banners; by its side rode standard-bearers in
+complete armour. It need hardly be added that the goddess and the genius
+did not suffer the Duke to pass by without an address. A second car,
+drawn by an unicorn, bore a Caritas with a burning torch; between the
+two came the classical spectacle of a car in the form of a ship, moved
+by men concealed within it. The whole procession now advanced before the
+Duke. In front of the Church of S. Pietro, a halt was again made. The
+saint, attended by two angels, descended in an aureole from the façade,
+placed a wreath of laurel on the head of the Duke, and then floated back
+to his former position.[952] The clergy provided another allegory of a
+purely religious kind. Idolatry and Faith stood on two lofty pillars,
+and after Faith, represented by a beautiful girl, had uttered her
+welcome, the other column fell to pieces with the lay figure upon it.
+Further on, Borso was met by Cæsar with seven beautiful women, who were
+presented to him as the seven Virtues which he was exhorted to pursue.
+At last the Cathedral was reached, but after the service the Duke again
+took his seat on a lofty golden throne, and a second time received the
+homage of some of the masks already mentioned. To conclude all, three
+angels flew down from an adjacent building, and, amid songs of joy,
+delivered to him branches of palm, as symbols of peace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us now give a glance at those festivals the chief feature of which
+was the procession itself.
+
+There is no doubt that from an early period of the Middle Ages the
+religious processions gave rise to the use of masks. Little angels
+accompanied the sacrament or the sacred pictures and reliques on their
+way through the streets; or characters in the Passion--such as Christ
+with the cross, the thieves and the soldiers, or the faithful
+women--were represented for public edification. But the great feasts of
+the Church were from an early time accompanied by a civic procession,
+and the naïveté of the Middle Ages found nothing unfitting in the many
+secular elements which it contained. We may mention especially the naval
+car (_carrus navalis_), which had been inherited from pagan times,[953]
+and which, as an instance already quoted shows, was admissible at
+festivals of very various kinds, and has permanently left its name on
+one of them in particular--the Carnival. Such ships, decorated with all
+possible splendour, delighted the eyes of spectators long after the
+original meaning of them was forgotten. When Isabella of England met her
+bridegroom, the Emperor Frederick II., at Cologne, she was met by a
+number of such chariots, drawn by invisible horses, and filled with a
+crowd of priests who welcomed her with music and singing.
+
+But the religious processions were not only mingled with secular
+accessories of all kinds, but were often replaced by processions of
+clerical masks. Their origin is perhaps to be found in the parties of
+actors who wound their way through the streets of the city to the place
+where they were about to act the mystery; but it is possible that at an
+early period the clerical procession may have constituted itself as a
+distinct species. Dante[954] describes the ‘Trionfo’ of Beatrice, with
+the twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse, with the four mystical Beasts,
+with the three Christian and four Cardinal Virtues, and with Saint Luke,
+Saint Paul, and other Apostles, in a way which almost forces us to
+conclude that such processions actually occurred before his time. We
+are chiefly led to this conclusion by the chariot in which Beatrice
+drives, and which in the miraculous forest of the vision would have been
+unnecessary or rather out of place. It is possible, on the other hand,
+that Dante looked on the chariot as a symbol of victory and triumph, and
+that his poem rather served to give rise to these processions, the form
+of which was borrowed from the triumph of the Roman Emperors. However
+this may be, poetry and theology continued to make free use of the
+symbol. Savonarola[955] in his ‘Triumph of the Cross’ represents Christ
+on a Chariot of Victory, above his head the shining sphere of the
+Trinity, in his left hand the Cross, in his right the Old and New
+Testaments; below him the Virgin Mary; on both sides the Martyrs and
+Doctors of the Church with open books; behind him all the multitude of
+the saved; and in the distance the countless host of his
+enemies--emperors, princes, philosophers, heretics--all vanquished,
+their idols broken, and their books burned. A great picture of Titian,
+which is known only as a woodcut, has a good deal in common with this
+description. The ninth and tenth of Sabellico’s (p. 62) thirteen Elegies
+on the Mother of God contain a minute account of her triumph, richly
+adorned with allegories, and especially interesting from that
+matter-of-fact air which also characterises the realistic painting of
+the fifteenth century.
+
+Nevertheless, the secular ‘Trionfi’ were far more frequent than the
+religious. They were modelled on the procession of the Roman Imperator,
+as it was known from the old reliefs and from the writings of ancient
+authors.[956] The historical conceptions then prevalent in Italy, with
+which these shows were closely connected, have been already discussed
+(p. 139).
+
+We now and then read of the actual triumphal entrance of a victorious
+general, which was organised as far as possible on the ancient pattern,
+even against the will of the hero himself. Francesco Sforza had the
+courage (1450) to refuse the triumphal chariot which had been prepared
+for his return to Milan, on the ground that such things were monarchical
+superstitions.[957] Alfonso the Great, on his entrance into Naples
+(1443), declined the wreath of laurel,[958] which Napoleon did not
+disdain to wear at his coronation in Notre-Dame. For the rest, Alfonso’s
+procession, which passed by a breach in the wall through the city to the
+cathedral, was a strange mixture of antique, allegorical, and purely
+comic elements. The car, drawn by four white horses, on which he sat
+enthroned, was lofty and covered with gilding; twenty patricians carried
+the poles of the canopy of cloth of gold which shaded his head. The part
+of the procession which the Florentines then present in Naples had
+undertaken was composed of elegant young cavaliers, skilfully
+brandishing their lances, of a chariot with the figure of Fortune, and
+of seven Virtues on horseback. The goddess herself,[959] in accordance
+with the inexorable logic of allegory to which even the painters at that
+time conformed, wore hair only on the front part of her head, while the
+back part was bald, and the genius who sat on the lower steps of the
+car, and who symbolised the fugitive character of fortune, had his feet
+immersed (?) in a basin of water. Then followed, equipped by the same
+Florentines, a troop of horsemen in the costumes of various nations,
+dressed as foreign princes and nobles, and then, crowned with laurel and
+standing above a revolving globe, a Julius Cæsar,[960] who explained to
+the king in Italian verse the meaning of the allegories, and then took
+his place in the procession. Sixty Florentines, all in purple and
+scarlet, closed this splendid display of what their home could achieve.
+Then a band of Catalans advanced on foot, with lay figures of horses
+fastened on to them before and behind, and engaged in a mock combat with
+a body of Turks, as though in derision of the Florentine sentimentalism.
+Last of all came a gigantic tower, the door of which was guarded by an
+angel with a drawn sword; on it stood four Virtues, who each addressed
+the king with a song. The rest of the show had nothing specially
+characteristic about it.
+
+At the entrance of Louis XII. into Milan in the year 1507[961] we find,
+besides the inevitable chariot with Virtues, a living group representing
+Jupiter, Mars, and a figure of Italy caught in a net. After which came a
+car laden with trophies, and so forth.
+
+And when there were in reality no triumphs to celebrate, the poets found
+a compensation for themselves and their patrons. Petrarch and Boccaccio
+had described the representation of every sort of fame as attendants
+each of an allegorical figure (p. 409); the celebrities of past ages
+were now made attendants of the prince. The poetess Cleofe Gabrielli of
+Gubbio paid this honour to Borso of Ferrara.[962] She gave him seven
+queens--the seven liberal arts--as his handmaids, with whom he mounted a
+chariot; further, a crowd of heroes, distinguished by names written on
+their foreheads; then followed all the famous poets; and after them the
+gods driving in their chariots. There is, in fact, at this time simply
+no end to the mythological and allegorical charioteering, and the most
+important work of art of Borso’s time--the frescoes in the Palazzo
+Schifanoja--shows us a whole frieze filled with these motives.[963]
+Raphael, when he had to paint the Camera della Segnatura, found this
+mode of artistic thought completely vulgarised and worn out. The new and
+final consecration which he gave to it will remain a wonder to all ages.
+
+The triumphal processions, strictly speaking, of victorious generals,
+formed the exception. But all the festive processions, whether they
+celebrated any special event or were mainly held for their own sakes,
+assumed more or less the character and nearly always the name of a
+‘Trionfo.’ It is a wonder that funerals were not also treated in the
+same way.[964]
+
+It was the practice, both at the Carnival and on other occasions, to
+represent the triumphs of ancient Roman commanders, such as that of
+Paulus Æmilius under Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence, and that of
+Camillus on the visit of Leo X. Both were conducted by the painter
+Francesco Gronacci.[965] In Rome, the first complete exhibition of this
+kind was the triumph of Augustus after the victory over Cleopatra,[966]
+under Paul II., where, besides the comic and mythological masks, which,
+as a matter of fact, were not wanting in the ancient triumphs, all the
+other requisites were to be found--kings in chains, tablets with decrees
+of the senate and people, a senate clothed in the ancient costume,
+praetors, aediles, and quaestors, four chariots filled with singing
+masks, and, doubtless, cars laden with trophies. Other processions
+rather aimed at setting forth, in a general way, the universal empire of
+ancient Rome; and in answer to the very real danger which threatened
+Europe from the side of the Turks, a cavalcade of camels bearing masks
+representing Ottoman prisoners, appeared before the people. Later, at
+the Carnival of the year 1500, Cæsar Borgia, with a bold allusion to
+himself, celebrated the triumph of Julius Cæsar, with a procession of
+eleven magnificent chariots,[967] doubtless to the scandal of the
+pilgrims who had come for the Jubilee (vol. i. p. 116). Two ‘Trionfi,’
+famous for their taste and beauty, were given by rival companies in
+Florence, on the election of Leo X. to the Papacy.[968] One of them
+represented the three Ages of Man, the other the four Ages of the World,
+ingeniously set forth in five scenes of Roman history, and in two
+allegories of the golden age of Saturn and of its final return. The
+imagination displayed in the adornment of the chariots, when the great
+Florentine artists undertook the work, made the scene so impressive that
+such representations became in time a permanent element in the popular
+life. Hitherto the subject cities had been satisfied merely to present
+their symbolical gifts--costly stuffs and wax-candles--on the day when
+they annually did homage. The guild of merchants now built ten chariots,
+to which others were afterwards to be added, not so much to carry as to
+symbolise the tribute, and Andrea del Sarto, who painted some of them,
+no doubt did his work to perfection.[969] These cars, whether used to
+hold tribute or trophies, now formed a part of all such celebrations,
+even when there was not much money to be laid out. The Sienese
+announced, in 1477, the alliance between Ferrante and Sixtus IV., with
+which they themselves were associated, by driving a chariot round the
+city, with ‘one clad as the goddess of peace standing on a hauberk and
+other arms.’[970]
+
+At the Venetian festivals the processions, not on land but on water,
+were marvellous in their fantastic splendour. The sailing of the
+Bucentaur to meet the Princess of Ferrara in the year 1491 (p. 136)
+seems to have been something belonging to fairyland.[971] Countless
+vessels with garlands and hangings, filled with the richly-dressed youth
+of the city, moved in front; genii with attributes symbolising the
+various gods, floated on machines hung in the air; below stood others
+grouped as tritons and nymphs; the air was filled with music, sweet
+odours, and the fluttering of embroidered banners. The Bucentaur was
+followed by such a crowd of boats of every sort that for a mile all
+round (_octo stadia_) the water could not be seen. With regard to the
+rest of the festivities, besides the pantomime mentioned above, we may
+notice as something new, a boat-race of fifty powerful girls. In the
+sixteenth century,[972] the nobility were divided into corporations with
+a view to these festivals, whose most noteworthy feature was some
+extraordinary machine placed on a ship. So, for instance, in the year
+1541, at the festival of the ‘Sempiterni,’ a round ‘universe’ floated
+along the Grand Canal, and a splendid ball was given inside it. The
+Carnival, too, in this city was famous for its dances, processions, and
+exhibitions of every kind. The Square of St. Mark was found to give
+space enough not only for tournaments (p. 390), but for ‘Trionfi,’
+similar to those common on the mainland. At a festival held on the
+conclusion of peace,[973] the pious brotherhoods (‘scuole’) took each
+its part in the procession. There, among golden chandeliers with red
+candles, among crowds of musicians and winged boys with golden bowls and
+horns of plenty, was seen a car on which Noah and David sat together
+enthroned; then came Abigail, leading a camel laden with treasures, and
+a second car with a group of political figures--Italy sitting between
+Venice and Liguria, the two last with their coats of arms, the former
+with a stork, the symbol of unity--and on a raised step three female
+symbolical figures with the arms of the allied princes. This was
+followed by a great globe with the constellations, as it seems, round
+it. The princes themselves, or rather their bodily representatives,
+appeared on other chariots with their servants and their coats of arms,
+if we have rightly interpreted our author.[974] There was also music at
+these and all other similar processions.
+
+The Carnival, properly so called, apart from these great triumphal
+marches, had nowhere, perhaps, in the fifteenth century, so varied a
+character as in Rome.[975] There were races of every kind--of horses,
+asses, buffalos, old men, young men, Jews, and so on. Paul II.
+entertained the people in crowds before the Palazzo di Venezia, in which
+he lived. The games in the Piazza Navona, which had probably never
+altogether ceased since the classical times, were remarkable for their
+warlike splendour. We read of a sham fight of cavalry, and a review of
+all the citizens in arms. The greatest freedom existed with regard to
+the use of masks, which were sometimes allowed for several months
+together.[976] Sixtus IV. ventured, in the most populous part of the
+city--at the Campofiore and near the Banchi--to make his way through
+crowds of masks, though he declined to receive them as visitors in the
+Vatican. Under Innocent VIII., a discreditable usage, which had already
+appeared among the Cardinals, attained its height. In the Carnival of
+1491, they sent one another chariots full of splendid masks, of singers,
+and of buffoons, chanting scandalous verses. They were accompanied by
+men on horseback.[977] Apart from the Carnival, the Romans seem to have
+been the first to discover the effect of a great procession by
+torchlight. When Pius II. came back from the Congress of Mantua in
+1459,[978] the people waited on him with a squadron of horsemen bearing
+torches, who rode in shining circles before his palace. Sixtus IV.,
+however, thought it better to decline a nocturnal visit of the people,
+who proposed to wait on him with torches and olive-branches.[979]
+
+But the Florentine Carnival surpassed the Roman in a certain class of
+processions, which have left their mark even in literature.[980] Among a
+crowd of masks on foot and on horseback appeared some huge, fantastic
+chariot, and upon it an allegorical figure or group of figures with the
+proper accompaniments, such as Jealousy with four spectacled faces on
+one head; the four temperaments (p. 309) with the planets belonging to
+them; the three Fates; Prudence enthroned above Hope and Fear, which lay
+bound before her; the four Elements, Ages, Winds, Seasons, and so on; as
+well as the famous chariot of Death with the coffins, which presently
+opened. Sometimes we meet with a splendid scene from classical
+mythology--Bacchus and Ariadne, Paris and Helen, and others. Or else a
+chorus of figures forming some single class or category, as the beggars,
+the hunters and nymphs, the lost souls, who in their lifetime were
+hard-hearted women, the hermits, the astrologers, the vagabonds, the
+devils, the sellers of various kinds of wares, and even on one occasion
+‘il popolo,’ the people as such, who all reviled one another in their
+songs. The songs, which still remain and have been collected, give the
+explanation of the masquerade sometimes in a pathetic, sometimes in a
+humorous, and sometimes in an excessively indecent tone. Some of the
+worst in this respect are attributed to Lorenzo the Magnificent,
+probably because the real author did not venture to declare himself.
+However this may be, we must certainly ascribe to him the beautiful song
+which accompanied the masque of Bacchus and Ariadne, whose refrain still
+echoes to us from the fifteenth century, like a regretful presentiment
+of the brief splendour of the Renaissance itself:--
+
+    ‘Quanto è bella giovinezza,
+     Che si fugge tuttavia!
+     Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:
+     Di doman non c’è certezza.’
+
+
+
+
+_PART VI._
+
+MORALITY AND RELIGION.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MORALITY.
+
+
+The relation of the various peoples of the earth to the supreme
+interests of life, to God, virtue, and immortality, may be investigated
+up to a certain point, but can never be compared to one another with
+absolute strictness and certainty. The more plainly in these matters our
+evidence seems to speak, the more carefully must we refrain from
+unqualified assumptions and rash generalisations.
+
+This remark is especially true with regard to our judgment on questions
+of morality. It may be possible to indicate many contrasts and shades of
+difference among different nations, but to strike the balance of the
+whole is not given to human insight. The ultimate truth with respect to
+the character, the conscience, and the guilt of a people remains for
+ever a secret; if only for the reason that its defects have another
+side, where they reappear as peculiarities or even as virtues. We must
+leave those who find a pleasure in passing sweeping censures on whole
+nations, to do so as they like. The peoples of Europe can maltreat, but
+happily not judge one another. A great nation, interwoven by its
+civilisation, its achievements, and its fortunes with the whole life of
+the modern world, can afford to ignore both its advocates and its
+accusers. It lives on with or without the approval of theorists.
+
+Accordingly, what here follows is no judgment, but rather a string of
+marginal notes, suggested by a study of the Italian Renaissance
+extending over some years. The value to be attached to them is all the
+more qualified as they mostly touch on the life of the upper classes,
+with respect to which we are far better informed in Italy than in any
+other country in Europe at that period. But though both fame and infamy
+sound louder here than elsewhere, we are not helped thereby in forming
+an adequate moral estimate of the people.
+
+What eye can pierce the depths in which the character and fate of
+nations are determined?--in which that which is inborn and that which
+has been experienced combine to form a new whole and a fresh nature?--in
+which even those intellectual capacities, which at first sight we should
+take to be most original, are in fact evolved late and slowly? Who can
+tell if the Italian before the thirteenth century possessed that
+flexible activity and certainty in his whole being--that play of power
+in shaping whatever subject he dealt with in word or in form, which was
+peculiar to him later? And if no answer can be found to these questions,
+how can we possibly judge of the infinite and infinitely intricate
+channels through which character and intellect are incessantly pouring
+their influence one upon the other. A tribunal there is for each one of
+us, whose voice is our conscience; but let us have done with these
+generalities about nations. For the people that seems to be most sick
+the cure may be at hand; and one that appears to be healthy may bear
+within it the ripening germs of death, which the hour of danger will
+bring forth from their hiding-place.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the civilisation of the
+Renaissance had reached its highest pitch, and at the same time the
+political ruin of the nation seemed inevitable, there were not wanting
+serious thinkers who saw a connexion between this ruin and the prevalent
+immorality. It was not one of those methodistical moralists who in every
+age think themselves called to declaim against the wickedness of the
+time, but it was Macchiavelli, who, in one of his most well-considered
+works,[981] said openly: ‘We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above
+others.’ Another man had perhaps said, ‘We are individually highly
+developed; we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion which
+were natural to us in our undeveloped state, and we despise outward law,
+because our rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and officers
+wicked men.’ Macchiavelli adds, ‘because the Church and her
+representatives set us the worst example.’
+
+Shall we add also, ‘because the influence exercised by antiquity was in
+this respect unfavourable’? The statement can only be received with many
+qualifications. It may possibly be true of the humanists (p. 272 sqq.),
+especially as regards the profligacy of their lives. Of the rest it may
+perhaps be said with some approach to accuracy, that, after they became
+familiar with antiquity, they substituted for holiness--the Christian
+ideal of life--the cultus of historical greatness (see Part II. chap.
+iii.). We can understand, therefore, how easily they would be tempted to
+consider those faults and vices to be matters of indifference, in spite
+of which their heroes were great. They were probably scarcely conscious
+of this themselves, for if we are summoned to quote any statement of
+doctrine on this subject, we are again forced to appeal to humanists
+like Paolo Giovio, who excuses the perjury of Giangaleazzo Visconti,
+through which he was enabled to found an empire, by the example of
+Julius Cæsar.[982] The great Florentine historians and statesmen never
+stoop to these slavish quotations, and what seems antique in their deeds
+and their judgments is so because the nature of their political life
+necessarily fostered in them a mode of thought which has some analogy
+with that of antiquity.
+
+Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Italy at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century found itself in the midst of a grave moral crisis, out
+of which the best men saw hardly any escape.
+
+Let us begin by saying a few words about that moral force which was then
+the strongest bulwark against evil. The highly gifted men of that day
+thought to find it in the sentiment of honour. This is that enigmatic
+mixture of conscience and egoism which often survives in the modern man
+after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and
+hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness and great
+vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions; yet,
+nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left in the wreck of a
+character may gather around it, and from this fountain may draw new
+strength. It has become, in a far wider sense than is commonly believed,
+a decisive test of conduct in the minds of the cultivated Europeans of
+our own day, and many of those who yet hold faithfully by religion and
+morality are unconsciously guided by this feeling in the gravest
+decisions of their lives.[983]
+
+It lies without the limits of our task to show how the men of antiquity
+also experienced this feeling in a peculiar form, and how, afterwards,
+in the Middle Ages, a special sense of honour became the mark of a
+particular class. Nor can we here dispute with those who hold that
+conscience, rather than honour, is the motive power. It would indeed be
+better and nobler if it were so; but since it must be granted that even
+our worthier resolutions result from ‘a conscience more or less dimmed
+by selfishness,’ it is better to call the mixture by its right
+name.[984] It is certainly not always easy, in treating of the Italian
+of this period, to distinguish this sense of honour from the passion for
+fame, into which, indeed, it easily passes. Yet the two sentiments are
+essentially different.
+
+There is no lack of witnesses on this subject. One who speaks plainly
+may here be quoted as a representative of the rest. We read in the
+recently-published ‘Aphorisms’ of Guicciardini:[985] ‘He who esteems
+honour highly, succeeds in all that he undertakes, since he fears
+neither trouble, danger, nor expense; I have found it so in my own case,
+and may say it and write it; vain and dead are the deeds of men which
+have not this as their motive.’ It is necessary to add that, from what
+is known of the life of the writer, he can here be only speaking of
+honour, and not of fame. Rabelais has put the matter more clearly than
+perhaps any Italian. We quote him, indeed, unwillingly in these pages.
+What the great, baroque Frenchman gives us, is a picture of what the
+Renaissance would be without form and without beauty.[986] But his
+description of an ideal state of things in the Thelemite monastery is
+decisive as historical evidence. In speaking of his gentlemen and ladies
+of the Order of Free Will,[987] he tells us as follows:--
+
+‘En leur reigle n’estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras. Parce
+que gens liberes, bien nayz,[988] bien instruictz, conversans en
+compaignies honnestes, ont par nature ung instinct et aguillon qui
+toujours les poulse à faitz vertueux, et retire de vice; lequel ilz
+nommoyent honneur.’
+
+This is that same faith in the goodness of human nature which inspired
+the men of the second half of the eighteenth century, and helped to
+prepare the way for the French Revolution. Among the Italians, too, each
+man appeals to this noble instinct within him, and though with regard to
+the people as a whole--chiefly in consequence of the national
+disasters--judgments of a more pessimistic sort became prevalent, the
+importance of this sense of honour must still be rated highly. If the
+boundless development of individuality, stronger than the will of the
+individual, be the work of a historical providence, not less so is the
+opposing force which then manifested itself in Italy. How often, and
+against what passionate attacks of selfishness it won the day, we cannot
+tell, and therefore no human judgment can estimate with certainty the
+absolute moral value of the nation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A force which we must constantly take into account in judging of the
+morality of the more highly-developed Italian of this period, is that
+of the imagination. It gives to his virtues and vices a peculiar colour,
+and under its influence his unbridled egoism shows itself in its most
+terrible shape.
+
+The force of his imagination explains, for example, the fact that he was
+the first gambler on a large scale in modern times. Pictures of future
+wealth and enjoyment rose in such life-like colours before his eyes,
+that he was ready to hazard everything to reach them. The Mohammedan
+nations would doubtless have anticipated him in this respect, had not
+the Koran, from the beginning, set up the prohibition against gambling
+as a chief safeguard of public morals, and directed the imagination of
+its followers to the search after buried treasures. In Italy, the
+passion for play reached an intensity which often threatened or
+altogether broke up the existence of the gambler. Florence had already,
+at the end of the fourteenth century, its Casanova--a certain
+Buonaccorso Pitti,[989] who, in the course of his incessant journeys as
+merchant, political agent, diplomatist and professional gambler, won and
+lost sums so enormous that none but princes like the Dukes of Brabant,
+Bavaria, and Savoy, were able to compete with him. That great
+lottery-bank, which was called the Court of Rome, accustomed people to a
+need of excitement, which found its satisfaction in games of hazard
+during the intervals between one intrigue and another. We read, for
+example, how Franceschetto Cybò, in two games with the Cardinal
+Raffaello Riario, lost no less than 14,000 ducats, and afterwards
+complained to the Pope that his opponent had cheated him.[990] Italy has
+since that time been the home of the lottery.
+
+It was to the imagination of the Italians that the peculiar character of
+their vengeance was due. The sense of justice was, indeed, one and the
+same throughout Europe, and any violation of it, so long as no
+punishment was inflicted, must have been felt in the same manner. But
+other nations, though they found it no easier to forgive, nevertheless
+forgot more easily, while the Italian imagination kept the picture of
+the wrong alive with frightful vividness.[991] The fact that, according
+to the popular morality, the avenging of blood is a duty--a duty often
+performed in a way to make us shudder--gives to this passion a peculiar
+and still firmer basis. The government and the tribunals recognise its
+existence and justification, and only attempt to keep it within certain
+limits. Even among the peasantry, we read of Thyestean banquets and
+mutual assassination on the widest scale. Let us look at an
+instance.[992]
+
+In the district of Aquapendente three boys were watching cattle, and one
+of them said: ‘Let us find out the way how people are hung.’ While one
+was sitting on the shoulders of the other, and the third, after
+fastening the rope round the neck of the first, was tying it to an oak,
+a wolf came, and the two who were free ran away and left the other
+hanging. Afterwards they found him dead, and buried him. On the Sunday
+his father came to bring him bread, and one of the two confessed what
+had happened, and showed him the grave. The old man then killed him with
+a knife, cut him up, brought away the liver, and entertained the boy’s
+father with it at home. After dinner, he told him whose liver it was.
+Hereupon began a series of reciprocal murders between the two families,
+and within a month thirty-six persons were killed, women as well as men.
+
+And such ‘vendette,’ handed down from father to son, and extending to
+friends and distant relations, were not limited to the lower classes,
+but reached to the highest. The chronicles and novels of the period are
+full of such instances, especially of vengeance taken for the violation
+of women. The classic land for these feuds was Romagna, where the
+‘vendetta’ was interwoven with intrigues and party divisions of every
+conceivable sort. The popular legends present an awful picture of the
+savagery into which this brave and energetic people had relapsed. We are
+told, for instance, of a nobleman at Ravenna, who had got all his
+enemies together in a tower, and might have burned them; instead of
+which he let them out, embraced them, and entertained them sumptuously;
+whereupon shame drove them mad, and they conspired against him.[993]
+Pious and saintly monks exhorted unceasingly to reconciliation, but they
+can scarcely have done more than restrain to a certain extent the feuds
+already established; their influence hardly prevented the growth of new
+ones. The novelists sometimes describe to us this effect of
+religion--how sentiments of generosity and forgiveness were suddenly
+awakened, and then again paralysed by the force of what had once been
+done and could never be undone. The Pope himself was not always lucky as
+a peacemaker. ‘Pope Paul II. desired that the quarrel between Antonio
+Caffarello and the family of Alberino should cease, and ordered Giovanni
+Alberino and Antonio Caffarello to come before him, and bade them kiss
+one another, and promised them a fine of 2,000 ducats in case they
+renewed this strife, and two days after Antonio was stabbed by the same
+Giacomo Alberino, son of Giovanni, who had wounded him once before; and
+the Pope was full of anger, and confiscated the goods of Alberino, and
+destroyed his houses, and banished father and son from Rome.’[994] The
+oaths and ceremonies by which reconciled enemies attempted to guard
+themselves against a relapse, are sometimes utterly horrible. When the
+parties of the ‘Nove’ and the ‘Popolari’ met and kissed one another by
+twos in the cathedral at Siena on Christmas Eve, 1494,[995] an oath was
+read by which all salvation in time and eternity was denied to the
+future violator of the treaty--‘an oath more astonishing and dreadful
+than had ever yet been heard.’ The last consolations of religion in the
+hour of death were to turn to the damnation of the man who should break
+it. It is clear, however, that such a ceremony rather represents the
+despairing mood of the mediators than offers any real guarantee of
+peace, inasmuch as the truest reconciliation is just that one which has
+least need of it.
+
+This personal need of vengeance felt by the cultivated and highly placed
+Italian, resting on the solid basis of an analogous popular custom,
+naturally displays itself under a thousand different aspects, and
+receives the unqualified approval of public opinion, as reflected in the
+works of the novelists.[996] All are at one on the point, that, in the
+case of those injuries and insults for which Italian justice offered no
+redress, and all the more in the case of those against which no human
+law can ever adequately provide, each man is free to take the law into
+his own hands. Only there must be art in the vengeance, and the
+satisfaction must be compounded of the material injury and moral
+humiliation of the offender. A mere brutal, clumsy triumph of force was
+held by public opinion to be no satisfaction. The whole man with his
+sense of fame and of scorn, not only his fist, must be victorious.
+
+The Italian of that time shrank, it is true, from no dissimulation in
+order to attain his ends, but was wholly free from hypocrisy in matters
+of principle. In these he attempted to deceive neither himself nor
+others. Accordingly, revenge was declared with perfect frankness to be a
+necessity of human nature. Cool-headed people declared that it was then
+most worthy of praise, when it was disengaged from passion, and worked
+simply from motives of expedience, ‘in order that other men may learn to
+leave us unharmed.’[997] Yet such instances must have formed only a
+small minority in comparison with those in which passion sought an
+outlet. This sort of revenge differs clearly from the avenging of blood,
+which has been already spoken of; while the latter keeps more or less
+within the limits of retaliation--the ‘jus talionis’--the former
+necessarily goes much farther, not only requiring the sanction of the
+sense of justice, but craving admiration, and even striving to get the
+laugh on its own side.
+
+Here lies the reason why men were willing to wait so long for their
+revenge. A ‘bella vendetta’ demanded as a rule a combination of
+circumstances for which it was necessary to wait patiently. The gradual
+ripening of such opportunities is described by the novelists with
+heartfelt delight.
+
+There is no need to discuss the morality of actions in which plaintiff
+and judge are one and the same person. If this Italian thirst for
+vengeance is to be palliated at all, it must be by proving the existence
+of a corresponding national virtue, namely gratitude. The same force of
+imagination which retains and magnifies wrong once suffered, might be
+expected also to keep alive the memory of kindness received.[998] It is
+not possible, however, to prove this with regard to the nation as a
+whole, though traces of it may be seen in the Italian character of
+to-day. The gratitude shown by the inferior classes for kind treatment,
+and the good memory of the upper for politeness in social life, are
+instances of this.
+
+This connexion between the imagination and the moral qualities of the
+Italian repeats itself continually. If, nevertheless, we find more cold
+calculation in cases where the Northerner rather follows his impulses,
+the reason is that individual development in Italy was not only more
+marked and earlier in point of time, but also far more frequent. Where
+this is the case in other countries, the results are also analogous. We
+find, for example, that the early emancipation of the young from
+domestic and paternal authority is common to North America with Italy.
+Later on, in the more generous natures, a tie of freer affection grows
+up between parents and children.
+
+It is in fact a matter of extreme difficulty to judge fairly of other
+nations in the sphere of character and feeling. In these respects a
+people may be developed highly, and yet in a manner so strange that a
+foreigner is utterly unable to understand it. Perhaps all the nations of
+the West are in this point equally favoured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But where the imagination has exercised the most powerful and despotic
+influence on morals is in the illicit intercourse of the two sexes. It
+is well known that prostitution was freely practised in the Middle Ages,
+before the appearance of syphilis. A discussion, however, on these
+questions does not belong to our present work. What seems characteristic
+of Italy at this time, is that here marriage and its rights were more
+often and more deliberately trampled under foot than anywhere else. The
+girls of the higher classes were carefully secluded, and of them we do
+not speak. All passion was directed to the married women.
+
+Under these circumstances it is remarkable that, so far as we know,
+there was no diminution in the number of marriages, and that family life
+by no means underwent that disorganisation which a similar state of
+things would have produced in the North. Men wished to live as they
+pleased, but by no means to renounce the family, even when they were not
+sure that it was all their own. Nor did the race sink, either physically
+or mentally, on this account; for that apparent intellectual decline
+which showed itself towards the middle of the sixteenth century may be
+certainly accounted for by political and ecclesiastical causes, even if
+we are not to assume that the circle of achievements possible to the
+Renaissance had been completed. Notwithstanding their profligacy, the
+Italians continued to be, physically and mentally, one of the healthiest
+and best-born populations in Europe,[999] and have retained this
+position, with improved morals, down to our own time.
+
+When we come to look more closely at the ethics of love at the time of
+the Renaissance, we are struck by a remarkable contrast. The novelists
+and comic poets give us to understand that love consists only in sensual
+enjoyment, and that to win this, all means, tragic or comic, are not
+only permitted, but are interesting in proportion to their audacity and
+unscrupulousness. But if we turn to the best of the lyric poets and
+writers of dialogues, we find in them a deep and spiritual passion of
+the noblest kind, whose last and highest expression is a revival of the
+ancient belief in an original unity of souls in the Divine Being. And
+both modes of feeling were then genuine, and could co-exist in the same
+individual. It is not exactly a matter of glory, but it is a fact, that
+in the cultivated man of modern times, this sentiment can be not merely
+unconsciously present in both its highest and lowest stages, but may
+thus manifest itself openly, and even artistically. The modern man,
+like the man of antiquity, is in this respect too a microcosm, which the
+mediæval man was not and could not be.
+
+To begin with the morality of the novelists. They treat chiefly, as we
+have said, of married women, and consequently of adultery.
+
+The opinion mentioned above (p. 395) of the equality of the two sexes is
+of great importance in relation to this subject. The highly developed
+and cultivated woman disposes of herself with a freedom unknown in
+Northern countries; and her unfaithfulness does not break up her life in
+the same terrible manner, so long as no outward consequence follow from
+it. The husband’s claim on her fidelity has not that firm foundation
+which it acquires in the North through the poetry and passion of
+courtship and betrothal. After the briefest acquaintance with her future
+husband, the young wife quits the convent or the paternal roof to enter
+upon a world in which her character begins rapidly to develop. The
+rights of the husband are for this reason conditional, and even the man
+who regards them in the light of a ‘jus quaesitum’ thinks only of the
+outward conditions of the contract, not of the affections. The beautiful
+young wife of an old man sends back the presents and letters of a
+youthful lover, in the firm resolve to keep her honour (honesta). ‘But
+she rejoices in the love of the youth for the sake of his great
+excellence; and she perceives that a noble woman may love a man of merit
+without loss to her honour.’[1000] But the way is short from such a
+distinction to a complete surrender.
+
+The latter seems indeed as good as justified, when there is
+unfaithfulness on the part of the husband. The woman, conscious of her
+own dignity, feels this not only as a pain, but also as a humiliation
+and deceit, and sets to work, often with the calmest consciousness of
+what she is about, to devise the vengeance which the husband deserves.
+Her tact must decide as to the measure of punishment which is suited to
+the particular case. The deepest wound, for example, may prepare the way
+for a reconciliation and a peaceful life in the future, if only it
+remain secret. The novelists, who themselves undergo such experiences or
+invent them according to the spirit of the age, are full of admiration
+when the vengeance is skilfully adapted to the particular case, in fact,
+when it is a work of art. As a matter of course, the husband never at
+bottom recognises this right of retaliation, and only submits to it from
+fear or prudence. Where these motives are absent, where his wife’s
+unfaithfulness exposes him or may expose him to the derision of
+outsiders, the affair becomes tragical, and not seldom ends in murder or
+other vengeance of a violent sort. It is characteristic of the real
+motive from which these deeds arise, that not only the husbands, but the
+brothers[1001] and the father of the woman feel themselves not only
+justified in taking vengeance, but bound to take it. Jealousy,
+therefore, has nothing to do with the matter, moral reprobation but
+little; the real reason is the wish to spoil the triumph of others.
+‘Nowadays,’ says Bandello,[1002] ‘we see a woman poison her husband to
+gratify her lusts, thinking that a widow may do whatever she desires.
+Another, fearing the discovery of an illicit amour, has her husband
+murdered by her lover. And though fathers, brothers, and husbands arise
+to extirpate the shame with poison, with the sword, and by every other
+means, women still continue to follow their passions, careless of their
+honour and their lives.’ Another time, in a milder strain, he exclaims:
+‘Would that we were not daily forced to hear that one man has murdered
+his wife because he suspected her of infidelity; that another has killed
+his daughter, on account of a secret marriage; that a third has caused
+his sister to be murdered, because she would not marry as he wished! It
+is great cruelty that we claim the right to do whatever we list, and
+will not suffer women to do the same. If they do anything which does not
+please us, there we are at once with cords and daggers and poison. What
+folly it is of men to suppose their own and their house’s honour depends
+on the appetite of a woman!’ The tragedy in which such affairs commonly
+ended was so well known that the novelist looked on the threatened
+gallant as a dead man, even while he went about alive and merry. The
+physician and lute-player Antonio Bologna[1003] had made a secret
+marriage with the widowed Duchess of Amalfi, of the house of Aragon.
+Soon afterwards her brother succeeded in securing both her and her
+children, and murdered them in a castle. Antonio, ignorant of their
+fate, and still cherishing the hope of seeing them again, was staying at
+Milan, closely watched by hired assassins, and one day in the society of
+Ippolita Sforza sang to the lute the story of his misfortunes. A friend
+of the house, Delio, ‘told the story up to this point to Scipione
+Attelano, and added that he would make it the subject of a novel, as he
+was sure that Antonio would be murdered.’ The manner in which this took
+place, almost under the eyes of Delio and Attelano, is thrillingly
+described by Bandello (i. 26).
+
+Nevertheless, the novelists habitually show a sympathy for all the
+ingenious, comic, and cunning features which may happen to attend
+adultery. They describe with delight how the lover manages to hide
+himself in the house, all the means and devices by which he communicates
+with his mistress, the boxes with cushions and sweetmeats in which he
+can be hidden and carried out of danger. The deceived husband is
+described sometimes as a fool to be laughed at, sometimes as a
+blood-thirsty avenger of his honour; there is no third situation except
+when the woman is painted as wicked and cruel, and the husband or lover
+is the innocent victim. It may be remarked, however, that narratives of
+the latter kind are not strictly speaking novels, but rather warning
+examples taken from real life.[1004]
+
+When in the course of the sixteenth century Italian life fell more and
+more under Spanish influence, the violence of the means to which
+jealousy had recourse perhaps increased. But this new phase must be
+distinguished from the punishment of infidelity which existed before,
+and which was founded in the spirit of the Renaissance itself. As the
+influence of Spain declined, these excesses of jealousy declined also,
+till towards the close of the seventeenth century they had wholly
+disappeared, and their place was taken by that indifference which
+regarded the ‘Cicisbeo’ as an indispensable figure in every household,
+and took no offence at one or two supernumerary lovers (‘Patiti’).
+
+But who can undertake to compare the vast sum of wickedness which all
+these facts imply, with what happened in other countries? Was the
+marriage-tie, for instance, really more sacred in France during the
+fifteenth century than in Italy? The ‘fabliaux’ and farces would lead us
+to doubt it, and rather incline us to think that unfaithfulness was
+equally common, though its tragic consequences were less frequent,
+because the individual was less developed and his claims were less
+consciously felt than in Italy. More evidence, however, in favour of the
+Germanic peoples lies in the fact of the social freedom enjoyed among
+them by girls and women, which impressed Italian travellers so
+pleasantly in England and in the Netherlands (p. 399, note 2). And yet
+we must not attach too much importance to this fact. Unfaithfulness was
+doubtless very frequent, and in certain cases led to a sanguinary
+vengeance. We have only to remember how the northern princes of that
+time dealt with their wives on the first suspicion of infidelity.
+
+But it was not merely the sensual desire, not merely the vulgar appetite
+of the ordinary man, which trespassed upon forbidden ground among the
+Italians of that day, but also the passion of the best and noblest; and
+this, not only because the unmarried girl did not appear in society, but
+also because the man, in proportion to the completeness of his own
+nature, felt himself most strongly attracted by the woman whom marriage
+had developed. These are the men who struck the loftiest notes of
+lyrical poetry, and who have attempted in their treatises and dialogues
+to give us an idealised image of the devouring passion--‘l’amor divino.’
+When they complain of the cruelty of the winged god, they are not only
+thinking of the coyness or hard-heartedness of the beloved one, but also
+of the unlawfulness of the passion itself. They seek to raise
+themselves above this painful consciousness by that spiritualisation of
+love which found a support in the Platonic doctrine of the soul, and of
+which Pietro Bembo is the most famous representative. His thoughts on
+this subject are set forth by himself in the third book of the
+‘Asolani,’ and indirectly by Castiglione, who puts in his mouth the
+splendid speech with which the fourth book of the ‘Cortigiano’
+concludes; neither of these writers was a stoic in his conduct, but at
+that time it meant something to be at once a famous and a good man, and
+this praise must be accorded to both of them; their contemporaries took
+what these men said to be a true expression of their feeling, and we
+have not the right to despise it as affectation. Those who take the
+trouble to study the speech in the ‘Cortigiano’ will see how poor an
+idea of it can be given by an extract. There were then living in Italy
+several distinguished women, who owed their celebrity chiefly to
+relations of this kind, such as Giulia Gonzaga, Veronica da Coreggio,
+and, above all, Vittoria Colonna. The land of profligates and scoffers
+respected these women and this sort of love--and what more can be said
+in their favour? We cannot tell how far vanity had to do with the
+matter, how far Vittoria was flattered to hear around her the sublimated
+utterances of hopeless love from the most famous men in Italy. If the
+thing was here and there a fashion, it was still no trifling praise for
+Vittoria that she, at least, never went out of fashion, and in her
+latest years produced the most profound impressions. It was long before
+other countries had anything similar to show.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the imagination then, which governed this people more than any other,
+lies one general reason why the course of every passion was violent, and
+why the means used for the gratification of passion were often criminal.
+There is a violence which cannot control itself because it is born of
+weakness; but in Italy what we find is the corruption of powerful
+natures. Sometimes this corruption assumes a colossal shape, and crime
+seems to acquire almost a personal existence of its own.
+
+The restraints of which men were conscious were but few. Each
+individual, even among the lowest of the people, felt himself inwardly
+emancipated from the control of the State and its police, whose title to
+respect was illegitimate, and itself founded on violence; and no man
+believed any longer in the justice of the law. When a murder was
+committed, the sympathies of the people, before the circumstances of the
+case were known, ranged themselves instinctively on the side of the
+murderer.[1005] A proud, manly bearing before and at the execution
+excited such admiration that the narrator often forgets to tell us for
+what offence the criminal was put to death.[1006] But when we add to
+this inward contempt of law and to the countless grudges and enmities
+which called for satisfaction, the impunity which crime enjoyed during
+times of political disturbance, we can only wonder that the state and
+society were not utterly dissolved. Crises of this kind occurred at
+Naples during the transition from the Aragonese to the French and
+Spanish rule, and at Milan, on the repeated expulsions and returns of
+the Sforzas; at such times those men who have never in their hearts
+recognised the bonds of law and society, come forward and give free play
+to their instincts of murder and rapine. Let us take, by way of example,
+a picture drawn from a humbler sphere.
+
+When the Duchy of Milan was suffering from the disorders which followed
+the death of Giangaleazzo Sforza, about the year 1480 (pp. 40, 126), all
+safety came to an end in the provincial cities. This was the case in
+Parma,[1007] where the Milanese Governor, terrified by threats of
+murder, and after vainly offering rewards for the discovery of the
+offenders, consented to throw open the gaols and let loose the most
+abandoned criminals. Burglary, the demolition of houses, shameless
+offences against decency, public assassination and murders, especially
+of Jews, were events of everyday occurrence. At first the authors of
+these deeds prowled about singly, and masked; soon large gangs of armed
+men went to work every night without disguise. Threatening letters,
+satires, and scandalous jests circulated freely; and a sonnet in
+ridicule of the Government seems to have roused its indignation far more
+than the frightful condition of the city. In many churches the sacred
+vessels with the host were stolen, and this fact is characteristic of
+the temper which prompted these outrages. It is impossible to say what
+would happen now in any country of the world, if the government and
+police ceased to act, and yet hindered by their presence the
+establishment of a provisional authority; but what then occurred in
+Italy wears a character of its own, through the great share which
+personal hatred and revenge had in it. The impression, indeed, which
+Italy at this period makes on us is, that even in quiet times great
+crimes were commoner than in other countries. We may, it is true, be
+misled by the fact that we have far fuller details on such matters here
+than elsewhere, and that the same force of imagination, which gives a
+special character to crimes actually committed, causes much to be
+invented which never really happened. The amount of violence was perhaps
+as great elsewhere. It is hard to say for certain, whether in the year
+1500 men were any safer, whether human life was after all better
+protected, in powerful, wealthy Germany, with its robber knights,
+extortionate beggars, and daring highwaymen. But one thing is certain,
+that premeditated crimes, committed professionally and for hire by third
+parties, occurred in Italy with great and appalling frequency.
+
+So far as regards brigandage, Italy, especially in the more fortunate
+provinces, such as Tuscany, was certainly not more, and probably less,
+troubled than the countries of the North. But the figures which do meet
+us are characteristic of the country. It would be hard, for instance, to
+find elsewhere the case of a priest, gradually driven by passion from
+one excess to another, till at last he came to head a band of robbers.
+That age offers us this example among others.[1008] On August 12, 1495,
+the priest Don Niccolò de’ Pelegati of Figarolo was shut up in an iron
+cage outside the tower of San Giuliano at Ferrara. He had twice
+celebrated his first mass; the first time he had the same day committed
+murder, but afterwards received absolution at Rome; he then killed four
+people and married two wives, with whom he travelled about. He
+afterwards took part in many assassinations, violated women, carried
+others away by force, plundered far and wide, and infested the territory
+of Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform, extorting food and
+shelter by every sort of violence. When we think of what all this
+implies, the mass of guilt on the head of this one man is something
+tremendous. The clergy and monks had many privileges and little
+supervision, and among them were doubtless plenty of murderers and other
+malefactors--but hardly a second Pelegati. It is another matter, though
+by no means creditable, when ruined characters sheltered themselves in
+the cowl in order to escape the arm of the law, like the corsair whom
+Massuccio knew in a convent at Naples.[1009] What the real truth was
+with regard to Pope John XXIII. in this respect, is not known with
+certainty.[1010]
+
+The age of the famous brigand chief did not begin till later, in the
+seventeenth century, when the political strife of Guelph and Ghibelline,
+of Frenchman and Spaniard, no longer agitated the country. The robber
+then took the place of the partisan.
+
+In certain districts of Italy, where civilization had made little
+progress, the country people were disposed to murder any stranger who
+fell into their hands. This was especially the case in the more remote
+parts of the Kingdom of Naples, where the barbarism dated probably from
+the days of the Roman ‘latifundia,’ and when the stranger and the enemy
+(‘hospes’ and ‘hostis’) were in all good faith held to be one and the
+same. These people were far from being irreligious. A herdsman once
+appeared in great trouble at the confessional, avowing that, while
+making cheese during Lent, a few drops of milk had found their way into
+his mouth. The confessor, skilled in the customs of the country,
+discovered in the course of his examination that the penitent and his
+friends were in the practice of robbing and murdering travellers, but
+that, through the force of habit, this usage gave rise to no twinges of
+conscience within them.[1011] We have already mentioned (p. 352, note 3)
+to what a degree of barbarism the peasants elsewhere could sink in times
+of political confusion.
+
+A worse symptom than brigandage of the morality of that time was the
+frequency of paid assassination. In that respect Naples was admitted to
+stand at the head of all the cities of Italy. ‘Nothing,’ says
+Pontano,[1012] ‘is cheaper here than human life.’ But other districts
+could also show a terrible list of these crimes. It is hard, of course,
+to classify them according to the motives by which they were prompted,
+since political expediency, personal hatred, party hostility, fear, and
+revenge, all play into one another. It is no small honour to the
+Florentines, the most highly-developed people of Italy, that offences of
+this kind occurred more rarely among them than anywhere else,[1013]
+perhaps because there was a justice at hand for legitimate grievances
+which was recognised by all, or because the higher culture of the
+individual gave him different views as to the right of men to interfere
+with the decrees of fate. In Florence, if anywhere, men were able to
+feel the incalculable consequences of a deed of blood, and to
+understand how insecure the author of a so-called profitable crime is of
+any true and lasting gain. After the fall of Florentine liberty,
+assassination, especially by hired agents, seems to have rapidly
+increased, and continued till the government of Cosimo I. had attained
+such strength that the police[1014] was at last able to repress it.
+
+Elsewhere in Italy paid crimes were probably more or less frequent in
+proportion to the number of powerful and solvent buyers. Impossible as
+it is to make any statistical estimate of their amount, yet if only a
+fraction of the deaths which public report attributed to violence were
+really murders, the crime must have been terribly frequent. The worst
+example of all was set by princes and governments, who without the
+faintest scruple reckoned murder as one of the instruments of their
+power. And this, without being in the same category with Cæsar Borgia.
+The Sforzas, the Aragonese monarchs, the Republic of Venice,[1015] and
+later on, the agents of Charles V. resorted to it whenever it suited
+their purpose. The imagination of the people at last became so
+accustomed to facts of this kind, that the death of any powerful man was
+seldom or never attributed to natural causes.[1016] There were certainly
+absurd notions current with regard to the effect of various poisons.
+There may be some truth in the story of that terrible white powder used
+by the Borgias, which did its work at the end of a definite period (p.
+116), and it is possible that it was really a ‘velenum atterminatum’
+which the Prince of Salerno handed to the Cardinal of Aragon, with the
+words: ‘In a few days you will die, because your father, King Ferrante,
+wished to trample upon us all.’[1017] But the poisoned letter which
+Caterina Riario sent to Pope Alexander VI.[1018] would hardly have
+caused his death even if he had read it; and when Alfonso the Great was
+warned by his physicians not to read in the ‘Livy’ which Cosimo de’
+Medici had presented to him, he told them with justice not to talk like
+fools.[1019] Nor can that poison, with which the secretary of Piccinino
+wished to anoint the sedan-chair of Pius II.,[1020] have affected any
+other organ than the imagination. The proportion which mineral and
+vegetable poisons bore to one another cannot be ascertained precisely.
+The poison with which the painter Rosso Fiorentino destroyed himself
+(1541) was evidently a powerful acid,[1021] which it would have been
+impossible to administer to another person without his knowledge. The
+secret use of weapons, especially of the dagger, in the service of
+powerful individuals, was habitual in Milan, Naples, and other cities.
+Indeed, among the crowds of armed retainers who were necessary for the
+personal safety of the great, and who lived in idleness, it was natural
+that outbreaks of this mania for blood should from time to time occur.
+Many a deed of horror would never have been committed, had not the
+master known that he needed but to give a sign to one or other of his
+followers.
+
+Among the means used for the secret destruction of others--so far, that
+is, as the intention goes--we find magic,[1022] practised, however,
+sparingly. Where ‘maleficii,’ ‘malie,’ and so forth, are mentioned, they
+appear rather as a means of heaping up additional terror on the head of
+some hated enemy. At the courts of France and England in the fourteenth
+and fifteenth centuries, magic, practised with a view to the death of an
+opponent, plays a far more important part in Italy.
+
+In this country, finally, where individuality of every sort attained its
+highest development, we find instances of that ideal and absolute
+wickedness which delights in crimes for their own sake, and not as means
+to an end, or at any rate as means to ends for which our psychology has
+no measure.
+
+Among these appalling figures we may first notice certain of the
+‘Condottieri,’[1023] such as Braccio di Montone, Tiberto Brandolino, and
+that Werner von Urslingen whose silver hauberk bore the inscription:
+‘The enemy of God, of pity and of mercy.’ This class of men offers us
+some of the earliest instances of criminals deliberately repudiating
+every moral restraint. Yet we shall be more reserved in our judgment of
+them when we remember that the worst part of their guilt--in the
+estimate of those who record it--lay in their defiance of spiritual
+threats and penalties, and that to this fact is due that air of horror
+with which they are represented as surrounded. In the case of Braccio,
+the hatred of the Church went so far that he was infuriated at the sight
+of monks at their psalms, and had thrown them down from the top of a
+tower;[1024] but at the same time ‘he was loyal to his soldiers and a
+great general.’ As a rule, the crimes of the ‘Condottieri’ were
+committed for the sake of some definite advantage, and must be
+attributed to a position in which men could not fail to be demoralised.
+Even their apparently gratuitous cruelty had commonly a purpose, if it
+were only to strike terror. The barbarities of the House of Aragon, as
+we have seen, were mainly due to fear and to the desire for vengeance.
+The thirst for blood on its own account, the devilish delight in
+destruction, is most clearly exemplified in the case of the Spaniard
+Cæsar Borgia, whose cruelties were certainly out of all proportion to
+the end which he had in view (p. 114 sqq.). In Sigismondo Malatesta,
+tyrant of Rimini (pp. 32, 228), the same disinterested love of evil may
+also be detected. It is not only the Court of Rome,[1025] but the
+verdict of history, which convicts him of murder, rape, adultery,
+incest, sacrilege, perjury and treason, committed not once but often.
+The most shocking crime of all--the unnatural attempt on his own son
+Roberto, who frustrated it with his drawn dagger,[1026]--may have been
+the result, not merely of moral corruption, but perhaps of some magical
+or astrological superstition. The same conjecture has been made to
+account for the rape of the Bishop of Fano[1027] by Pierluigi Farnese of
+Parma, son of Paul III.
+
+If we now attempt to sum up the principal features in the Italian
+character of that time, as we know it from a study of the life of the
+upper classes, we shall obtain something like the following result. The
+fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of
+its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. The individual first
+inwardly casts off the authority of a state which, as a fact, is in
+most cases tyrannical and illegitimate, and what he thinks and does is,
+rightly or wrongly, now called treason. The sight of victorious egoism
+in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm. And, while
+thinking to restore his inward equilibrium, he falls, through the
+vengeance which he executes, into the hands of the powers of darkness.
+His love, too, turns mostly for satisfaction to another individuality
+equally developed, namely, to his neighbour’s wife. In face of all
+objective facts, of laws and restraints of whatever kind, he retains the
+feeling of his own sovereignty, and in each single instance forms his
+decision independently, according as honour or interest, passion or
+calculation, revenge or renunciation, gain the upper hand in his own
+mind.
+
+If therefore egoism in its wider as well as narrower sense is the root
+and fountain of all evil, the more highly developed Italian was for this
+reason more inclined to wickedness than the member of other nations of
+that time.
+
+But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault
+of his own, but rather through an historical necessity. It did not come
+upon him alone, but also, and chiefly by means of Italian culture, upon
+the other nations of Europe, and has constituted since then the higher
+atmosphere which they breathe. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but
+necessary; within it has grown up a modern standard of good and evil--a
+sense of moral responsibility--which is essentially different from that
+which was familiar to the Middle Ages.
+
+But the Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging
+of a new age. Through his gifts and his passions, he has become the most
+characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of
+his time. By the side of profound corruption appeared human
+personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which
+shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor
+mediævalism either could or would bestow upon it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.
+
+
+The morality of a people stands in the closest connection with its
+consciousness of God, that is to say, with its firmer or weaker faith in
+the divine government of the world, whether this faith looks on
+the world as destined to happiness or to misery and speedy
+destruction.[1028] The infidelity then prevalent in Italy is notorious,
+and whoever takes the trouble to look about for proofs, will find them
+by the hundred. Our present task, here as elsewhere, is to separate and
+discriminate; refraining from an absolute and final verdict.
+
+The belief in God at earlier times had its source and chief support in
+Christianity and the outward symbol of Christianity, the Church. When
+the Church became corrupt, men ought to have drawn a distinction, and
+kept their religion in spite of all. But this is more easily said than
+done. It is not every people which is calm enough, or dull enough, to
+tolerate a lasting contradiction between a principle and its outward
+expression. But history does not record a heavier responsibility than
+that which rests upon the decaying Church. She set up as absolute truth
+and by the most violent means, a doctrine which she had distorted to
+serve her own aggrandisement. Safe in the sense of her inviolability,
+she abandoned herself to the most scandalous profligacy, and, in order
+to maintain herself in this state, she levelled mortal blows against the
+conscience and the intellect of nations, and drove multitudes of the
+noblest spirits, whom she had inwardly estranged, into the arms of
+unbelief and despair.
+
+Here we are met by the question: Why did not Italy, intellectually so
+great, react more energetically against the hierarchy; why did she not
+accomplish a reformation like that which occurred in Germany, and
+accomplish it at an earlier date?
+
+A plausible answer has been given to this question. The Italian mind, we
+are told, never went further than the denial of the hierarchy, while the
+origin and the vigour of the German Reformation was due to its positive
+religious doctrines, most of all to the doctrines of justification by
+faith and of the inefficacy of good works.
+
+It is certain that these doctrines only worked upon Italy through
+Germany, and this not till the power of Spain was sufficiently great to
+root them out without difficulty, partly by itself and partly by means
+of the Papacy, and its instruments.[1029] Nevertheless, in the earlier
+religious movements of Italy, from the Mystics of the thirteenth century
+down to Savonarola, there was a large amount of positive religious
+doctrine which, like the very definite Christianity of the Huguenots,
+failed to achieve success only because circumstances were against it.
+Mighty events like the Reformation elude, as respects their details,
+their outbreak and their development, the deductions of the
+philosophers, however clearly the necessity of them as a whole may be
+demonstrated. The movements of the human spirit, its sudden flashes, its
+expansions and its pauses, must for ever remain a mystery to our eyes,
+since we can but know this or that of the forces at work in it, never
+all of them together.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The feeling of the upper and middle classes in Italy with regard to the
+Church at the time when the Renaissance culminated, was compounded of
+deep and contemptuous aversion, of acquiescence in the outward
+ecclesiastical customs which entered into daily life, and of a sense of
+dependence on sacraments and ceremonies. The great personal influence of
+religious preachers may be added as a fact characteristic of Italy.
+
+That hostility to the hierarchy, which displays itself more especially
+from the time of Dante onwards in Italian literature and history, has
+been fully treated by several writers. We have already (p. 223) said
+something of the attitude of public opinion with regard to the Papacy.
+Those who wish for the strongest evidence which the best authorities
+offer us, can find it in the famous passages of Macchiavelli’s
+‘Discorsi,’ and in the unmutilated edition of Guicciardini. Outside the
+Roman Curia, some respect seems to have been felt for the best men among
+the bishops,[1030] and for many of the parochial clergy. On the other
+hand, the mere holders of benefices, the canons, and the monks were held
+in almost universal suspicion, and were often the objects of the most
+scandalous aspersions, extending to the whole of their order.
+
+It has been said that the monks were made the scapegoats for the whole
+clergy, for the reason that none but they could be ridiculed without
+danger.[1031] But this is certainly incorrect. They are introduced so
+frequently in the novels and comedies, because these forms of literature
+need fixed and well-known types where the imagination of the reader can
+easily fill up an outline. Besides which, the novelists do not as a fact
+spare the secular clergy.[1032] In the third place, we have abundant
+proof in the rest of Italian literature that men could speak boldly
+enough about the Papacy and the Court of Rome. In works of imagination
+we cannot expect to find criticism of this kind. Fourthly, the monks,
+when attacked, were sometimes able to take a terrible vengeance.
+
+It is nevertheless true that the monks were the most unpopular class of
+all, and that they were reckoned a living proof of the worthlessness of
+conventual life, of the whole ecclesiastical organisation, of the system
+of dogma, and of religion altogether, according as men pleased, rightly
+or wrongly, to draw their conclusions. We may also assume that Italy
+retained a clearer recollection of the origin of the two great mendicant
+orders than other countries, and had not forgotten that they were the
+chief agents in the reaction[1033] against what is called the heresy of
+the thirteenth century, that is to say, against an early and vigorous
+movement of the modern Italian spirit. And that spiritual police which
+was permanently entrusted to the Dominicans certainly never excited any
+other feeling than secret hatred and contempt.
+
+After reading the ‘Decameron’ and the novels of Franco Sacchetti, we
+might imagine that the vocabulary of abuse directed at the monks and
+nuns was exhausted. But towards the time of the Reformation this abuse
+became still fiercer. To say nothing of Aretino, who in the
+‘Ragionamenti’ uses conventual life merely as a pretext for giving free
+play to his own poisonous nature, we may quote one author as typical of
+the rest--Massuccio, in the first ten of his fifty novels. They are
+written in a tone of the deepest indignation, and with this purpose to
+make the indignation general; and are dedicated to men in the highest
+position, such as King Ferrante and Prince Alfonso of Naples. The
+stories are many of them old, and some of them familiar to readers of
+Boccaccio. But others reflect, with a frightful realism, the actual
+state of things at Naples. The way in which the priests befool and
+plunder the people by means of spurious miracles, added to their own
+scandalous lives, is enough to drive any thoughtful observer to despair.
+We read of the Minorite friars who travelled to collect alms: ‘They
+cheat, steal, and fornicate, and when they are at the end of their
+resources, they set up as saints and work miracles, one displaying the
+cloak of St. Vincent, another the handwriting[1034] of St. Bernadino, a
+third the bridle of Capistrano’s donkey.’ Others ‘bring with them
+confederates who pretend to be blind or afflicted with some mortal
+disease, and after touching the hem of the monk’s cowl, or the reliques
+which he carried, are healed before the eyes of the multitude. All then
+shout “Misericordia,” the bells are rung, and the miracle is recorded in
+a solemn protocol.’ Or else a monk in the pulpit is denounced as a liar
+by another who stands below among the audience; the accuser is
+immediately possessed by the devil, and then healed by the preacher. The
+whole thing was a pre-arranged comedy, in which, however, the principal
+with his assistant made so much money that he was able to buy a
+bishopric from a Cardinal, on which the two confederates lived
+comfortably to the end of their days. Massuccio makes no great
+distinction between Franciscans and Dominicans, finding the one worth as
+much as the other. ‘And yet the foolish people lets itself be drawn into
+their hatreds and divisions, and quarrels about them in public
+places,[1035] and calls itself “franceschino” or “domenichino.”’ The
+nuns are the exclusive property of the monks. Those of the former who
+have anything to do with the laity, are prosecuted and put in prison,
+while others are wedded in due form to the monks, with the
+accompaniments of mass, a marriage-contract, and a liberal indulgence in
+food and wine. ‘I myself,’ says the author, ‘have been there not once,
+but several times, and seen it all with my own eyes. The nuns afterwards
+bring forth pretty little monks or else use means to hinder that result.
+And if any one charges me with falsehood, let him search the nunneries
+well, and he will find there as many little bones as in Bethlehem at
+Herod’s time.’[1036] These things, and the like, are among the secrets
+of monastic life. The monks are by no means too strict with one another
+in the confessional, and impose a Paternoster in cases where they would
+refuse all absolution to a layman as if he were a heretic. ‘Therefore
+may the earth open and swallow up the wretches alive, with those who
+protect them!’ In another place Massuccio, speaking of the fact that the
+influence of the monks depends chiefly on the dread of another world,
+utters the following remarkable wish: ‘The best punishment for them
+would be for God to abolish Purgatory; they would then receive no more
+alms, and would be forced to go back to their spades.’
+
+If men were free to write, in the time of Ferrante, and to him, in this
+strain, the reason is perhaps to be found in the fact that the king
+himself had been incensed by a false miracle which had been palmed off
+on him.[1037] An attempt had been made to urge him to a persecution of
+the Jews, like that carried out in Spain and imitated by the
+Popes,[1038] by producing a tablet with an inscription bearing the name
+of St. Cataldus, said to have been buried at Tarentum, and afterwards
+dug up again. When he discovered the fraud, the monks defied him. He had
+also managed to detect and expose a pretended instance of fasting, as
+his father Alfonso had done before him.[1039] The Court, certainly, was
+no accomplice in maintaining these blind superstitions.[1040]
+
+We have been quoting from an author who wrote in earnest, and who by no
+means stands alone in his judgment. All the Italian literature of that
+time is full of ridicule and invective aimed at the begging
+friars.[1041] It can hardly have been doubted that the Renaissance would
+soon have destroyed these two Orders, had it not been for the German
+Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation which that provoked. Their
+saints and popular preachers could hardly have saved them. It would only
+have been necessary to come to an understanding at a favourable moment
+with a Pope like Leo X., who despised the Mendicant Orders. If the
+spirit of the age found them ridiculous or repulsive, they could no
+longer be anything but an embarrassment to the Church. And who can say
+what fate was in store for the Papacy itself, if the Reformation had not
+saved it?
+
+The influence which the Father Inquisitor of a Dominican monastery was
+able habitually to exercise in the city where it was situated, was in
+the latter part of the fifteenth century just considerable enough to
+hamper and irritate cultivated people, but not strong enough to extort
+any lasting fear or obedience.[1042] It was no longer possible to punish
+men for their thoughts, as it once was (p. 290 sqq.), and those whose
+tongues wagged most impudently against the clergy could easily keep
+clear of heretical doctrine. Except when some powerful party had an end
+to serve, as in the case of Savonarola, or when there was a question of
+the use of magical arts, as was often the case in the cities of North
+Italy, we seldom read at this time of men being burnt at the stake. The
+Inquisitors were in some instances satisfied with the most superficial
+retractation, in others it even happened that the victim was saved out
+of their hands on the way to the place of execution. In Bologna (1452)
+the priest Niccolò da Verona had been publicly degraded on a wooden
+scaffold in front of San Domenico as a wizard and profaner of the
+sacraments, and was about to be led away to the stake, when he was set
+free by a gang of armed men, sent by Achille Malvezzi, a noted friend of
+heretics and violator of nuns. The legate, Cardinal Bessarion, was only
+able to catch and hang one of the party; Malvezzi lived on in
+peace.[1043]
+
+It deserves to be noticed that the higher monastic orders--the
+Benedictines, with their many branches--were, notwithstanding their
+great wealth and easy lives, far less disliked than the mendicant
+friars. For ten novels which treat of ‘frati,’ hardly one can be found
+in which a ‘monaco’ is the subject and the victim. It was no small
+advantage to this order that it was founded earlier, and not as an
+instrument of police, and that it did not interfere with private life.
+It contained men of learning, wit, and piety, but the average has been
+described by a member of it, Firenzuola,[1044] who says: ‘These well-fed
+gentlemen with the capacious cowls do not pass their time in barefooted
+journeys and in sermons, but sit in elegant slippers with their hands
+crossed over their paunches, in charming cells wainscotted with
+cyprus-wood. And when they are obliged to quit the house, they ride
+comfortably, as if for their amusement, on mules and sleek, quiet
+horses. They do not overstrain their minds with the study of many books,
+for fear lest knowledge might put the pride of Lucifer in the place of
+monkish simplicity.’
+
+Those who are familiar with the literature of the time, will see that we
+have only brought forward what is absolutely necessary for the
+understanding of the subject.[1045] That the reputation attaching to the
+monks and the secular clergy must have shattered the faith of
+multitudes in all that is sacred is, of course obvious.
+
+And some of the judgments which we read are terrible; we will quote one
+of them in conclusion, which has been published only lately and is but
+little known. The historian Guicciardini, who was for many years in the
+service of the Medicean Popes says (1529) in his ‘Aphorisms’[1046]: ‘No
+man is more disgusted than I am with the ambition, the avarice, and the
+profligacy of the priests, not only because each of these vices is
+hateful in itself, but because each and all of them are most unbecoming
+in those who declare themselves to be men in special relations with God,
+and also because they are vices so opposed to one another, that they can
+only co-exist in very singular natures. Nevertheless, my position at the
+Court of several Popes forced me to desire their greatness for the sake
+of my own interest. But, had it been for this, I should have loved
+Martin Luther as myself, not in order to free myself from the laws which
+Christianity, as generally understood and explained, lays upon us, but
+in order to see this swarm of scoundrels (‘questa caterva di
+scellerati’) put back into their proper place, so that they may be
+forced to live either without vices or without power.’[1047]
+
+The same Guicciardini is of opinion that we are in the dark as to all
+that is supernatural, that philosophers and theologians have nothing but
+nonsense to tell us about it, that miracles occur in every religion and
+prove the truth of none in particular, and that all of them may be
+explained as unknown phenomena of nature. The faith which moves
+mountains, then common among the followers of Savonarola, is mentioned
+by Guicciardini as a curious fact, but without any bitter remark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Notwithstanding this hostile public opinion, the clergy and the monks
+had the great advantage that the people was used to them, and that their
+existence was interwoven with the everyday existence of all. This is the
+advantage which every old and powerful institution possesses. Everybody
+had some cowled or frocked relative, some prospect of assistance or
+future gain from the treasure of the Church; and in the centre of Italy
+stood the Court of Rome, where men sometimes became rich in a moment.
+Yet it must never be forgotten that all this did not hinder people from
+writing and speaking freely. The authors of the most scandalous satires
+were themselves mostly monks or beneficed priests. Poggio, who wrote the
+‘Facetiae,’ was a clergyman; Francesco Berni, the satirist, held a
+canonry; Teofilo Folengo, the author of the ‘Orlandino,’ was a
+Benedictine, certainly by no means a faithful one; Matteo Bandello, who
+held up his own order to ridicule, was a Dominican, and nephew of a
+general of this order. Were they encouraged to write by the sense that
+they ran no risk? Or did they feel an inward need to clear themselves
+personally from the infamy which attached to their order? Or were they
+moved by that selfish pessimism which takes for its maxim, ‘it will last
+our time’? Perhaps all of these motives were more or less at work. In
+the case of Folengo, the unmistakable influence of Lutheranism must be
+added.[1048]
+
+The sense of dependence on rites and sacraments, which we have already
+touched upon in speaking of the Papacy (p. 103), is not surprising among
+that part of the people which still believed in the Church. Among those
+who were more emancipated, it testifies to the strength of youthful
+impressions, and to the magical force of traditional symbols. The
+universal desire of dying men for priestly absolution shows that the
+last remnants of the dread of hell had not, even in the case of one like
+Vitellozzo, been altogether extinguished. It would hardly be possible to
+find a more instructive instance than this. The doctrine taught by the
+Church of the ‘character indelibilis’ of the priesthood, independently
+of the personality of the priest, had so far borne fruit that it was
+possible to loathe the individual and still desire his spiritual gifts.
+It is true, nevertheless, that there were defiant natures like Galeotto
+of Mirandola,[1049] who died unabsolved in 1499, after living for
+sixteen years under the ban of the Church. All this time the city lay
+under an interdict on his account, so that no mass was celebrated and
+no Christian burial took place.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A splendid contrast to all this is offered by the power exercised over
+the nation by its great Preachers of Repentance. Other countries of
+Europe were from time to time moved by the words of saintly monks, but
+only superficially, in comparison with the periodical upheaval of the
+Italian conscience. The only man, in fact, who produced a similar effect
+in Germany during the fifteenth century,[1050] was an Italian, born in
+the Abruzzi, named Giovanni Capistrano. Those natures which bear within
+them this religious vocation and this commanding earnestness, wore then
+in Northern countries an intuitive and mystical aspect. In the South
+they were practical and expansive, and shared in the national gift of
+language and oratorical skill. The North produced an ‘Imitation of
+Christ,’ which worked silently, at first only within the walls of the
+monastery, but worked for the ages; the South produced men who made on
+their fellows a mighty but passing impression.
+
+This impression consisted chiefly in the awakening of the conscience.
+The sermons were moral exhortations, free from abstract notions and full
+of practical application, rendered more impressive by the saintly and
+ascetic character of the preacher, and by the miracles which, even
+against his will, the inflamed imagination of the people attributed to
+him.[1051] The most powerful argument used was not the threat of Hell
+and Purgatory, but rather the living results of the ‘maledizione,’ the
+temporal ruin wrought on the individual by the curse which clings to
+wrong-doing. The grieving of Christ and the Saints has its consequences
+in this life. And only thus could men, sunk in passion and guilt, be
+brought to repentance and amendment--which was the chief object of these
+sermons.
+
+Among these preachers were Bernadino da Siena, and his two pupils,
+Alberto da Sarteano and Jacopo della Marca, Giovanni Capistrano, Roberto
+da Lecce (p. 413), and finally, Girolamo Savonarola. No prejudice of the
+day was stronger than that against the mendicant friar, and this they
+overcame. They were criticised and ridiculed by a scornful
+humanism;[1052] but when they raised their voices, no one gave heed to
+the humanists. The thing was no novelty, and the scoffing Florentines
+had already in the fourteenth century learned to caricature it whenever
+it appeared in the pulpit.[1053] But no sooner did Savonarola come
+forward than he carried the people so triumphantly with him, that soon
+all their beloved art and culture melted away in the furnace which he
+lighted. Even the grossest profanation done to the cause by hypocritical
+monks, who got up an effect in the audience by means of confederates (p.
+460), could not bring the thing itself into discredit. Men kept on
+laughing at the ordinary monkish sermons, with their spurious miracles
+and manufactured reliques;[1054] but did not cease to honour the great
+and genuine prophets. These are a true Italian specialty of the
+fifteenth century.
+
+The Order--generally that of St. Francis, and more particularly the
+so-called Observantines--sent them out according as they were wanted.
+This was commonly the case when there was some important public or
+private feud in a city, or some alarming outbreak of violence,
+immorality, or disease. When once the reputation of a preacher was
+made, the cities were all anxious to hear him even without any special
+occasion. He went wherever his superiors sent him. A special form of
+this work was the preaching of a Crusade against the Turks;[1055] but
+here we have to speak more particularly of the exhortations to
+repentance.
+
+The order of these, when they were treated methodically, seems to have
+followed the customary list of the deadly sins. The more pressing,
+however, the occasion is, the more directly does the preacher make for
+his main point. He begins perhaps in one of the great churches of the
+Order, or in the cathedral. Soon the largest piazza is too small for the
+crowds which throng from every side to hear him, and he himself can
+hardly move without risking his life.[1056] The sermon is commonly
+followed by a great procession; but the first magistrates of the city,
+who take him in their midst, can hardly save him from the multitude of
+women who throng to kiss his hands and feet, and cut off fragments from
+his cowl.[1057]
+
+The most immediate consequences which follow from the preacher’s
+denunciations of usury, luxury, and scandalous fashions, are the opening
+of the gaols--which meant no more than the discharge of the poorer
+creditors--and the burning of various instruments of luxury and
+amusement, whether innocent or not. Among these are dice, cards, games
+of all kinds, written incantations,[1058] masks, musical instruments,
+song-books, false hair, and so forth. All these would then be
+gracefully arranged on a scaffold (‘talamo’), a figure of the devil
+fastened to the top, and then the whole set on fire (comp. p. 372).
+
+Then came the turn of the more hardened consciences. Men who had long
+never been near the confessional, now acknowledged their sins.
+Ill-gotten gains were restored, and insults which might have borne fruit
+in blood retracted. Orators like Bernadino of Siena[1059] entered
+diligently into all the details of the daily life of men, and the moral
+laws which are involved in it. Few theologians nowadays would feel
+tempted to give a morning sermon ‘on contracts, restitutions, the public
+debt (“monte”), and the portioning of daughters,’ like that which he
+once delivered in the Cathedral at Florence. Imprudent speakers easily
+fell into the mistake of attacking particular classes, professions, or
+offices, with such energy that the enraged hearers proceeded to violence
+against those whom the preacher had denounced.[1060] A sermon which
+Bernadino once preached in Rome (1424) had another consequence besides a
+bonfire of vanities on the Capitol: ‘after this,’[1061] we read, ‘the
+witch Finicella was burnt, because by her diabolical arts she had killed
+many children and bewitched many other persons; and all Rome went to see
+the sight.’
+
+But the most important aim of the preacher was, as has been already
+said, to reconcile enemies and persuade them to give up thoughts of
+vengeance. Probably this end was seldom attained till towards the close
+of a course of sermons, when the tide of penitence flooded the city,
+and when the air resounded[1062] with the cry of the whole people:
+‘Misericordia!’ Then followed those solemn embracings and treaties of
+peace, which even previous bloodshed on both sides could not hinder.
+Banished men were recalled to the city to take part in these sacred
+transactions. It appears that these ‘Paci’ were on the whole faithfully
+observed, even after the mood which prompted them was over; and then the
+memory of the monk was blessed from generation to generation. But there
+were sometimes terrible crises like those in the families Della Valle
+and Croce in Rome (1482), where even the great Roberto da Lecce raised
+his voice in vain.[1063] Shortly before Holy Week he had preached to
+immense crowds in the square before the Minerva. But on the night before
+Maunday Thursday a terrible combat took place in front of the Palazzo
+della Valle, near the Ghetto. In the morning Pope Sixtus gave orders for
+its destruction, and then performed the customary ceremonies of the day.
+On Good Friday Roberto preached again with a crucifix in his hand; but
+he and his hearers could do nothing but weep.
+
+Violent natures, which had fallen into contradiction with themselves,
+often resolved to enter a convent, under the impression made by these
+men. Among such were not only brigands and criminals of every sort, but
+soldiers without employment.[1064] This resolve was stimulated by their
+admiration of the holy man, and by the desire to copy at least his
+outward position.
+
+The concluding sermon is a general benediction, summed up in the words:
+‘la pace sia con voi!’ Throngs of hearers accompany the preacher to the
+next city, and there listen for a second time to the whole course of
+sermons.
+
+The enormous influence exercised by these preachers made it important,
+both for the clergy and for the government, at least not to have them as
+opponents; one means to this end was to permit only monks[1065] or
+priests who had received at all events the lesser consecration, to enter
+the pulpit, so that the Order or Corporation to which they belonged was,
+to some extent, responsible for them. But it was not easy to make the
+rule absolute, since the Church and pulpit had long been used as a means
+of publicity in many ways, judicial, educational, and others, and since
+even sermons were sometimes delivered by humanists and other laymen (p.
+234 sqq.). There existed, too, in Italy a dubious class of
+persons,[1066] who were neither monks nor priests, and who yet had
+renounced the world--that is to say, the numerous class of hermits who
+appeared from time to time in the pulpit on their own authority, and
+often carried the people with them. A case of this kind occurred at
+Milan in 1516, after the second French conquest, certainly at a time
+when public order was much disturbed. A Tuscan hermit Hieronymus of
+Siena, possibly an adherent of Savonarola, maintained his place for
+months together in the pulpit of the Cathedral, denounced the hierarchy
+with great violence, caused a new chandelier and a new altar to be set
+up in the church, worked miracles, and only abandoned the field after a
+long and desperate struggle.[1067] During the decades in which the fate
+of Italy was decided, the spirit of prophecy was unusually active, and
+nowhere where it displayed itself was it confined to any one particular
+class. We know with what a tone of true prophetic defiance the hermits
+came forward before the sack of Rome (p. 122). In default of any
+eloquence of their own, these men made use of messengers with symbols of
+one kind or another, like the ascetic near Siena (1429), who sent a
+‘little hermit,’ that is a pupil, into the terrified city with a skull
+upon a pole, to which was attached a paper with a threatening text from
+the Bible.[1068]
+
+Nor did the monks themselves scruple to attack princes, governments, the
+clergy, or even their own order. A direct exhortation to overthrow a
+despotic house, like that uttered by Jacopo Bussolaro at Pavia in the
+fourteenth century,[1069] hardly occurs again in the following period;
+but there is no want of courageous reproofs, addressed even to the Pope
+in his own chapel (p. 239, note 1), and of naïve political advice given
+in the presence of rulers who by no means held themselves in need of
+it.[1070] In the Piazza del Castello at Milan, a blind preacher from the
+Incoronata--consequently an Augustinian--ventured in 1494 to exhort
+Ludovico Moro from the pulpit: ‘My lord, beware of showing the French
+the way, else you will repent it.’[1071] There were further prophetic
+monks, who, without exactly preaching political sermons, drew such
+appalling pictures of the future that the hearers almost lost their
+senses. After the election of Leo X. in the year 1513, a whole
+association of these men, twelve Franciscan monks in all, journeyed
+through the various districts of Italy, of which one or other was
+assigned to each preacher. The one who appeared in Florence,[1072] Fra
+Francesco di Montepulciano, struck terror into the whole people. The
+alarm was not diminished by the exaggerated reports of his prophecies
+which reached those who were too far off to hear him. After one of his
+sermons he suddenly died ‘of pain in the chest.’ The people thronged in
+such numbers to kiss the feet of the corpse that it had to be secretly
+buried in the night. But the newly awakened spirit of prophecy, which
+seized upon even women and peasants, could not be controlled without
+great difficulty. ‘In order to restore to the people their cheerful
+humour, the Medici--Giuliano, Leo’s brother, and Lorenzo--gave on St.
+John’s Day, 1514, those splendid festivals, tournaments, processions,
+and hunting-parties, which were attended by many distinguished persons
+from Rome, and among them, though disguised, by no less than six
+cardinals.’
+
+But the greatest of the prophets and apostles had been already burnt in
+Florence in the year 1498--Fra Giorolamo Savonarola of Ferrara. We must
+content ourselves with saying a few words respecting him.[1073]
+
+The instrument by means of which he transformed and ruled the city of
+Florence (1494-8) was his eloquence. Of this the meagre reports that
+are left to us, which were taken down mostly on the spot, give us
+evidently a very imperfect notion. It was not that he possessed any
+striking outward advantages, for voice, accent, and rhetorical skill
+constituted precisely his weakest side; and those who required the
+preacher to be a stylist, went to his rival Fra Mariano da Genazzano.
+The eloquence of Savonarola was the expression of a lofty and commanding
+personality, the like of which was not seen again till the time of
+Luther. He himself held his own influence to be the result of a divine
+illumination, and could therefore, without presumption, assign a very
+high place to the office of the preacher, who, in the great hierarchy of
+spirits, occupies the next place below the angels.
+
+This man, whose nature seemed made of fire, worked another and greater
+miracle than any of his oratorical triumphs. His own Dominican monastery
+of San Marco, and then all the Dominican monasteries of Tuscany, became
+like-minded with himself, and undertook voluntarily the work of inward
+reform. When we reflect what the monasteries then were, and what
+measureless difficulty attends the least change where monks are
+concerned, we are doubly astonished at so complete a revolution. While
+the reform was still in progress large numbers of Savonarola’s followers
+entered the Order, and thereby greatly facilitated his plans. Sons of
+the first houses in Florence entered San Marco as novices.
+
+This reform of the Order in a particular province was the first step to
+a national Church, in which, had the reformer himself lived longer, it
+must infallibly have ended. Savonarola, indeed, desired the regeneration
+of the whole Church, and near the end of his career sent pressing
+exhortations to the great powers urging them to call together a Council.
+But in Tuscany his Order and party were the only organs of his
+spirit--the salt of the earth--while the neighbouring provinces remained
+in their old condition. Fancy and asceticism tended more and more to
+produce in him a state of mind to which Florence appeared as the scene
+of the kingdom of God upon earth.
+
+The prophecies, whose partial fulfilment conferred on Savonarola a
+supernatural credit, were the means by which the ever-active Italian
+imagination seized control of the soundest and most cautious natures. At
+first the Franciscans of the Osservanza, trusting in the reputation
+which had been bequeathed to them by San Bernadino of Siena, fancied
+that they could compete with the great Dominican. They put one of their
+own men into the Cathedral pulpit, and outbid the Jeremiads of
+Savonarola by still more terrible warnings, till Pietro de’Medici, who
+then still ruled over Florence, forced them both to be silent. Soon
+after, when Charles VIII. came into Italy and the Medici were expelled,
+as Savonarola had clearly foretold, he alone was believed in.
+
+It must be frankly confessed that he never judged his own premonitions
+and visions critically, as he did those of others. In the funeral
+oration on Pico della Mirandola, he deals somewhat harshly with his dead
+friend. Since Pico, notwithstanding an inner voice which came from God,
+would not enter the Order, he had himself prayed to God to chasten him
+for his disobedience. He certainly had not desired his death, and alms
+and prayers had obtained the favour that Pico’s soul was safe in
+Purgatory. With regard to a comforting vision which Pico had upon his
+sick-bed, in which the Virgin appeared and promised him that he should
+not die, Savonarola confessed that he had long regarded it as a deceit
+of the Devil, till it was revealed to him that the Madonna meant the
+second and eternal death.[1074] If these things and the like are proofs
+of presumption, it must be admitted that this great soul at all events
+paid a bitter penalty for his fault. In his last days Savonarola seems
+to have recognised the vanity of his visions and prophecies. And yet
+enough inward peace was left him to enable him to meet death like a
+Christian. His partisans held to his doctrine and predictions for thirty
+years longer.
+
+He only undertook the reorganisation of the state for the reason that
+otherwise his enemies would have got the government into their own
+hands. It is unfair to judge him by the semi-democratic constitution (p.
+83, note 1) of the beginning of the year 1495. Nor is it either better
+or worse than other Florentine constitutions.[1075]
+
+He was at bottom the most unsuitable man who could be found for such a
+work. His ideal was a theocracy, in which all men were to bow in blessed
+humility before the Unseen, and all conflicts of passion were not even
+to be able to arise. His whole mind is written in that inscription on
+the Palazzo della Signoria, the substance of which was his maxim[1076]
+as early as 1495, and which was solemnly renewed by his partisans in
+1527: ‘Jesus Christus Rex populi Florentini S. P. Q. decreto creatus.’
+He stood in no more relation to mundane affairs and their actual
+conditions than any other inhabitant of a monastery. Man, according to
+him, has only to attend to those things which make directly for his
+salvation.
+
+This temper comes out clearly in his opinions on ancient literature:
+‘The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle, is that they
+brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics.
+Yet they and other philosophers are now in Hell. An old woman knows more
+about the Faith than Plato. It would be good for religion if many books
+that seem useful were destroyed. When there were not so many books and
+not so many arguments (“ragioni naturali”) and disputes, religion grew
+more quickly than it has done since.’ He wished to limit the classical
+instruction of the schools to Homer, Virgil, and Cicero, and to supply
+the rest from Jerome and Augustine. Not only Ovid and Catullus, but
+Terence and Tibullus, were to be banished. This may be no more than the
+expression of a nervous morality, but elsewhere in a special work he
+admits that science as a whole is harmful. He holds that only a few
+people should have to do with it, in order that the tradition of human
+knowledge may not perish, and particularly that there may be no want of
+intellectual athletes to confute the sophisms of the heretics. For all
+others, grammar, morals, and religious teaching (‘litterae sacrae’)
+suffice. Culture and education would thus return wholly into the charge
+of the monks, and as, in his opinion, the ‘most learned and the most
+pious’ are to rule over the states and empires, these rulers would also
+be monks. Whether he really foresaw this conclusion, we need not
+inquire.
+
+A more childish method of reasoning cannot be imagined. The simple
+reflection that the new-born antiquity and the boundless enlargement of
+human thought and knowledge which was due to it, might give splendid
+confirmation to a religion able to adapt itself thereto, seems never
+even to have occurred to the good man. He wanted to forbid what he could
+not deal with by any other means. In fact, he was anything but liberal,
+and was ready, for example, to send the astrologers to the same stake at
+which he afterwards himself died.[1077]
+
+How mighty must have been the soul which dwelt side by side with this
+narrow intellect! And what a flame must have glowed within him before he
+could constrain the Florentines, possessed as they were by the passion
+for culture, to surrender themselves to a man who could thus reason!
+
+How much of their heart and their worldliness they were ready to
+sacrifice for his sake is shown by those famous bonfires by the side of
+which all the ‘talami’ of Bernadino da Siena and others were certainly
+of small account.
+
+All this could not, however, be effected without the agency of a
+tyrannical police. He did not shrink from the most vexatious
+interferences with the much-prized freedom of Italian private life,
+using the espionage of servants on their masters as a means of carrying
+out his moral reforms. That transformation of public and private life
+which the iron Calvin was but just able to effect at Geneva with the aid
+of a permanent state of siege necessarily proved impossible at Florence,
+and the attempt only served to drive the enemies of Savonarola to a more
+implacable hostility. Among his most unpopular measures may be mentioned
+those organised parties of boys, who forced their way into the houses
+and laid violent hands on any objects which seemed suitable for the
+bonfire. As it happened that they were sometimes sent away with a
+beating, they were afterwards attended, in order to keep up the figment
+of a pious ‘rising generation,’ by a body-guard of grown-up persons.
+
+On the last day of the Carnival in the year 1497, and on the same day
+the year after, the great ‘Auto da Fé’ took place on the Piazza della
+Signoria. In the centre of it rose a great pyramidal flight of stairs
+like the ‘rogus’ on which the Roman Emperors were commonly burned. On
+the lowest tier were arranged false beards, masks, and carnival
+disguises; above came volumes of the Latin and Italian poets, among
+others Boccaccio, the ‘Morgante’ of Pulci, and Petrarch, partly in the
+form of valuable printed parchments and illuminated manuscripts; then
+women’s ornaments and toilette articles, scents, mirrors, veils, and
+false hair; higher up, lutes, harps, chess-boards, playing-cards; and
+finally, on the two uppermost tiers, paintings only, especially of
+female beauties, partly fancy-pictures, bearing the classical names of
+Lucretia, Cleopatra, or Faustina, partly portraits of the beautiful
+Bencina, Lena Morella, Bina, and Maria de’Lenzi; all the pictures of
+Bartolommeo della Porta, who brought them of his own accord; and, as it
+seems, some female heads--masterpieces of ancient sculptors. On the
+first occasion a Venetian merchant who happened to be present offered
+the Signoria 22,000 gold florins for the objects on the pyramid; but the
+only answer he received was that his portrait, too, was taken, and
+burned along with the rest. When the pile was lighted, the Signoria
+appeared on the balcony, and the air echoed with song, the sound of
+trumpets, and the pealing of bells. The people then adjourned to the
+Piazza di San Marco, where they danced round in three concentric
+circles. The innermost was composed of monks of the monastery,
+alternating with boys, dressed as angels; then came young laymen and
+ecclesiastics; and on the outside old men, citizens, and priests, the
+latter crowned with wreaths of olive.[1078]
+
+All the ridicule of his victorious enemies, who in truth had no lack of
+justification or of talent for ridicule, was unable to discredit the
+memory of Savonarola. The more tragic the fortunes of Italy became, the
+brighter grew the halo which in the recollection of the survivors
+surrounded the figure of the great monk and prophet. Though his
+predictions may not have been confirmed in detail, the great and
+general calamity which he foretold was fulfilled with appalling truth.
+
+Great, however, as the influence of all these preachers may have been,
+and brilliantly as Savonarola justified the claim of the monks to this
+office,[1079] nevertheless the order as a whole could not escape the
+contempt and condemnation of the people. Italy showed that she could
+give her enthusiasm only to individuals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If, apart from all that concerns the priests and the monks, we attempt
+to measure the strength of the old faith, it will be found great or
+small according to the light in which it is considered. We have spoken
+already of the need felt for the Sacraments as something indispensable
+(pp. 103, 464). Let us now glance for a moment at the position of faith
+and worship in daily life. Both were determined partly by the habits of
+the people and partly by the policy and example of the rulers.
+
+All that has to do with penitence and the attainment of salvation by
+means of good works was in much the same stage of development or
+corruption as in the North of Europe, both among the peasantry and among
+the poorer inhabitants of the cities. The instructed classes were here
+and there influenced by the same motives. Those sides of popular
+Catholicism which had their origin in the old pagan ways of addressing,
+rewarding, and reconciling the gods have fixed themselves ineradicably
+in the consciousness of the people. The eighth eclogue of Battista
+Mantovano,[1080] which has been already quoted elsewhere, contains the
+prayer of a peasant to the Madonna, in which she is called upon as the
+special patroness of all rustic and agricultural interests. And what
+conceptions they were which the people formed of their protectress in
+heaven! What was in the mind of the Florentine woman[1081] who gave ‘ex
+voto’ a keg of wax to the Annunziata, because her lover, a monk, had
+gradually emptied a barrel of wine without her absent husband finding it
+out! Then, too, as still in our own days, different departments of human
+life were presided over by their respective patrons. The attempt has
+often been made to explain a number of the commonest rites of the
+Catholic Church as remnants of pagan ceremonies, and no one doubts that
+many local and popular usages, which are associated with religious
+festivals, are forgotten fragments of the old pre-christian faiths of
+Europe. In Italy, on the contrary, we find instances in which the
+affiliation of the new faith on the old seems consciously recognised.
+So, for example, the custom of setting out food for the dead four days
+before the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, that is to say, on February
+18, the date of the ancient Feralia.[1082] Many other practices of this
+kind may then have prevailed and have since then been extirpated.
+Perhaps the paradox is only apparent if we say that the popular faith in
+Italy had a solid foundation just in proportion as it was pagan.
+
+The extent to which this form of belief prevailed in the upper classes
+can to a certain point be shown in detail. It had, as we have said in
+speaking of the influence of the clergy, the power of custom and early
+impressions on its side. The love for ecclesiastical pomp and display
+helped to confirm it, and now and then there came one of those epidemics
+of revivalism, which few even among the scoffers and the sceptics were
+able to withstand.
+
+But in questions of this kind it is perilous to grasp too hastily at
+absolute results. We might fancy, for example, that the feeling of
+educated men towards the reliques of the saints would be a key by which
+some chambers of their religious consciousness might be opened. And in
+fact, some difference of degree may be demonstrable, though by no means
+as clearly as might be wished. The Government of Venice in the fifteenth
+century seems to have fully shared in the reverence felt throughout the
+rest of Europe for the remains of the bodies of the saints (p. 72). Even
+strangers who lived in Venice found it well to adapt themselves to this
+superstition.[1083] If we can judge of scholarly Padua from the
+testimony of its topographer Michele Savonarola (p. 145), things must
+have been much the same there. With a mixture of pride and pious awe,
+Michele tells us how in times of great danger the saints were heard to
+sigh at night along the streets of the city, how the hair and nails on
+the corpse of a holy nun in Santa Chiara kept on continually growing,
+and how the same corpse, when any disaster was impending, used to make a
+noise and lift up the arms.[1084] When he sets to work to describe the
+chapel of St. Anthony in the Santo, the writer loses himself in
+ejaculations and fantastic dreams. In Milan the people at least showed a
+fanatical devotion to relics; and when once, in the year 1517, the monks
+of San Simpliciano were careless enough to expose six holy corpses
+during certain alterations of the high altar, which event was followed
+by heavy floods of rain, the people[1085] attributed the visitation to
+this sacrilege, and gave the monks a sound beating whenever they met
+them in the street. In other parts of Italy, and even in the case of the
+Popes themselves, the sincerity of this feeling is much more dubious,
+though here, too, a positive conclusion is hardly attainable. It is
+well known amid what general enthusiasm Pius II. solemnly deposited the
+head of the Apostle Andrew, which had been brought from Greece, and then
+from Santa Maura, in the Church of St. Peter (1462); but we gather from
+his own narrative that he only did it from a kind of shame, as so many
+princes were competing for the relic. It was not till afterwards that
+the idea struck him of making Rome the common refuge for all the remains
+of the saints which had been driven from their own churches.[1086] Under
+Sixtus IV. the population of the city was still more zealous in this
+cause than the Pope himself, and the magistracy (1483) complained
+bitterly that Sixtus had sent to Louis XI., the dying king of France,
+some specimens of the Lateran relics.[1087] A courageous voice was
+raised about this time at Bologna, advising the sale of the skull of St.
+Dominic to the king of Spain, and the application of the money to some
+useful public object.[1088] But those who had the least reverence of all
+for the relics were the Florentines. Between the decision to honour
+their saint S. Zanobi with a new sarcophagus and the final execution of
+the project by Ghiberti nineteen years elapsed (1409-28), and then it
+only happened by chance, because the master had executed a smaller order
+of the same kind with great skill.[1089]
+
+Perhaps through being tricked by a cunning Neapolitan abbess (1352), who
+sent them a spurious arm of the patroness of the Cathedral, Santa
+Reparata, made of wood and plaster, they began to get tired of
+relics.[1090] Or perhaps it would be truer to say that their æsthetic
+sense turned them away in disgust from dismembered corpses and mouldy
+clothes. Or perhaps their feeling was rather due to that sense for
+glory which thought Dante and Petrarch worthier of a splendid grave than
+all the twelve apostles put together. It is probable that throughout
+Italy, apart from Venice and from Rome, the condition of which latter
+city was exceptional, the worship of relics had been long giving way to
+the adoration of the Madonna,[1091] at all events to a greater extent
+than elsewhere in Europe; and in this fact lies indirect evidence of an
+early development of the æsthetic sense.
+
+It may be questioned whether in the North, where the vastest cathedrals
+are nearly all dedicated to Our Lady, and where an extensive branch of
+Latin and indigenous poetry sang the praises of the Mother of God, a
+greater devotion to her was possible. In Italy, however, the number of
+miraculous pictures of the Virgin was far greater, and the part they
+played in the daily life of the people much more important. Every town
+of any size contained a quantity of them, from the ancient, or
+ostensibly ancient, paintings by St. Luke, down to the works of
+contemporaries, who not seldom lived to see the miracles wrought by
+their own handiwork. The work of art was in these cases by no means as
+harmless as Battista Mantovano[1092] thinks; sometimes it suddenly
+acquired a magical virtue. The popular craving for the miraculous,
+especially strong in women, may have been fully satisfied by these
+pictures, and for this reason the relics been less regarded. It cannot
+be said with certainty how far the respect for genuine relics suffered
+from the ridicule which the novelists aimed at the spurious.[1093]
+
+The attitude of the educated classes towards Mariolatry is more clearly
+recognisable than towards the worship of images. One cannot but be
+struck with the fact that in Italian literature Dante’s ‘Paradise’[1094]
+is the last poem in honour of the Virgin, while among the people hymns
+in her praise have been constantly produced down to our own day. The
+names of Sannazaro and Sabellico[1095] and other writers of Latin poems
+prove little on the other side, since the object with which they wrote
+was chiefly literary. The poems written in Italian in the
+fifteenth[1096] and at the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, in
+which we meet with genuine religious feeling, such as the hymns of
+Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the sonnets of Vittoria Colonna and of
+Michelangelo, might have been just as well composed by Protestants.
+Besides the lyrical expression of faith in God, we chiefly notice in
+them the sense of sin, the consciousness of deliverance through the
+death of Christ, the longing for a better world. The intercession of the
+Mother of God is only mentioned by the way.[1097] The same phenomenon is
+repeated in the classical literature of the French at the time of Louis
+XIV. Not till the time of the Counter-Reformation did Mariolatry
+reappear in the higher Italian poetry. Meanwhile the plastic arts had
+certainly done their utmost to glorify the Madonna. It may be added that
+the worship of the saints among the educated classes often took an
+essentially pagan form (p. 260).
+
+We might thus critically examine the various sides of Italian
+Catholicism at this period, and so establish with a certain degree of
+probability the attitude of the instructed classes toward popular faith.
+Yet an absolute and positive result cannot be reached. We meet with
+contrasts hard to explain. While architects, painters, and sculptors
+were working with restless activity in and for the churches, we hear at
+the beginning of the sixteenth century the bitterest complaints of the
+neglect of public worship and of these churches themselves.
+
+    Templa ruunt, passim sordent altaria, cultus
+    Paulatim divinus abit.[1098]
+
+It is well known how Luther was scandalised by the irreverence with
+which the priests in Rome said Mass. And at the same time the feasts of
+the Church were celebrated with a taste and magnificence of which
+Northern countries had no conception. It looks as if this most
+imaginative of nations was easily tempted to neglect every-day things,
+and as easily captivated by anything extraordinary.
+
+It is to this excess of imagination that we must attribute the epidemic
+religious revivals, upon which we shall again say a few words. They must
+be clearly distinguished from the excitement called forth by the great
+preachers. They were rather due to general public calamities, or to the
+dread of such.
+
+In the Middle Ages all Europe was from time to time flooded by these
+great tides, which carried away whole peoples in their waves. The
+Crusades and the Flagellant revival are instances. Italy took part in
+both of these movements. The first great companies of Flagellants
+appeared, immediately after the fall of Ezzelino and his house, in the
+neighbourhood of the same Perugia[1099] which has been already spoken
+of (p. 482, note 2), as the head-quarters of the revivalist preachers.
+Then followed the Flagellants of 1310 and 1334,[1100] and then the great
+pilgrimage without scourging in the year 1399, which Corio has
+recorded.[1101] It is not impossible that the Jubilees were founded
+partly in order to regulate and render harmless this sinister passion
+for vagabondage which seized on whole populations at times of religious
+excitement. The great sanctuaries of Italy, such as Loreto and others,
+had meantime become famous, and no doubt diverted a certain part of this
+enthusiasm.[1102]
+
+But terrible crises had still at a much later time the power to reawaken
+the glow of mediæval penitence, and the conscience-stricken people,
+often still further appalled by signs and wonders, sought to move the
+pity of Heaven by wailings and scourgings, by fasts, processions, and
+moral enactments. So it was at Bologna when the plague came in
+1457,[1103] so in 1496 at a time of internal discord at Siena,[1104] to
+mention two only out of countless instances. No more moving scene can be
+imagined than that we read of at Milan in 1529, when famine, plague, and
+war conspired with Spanish extortion to reduce the city to the lowest
+depths of despair.[1105] It chanced that the monk who had the ear of the
+people, Fra Tommaso Nieto, was himself a Spaniard. The Host was borne
+along in a novel fashion, amid barefooted crowds of old and young. It
+was placed on a decorated bier, which rested on the shoulders of four
+priests in linen garments--an imitation of the Ark of the Covenant[1106]
+which the children of Israel once carried round the walls of Jericho.
+Thus did the afflicted people of Milan remind their ancient God of His
+old covenant with man; and when the procession again entered the
+cathedral, and it seemed as if the vast building must fall in with the
+agonised cry of ‘Misericordia!’ many who stood there may have believed
+that the Almighty would indeed subvert the laws of nature and of
+history, and send down upon them a miraculous deliverance.
+
+There was one government in Italy, that of Duke Ercole I. of
+Ferrara,[1107] which assumed the direction of public feeling, and
+compelled the popular revivals to move in regular channels. At the time
+when Savonarola was powerful in Florence, and the movement which he
+began spread far and wide among the population of central Italy, the
+people of Ferrara voluntarily entered on a general fast (at the
+beginning of 1496). A Lazarist announced from the pulpit the approach of
+a season of war and famine such as the world had never seen; but the
+Madonna had assured some pious people[1108] that these evils might be
+avoided by fasting. Upon this, the court itself had no choice but to
+fast, but it took the conduct of the public devotions into its own
+hands. On Easter Day, the 3rd of April, a proclamation on morals and
+religion was published, forbidding blasphemy, prohibited games, sodomy,
+concubinage, the letting of houses to prostitutes or panders, and the
+opening of all shops on feast-days, excepting those of the bakers and
+greengrocers. The Jews and Moors, who had taken refuge from the
+Spaniards at Ferrara, were now compelled again to wear the yellow O upon
+the breast. Contraveners were threatened, not only with the punishments
+already provided by law, but also ‘with such severer penalties as the
+Duke might think good to inflict,’ of which one-fourth in case of a
+pecuniary fine was to be paid to the Duke, and the other three-fourths
+were to go to some public institution. After this, the Duke and the
+court went several days in succession to hear sermons in church, and on
+the 10th of April all the Jews in Ferrara were compelled to do the
+same.[1109] On the 3rd of May the director of police--that Zampante who
+has been already referred to (p. 50)--sent the crier to announce that
+whoever had given money to the police-officers in order not to be
+informed against as a blasphemer, might, if he came forward, have it
+back with a further indemnification. These wicked officers, he said, had
+extorted as much as two or three ducats from innocent persons by
+threatening to lodge an information against them. They had then mutually
+informed against one another, and so had all found their way into
+prison. But as the money had been paid precisely in order not to have to
+do with Zampante, it is probable that his proclamation induced few
+people to come forward. In the year 1500, after the fall of Ludovico
+Moro, when a similar outbreak of popular feeling took place,
+Ercole[1110] ordered a series of nine processions, in which there were
+4,000 children dressed in white, bearing the standard of Jesus. He
+himself rode on horseback, as he could not walk without difficulty. An
+edict was afterwards published of the same kind as that of 1496. It is
+well known how many churches and monasteries were built by this ruler.
+He even sent for a live saint, the Suor Colomba, shortly before he
+married his son Alfonso to Lucrezia Borgia (1502). A special
+messenger[1111] fetched the saint with fifteen other nuns from Viterbo,
+and the Duke himself conducted her on her arrival at Ferrara into a
+convent prepared for her reception. We shall probably do him no
+injustice if we attribute all these measures very largely to political
+calculation. To the conception of government formed by the House of
+Este, as indicated above (p. 46, sqq.), this employment of religion for
+the ends of statecraft belongs by a kind of logical necessity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+RELIGION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
+
+
+But in order to reach a definite conclusion with regard to the religious
+sense of the men of this period, we must adopt a different method. From
+their intellectual attitude in general, we can infer their relation both
+to the Divine idea and to the existing religion of their age.
+
+These modern men, the representatives of the culture of Italy, were born
+with the same religious instincts as other mediæval Europeans. But their
+powerful individuality made them in religion, as in other matters,
+altogether subjective, and the intense charm which the discovery of the
+inner and outer universe exercised upon them rendered them markedly
+worldly. In the rest of Europe religion remained, till a much later
+period, something given from without, and in practical life egoism and
+sensuality alternated with devotion and repentance. The latter had no
+spiritual competitors, as in Italy, or only to a far smaller extent.
+
+Further, the close and frequent relations of Italy with Byzantium and
+the Mohammedan peoples had produced a dispassionate tolerance which
+weakened the ethnographical conception of a privileged Christendom. And
+when classical antiquity with its men and institutions became an ideal
+of life, as well as the greatest of historical memories, ancient
+speculation and scepticism obtained in many cases a complete mastery
+over the minds of Italians.
+
+Since, again, the Italians were the first modern people of Europe who
+gave themselves boldly to speculations on freedom and necessity, and
+since they did so under violent and lawless political circumstances, in
+which evil seemed often to win a splendid and lasting victory, their
+belief in God began to waver, and their view of the government of the
+world became fatalistic. And when their passionate natures refused to
+rest in the sense of uncertainty, they made a shift to help themselves
+out with ancient, oriental, or mediæval superstition. They took to
+astrology and magic.
+
+Finally, these intellectual giants, these representatives of the
+Renaissance, show, in respect to religion, a quality which is common in
+youthful natures. Distinguishing keenly between good and evil, they yet
+are conscious of no sin. Every disturbance of their inward harmony they
+feel themselves able to make good out of the plastic resources of their
+own nature, and therefore they feel no repentance. The need of salvation
+thus becomes felt more and more dimly, while the ambitions and the
+intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether every
+thought of a world to come, or else cause it to assume a poetic instead
+of a dogmatic form.
+
+When we look on all this as pervaded and often perverted by the
+all-powerful Italian imagination, we obtain a picture of that time which
+is certainly more in accordance with truth than are vague declamations
+against modern paganism. And closer investigation often reveals to us
+that underneath this outward shell much genuine religion could still
+survive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fuller discussion of these points must be limited to a few of the
+most essential explanations.
+
+That religion should again become an affair of the individual and of his
+own personal feeling was inevitable when the Church became corrupt in
+doctrine and tyrannous in practice, and is a proof that the European
+mind was still alive. It is true that this showed itself in many
+different ways. While the mystical and ascetical sects of the North lost
+no time in creating new outward forms for their new modes of thought and
+feeling, each individual in Italy went his own way, and thousands
+wandered on the sea of life without any religious guidance whatever. All
+the more must we admire those who attained and held fast to a personal
+religion. They were not to blame for being unable to have any part or
+lot in the old Church, as she then was; nor would it be reasonable to
+expect that they should all of them go through that mighty spiritual
+labour which was appointed to the German reformers. The form and aim of
+this personal faith, as it showed itself in the better minds, will be
+set forth at the close of our work.
+
+The worldliness, through which the Renaissance seems to offer so
+striking a contrast to the Middle Ages, owed its first origin to the
+flood of new thoughts, purposes, and views, which transformed the
+mediæval conception of nature and man. This spirit is not in itself more
+hostile to religion than that ‘culture’ which now holds its place, but
+which can give us only a feeble notion of the universal ferment which
+the discovery of a new world of greatness then called forth. This
+worldliness was not frivolous, but earnest, and was ennobled by art and
+poetry. It is a lofty necessity of the modern spirit that this attitude,
+once gained, can never again be lost, that an irresistible impulse
+forces us to the investigation of men and things, and that we must hold
+this enquiry to be our proper end and work.[1112] How soon and by what
+paths this search will lead us back to God, and in what ways the
+religious temper of the individual will be affected by it, are questions
+which cannot be met by any general answer. The Middle Ages, which spared
+themselves the trouble of induction and free enquiry, can have no right
+to impose upon us their dogmatical verdict in a matter of such vast
+importance.
+
+To the study of man, among many other causes, was due the tolerance and
+indifference with which the Mohammedan religion was regarded. The
+knowledge and admiration of the remarkable civilisation which Islam,
+particularly before the Mongol inundation, had attained, was peculiar to
+Italy from the time of the Crusades. This sympathy was fostered by the
+half-Mohammedan government of some Italian princes, by dislike and even
+contempt for the existing Church, and by constant commercial intercourse
+with the harbours of the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean.[1113] It
+can be shown that in the thirteenth century the Italians recognised a
+Mohammedan ideal of nobleness, dignity, and pride, which they loved to
+connect with the person of a Sultan. A Mameluke Sultan is commonly
+meant; if any name is mentioned, it is the name of Saladin.[1114] Even
+the Osmanli Turks, whose destructive tendencies were no secret, gave the
+Italians, as we have shown above (p. 92, sqq.), only half a fright, and
+a peaceable accord with them was looked upon as no impossibility. Along
+with this tolerance, however, appeared the bitterest religious
+opposition to Mohammedanism; the clergy, says Filelfo, should come
+forward against it, since it prevailed over a great part of the world
+and was more dangerous to Christendom than Judaism was;[1115] along with
+the readiness to compromise with the Turks, appeared the passionate
+desire for a war against them which possessed Pius II. during the whole
+of his pontificate, and which many of the humanists expressed in
+high-flown declamations.
+
+The truest and most characteristic expression of this religious
+indifference is the famous story of the Three Rings, which Lessing has
+put into the mouth of his Nathan, after it had been already told
+centuries earlier, though with some reserve, in the ‘Hundred Old Novels’
+(nov. 72 or 73), and more boldly in Boccaccio.[1116] In what language
+and in what corner of the Mediterranean it was first told, can never be
+known; most likely the original was much more plain-spoken than the two
+Italian adaptations. The religious postulate on which it rests, namely
+Deism, will be discussed later on in its wider significance for this
+period. The same idea is repeated, though in a clumsy caricature, in the
+famous proverb of the ‘three who have deceived the world, that is,
+Moses, Christ, and Mohammed.’[1117] If the Emperor Frederick II., in
+whom this saying is said to have originated, really thought so, he
+probably expressed himself with more wit. Ideas of the same kind were
+also current in Islam.
+
+At the height of the Renaissance, towards the close of the fifteenth
+century, Luigi Pulci offers us an example of the same mode of thought in
+the ‘Morgante Maggiore.’ The imaginary world of which his story treats
+is divided, as in all heroic poems of romance, into a Christian and a
+Mohammedan camp. In accordance with the mediæval temper, the victory of
+the Christian and the final reconciliation among the combatants was
+attended by the baptism of the defeated Islamites, and the
+Improvisatori, who preceded Pulci in the treatment of these subjects,
+must have made free use of this stock incident. It was Pulci’s object to
+parody his predecessors, particularly the worst among them, and this he
+does by those appeals to God, Christ, and the Madonna, with which each
+canto begins; and still more clearly by the sudden conversions and
+baptisms, the utter senselessness of which must have struck every reader
+or hearer. This ridicule leads him further to the confession of his
+faith in the relative goodness of all religions,[1118] which faith,
+notwithstanding his professions of orthodoxy,[1119] rests on an
+essentially theistic basis. In another point too he departs widely from
+mediæval conceptions. The alternatives in past centuries were:
+Christian, or else Pagan and Mohammedan; orthodox believer or heretic.
+Pulci draws a picture of the Giant Margutte[1120] who, disregarding each
+and every religion, jovially confesses to every form of vice and
+sensuality, and only reserves to himself the merit of having never
+broken faith. Perhaps the poet intended to make something of this--in
+his way--honest monster, possibly to have led him into virtuous paths by
+Morgante, but he soon got tired of his own creation, and in the next
+canto brought him to a comic end.[1121] Margutte has been brought
+forward as a proof of Pulci’s frivolity; but he is needed to complete
+the picture of the poetry of the fifteenth century. It was natural that
+it should somewhere present in grotesque proportions the figure of an
+untamed egoism, insensible to all established rule, and yet with a
+remnant of honourable feeling left. In other poems sentiments are put
+into the mouths of giants, fiends, infidels, and Mohammedans which no
+Christian knight would venture to utter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Antiquity exercised an influence of another kind than that of Islam, and
+this not through its religion, which was but too much like the
+Catholicism of this period, but through its philosophy. Ancient
+literature, now worshipped as something incomparable, is full of the
+victory of philosophy over religious tradition. An endless number of
+systems and fragments of systems were suddenly presented to the Italian
+mind, not as curiosities or even as heresies, but almost with the
+authority of dogmas, which had now to be reconciled rather than
+discriminated. In nearly all these various opinions and doctrines a
+certain kind of belief in God was implied; but taken altogether they
+formed a marked contrast to the Christian faith in a Divine government
+of the world. And there was one central question, which mediæval
+theology had striven in vain to solve, and which now urgently demanded
+an answer from the wisdom of the ancients, namely, the relation of
+Providence to the freedom or necessity of the human will. To write the
+history of this question even superficially from the fourteenth century
+onwards, would require a whole volume. A few hints must here suffice.
+
+If we take Dante and his contemporaries as evidence, we shall find that
+ancient philosophy first came into contact with Italian life in the form
+which offered the most marked contrast to Christianity, that is to say,
+Epicureanism. The writings of Epicurus were no longer preserved, and
+even at the close of the classical age a more or less one-sided
+conception had been formed of his philosophy. Nevertheless, that phase
+of Epicureanism which can be studied in Lucretius, and especially in
+Cicero, is quite sufficient to make men familiar with a godless
+universe. To what extent his teaching was actually understood, and
+whether the name of the problematic Greek sage was not rather a
+catchword for the multitude, it is hard to say. It is probable that the
+Dominican Inquisition used it against men who could not be reached by a
+more definite accusation. In the case of sceptics born before the time
+was ripe, whom it was yet hard to convict of positive heretical
+utterances, a moderate degree of luxurious living may have sufficed to
+provoke the charge. The word is used in this conventional sense by
+Giovanni Villani,[1122] when he explains the Florentine fires of 1115
+and 1117 as a Divine judgment on heresies, among others, ‘on the
+luxurious and gluttonous sect of Epicureans.’ The same writer says of
+Manfred, ‘His life was Epicurean, since he believed neither in God, nor
+in the Saints, but only in bodily pleasure.’
+
+Dante speaks still more clearly in the ninth and tenth cantos of the
+‘Inferno.’ That terrible fiery field covered with half-opened tombs,
+from which issued cries of hopeless agony, was peopled by the two great
+classes of those whom the Church had vanquished or expelled in the
+thirteenth century. The one were heretics who opposed the Church by
+deliberately spreading false doctrine; the other were Epicureans, and
+their sin against the Church lay in their general disposition, which was
+summed up in the belief that the soul dies with the body.[1123] The
+Church was well aware that this one doctrine, if it gained ground, must
+be more ruinous to her authority than all the teachings of the
+Manichaeans and Paterini, since it took away all reason for her
+interference in the affairs of men after death. That the means which she
+used in her struggles were precisely what had driven the most gifted
+natures to unbelief and despair was what she naturally would not herself
+admit.
+
+Dante’s loathing of Epicurus, or of what he took to be his doctrine, was
+certainly sincere. The poet of the life to come could not but detest the
+denier of immortality; and a world neither made nor ruled by God, no
+less than the vulgar objects of earthly life which the system appeared
+to countenance, could not but be intensely repugnant to a nature like
+his. But if we look closer, we find that certain doctrines of the
+ancients made even on him an impression which forced the biblical
+doctrine of the Divine government into the background, unless, indeed,
+it was his own reflection, the influence of opinions then prevalent, or
+loathing for the injustice that seemed to rule this world, which made
+him give up the belief in a special Providence.[1124] His God leaves all
+the details of the world’s government to a deputy, Fortune, whose sole
+work it is to change and change again all earthly things, and who can
+disregard the wailings of men in unalterable beatitude. Nevertheless,
+Dante does not for a moment loose his hold on the moral responsibility
+of man; he believes in free will.
+
+The belief in the freedom of the will, in the popular sense of the
+words, has always prevailed in Western countries. At all times men have
+been held responsible for their actions, as though this freedom were a
+matter of course. The case is otherwise with the religious and
+philosophical doctrine, which labours under the difficulty of
+harmonising the nature of the will with the laws of the universe at
+large. We have here to do with a question of more or less, which every
+moral estimate must take into account. Dante is not wholly free from
+those astrological superstitions which illumined the horizon of his time
+with deceptive light, but they do not hinder him from rising to a worthy
+conception of human nature. ‘The stars,’ he makes his Marco Lombardo
+say,[1125] ‘the stars give the first impulse to your actions,’ but
+
+    Light has been given you for good and evil
+    And free volition; which, if some fatigue
+    In the first battles with the heavens it suffers,
+    Afterwards conquers all, if well ‘tis nurtured.
+
+Others might seek the necessity which annulled human freedom in another
+power than the stars, but the question was henceforth an open and
+inevitable one. So far as it was a question for the schools or the
+pursuit of isolated thinkers, its treatment belongs to the historian of
+philosophy. But inasmuch as it entered into the consciousness of a wider
+public, it is necessary for us to say a few words respecting it.
+
+The fourteenth century was chiefly stimulated by the writings of Cicero,
+who, though in fact an eclectic, yet, by his habit of setting forth the
+opinions of different schools, without coming to a decision between
+them, exercised the influence of a sceptic. Next in importance came
+Seneca, and the few works of Aristotle which had been translated into
+Latin. The immediate fruit of these studies was the capacity to reflect
+on great subjects, if not in direct opposition to the authority of the
+Church, at all events independently of it.
+
+In the course of the fifteenth century the works of antiquity were
+discovered and diffused with extraordinary rapidity. All the writings of
+the Greek philosophers which we ourselves possess were now, at least in
+the form of Latin translations, in everybody’s hands. It is a curious
+fact that some of the most zealous apostles of this new culture were men
+of the strictest piety, or even ascetics (p. 273). Fra Ambrogio
+Camaldolese, as a spiritual dignitary chiefly occupied with
+ecclesiastical affairs, and as a literary man with the translation of
+the Greek Fathers of the Church, could not repress the humanistic
+impulse, and at the request of Cosimo de’Medici, undertook to translate
+Diogenes Laertius into Latin.[1126] His contemporaries, Niccolò Niccoli,
+Griannozzo Manetti, Donato Acciajuoli, and Pope Nicholas V.,[1127]
+united to a many-sided humanism profound biblical scholarship and deep
+piety. In Vittorino da Feltre the same temper has been already noticed
+(p. 213 sqq.). The same Matthew Vegio, who added a thirteenth book to
+the ‘Æneid,’ had an enthusiasm for the memory of St. Augustine and his
+mother Monica which cannot have been without a deeper influence upon
+him. The result of all these tendencies was that the Platonic Academy at
+Florence deliberately chose for its object the reconciliation of the
+spirit of antiquity with that of Christianity. It was a remarkable oasis
+in the humanism of the period.[1128]
+
+This humanism was in fact pagan, and became more and more so as its
+sphere widened in the fifteenth century. Its representatives, whom we
+have already described as the advanced guard of an unbridled
+individualism, display as a rule such a character that even their
+religion, which is sometimes professed very definitely, becomes a matter
+of indifference to us. They easily got the name of atheists, if they
+showed themselves indifferent to religion, and spoke freely against the
+Church; but not one of them ever professed, or dared to profess, a
+formal, philosophical atheism.[1129] If they sought for any leading
+principle, it must have been a kind of superficial rationalism--a
+careless inference from the many and contradictory opinions of antiquity
+with which they busied themselves, and from the discredit into which the
+Church and her doctrines had fallen. This was the sort of reasoning
+which was near bringing Galeottus Martius[1130] to the stake, had not
+his former pupil, Pope Sixtus IV., perhaps at the request of Lorenzo
+de’Medici, saved him from the hands of the Inquisition. Galeotto had
+ventured to write that the man who walked uprightly, and acted according
+to the natural law born within him, would go to heaven, whatever nation
+he belonged to.
+
+Let us take, by way of example, the religious attitude of one of the
+smaller men in the great army. Codrus Urceus[1131] was first the tutor
+of the last Ordelaffo, Prince of Forlì, and afterwards for many years
+professor at Bologna. Against the Church and the monks his language is
+as abusive as that of the rest. His tone in general is reckless to the
+last degree, and he constantly introduces himself in all his local
+history and gossip. But he knows how to speak to edification of the true
+God-Man, Jesus Christ, and to commend himself by letter to the prayers
+of a saintly priest.[1132] On one occasion, after enumerating the
+follies of the pagan religions, he thus goes on: ‘Our theologians, too,
+fight and quarrel “de lana caprina,” about the Immaculate Conception,
+Antichrist, Sacraments, Predestination, and other things, which were
+better let alone than talked of publicly.’ Once, when he was not at
+home, his room and manuscripts were burnt. When he heard the news he
+stood opposite a figure of the Madonna in the street, and cried to it:
+‘Listen to what I tell you; I am not mad, I am saying what I mean. If I
+ever call upon you in the hour of my death, you need not hear me or take
+me among your own, for I will go and spend eternity with the
+devil.’[1133] After which speech he found it desirable to spend six
+months in retirement at the house of a wood-cutter. With all this, he
+was so superstitious that prodigies and omens gave him incessant
+frights, leaving him no belief to spare for the immortality of the soul.
+When his hearers questioned him on the matter, he answered that no one
+knew what became of a man, of his soul or his body, after death, and the
+talk about another life was only fit to frighten old women. But when he
+came to die, he commended in his will his soul or his spirit[1134] to
+Almighty God, exhorted his weeping pupils to fear the Lord, and
+especially to believe in immortality and future retribution, and
+received the Sacrament with much fervour. We have no guarantee that more
+famous men in the same calling, however significant their opinions may
+be, were in practical life any more consistent. It is probable that most
+of them wavered inwardly between incredulity and a remnant of the faith
+in which they were brought up, and outwardly held for prudential reasons
+to the Church.
+
+Through the connexion of rationalism with the newly born science of
+historical investigation, some timid attempts at biblical criticism may
+here and there have been made. A saying of Pius II.[1135] has been
+recorded, which seems intended to prepare the way for such criticism:
+‘Even if Christianity were not confirmed by miracles, it ought still to
+be accepted on account of its morality.’ When Lorenzo Valla calls Moses
+and the Evangelists historians, he does not seek to diminish their
+dignity and reputation; but is nevertheless conscious that in these
+words lies as decided a contradiction to the traditional view taken by
+the Church, as in the denial that the Apostles’ Creed was the work of
+all the Apostles, or that the letter of Abgarus to Christ was
+genuine.[1136] The legends of the Church, in so far as they contained
+arbitrary versions of the biblical miracles, were freely
+ridiculed,[1137] and this reacted on the religious sense of the people.
+Where Judaising heretics are mentioned, we must understand chiefly those
+who denied the Divinity of Christ, which was probably the offence for
+which Giorgio da Novara was burnt at Bologna about the year 1500.[1138]
+But again at Bologna in the year 1497 the Dominican Inquisitor was
+forced to let the physician Gabrielle da Salò, who had powerful patrons,
+escape with a simple expression of penitence,[1139] although he was in
+the habit of maintaining that Christ was not God, but son of Joseph and
+Mary, and conceived in the usual way; that by his cunning he had
+deceived the world to its ruin; that he may have died on the cross on
+account of crimes which he had committed; that his religion would soon
+come to an end; that his body was not really contained in the sacrament,
+and that he performed his miracles, not through any divine power, but
+through the influence of the heavenly bodies. This latter statement is
+most characteristic of the time, Faith is gone, but magic still holds
+its ground.[1140]
+
+A worse fate befell a Canon of Bergamo, Zanino de Solcia, a few years
+earlier (1459), who had asserted that Christ did not suffer from love to
+man, but under the influence of the stars, and who advanced other
+curious scientific and moral ideas. He was forced to abjure his errors,
+and paid for them by perpetual imprisonment.[1141]
+
+With respect to the moral government of the world, the humanists seldom
+get beyond a cold and resigned consideration of the prevalent violence
+and misrule. In this mood the many works ‘On Fate,’ or whatever name
+they bear, are written. They tell of the turning of the wheel of
+Fortune, and of the instability of earthly, especially political,
+things. Providence is only brought in because the writers would still be
+ashamed of undisguised fatalism, of the avowal of their ignorance, or of
+useless complaints. Gioviano Pontano[1142] ingeniously illustrates the
+nature of that mysterious something which men call Fortune by a hundred
+incidents, most of which belonged to his own experience. The subject is
+treated more humorously by Æneas Sylvius, in the form of a vision seen
+in a dream.[1143] The aim of Poggio, on the other hand, in a work
+written in his old age,[1144] is to represent the world as a vale of
+tears, and to fix the happiness of various classes as low as possible.
+This tone became in future the prevalent one. Distinguished men drew up
+a debit and credit of the happiness and unhappiness of their lives, and
+generally found that the latter outweighed the former. The fate of Italy
+and the Italians, so far as it could be told in the year 1510, has been
+described with dignity and an almost elegiac pathos by Tristano
+Caracciolo.[1145] Applying this general tone of feeling to the
+humanists themselves, Pierio Valeriano afterwards composed his famous
+treatise (pp. 276-279). Some of these themes, such as the fortunes of
+Leo, were most suggestive. All the good that can be said of him
+politically has been briefly and admirably summed up by Francesco
+Vettori; the picture of Leo’s pleasures is given by Paolo Giovio and in
+the anonymous biography;[1146] and the shadows which attended his
+prosperity are drawn with inexorable truth by the same Pierio Valeriano.
+
+We cannot, on the other hand, read without a kind of awe how men
+sometimes boasted of their fortune in public inscriptions. Giovanni II.
+Bentivoglio, ruler of Bologna, ventured to carve in stone on the newly
+built tower by his palace, that his merit and his fortune had given him
+richly of all that could be desired[1147]--and this a few years before
+his expulsion. The ancients, when they spoke in this tone, had
+nevertheless a sense of the envy of the gods. In Italy it was probably
+the Condottieri (p. 22) who first ventured to boast so loudly of their
+fortune.
+
+But the way in which resuscitated antiquity affected religion most
+powerfully, was not through any doctrines or philosophical system, but
+through a general tendency which it fostered. The men, and in some
+respects the institutions of antiquity were preferred to those of the
+Middle Ages, and in the eager attempt to imitate and reproduce them,
+religion was left to take care of itself. All was absorbed in the
+admiration for historical greatness (part ii. chap. iii., and above,
+_passim_). To this the philologians added many special follies of their
+own, by which they became the mark for general attention. How far Paul
+II. was justified in calling his Abbreviators and their friends to
+account for their paganism, is certainly a matter of great doubt, as his
+biographer and chief victim, Platina, (pp. 231, 331) has shown a
+masterly skill in explaining his vindictiveness on other grounds, and
+especially in making him play a ludicrous figure. The charges of
+infidelity, paganism,[1148] denial of immortality, and so forth, were
+not made against the accused till the charge of high treason had broken
+down. Paul, indeed, if we are correctly informed about him, was by no
+means the man to judge of intellectual things. He knew little Latin, and
+spoke Italian at Consistories and in diplomatic negotiations. It was he
+who exhorted the Romans to teach their children nothing beyond reading
+and writing. His priestly narrowness of view reminds us of Savonarola
+(p. 476), with the difference that Paul might fairly have been told that
+he and his like were in great part to blame if culture made men hostile
+to religion. It cannot, nevertheless, be doubted that he felt a real
+anxiety about the pagan tendencies which surrounded him. And what, in
+truth, may not the humanists have allowed themselves at the court of the
+profligate pagan, Sigismondo Malatesta? How far these men, destitute for
+the most part of fixed principle, ventured to go, depended assuredly on
+the sort of influences they were exposed to. Nor could they treat of
+Christianity without paganising it (part iii. chap. x.). It is curious,
+for instance, to notice how far Gioviano Pontano carried this confusion.
+He speaks of a saint not only as ‘divus,’ but as ‘deus;’ the angels he
+holds to be identical with the genii of antiquity;[1149] and his notion
+of immortality reminds us of the old kingdom of the shades. This spirit
+occasionally appears in the most extravagant shapes. In 1526, when Siena
+was attacked by the exiled party,[1150] the worthy canon Tizio, who
+tells us the story himself, rose from his bed on the 22nd July, called
+to mind what is written in the third book of Macrobius,’[1151]
+celebrated mass, and then pronounced against the enemy the curse with
+which his author had supplied him, only altering ‘Tellus mater teque
+Juppiter obtestor’ into ‘Tellus teque Christe Deus obtestor.’ After he
+had done this for three days, the enemy retreated. On the one side,
+these things strike us an affair of mere style and fashion; on the
+other, as a symptom of religious decadence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITION.
+
+
+But in another way, and that dogmatically, antiquity exercised a
+perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of
+superstition. Some fragments of this had survived in Italy all through
+the Middle Ages, and the resuscitation of the whole was thereby made so
+much the more easy. The part played by the imagination in the process
+need not be dwelt upon. This only could have silenced the critical
+intellect of the Italians.
+
+The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds
+destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery. Others, like
+Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance,
+and if they nevertheless retained a sturdy faith, it was because they
+held that the higher destiny of man would be accomplished in the life to
+come. But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism
+got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the
+former as its consequence.
+
+The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of
+antiquity, or even of the Arabians. From the relations of the planets
+among themselves and to the signs of the zodiac, future events and the
+course of whole lives were inferred, and the most weighty decisions were
+taken in consequence. In many cases the line of action thus adopted at
+the suggestion of the stars may not have been more immoral than that
+which would otherwise have been followed. But too often the decision
+must have been made at the cost of honour and conscience. It is
+profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and
+enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its
+support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish
+to penetrate and determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side
+of astrology.
+
+At the beginning of the thirteenth century this superstition suddenly
+appeared in the foreground of Italian life. The Emperor Frederick II.
+always travelled with his astrologer Theodorus; and Ezzelino da
+Romano[1152] with a large, well-paid court of such people, among them
+the famous Guido Bonatto and the long-bearded Saracen, Paul of Bagdad.
+In all important undertakings they fixed for him the day and the hour,
+and the gigantic atrocities of which he was guilty may have been in part
+practical inferences from their prophecies. Soon all scruples about
+consulting the stars ceased. Not only princes, but free cities[1153] had
+their regular astrologers, and at the universities,[1154] from the
+fourteenth to the sixteenth century, professors of this pseudo-science
+were appointed, and lectured side by side with the astronomers. It was
+well known that Augustine and other Fathers of the Church had combated
+astrology, but their old-fashioned notions were dismissed with easy
+contempt.[1155] The Popes[1156] commonly made no secret of their
+star-gazing, though Pius II., who also despised magic, omens, and the
+interpretation of dreams, is an honourable exception.[1157] Julius II.,
+on the other hand, had the day for his coronation and the day for his
+return from Bologna calculated by the astrologers.[1158] Even Leo X.
+seems to have thought the flourishing condition of astrology a credit to
+his pontificate,[1159] and Paul III. never held a Consistory till the
+star-gazers had fixed the hour.[1160]
+
+It may fairly be assumed that the better natures did not allow their
+actions to be determined by the stars beyond a certain point, and that
+there was a limit where conscience and religion made them pause. In
+fact, not only did pious and excellent people share the delusion, but
+they actually came forward to profess it publicly. One of these was
+Maestro Pagolo of Florence,[1161] in whom we can detect the same desire
+to turn astrology to moral account which meets us in the late Roman
+Firmicus Maternus.[1162] His life was that of a saintly ascetic. He ate
+almost nothing, despised all temporal goods, and only collected books. A
+skilled physician, he only practised among his friends, and made it a
+condition of his treatment that they should confess their sins. He
+frequented the small but famous circle which assembled in the Monastery
+of the Angeli around Fra Ambrogio Camaldolese (p. 463). He also saw much
+of Cosimo the Elder, especially in his last years; for Cosimo accepted
+and used astrology, though probably only for objects of lesser
+importance. As a rule, however, Pagolo only interpreted the stars to his
+most confidential friends. But even without this severity of morals, the
+astrologers might be highly respected and show themselves everywhere.
+There were also far more of them in Italy than in other European
+countries, where they only appeared at the great courts, and there not
+always. All the great householders in Italy, when the fashion was once
+established, kept an astrologer, who, it must be added, was not always
+sure of his dinner.[1163] Through the literature of this science, which
+was widely diffused even before the invention of printing, a
+dilettantism also grew up which as far as possible followed in the steps
+of the masters. The worst class of astrologers were those who used the
+stars either as an aid or a cloak to magical arts.
+
+Yet apart from the latter, astrology is a miserable feature in the life
+of that time. What a figure do all these highly gifted, many-sided,
+original characters play, when the blind passion for knowing and
+determining the future dethrones their powerful will and resolution! Now
+and then, when the stars send them too cruel a message, they manage to
+brace themselves up, act for themselves, and say boldly: ‘Vir sapiens
+dominabitur astris’--the wise man is master of the stars,[1164] and then
+again relapse into the old delusion.
+
+In all the better families the horoscope of the children was drawn as a
+matter of course, and it sometimes happened that for half a lifetime men
+were haunted by the idle expectation of events which never occurred. The
+stars[1165] were questioned whenever a great man had to come to any
+important decision, and even consulted as to the hour at which any
+undertaking was to be begun. The journeys of princes, the reception of
+foreign ambassadors,[1166] the laying of the foundation-stone of public
+buildings, depended on the answer. A striking instance of the latter
+occurs in the life of the aforenamed Guido Bonatto, who by his personal
+activity and by his great systematic work on the subject[1167] deserves
+to be called the restorer of astrology in the thirteenth century. In
+order to put an end to the struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines at
+Forli, he persuaded the inhabitants to rebuild the city walls and to
+begin the works under a constellation indicated by himself. If then two
+men, one from each party, at the same moment put a stone into the
+foundation, there would henceforth and for ever be no more party
+divisions in Forli. A Guelph and a Ghibelline were selected for this
+office; the solemn moment arrived, each held the stone in his hands, the
+workmen stood ready with their implements, Bonatto gave the signal and
+the Ghibelline threw down his stone on to the foundation. But the Guelph
+hesitated, and at last refused to do anything at all, on the ground that
+Bonatto himself had the reputation of a Ghibelline and might be
+devising some mysterious mischief against the Guelphs. Upon which the
+astrologer addressed him: ‘God damn thee and the Guelph party, with your
+distrustful malice! This constellation will not appear above our city
+for 500 years to come.’ In fact God soon afterwards did destroy the
+Guelphs of Forli, but now, writes the chronicler about 1480, the two
+parties are thoroughly reconciled, and their very names are heard no
+longer.[1168]
+
+Nothing that depended upon the stars was more important than decisions
+in time of war. The same Bonatto procured for the great Ghibelline
+leader Guido da Montefeltro a series of victories, by telling him the
+propitious hour for marching.[1169] When Montefeltro was no longer
+accompanied by him[1170] he lost the courage to maintain his despotism,
+and entered a Minorite monastery, where he lived as a monk for many
+years till his death. In the war with Pisa in 1362, the Florentines
+commissioned their astrologer to fix the hour for the march,[1171] and
+almost came too late through suddenly receiving orders to take a
+circuitous route through the city. On former occasions they had marched
+out by the Via di Borgo S. Apostolo, and the campaign had been
+unsuccessful. It was clear that there was some bad omen connected with
+the exit through this street against Pisa, and consequently the army was
+now led out by the Porta Rossa. But as the tents stretched out there to
+dry had not been taken away, the flags--another bad omen--had to be
+lowered. The influence of astrology in war was confirmed by the fact
+that nearly all the Condottieri believed in it. Jacopo Caldora was
+cheerful in the most serious illness, knowing that he was fated to fall
+in battle, which in fact happened.[1172] Bartolommeo Alviano was
+convinced that his wounds in the head were as much a gift of the stars
+as his military command.[1173] Niccolò Orsini Pitigliano asked the
+physicist and astrologer Alessandro Benedetto[1174] to fix a favourable
+hour for the conclusion of his bargain with Venice (1495). When the
+Florentines on June 1, 1498, solemnly invested their new Condottiere
+Paolo Vitelli with his office, the Marshal’s staff which they handed
+him was, at his own wish, decorated with pictures of the
+constellations.[1175] There were nevertheless generals like Alphonso the
+Great of Naples who did not allow their march to be settled by the
+prophets.[1176]
+
+Sometimes it is not easy to make out whether in important political
+events the stars were questioned beforehand, or whether the astrologers
+were simply impelled afterwards by curiosity to find out the
+constellation which decided the result. When Giangaleazzo Visconti (p.
+12) by a master-stroke of policy took prisoners his uncle Bernabò, with
+the latter’s family (1385), we are told by a contemporary, that Jupiter,
+Saturn, and Mars stood in the house of the Twins,[1177] but we cannot
+say if the deed was resolved on in consequence. It is also probable that
+the advice of the astrologers was often determined by political
+calculation not less than by the course of the planets.[1178]
+
+All Europe, through the latter part of the Middle Ages, had allowed
+itself to be terrified by predictions of plagues, wars, floods, and
+earthquakes, and in this respect Italy was by no means behind other
+countries. The unlucky year 1494, which for ever opened the gates of
+Italy to the stranger, was undeniably ushered in by many prophecies of
+misfortune[1179]--only we cannot say whether such prophecies were not
+ready for each and every year.
+
+This mode of thought was extended with thorough consistency into regions
+where we should hardly expect to meet with it. If the whole outward and
+spiritual life of the individual is determined by the facts of his
+birth, the same law also governs groups of individuals and historical
+products--that is to say, nations and religions; and as the
+constellation of these things changes, so do the things themselves. The
+idea that each religion has its day, first came into Italian culture in
+connexion with these astrological beliefs, chiefly from Jewish and
+Arabian sources.[1180] The conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn brought
+forth, we are told,[1181] the faith of Israel; that of Jupiter and Mars,
+the Chaldean; with the Sun, the Egyptian; with Venus, the Mohammedan;
+with Mercury, the Christian; and the conjunction of Jupiter with the
+Moon will one day bring forth the religion of Antichrist. Checco
+d’Ascoli had already blasphemously calculated the nativity of Christ,
+and deduced from it his death upon the cross. For this he was burnt at
+the stake in 1327, at Florence.[1182] Doctrines of this sort ended by
+simply darkening men’s whole perceptions of spiritual things.
+
+So much more worthy then of recognition is the warfare which the clear
+Italian spirit waged against this army of delusions. Notwithstanding the
+great monumental glorification of astrology, as in the frescos in the
+Salone at Padua,[1183] and those in Borso’s summer palace (Schifanoja),
+at Ferrara, notwithstanding the shameless praises of even such a man as
+the elder Beroaldus,[1184] there was no want of thoughtful and
+independent minds to protest against it. Here, too, the way had been
+prepared by antiquity, but it was their own common sense and observation
+which taught them what to say. Petrarch’s attitude towards the
+astrologers, whom he knew by personal intercourse, is one of bitter
+contempt;[1185] and no one saw through their system of lies more clearly
+than he. The novels, from the time when they first began to appear--from
+the time of the ‘Cento novelle antiche,’ are almost always hostile to
+the astrologers.[1186] The Florentine chroniclers bravely keep
+themselves free from the delusions which, as part of historical
+tradition, they are compelled to record. Giovanni Villani says more than
+once,[1187] ‘No constellation can subjugate either the free will of man,
+or the counsels of God.’ Matteo Villani[1188] declares astrology to be a
+vice which the Florentines had inherited, along with other
+superstitions, from their pagan ancestors, the Romans. The question,
+however, did not remain one for mere literary discussion, but the
+parties for and against disputed publicly. After the terrible floods of
+1333, and again in 1345, astrologers and theologians discussed with
+great minuteness the influence of the stars, the will of God, and the
+justice of his punishments.[1189] These struggles never ceased
+throughout the whole time of the Renaissance,[1190] and we may conclude
+that the protestors were in earnest, since it was easier for them to
+recommend themselves to the great by defending, than by opposing
+astrology.
+
+In the circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent, among his most distinguished
+Platonists, opinions were divided on this question. That Marsilio Ficino
+defended astrology, and drew the horoscope of the children of the house,
+promising the little Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., that he would one day
+be Pope,[1191] as Giovio would have us believe, is an invention--but
+other academicians accepted astrology. Pico della Mirandola,[1192] on
+the other hand, made an epoch in the subject by his famous refutation.
+He detects in this belief the root of all impiety and immorality. If the
+astrologer, he maintains, believes in anything at all, he must worship
+not God, but the planets, from which all good and evil are derived. All
+other superstitions find a ready instrument in astrology, which serves
+as handmaid to geomancy, chiromancy, and magic of every kind. As to
+morality, he maintains that nothing can more foster evil than the
+opinion that heaven itself is the cause of it, in which case the faith
+in eternal happiness and punishment must also disappear. Pico even took
+the trouble to check off the astrologers inductively, and found that in
+the course of a month three-fourths of their weather prophecies turned
+out false. But his main achievement was to set forth, in the Fourth
+Book--a positive Christian doctrine of the freedom of the will and the
+government of the universe, which seems to have made a greater
+impression on the educated classes throughout Italy than all the
+revivalist preachers put together. The latter, in fact, often failed to
+reach these classes.
+
+The first result of his book was that the astrologers ceased to publish
+their doctrines,[1193] and those who had already printed them were more
+or less ashamed of what they had done. Gioviano Pontano, for example, in
+his book on Fate (p. 503), had recognised the science, and in a great
+work of his own,[1194] the several parts of which were dedicated to his
+highly-placed friends and fellow-believers, Aldo Manucci, P. Bembo, and
+Sandazaro, had expounded the whole theory of it in the style of the old
+Firmicus, ascribing to the stars the growth of every bodily and
+spiritual quality. He now in his dialogue ‘Ægidius,’ surrendered, if not
+astrology, at least certain astrologers, and sounded the praises of free
+will, by which man is enabled to know God.[1195] Astrology remained more
+or less in fashion, but seems not to have governed human life in the way
+it formerly had done. The art of painting, which in the fifteenth
+century had done its best to foster the delusion, now expressed the
+altered tone of thought. Raphael, in the cupola of the Cappella
+Chigi,[1196] represents the gods of the different planets and the starry
+firmament, watched, however, and guided by beautiful angel-figures, and
+receiving from above the blessing of the Eternal Father. There was also
+another cause which now began to tell against astrology in Italy. The
+Spaniards took no interest in it, not even the generals, and those who
+wished to gain their favour[1197] declared open war against the
+half-heretical, half-Mohammedan science. It is true that
+Guicciardini[1198] writes in the year 1529: ‘How happy are the
+astrologers, who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred lies,
+while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred
+truths.’ But the contempt for astrology did not necessarily lead to a
+return to the belief in Providence. It could as easily lead to an
+indefinite Fatalism.
+
+In this respect, as in others, Italy was unable to make its own way
+healthily through the ferment of the Renaissance, because the foreign
+invasion and the Counter-Reformation came upon it in the middle. Without
+such interfering causes its own strength would have enabled it
+thoroughly to get rid of these fantastic illusions. Those who hold that
+the onslaught of the strangers and the Catholic reactions were
+necessities for which the Italian people was itself solely responsible,
+will look on the spiritual bankruptcy which they produced as a just
+retribution. But it is a pity that the rest of Europe had indirectly to
+pay so large a part of the penalty.
+
+The beliefs in omens seems a much more innocent matter than astrology.
+The Middle Ages had everywhere inherited them in abundance from the
+various pagan religions; and Italy did not differ in this respect from
+other countries. What is characteristic of Italy is the support lent by
+humanism to the popular superstition. The pagan inheritance was here
+backed up by a pagan literary development.
+
+The popular superstition of the Italians rested largely on premonitions
+and inferences drawn from ominous occurrences,[1199] with which a good
+deal of magic, mostly of an innocent sort, was connected. There was,
+however, no lack of learned humanists who boldly ridiculed these
+delusions, and to whose attacks we partly owe the knowledge of them.
+Gioviano Pontano; the author of the great astrological work already
+mentioned (p. 280), enumerates with pity in his ‘Charon,’ a long string
+of Neapolitan superstitions--the grief of the women when a fowl or a
+goose caught the pip; the deep anxiety of the nobility if a hunting
+falcon did not come home, or if a horse sprained his foot; the magical
+formulæ of the Apulian peasants, recited on three Saturday evenings,
+when mad dogs were at large. The animal kingdom, as in antiquity, was
+regarded as specially significant in this respect, and the behaviour of
+the lions, leopards, and other beasts kept by the State (p. 293 sqq.)
+gave the people all the more food for reflection, because they had come
+to be considered as living symbols of the State. During the siege of
+Florence, in 1529, an eagle which had been shot at fled into the city,
+and the Signoria gave the bearer four ducats, because the omen was
+good.[1200] Certain times and places were favourable or unfavourable, or
+even decisive one way or the other, for certain actions. The
+Florentines, so Varchi tells us, held Saturday to be the fateful day on
+which all important events, good as well as bad, commonly happened.
+Their prejudice against marching out to war through a particular street
+has been already mentioned (p. 512). At Perugia one of the gates, the
+‘Porta eburnea,’ was thought lucky, and the Baglioni always went out to
+fight through it.[1201] Meteors and the appearance of the heavens were
+as significant in Italy as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, and the popular
+imagination saw warring armies in an unusual formation of clouds, and
+heard the clash of their collision high in the air.[1202] The
+superstition became a more serious matter when it attached itself to
+sacred things, when figures of the Virgin wept or moved the eyes,[1203]
+or when public calamities were associated with some alleged act of
+impiety, for which the people demanded expiation. In 1478, when
+Piacenza was visited with a violent and prolonged rainfall, it was said
+that there would be no dry weather till a certain usurer, who had been
+lately buried at San Francesco, had ceased to rest in consecrated earth.
+As the bishop was not obliging enough to have the corpse dug up, the
+young fellows of the town took it by force, dragged it round the streets
+amid frightful confusion, offered it to be insulted and maltreated by
+former creditors, and at last threw it into the Po.[1204] Even Politian
+accepted this point of view in speaking of Giacomo Pazzi, one of the
+chief of the conspiracy of 1478, in Florence, which is called after his
+name. When he was put to death, he devoted his soul to Satan with
+fearful words. Here, too, rain followed and threatened to ruin the
+harvest; here, too, a party of men, mostly peasants, dug up the body in
+the church, and immediately the clouds departed and the sun shone--‘so
+gracious was fortune to the opinion of the people,’ adds the great
+scholar.[1205] The corpse was first cast into unhallowed ground, the
+next day again dug up, and after a horrible procession through the city,
+thrown into the Arno.
+
+These facts and the like bear a popular character, and might have
+occurred in the tenth, just as well as in the sixteenth century. But now
+comes the literary influence of antiquity. We know positively that the
+humanists were peculiarly accessible to prodigies and auguries, and
+instances of this have been already quoted. If further evidence were
+needed, it would be found in Poggio. The same radical thinker who denied
+the rights of noble birth and the inequality of men (p. 361 sqq.), not
+only believed in all the mediæval stories of ghosts and devils (fol.
+167, 179), but also in prodigies after the ancient pattern, like those
+said to have occurred on the last visit of Eugenius IV. to
+Florence.[1206] ‘Near Como there was seen one evening 4,000 dogs, who
+took the road to Germany; these were followed by a great herd of cattle,
+and these by an army on foot and horseback, some with no heads and some
+with almost invisible heads, and then a gigantic horseman with another
+herd of cattle behind him.’ Poggio also believes in a battle of magpies
+and jackdaws (fol. 180). He even relates, perhaps without being aware of
+it, a well-preserved piece of ancient mythology. On the Dalmatian coast
+a Triton had appeared, bearded and horned, a genuine sea-satyr, ending
+in fins and a tail; he carried away women and children from the shore,
+till five stout-hearted washer-women killed him with sticks and
+stones.[1207] A wooden model of the monster, which was exhibited at
+Ferrara, makes the whole story credible to Poggio. Though there were no
+more oracles, and it was no longer possible to take counsel of the gods,
+yet it became again the fashion to open Virgil at hazard, and take the
+passage hit upon as an omen[1208] (‘Sortes Virgilianae’). Nor can the
+belief in dæmons current in the later period of antiquity have been
+without influence on the Renaissance. The work of Jamblichus or Abammon
+on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, which may have contributed to this
+result, was printed in a Latin translation at the end of the fifteenth
+century. The Platonic Academy at Florence was not free from these and
+other neo-platonic dreams of the Roman decadence. A few words must here
+be given to the belief in dæmons and to the magic which was connected
+with this belief.
+
+The popular faith in what is called the spirit-world was nearly the
+same in Italy as elsewhere in Europe.[1209] In Italy as elsewhere there
+were ghosts, that is, reappearances of deceased persons; and if the view
+taken of them differed in any respect from that which prevailed in the
+North, the difference betrayed itself only in the ancient name ‘ombra.’
+Nowadays if such a shade presents itself, a couple of masses are said
+for its repose. That the spirits of bad men appear in a dreadful shape,
+is a matter of course, but along with this we find the notion that the
+ghosts of the departed are universally malicious. The dead, says the
+priest in Bandello,[1210] kill the little children. It seems as if a
+certain shade was here thought of as separate from the soul, since the
+latter suffers in Purgatory, and when it appears, does nothing but wail
+and pray. To lay the ghost, the tomb was opened, the corpse pulled to
+pieces, the heart burned and the ashes scattered to the four
+winds.[1211] At other times what appears is not the ghost of a man, but
+of an event--of a past condition of things. So the neighbours explained
+the diabolical appearances in the old palace of the Visconti near San
+Giovanni in Conca, at Milan, since here it was that Bernabò Visconti had
+caused countless victims of his tyranny to be tortured and strangled,
+and no wonder if there were strange things to be seen.[1212] One evening
+a swarm of poor people with candles in their hands appeared to a
+dishonest guardian of the poor at Perugia, and danced round about him; a
+great figure spoke in threatening tones on their behalf--it was St.
+Alò, the patron saint of the poor-house.[1213] These modes of belief
+were so much a matter of course that the poets could make use of them as
+something which every reader would understand. The appearance of the
+slain Ludovico Pico under the walls of the besieged Mirandola is finely
+represented by Castiglione.[1214] It is true that poetry made the freest
+use of these conceptions when the poet himself had outgrown them.
+
+Italy, too, shared the belief in dæmons with the other nations of the
+Middle Ages. Men were convinced that God sometimes allowed bad spirits
+of every class to exercise a destructive influence on parts of the world
+and of human life. The only reservation made was that the man to whom
+the Evil One came as tempter, could use his free will to resist.[1215]
+In Italy the dæmonic influence, especially as shown in natural events,
+easily assumed a character of poetical greatness. In the night before
+the great inundation of the Val d’Arno in 1333, a pious hermit above
+Vallombrosa heard a diabolical tumult in his cell, crossed himself,
+stepped to the door, and saw a crowd of black and terrible knights
+gallop by in armour. When conjured to stand, one of them said: ‘We go to
+drown the city of Florence on account of its sins, if God will let
+us.’[1216] With this, the nearly contemporary vision at Venice (1340)
+may be compared, out of which a great master of the Venetian school,
+probably Giorgione, made the marvellous picture of a galley full of
+dæmons, which speeds with the swiftness of a bird over the stormy lagune
+to destroy the sinful island-city, till the three saints, who have
+stepped unobserved into a poor boatman’s skiff, exorcised the fiends and
+sent them and their vessel to the bottom of the waters.[1217]
+
+To this belief the illusion was now added that by means of magical arts
+it was possible to enter into relations with the evil ones, and use
+their help to further the purposes of greed, ambition, and sensuality.
+Many persons were probably accused of doing so before the time when it
+was actually attempted by many; but when the so-called magicians and
+witches began to be burned, the deliberate practice of the black art
+became more frequent. With the smoke of the fires in which the suspected
+victims were sacrificed, were spread the narcotic fumes by which numbers
+of ruined characters were drugged into magic; and with them many
+calculating impostors became associated.
+
+The primitive and popular form in which the superstition had probably
+lived on uninterruptedly from the time of the Romans,[1218] was the art
+of the witch (Strega). The witch, so long as she limited herself to mere
+divination,[1219] might be innocent enough, were it not that the
+transition from prophecy to active help could easily, though often
+imperceptibly, be a fatal downward step. She was credited in such a case
+not only with the power of exciting love or hatred between man and
+woman, but also with purely destructive and malignant arts, and was
+especially charged with the sickness of little children, even when the
+malady obviously came from the neglect and stupidity of the parents. It
+is still questionable how far she was supposed to act by mere magical
+ceremonies and formulæ, or by a conscious alliance with the fiends,
+apart from the poisons and drugs which she administered with a full
+knowledge of their effect.
+
+The more innocent form of the superstition, in which the mendicant friar
+could venture to appear as the competitor of the witch, is shown in the
+case of the witch of Gaeta whom we read of in Pontano.[1220] His
+traveller Suppatius reaches her dwelling while she is giving audience to
+a girl and a servant-maid, who come to her with a black hen, nine eggs
+laid on a Friday, a duck, and some white thread--for it is the third day
+since the new moon. They are then sent away, and bidden to come again at
+twilight. It is to be hoped that nothing worse than divination is
+intended. The mistress of the servant-maid is pregnant by a monk; the
+girl’s lover has proved untrue and has gone into a monastery. The witch
+complains: ‘Since my husband’s death I support myself in this way, and
+should make a good thing of it, since the Gaetan women have plenty of
+faith, were it not that the monks baulk me of my gains by explaining
+dreams, appeasing the anger of the saints for money, promising husbands
+to the girls, men-children to the pregnant women, offspring to the
+barren, and besides all this visiting the women at night when their
+husbands are away fishing, in accordance with the assignations made in
+day-time at church.’ Suppatius warns her against the envy of the
+monastery, but she has no fear, since the guardian of it is an old
+acquaintance of hers.[1221]
+
+But the superstition further gave rise to a worse sort of witches,
+namely those who deprived men of their health and life. In these cases
+the mischief, when not sufficiently accounted for by the evil eye and
+the like, was naturally attributed to the aid of powerful spirits. The
+punishment, as we have seen in the case of Finicella (p. 469), was the
+stake; and yet a compromise with fanaticism was sometimes practicable.
+According to the laws of Perugia, for example, a witch could settle the
+affair by paying down 400 pounds.[1222] The matter was not then treated
+with the seriousness and consistency of later times. In the territories
+of the Church, at Norcia (Nursia), the home of St. Benedict, in the
+upper Apennines, there was a perfect nest of witches and sorcerers, and
+no secret was made of it. It is spoken of in one of the most remarkable
+letters of Æneas Sylvius,[1223] belonging to his earlier period. He
+writes to his brother: ‘The bearer of this came to me to ask if I knew
+of a Mount of Venus in Italy, for in such a place magical arts were
+taught, and his master, a Saxon and a great astronomer,[1224] was
+anxious to learn them. I told him that I knew of a Porto Venere not far
+from Carrara, on the rocky coast of Liguria, where I spent three nights
+on the way to Basel; I also found that there was a mountain called Eryx
+in Sicily, which was dedicated to Venus, but I did not know whether
+magic was taught there. But it came into my mind while talking that in
+Umbria, in the old Duchy (Spoleto), near the town of Nursia, there is a
+cave beneath a steep rock, in which water flows. There, as I remember to
+have heard, are witches (striges), dæmons, and nightly shades, and he
+that has the courage can see and speak to ghosts (spiritus), and learn
+magical arts.[1225] I have not seen it, nor taken any trouble about it,
+for that which is learned with sin is better not learned at all.’ He
+nevertheless names his informant, and begs his brother to take the
+bearer of the letter to him, should he be still alive. Æneas goes far
+enough here in his politeness to a man of position, but personally he
+was not only freer from superstition than his contemporaries (pp. 481,
+508), but he also stood a test on the subject which not every educated
+man of our own day could endure. At the time of the Council of Basel,
+when he lay sick of the fever for seventy-five days at Milan, he could
+never be persuaded to listen to the magic doctors, though a man was
+brought to his bedside who a short time before had marvellously cured
+2,000 soldiers of fever in the camp of Piccinino. While still an
+invalid, Æneas rode over the mountains to Basel, and got well on the
+journey.[1226]
+
+We learn something more about the neighbourhood of Norcia through the
+necromancer who tried to get Benvenuto Cellini into his power. A new
+book of magic was to be consecrated,[1227] and the best place for the
+ceremony was among the mountains in that district. The master of the
+magician had once, it is true, done the same thing near the Abbey of
+Farfa, but had there found difficulties which did not present themselves
+at Norcia; further, the peasants in the latter neighbourhood were
+trustworthy people who had practice in the matter, and who could afford
+considerable help in case of need. The expedition did not take place,
+else Benvenuto would probably have been able to tell us something of the
+impostor’s assistants. The whole neighbourhood was then proverbial.
+Aretino says somewhere of an enchanted well, ‘there dwell the sisters of
+the sibyl of Norcia and the aunt of the Fata Morgana.’ And about the
+same time Trissino could still celebrate the place in his great
+epic[1228] with all the resources of poetry and allegory as the home of
+authentic prophecy.
+
+After the famous Bull of Innocent VIII. (1484),[1229] witchcraft and the
+persecution of witches grew into a great and revolting system. The chief
+representatives of this system of persecution were German Dominicans;
+and Germany and, curiously enough, those parts of Italy nearest Germany
+were the countries most afflicted by this plague. The bulls and
+injunctions of the Popes themselves[1230] refer, for example, to the
+Dominican Province of Lombardy, to Cremona, to the dioceses of Brescia
+and Bergamo. We learn from Sprenger’s famous theoretico-practical guide,
+the ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ that forty-one witches were burnt at Como in
+the first year after the publication of the bull; crowds of Italian
+women took refuge in the territory of the Archduke Sigismund, where they
+believed themselves to be still safe. Witchcraft ended by taking firm
+root in a few unlucky Alpine valleys, especially in the Val
+Camonica;[1231] the system of persecution had succeeded in permanently
+infecting with the delusion those populations which were in any way
+predisposed for it. This essentially German form of witchcraft is what
+we should think of when reading the stories and novels of Milan or
+Bologna.[1232] That it did not make further progress in Italy is
+probably due to the fact that elsewhere a highly developed ‘Stregheria’
+was already in existence, resting on a different set of ideas. The
+Italian witch practised a trade, and needed for it money and, above all,
+sense. We find nothing about her of the hysterical dreams of the
+Northern witch, of marvellous journeys through the air, of Incubus and
+Succubus; the business of the ‘Strega’ was to provide for other people’s
+pleasure. If she was credited with the power of assuming different
+shapes, or of transporting herself suddenly to distant places, she was
+so far content to accept this reputation, as her influence was thereby
+increased; on the other hand, it was perilous for her when the fear of
+her malice and vengeance, and especially of her power for enchanting
+children, cattle, and crops, became general. Inquisitors and magistrates
+were then thoroughly in accord with popular wishes if they burnt her.
+
+By far the most important field for the activity of the ‘Strega’ lay, as
+has been said, in love-affairs, and included the stirring up of love and
+of hatred, the producing of abortion, the pretended murder of the
+unfaithful man or woman by magical arts, and even the manufacture of
+poisons.[1233] Owing to the unwillingness of many persons to have to do
+with these women, a class of occasional practitioners arose who secretly
+learned from them some one or other of their arts, and then used this
+knowledge on their own account. The Roman prostitutes, for example,
+tried to enhance their personal attractions by charms of another
+description in the style of Horatian Canidia. Aretino[1234] may not only
+have known, but have also told the truth about them in this particular.
+He gives a list of the loathsome messes which were to be found in their
+boxes--hair, skulls, ribs, teeth, dead men’s eyes, human skin, the
+navels of little children, the soles of shoes and pieces of clothing
+from tombs. They even went themselves to the graveyard and fetched bits
+of rotten flesh, which they slily gave their lovers to eat--with more
+that is still worse. Pieces of the hair and nails of the lover were
+boiled in oil stolen from the ever-burning lamps in the church. The most
+innocuous of their charms was to make a heart of glowing ashes, and then
+to pierce it while singing--
+
+    Prima che’l fuoco spenghi,
+    Fa ch’a mia porta venghi;
+    Tal ti punga mio amore
+    Quale io fo questo cuore.
+
+There were other charms practised by moonshine, with drawings on the
+ground, and figures of wax or bronze, which doubtless represented the
+lover, and were treated according to circumstances.
+
+These things were so customary that a woman who, without youth and
+beauty, nevertheless exercised a powerful charm on men, naturally became
+suspected of witchcraft. The mother of Sanga,[1235] secretary to Clement
+VII., poisoned her son’s mistress, who was a woman of this kind.
+Unfortunately the son died too, as well as a party of friends who had
+eaten of the poisoned salad.
+
+Next come, not as helper, but as competitor to the witch, the magician
+or enchanter--‘incantatore’--who was still more familiar with the most
+perilous business of the craft. Sometimes he was as much or more of an
+astrologer than of a magician; he probably often gave himself out as an
+astrologer in order not to be prosecuted as a magician, and a certain
+astrology was essential in order to find out the favourable hour for a
+magical process.[1236] But since many spirits are good[1237] or
+indifferent, the magician could sometimes maintain a very tolerable
+reputation, and Sixtus IV. in the year 1474, had to proceed expressly
+against some Bolognese Carmelites,[1238] who asserted in the pulpit that
+there was no harm in seeking information from the dæmons. Very many
+people believed in the possibility of the thing itself; an indirect
+proof of this lies in the fact that the most pious men believed that by
+prayer they could obtain visions of good spirits. Savonarola’s mind was
+filled with these things; the Florentine Platonists speak of a mystic
+union with God; and Marcellus Palingenius (p. 264), gives us to
+understand clearly enough that he had to do with consecrated
+spirits.[1239] The same writer is convinced of the existence of a whole
+hierarchy of bad dæmons, who have their seat from the moon downwards,
+and are ever on the watch to do some mischief to nature and human
+life.[1240] He even tells of his own personal acquaintance with some of
+them, and as the scope of the present work does not allow of a
+systematic exposition of the then prevalent belief in spirits, the
+narrative of Palingenius may be given as one instance out of many.[1241]
+
+At S. Silvestro, on Soracte, he had been receiving instruction from a
+pious hermit on the nothingness of earthly things and the worthlessness
+of human life; and when the night drew near he set out on his way back
+to Rome. On the road, in the full light of the moon, he was joined by
+three men, one of whom called him by name, and asked him whence he came.
+Palingenius made answer: ‘From the wise man on the mountain.’ ‘O fool,’
+replied the stranger, ‘dost thou in truth believe that anyone on earth
+is wise? Only higher beings (Divi) have wisdom, and such are we three,
+although we wear the shapes of men. I am named Saracil, and these two
+Sathiel and Jana. Our kingdom lies near the moon, where dwell that
+multitude of intermediate beings who have sway over earth and sea.’
+Palingenius then asked, not without an inward tremor, what they were
+going to do at Rome. The answer was: ‘One of our comrades, Ammon, is
+kept in servitude by the magic arts of a youth from Narni, one of the
+attendants of Cardinal Orsini; for mark it, O men, there is proof of
+your own immortality therein, that you can control one of us; I myself,
+shut up in crystal, was once forced to serve a German, till a bearded
+monk set me free. This is the service which we wish to render at Rome to
+our friend, and we shall also take the opportunity of sending one or two
+distinguished Romans to the nether world.’ At these words a light breeze
+arose, and Sathiel said: ‘Listen, our messenger is coming back from
+Rome, and this wind announces him.’ And then another being appeared,
+whom they greeted joyfully and then asked about Rome. His utterances are
+strongly anti-papal: Clement VII. was again allied with the Spaniards
+and hoped to root out Luther’s doctrines, not with arguments, but by the
+Spanish sword. This is wholly in the interest of the dæmons, whom the
+impending bloodshed would enable to carry away the souls of thousands
+into hell. At the close of this conversation, in which Rome with all its
+guilt is represented as wholly given over to the Evil One, the
+apparitions vanish, and leave the poet sorrowfully to pursue his way
+alone.[1242]
+
+Those who would form a conception of the extent of the belief in those
+relations to the dæmons which could be openly avowed in spite of the
+penalties attaching to witchcraft, may be referred to the much read work
+of Agrippa of Nettesheim on ‘Secret Philosophy.’ He seems originally to
+have written it before he was in Italy,[1243] but in the dedication to
+Trithemius he mentions Italian authorities among others, if only by way
+of disparagement. In the case of equivocal persons like Agrippa, or of
+the knaves and fools into whom the majority of the rest may be divided,
+there is little that is interesting in the system they profess, with its
+formulæ, fumigations, ointments, and the rest of it.[1244] But this
+system was filled with quotations from the superstitions of antiquity,
+the influence of which on the life and the passions of Italians is at
+times most remarkable and fruitful. We might think that a great mind
+must be thoroughly ruined, before it surrendered itself to such
+influences; but the violence of hope and desire led even vigorous and
+original men of all classes to have recourse to the magician, and the
+belief that the thing was feasible at all weakened to some extent the
+faith, even of those who kept at a distance, in the moral order of the
+world. At the cost of a little money and danger it seemed possible to
+defy with impunity the universal reason and morality of mankind, and to
+spare oneself the intermediate steps which otherwise lie between a man
+and his lawful or unlawful ends.
+
+Let us here glance for a moment at an older and now decaying form of
+superstition. From the darkest period of the Middle Ages, or even from
+the days of antiquity, many cities of Italy had kept the remembrance of
+the connexion of their fate with certain buildings, statues, or other
+material objects. The ancients had left records of consecrating priests
+or Telestæ, who were present at the solemn foundation of cities, and
+magically guaranteed their prosperity by erecting certain monuments or
+by burying certain objects (Telesmata). Traditions of this sort were
+more likely than anything else to live on in the form of popular,
+unwritten legend; but in the course of centuries the priest naturally
+became transformed into the magician, since the religious side of his
+function was no longer understood. In some of his Virgilian miracles at
+Naples,[1245] the ancient remembrance of one of these Telestæ is clearly
+preserved, his name being in course of time supplanted by that of
+Virgil. The enclosing of the mysterious picture of the city in a vessel
+is neither more nor less than a genuine, ancient Telesma; and Virgil the
+founder of Naples is only the officiating priest, who took part in the
+ceremony, presented in another dress. The popular imagination went on
+working at these themes, till Virgil became also responsible for the
+brazen horse, for the heads at the Nolan gate, for the brazen fly over
+another gate, and even for the Grotto of Posilippo--all of them things
+which in one respect or other served to put a magical constraint upon
+fate, and the first two of which seemed to determine the whole fortune
+of the city. Mediæval Rome also preserved confused recollections of the
+same kind. At the church of S. Ambrogio at Milan, there was an ancient
+marble Hercules; so long, it was said, as this stood in its place, so
+long would the Empire last. That of the Germans is probably meant, as
+the coronation of their Emperors at Milan took place in this
+church.[1246] The Florentines[1247] were convinced that the temple of
+Mars, afterwards transformed into the Baptistry, would stand to the end
+of time, according to the constellation under which it had been built;
+they had, as Christians, removed from it the marble equestrian statue;
+but since the destruction of the latter would have brought some great
+calamity on the city--also according to a constellation--they set it
+upon a tower by the Arno. When Totila conquered Florence, the statue
+fell into the river, and was not fished out again till Charles the Great
+refounded the city. It was then placed on a pillar at the entrance to
+the Ponte Vecchio, and on this spot Buondelmente was slain in 1215. The
+origin of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline was thus
+associated with the dreaded idol. During the inundation of 1333 the
+statue vanished forever.[1248]
+
+But the same Telesma reappears elsewhere. Guido Bonatto, already
+mentioned, was not satisfied, at the refounding of the walls of Forli,
+with requiring certain symbolic acts of reconciliation from the two
+parties (p. 511). By burying a bronze or stone equestrian statue,[1249]
+which he had produced by astro logical or magical arts, he believed
+that he had defended the city from ruin, and even from capture and
+plunder. When Cardinal Albornoz (p. 102) was governor of Romagna some
+sixty years later, the statue was accidentally dug up and then shown to
+the people, probably by the order of the Cardinal, that it might be
+known by what means the cruel Montefeltro had defended himself against
+the Roman Church. And again, half a century later, when an attempt to
+surprise Forli had failed, men began to talk afresh of the virtue of the
+statue, which had perhaps been saved and reburied. It was the last time
+that they could do so; for a year later Forli was really taken. The
+foundation of buildings all through the fifteenth century was associated
+not only with astrology (p. 511) but also with magic. The large number
+of gold and silver medals which Paul II. buried in the foundations of
+his buildings[1250] was noticed, and Platina was by no means displeased
+to recognise an old pagan Telesma in the fact. Neither Paul nor his
+biographer were in any way conscious of the mediæval religious
+significance of such an offering.[1251]
+
+But this official magic, which in many cases only rests on hearsay, was
+comparatively unimportant by the side of the secret arts practised for
+personal ends.
+
+The form which these most often took in daily life is shown by Ariosto
+in his comedy of the necromancers.[1252] His hero is one of the many
+Jewish exiles from Spain, although he also gives himself out for a
+Greek, an Egyptian, and an African, and is constantly changing his name
+and costume. He pretends that his incantations can darken the day and
+lighten the darkness, that he can move the earth, make himself
+invisible, and change men into beasts; but these vaunts are only an
+advertisement. His true object is to make his account out of unhappy and
+troubled marriages, and the traces which he leaves behind him in his
+course are like the slime of a snail, or often like the ruin wrought by
+a hail-storm. To attain his ends he can persuade people that the box in
+which a lover is hidden is full of ghosts, or that he can make a corpse
+talk. It is at all events a good sign that poets and novelists could
+reckon on popular applause in holding up this class of men to ridicule.
+Bandello not only treats the sorcery of a Lombard monk as a miserable,
+and in its consequences terrible, piece of knavery,[1253] but he also
+describes with unaffected indignation[1254] the disasters which never
+cease to pursue the credulous fool. ‘A man hopes with “Solomon’s Key”
+and other magical books to find the treasures hidden in the bosom of the
+earth, to force his lady to do his will, to find out the secrets of
+princes, and to transport himself in the twinkling of an eye from Milan
+to Rome. The more often he is deceived, the more steadfastly he
+believes.... Do you remember the time, Signor Carlo, when a friend of
+ours, in order to win the favour of his beloved, filled his room with
+skulls and bones like a churchyard?’ The most loathsome tasks were
+prescribed--to draw three teeth from a corpse or a nail from its finger,
+and the like; and while the hocus-pocus of the incantation was going on,
+the unhappy participants sometimes died of terror.
+
+Benvenuto Cellini did not die during the well-known incantation (1532)
+in the Coliseum at Rome,[1255] although both he and his companions
+witnessed no ordinary horrors; the Sicilian priest, who probably
+expected to find him a useful coadjutor in the future, paid him the
+compliment as they went home of saying that he had never met a man of so
+sturdy a courage. Every reader will make his own reflections on the
+proceedings themselves. The narcotic fumes and the fact that the
+imaginations of the spectators were predisposed for all possible
+terrors, are the chief points to be noticed, and explain why the lad who
+formed one of the party, and on whom they made most impression, saw
+much more than the others. But it may be inferred that Benvenuto himself
+was the one whom it was wished to impress, since the dangerous beginning
+of the incantation can have had no other aim than to arouse curiosity.
+For Benvenuto had to think before the fair Angelica occurred to him; and
+the magician told him afterwards that love-making was folly compared
+with the finding of treasures. Further, it must not be forgotten that it
+flattered his vanity to be able to say, ‘The dæmons have kept their
+word, and Angelica came into my hands, as they promised, just a month
+later’ (cap. 68). Even on the supposition that Benvenuto gradually lied
+himself into believing the whole story, it would still be permanently
+valuable as evidence of the mode of thought then prevalent.
+
+As a rule, however, the Italian artists, even ‘the odd, capricious, and
+eccentric’ among them, had little to do with magic. One of them, in his
+anatomical studies, may have cut himself a jacket out of the skin of a
+corpse, but at the advice of his confessor he put it again into the
+grave.[1256] Indeed the frequent study of anatomy probably did more than
+anything else to destroy the belief in the magical influence of various
+parts of the body, while at the same time the incessant observation and
+representation of the human form made the artist familiar with a magic
+of a wholly different sort.
+
+In general, notwithstanding the instances which have been quoted, magic
+seems to have been markedly on the decline at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century,--that is to say, at a time when it first began to
+flourish vigorously out of Italy; and thus the tours of Italian
+sorcerers and astrologers in the North seem not to have begun till their
+credit at home was thoroughly impaired. In the fourteenth century it was
+thought necessary carefully to watch the lake on Mount Pilatus, near
+Scariotto, to hinder the magicians from there consecrating their
+books.[1257] In the fifteenth century we find, for example, that the
+offer was made to produce a storm of rain, in order to frighten away a
+besieged army; and even then the commander of the besieged town--Nicolò
+Vitelli in Città di Castello--had the good sense to dismiss the
+sorcerers as godless persons.[1258] In the sixteenth century no more
+instances of this official kind appear, although in private life the
+magicians were still active. To this time belongs the classic figure of
+German sorcery, Dr. Johann Faust; the Italian ideal, on the other hand,
+Guido Bonatto, dates back to the thirteenth century.
+
+It must nevertheless be added that the decrease of the belief in magic
+was not necessarily accompanied by an increase of the belief in a moral
+order, but that in many cases, like the decaying faith in astrology, the
+delusion left behind it nothing but a stupid fatalism.
+
+One or two minor forms of this superstition, pyromancy, chiromancy[1259]
+and others, which obtained some credit as the belief in sorcery and
+astrology were declining, may be here passed over, and even the
+pseudo-science of physiognomy has by no means the interest which the
+name might lead us to expect. For it did not appear as the sister and
+ally of art and psychology, but as a new form of fatalistic
+superstition, and, what it may have been among the Arabians, as the
+rival of astrology. The author of a physiognomical treatise, Bartolommeo
+Cocle, who styled himself a ‘metoposcopist,’[1260] and whose science,
+according to Giovio, seemed like one of the most respectable of the free
+arts, was not content with the prophecies which he made to the many
+clever people who daily consulted him, but wrote also a most serious
+‘catalogue of such whom great dangers to life were awaiting.’ Giovio,
+although grown old in the free thought of Rome--‘in hac luce romana’--is
+of opinion that the predictions contained therein had only too much
+truth in them.[1261] We learn from the same source how the people aimed
+at in these and similar prophecies took vengeance on the seer. Giovanni
+Bentivoglio caused Lucas Gauricus to be five times swung to and fro
+against the wall, on a rope hanging from a lofty winding staircase,
+because Lucas had foretold to him the loss of his authority.[1262] Ermes
+Bentivoglio sent an assassin after Cocle, because the unlucky
+metoposcopist had unwillingly prophesied to him that he would die an
+exile in battle. The murderer seems to have derided the dying man in his
+last moments, saying that the prophet had foretold to him that he would
+shortly commit an infamous murder. The reviver of chiromancy, Antioco
+Tiberto of Cesena,[1263] came by an equally miserable end at the hands
+of Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, to whom he had prophesied the worst
+that a tyrant can imagine, namely, death in exile and in the most
+grievous poverty. Tiberto was a man of intelligence, who was supposed to
+give his answers less according to any methodical chiromancy than by
+means of his shrewd knowledge of mankind; and his high culture won for
+him the respect of those scholars who thought little of his
+divination.[1264]
+
+Alchemy, in conclusion, which is not mentioned in antiquity till quite
+late under Diocletian, played only a very subordinate part at the best
+period of the Renaissance.[1265] Italy went through the disease earlier,
+when Petrarch in the fourteenth century confessed, in his polemic
+against it, that gold-making was a general practice.[1266] Since then
+that particular kind of faith, devotion, and isolation which the
+practice of alchemy required became more and more rare in Italy, just
+when Italian and other adepts began to make their full profit out of the
+great lords in the North.[1267] Under Leo X. the few Italians who busied
+themselves with it were called ‘ingenia curiosa,’[1268] and Aurelio
+Augurelli, who dedicated to Leo X., the great despiser of gold, his
+didactic poem on the making of the metal, is said to have received in
+return a beautiful but empty purse. The mystic science which besides
+gold sought for the omnipotent philosopher’s stone, is a late northern
+growth, which had its rise in the theories of Paracelsus and others.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+GENERAL DISINTEGRATION OF BELIEF.
+
+
+With these superstitions, as with ancient modes of thought generally,
+the decline in the belief of immortality stands in the closest
+connection.[1269] This question has the widest and deepest relations
+with the whole development of the modern spirit.
+
+One great source of doubt in immortality was the inward wish to be under
+no obligations to the hated Church. We have seen that the Church branded
+those who thus felt as Epicureans (p. 496 sqq.). In the hour of death
+many doubtless called for the sacraments, but multitudes during their
+whole lives, and especially during their most vigorous years, lived and
+acted on the negative supposition. That unbelief on this particular
+point must often have led to a general scepticism, is evident of itself,
+and is attested by abundant historical proof. These are the men of whom
+Ariosto says: ‘Their faith goes no higher than the roof.’[1270] In
+Italy, and especially in Florence, it was possible to live as an open
+and notorious unbeliever, if a man only refrained from direct acts of
+hostility against the Church.[1271] The confessor, for instance, who was
+sent to prepare a political offender for death, began by inquiring
+whether the prisoner was a believer, ‘for there was a false report that
+he had no belief at all.’[1272]
+
+The unhappy transgressor here referred to--the same Pierpaolo Boscoli
+who has been already mentioned (p. 59)--who in 1513 took part in an
+attempt against the newly restored family of the Medici, is a faithful
+mirror of the religious confusion then prevalent. Beginning as a
+partisan of Savonarola, he became afterwards possessed with an
+enthusiasm for the ancient ideals of liberty, and for paganism in
+general; but when he was in prison his early friends regained the
+control of his mind, and secured for him what they considered a pious
+ending. The tender witness and narrator of his last hours is one of the
+artistic family of the Delia Robbia, the learned philologist Luca. ‘Ah,’
+sighs Boscoli, ‘get Brutus out of my head for me, that I may go my way
+as a Christian.’ ‘If you will,’ answers Luca, ‘the thing is not
+difficult; for you know that these deeds of the Romans are not handed
+down to us as they were, but idealised (con arte accresciute).’ The
+penitent now forces his understanding to believe, and bewails his
+inability to believe voluntarily. If he could only live for a month with
+pious monks, he would truly become spiritually minded. It comes out that
+these partisans of Savonarola knew their Bible very imperfectly; Boscoli
+can only say the Paternoster and Avemaria, and earnestly begs Luca to
+exhort his friends to study the sacred writings, for only what a man has
+learned in life does he possess in death. Luca then reads and explains
+to him the story of the Passion according to the Gospel of St. Matthew;
+the poor listener, strange to say, can perceive clearly the Godhead of
+Christ, but is perplexed at his manhood; he wishes to get as firm a hold
+of it ‘as if Christ came to meet him out of a wood.’ His friend
+thereupon exhorts him to be humble, since this was only a doubt sent him
+by the Devil. Soon after it occurs to the penitent that he has not
+fulfilled a vow made in his youth to go on pilgrimage to the Impruneta;
+his friend promises to do it in his stead. Meantime the confessor--a
+monk, as was desired, from Savonarola’s monastery--arrives, and after
+giving him the explanation quoted above of the opinion of St. Thomas
+Aquinas on tyrannicide, exhorts him to bear death manfully. Boscoli
+makes answer: ‘Father, waste no time on this; the philosophers have
+taught it me already; help me to bear death out of love to Christ.’ What
+follows--the communion, the leave-taking and the execution--is very
+touchingly described, one point deserves special mention. When Boscoli
+laid his head on the block, he begged the executioner to delay the
+stroke for a moment: ‘During the whole time since the announcement of
+the sentence he had been striving after a close union with God, without
+attaining it as he wished, and now in this supreme moment he thought
+that by a strong effort he could give himself wholly to God.’ It is
+clearly some half-understood expression of Savonarola which was
+troubling him.
+
+If we had more confessions of this character the spiritual picture of
+the time would be the richer by many important features which no poem or
+treatise has preserved for us. We should see more clearly how strong the
+inborn religious instinct was, how subjective and how variable the
+relation of the individual to religion, and what powerful enemies and
+competitors religion had. That men whose inward condition is of this
+nature, are not the men to found a new church, is evident; but the
+history of the Western spirit would be imperfect without a view of that
+fermenting period among the Italians, while other nations, who have had
+no share in the evolution of thought, may be passed over without loss.
+But we must return to the question of immortality.
+
+If unbelief in this respect made such progress among the more highly
+cultivated natures, the reason lay partly in the fact that the great
+earthly task of discovering the world and representing it in word and
+form, absorbed most of the higher spiritual faculties. We have already
+spoken (p. 490) of the inevitable worldliness of the Renaissance. But
+this investigation and this art were necessarily accompanied by a
+general spirit of doubt and inquiry. If this spirit shows itself but
+little in literature, if we find, for example, only isolated instances
+of the beginnings of biblical criticism (p. 465), we are not therefore
+to infer that it had no existence. The sound of it was only
+over-powered by the need of representation and creation in all
+departments--that is, by the artistic instinct; and it was further
+checked, whenever it tried to express itself theoretically, by the
+already existing despotism of the Church. This spirit of doubt must, for
+reasons too obvious to need discussion, have inevitably and chiefly
+busied itself with the question of the state of man after death.
+
+And here came in the influence of antiquity, and worked in a twofold
+fashion on the argument. In the first place men set themselves to master
+the psychology of the ancients, and tortured the letter of Aristotle for
+a decisive answer. In one of the Lucianic dialogues of the time[1273]
+Charon tells Mercury how he questioned Aristotle on his belief in
+immortality, when the philosopher crossed in the Stygian boat; but the
+prudent sage, although dead in the body and nevertheless living on,
+declined to compromise himself by a definite answer--and centuries later
+how was it likely to fare with the interpretation of his writings? All
+the more eagerly did men dispute about his opinion and that of others on
+the true nature of the soul, its origin, its pre-existence, its unity in
+all men, its absolute eternity, even its transformations; and there were
+men who treated of these things in the pulpit.[1274] The dispute was
+warmly carried on even in the fifteenth century; some proved that
+Aristotle taught the doctrine of an immortal soul;[1275] others
+complained of the hardness of men’s hearts, who would not believe that
+there was a soul at all, till they saw it sitting down on a chair before
+them;[1276] Filelfo in his funeral oration on Francesco Sforza brings
+forward a long list of opinions of ancient and even of Arabian
+philosophers in favour of immortality, and closes the mixture, which
+covers a folio page and a half of print,[1277] with the words, ‘Besides
+all this we have the Old and New Testaments, which are above all truth.’
+Then came the Florentine Platonists with their master’s doctrine of the
+soul, supplemented at times, as in the case of Pico, by Christian
+teaching. But the opposite opinion prevailed in the instructed world. At
+the beginning of the sixteenth century the stumbling-block which it put
+in the way of the Church was so serious that Leo X. set forth a
+Constitution[1278] at the Lateran Council in 1513, in defence of the
+immortality and individuality of the soul, the latter against those who
+asserted that there was but one soul in all men. A few years later
+appeared the work of Pomponazzo, in which the impossibility of a
+philosophical proof of immortality is maintained; and the contest was
+now waged incessantly with replies and apologies, till it was silenced
+by the Catholic reaction. The pre-existence of the soul in God,
+conceived more or less in accordance with Plato’s theory of ideas, long
+remained a common belief, and proved of service even to the poets.[1279]
+The consequences which followed from it as to the mode of the soul’s
+continued existence after death, were not more closely considered.
+
+There was a second way in which the influence of antiquity made itself
+felt, chiefly by means of that remarkable fragment of the sixth book of
+Cicero’s ‘Republic’ known by the name of Scipio’s Dream. Without the
+commentary of Macrobius it would probably have perished like the rest of
+the second part of the work; it was now diffused in countless manuscript
+copies,[1280] and, after the discovery of typography, in a printed form,
+and edited afresh by various commentators. It is the description of a
+transfigured hereafter for great men, pervaded by the harmony of the
+spheres. This pagan heaven, for which many other testimonies were
+gradually extracted from the writings of the ancients, came step by step
+to supplant the Christian heaven in proportion as the ideal of fame and
+historical greatness threw into the shade the ideal of the Christian
+life, without, nevertheless, the public feeling being thereby offended
+as it was by the doctrine of personal annihilation after death. Even
+Petrarch founds his hope chiefly on this Dream of Scipio, on the
+declarations found in other Ciceronian works, and on Plato’s ‘Phædo,’
+without making any mention of the Bible.[1281] ‘Why,’ he asks elsewhere,
+‘should not I as a Catholic share a hope which was demonstrably
+cherished by the heathen?’ Soon afterwards Coluccio Salutati wrote his
+‘Labours of Hercules’ (still existing in manuscript), in which it is
+proved at the end that the valorous man, who has well endured the great
+labours of earthly life, is justly entitled to a dwelling among the
+stars.[1282] If Dante still firmly maintained that the great pagans,
+whom he would have gladly welcomed in Paradise, nevertheless must not
+come beyond the Limbo at the entrance to Hell,[1283] the poetry of a
+later time accepted joyfully the new liberal ideas of a future life.
+Cosimo the Elder, according to Bernardo Pulci’s poem on his death, was
+received in heaven by Cicero, who had also been called the ‘Father of
+his country,’ by the Fabii, by Curius, Fabricius and many others; with
+them he would adorn the choir where only blameless spirits sing.[1284]
+
+But in the old writers there was another and less pleasing picture of
+the world to come--the shadowy realms of Homer and of those poets who
+had not sweetened and humanised the conception. This made an impression
+on certain temperaments. Gioviano Pontano somewhere attributes to
+Sannazaro the story of a vision, which he beheld one morning early while
+half awake.[1285] He seemed to see a departed friend, Ferrandus
+Januarius, with whom he had often discoursed on the immortality of the
+soul, and whom he now asked whether it was true that the pains of Hell
+were really dreadful and eternal. The shadow gave an answer like that of
+Achilles when Odysseus questioned him. ‘So much I tell and aver to thee,
+that we who are parted from earthly life have the strongest desire to
+return to it again.’ He then saluted his friend and disappeared.
+
+It cannot but be recognised that such views of the state of man after
+death partly presuppose and partly promote the dissolution of the most
+essential dogmas of Christianity. The notion of sin and of salvation
+must have almost entirely evaporated. We must not be misled by the
+effects of the great preachers of repentance or by the epidemic revivals
+which have been described above (part vi. cap. 2). For even granting
+that the individually developed classes had shared in them like the
+rest, the cause of their participation was rather the need of emotional
+excitement, the rebound of passionate natures, the horror felt at great
+national calamities, the cry to heaven for help. The awakening of the
+conscience had by no means necessarily the sense of sin and the felt
+need of salvation as its consequence, and even a very severe outward
+penance did not perforce involve any repentance in the Christian meaning
+of the word. When the powerful natures of the Renaissance tell us that
+their principle is to repent of nothing,[1286] they may have in their
+minds only matters that are morally indifferent, faults of unreason or
+imprudence; but in the nature of the case this contempt for repentance
+must extend to the sphere of morals, because its origin, namely the
+consciousness of individual force, is common to both sides of human
+nature. The passive and contemplative form of Christianity, with its
+constant reference to a higher world beyond the grave, could no longer
+control these men. Macchiavelli ventured still farther, and maintained
+that it could not be serviceable to the state and to the maintenance of
+public freedom.[1287]
+
+The form assumed by the strong religious instinct which, notwithstanding
+all, survived in many natures, was Theism or Deism, as we may please to
+call it. The latter name may be applied to that mode of thought which
+simply wiped away the Christian element out of religion, without either
+seeking or finding any other substitute for the feelings to rest upon.
+Theism may be considered that definite heightened devotion to the one
+Supreme Being which the Middle Ages were not acquainted with. This mode
+of faith does not exclude Christianity, and can either ally itself with
+the Christian doctrines of sin, redemption, and immortality, or else
+exist and flourish without them.
+
+Sometimes this belief presents itself with childish naïveté and even
+with a half-pagan air, God appearing as the almighty fulfiller of human
+wishes. Agnolo Pandolfini[1288] tells us how, after his wedding, he shut
+himself in with his wife, and knelt down before the family altar with
+the picture of the Madonna, and prayed, not to her, but to God that he
+would vouchsafe to them the right use of their property, a long life in
+joy and unity with one another, and many male descendants: ‘for myself I
+prayed for wealth, honour, and friends, for her blamelessness, honesty,
+and that she might be a good housekeeper.’ When the language used has a
+strong antique flavour, it is not always easy to keep apart the pagan
+style and the theistic belief.[1289]
+
+This temper sometimes manifests itself in times of misfortune with a
+striking sincerity. Some addresses to God are left us from the latter
+period of Firenzuola, when for years he lay ill of fever, in which,
+though he expressly declares himself a believing Christian, he shows
+that his religious consciousness is essentially theistic.[1290] His
+sufferings seem to him neither as the punishment of sin, nor as
+preparation for a higher world; they are an affair between him and God
+only, who has put the strong love of life between man and his despair.
+‘I curse, but only curse Nature, since thy greatness forbids me to utter
+thy name.... Give me death, Lord, I beseech thee, give it me now!’
+
+In these utterances and the like, it would be vain to look for a
+conscious and consistent Theism; the speakers partly believed themselves
+to be still Christians, and for various other reasons respected the
+existing doctrines of the Church. But at the time of the Reformation,
+when men were driven to come to a distinct conclusion on such points,
+this mode of thought was accepted with a fuller consciousness; a number
+of the Italian Protestants came forward as Anti-Trinitarians and
+Socinians, and even as exiles in distant countries made the memorable
+attempt to found a church on these principles. From the foregoing
+exposition it will be clear that, apart from humanistic rationalism,
+other spirits were at work in this field.
+
+One chief centre of theistic modes of thought lay in the Platonic
+Academy at Florence, and especially in Lorenzo Magnifico himself. The
+theoretical works and even the letters of these men show us only half
+their nature. It is true that Lorenzo, from his youth till he died,
+expressed himself dogmatically as a Christian,[1291] and that Pico was
+drawn by Savonarola’s influence to accept the point of view of a monkish
+ascetic.[1292] But in the hymns of Lorenzo,[1293] which we are tempted
+to regard as the highest product of the spirit of this school, an
+unreserved Theism is set forth--a Theism which strives to treat the
+world as a great moral and physical Cosmos. While the men of the Middle
+Ages look on the world as a vale of tears, which Pope and Emperor are
+set to guard against the coming of Antichrist; while the fatalists of
+the Renaissance oscillate between seasons of overflowing energy and
+seasons of superstition or of stupid resignation, here, in this circle
+of chosen spirits,[1294] the doctrine is upheld that the visible world
+was created by God in love, that it is the copy of a pattern
+pre-existing in Him, and that He will ever remain its eternal mover and
+restorer. The soul of man can by recognising God draw Him into its
+narrow boundaries, but also by love to Him itself expand into the
+Infinite--and this is blessedness on earth.
+
+Echoes of mediæval mysticism here flow into one current with Platonic
+doctrines, and with a characteristically modern spirit. One of the most
+precious fruits of the knowledge of the world and of man here comes to
+maturity, on whose account alone the Italian Renaissance must be called
+the leader of modern ages.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+A.
+
+Academies, educational, 281.
+
+Adrian VI., Pope, 121;
+  satires against, 162-164.
+
+‘_Africa_,’ the, of Petrarch, 258.
+
+Aguello of Pisa, 11.
+
+Alberto da Sarteano, 467.
+
+Alberti, Leon Battista, 136-138.
+
+Albertinus, Musattus, fame of, 140-141.
+
+Alboronoz, 102.
+
+Alchemy, 539, 540.
+
+Alexander VI., Pope, 109-117;
+  death of, 117.
+
+Alfonso I., 49.
+
+Alfonso of Ferrara, 99.
+
+Alfonso the Great of Naples, 35, 95, 459-461;
+  contempt for astrology, 513;
+  enthusiasm for antiquity, 225-227, 228.
+
+Alighieri Dante.--_See Dante._
+
+Allegorical representations, 415.
+
+Allegory, age of, 408-410;
+  superiority of Italian, 410-411.
+
+Amiens, treaty of, 123.
+
+‘_Amorosá Visione_,’ the, of Boccaccio, 324.
+
+Antiquity, importance of, Dante on, 204-205;
+  reproduction of, 230-242.
+
+Anti-Trinitarians, 549.
+
+Apollo Belvedere, discovery of the, 184.
+
+Aquinas, St. Thomas, 6, 7, 60.
+
+Arabic, study of, 200-202.
+
+Aragonese Dynasty, 16, 35.
+
+Aretino, Pietro, the railer, 164-168;
+  father of modern journalism, 165.
+
+Ariosto, 134;
+  and the Humanists, 273;
+  his artistic aim in epic, 326;
+  his picture of Roman society, 185;
+  ‘_Orlando Furioso_,’ the, of, 325, 326, 327;
+  position as a Dramatist, 320;
+  style, 306;
+  satire on sorcery, 535-536.
+
+Arlotto (jester), 156.
+
+Army list, Venetian, 67.
+
+‘_Asolani_,’ the, of Bembo, 243.
+
+Assassination, paid, 450, 457.
+
+Assassins in Rome, 109.
+
+Astrology, belief in, 507-518;
+  protest against, 515.
+
+Auguries, belief in, 520, 521.
+
+Authors, the old, 187-202.
+
+Autobiography in Italy, 332, 333.
+
+
+B.
+
+Bacchus and Ariadne, song of, by Lorenzo de Medici, 427-428.
+
+Baglioni of Perugia, the, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32;
+  and the Oddi, disputes between, 29.
+
+Bandello, as novelist, 306;
+  on infidelity, 443-444;
+  style of writing, 382.
+
+Baraballe, comic procession of, 158.
+
+Bassano, Jacopo, rustic paintings of, 354.
+
+Belief, general disintegration of, 541-550.
+
+Bembo, Pietro, 231;
+  epigrams of, 267;
+  his ‘_Historia rerum Venetarum_,’ 248;
+  letters of, 233;
+  the ‘_Sacra_’ of, 259.
+
+Benedictines, the, 463.
+
+Bernabö, boar hounds of, 13.
+
+Bernadino da Siena, 235, 467, 469.
+
+Bessarion, Cardinal, his collection of Greek MSS., 189.
+
+Biblical criticism, 501.
+
+Biographies, Collective, 330 sqq.
+
+Biography, 328-337;
+  comparative, art of, 329.
+
+Blondus of Forli, historical writings of, 245, 246.
+
+Boar-hounds of Bernabö, 13.
+
+Boccaccio, 151;
+  life of Dante, 329;
+  master of personal description, 344;
+  on ‘tyranny,’ 56;
+  representative of antiquity, 205;
+  sonnets of, 314.
+
+Bojardo, as epic poet, 325;
+  inventiveness of, 324;
+  style of, 306.
+
+Borgias, the crimes of the, 109-117.
+
+Borgia, Cæsar, 109-117;
+  death of, 117.
+
+Borso of Este, 49, 50, 51;
+  created duke of Modena and Reggio, 19;
+  welcome of, to Reggio, 417, 418.
+
+Boscoli, Pierpaolo, death of, 542-543.
+
+Botanical Gardens, 292.
+
+Brigandage, 449-450.
+
+Burchiello as Comedian, 320.
+
+
+C.
+
+Calumny at Papal Court, 161.
+
+Calvi Fabio, of Ravenna, 278-279.
+
+Cambray, League of, 68, 89.
+
+Can Grande della Scala, Court of, 9.
+
+Canzone, the, 310.
+
+‘_Canzone Zingaresca_,’ of Politian, 354.
+
+Capistrano, Giovanni, 467.
+
+‘_Capitolo_,’ the, 162-163.
+
+Cardano, Girolamo, of Milan, autobiography of, 334.
+
+Caricaturists, 159.
+
+‘_Carmina Burana_,’ the, 173.
+
+Carnival, the, 407, 425-427.
+
+Castiglione, 388.
+
+Catalogues of Libraries, 190, 191.
+
+Cathedral, Milan, founding of, 14.
+
+Catilinarians, the, 105.
+
+Catullus, as model, 264-265.
+
+Cellini, Benvenuto, autobiography of, 333-334.
+
+Celso, Caterina di San, 400.
+
+Certosa, Convent of, founding of, 13.
+
+Charles V., Emperor, action of, 123, 124.
+
+Charles IV., Emperor, 17, 18.
+
+Charles VIII. in Italy, 89, 90;
+  entry into Italy, 413.
+
+Children, naming of, 250-251.
+
+Chroniclers, Italian, 245;
+  Florentine, condemn astrology, 515.
+
+Church dignities, not bestowed according to pedigree, 360;
+  the corruption of, 456;
+  held in contempt, 457-458;
+  regeneration of, 125;
+  secularization of, proposed by Emperor Charles V., 123;
+  spirit of reform in, 123.
+
+Cicero, taken as model for style, 253-54.
+
+Ciceronianism and revival of Vitruvius, analogy between, 256.
+
+Ciriaco of Ancona, an antiquarian, 181.
+
+Class distinction ignored, 359-368.
+
+Clement VII., Pope, detested, 122;
+  flight of, 123;
+  temperament of, 309.
+
+Cleopatra, the discovery of, 184.
+
+Clubs, political, 387.
+
+Colonna, Giovanne, 177-178;
+  Giulia Gonzaga, 385;
+  Vittoria, 386, 446.
+
+‘_Commedia dell’Arte_,’ 320, 321.
+
+_Commentaries_, the, of Pius II., 333.
+
+Composition, Latin, history of, 252-253.
+
+Condottieri, the, despotisms founded by, 22, 23, 24.
+
+Convent of Certosa of Pavia, founding of, 13.
+
+Cornaro, Luigi, Autobiography of, 335-337;
+  _Vita Sobria_ of, 244.
+
+Corpse of girl, discovery of, 183.
+
+Corpus Christi, feast of, celebration of, 414.
+
+Corruption in Papacy, 106, 107.
+
+‘_Cortigiano_,’ the, by Castiglione, 381, 388, 446.
+
+Cosmetics, use of, 373-374.
+
+Council of Ten, 66.
+
+Country life, descriptions of, 306;
+  love of, 404-405.
+
+Crime, for its own sake, 453-454;
+  prevalence of, among priests, 448-449.
+
+Criticism, Biblical, 501.
+
+Crusades, the, 485-486;
+  influence of, 285.
+
+Culture, general Latinization of, 249-256.
+
+‘_Curiale_,’ the, 378.
+
+Cybò, Franceschetto, 108-109;
+  as gambler, 436.
+
+
+D.
+
+Daemons, belief in, 521-524, 531.
+
+Dagger, use of the, 452.
+
+Dante, Alighieri, 75, 76, 83, 130, 133, 135;
+  as advocate of antiquity, 204-205;
+  satirist, 155;
+  belief in freedom of the will, 498;
+  burial place of, 143;
+  desire for fame, his, 139;
+  influence of, 324;
+  influence of nature shown in works, 299;
+  life of, by Boccaccio, 329;
+  on Epicureanism, 496-497;
+  the Italian language, 378-379;
+  nobility, 360-361;
+  view of the sonnet, 312;
+  ‘_Vita Nuova_’ of, 333.
+
+Decadence of oratory, 241, 242.
+
+‘_Decades_,’ the, of Sabellico, 248.
+
+‘_Decameron_,’ the, 459.
+
+‘_De Genealogia Deorum_,’ 205-207.
+
+Demeanour of individuals, 369.
+
+Descriptions of life in movement, 348-355.
+
+Description of nations and cities, 338-342;
+  outward man, 343-347.
+
+Difference of birth, loss of significance of, 354.
+
+Dignities, Church, not bestowed according to pedigree, 360.
+
+‘_Discorsi_,’ the, of Macchiavelli, 458.
+
+Domestic comfort, 376-377;
+  economy, 132, 402-405.
+
+Dress, importance attached to, 369-370;
+  regulations relating to, 370-371.
+
+
+E.
+
+Ecloques of Battista Mantovano, 352, 479.
+
+Economy, domestic, 132, 402-405.
+
+Education, equal, of sexes, 396;
+  private, 135.
+
+Emperor Charles IV., 17;
+  submission to the Pope, 18;
+  Frederick II., 5-7, 69;
+  III., 19;
+  Sigismund, 18, 19.
+
+Epicureanism, 496.
+
+Epigram, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270.
+
+Epigraph, the, 268, 269.
+
+Equalization of classes, 359-368.
+
+Erasmus, 254.
+
+Ercole I., Duke of Ferrara, 487-489.
+
+Este, House of, government of the, 46, 48;
+  Isabella of, 43, 44;
+  novels relating to, 51, 52, 53;
+  popular feeling towards, 49, 50.
+
+Van Eyck, Hubert, 302, 303;
+  Johann, 302, 303.
+
+Ezzelino da Romano, 6, 7.
+
+
+F.
+
+Fame, modern idea of, 139-153;
+  thirst for, evils of, 152-153.
+
+Federigo of Urbino, 99.
+
+Feltre, Vittorino da, 213-214.
+
+Female beauty, Firenzuola on, 345-347.
+
+Ferrante of Naples, 36, 37, 459-461.
+
+Ferrara, flourishing state of, 47;
+  sale of public offices at, 47, 48.
+
+Festivals, 406-428;
+  full development of, 407;
+  higher phase in life of people, 406.
+
+Fire-arms, adoption of, 98-99.
+
+Firenzuola on female beauty, 345-347.
+
+Flagellants, the, 485-486.
+
+Flogging, 403.
+
+Florence, 61-87;
+  general statistics of, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80;
+  home of scandal-mongers, 161;
+  life more secure in, 440-451;
+  and Venice, birthplaces of science of statistics, 69-72.
+
+Florentines, the, as perfectors of festivals, 408.
+
+Foscari, Francesco, torture of, 66.
+
+France, changed attitude of, 91, 92.
+
+Frederick II., Emperor, 5-7, 69;
+  III., 19.
+
+Frederick of Urbino, learning of, 227;
+  oratory of, 237.
+
+Freedom of will, belief in, 497.
+
+Friars, mendicant, 462.
+
+
+G.
+
+Gallerana, Cecilia, 386.
+
+Gamblers, professional, 436.
+
+Gambling on large scale, 436.
+
+Gaston de Foix, 309.
+
+Genoa, 86-87.
+
+Germano-Spanish army, advance of, 122.
+
+Ghibellines and Guelphs, political sonnets of, 312.
+
+Ghosts, 521-523.
+
+Giangaleazzo, 13-14.
+
+Girls, in society, absence of, 399.
+
+Girolamo Savonarola (see Savonarola).
+
+Godfrey of Strasburg, 309.
+
+Golden Spur, order of the, 53.
+
+Gonnella (jester), 157.
+
+Gonzaga, House of, of Mantua, 43;
+  Francesco, 43, 44;
+  Giovan Francesco, 213-214;
+  Isabella, 385.
+
+Government, divine, belief in, destroyed, 507.
+
+‘_Gran Consilio_,’ the, 66.
+
+Gratitude as an Italian virtue, 440.
+
+Greater dynasties, 35-54.
+
+Greek, the study of, 195-197.
+
+Guarino of Verono, 215.
+
+Guelphs and Ghibellines, political sonnets of, 312.
+
+Guicciardini, his opinion of the priesthood, 464.
+
+Gymnastics first taught as an art, 389.
+
+Gyraldus, historian of the humanists, 276.
+
+
+H.
+
+Hair, false, 372.
+
+Hermits, 471.
+
+Hierarchy, hostility to the, 458.
+
+Hieronymus of Siena, 471-472.
+
+‘_Historia rerum Venetarum_,’ the, of Bembo, 248.
+
+History, treated of in poetry, 261.
+
+Honour, the sentiment of, 433-435.
+
+Horses, breeding of, 295-296.
+
+Humanism in the Fourteenth Century, 203;
+  furtherers of, 217-229.
+
+Humanists, fall of, in 16th century, 272-281;
+  faults of, 276;
+  historian of, 276;
+  temptations of, 275-276.
+
+Human Nature, study of intellectual side of, 308-309.
+
+Husband, rights of, 442.
+
+Hypocrisy, freedom of Italians from, 439.
+
+
+I.
+
+‘_Il Galateo_’ of G. della Casa, 375-376.
+
+Illegitimacy, indifference to, 21, 22.
+
+Immorality, prevalent at beginning of 16th century, 432.
+
+Immortality, decline of belief in, 541.
+
+Individual, the, assertion of, 129, 130, 131;
+  the, and the Italian State, 129-138;
+  the perfecting of, 134-138.
+
+Individuality, keen perception of Italians for, 329.
+
+Infidelity in marriage, 440-441, 456.
+
+Inn-keepers, German, 375.
+
+Innocent VIII., Pope, election of, 107.
+
+Inquisitors and Science, 291;
+  detrimental to development of drama, 317.
+
+Instruments, musical, collections of 393.
+
+Intolerance, religious, 6.
+
+Isabella of Este, 43, 44.
+
+Italians, cleanliness of, 374;
+  discoverers of the Middle Ages, 286;
+  journeys of, 285-288;
+  judges as to personal beauty, 342;
+  supremacy of, in literary world, 151;
+  writing of, 193.
+
+Italy, a school for scandal, 160;
+  subject to Spain, 94.
+
+
+J.
+
+Jacopo della Marca, 467.
+
+‘_Jerusalem delivered_’ of Tasso, delineation of character in, 327.
+
+Jesting, a profession, 156.
+
+Jews, literary activity of the, 199-201.
+
+Journeys of the Italians, 285-288.
+
+Julius II., Pope, character of, 118;
+  election of, 117.
+
+
+K.
+
+Knighthood, passion for, 364.
+
+
+L.
+
+Laetus Pomponus, life of, 279-281.
+
+‘_L’amor, diveno_,’ 445, 446.
+
+Language as basis of social intercourse, 378-383.
+
+Laöcoon, the, discovery of, 148.
+
+Latin composition, history of, 252-253;
+  treatises, and History, 243-248.
+
+Latini, Brunetto, originator of new epoch in poetry, 310.
+
+Laurel wreath, the, coronation of poets with, 207-209.
+
+Law, absence of belief in, 447.
+
+League of Cambray, 68, 89.
+
+Leo X., Pope, buffoonery of, 157-158;
+  influence on humanism, 224-225;
+  love of jesters, 157;
+  policy of, 119, 120, 121.
+
+Letter-writing, object of, 232.
+
+Library Catalogues, 190, 191.
+
+Life, outward refinement of, 369-377.
+
+Lionardo da Vinci, 114.
+
+Lorenzo the Magnificent, 90, 95, 108;
+  as describer of country life, 350, 353;
+  parody of ‘_Inferno_’ by, 159;
+  song of Bacchus and Ariadne, 427-428;
+  tact of, 386-387;
+  theistic belief of, 549-550.
+
+Ludovico Casella, death of, 57.
+
+Ludovico il Moro, 41, 42, 64, 93.
+
+Lutherans, danger from the, 121.
+
+Luther, Martin, 121.
+
+
+M.
+
+Macchiavelli, 81, 82, 84-86, 96;
+  as comedian, 320;
+  ‘_Discorsi il_’ of, 458;
+  metrical history by, 263;
+  on Italian immorality, 432.
+
+Madonna, the worship of, 483-485.
+
+Magicians, 530-533;
+  burning of, 524.
+
+Magic, decline of, 537;
+  official, 533-535, 538;
+  practice of, 453.
+
+Malatesta, Pandolfo, 27;
+  Robert, 23, 26;
+  Sigismondo, 33, 228-229.
+
+Man, the discovery of, 308-327.
+
+Manetti, Giannozzo, 197, 225;
+  high character of, 218-220;
+  eloquence of, 240.
+
+Mantovano, Battista, eclogues of, 352, 479.
+
+Manucci, Aldo, 197.
+
+Mayia, Galeazzo, of Milan, 40, 41, 106;
+  Filippo, of Milan, 38-39.
+
+Mariolatry, 484-485.
+
+Massuccio, novels of, 459-460.
+
+Maximilian I., commencement of new Imperial policy under, 20.
+
+Medici, House of, charm over Florence, 220-221;
+  passion for tournaments, 366-367.
+
+Medici Giovanni, 119-121;
+  Lorenzo, on ‘nobility,’ 361, 362;
+  the younger, 85.
+
+Menageries, 296;
+  human, 293-295.
+
+‘_Meneghino_,’ the, Mask of Milan, 321.
+
+Mercenary troops, introduction of, 98.
+
+Middle Ages, works on, by humanists, 246, 247.
+
+Milano-Venetian War, 99.
+
+Mirandola, Pico della, 198-199, 202;
+  death of, 465;
+  on dignity of man, 354-355;
+  free will, 516;
+  refutation of astrology, 516.
+
+Mohammedanism, opposition to, 493.
+
+Monks, abuse of, in ‘_Decameron_,’ 459;
+  as satirists, 465;
+  scandalous lives of, 460-461;
+  unpopularity of, 459.
+
+Montefeltro, House of, of Urbino, 43;
+  Federigo, 44-46;
+  Guido, in relation to astrology, 512.
+
+Montepulciano, Fra Francesco di, 473.
+
+Morality, 431-455.
+
+‘_Morgante Maggiore_,’ the, of Luigi Pulci, 323-324, 494-495.
+
+Murder, public sympathy on side of, 447.
+
+Music, 390-394.
+
+Mystery plays, 406-407, 411-413, 416.
+
+Mythological representations, 415, 416.
+
+Myths, new, 259.
+
+
+N.
+
+Naming of children, 250-251.
+
+Natural Science in Italy, 289-297.
+
+Nature, beauty in, discovery of, 298-307.
+
+Navagero, style of, 265.
+
+‘_Nencia_,’ the, of Politian, 354.
+
+‘_Nipoti_,’ the, 106, 107.
+
+Niccoli, Niccolo, 188-189, 217;
+  on ‘nobility,’ 361-362.
+
+Nicholas V., Pope, faith in higher learning of, 223.
+
+Novels of Bandello, 306;
+  of Massuccio, 459, 460.
+
+
+O.
+
+Oddi, the, and the Baglioni of Perugia, disputes between, 29.
+
+Old writers, influence of, on Italian mind, 187.
+
+Omens, belief in, 518-521.
+
+‘_On the infelicity of the Scholar_,’ by Piero Valeriano, 276-277.
+
+Orator, the, important position of, 233, 234-238.
+
+Oratory, Pulpit, 238.
+
+Oriental Studies, revival of, 197.
+
+‘_Orlando Furioso_,’ the, of Ariosto, 325, 326, 327.
+
+Outward refinement of life, 369-377.
+
+
+P.
+
+Palingenius, Marcellus, ‘_Zodiac of Life_,’ of, 264.
+
+Painting, rustic, of Jacopo Bassano, 354.
+
+Pandolfini, Agnolo, 132;
+  on home management, 402-404.
+
+Pantomime, the, 407, 416, 417.
+
+Papacy, the, and its dangers, 102-125;
+  corruption in, 106, 107, 109.
+
+Papal Court, calumny rife at, 161;
+  State, spirit of reform in, 123;
+  subjection of, 110.
+
+Pardons, sale of, 108.
+
+Parody, beginnings of, 263.
+
+Peasant life, poetical treatment of, 351-352.
+
+Perfect man of society, the, 388-394.
+
+Personal faith, 491-492.
+
+Petrarch and Laura, 151;
+  ascent of Mount Ventoux by, 301-302;
+  as geographer, 300;
+  contempt of astrologers, his, 515;
+  fixer of form of sonnet, 310;
+  ideal prince of, 9-10;
+  influence of nature on, 300, 301;
+  in Rome, 177-178;
+  life of, 313-314;
+  objection to fame, his, 141-142;
+  on tournaments, 365;
+  representative of antiquity, the, 205.
+
+Petty tyrannies, 28-34.
+
+Piacenza, devastation of, 101.
+
+Piccinino, Giacomo, 25, 26;
+  Jacopo, 99.
+
+Plautus, plays of, representations of, 255, 317-319.
+
+Poems, didactic, 264.
+
+Poetry, elegiac, 264, 266, 267;
+  epic, 321-323, 325;
+  Italian, second great age of, 305-306;
+  Latin modern, 257-271;
+  lyric, 306;
+  Maccaronic, 270, 271;
+  precursor of plastic arts, the, 312.
+
+Poggio, on ‘_Knighthood_,’ 365;
+  on ‘_Nobility_,’ 361-362.
+
+Policy, Foreign, of Italian states, 88-97.
+
+Politeness, Manual of, by G. della Casa, 375-376.
+
+Politics, Florentine, 73-74.
+
+Politian, as letter writer, 233;
+  ‘_Canzone Zingaresca_’ of, 354.
+
+Pope Adrian VI., satires against, 162-164.
+
+Pope Alexander VI., 109-117;
+  death of, 117.
+
+Pope Clement VII., deliverance of, 123.
+
+Pope Innocent VIII., election of, 107.
+
+Pope Nicholas V., 188.
+
+Pope Paul II., 105;
+  attempts as peacemaker, 438;
+  personal head of republic of letters, 223;
+  priestly narrowness of, 505.
+
+Pope Paul III., 123.
+
+Pope Pius II., 105;
+  as antiquarian, 180-181;
+  as descriptive writer, 349;
+  believer in witches, 526-527;
+  celebration of feast of Corpus Christi by, 414;
+  contempt for astrology and magic, 508;
+  eloquence of, 235, 240;
+  love of nature, 303-305;
+  views on miracles, 501.
+
+Pope Sixtus IV., 105, 106, 107.
+
+Porcaro, Stefano, conspiracy of, 104.
+
+Porcello, Gian, Antonio dei Pandori, 99, 100.
+
+Poggio, walks through Rome of, 176.
+
+Preachers of repentance, 466-479;
+  personal influence of, 458.
+
+Printing, discovery of, reception of, 194.
+
+Processions, 406-407, 418-425.
+
+Prodigies, belief in, 520-521.
+
+Prophets, honour accorded to genuine, 467.
+
+Public worship, neglect of, 485.
+
+Pulci, epic poet, 323-325.
+
+‘_Pulcinell_,’ the mask of Naples, 321.
+
+
+R.
+
+Rambaldoni, Vittore dai, 213-214.
+
+Rangona, Bianca, 336.
+
+Raphael, 30;
+  appeal of, for restoration of ancient Rome, 184;
+  original subject of his picture, ‘_Deposition_,’ 32.
+
+Rationalism, 500, 501.
+
+Reformation, German, 122;
+  effects on Papacy, 124.
+
+Regattas, Venetian, 390.
+
+Relics, pride taken in, 142-145.
+
+Religion in daily life, 456-489;
+  spirit of the Renaissance, and, 491-506.
+
+Religious tolerance, 490, 492, 493;
+  revivals, epidemics of, 485.
+
+Renaissance, the, a new birth, 175;
+  and the spirit of religion, 491-506.
+
+Repentance, preachers of, 466-479.
+
+Reproduction of antiquity: Latin correspondence and orations, 230-242.
+
+Republics, the, 61-87.
+
+Revivals, epidemics of religious, 485.
+
+Riario, Girolamo, 107;
+  Pietro, Cardinal, 106.
+
+Rienzi, Cola di, 15, 176.
+
+Rimini, House of, the, 29;
+  fall of, 33.
+
+Rites, Church, sense of dependence on, 465.
+
+Roberto da Lecce, 467, 470.
+
+Rome, assassins in, 109;
+  city of ruins, 177-186;
+  first topographical study of, 179;
+  Poggio’s walks through, 176.
+
+Ruins in landscape gardening result of Christian legend, 186.
+
+
+S.
+
+‘_Sacra_,’ the, of Pietro Bembo, 259.
+
+Sadoleto, Jacopo, 231.
+
+Saints, reverence for relics of, 481-482;
+  worship of, 485.
+
+Salò, Gabriella da, belief of, 502.
+
+Sannazaro, 151, 260, 265-267;
+  fame of, 261, 268.
+
+Sanctuaries of Italy, 486.
+
+Sansecondo, Giovan Maria, 392;
+  Jacopo, 392.
+
+Satires, Monks the authors of, 465.
+
+Savonarola, Girolamo, 467, 473-479;
+  belief in dæmons, 531;
+  eloquence of, 474;
+  funeral oration on, 475;
+  reform of Dominican monasteries due to, 474.
+
+Scaliger, 254.
+
+Scarampa, Camilla, 386.
+
+Science, national sympathy with, 289-292;
+  natural, in Italy, 289-297.
+
+‘_Scrittori_’ (copyists), 192-193.
+
+Secretaries, papal, important position of, 231.
+
+Sforza, house of, 24;
+  Alessandro, 28;
+  Francesco, 24, 25, 26, 39, 40, 99;
+  Galeazzo Maria, assassination of, 57-58.
+
+Sforza, Ippolita, 385;
+  Jacopo, 24, 25.
+
+Shakespeare, William, 316.
+
+Siena, 86.
+
+Sigismund, Emperor, 18, 19.
+
+Sixtus IV., Pope, 105, 106, 107.
+
+Slavery in Italy, 296.
+
+Society, higher forms of, 384-387;
+  ideal man of, 388-394;
+  in, Italian models to other countries, 389.
+
+Sociniaris, 549.
+
+Sonnet, the, 310-311, 312.
+
+Sonnets of Boccaccio, 314;
+  of Dante, 312.
+
+Spain, changed attitude of, 91, 92.
+
+Spaniards, detrimental to development of drama, 317.
+
+Spanish-Germano Army, advance of, 122.
+
+Spanish influence, jealousy under, 445.
+
+Speeches, subject of public, 239-241.
+
+Spur, golden, order of, 53.
+
+Spiritual description in poetry, 308-327.
+
+Statistics, science of, birthplace of, 69-72.
+
+St. Peter’s at Rome, reconstruction of., 119.
+
+Stentorello, the mask of Florence, 321.
+
+Superstition, mixture of ancient and modern, 507-540.
+
+Sylvius Æneas, see Pope Pius II.
+
+
+T.
+
+Taxation, 5, 8, 13, 35, 36, 47.
+
+Teano, Cardinal, 255.
+
+‘_Telesma_,’ the, 533-535.
+
+‘_Telestae_,’ the, 533-535.
+
+Terence, plays of, representation of, 255.
+
+‘_Teseide_,’ the, of Boccaccio, 259.
+
+Tiburzio, 105.
+
+Tolerance, religious, 490, 492, 493.
+
+Torso, the, discovery of, 184.
+
+Tragedy in time of Renaissance, 315-316, 317.
+
+Treatise, the, 243.
+
+‘_Trionfo_,’ the, 407, 419, 420, 423;
+  of Beatrice, 419-420.
+
+‘_Trionfi_,’ the, of Petrarch, 324.
+
+‘_Trovatori_,’ the, 310.
+
+_Trovatori della transizione_, the, 311.
+
+Turks, conspiracies with the, 92, 93.
+
+Tuscan dialect basis of new national speech, 379.
+
+Tyranny, opponents of, 55-60.
+
+Tyrannies, petty, 28-34.
+
+
+U.
+
+Uberti, Fazio degli, vision of, 178.
+
+Universities and Schools, 210-216.
+
+
+V.
+
+Valeriano, P., on the infelicity of the scholar, 276-277.
+
+Vatican, Library of, founding of, 188.
+
+‘_Vendetta_,’ the, 437-440.
+
+Vengeance, Italian, 436-400.
+
+Venetian-Milano war, 99.
+
+Venice, 61-87;
+  and Florence, birthplace of science of statistics, 69-72.
+
+Venice, processions in, 73;
+  public institutions in, 63;
+  relation of, to literature, 70;
+  stability of, cause of, 65-66;
+  statistics, general of, 69, 70, 71, 78.
+
+Villani, Giovanni, 73;
+  Matteo, 76.
+
+Vinci, Lionardo da, 138.
+
+Violin, the, 392.
+
+Visconti, the, 10, 15, 18, 22, 38, 40;
+  Giangaleazzo, 513;
+  Giovan Maria, assassination of, 57, 58.
+
+‘_Vita Nuova_,’ the, of Dante, 333.
+
+‘_Vita Sobria_,’ the, of Luigi Cornaro, 244.
+
+Vitelli, Paolo, 99.
+
+Vitruvius, revival of, and Ciceronianism, analogy between, 156.
+
+Venus of the Vatican, discovery of, 184.
+
+‘_Versi Sciolti_,’ the, origin of, 310.
+
+
+W.
+
+War as a work of art, 98-101.
+
+Wit, analysis of, 159-160;
+  first appearance of, in literature, 154;
+  modern, and satire, 154-168.
+
+Witch of Gaeta, the, 525.
+
+Witchcraft, 524-530.
+
+Witches, 524, 525, 526;
+  burning of, 524, 526, 528.
+
+Women, Ariosto on, 395;
+  equality of, with men, 395;
+  function of, 398;
+  heroism of, 398;
+  ideal for, 398;
+  position of, 395-401.
+
+Worship, public, neglect of, 485.
+
+
+Z.
+
+Zampante of Lucca, director of police, 50.
+
+‘_Zodiac of Life_,’ of Marcellus Palingenius, 264.
+
+
+                       GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
+                   LONDON: 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
+                   CAPE TOWN: 73 ST. GEORGE’S STREET
+                SYDNEY, N.S.W.: 218-222 CLARENCE STREET
+                WELLINGTON, N.Z.: 110-112 LAMBTON QUAY
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _History of Architecture_, by Franz Kugler. (The first half of the
+fourth volume, containing the ‘Architecture and Decoration of the
+Italian Renaissance,’ is by the Author.)
+
+[2] Macchiavelli, _Discorsi_, 1. i. c. 12. ‘E la cagione, che la Italia
+non sia in quel medesimo termine, ne habbia anch’ ella ò una republica ò
+un prencipe che la governi, è solamente la Chiesa; perchè havendovi
+habitato e tenuto imperio temporale non è stata si potente ne di tal
+virtè, che l’habbia potuto occupare il restante d’Italia e farsene
+prencipe.’
+
+[3] The rulers and their dependents were together called ‘lo stato,’ and
+this name afterwards acquired the meaning of the collective existence of
+a territory.
+
+[4] C. Winckelmann, _De Regni Siculi Administratione qualis fuerit
+regnante Friderico II._, Berlin. 1859. A. del Vecchio, _La legislazione
+di Federico II. imperatore_. Turin, 1874. Frederick II. has been fully
+and thoroughly discussed by Winckelmann and Schirrmacher.
+
+[5] Baumann, _Staatslehre des Thomas von Aquino_. Leipzig, 1873, esp.
+pp. 136 sqq.
+
+[6] _Cento Novelle Antiche_, ed. 1525. For Frederick, Nov. 2, 21, 22,
+23, 24, 30, 53, 59, 90, 100; for Ezzelino, Nov. 31, and esp. 84.
+
+[7] Scardeonius, _De Urbis Patav. Antiqu. in Grævius_, Thesaurus, vi.
+iii. p. 259.
+
+[8] Sismondi, _Hist. de Rép. Italiennes_, iv. p. 420; viii. pp. 1 sqq.
+
+[9] Franco Sacchetti, _Novelle_ (61, 62).
+
+[10] Dante, it is true, is said to have lost the favour of this prince,
+which impostors knew how to keep. See the important account in Petrarch,
+_De Rerum Memorandarum_, lib. ii. 3, 46.
+
+[11] Petrarca, _Epistolæ Seniles_, lib. xiv. 1, to Francesco di Carrara
+(Nov. 28, 1373). The letter is sometimes printed separately with the
+title, ‘De Republica optime administranda,’ e.g. Bern, 1602.
+
+[12] It is not till a hundred years later that the princess is spoken of
+as the mother of the people. Comp. Hieron. Crivelli’s funeral oration on
+Bianca Maria Visconti, in Muratori, _Scriptores Rerum Italicarum_, xxv.
+col. 429. It was by way of parody of this phrase that a sister of Sixtus
+IV. is called in Jac Volateranus (Murat., xxiii. col. 109) ‘mater
+ecclesiæ.’
+
+[13] With the parenthetical request, in reference to a previous
+conversation, that the prince would again forbid the keeping of pigs in
+the streets of Padua, as the sight of them was unpleasing, especially
+for strangers, and apt to frighten the horses.
+
+[14] Petrarca, _Rerum Memorandar._, lib. iii. 2, 66.--Matteo I. Visconti
+and Guido della Torre, then ruling in Milan, are the persons referred
+to.
+
+[15] Matteo Villani, v. 81: the secret murder of Matteo II. (Maffiolo)
+Visconti by his brother.
+
+[16] Filippo Villani, _Istorie_, xi. 101. Petrarch speaks in the same
+tone of the tyrants dressed out ‘like altars at a festival.’--The
+triumphal procession of Castracane at Lucca is described minutely in his
+life by Tegrimo, in Murat., xi., col, 1340.
+
+[17] _De Vulgari Eloqui_, i. c. 12: ... ‘qui non heroico more, sed
+plebeo sequuntur superbiam.’
+
+[18] This we find first in the fifteenth century, but their
+representations are certainly based on the beliefs of earlier times: L.
+B. Alberti, _De re ædif._, v. 3.--Franc. di Giorgio, ‘Trattato,’ in
+Della Valle, Lettere Sanesi, iii. 121.
+
+[19] Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 61.
+
+[20] Matteo Villani, vi. 1.
+
+[21] The Paduan passport office about the middle of the fourteenth
+century is referred to by Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 117, in the words,
+‘quelli delle bullete.’ In the last ten years of the reign of Frederick
+II., when the strictest control was exercised on the personal conduct of
+his subjects, this system must have been very highly developed.
+
+[22] Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 247 sqq. Recent Italian writers
+have observed that the Visconti have still to find a historian who,
+keeping the just mean between the exaggerated praises of contemporaries
+(_e.g._ Petrarch) and the violent denunciations of later political
+(Guelph) opponents, will pronounce a final judgment upon them.
+
+[23] E.g. of Paolo Giovio: _Elogia Virorum bellicâ virtute illustrium_,
+Basel, 1575, p. 85, in the life of Bernabò. Giangal. (_Vita_, pp. 86
+sqq.) is for Giovio ‘post Theodoricum omnium præstantissimus.’ Comp.
+also Jovius, _Vitæ xii. Vicecomitum Mediolani principum_, Paris, 1549.
+pp. 165 sqq.
+
+[24] Corio, fol. 272, 285.
+
+[25] Cagnola, in the _Archiv. Stor._, iii. p. 23.
+
+[26] So Corio, fol. 286, and Poggio, _Hist. Florent._ iv. in Murat. xx.
+col 290.--Cagnola (loc. cit.) speaks of his designs on the imperial
+crown. See too the sonnet in Trucchi, _Poesie Ital. ined._, ii. p. 118:
+
+    “Stan le città lombarde con le chiave
+     In man per darle a voi ... etc.
+     Roma vi chiamo: Cesar mio novello
+     Io sono ignuda, e l’anima pur vive:
+     Or mi coprite col vostro mantello,” etc.
+
+
+[27] Corio, fol. 301 and sqq. Comp. Ammian. Marcellin., xxix. 3.
+
+[28] So Paul. Jovius, _Elogia_, pp. 88-92, Jo. Maria Philippus.
+
+[29] De Gingins, _Dépêches des Ambassadeurs Milanais_, Paris and Geneva
+1858, ii. pp. 200 sqq. (N. 213). Comp. ii. 3 (N. 144) and ii. 212 sqq.
+(N. 218).
+
+[30] Paul. Jovius, _Elogia_, pp. 156 sqq. Carolus, Burg. dux.
+
+[31] This compound of force and intellect is called by Macchiavelli
+_Virtù_, and is quite compatible with _scelleratezza_. E.g. _Discorsi_,
+i. 10. in speaking of Sep. Severus.
+
+[32] On this point Franc. Vettori, _Arch. Stor._ vi. p. 29. 3 sqq.: ‘The
+investiture at the hands of a man who lives in Germany, and has nothing
+of the Roman Emperor about him but the empty name, cannot turn a
+scoundrel into the real lord of a city.’
+
+[33] M. Villani, iv. 38, 39, 44, 56, 74, 76, 92; v. 1, 2, 14-16, 21, 22,
+36, 51, 54. It is only fair to consider that dislike of the Visconti may
+have led to worse representations than the facts justified. Charles IV.
+is once (iv. 74) highly praised by Villani.
+
+[34] It was an Italian, Fazio degli Uberti (_Dittamondo_, l. vi. cap.
+5--about 1360) who recommended to Charles IV. a crusade to the Holy
+Land. The passage is one of the best in this poem, and in other respects
+characteristic. The poet is dismissed from the Holy Sepulchre by an
+insolent Turk:
+
+    ‘Con passi lunghi e con la testa bassa
+     Oltre passai e dissi: ecco vergogna
+     Del cristian che’l saracin qui lassa!
+     Poscia al Pastor (the Pope) mi volsi far rampogna
+     E tu ti stai, che sei vicar di Cristo,
+     Co’ frati tuoi a ingrassar la carogna?
+
+     Similimente dissi a quel sofisto (Charles IV.)
+     Che sta in Buemme (Bohemia) a piantar vigne e fichi
+     E che non cura di si caro acquisto:
+     Che fai? Perchè non segui i primi antichi
+     Cesari de’ Romani, e che non segui,
+     Dico, gli Otti, i Corradi, i Federichi?
+     E che pur tieni questo imperio in tregui?
+     E se non hai lo cuor d’esser Augusto,
+     Che non rifiuti? o che non ti dilegui?’ etc.
+
+Some eight years earlier, about 1352, Petrarch had written (to Charles
+IV., _Epist. Fam._, lib. xii. ep. 1, ed. Fracassetti, vol. ii. p. 160):
+‘Simpliciter igitur et aperte ... pro maturando negotio terræ sanctæ ...
+oro tuo egentem auxilio quam primum invisere velis Ausoniam.’
+
+[35] See for details Vespasiano Fiorent. ed. Mai, _Specilegium Romanum_,
+vol. i. p. 54. Comp. 150 and Panormita, _De Dictis et Factis Alfonsi_,
+lib. iv. nro. 4.
+
+[36] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 217 sqq.
+
+[37] ‘Haveria voluto scortigare la brigata.’ Giov. Maria Filelfo, then
+staying at Bergamo, wrote a violent satire ‘in vulgus equitum auro
+notatorum.’ See his biography in Favre, _Mélanges d’Histoire
+littéraire_, 1856, i. p. 10.
+
+[38] _Annales Estenses_, in Murat. xx. col. 41.
+
+[39] Poggii, _Hist. Florent. pop._ l. vii. in Murat. col. 381. This view
+is in accordance with the anti-monarchical sentiments of many of the
+humanists of that day. Comp. the evidence given by Bezold, ‘Lehre von
+der Volkssouverainität während des Mittelalters,’ _Hist. Ztschr._ bd.
+36, s. 365.
+
+[40] Some years later the Venetian Lionardo Giustiniani blames the word
+‘imperator’ as unclassical and therefore unbecoming the German emperor,
+and calls the Germans barbarians, on account of their ignorance of the
+language and manners of antiquity. The cause of the Germans was defended
+by the humanist H. Bebel. See L. Geiger, in the _Allgem. Deutsche
+Biogr._ ii. 196.
+
+[41] Senarega, _De reb. Genuens_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 575.
+
+[42] Enumerated in the _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 203.
+Comp. Pic. ii. _Comment._ ii. p. 102, ed. Rome, 1584.
+
+[43] Marin Sanudo, _Vita de’ Duchi di Venezia_, in Murat. xxii. col.
+1113.
+
+[44] Varchi, _Stor. Fiorent._ i. p. 8.
+
+[45] Soriano, _Relazione di Roma_, 1533, in Tommaso Gar. _Relaz. della
+Corte di Roma_, (in Alberi, _Relaz. degli ambasc. Veneti_, ii. ser.
+iii.).
+
+[46] For what follows, see Canestrini, in the Introduction to vol. xv.
+of the _Archiv. Stor._
+
+[47] For him, see Shepherd-Tonelli, _Vita di Piggio_, App. pp.
+viii.-xvi.
+
+[48] Cagnola, _Archiv. Stor._ iii. p. 28: ‘Et (Filippo Maria) da lei
+(Beatr.) ebbe molto tesoro e dinari, e tutte le giente d’arme del dicto
+Facino, che obedivano a lei.’
+
+[49] Inpressura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1911. For the
+alternatives which Macchiavelli puts before the victorious Condottiere,
+see _Discorsi_, i. 30. After the victory he is either to hand over the
+army to his employer and wait quietly for his reward, or else to win the
+soldiers to his own side to occupy the fortresses and to punish the
+prince ‘di quella ingratitudine che esso gli userebbe.’
+
+[50] Comp. Barth. Facius, _De Viv. Ill._ p. 64, who tells us that C.
+commanded an army of 60,000 men. It is uncertain whether the Venetians
+did not poison Alviano in 1516, because he, as Prato says in _Arch.
+Stor._ iii. p. 348, aided the French too zealously in the battle of S.
+Donato. The Republic made itself Colleoni’s heir, and after his death in
+1475 formally confiscated his property. Comp. Malipiero, _Annali
+Veneti_, in _Arch. Stor._ vii. i. 244. It was liked when the Condottieri
+invested their money in Venice, ibid. p. 351.
+
+[51] Cagnola, in _Arch. Stor._ iii. pp. 121 sqq.
+
+[52] At all events in Paul Jovius, _Vita Magni Sfortiæ_, Rom. 1539,
+(dedicated to the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza), one of the most attractive
+of his biographies.
+
+[53] Æn. Sylv. _Comment. de Dictis et Factis Alfonsi_, Opera, ed. 1538,
+p. 251: Novitate gaudens Italia nihil habet stabile, nullum in eâ vetus
+regnum, facile hic ex servis reges videmus.’
+
+[54] Pii, ii. _Comment._ i. 46; comp. 69.
+
+[55] Sismondi, x. 258; Corio. fol. 412, where Sforza is accused of
+complicity, as he feared danger to his own son from P.’s popularity.
+_Storia Bresciana_, in Murat. xxi. col. 209. How the Venetian
+Condottiere Colleoni was tempted in 1466, is told by Malipiero _Annali
+Veneti, Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p. 210. The Florentine exiles offered to
+make him Duke of Milan if he would expel from Florence their enemy,
+Piero de’ Medici.
+
+[56] Allegretti, _Diari Sanesi_, in Murat. xxiii. p. 811.
+
+[57] _Orationes Philelphi_, ed. Venet. 1492, fol. 9, in the funeral
+oration on Francesco.
+
+[58] Marin Sanudo, _Vita del Duchi di Venezia_, in Murat. xxii. col.
+1241. See Reumont, _Lorenzo von Medici_ (Lpz. 1874), ii. pp. 324-7, and
+the authorities there quoted.
+
+[59] Malipiero, _Ann. Venet., Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p. 407.
+
+[60] _Chron. Eugubinum_, in Murat. xxi. col. 972.
+
+[61] _Vespas. Fiorent._ p. 148.
+
+[62] _Archiv. Stor._ xvi., parte i. et ii., ed. Bonaini, Fabretti,
+Polidori.
+
+[63] Julius II. conquered Perugia with ease in 1506, and compelled
+Gianpaolo Baglione to submit. The latter, as Macchiavelli (_Discorsi_,
+i. c. 27) tells us, missed the chance of immortality by not murdering
+the Pope.
+
+[64] Varelin _Stor. Fiorent._ i. pp. 242 sqq.
+
+[65] Comp. (inter. al.) Jovian. Pontan. _De Immanitate_, cap. 17.
+
+[66] Malipiero, _Ann. Venet., Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. pp. 498 sqq. After
+vainly searching for his beloved, whose father had shut her up in a
+monastery he threatened the father, burnt the monastery and other
+buildings, and committed many acts of violence.
+
+[67] Lil. Greg. Giraldus, _De Sepulchris ac vario Sepeliendi Ritu_.
+_Opera_ ed. Bas. 1580, i. pp. 640 sqq. Later edition by J. Faes,
+Helmstädt, 1676 Dedication and postscript of Gir. ‘ad Carolum Miltz
+Germanum,’ in these editions without date; neither contains the passage
+given in the text.--In 1470 a catastrophe in miniature had already
+occurred in the same family (Galeotto had had his brother Antonio Maria
+thrown into prison). Comp. _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 225.
+
+[68] Jovian. Pontan. Opp. ed. Basileæ, 1538, t. i. _De Liberalitate_,
+cap. 19, 29, and _De Obedientia_, l. 4. Comp. Sismondi, x. p. 78, and
+Panormita, _De Dictis et Factis Alphonsi_, lib. i. nro. 61, iv. nro. 42.
+
+[69] Tristano Caracciolo. ‘De Fernando qui postea rex Aragonum fuit,
+ejusque posteris,’ in Muratori XXII.; Jovian Pontanus, _De Prudentia_,
+l. iv.; _De Magnanimitate_, l. i.; _De Liberalitate_, cap. 29, 36; _De
+Immanitate_, cap. 8. Cam. Porzio, _Congiura dei Baroni del Regno de
+Napoli contro il re Ferdinando I._, Pisa, 1818, cap. 29, 36, new
+edition, Naples, 1859, _passim_; Comines, Charles VIII., with the
+general characteristics of the Arragonese. See for further information
+as to Ferrante’s works for his people, the _Regis Ferdinandi primi
+Instructionum liber_, 1486-87, edited by Scipione Vopicella, which would
+dispose us to moderate to some extent the harsh judgment which has been
+passed upon him.
+
+[70] Paul. Jovius. _Histor._ i. p. 14. in the speech of a Milanese
+ambassador; _Diario Ferrarese_, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 294.
+
+[71] He lived in the closest intimacy with Jews, e.g. Isaac Abranavel,
+who fled with him to Messina. Comp. Zunz, _Zur. Gesch. und Lit._
+(Berlin, 1845) s. 529.
+
+[72] Petri Candidi Decembrii Vita Phil. Mariæ Vicecomitis, in Murat.
+xx., of which however Jovius (_Vitæ xii. Vicecomitum_ p. 186) says not
+without reason: ‘Quum omissis laudibus quæ in Philippo celebrandæ
+fuerant, vitia, notaret.’ Guarino praises this prince highly. Rosmino
+Guarini, ii. p. 75. Jovius, in the above-mentioned work (p. 186), and
+Jov. Pontanus, _De Liberalitate_, ii. cap. 28 and 31, take special
+notice of his generous conduct to the captive Alfonso.
+
+[73] Were the fourteen marble statues of the saints in the Citadel of
+Milan executed by him? See _History of the Frundsbergs_, fol. 27.
+
+[74] It troubled him: _quod aliquando ‘non esse’ necesse esset_.
+
+[75] Corio, fol. 400; Cagnola, in _Archiv. Stor._ iii. p. 125.
+
+[76] _Pii II. Comment._ iii. p. 130. Comp. ii. 87. 106. Another and
+rather darker estimate of Sforza’s fortune is given by Caracciolo, _De
+Varietate Fortunæ_, in Murat. xxii. col. 74. See for the opposite view
+the praises of Sforza’s luck in the _Oratio parentalis de divi Francesci
+Sphortiæ felicitate_, by Filelfo (the ready eulogist of any master who
+paid him), who sung, without publishing, the exploits of Francesco in
+the Sforziad. Even Decembrio, the moral and literary opponent of
+Filelfo, celebrates Sforza’s fortune in his biography (_Vita Franc.
+Sphortiæ_, in Murat. xx.). The astrologers said: ‘Francesco Sforza’s
+star brings good luck to a man, but ruin to his descendants.’ Arluni,
+_De Bello Veneto_, libri vi. in Grævius, _Thes. Antiqu. et Hist.
+Italicæ_, v. pars iii. Comp. also Barth. Facius, _De Vir. III._ p. 67.
+
+[77] Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. pp. 216 sqq. 221-4.
+
+[78] Important documents as to the murder of Galeazzo Maria Sforza are
+published by G. D’Adda in the _Archivio Storico Lombardo Giornale della
+Società Lombarda_, vol. ii. (1875), pp. 284-94. 1. A Latin epitaph on
+the murderer Lampugnano, who lost his life in the attempt, and whom the
+writer represents as saying: ‘Hic lubens quiesco, æternum inquam facinus
+monumentumque ducibus, principibus, regibus, qui modo sunt quique mox
+futura trahantur ne quid adversus justitiam faciant dicantve; 2. A Latin
+letter of Domenico de’ Belli, who, when eleven years old, was present at
+the murder; 3. The ‘lamento’ of Galeazzo Maria, in which, after calling
+upon the Virgin Mary and relating the outrage committed upon him, he
+summons his wife and children, his servants and the Italian cities which
+obeyed him, to bewail his fate, and sends forth his entreaty to all the
+nations of the earth, to the nine muses and the gods of antiquity, to
+set up a universal cry of grief.
+
+[79] _Chron. Venetum_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 65.
+
+[80] Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. p. 492. Comp. 482,
+562.
+
+[81] His last words to the same man, Bernardino da Corte, are to be
+found, certainty with oratorical decorations, but perhaps agreeing in
+the main with the thoughts of the Moor, in Senarega, Murat. xxiv. col.
+567.
+
+[82] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 336, 367, 369. The people
+believed he was forming a treasure.
+
+[83] Corio, fol. 448. The after effects of this state of things are
+clearly recognisable in those of the novels and introductions of
+Bandello which relate to Milan.
+
+[84] Amoretti, _Memorie Storiche sulla Vita Ecc. di Lionardo da Vinci_,
+pp. 35 sqq., pp. 83 sqq. Here we may also mention the Moor’s efforts for
+the improvement of the university of Pavia.
+
+[85] See his sonnets in Trucchi, _Poesie inedite_.
+
+[86] Prato, in the _Arch. Stor._ iii. 298. Comp. 302.
+
+[87] Born 1466, betrothed to Isabella, herself six years of age, in
+1480, suc. 1484; m. 1490, d. 1519. Isabella’s death, 1539. Her sons,
+Federigo (1519-1540), made Duke in 1530, and the famous Ferrante
+Gonzaga. What follows is taken from the correspondence of Isabella, with
+Appendices, _Archiv. Stor._, append., tom. ii. communicated by d’Arco.
+See the same writer, _Delle Arti e degli Artifici di Mantova_, Mant.
+1857-59, 2 vols. The catalogue of the collection has been repeatedly
+printed. Portrait and biography of Isabella in Didot, _Alde Manuce_,
+Paris, 1875, pp. lxi-lxviii. See also below, part ii. chapter 2.
+
+[88] Franc. Vettori, in the _Arch. Stor._ Append., tom. vi. p. 321. For
+Federigo, see _Vespas. Fiorent._ pp. 132 sqq. and Prendilacqua, _Vita di
+Vittorino da Feltre_, pp. 48-52. V. endeavoured to calm the ambitious
+youth Federigo, then his scholar, with the words: ‘Tu quoque Cæsar
+eris.’ There is much literary information respecting him in, e.g.,
+Favre, _Mélanges d’Hist. Lit._ i. p. 125, note 1.
+
+[89] See below, part iii. chapter 3.
+
+[90] Castiglione, _Cortigiano_, l. i.
+
+[91] Petr. Bembus, _De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio deque Elizabetha Gonzaga
+Urbini ducibus_, Venetis, 1530. Also in Bembo’s Works, Basel, 1566, i.
+pp. 529-624. In the form of a dialogue; contains among other things, the
+letter of Frid. Fregosus and the speech of Odaxius on Guido’s life and
+death.
+
+[92] What follows is chiefly taken from the _Annales Estenses_, in
+Murat. xx. and the _Diario Ferrarese_, Murat. xxiv
+
+[93] See Bandello, i. nov. 32.
+
+[94] _Diario Ferrar._ l. c. col. 347.
+
+[95] Paul. Jov. _Vita Alfonsi ducis_, ed. Flor. 1550, also an Italian by
+Giovanbattista Gelli, Flor. 1553.
+
+[96] Paulus Jovius, l. c.
+
+[97] The journey of Leo X. when Cardinal, may be also mentioned here.
+Comp. Paul. Jov. _Vita Leonis X._ lib. i. His purpose was less serious,
+and directed rather to amusement and knowledge of the world; but the
+spirit is wholly modern. No Northerner then travelled with such objects.
+
+[98] _Diar. Ferr._ in Murat. xxiv. col. 232 and 240.
+
+[99] Jovian. Pontan. _De Liberalitate_, cap. 28.
+
+[100] Giraldi, _Hecatomithi_, vi. nov. 1 (ed. 1565, fol. 223 _a_).
+
+[101] Vasari, xii. 166, _Vita di Michelangelo_.
+
+[102] As early as 1446 the members of the House of Gonzaga followed the
+corpse of Vittorino da Feltre.
+
+[103] Capitolo 19, and in the _Opere Minore_, ed. Lemonnier, vol. i. p.
+425, entitled Elegia 17. Doubtless the cause of this death (above, p.
+46) was unknown to the young poet, then 19 years old.
+
+[104] The novels in the _Hecatomithi_ of Giraldi relating to the House
+of Este are to be found, with one exception (i. nov. 8), in the 6th
+book, dedicated to Francesco of Este, Marchese della Massa, at the
+beginning of the second part of the whole work, which is inscribed to
+Alfonso II. ‘the fifth Duke of Ferrara.’ The 10th book, too, is
+specially dedicated to him, but none of the novels refer to him
+personally, and only one to his predecessor Hercules I.; the rest to
+Hercules I. ‘the second Duke,’ and Alfonso I. ‘the third Duke of
+Ferrara.’ But the stories told of these princes are for the most part
+not love tales. One of them (i. nov. 8) tells of the failure of an
+attempt made by the King of Naples to induce Hercules of Este to deprive
+Borso of the government of Ferrara; another (vi. nov. 10) describes
+Ercole’s high-spirited treatment of conspirators. The two novels that
+treat of Alfonso I. (vi. nov. 2, 4), in the latter of which he only
+plays a subordinate part, are also, as the title of the book shows and
+as the dedication to the above-named Francesco explains more fully,
+accounts of ‘atti di cortesía’ towards knights and prisoners, but not
+towards women, and only the two remaining tales are love-stories. They
+are of such a kind as can be told during the lifetime of the prince;
+they set forth his nobleness and generosity, his virtue and
+self-restraint. Only one of them (vi. nov. 1) refers to Hercules I., who
+was dead long before the novels were compiled, and only one to the
+Hercules II. then alive (b. 1508, d. 1568) son of Lucrezia Borgia,
+husband of Renata, of whom the poet says: ‘Il giovane, che non meno ha
+benigno l’animo, che cortese l’aspetto, come già il vedemmo in Roma, nel
+tempo, ch’egli, in vece del padre, venne à Papa Hadriano.’ The tale
+about him is briefly as follows:--Lucilla, the beautiful daughter of a
+poor but noble widow, loves Nicandro, but cannot marry him, as the
+lover’s father forbids him to wed a portionless maiden. Hercules, who
+sees the girl and is captivated by her beauty, finds his way, through
+the connivance of her mother, into her bedchamber, but is so touched by
+her beseeching appeal that he respects her innocence, and, giving her a
+dowry, enables her to marry Nicandro.
+
+In Bandello, ii. nov. 8 and 9 refer to Alessandro Medici, 26 to Mary of
+Aragon, iii. 26, iv. 13 to Galeazzo Sforza, iii. 36, 37 to Henry VIII.
+of England, ii. 27 to the German Emperor Maximilian. The emperor, ‘whose
+natural goodness and more than imperial generosity are praised by all
+writers,’ while chasing a stag is separated from his followers, loses
+his way, and at last emerging from the wood, enquires the way from a
+countryman. The latter, busied with lading wood, begs the emperor, whom
+he does not know, to help him, and receives willing assistance. While
+still at work, Maximilian is rejoined, and, in spite of his signs to the
+contrary, respectfully saluted by his followers, and thus recognised by
+the peasant, who implores forgiveness for the freedom he has unwittingly
+taken. The emperor raises the kneeling suppliant, gives him presents,
+appoints him as his attendant, and confers upon him distinguished
+privileges. The narrator concludes: ‘Dimostrò Cesare nello smontar da
+cavallo e con allegra ciera aiutar il bisognoso contadino, una
+indicibile e degna d’ogni lode humanità, e in sollevarlo con danari e
+privilegii dalla sua faticosa vita, aperse il suo veramente animo
+Cesareo’ (ii. 415). A story in the _Hecatomithi_ (viii. nov. 5) also
+treats of Maximilian. It is the same tale which has acquired a
+world-wide celebrity through Shakespeare’s _Measure for Measure_ (for
+its diffusion see Kirchhof’s _Wendunmuth_, ed. Oesterley, bd. v. s. 152
+sqq.), and the scene of which is transferred by Giraldi to Innsbruck.
+Maximilian is the hero, and here too receives the highest eulogies.
+After being first called ‘Massimiliano il Grande,’ he is designated as
+one ‘che fu raro esempio di cortesia, di magnanimità, e di singolare
+giustizia.’
+
+[105] In the _Deliciæ Poet. Italorum_ (1608), ii. pp. 455 sqq.: ad
+Alfonsum ducem Calabriæ. (Yet I do not believe that the above remark
+fairly applies to this poem, which clearly expresses the joys which
+Alfonso has with Drusula, and describes the sensations of the happy
+lover, who in his transports thinks that the gods themselves must envy
+him.--L.G.).
+
+[106] Mentioned as early as 1367, in the _Polistore_, in Murat. xxiv.
+col. 848, in reference to Niccolò the Elder, who makes twelve persons
+knights in honour of the twelve Apostles.
+
+[107] Burigozzo, in the _Archiv. Stor._ iii. p. 432.
+
+[108] _Discorsi_, i. 17, on Milan after the death of Filippo Visconti.
+
+[109] _De Incert. et Vanitate Scientiar._ cap. 55.
+
+[110] Prato, _Archiv. Stor._ iii. p. 241.
+
+[111] _De Casibus Virorum Illustrium_, l. ii. cap. 15.
+
+[112] _Discorsi_, iii. 6; comp. _Storie Fiorent._ l. viii. The
+description of conspiracies has been a favourite theme of Italian
+writers from a very remote period. Luitprand (of Cremona, _Mon. Germ._,
+ss. iii. 264-363) gives us a few, which are more circumstantial than
+those of any other contemporary writer of the tenth century; in the
+eleventh the deliverance of Messina from the Saracens, accomplished by
+calling in Norman Roger (Baluz. _Miscell._ i. p. 184), gives occasion to
+a characteristic narrative of this kind (1060); we need hardly speak of
+the dramatic colouring given to the stories of the Sicilian Vespers
+(1282). The same tendency is well known in the Greek writers.
+
+[113] Corio, fol. 333. For what follows, ibid. fol. 305, 422 sqq. 440.
+
+[114] So in the quotations from Gallus, in Sismondi, xi. 93. For the
+whole subject see Reumont, _Lorenzo dei Medici_, pp. 387-97, especially
+396.
+
+[115] Corio, fol. 422. Allegretto, _Diari Sanesi_, in Murat. xxiii. col.
+777. See above, p. 41.
+
+[116] The enthusiasm with which the Florentine Alamanno Rinuccini (b.
+1419) speaks in his _Ricordi_ (ed. by G. Aiazzi, Florence, 1840) of
+murderers and their deeds is very remarkable. For a contemporary, though
+not Italian, apology for tyrannicide, see Kervyn de Lettenhove, _Jean
+sans Peur et l’Apologie du Tyrannicide_, in the _Bulletin de l’Académie
+de Bruxelles_, xi. (1861), pp. 558-71. A century later opinion in Italy
+had changed altogether. See the condemnation of Lampugnani’s deed in
+Egnatius, _De Exemplis Ill. Vir._, Ven. fol. 99 _b_; comp. also 318 _b_.
+
+Petr. Crinitus, also (_De honestâ disciplinâ_, Paris, 1510, fol. 134
+_b_), writes a poem _De virtute Jo. Andr. Lamponiani tyrannicidæ_, in
+which Lampugnani’s deed is highly praised, and he himself is represented
+as a worthy companion of Brutus.
+
+Comp. also the Latin poem: _Bonini Mombritii poetæ Mediol. trenodiæ in
+funere illustrissimi D. Gal. Marie Sfor_ (2 Books--Milan, 1504), edited
+by Ascalon Vallis (_sic_), who in his dedication to the jurist Jac.
+Balsamus praises the poet and names other poems equally worthy to be
+printed. In this work, in which Megæra and Mars, Calliope and the poet,
+appear as interlocutors, the assassin--not Lampugnano, but a man from a
+humble family of artisans--is severely blamed, and he with his fellow
+conspirators are treated as ordinary criminals; they are charged with
+high treason on account of a projected alliance with Charles of
+Burgundy. No less than ten prognostics of the death of Duke Galeazzo are
+enumerated. The murder of the Prince, and the punishment of the assassin
+are vividly described; the close consists of pious consolations
+addressed to the widowed Princess, and of religious meditations.
+
+[117] ‘Con studiare el Catalinario,’ says Allegretto. Comp. (in Corio) a
+sentence like the following in the desposition of Olgiati: ‘Quisque
+nostrum magis socios potissime et infinitos alios sollicitare,
+infestare, alter alteri benevolos se facere cœpit. Aliquid aliquibus
+parum donare: simul magis noctu edere, bibere, vigilare, nostra omnia
+bona polliceri,’ etc.
+
+[118] Vasari, iii. 251, note to _V. di Donatello_.
+
+[119] It now has been removed to a newly constructed building.
+
+[120] _Inferno_, xxxiv. 64.
+
+[121] Related by a hearer, Luca della Robbia, _Archiv. Stor._ i. 273.
+Comp. Paul. Jovius, _Vita Leonis X._ iii. in the _Viri Illustres_.
+
+[122] First printed in 1723, as appendix to Varchi’s History, then in
+Roscoe, _Vita di Lorenzo de’ Medici_, vol. iv. app. 12, and often
+besides. Comp. Reumont, _Gesch. Toscana’s seit dem Ende des Florent.
+Freistaates_, Gotha, 1876, i. p. 67, note. See also the report in the
+_Lettere de’ Principi_ (ed. Venez. 1577), iii. fol. 162 sqq.
+
+[123] On the latter point see Jac. Nardi, _Vita di Ant. Giacomini_,
+Lucca (1818), p. 18.
+
+[124] ‘Genethliacum Venetæ urbis,’ in the _Carmina_ of Ant. Sabellicus.
+The 25th of March was chosen ‘essendo il cielo in singolar disposizione,
+si come da gli astronomi è stato calcolato più volte.’ Comp. Sansovino,
+_Venezia città nobilissima e singolare, descritta in 14 libri_, Venezia,
+1581, fol. 203. For the whole chapter see _Johannis Baptistæ Egnatii
+viri doctissimi de exemplis Illustrium Virorum Venetæ civitatis atque
+aliarum gentium_, Paris, 1554. The eldest Venetian chronicler, Joh.
+Diaconi, _Chron. Venetum_ in Pertz, _Monum._ S.S. vii. pp. 5, 6, places
+the occupation of the islands in the time of the Lombards and the
+foundation of the Rialto later.
+
+[125] ‘De Venetæ urbis apparatu panagiricum carmen quod oraculum
+inscribitur.’
+
+[126] The whole quarter was altered in the reconstructions of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+[127] Benedictus _Carol. VIII._ in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1597,
+1601, 1621. In the _Chron. Venetum_, Murat. xxiv. col. 26, the political
+virtues of the Venetians are enumerated: ‘bontà, innocenza, zelo di
+carità, pietà, misericordia.’
+
+[128] Many of the nobles cropped their hair. See _Erasmi Colloquia_, ed.
+Tiguri, a. 1553: miles et carthusianus.
+
+[129] _Epistolæ_, lib. v. fol. 28.
+
+[130] Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. pp. 377, 431, 481,
+493, 530; ii. pp. 661, 668, 679. _Chron. Venetum_, in Muratori, xxiv.
+col. 57. _Diario Ferrarese_, ib. col. 240. See also _Dispacci di Antonio
+Giustiniani_ (Flor. 1876), i. p. 392.
+
+[131] Malipiero, in the _Archiv. Stor._ vii. ii. p. 691. Comp. 694, 713,
+and i. 535.
+
+[132] Marin Sanudo, _Vite dei Duchi_, Murat. xxii. col. 1194.
+
+[133] _Chron. Venetum_, Murat. xxiv. col. 105.
+
+[134] _Chron. Venetum_, Murat. xxiv. col. 123 sqq. and Malipiero, l. c.
+vii. i. pp. 175, 187 sqq. relate the significant fall of the Admiral
+Antonio Grimani, who, when accused on account of his refusal to
+surrender the command in chief to another, himself put irons on his feet
+before his arrival at Venice, and presented himself in this condition to
+the Senate. For him and his future lot, see Egnatius, fol. 183 _a_ sqq.,
+198 _b_ sqq.
+
+[135] _Chron. Ven._ l. c. col. 166.
+
+[136] Malipiero, l. c. vii. i. 349. For other lists of the same kind see
+Marin Sanudo, _Vite dei Duchi_, Murat. xxii. col. 990 (year 1426), col.
+1088 (year 1440), in Corio, fol. 435-438 (1483), in Guazzo _Historie_,
+fol. 151 sqq.
+
+[137] Guicciardini (_Ricordi_, n. 150) is one of the first to remark
+that the passion for vengeance can drown the clearest voice of
+self-interest.
+
+[138] Malipiero, l. c. vii. i., p. 328.
+
+[139] The statistical view of Milan, in the ‘Manipulus Florum’ (in
+Murat. xi. 711 sqq.) for the year 1288, is important, though not
+extensive. It includes house-doors, population, men of military age,
+‘loggie’ of the nobles, wells, bakeries, wine-shops, butchers’-shops,
+fishmongers, the consumption of corn, dogs, birds of chase, the price of
+salt, wood, hay, and wines; also the judges, notaries, doctors,
+schoolmasters, copying clerks, armourers, smiths, hospitals,
+monasteries, endowments, and religious corporations. A list perhaps
+still older is found in the ‘Liber de magnalibus Mediolani,’ in _Heinr.
+de Hervordia_, ed. Potthast, p. 165. See also the statistical account of
+Asti about the year 1250 in Ogerius Alpherius (Alfieri), _De Gestis
+Astensium, Histor. patr. Monumenta, Scriptorum_, tom. iii. col. 684.
+sqq.
+
+[140] Especially Marin Sanudo, in the _Vite dei Duchi di Venezia_,
+Murat. xxii. _passim_.
+
+[141] See for the marked difference between Venice and Florence, an
+important pamphlet addressed 1472 to Lorenzo de’ Medici by certain
+Venetians, and the answer to it by Benedetto Dei, in Paganini, _Della
+Decima_, Florence, 1763, iii. pp. 135 sqq.
+
+[142] In Sanudo, l. c. col. 958. What relates to trade is extracted in
+Scherer, _Allgem. Gesch. des Welthandels_, i. 326, note.
+
+[143] Here all the houses, not merely those owned by the state, are
+meant. The latter, however, sometimes yielded enormous rents. See
+Vasari, xiii. 83. V. d. Jac. Sansovino.
+
+[144] See Sanudo, col. 963. In the same place a list of the incomes of
+the other Italian and European powers is given. An estimate for 1490 is
+to be found, col. 1245 sqq.
+
+[145] This dislike seems to have amounted to positive hatred in Paul II.
+who called the humanists one and all heretics. Platina, _Vita Pauli_,
+ii. p. 323. See also for the subject in general, Voigt, _Wiederbelebung
+des classischen Alterthums_, Berlin, 1859, pp. 207-213. The neglect of
+the sciences is given as a reason for the flourishing condition of
+Venice by Lil. Greg. Giraldus, _Opera_, ii. p. 439.
+
+[146] Sanudo, l. c. col. 1167.
+
+[147] Sansovina, _Venezia_, lib. xiii. It contains the biographies of
+the Doges in chronological order, and, following these lives one by one
+(regularly from the year 1312, under the heading _Scrittori Veneti_),
+short notices of contemporary writers.
+
+[148] Venice was then one of the chief seats of the Petrarchists. See G.
+Crespan, _Del Petrarchismo_, in _Petrarca e Venezia_, 1874, pp. 187-253.
+
+[149] See Heinric. de Hervordia ad a. 1293, p. 213, ed. Potthast, who
+says: ‘The Venetians wished to obtain the body of Jacob of Forli from
+the inhabitants of that place, as many miracles were wrought by it. They
+promised many things in return, among others to bear all the expense of
+canonising the defunct, but without obtaining their request.’
+
+[150] Sanudo, l. c. col. 1158, 1171, 1177. When the body of St. Luke was
+brought from Bosnia, a dispute arose with the Benedictines of S.
+Giustina at Padua, who claimed to possess it already, and the Pope had
+to decide between the two parties. Comp. Guicciardini, _Ricordi_, n.
+401.
+
+[151] Sansovino, _Venezia_, lib. xii. ‘dell’andate publiche del
+principe.’ Egnatius, fol. 50_a_. For the dread felt at the papal
+interdict see Egnatius, fol. 12 _a_ sqq.
+
+[152] G. Villani, viii. 36. The year 1300 is also a fixed date in the
+_Divine Comedy_.
+
+[153] Stated about 1470 in _Vespas. Fiorent._ p. 554.
+
+[154] The passage which followed in former editions referring to the
+_Chronicle of Dino Compagni_ is here omitted, since the genuineness of
+the _Chronicle_ has been disproved by Paul Scheffer-Boichhorst
+(_Florentiner Studien_, Leipzig, 1874, pp. 45-210), and the disproof
+maintained (_Die Chronik des D. C._, Leipzig, 1875) against a
+distinguished authority (C. Hegel, _Die Chronik des D. C., Versuch einer
+Rettung_, Leipzig, 1875). Scheffer’s view is generally received in
+Germany (see W. Bernhardi, _Der Stand der Dino-Frage, Hist. Zeitschr.
+N.F._, 1877, bd. i.), and even Hegel assumes that the text as we have it
+is a later manipulation of an unfinished work of Dino. Even in Italy,
+though the majority of scholars have wished to ignore this critical
+onslaught, as they have done other earlier ones of the same kind, some
+voices have been raised to recognise the spuriousness of the document.
+(See especially P. Fanfani in his periodical _Il Borghini_, and in the
+book _Dino Campagni Vendicato_, Milano, 1875). On the earliest
+Florentine histories in general see Hartwig, _Forschungen_, Marburg,
+1876, and C. Hegel in H. von Sybel’s _Historischer Zeitschrift_, b.
+xxxv. Since then Isidore del Lungo, who with remarkable decision asserts
+its genuineness, has completed his great edition of Dino, and furnished
+it with a detailed introduction: _Dino Campagni e la sua cronaca_, 2
+vols. Firenze, 1879-80. A manuscript of the history, dating back to the
+beginning of the fifteenth century, and consequently earlier than all
+the hitherto known references and editions, has been lately found. In
+consequence of the discovery of this MS. and of the researches
+undertaken by C. Hegel, and especially of the evidence that the style of
+the work does not differ from that of the fourteenth century, the
+prevailing view of the subject is essentially this, that the Chronicle
+contains an important kernel, which is genuine, which, however, perhaps
+even in the fourteenth century, was remodelled on the ground-plan of
+Villani’s Chronicle. Comp. Gaspary, _Geschichte der italienischen
+Literatur_. Berlin, 1885, i. pp. 361-9, 531 sqq.
+
+[155] _Purgatorio_, vi. at the end.
+
+[156] _De Monarchia_, i. 1. (New critical edition by Witte, Halle, 1863,
+71; German translation by O. Hubatsch, Berlin, 1872).
+
+[157] _Dantis Alligherii Epistolæ_, cum notis C. Witte, Padua, 1827. He
+wished to keep the Pope as well as the Emperor always in Italy. See his
+letter, p. 35, during the conclave of Carpentras, 1314. On the first
+letter see _Vitæ Nuova_, cap. 31, and _Epist._ p. 9.
+
+[158] Giov. Villani, xi. 20. Comp. Matt. Villani, ix. 93, who says that
+John XXII. ‘astuto in tutte sue cose e massime in fare il danaio,’ left
+behind him 18 million florins in cash and 6 millions in jewels.
+
+[159] See for this and similar facts Giov. Villani, xi. 87, xii. 54. He
+lost his own money in the crash and was imprisoned for debt. See also
+Kervyn de Lettenhove, _L’Europe au Siècle de Philippe le Bel, Les
+Argentiers Florentins_ in _Bulletin de l’Académie de Bruxelles_ (1861),
+vol. xii. pp. 123 sqq.
+
+[160] Giov. Villani, xi. 92, 93. In Macchiavelli, _Stor. Fiorent._ lib.
+ii. cap. 42, we read that 96,000 persons died of the plague in 1348.
+
+[161] The priest put aside a black bean for every boy and a white one
+for every girl. This was the only means of registration.
+
+[162] There was already a permanent fire brigade in Florence.
+
+[163] Matteo Villani, iii. 106.
+
+[164] Matteo Villani, i. 2-7, comp. 58. The best authority for the
+plague itself is the famous description by Boccaccio at the beginning of
+the _Decameron_.
+
+[165] Giov. Villani, x. 164.
+
+[166] _Ex Annalibus Ceretani_, in Fabroni, _Magni Cormi Vita_, Adnot.
+34. vol. ii. p. 63.
+
+[167] _Ricordi_ of Lorenzo, in Fabroni. _Laur. Med. Magnifici Vita_,
+Adnot. 2 and 25. Paul. Jovius, _Elogia_, pp. 131 sqq. Cosmus.
+
+[168] Given by Benedetto Dei, in the passage quoted above (p. 70, note
+1). It must be remembered that the account was intended to serve as a
+warning to assailants. For the whole subject see Reumont, _Lor. dei
+Medici_, ii. p. 419. The financial project of a certain Ludovico Ghetti,
+with important facts, is given in Roscoe, _Vita di Lor. Med._ ii.
+Append, i.
+
+[169] E. g. in the _Arch. Stor._ iv.(?) See as a contrast the very
+simple ledger of Ott. Nuland, 1455-1462 (Stuttg. 1843), and for a rather
+later period the day-book of Lukas Rem, 1494-1541, ed. by B. Greiff,
+Augsb., 1861.
+
+[170] Libri, _Histoire des Sciences Mathématiques_, ii. 163 sqq.
+
+[171] Varchi, _Stor. Fiorent._ iii. p. 56 and sqq. up to the end of the
+9th book. Some obviously erroneous figures are probably no more than
+clerical or typographical blunders.
+
+[172] In respect of prices and of wealth in Italy, I am only able, in
+default of further means of investigation, to bring together some
+scattered facts, which I have picked up here and there. Obvious
+exaggerations must be put aside. The gold coins which are worth
+referring to are the ducat, the sequin, the ‘fiorino d’oro,’ and the
+‘scudo d’oro.’ The value of all is nearly the same, 11 to 12 francs of
+our money.
+
+In Venice, for example, the Doge Andrea Vendramin (1476) with 170,000
+ducats passed for an exceedingly rich man (Malipiero, l. c. vii. ii. p.
+666. The confiscated fortune of Colleoni amounted to 216,000 florins, l.
+c. p. 244.
+
+About 1460 the Patriarch of Aquileia, Ludovico Patavino, with 200,000
+ducats, was called ‘perhaps the richest of all Italians.’ (Gasp.
+Veroneus _Vita Pauli II._, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1027.) Elsewhere
+fabulous statements.
+
+Antonio Grimani paid 30,000 ducats for his son’s election as Cardinal.
+His ready money alone was put at 100,000 ducats. (_Chron. Venetum_,
+Murat. xxiv. col. 125.)
+
+For notices as to the grain in commerce and on the market at Venice, see
+in particular Malipiero, l. c. vii. ii. p. 709 sqq. Date 1498.
+
+In 1522 it is no longer Venice, but Genoa, next to Rome, which ranks as
+the richest city in Italy (only credible on the authority of Francesco.
+Vettori. See his history in the _Archiv. Stor._ Append. tom. vi. p.
+343). Bandello, _parte_ ii. _novello_ 34 and 42, names as the richest
+Genoese merchant of his time Ansaldo Grimaldi.
+
+Between 1400 and 1580 Franc. Sansovino assumes a depreciation of 50 per
+cent. in the value of money. (_Venezia_, fol. 151 bis.)
+
+In Lombardy it is believed that the relation between the price of corn
+about the middle of the fifteenth and that at the middle of the present
+century is as 3 to 8. (Sacco di Piacenza, in _Archiv. Stor._ Append.
+tom. v. Note of editor Scarabelli.)
+
+At Ferrara there were people at the time of Duke Borso with 50,000 to
+60,000 ducats (_Diario Ferrarese_, Murat. xxiv. col. 207, 214, 218; an
+extravagant statement, col. 187). In Florence the data are exceptional
+and do not justify a conclusion as to averages. Of this kind are the
+loans to foreign princes, in which the names of one or two houses only
+appear, but which were in fact the work of great companies. So too the
+enormous fines levied on defeated parties; we read, e.g. that from 1430
+to 1453 seventy-seven families paid 4,875,000 gold florins (Varchi, iii.
+p. 115 sqq.), and that Giannozzo Mannetti alone, of whom we shall have
+occasion to speak hereafter, was forced to pay a sum of 135,000 gold
+florins, and was reduced thereby to beggary (Reumont, i. 157).
+
+The fortune of Giovanni Medici amounted at his death (1428) to 179,221
+gold florins, but the latter alone of his two sons Cosimo and Lorenzo
+left at his death (1440) as much as 235,137 (Fabroni, _Laur. Med._
+Adnot. 2). Cosimo’s son Piero left (1469) 237,982 scudi (Reumont,
+_Lorenzo de’ Medici_, i. 286).
+
+It is a proof of the general activity of trade that the forty-four
+goldsmiths on the Ponte Vecchio paid in the fourteenth century a rent of
+800 florins to the Government (Vasari, ii. 114, _Vita di Taddeo Gaddi_).
+The diary of Buonaccorso Pitti (in Delécluze, _Florence et ses
+Vicissitudes_, vol. ii.) is full of figures, which, however, only prove
+in general the high price of commodities and the low value of money.
+
+For Rome, the income of the Curia, which was derived from all Europe,
+gives us no criterion; nor are statements about papal treasures and the
+fortunes of cardinals very trustworthy. The well-known banker Agostino
+Chigi left (1520) a fortune of in all 800,000 ducats (_Lettere
+Pittoriche_, i. Append. 48).
+
+During the high prices of the year 1505 the value of the _staro
+ferrarrese del grano_, which commonly weighed from 68 to 70 pounds
+(German), rose to 1⅓ ducats. The _semola_ or _remolo_ was sold at
+_venti soldi lo staro_; in the following fruitful years the _staro_
+fetched six _soldi_. Bonaventura Pistofilo, p. 494. At Ferrara the rent
+of a house yearly in 1455 was 25 _Lire_; comp. _Atti e memorie_, Parma,
+vi. 250; see 265 sqq. for a documentary statement of the prices which
+were paid to artists and amanuenses.
+
+From the inventory of the Medici (extracts in Muntz, _Prècurseurs_, 158
+sqq.) it appears that the jewels were valued at 12,205 ducats; the rings
+at 1,792; the pearls (apparently distinguished from other jewels,
+S.G.C.M.) at 3,512; the medallions, cameos and mosaics at 2,579; the
+vases at 4,850; the reliquaries and the like at 3,600; the library at
+2,700; the silver at 7,000. Giov. Rucellai reckons that in 1473(?) he
+has paid 60,000 gold florins in taxes, 10,000 for the dowries of his
+five daughters, 2,000 for the improvement of the church of Santa Maria
+Novella. In 1474 he lost 20,000 gold florins through the intrigues of an
+enemy. (_Autografo dallo Tibaldone di G.R._, Florence, 1872). The
+marriage of Barnardo Rucellai with Nannina, the sister of Lorenzo de’
+Medici, cost 3,686 florins (Muntz, _Précurseurs_, 244, i).
+
+[173] So far as Cosimo (1433-1465) and his grandson Lorenzo Magnifico
+(d. 1492) are concerned, the author refrains from any criticism on their
+internal policy. The exaltation of both, particularly of Lorenzo, by
+William Roscoe (_Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, called the Magnificent_,
+1st ed. Liverpool, 1795; 10th ed. London, 1851), seems to have been a
+principal cause of the reaction of feeling against them. This reaction
+appeared first in Sismondi (_Hist. des Rép. Italiennes_, xi.), in reply
+to whose strictures, sometimes unreasonably severe, Roscoe again came
+forward (_Illustrations, Historical and Critical, of the Life of Lor. d.
+Med._, London, 1822); later in Gino Capponi (_Archiv. Stor. Ital._ i.
+(1842), pp. 315 sqq.), who afterwards (_Storia della Rep. di Firenze_, 2
+vols. Florence, 1875) gave further proofs and explanations of his
+judgment. See also the work of Von Reumont (_Lor. d. Med. il Magn._), 2
+vols. Leipzig, 1874, distinguished no less by the judicial calmness of
+its views than by the mastery it displays of the extensive materials
+used. See also A. Castelman: _Les Medicis_, 2 vols. Paris, 1879. The
+subject here is only casually touched upon. Comp. two works of B. Buser
+(Leipzig, 1879) devoted to the home and foreign policy of the Medici.
+(1) _Die Beziehungen der Medicus zu Frankreich._ 1434-1494, &c. (2)
+_Lorenzo de’ Medici als italienischen Staatsman_, &c., 2nd ed., 1883.
+
+[174] Franc. Burlamacchi, father of the head of the Lucchese
+Protestants, Michele B. See _Arch. Stor. Ital._ ser. i. tom. x., pp.
+435-599; Documenti, pp. 146 sqq.; further Carlo Minutoli, _Storia di Fr.
+B._, Lucca, 1844, and the important additions of Leone del Prete in the
+_Giornale Storico degli Archiv. Toscani_, iv. (1860), pp. 309 sqq. It is
+well known how Milan, by its hard treatment of the neighbouring cities
+from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, prepared the way for the
+foundation of a great despotic state. Even at the time of the extinction
+of the Visconti in 1447, Milan frustrated the deliverance of Upper
+Italy, principally through not accepting the plan of a confederation of
+equal cities. Comp. Corio, fol. 358 sqq.
+
+[175] On the third Sunday in Advent, 1494, Savonarola preached as
+follows on the method of bringing about a new constitution: The sixteen
+companies of the city were each to work out a plan, the Gonfalonieri to
+choose the four best of these, and the Signory to name the best of all
+on the reduced list. Things, however, took a different turn, under the
+influence indeed of the preacher himself. See P. Villari, _Savonarola_.
+Besides this sermon, S. had written a remarkable _Trattato circa il
+regimento di Ferenze_ (reprinted at Lucca, 1817).
+
+[176] The latter first in 1527, after the expulsion of the Medici. See
+Varchi, i. 121, &c.
+
+[177] Macchiavelli, _Storie Fior._ l. iii. cap. 1: ‘Un Savio dator di
+leggi,’ could save Florence.
+
+[178] Varchi, _Stor. Fior._ i. p. 210.
+
+[179] ‘Discorso sopra il riformar lo Stato di Firenze,’ in the _Opere
+Minori_, p. 207.
+
+[180] The same view, doubtless borrowed from here, occurs in
+Montesquieu.
+
+[181] Belonging to a rather later period (1532?). Compare the opinion of
+Guicciardini, terrible in its frankness, on the condition and inevitable
+organisation of the Medicean party. _Lettere di Principi_, iii. fol.
+124, (ediz. Venez. 1577).
+
+[182] Æn. Sylvii, _Apologia ad Martinum Mayer_, p. 701. To the same
+effect Macchiavelli, _Discorsi_, i. 55, and elsewhere.
+
+[183] How strangely modern half-culture affected political life is shown
+by the party struggles of 1535. Della Valle, _Lettere Sanesi_, iii. p.
+317. A number of small shopkeepers, excited by the study of Livy and of
+Macchiavelli’s _Discorsi_, call in all seriousness for tribunes of the
+people and other Roman magistrates against the misgovernment of the
+nobles and the official classes.
+
+[184] Piero Valeriano, _De Infelicitate Literator._, speaking of
+Bartolommeo della Rovere. (The work of P. V. written 1527 is quoted
+according to the edition by Menken, _Analecta de Calamitate
+Literatorum_, Leipz. 1707.) The passage here meant can only be that at
+p. 384, from which we cannot infer what is stated in the text, but in
+which we read that B. d. R. wished to make his son abandon a taste for
+study which he had conceived and put him into business.
+
+[185] Senarega, _De reb. Genuens_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 548. For the
+insecurity of the time see esp. col. 519, 525, 528, &c. For the frank
+language of the envoy on the occasion of the surrender of the state to
+Francesco Sforza (1464), when the envoy told him that Genoa surrendered
+in the hope of now living safely and comfortably, see Cagnola, _Archiv.
+Stor._ iii. p. 165 sqq. The figures of the Archbishop, Doge, Corsair,
+and (later) Cardinal Paolo Fregoso form a notable contrast to the
+general picture of the condition of Italy.
+
+[186] So Varchi, at a much later time. _Stor. Fiorent._ i. 57.
+
+[187] Galeazzo Maria Sforza, indeed, declared the contrary (1467) to the
+Venetian agent, namely, that Venetian subjects had offered to join him
+in making war on Venice; but this is only vapouring. Comp. Malipiero,
+_Annali Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. p. 216 sqq. On every occasion
+cities and villages voluntarily surrendered to Venice, chiefly, it is
+true, those that escaped from the hands of some despot, while Florence
+had to keep down the neighbouring republics, which were used to
+independence, by force of arms, as Guicciardini (_Ricordi_, n. 29)
+observes.
+
+[188] Most strongly, perhaps, in an instruction to the ambassadors going
+to Charles VII. in the year 1452. (See Fabroni, _Cosmus_, Adnot. 107,
+fol. ii. pp. 200 sqq.) The Florentine envoys were instructed to remind
+the king of the centuries of friendly relations which had subsisted
+between France and their native city, and to recall to him that Charles
+the Great had delivered Florence and Italy from the barbarians
+(Lombards), and that Charles I. and the Romish Church were ‘fondatori
+della parte Guelfa. Il qual fundamento fa cagione della ruina della
+contraria parte e introdusse lo stato di felicità, in che noi siamo.’
+When the young Lorenzo visited the Duke of Anjou, then staying at
+Florence, he put on a French dress. Fabroni, ii. p. 9.
+
+[189] Comines, _Charles VIII._ chap. x. The French were considered
+‘comme saints.’ Comp. chap. 17; _Chron. Venetum_, in Murat. xxiv. col.
+5, 10, 14, 15; Matarazzo, _Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p.
+23, not to speak of countless other proofs. See especially the documents
+in Desjardins, op. cit. p. 127, note 1.
+
+[190] _Pii II. Commentarii_, x. p. 492.
+
+[191] Gingins, _Dépêches des Ambassadeurs Milanais_, _etc._ i. pp. 26,
+153, 279, 283, 285, 327, 331, 345, 359; ii. pp. 29, 37, 101, 217, 306.
+Charles once spoke of giving Milan to the young Duke of Orleans.
+
+[192] Niccolò Valori, _Vita di Lorenzo_, Flor. 1568. Italian translation
+of the Latin original, first printed in 1749 (later in Galletti, _Phil.
+Villani, Liber de Civit. Flor. famosis Civibus_, Florence, 1847, pp.
+161-183; passage here referred to p. 171). It must not, however, be
+forgotten that this earliest biography, written soon after the death of
+Lorenzo, is a flattering rather than a faithful portrait, and that the
+words here attributed to Lorenzo are not mentioned by the French
+reporter, and can, in fact, hardly have been uttered. Comines, who was
+commissioned by Louis XI. to go to Rome and Florence, says (_Mémoires_,
+l. vi. chap. 5): ‘I could not offer him an army, and had nothing with me
+but my suite.’ (Comp. Reumont, _Lorenzo_, i. p. 197, 429; ii. 598). In a
+letter from Florence to Louis XI. we read (Aug. 23, 1478: ‘Omnis spes
+nostra reposita est in favoribus suæ majestatis.’ A. Desjardins,
+_Négociations Diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane_ (Paris, 1859),
+i. p. 173. Similarly Lorenzo himself in Kervyn de Lettenhove, _Lettres
+et Négotiations de Philippe de Comines_, i. p. 190. Lorenzo, we see, is
+in fact the one who humbly begs for help, not who proudly declines it.
+
+Dr. Geiger in his appendix maintains that Dr. Burchhardt’s view as to
+Lorenzo’s national Italian policy is not borne out by evidence. Into
+this discussion the translator cannot enter. It would need strong proof
+to convince him that the masterly historical perception of Dr.
+Burchhardt was in error as to a subject which he has studied with minute
+care. In an age when diplomatic lying and political treachery were
+matters of course, documentary evidence loses much of its weight, and
+cannot be taken without qualification as representing the real feelings
+of the persons concerned, who fenced, turned about, and lied, first on
+one side and then on another, with an agility surprising to those
+accustomed to live among truth-telling people (S.G.C.M.)
+
+Authorities quoted by Dr. Geiger are: Reumont, _Lorenzo_, 2nd ed., i.
+310; ii. 450. Desjardins: _Négociations Diplomatiques de la France avec
+la Toscane_ (Paris, 1859), i. 173. Kervyn de Lettenhove, _Lettres et
+Négociations de Philippe de Comines_, i. 180.
+
+[193] Fabroni, _Laurentius Magnificus_, Adnot. 205 sqq. In one of his
+Briefs it was said literally, ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta
+movebo;’ but it is to be hoped that he did not allude to the Turks.
+(Villari, _Storia di Savonarola_, ii. p. 48 of the ‘Documenti.’)
+
+[194] E.g. Jovian. Pontan. in his _Charon_. In the dialogue between
+Æcus, Minos, and Mercurius (_Op._ ed. Bas. ii. p. 1167) the first says:
+‘Vel quod haud multis post sæculis futurum auguror, ut Italia, cujus
+intestina te odia male habent Minos, in unius redacta ditionem resumat
+imperii majestatem.’ And in reply to Mercury’s warning against the
+Turks, Æcus answers: ‘Quamquam timenda hæc sunt, tamen si vetera
+respicimus, non ab Asia aut Græcia, verum a Gallis Germanisque timendum
+Italiæ semper fuit.’
+
+[195] Comines, _Charles VIII._, chap. 7. How Alfonso once tried in time
+of war to seize his opponents at a conference, is told by Nantiporto, in
+Murat. iii. ii. col. 1073. He was a genuine predecessor of Cæsar Borgia.
+
+[196] _Pii II. Commentarii_, x. p. 492. See a letter of Malatesta in
+which he recommends to Mohammed II. a portrait-painter, Matteo Passo of
+Verona, and announces the despatch of a book on the art of war, probably
+in the year 1463, in Baluz. _Miscell._ iii. 113. What Galeazzo Maria of
+Milan told in 1467 to a Venetian envoy, namely, that he and his allies
+would join with the Turks to destroy Venice, was said merely by way of
+threat. Comp. Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. p. 222.
+For Boccalino, see page 36.
+
+[197] Porzio, _Congiura dei Baroni_, l. i. p. 5. That Lorenzo, as Porzio
+hints, really had a hand in it, is not credible. On the other hand, it
+seems only too certain that Venice prompted the Sultan to the deed. See
+Romanin, _Storia Documentata di Venezia_, lib. xi. cap. 3. After Otranto
+was taken, Vespasiano Bisticci uttered his ‘Lamento d’Italia, _Archiv.
+Stor. Ital._ iv. pp. 452 sqq.
+
+[198] _Chron. Venet._ in Murat. xxiv. col. 14 and 76.
+
+[199] Malipiero, l. c. p. 565, 568.
+
+[200] Trithem. _Annales Hirsaug_, ad. a. 1490, tom. ii. pp. 535 sqq.
+
+[201] Malipiero, l. c. 161; comp. p. 152. For the surrender of Djem to
+Charles VIII. see p. 145, from which it is clear that a connection of
+the most shameful kind existed between Alexander and Bajazet, even if
+the documents in Burcardus be spurious. See on the subject Ranke, _Zur
+Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber_, 2 Auflage, Leipzig, 1874, p. 99, and
+Gregorovius, bd. vii. 353, note 1. _Ibid._ p. 353, note 2, a declaration
+of the Pope that he was not allied with the Turks.
+
+[202] Bapt. Mantuanus, _De Calamitatibus Temporum_, at the end of the
+second book, in the song of the Nereid Doris to the Turkish fleet.
+
+[203] Tommaso Gar, _Relaz. della Corte di Roma_, i. p. 55.
+
+[204] Ranke, _Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker_. The
+opinion of Michelet (_Reforme_, p. 467), that the Turks would have
+adopted Western civilisation in Italy, does not satisfy me. This mission
+of Spain is hinted at, perhaps for the first time, in the speech
+delivered by Fedra Inghirami in 1510 before Julius II., at the
+celebration of the capture of Bugia by the fleet of Ferdinand the
+Catholic. See _Anecdota Litteraria_, ii. p. 419.
+
+[205] Among others Corio, fol. 333. Jov. Pontanus, in his treatise, _De
+Liberalitate_, cap. 28, considers the free dismissal of Alfonso as a
+proof of the ‘liberalitas’ of Filippo Maria. (See above, p. 38, note 1.)
+Compare the line of conduct adopted with regard to Sforza, fol. 329.
+
+[206] Nic. Valori, _Vita di Lorenzo_; Paul Jovius, _Vita Leonis X._ l.
+i. The latter certainly upon good authority, though not without
+rhetorical embellishment. Comp. Reumont, i. 487, and the passage there
+quoted.
+
+[207] If Comines on this and many other occasions observes and judges as
+objectively as any Italian, his intercourse with Italians, particularly
+with Angelo Catto, must be taken into account.
+
+[208] Comp. e.g. Malipiero, pp. 216, 221, 236, 237, 468, &c., and above
+pp. 88, note 2, and 93, note 1. Comp. Egnatius, fol. 321 _a_. The Pope
+curses an ambassador; a Venetian envoy insults the Pope; another, to win
+over his hearers, tells a fable.
+
+[209] In Villari, _Storia di Savonarola_, vol. ii. p. xliii. of the
+‘Documenti,’ among which are to be found other important political
+letters. Other documents, particularly of the end of the fifteenth
+century in Baluzius, _Miscellanea_, ed. Mansi, vol. i. See especially
+the collected despatches of Florentine and Venetian ambassadors at the
+end of the fifteenth and beginning of sixteenth centuries in Desjardins,
+_Négotiations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane_. vols. i. ii.
+Paris. 1859, 1861.
+
+[210] The subject has been lately treated more fully by Max Jähns, _Die
+Kriegskunst als Kunst_, Leipzig, 1874.
+
+[211] _Pii II. Comment._ iv. p. 190, ad. a. 1459.
+
+[212] The Cremonese prided themselves on their skill in this department.
+See _Cronaca di Cremona_ in the _Bibliotheca Historica Italica_, vol. i.
+Milan, 1876, p. 214, and note. The Venetians did the same, Egnatius,
+fol. 300 sqq.
+
+[213] To this effect Paul Jovius (_Elogia_, p. 184) who adds: ‘Nondum
+enim invecto externarum gentium cruento more, Italia milites sanguinarii
+et multæ cædis avidi esse didicerant.’ We are reminded of Frederick of
+Urbino, who would have been ‘ashamed’ to tolerate a printed book in his
+library. See _Vespas. Fiorent._
+
+[214] _Porcellii Commentaria Jac. Picinini_, in Murat. xx. A
+continuation for the war of 1453, _ibid._ xxv. Paul Cortesius (_De
+Hominibus Doctis_, p. 33, Florence, 1734) criticises the book severely
+on account of the wretched hexameters.
+
+[215] Porcello calls Scipio Æmilianus by mistake, meaning Africanus
+Major.
+
+[216] Simonetta, _Hist. Fr. Sfortiæ_, in Murat. xxi. col. 630.
+
+[217] So he was considered. Comp. Bandello, parte i. nov. 40.
+
+[218] Comp. e.g. _De Obsidione Tiphernatium_, in vol. 2, of the _Rer.
+Italic. Scriptores excodd. Florent._ col. 690. The duel of Marshal
+Boucicault with Galeazzo Gonzaga (1406) in Cagnola, _Arch. Stor._ iii.
+p. 25. Infessura tells us of the honour paid by Sixtus IV. to the
+duellists among his guards. His successors issued bulls against
+duelling.
+
+[219] We may here notice parenthetically (see Jähns, pp. 26, sqq.) the
+less favourable side of the tactics of the Condottieri. The combat was
+often a mere sham-fight, in which the enemy was forced to withdraw by
+harmless manœuvres. The object of the combatants was to avoid bloodshed,
+at the worst to make prisoners with a view to the ransom. According to
+Macchiavelli, the Florentines lost in a great battle in the year 1440
+one man only.
+
+[220] For details, see _Arch. Stor._ Append. tom. v.
+
+[221] Here once for all we refer our readers to Ranke’s _Popes_, vol.
+i., and to Sugenheim, _Geschichte der Entstehung und Ausbildung des
+Kirchenstaates_. The still later works of Gregorovius and Reumont have
+also been made use of, and when they offer new facts or views, are
+quoted. See also _Geschichte der römischen Papstthums_, W. Wattenbach,
+Berlin, 1876.
+
+[222] For the impression made by the blessing of Eugenius IV. in
+Florence, see _Vespasiano Fiorent_, p. 18. See also the passage quoted
+in Reumont, _Lorenzo_, i. 171. For the impressive offices of Nicholas
+V., see Infessura (Eccard, ii. col. 1883 sqq.) and J. Manetti, _Vita
+Nicolai V._ (Murat. iii. ii. col. 923). For the homage given to Pius
+II., see _Diario Ferrarese_ (Murat. xxiv. col. 205), and _Pii II.
+Commentarii_, _passim_, esp. iv. 201, 204, and xi. 562. For Florence,
+see _Delizie degli Eruditi_, xx. 368. Even professional murderers
+respect the person of the Pope.
+
+The great offices in church were treated as matters of much importance
+by the pomp-loving Paul II. (Platina, l. c. 321) and by Sixtus IV., who,
+in spite of the gout, conducted mass at Easter in a sitting posture.
+(_Jac. Volaterran. Diarium_, Murat. xxiii. col. 131.) It is curious to
+notice how the people distinguished between the magical efficacy of the
+blessing and the unworthiness of the man who gave it; when he was unable
+to give the benediction on Ascension Day, 1481, the populace murmured
+and cursed him. (_Ibid._ col. 133.)
+
+[223] Macchiavelli, _Scritti Minori_, p. 142, in the well-known essay on
+the catastrophe of Sinigaglia. It is true that the French and Spanish
+soldiers were still more zealous than the Italians. Comp. in Paul. Jov.
+_Vita Leonis X._ (l. ii.) the scene before the battle of Ravenna, in
+which the Legate, weeping for joy, was surrounded by the Spanish troops,
+and besought for absolution. See further (_ibid._) the statements
+respecting the French in Milan.
+
+[224] In the case of the heretics of Poli, in the Campagna, who held the
+doctrine that a genuine Pope must show the poverty of Christ as the mark
+of his calling, we have simply a kind of Waldensian doctrine. Their
+imprisonment under Paul II. is related by Infessura (Eccard, ii. col.
+1893), Platina, p. 317, &c.
+
+[225] As an illustration of this feeling see the poem addressed to the
+Pope, quoted in Gregorovius, vii. 136.
+
+[226] _Dialogus de Conjuratione Stephani de Porcariis_, by his
+contemporary Petrus Godes de Vicenza, quoted and used by Gregorovius,
+viii. 130. L. B. Alberti, _De Porcaria Conjuratione_, in Murat. xxv.
+col. 309. Porcari was desirous ‘omnem pontificiam turbam funditus
+exstinguere.’ The author concludes: ‘Video sane, quo stent loco res
+Italiæ; intelligo qui sint, quibus hic perturbata esse omnia
+conducat....’ He names them ‘Extrinsecus impulsores,’ and is of opinion
+that Porcari will find successors in his misdeeds. The dreams of Porcari
+certainly bore some resemblance to those of Cola Rienzi. He also
+referred to himself the poem ‘Spirto Gentil,’ addressed by Petrarch to
+Rienzi.
+
+[227] ‘Ut Papa tantum vicarius Christi sit et non etiam Cæsaris.... Tunc
+Papa et dicetur et erit pater sanctus, pater omnium, pater ecclesiæ,’
+&c. Valla’s work was written rather earlier, and was aimed at Eugenius
+IV. See Vahlen, _Lor. Valla_ (Berlin, 1870), pp. 25 sqq., esp. 32.
+Nicholas V., on the other hand, is praised by Valla, Gregorovius, vii.
+136.
+
+[228] _Pii II. Comment._ iv. pp. 208 sqq. Voigt, _Enea Silvio_, iii. pp.
+151 sqq.
+
+[229] Platina, _Vita Pauli II._
+
+[230] Battista Mantovano, _De Calamitatibus Temporum_, l. iii. The
+Arabian sells incense, the Tyrian purple, the Indian ivory: ‘Venalia
+nobis templa, sacerdotes, altaria sacra, coronæ, ignes, thura, preces,
+cælum est venale Deusque.’ _Opera_, ed. Paris, 1507, fol. 302 _b_. Then
+follows an exhortation to Pope Sixtus, whose previous efforts are
+praised, to put an end to these evils.
+
+[231] See e.g. the _Annales Placentini_, in Murat. xx. col. 943.
+
+[232] Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 416-420. Pietro had already helped
+at the election of Sixtus. See Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii.
+col. 1895. It is curious that in 1469 it had been prophesied that
+deliverance would come from Savona (home of Sixtus, elected in 1471)
+within three years. See the letter and date in Baluz. _Miscell._ iii. p.
+181. According to Macchiavelli, _Storie Fiorent._ l. vii. the Venetians
+poisoned the cardinal. Certainly they were not without motives to do so.
+
+[233] Honorius II. wished, after the death of William I. (1127), to
+annex Apulia, as a feof reverted to St. Peter.
+
+[234] Fabroni, _Laurentius Mag._ Adnot. 130. An informer, Vespucci,
+sends word of both, ‘Hanno in ogni elezione a mettere a sacco questa
+corte, e sono i maggior ribaldi del mondo.’
+
+[235] Corio, fol. 450. Details, partly from unpublished documents, of
+these acts of bribery in Gregorovius, vii. 310 sqq.
+
+[236] A most characteristic letter of exhortation by Lorenzo in Fabroni,
+_Laurentius Magn._ Adnot. 217, and extracts in Ranke, _Popes_, i. p. 45,
+and in Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. pp. 482 sqq.
+
+[237] And perhaps of certain Neapolitan feofs, for the sake of which
+Innocent called in the Angevins afresh against the immovable Ferrante.
+The conduct of the Pope in this affair and his participation in the
+second conspiracy of the barons, were equally foolish and dishonest. For
+his method of treating with foreign powers, see above p. 127, note 2.
+
+[238] Comp. in particular Infessura, in Eccard. _Scriptores_, ii.
+_passim_.
+
+[239] According to the _Dispacci di Antonio Giustiniani_, i. p. 60, and
+iii. p. 309, Seb. Pinzon was a native of Cremona.
+
+[240] Recently by Gregorovius, _Lucrezia Borgia_, 2 Bände 3 Aufl.,
+Stuttgart, 1875.
+
+[241] Except the Bentivoglio at Bologna, and the House of Este at
+Ferrara. The latter was compelled to form a family relationship,
+Lucrezia marrying Prince Alfonso.
+
+[242] According to Corio (fol. 479) Charles had thoughts of a Council,
+of deposing the Pope, and even of carrying him away to France, this upon
+his return from Naples. According to Benedictus, _Carolus VIII._ (in
+Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1584), Charles, while in Naples, when
+Pope and cardinals refused to recognise his new crown, had certainly
+entertained the thought ‘de Italiæ imperio deque pontificis statu
+mutando,’ but soon after made up his mind to be satisfied with the
+personal humiliation of Alexander. The Pope, nevertheless, escaped him.
+Particulars in Pilorgerie, _Campagne et Bulletins de la Grande Armée
+d’Italie_, 1494, 1495 (Paris, 1866, 8vo.), where the degree of
+Alexander’s danger at different moments is discussed (pp. 111, 117,
+&c.). In a letter, there printed, of the Archbishop of St. Malo to Queen
+Anne, it is expressly stated: ‘Si nostre roy eust voulu obtemperer à la
+plupart des Messeigneurs les Cardinaulx, ilz eussent fait ung autre
+pappe en intention de refformer l’église ainsi qu’ilz disaient. Le roy
+désire bien la reformacion, mais il ne veult point entreprandre de sa
+depposicion.’
+
+[243] Corio, fol. 450. Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p.
+318. The rapacity of the whole family can be seen in Malipiero, among
+other authorities, l. c. p. 565. A ‘nipote’ was splendidly entertained
+in Venice as papal legate, and made an enormous sum of money by selling
+dispensations; his servants, when they went away, stole whatever they
+could lay their hands on, including a piece of embroidered cloth from
+the high altar of a church at Murano.
+
+[244] This in Panvinio alone among contemporary historians (Contin.
+Platinæ, p. 339), ‘insidiis Cæsaris fratris interfectus ... connivente
+... ad scelus patre,’ and to the same effect Jovius, _Elog. Vir. Ill._
+p. 302. The profound emotion of Alexander looks like a sign of
+complicity. After the corpse was drawn out of the Tiber, Sannazaro wrote
+(_Opera Omnia Latine Scripta_ 1535, fol. 41 _a_):
+
+    ‘Piscatorem hominum ne te non, Sixte, putemus
+      Piscaris natum retibus, ecce, tuum.’
+
+Besides the epigram quoted there are others (fol. 36 _b_, 42 _b_, 47
+_b_, 51 _a_, _b_--in the last passage 5) in Sannazaro on, i.e. against,
+Alexander. Among them is a famous one, referred to in Gregorovius i.
+314, on Lucrezia Borgia:
+
+    Ergo te semper cupiet Lucretia Sextus?
+    O fatum diri nominis: hic pater est?
+
+Others execrate his cruelty and celebrate his death as the beginning of
+an era of peace. On the Jubilee (see below, p. 108, note 1), there is
+another epigram, fol. 43 _b_. There are others no less severe (fol. 34
+_b_, 35 _a_, _b_, 42 _b_, 43 _a_) against Cæsar Borgia, among which we
+find in one of the strongest:
+
+    Aut nihil aut Cæsar vult dici Borgia; quidni?
+      Cum simul et Cæsar possit, et esse nihil.
+
+(made use of by Bandello, iv. nov. 11). On the murder of the Duke of
+Gandia, see especially the admirable collection of the most original
+sources of evidence in Gregorovius, vii. 399-407, according to which
+Cæsar’s guilt is clear, but it seems very doubtful whether Alexander
+knew, or approved, of the intended assassination.
+
+[245] Macchiavelli, _Opere_, ed. Milan, vol. v. pp. 387, 393, 395, in
+the _Legazione al Duca Valentino_.
+
+[246] Tommaso Gar, _Relazioni della Corte di Roma_, i. p. 12, in the
+_Rel. of P. Capello_. Literally: ‘The Pope has more respect for Venice
+than for any other power in the world.’ ‘E però desidera, che ella
+(Signoria di Venezia) protegga il figliuolo, e dice voler fare tale
+ordine, che il papato o sia suo, ovvero della signoria nostra.’ The word
+‘suo’ can only refer to Cæsar. An instance of the uncertainty caused by
+this usage is found in the still lively controversy respecting the words
+used by Vasari in the _Vita di Raffaello_: ‘A Bindo Altoviti fece il
+ritratto suo, &c.’
+
+[247] _Strozzii Poetae_, p. 19, in the ‘Venatio’ of Ercole Strozza: ’
+... cui triplicem fata invidere coronam.’ And in the Elegy on Cæsar’s
+death, p. 31 sqq.: ‘Speraretque olim solii decora alta paterni.’
+
+[248] _Ibid._ Jupiter had once promised
+
+    ‘Affore Alexandri sobolem, quæ poneret olim
+     Italiæ leges, atque aurea sæcla referret,’ etc.
+
+
+[249] _Ibid._
+
+    ‘Sacrumque decus majora parantem deposuisse.’
+
+
+[250] He was married, as is well known, to a French princess of the
+family of Albret, and had a daughter by her; in some way or other he
+would have attempted to found a dynasty. It is not known that he took
+steps to regain the cardinal’s hat, although (acc. to Macchiavelli, l.
+c. p. 285) he must have counted on the speedy death of his father.
+
+[251] Macchiavelli, l. c. p. 334. Designs on Siena and eventually on all
+Tuscany certainly existed, but were not yet ripe; the consent of France
+was indispensable.
+
+[252] Macchiavelli, l. c. pp. 326, 351, 414; Matarazzo, _Cronaca di
+Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. pp. 157 and 221. He wished his soldiers
+to quarter themselves where they pleased, so that they gained more in
+time of peace than of war. Petrus Alcyonius, _De Exilio_ (1522), ed.
+Mencken, p. 19, says of the style of conducting war: ‘Ea scelera et
+flagitia a nostris militibus patrata sunt quæ ne Scythæ quidem aut
+Turcæ, aut Pœni in Italia commisissent.’ The same writer (p. 65) blames
+Alexander as a Spaniard: ‘Hispani generis hominem, cujus proprium est,
+rationibus et commodis Hispanorum consultum velle, non Italorum.’ See
+above, p. 109.
+
+[253] To this effect Pierio Valeriano, _De Infelicitate Literat._ ed.
+Mencken, p. 282, in speaking of Giovanni Regio: ‘In arcano proscriptorum
+albo positus.’
+
+[254] Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 11. From May 22, 1502, onwards the
+_Despatches of Giustiniani_, 3 vols. Florence, 1876, edited by Pasquale
+Villari, offer valuable information.
+
+[255] Paulus Jovius, _Elogia_, Cæsar Borgia. In the _Commentarii Urbani_
+of Ralph. Volaterianus, lib. xxii. there is a description of Alexander
+VI., composed under Julius II., and still written very guardedly. We
+here read: ‘Roma ... nobilis jam carneficina facta erat.’
+
+[256] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 362.
+
+[257] Paul. Jovius, _Histor._ ii. fol. 47.
+
+[258] See the passages in Ranke, _Röm. Päpste_; Sämmtl. Werke, Bd.
+xxxvii. 35, and xxxix. Anh. Abschn. 1, Nro. 4, and Gregorovius, vii.
+497, sqq. Giustiniani does not believe in the Pope’s being poisoned. See
+his _Dispacci_, vol. ii. pp. 107 sqq.; Villari’s Note, pp. 120 sqq., and
+App. pp. 458 sqq.
+
+[259] Panvinius, _Epitome Pontificum_, p. 359. For the attempt to poison
+Alexander’s successor, Julius II., see p. 363. According to Sismondi,
+xiii. p. 246, it was in this way that Lopez, Cardinal of Capua, for
+years the partner of all the Pope’s secrets, came by his end; according
+to Sanuto (in Ranke, _Popes_, i. p. 52, note), the Cardinal of Verona
+also. When Cardinal Orsini died, the Pope obtained a certificate of
+natural death from a college of physicians.
+
+[260] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 254; comp. Attilio Alessio, in Baluz.
+_Miscell._, iv. p. 518 sqq.
+
+[261] And turned to the most profitable account by the Pope. Comp.
+_Chron. Venetum_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 133, given only as a report: ‘E
+si giudiceva, che il Pontefice dovesse cavare assai danari di questo
+Giubileo, che gli tornerà molto a proposito.
+
+[262] Anshelm, _Berner Chronik_, iii. pp. 146-156. Trithem. _Annales
+Hirsaug._ tom. ii. pp. 579, 584, 586.
+
+[263] Panvin. _Contin. Platinae_, p. 341.
+
+[264] Hence the splendour of the tombs of the prelates erected during
+their lifetime. A part of the plunder was in this way saved from the
+hands of the Popes.
+
+[265] Whether Julius really hoped that Ferdinand the Catholic would be
+induced to restore to the throne of Naples the expelled Aragonese
+dynasty, remains, in spite of Giovio’s declaration (_Vita Alfonsi
+Ducis_), very doubtful.
+
+[266] Both poems in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, iv. 257 and 297. Of
+his death the _Cronaca di Cremona_ says: ‘quale fu grande danno per la
+Italia, perchè era homo che non voleva tramontani in Italia, ed haveva
+cazato Francesi, e l’animo era de cazar le altri.’ _Bibl. Hist. Ital._
+(1876) i. 217. It is true that when Julius, in August, 1511, lay one day
+for hours in a fainting fit, and was thought to be dead, the more
+restless members of the noblest families--Pompeo Colonna and Antimo
+Savelli--ventured to call ‘the people’ to the Capitol, and to urge them
+to throw off the Papal yoke--‘a vendicarsi in libertà ... a publica
+ribellione,’ as Guicciardini tells us in his tenth book. See, too, Paul.
+Jov. in the _Vita Pompeji Columnae_, and Gregorovius, viii. 71-75.
+
+[267] _Septimo decretal._ l. i. tit. 3, cap. 1-3.
+
+[268] Franc. Vettori, in the _Arch. Stor._ vi. 297.
+
+[269] Besides which it is said (Paul. Lang. _Chronicon Cilicense_) to
+have produced not less than 500,000 gold florins; the order of the
+Franciscans alone, whose general was made a cardinal, paid 30,000. For a
+notice of the various sums paid, see Sanuto, xxiv. fol. 227; for the
+whole subject see Gregorovius, viii. 214 sqq.
+
+[270] Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 301. _Arch. Stor._ Append. i. p. 293 sqq.
+Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, vi. p. 232 sqq. Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 42.
+
+[271] Ariosto, Sat. vi. v. 106. ‘Tutti morrete, ed è fatal che muoja
+Leone appresso.’ Sat. 3 and 7 ridicule the hangers on at Leo’s Court.
+
+[272] One of several instances of such combinations is given in the
+_Lettere dei Principi_, i. 65, in a despatch of the Cardinal Bibbiena
+from Paris of the year 1518.
+
+[273] Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 333.
+
+[274] At the time of the Lateran Council, in 1512, Pico wrote an
+address: _J. E. P. Oratio ad Leonem X. et Concilium Lateranense de
+Reformandis Ecclesiæ Moribus_ (ed. Hagenau, 1512, frequently printed in
+editions of his works). The address was dedicated to Pirckheimer and was
+again sent to him in 1517. Comp. _Vir. Doct. Epist. ad Pirck._, ed.
+Freytag, Leipz. 1838, p. 8. Pico fears that under Leo evil may
+definitely triumph over good, ‘et in te bellum a nostræ religionis
+hostibus ante audias geri quam pariri.’
+
+[275] _Lettere dei Principi_, i. (Rome. 17th March, 1523): ‘This city
+stands on a needle’s point, and God grant that we are not soon driven to
+Avignon or to the end of the Ocean. I foresee the early fall of this
+spiritual monarchy.... Unless God helps us we are lost.’ Whether Adrian
+were really poisoned or not, cannot be gathered with certainty from Blas
+Ortiz, _Itinerar. Hadriani_ (Baluz. _Miscell._ ed. Mansi, i. p. 386
+sqq.); the worst of it was that everybody believed it.
+
+[276] Negro, l.c. on Oct. 24 (should be Sept.) and Nov. 9, 1526, April
+11, 1527. It is true that he found admirers and flatterers. The dialogue
+of Petrus Alcyonus ‘De Exilio’ was written in his praise, shortly before
+he became Pope.
+
+[277] Varchi, _Stor. Fiorent._ i. 43, 46 sqq.
+
+[278] Paul. Jov., _Vita Pomp. Columnae_.
+
+[279] Ranke, _Deutsche Geschichte_ (4 Aufl.) ii. 262 sqq.
+
+[280] Varchi, _Stor. Fiorent._ ii. 43 sqq.
+
+[281] _Ibid._ and Ranke, _Deutsche Gesch._ ii. 278, note, and iii. 6
+sqq. It was thought that Charles would transfer his seat of government
+to Rome.
+
+[282] See his letter to the Pope, dated Carpentras, Sept. 1, 1527, in
+the _Anecdota litt._ iv. p. 335.
+
+[283] _Lettere dei Principi_, i. 72. Castiglione to the Pope, Burgos,
+Dec. 10, 1527.
+
+[284] Tommaso Gar, _Relaz. della Corte di Roma_, i. 299.
+
+[285] The Farnese succeeded in something of the kind, the Caraffa were
+ruined.
+
+[286] Petrarca, _Epist. Fam._ i. 3. p. 574, when he thanks God that he
+was born an Italian. And again in the _Apologia contra cujusdam anonymi
+Galli Calumnias_ of the year 1367 (_Opp._ ed. Bas. 1581) p. 1068 sqq.
+See L. Geiger, _Petrarca_, 129-145.
+
+[287] Particularly those in vol. i. of Schardius, _Scriptores rerum
+Germanicarum_, Basel, 1574. For an earlier period, Felix Faber,
+_Historia Suevorum_, libri duo (in Goldast, _Script. rer. Suev._ 1605);
+for a later, Irenicus, _Exegesis Germaniæ_, Hagenau, 1518. On the latter
+work and the patriotic histories of that time, see various studies of A.
+Horawitz, _Hist. Zeitschrift_, bd. xxxiii. 118, anm. 1.
+
+[288] One instance out of many: _The Answers of the Doge of Venice to a
+Florentine Agent respecting Pisa_, 1496, in Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti.
+Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p. 427.
+
+[289] Observe the expressions ‘uomo singolare’ and ‘uomo unico’ for the
+higher and highest stages of individual development.
+
+[290] By the year 1390 there was no longer any prevailing fashion of
+dress for men at Florence, each preferring to clothe himself in his own
+way. See the _Canzone_ of Franco Sacchetti: ‘Contro alle nuove foggie’
+in the _Rime_, publ. dal Poggiali, p. 52.
+
+[291] At the close of the sixteenth century Montaigne draws the
+following parallel (_Essais_, l. iii. chap. 5, vol. iii. p. 367 of the
+Paris ed. 1816): ‘Ils (les Italiens) ont plus communement des belles
+femmes et moins de laides que nous; mais des rares et excellentes
+beautés j’estime que nous allons à pair. Et j’en juge autant des
+esprits; de ceux de la commune façon, ils en ont beaucoup plus et
+evidemment; la brutalité y est sans comparaison plus rare; d’ames
+singulières et du plus hault estage, nous ne leur en debvons rien.’
+
+[292] And also of their wives, as is seen in the family of Sforza and
+among other North Italian rulers. Comp. in the work of Jacobus Phil.
+Bergomensis, _De Plurimis Claris Selectisque Mulieribus_, Ferrara, 1497,
+the lives of Battista Malatesta, Paola Gonzaga, Bona Lombarda, Riccarda
+of Este, and the chief women of the House of Sforza, Beatrice and
+others. Among them are more than one genuine virago, and in several
+cases natural gifts are supplemented by great humanistic culture. (See
+below, chap. 3 and part v.)
+
+[293] Franco Sacchetti, in his ‘Capitolo’ (_Rime_, publ. dal Poggiali,
+p. 56), enumerates about 1390 the names of over a hundred distinguished
+people in the ruling parties who had died within his memory. However
+many mediocrities there may have been among them, the list is still
+remarkable as evidence of the awakening of individuality. On the ‘Vite’
+of Filippo Villani, see below.
+
+[294] _Trattato del Governo della Famiglia_ forms a part of the work:
+_La Cura della Famiglia_ (_Opere Volg. di Leon Batt. Alberti_, publ. da
+Anicio Bonucci, Flor. 1844, vol. ii.). See there vol. i. pp. xxx.-xl.,
+vol. ii. pp. xxxv. sqq. and vol. v. pp. 1-127. Formerly the work was
+generally, as in the text, attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446; see
+on him _Vesp. Fiorent._, pp. 291 and 379); the recent investigations of
+Fr. Palermo (Florence 1871), have shown Alberti to be the author. The
+work is quoted from the ed. Torino, Pomba, 1828.
+
+[295] Trattato, p. 65 sqq.
+
+[296] Jov. Pontanus, _De Fortitudine_, l. ii. cap. 4, ‘De tolerando
+Exilio,’ Seventy years later, Cardanus (_De Vitâ Propriâ_, cap. 32)
+could ask bitterly: ‘Quid est patria nisi consensus tyrannorum minutorum
+ad opprimendos imbelles timidos et qui plerumque sunt innoxii?’
+
+[297] _De Vulgari Eloquio_, lib. i. cap. 6. On the ideal Italian
+language, cap. 17. The spiritual unity of cultivated men, cap. 18. On
+home-sickness, comp. the famous passages, _Purg._ viii. 1 sqq., and
+_Parad._ xxv. 1 sqq.
+
+[298] _Dantis Alligherii Epistolae_, ed. Carolus Witte, p. 65.
+
+[299] Ghiberti, _Secondo Commentario_, cap. xv. (Vasari ed Lemonnier, i.
+p. xxix.).
+
+[300] _Codri Urcei Vita_, at the end of his works, first pub. Bologna
+1502. This certainly comes near the old saying: ‘ubi bene, ibi patria.’
+C. U. was not called after the place of his birth, but after Forli,
+where he lived long; see Malagola, _Codro Urceo_, Bologna, 1877, cap. v.
+and app. xi. The abundance of neutral intellectual pleasure, which is
+independent of local circumstances, and of which the educated Italians
+became more and more capable, rendered exile more tolerable to them.
+Cosmopolitanism is further a sign of an epoch in which new worlds are
+discovered, and men feel no longer at home in the old. We see it among
+the Greeks after the Peloponnesian war; Plato, as Niebuhr says, was not
+a good citizen, and Xenophon was a bad one; Diogenes went so far as to
+proclaim homelessness a pleasure, and calls himself, Laertius tells us,
+ἁπολις. Here another remarkable work may be mentioned. Petrus Alcyonius
+in his book: _Medices Legatus de Exilio lib. duo_, Ven. 1522 (printed in
+Mencken, _Analecta de Calam. Literatorum_, Leipzig, 1707, pp. 1-250)
+devotes to the subject of exile a long and prolix discussion. He tries
+logically and historically to refute the three reasons for which
+banishment is held to be an evil, viz. 1. Because the exile must live
+away from his fatherland. 2. Because he loses the honours given him at
+home. 3. Because he must do without his friends and relatives; and comes
+finally to the conclusion that banishment is not an evil. His
+dissertation culminates in the words, ‘Sapientissimus quisque omnem
+orbem terrarum unam urbem esse ducit. Atque etiam illam veram sibi esse
+patriam arbitratur quæ se perigrinantem exciperit, quæ pudorem,
+probitatem, virtutem colit, quæ optima studia, liberales disciplinas
+amplectitur, quæ etiam facit ut peregrini omnes honesto otio teneant
+statum et famam dignitatis suæ.’
+
+[301] This awakening of personality is also shown in the great stress
+laid on the independent growth of character, in the claim to shape the
+spiritual life for oneself, apart from parents and ancestors. Boccaccio
+(_De Cas. Vir. Ill._ Paris, s. a. fol. xxix. _b_) points out that
+Socrates came of uneducated, Euripides and Demosthenes of unknown,
+parents, and exclaims: ‘Quasi animos a gignentibus habeamus!’
+
+[302] Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 16.
+
+[303] The angels which he drew on tablets at the anniversary of the
+death of Beatrice (_Vita Nuova_, p. 61) may have been more than the work
+of a dilettante. Lion. Aretino says he drew ‘egregiamente,’ and was a
+great lover of music.
+
+[304] For this and what follows, see esp. _Vespasiano Fiorentino_, an
+authority of the first order for Florentine culture in the fifteenth
+century Comp. pp. 359, 379, 401, etc. See, also, the charming and
+instructive _Vita Jannoctii Manetti_ (b. 1396), by Naldus Naldius, in
+Murat. xx. pp. 529-608.
+
+[305] What follows is taken, e.g., from Perticari’s account of Pandolfo
+Collenuccio, in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi iii. pp. 197 sqq., and from
+the _Opere del Conte Perticari_, Mil. 1823, vol. ii.
+
+[306] For what follows compare Burckhardt, _Geschichte der Renaissance
+in Italien_, Stuttg. 1868, esp. p. 41 sqq., and A. Springer,
+_Abhandlungen zur neueren Kunstgeschichte_, Bonn, 1867, pp. 69-102. A
+new biography of Alberti is in course of preparation by Hub. Janitschek.
+
+[307] In Murat. xxv. col. 295 sqq., with the Italian translation in the
+_Opere Volgari di L. B. Alberti_, vol. i. pp. lxxxix-cix, where the
+conjecture is made and shown to be probable that this ‘Vita’ is by
+Alberti himself. See, further, Vasari, iv. 52 sqq. Mariano Socini, if we
+can believe what we read of him in Æn. Sylvius (_Opera_, p. 622,
+_Epist._ 112) was a universal dilettante, and at the same time a master
+in several subjects.
+
+[308] Similar attempts, especially an attempt at a flying-machine, had
+been made about 880 by the Andalusian Abul Abbas Kasim ibn Firnas. Comp.
+Gyangos, _The History of the Muhammedan Dynasties in Spain_ (London,
+1840), i. 148 sqq. and 425-7; extracts in Hammer, _Literaturgesch. der
+Araber_, i. Introd. p. li.
+
+[309] Quidquid ingenio esset hominum cum quadam effectum elegantia, id
+prope divinum ducebat.
+
+[310] This is the book (comp. p. 185, note 2) of which one part, often
+printed alone, long passed for a work of Pandolfini.
+
+[311] In his work, _De Re Ædificatoria_, l. viii. cap. i., there is a
+definition of a beautiful road: ‘Si modo mare, modo montes, modo lacum
+fluentem fontesve, modo aridam rupem aut planitiem, modo nemus vallemque
+exhibebit.’
+
+[312] One writer among many: Blondus, _Roma Triumphans_, l. v. pp. 117
+sqq., where the definitions of glory are collected from the ancients,
+and the desire of it is expressly allowed to the Christian. Cicero’s
+work, _De Gloria_, which Petrarch claimed to own, was stolen from him by
+his teacher Convenevole, and has never since been seen. Alberti, in a
+youthful composition when he was only twenty years of age, praises the
+desire of fame. _Opere_, vol. i. pp. cxxvii-clxvi.
+
+[313] _Paradiso_, xxv. at the beginning: ‘Se mai continga,’ &c. See
+above, p. 133, note 2. Comp. Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 49.
+‘Vaghissimo fu e d’onore e di pompa, e per avventura più che alla sua
+inclita virtù non si sarebbe richiesto.’
+
+[314] _De Vulgari Eloquio_, l. i. cap. i. and esp. _De Monarchia_, l. i.
+cap. i., where he wishes to set forth the idea of monarchy not only in
+order to be useful to the world but also ‘ut palmam tanti bravii primus
+in meam gloriam adipiscar.’
+
+[315] _Convito_, ed. Venezia, 1529, fol. 5 and 6.
+
+[316] _Paradiso_, vi. 112 sqq.
+
+[317] E.g. _Inferno_, vi. 89; xiii. 53; xvi. 85; xxxi. 127.
+
+[318] _Purgatorio_, v. 70, 87, 133; vi. 26; viii. 71; xi. 31; xiii. 147.
+
+[319] _Purgatorio_, xi. 85-117. Besides ‘gloria’ we here find close
+together ‘grido, fama, rumore, nominanza, onore’ all different names for
+the same thing. Boccaccio wrote, as he admits in his letter to Joh.
+Pizinga (_Op. Volg._ xvi. 30 sqq.) ‘perpetuandi nominis desiderio’.
+
+[320] Scardeonius, _De Urb. Patav. Antiqu._ (Græv. _Thesaur._ vi. iii.
+col. 260). Whether ‘cereis’ or ‘certis muneribus’ should be the reading,
+cannot be said. The somewhat solemn nature of Mussatus can be recognised
+in the tone of his history of Henry VII.
+
+[321] Franc. Petrarca, _Posteritati_, or _Ad Posteros_, at the beginning
+of the editions of his works, or the only letter of Book xviii. of the
+_Epp. Seniles_; also in Fracassetti, _Petr. Epistolæ Familiares_, 1859,
+i. 1-11. Some modern critics of Petrarch’s vanity would hardly have
+shown as much kindness and frankness had they been in his place.
+
+[322] _Opera_, ed. 1581, p. 177: ‘De celebritate nominis importuna.’
+Fame among the mass of people was specially offensive to him. _Epp.
+Fam._ i. 337, 340. In Petrarch, as in many humanists of the older
+generation, we can observe the conflict between the desire for glory and
+the claims of Christian humility.
+
+[323] ‘De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ’ in the editions of the works.
+Often printed separately, e.g. Bern, 1600. Compare Petrarch’s famous
+dialogue, ‘De Contemptu Mundi’ or ‘De Conflictu Curarum Suarum,’ in
+which the interlocutor Augustinus blames the love of fame as a damnable
+fault.
+
+[324] _Epp. Fam._ lib. xviii. (ed. Fracassetti) 2. A measure of
+Petrarch’s fame is given a hundred years later by the assertion of
+Blondus (_Italia Illustrata_, p. 416) that hardly even a learned man
+would know anything of Robert the Good if Petrarch had not spoken of him
+so often and so kindly.
+
+[325] It is to be noted that even Charles IV., perhaps influenced by
+Petrarch, speaks in a letter to the historian Marignola of fame as the
+object of every striving man. H. Friedjung, _Kaiser Karl IV. und sein
+Antheil am geistigen Leben seiner Zeit_, Vienna, 1876, p. 221.
+
+[326] _Epist. Seniles_, xiii. 3, to Giovanni Aretino, Sept. 9, 1370.
+
+[327] Filippo Villani, _Vite_, p. 19
+
+[328] Both together in the epitaph on Boccaccio: ‘Nacqui in Firenze al
+Pozzo Toscanelli; Di fuor sepolto a Certaldo giaccio,’ &c. Comp. _Op.
+Volg. di Boccaccio_, xvi. 44.
+
+[329] Mich. Savonarola, _De Laudibus Patavii_, in Murat. xxiv. col.
+1157. Arquà remained from thenceforth the object of special veneration
+(comp. Ettore Conte Macola, _I Codici di Arquà_, Padua, 1874), and was
+the scene of great solemnities at the fifth centenary of Petrarch’s
+death. His dwelling is said to have been lately given to the city of
+Padua by the last owner, Cardinal Silvestri.
+
+[330] The decree of 1396 and its grounds in Gaye, _Carteggio_, i. 123.
+
+[331] Reumont, _Lorenzo de’ Medici_, ii. 180.
+
+[332] Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 39.
+
+[333] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 121.
+
+[334] The former in the well-known sarcophagus near San Lorenzo, the
+latter over a door in the Palazzo della Ragione. For details as to their
+discovery in 1413, see Misson, _Voyage en Italie_, vol. i., and Michele
+Savonarola, col. 1157.
+
+[335] _Vita di Dante_, l. c. How came the body of Cassius from Philippi
+back to Parma?
+
+[336] ‘Nobilitatis fastu’ and ‘sub obtentu religionis,’ says Pius II.
+(_Comment._ x. p. 473). The new sort of fame must have been inconvenient
+to those who were accustomed to the old.
+
+That Carlo Malatesta caused the statue of Virgil to be pulled down and
+thrown into the Mincio, and this, as he alleged, from anger at the
+veneration paid to it by the people of Mantua, is a well-authenticated
+fact, specially attested by an invective written in 1397 by P. P.
+Vergerio against C. M., _De dirutâ Statuâ Virgilii P. P. V.
+eloquentissimi Oratoris Epistola ex Tugurio Blondi sub Apolline_, ed. by
+Marco Mantova Benavides (publ. certainly before 1560 at Padua). From
+this work it is clear that till then the statue had not been set up
+again. Did this happen in consequence of the invective? Bartholomæus
+Facius (_De Vir. Ill._ p. 9 sqq. in the Life of P. P. V. 1456) says it
+did, ‘Carolum Malatestam invectus Virgilii statua, quam ille Mantuæ in
+foro everterat, quoniam gentilis fuerat, ut ibidem restitueretur,
+effecit;’ but his evidence stands alone. It is true that, so far as we
+know, there are no contemporary chronicles for the history of Mantua at
+that period (Platina, _Hist. Mant._ in Murat. xx. contains nothing about
+the matter), but later historians are agreed that the statue was not
+restored. See for evidence, Prendilacqua, _Vita di Vitt. da Feltre_,
+written soon after 1446 (ed. 1871, p. 78), where the destruction but not
+the restoration of the statue is spoken of, and the work of Ant.
+Possevini, jun. (_Gonzaga_, Mantua, 1628), where, p. 486, the pulling
+down of the statue, the murmurings and violent opposition of the people,
+and the promise given in consequence by the prince that he _would_
+restore it, are all mentioned, with the addition: ‘Nec tamen restitutus
+est Virgilius.’ Further, on March 17, 1499, Jacopo d’Hatry writes to
+Isabella of Este, that he has spoken with Pontano about a plan of the
+princess to raise a statue to Virgil at Mantua, and that Pontano cried
+out with delight that Vergerio, if he were alive, would be even more
+pleased ‘che non se attristò quando el Conte Carola Malatesta persuase
+abuttare la statua di Virgilio nel flume.’ The writer then goes on to
+speak of the manner of setting it up, of the inscription ‘P. Virgilius
+Mantuanus’ and ‘Isabella Marchionissa Mantuæ restituit,’ and suggests
+that Andrea Mantegna would be the right man to be charged with the work.
+Mantegna did in fact make the drawings for it. (The drawing and the
+letter in question are given in Baschet, _Recherches de documents d’art
+et d’histoire dans les Archives de Mantoue; documents inédits concernant
+la personne et les œuvres d’Andrea Mantegna_, in the _Gazette des
+Beaux-Arts_, xx. (1866) 478-492, esp. 486 sqq.) It is clear from this
+letter that Carlo Malatesta did not have the statue restored. In
+Comparetti’s work on Virgil in the Middle Ages, the story is told after
+Burckhardt, but without authorities. Dr. Geiger, on the authority of
+Professor Paul of Berlin, distinguishes between C. Cassius Longinus and
+Cassius Parmensis, the poet, both among the assassins of Cæsar.
+
+[337] Comp. Keyssler’s _Neueste Reisen_, p. 1016.
+
+[338] The elder was notoriously a native of Verona.
+
+[339] This is the tone of the remarkable work, _De Laudibus Papiæ_, in
+Murat. xx., dating from the fourteenth century--much municipal pride,
+but no idea of personal fame.
+
+[340] _De Laudibus Patavii_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1138 sqq. Only three
+cities, in his opinion--could be compared with Padua--Florence, Venice
+and Rome.
+
+[341] ‘Nam et veteres nostri tales aut divos aut æternâ memoriâ dignos
+non immerito prædicabant, quum virtus summa sanctitatis sit consocia et
+pari ematur pretio.’ What follows is most characteristic: ‘Hos itaque
+meo facili judicio æternos facio.’
+
+[342] Similar ideas occur in many contemporary writers. Codrus Urceus,
+_Sermo_ xiii. (_Opp._ 1506, fol. xxxviii. _b_), speaking of Galeazzo
+Bentivoglio, who was both a scholar and a warrior, ‘Cognoscens artem
+militarem esse quidem excellentem, sed literas multo certe
+excellentiores.’
+
+[343] What follows immediately is not, as the editor remarks (Murat.
+xxiv col. 1059, note), from the pen of Mich. Savonarola.
+
+[344] Petrarch, in the ‘Triumph’ here quoted, only dwells on characters
+of antiquity, and in his collection, _De Rebus Memorandis_, has little
+to say of contemporaries. In the _Casus Virorum Illustrium_ of Boccaccio
+(among the men a number of women, besides Philippa Catinensis treated of
+at the end, are included, and even the goddess Juno is described), only
+the close of the eighth book and the last book--the ninth--deal with
+non-classical times. Boccaccio’s remarkable work, _De Claris
+Mulieribus_, treats also almost exclusively of antiquity. It begins with
+Eve, speaks then of ninety-seven women of antiquity, and seven of the
+Middle ages, beginning with Pope Joan and ending with Queen Johanna of
+Naples. And so at a much later time in the _Commentarii Urbani_ of
+Ralph. Volaterranus. In the work _De Claris Mulieribus_ of the
+Augustinian Jacobus Bergomensis (printed 1497, but probably published
+earlier) antiquity and legend hold the chief place, but there are still
+some valuable biographies of Italian women. There are one or two lives
+of contemporary women by Vespasiano da Bisticci (_Arch. Stor. Ital._ iv.
+i. pp. 430 sqq.). In Scardeonius (_De Urb. Patav. Antiqu. Græv.
+Thesaur._ vi. iii. col. 405 sqq.,) only famous Paduan women are
+mentioned. First comes a legend or tradition from the time of the fall
+of the empire, then tragical stories of the party struggles of the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; then notices of several heroic
+women; then the foundress of nunneries, the political woman, the female
+doctor, the mother of many and distinguished sons, the learned woman,
+the peasant girl who dies defending her chastity; then the cultivated
+beauty of the sixteenth century, on whom everybody writes sonnets; and
+lastly, the female novelist and poet at Padua. A century later the
+woman-professor would have been added to these. For the famous woman of
+the House of Este, see Ariosto, _Orl._ xiii.
+
+[345] Bartolommeo Facio and Paolo Cortese. B. F. _De Viris Illustribus
+Liber_, was first published by L. Mehus (Florence, 1745). The book was
+begun by the author (known by other historical works, and resident at
+the court of Alfonso of Naples) after he had finished the history of
+that king (1455), and ended, as references to the struggles of Hungary
+and the writer’s ignorance of the elevation of Æneas Silvius to the
+cardinalate show, in 1456. (See, nevertheless, Wahlen, _Laurentii Vallæ
+Opuscula Tria_, Vienna, 1869, p. 67, note 1.) It is never quoted by
+contemporaries, and seldom by later writers. The author wishes in this
+book to describe the famous men, ‘ætatis memoriæque nostræ,’ and
+consequently only mentions such as were born in the last quarter of the
+fourteenth century, and were still living in, or had died shortly
+before, the middle of the fifteenth. He chiefly limits himself to
+Italians, except in the case of artists or princes, among the latter of
+whom he includes the Emperor Sigismund and Albrecht Achilles of
+Brandenburg; and in arranging the various biographies he neither follows
+chronological order nor the distinction which the subject of each
+attained, but puts them down ‘ut quisque mihi occurrerit,’ intending to
+treat in a second part of those whom he might have left out in the
+first. He divides the famous men into nine classes, nearly all of them
+prefaced by remarks on their distinctive qualities: 1. Poets; 2.
+Orators; 3. Jurists; 4. Physicians (with a few philosophers and
+theologians, as an appendix); 5. Painters; 6. Sculptors; 7. Eminent
+citizens; 8. Generals; 9. Princes and kings. Among the latter he treats
+with special fulness and care of Pope Nicholas V. and King Alfonso of
+Naples. In general he gives only short and mostly eulogistic
+biographies, confined in the case of princes and soldiers to the list of
+their deeds, and of artists and writers to the enumeration of their
+works. No attempt is made at a detailed description or criticism of
+these; only with regard to a few works of art which he had himself seen
+he writes more fully. Nor is any attempt made at an estimate of
+individuals; his heroes either receive a few general words of praise, or
+must be satisfied with the mere mention of their names. Of himself the
+author says next to nothing. He states only that Guarino was his
+teacher, that Manetti wrote a book on a subject which he himself had
+treated, that Bracellius was his countryman, and that the painter Pisano
+of Verona was known to him (pp. 17, 18, 19, 48; but says nothing in
+speaking of Laurentius Valla of his own violent quarrels with this
+scholar. On the other hand, he does not fail to express his piety and
+his hatred to the Turks (p. 64), to relieve his Italian patriotism by
+calling the Swiss barbarians (p. 60), and to say of P. P. Vergerius,
+‘dignus qui totam in Italia vitam scribens exegisset’ (p. 9).
+
+Of all celebrities he evidently sets most store by the scholars, and
+among these by the ‘oratores,’ to whom he devotes nearly a third of his
+book. He nevertheless has great respect for the jurists, and shows a
+special fondness for the physicians, among whom he well distinguishes
+the theoretical from the practical, relating the successful diagnoses
+and operations of the latter. That he treats of theologians and
+philosophers in connection with the physicians, is as curious as that he
+should put the painters immediately after the physicians, although, as
+he says, they are most allied to the poets. In spite of his reverence
+for learning, which shows itself in the praise given to the princes who
+patronised it, he is too much of a courtier not to register the tokens
+of princely favour received by the scholars he speaks of, and to
+characterise the princes in the introduction to the chapters devoted to
+them as those who ‘veluti corpus membra, ita omnia genera quæ supra
+memoravimus, regunt ac tuentur.’
+
+The style of the book is simple and unadorned, and the matter of it full
+of instruction, notwithstanding its brevity. It is a pity that Facius
+did not enter more fully into the personal relations and circumstances
+of the men whom he described, and did not add to the list of their
+writings some notice of the contents and the value of them.
+
+The work of Paolo Cortese (b. 1645, d. 1510), _De Hominibus Doctis
+Dialogus_ (first ed. Florence, 1734), is much more limited in its
+character. This work, written about 1490, since it mentions Antonius
+Geraldinus as dead, who died in 1488, and was dedicated to Lorenzo de’
+Medici, who died in 1492, is distinguished from that of Facius, written
+a generation earlier, not only by the exclusion of all who are not
+learned men, but by various inward and outward characteristics. First by
+the form, which is that of a dialogue between the author and his two
+companions, Alexander Farnese and Antonius, and by the digressions and
+unequal treatment of the various characters caused thereby; and secondly
+by the manner of the treatment itself. While Facius only speaks of the
+men of his own time, Cortese treats only of the dead, and in part of
+those long dead, by which he enlarges his circle more than he narrows it
+by exclusion of the living; while Facius merely chronicles works and
+deeds, as if they were unknown, Cortese criticises the literary activity
+of his heroes as if the reader were already familiar with it. This
+criticism is shaped by the humanistic estimate of eloquence, according
+to which no man could be considered of importance unless he had achieved
+something remarkable in eloquence, _i.e._ in the classical, Ciceronian
+treatment of the Latin language. On this principle Dante and Petrarch
+are only moderately praised, and are blamed for having diverted so much
+of their powers from Latin to Italian; Guarino is described as one who
+had beheld perfect eloquence at least through a cloud; Lionardo Aretino
+as one who had offered his contemporaries ‘aliquid splendidius;’ and
+Enea Silvio as he ‘in quo primum apparuit mutati sæculi signum.’ This
+point of view prevailed over all others; never perhaps was it held so
+one-sidedly as by Cortese. To get a notion of his way of thinking we
+have only to hear his remarks on a predecessor, also the compiler of a
+great biographical collection, Sicco Polentone: ‘Ejus sunt viginti ad
+filium libri scripti de claris scriptoribus, utiles admodum qui jam fere
+ab omnibus legi sent desiti. Est enim in judicando parum acer, nec
+servit aurium voluptati quum tractat res ab aliis ante tractatas; sed
+hoc ferendum. Illud certe molestum est, dum alienis verbis sententiisque
+scripta infarcit et explet sua; ex quo nascitur maxime vitiosum
+scribendi genus, quum modo lenis et candidus, modo durus et asper
+apparcat, et sic in toto genere tanquam in unum agrum plura inter se
+inimicissima sparsa semina.’
+
+All are not treated with so much detail; most are disposed of in a few
+brief sentences; some are merely named without a word being added. Much
+is nevertheless to be learned from his judgments, though we may not be
+able always to agree with them. We cannot here discuss him more fully,
+especially as many of his most characteristic remarks have been already
+made use of; on the whole, they give us a clear picture of the way in
+which a later time, outwardly more developed, looked down with critical
+scorn upon an earlier age, inwardly perhaps richer, but externally less
+perfect.
+
+Facius, the author of the first-mentioned biographical work, is spoken
+of, but not his book. Like Facius, Cortese is the humble courtier,
+looking on Lorenzo de’ Medici as Facius looked on Alfonso of Naples;
+like him, he is a patriot who only praises foreign excellence
+unwillingly and because he must; adding the assurance that he does not
+wish to oppose his own country (p. 48, speaking of Janus Pannonius).
+
+Information as to Cortese has been collected by Bernardus Paperinius,
+the editor of his work; we may add that his Latin translation of the
+novel of L. B. Alberti, _Hippolytus and Dejanira_, is printed for the
+first time in the _Opere di L. B. A._ vol. iii. pp. 439-463.
+
+[346] How great the fame of the humanists was is shown by the fact that
+impostors attempted to make capital out of the use of their names. There
+thus appeared at Verona a man strangely clad and using strange gestures,
+who, when brought before the mayor, recited with great energy passages
+of Latin verse and prose, taken from the works of Panormita, answered in
+reply to the questions put to him that he was himself Panormita, and was
+able to give so many small and commonly unknown details about the life
+of this scholar, that his statement obtained general credit. He was then
+treated with great honour by the authorities and the learned men of the
+city, and played his assumed part successfully for a considerable time,
+until Guarino and others who knew Panormita personally discovered the
+fraud. Comp. Rosmini, _Vita di Guarino_, ii. 44 sqq., 171 sqq. Few of
+the humanists were free from the habit of boasting. Codrus Urceus
+(_Vita_, at the end of the _Opera_, 1506, fol. lxx.), when asked for his
+opinion about this or that famous man, used to answer: ‘Sibi scire
+videntur.’ Barth. Facius, _De Vir. Ill._ p. 31, tells of the jurist
+Antonius Butriensis: ‘Id unum in eo viro notandum est, quod neminem
+unquam, adeo excellere homines in eo studio volebat, ut doctoratu dignum
+in examine comprobavit.’
+
+[347] A Latin poet of the twelfth century, one of the wandering scholars
+who barters his song for a coat, uses this as a threat. _Carmina
+Burana_, p. 76.
+
+[348] Sonnet cli: Lasso ch’i ardo.
+
+[349] Boccaccio, _Opere Volgari_, vol. xvi. in Sonnet 13: Pallido,
+vinto, etc.
+
+[350] Elsewhere, and in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, iv. 203.
+
+[351] _Angeli Politiani Epp._ lib. x.
+
+[352] Quatuor navigationes, etc. Deodatum (_St. Dié_), 1507. Comp. O.
+Peschel, _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_, 1859, ed. 2,
+1876.
+
+[353] Paul. Jov. _De Romanis Piscibus_, Præfatio (1825). The first
+decade of his histories would soon be published, ‘non sine aliqua spe
+immortalitatis.’
+
+[354] Comp. _Discorsi_, i. 27. ‘Tristizia’ (crime) can have ‘grandezza’
+and be ‘in alcuna parte generosa’; ‘grandezza’ can take away ‘infamia’
+from a deed; a man can be ‘onorevolmente tristo’ in contrast to one who
+is ‘perfettamente buono.’
+
+[355] _Storie Fiorentine_, l. vi.
+
+[356] Paul. Jov. _Elog. Vir. Lit. Ill._ p. 192, speaking of Marius
+Molsa.
+
+[357] Mere railing is found very early, in Benzo of Alba, in the
+eleventh century (_Mon. Germ._ ss. xi. 591-681).
+
+[358] The Middle Ages are further rich in so-called satirical poems; but
+the satire is not individual, but aimed at classes, categories, and
+whole populations, and easily passes into the didactic tone. The whole
+spirit of this literature is best represented by _Reineke Fuchs_, in all
+its forms among the different nations of the West. For this branch of
+French literature see a new and admirable work by Lenient, _La Satire en
+France au Moyen-âge_, Paris, 1860, and the equally excellent
+continuation, _La Satire en France, ou la littérature militante, au
+XVIe Siècle_, Paris, 1866.
+
+[359] See above, p. 7 note 2. Occasionally we find an insolent joke,
+nov. 37.
+
+[360] _Inferno_, xxi. xxii. The only possible parallel is with
+Aristophanes.
+
+[361] A modest beginning _Opera_, p. 421, sqq., in _Rerum Memorandarum
+Libri IV._ Again, in _Epp. Seniles_, x. 2. Comp. _Epp. Fam._ ed.
+Fracass. i. 68 sqq., 70, 240, 245. The puns have a flavour of their
+mediæval home, the monasteries. Petrarch’s invectives ‘contra Gallum,’
+‘contra medicum objurgantem,’ and his work, _De Sui Ipsius et Multorum
+Ignorantia_; perhaps also his _Epistolæ sine Titulo_,’ may be quoted as
+early examples of satirical writing.
+
+[362] Nov. 40, 41; Ridolfo da Camerino is the man.
+
+[363] The well-known jest of Brunellesco and the fat wood-carver,
+Manetto Ammanatini, who is said to have fled into Hungary before the
+ridicule he encountered, is clever but cruel.
+
+[364] The ‘Araldo’ of the Florentine Signoria. One instance among many,
+_Commissioni di Rinaldo degli Albizzi_, iii. 651, 669. The fool as
+necessary to enliven the company after dinner; Alcyonius, _De Exilio_,
+ed. Mencken, p. 129.
+
+[365] Sacchetti, nov. 48. And yet, according to nov. 67, there was an
+impression that a Romagnole was superior to the worst Florentine.
+
+[366] L. B. Alberti, _Del Governo della Famiglia, Opere_, ed. Bonucci,
+v. 171. Comp. above, p. 132, note 1.
+
+[367] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 156; comp. 24 for Dolcibene and the Jews.
+(For Charles IV. and the fools, _Friedjung_, o.c. p. 109.) The _Facetiæ_
+of Poggio resemble Sacchetti’s in substance--practical jokes,
+impertinences, refined indecency misunderstood by simple folk; the
+philologist is betrayed by the large number of verbal jokes. On L. A.
+Alberti, see pp. 136, sqq.
+
+[368] And consequently in those novels of the Italians whose subject is
+taken from them.
+
+[369] According to Bandello, iv. nov. 2, Gonnella could twist his
+features into the likeness of other people, and mimic all the dialects
+of Italy.
+
+[370] Paul. Jov. _Vita Leonis X._
+
+[371] ‘Erat enim Bibiena mirus artifex hominibus ætate vel professione
+gravibus ad insaniam impellendis.’ We are here reminded of the jests of
+Christine of Sweden with her philologists. Comp. the remarkable passage
+of Jovian. Pontanus, _De Sermone_, lib. ii. cap. 9: ‘Ferdinandus Alfonsi
+filius, Neapolitanorum rex magnus et ipse fuit artifex et vultus
+componendi et orationes in quem ipse usus vellet. Nam ætatis nostri
+Pontifices maximi fingendis vultibus ac verbis vel histriones ipsos
+anteveniunt.
+
+[372] The eye-glass I not only infer from Rafael’s portrait, where it
+can be explained as a magnifier for looking at the miniatures in the
+prayer-book, but from a statement of Pellicanus, according to which Leo
+views an advancing procession of monks through a ‘specillum’ (comp.
+_Züricher Taschenbuch_ for 1858, p. 177), and from the ‘cristallus
+concava,’ which, according to Giovio, he used when hunting. (Comp.
+‘Leonis X. vita auctore anon, conscripta’ in the Appendix to Roscoe.) In
+Attilius Alessius (Baluz. _Miscell._ iv. 518) we read, ‘Oculari ex
+gemina (gemma?) utebatur quam manu gestans, signando aliquid videndum
+esset, oculis admovebat.’ The shortsightedness in the family of the
+Medici was hereditary. Lorenzo was shortsighted, and replied to the
+Sienese Bartolommeo Soccini, who said that the air of Florence was bad
+for the eyes: ‘E quella di Siena al cervello.’ The bad sight of Leo X.
+was proverbial. After his election, the Roman wits explained the number
+MCCCCXL. engraved in the Vatican as follows: ‘Multi cæci Cardinales
+creaverunt cæcum decimum Leonem.’ Comp. Shepherd-Tonelli, _Vita del
+Poggio_, ii. 23, sqq., and the passages there quoted.
+
+[373] We find it also in plastic art, e.g., in the famous plate
+parodying the group of the Laöcoon as three monkeys. But here parody
+seldom went beyond sketches and the like, though much, it is true, may
+have been destroyed. Caricature, again, is something different.
+Lionardo, in the grotesque faces in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana,
+represents what is hideous when and because it is comical, and
+exaggerates the ludicrous element at pleasure.
+
+[374] Jovian. Pontan. _De Sermone_, libri v. He attributes a special
+gift of wit to the Sienese and Peruginese, as well as to the
+Florentines, adding the Spanish court as a matter of politeness.
+
+[375] _Il Cortigiano_, lib. ii. cap. 4 sqq., ed. Baude di Vesme,
+Florence, 1854, pp. 124 sqq. For the explanation of wit as the effect of
+contrast, though not clearly put, see _ibid._ cap. lxxiii. p. 136.
+
+[376] Pontanus, _De Sermone_, lib. iv. cap. 3, also advises people to
+abstain from using ‘ridicula’ either against the miserable or the
+strong.
+
+[377] _Galateo del Casa_, ed. Venez. 1789, p. 26 sqq. 48.
+
+[378] _Lettere Pittoriche_, i. p. 71, in a letter of Vinc. Borghini,
+1577. Macchiavelli (_Stor. Fior._ vii. cap. 28) says of the young
+gentlemen in Florence soon after the middle of the fifteenth century:
+‘Gli studî loro erano apparire col vestire splendidi, e col parlare
+sagaci ed astuti, e quello che più destramente mordeva gli altri, era
+più savio e da più stimato.’
+
+[379] Comp. Fedra Inghirami’s funeral oration on Ludovico Podocataro (d.
+Aug. 25, 1504) in the _Anecd. Litt._ i. p. 319. The scandal-monger
+Massaino is mentioned in Paul. Jov. _Dialogues de Viris Litt. Illustr._
+(Tiraboschi, tom. vii. parte iv. p. 1631).
+
+[380] This was the plan followed by Leo X., and his calculations were
+not disappointed. Fearfully as his reputation was mangled after his
+death by the satirists, they were unable to modify the general estimate
+formed of him.
+
+[381] This was probably the case with Cardinal Ardicino della Porta, who
+in 1491 wished to resign his dignity and take refuge in a monastery. See
+Infessura, in Eccard. ii. col. 2000.
+
+[382] See his funeral oration in the _Anecd. Litt._ iv. p. 315. He
+assembled an army of peasants in the March of Aneona, which was only
+hindered from acting by the treason of the Duke of Urbino. For his
+graceful and hopeless love-poems, see Trucchi, _Poesie Inedite_, iii.
+123.
+
+[383] How he used his tongue at the table of Clement VII. is told in
+Giraldi, _Hecatomithi_, vii. nov. 5.
+
+[384] The charge of taking into consideration the proposal to drown
+Pasquino (in Paul. Jov. _Vita Hadriani_), is transferred from Sixtus IV.
+to Hadrian. Comp. _Lettere dei Principi_, i. 114 sqq., letter of Negro,
+dated April 7, 1523. On St. Mark’s Day Pasquino had a special
+celebration, which the Pope forbade.
+
+[385] In the passages collected in Gregorovius, viii. 380 note, 381 sqq.
+393 sqq.
+
+[386] Comp. Pier. Valer. _De Infel. Lit._ ed. Mencken, p. 178.
+‘Pestilentia quæ cum Adriano VI. invecta Romam invasit.’
+
+[387] E.g. Firenzuola, _Opera_ (Milano 1802), vol. i. p. 116, in the
+_Discorsi degli Animali_.
+
+[388] Comp. the names in Höfler, _Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Academie_
+(1876), vol. 82, p. 435.
+
+[389] The words of Pier. Valerian, _De Infel. Lit._ ed. Mencken, p. 382,
+are most characteristic of the public feeling at Rome: ‘Ecce adest
+Musarum et eloquentiæ totiusque nitoris hostis acerrimis, qui literatis
+omnibus inimicitias minitaretur, quoniam, ut ipse dictitabat, Terentiani
+essent, quos quum odisse atque etiam persequi cœpisset voluntarium alii
+exilium, alias atque alias alii latebras quærentes tam diu latuere quoad
+Deo beneficio altero imperii anno decessit, qui si aliquanto diutius
+vixisset, Gothica illa tempora adversus bonas literas videbatur
+suscitaturus.’ The general hatred of Adrian was also due partly to the
+fact that in the great pecuniary difficulties in which he found himself
+he adopted the expedient of a direct tax. Ranke, _Päpste_, i. 411. It
+may here be mentioned that there were, nevertheless, poets to be found
+who praised Adrian. Comp. various passages in the _Coryciana_ (ed. Rome,
+1524), esp. J. J. 2_b_ sqq.
+
+[390] To the Duke of Ferrara, January 1, 1536 (_Lettere_, ed. 1539, fol.
+39): ‘You will now journey from Rome to Naples,’ ‘ricreando la vista
+avvilita nel mirar le miserie pontificali con la contemplazione delle
+eccellenze imperiali.’
+
+[391] The fear which he caused to men of mark, especially artists, by
+these means, cannot be here described. The publicistic weapon of the
+German Reformation was chiefly the pamphlet dealing with events as they
+occurred; Aretino is a journalist in the sense that he has within
+himself a perpetual occasion for writing.
+
+[392] E.g. in the _Capitolo_ on Albicante, a bad poet; unfortunately the
+passages are unfit for quotation.
+
+[393] _Lettere_, ed. Venez. 1539, fol. 12, dated May 31, 1527.
+
+[394] In the first _Capitolo_ to Cosimo.
+
+[395] Gaye, _Carteggio_, ii. 332.
+
+[396] See the insolent letter of 1536 in the _Lettere Pittor._ i.
+Append. 34. See above, p. 142, for the house where Petrarch was born in
+Arezzo.
+
+[397]
+
+    L’Aretin, per Deo grazia, è vivo e sano,
+    Ma’l mostaccio ha fregiato nobilmente,
+    E più colpi ha, che dita in una mano.’
+     (Mauro, ‘_Capitolo in lode delle bugie._’)
+
+
+[398] See e.g. the letter to the Cardinal of Lorraine, _Lettere_, ed.
+Venez. fol. 29, dated Nov. 21, 1534, and the letters to Charles V., in
+which he says that no man stands nearer to God than Charles.
+
+[399] For what follows, see Gaye, _Carteggio_, ii. 336, 337, 345.
+
+[400] _Lettere_, ed. Venez. 1539, fol. 15, dated June 16, 1529. Comp.
+another remarkable letter to M. A., dated April 15, 1528, fol. 212.
+
+[401] He may have done so either in the hope of obtaining the red hat or
+from fear of the new activity of the Inquisition, which he had ventured
+to attack bitterly in 1535 (l. c. fol. 37), but which, after the
+reorganisation of the institution in 1542, suddenly took a fresh start,
+and soon silenced every opposing voice.
+
+[402] [Carmina Burana, in the _Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins in
+Stuttgart_, vol. xvi. (Stuttg. 1847). The stay in Pavia (p. 68 _bis_),
+the Italian local references in general, the scene with the ‘pastorella’
+under the olive-tree (p. 146), the mention of the ‘pinus’ as a shady
+field tree (p. 156), the frequent use of the word ‘bravium’ (pp. 137,
+144), and particularly the form Madii for Maji (p. 141), all speak in
+favour of our assumption.]
+
+The conjecture of Dr. Burckhardt that the best pieces of the _Carmina
+Burana_ were written by an Italian, is not tenable. The grounds brought
+forward in its support have little weight (e.g. the mention of Pavia:
+‘Quis Paviæ demorans castus habeatur?’ which can be explained as a
+proverbial expression, or referred to a short stay of the writer at
+Pavia), cannot, further, hold their own against the reasons on the other
+side, and finally lose all their force in view of the probable
+identification of the author. The arguments of O. Hubatsch _Die
+lateinischen Vagantenlieder des Mittelalters_, Görlitz, 1870, p. 87)
+against the Italian origin of these poems are, among others, the attacks
+on the Italian and praise of the German clergy, the rebukes of the
+southerners as a ‘gens proterva,’ and the reference to the poet as
+‘transmontanus.’ Who he actually was, however, is not clearly made out.
+That he bore the name of Walther throws no light upon his origin. He was
+formerly identified with Gualterus de Mapes, a canon of Salisbury and
+chaplain to the English kings at the end of the twelfth century; since,
+by Giesebrecht (_Die Vaganten oder Goliarden und ihre Lieder, Allgemeine
+Monatschrift_, 1855), with Walther of Lille or Chatillon, who passed
+from France into England and Germany, and thence possibly with the
+Archbishop Reinhold of Köln (1164 and 75) to Italy (Pavia, &c.). If this
+hypothesis, against which Hubatsch (l. c.) has brought forward certain
+objections, must be abandoned, it remains beyond a doubt that the origin
+of nearly all these songs is to be looked for in France, from whence
+they were diffused through the regular school which here existed for
+them over Germany, and there expanded and mixed with German phrases;
+while Italy, as Giesebrecht has shown, remained almost unaffected by
+this class of poetry. The Italian translator of Dr. Burckhardt’s work,
+Prof. D. Valbusa, in a note to this passage (i. 235), also contests the
+Italian origin of the poem. [L. G.]
+
+[403] _Carm. Bur._ p. 155, only a fragment: the whole in Wright, _Walter
+Mapes_ (1841), p. 258. Comp. Hubatsch, p. 27 sqq., who points to the
+fact that a story often treated of in France is at the foundation. Æst.
+Inter. _Carm. Bur._ p. 67; Dum Dianæ, _Carm. Bur._ p. 124. Additional
+instances: ‘Cor patet Jovi;’ classical names for the loved one; once,
+when he calls her Blanciflor, he adds, as if to make up for it, the name
+of Helena.
+
+[404] In what way antiquity could serve as guide and teacher in all the
+higher regions of life, is briefly sketched by Æneas Sylvius (_Opera_,
+p. 603, in the _Epist._ 105, to the Archduke Sigismund).
+
+[405] For particulars we must refer the reader to Roscoe, _Lorenzo Mag._
+and _Leo X._, as well as to Voigt, _Enea Silvio_ (Berlin, 1856-63); to
+the works of Reumont and to Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom im
+Mittelalter_.
+
+To form a conception of the extent which studies at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century had reached, we cannot do better than turn to the
+_Commentarii Urbani_ of Raphael Volatterranus (ed. Basil, 1544, fol. 16,
+&c.). Here we see how antiquity formed the introduction and the chief
+matter of study in every branch of knowledge, from geography and local
+history, the lives of great and famous men, popular philosophy, morals
+and the special sciences, down to the analysis of the whole of Aristotle
+with which the work closes. To understand its significance as an
+authority for the history of culture, we must compare it with all the
+earlier encyclopædias. A complete and circumstantial account of the
+matter is given in Voigt’s admirable work, _Die Wiederbelebung des
+classischen Alterthums_ oder _Das erste Jahrhundert der Humanismus_,
+Berlin, 1859.
+
+[406] In William of Malmesbury, _Gesta Regum Anglor_. l. ii. § 169, 170,
+205, 206 (ed. Lond. 1840, vol. i. p. 277 sqq. and p. 354 sqq.), we meet
+with the dreams of treasure-hunters, Venus as ghostly love, and the
+discovery of the gigantic body of Pallas, son of Evander, about the
+middle of the eleventh century. Comp. Jac. ab Aquis _Imago Mundi_
+(_Hist. Patr. Monum. Script._ t. iii. col. 1603), on the origin of the
+House of Colonna, with reference to the discovery of hidden treasure.
+Besides the tales of the treasure-seekers, William of Malmesbury
+mentions the elegy of Hildebert of Mans, Bishop of Tours, one of the
+most singular examples of humanistic enthusiasm in the first half of the
+twelfth century.
+
+[407] Dante, _Convito_, tratt. iv. cap. v.
+
+[408] _Epp. Familiares_, vi. 2; references to Rome before he had seen
+it, and expressions of his longing for the city, _Epp. Fam._ ed.
+Fracass. vol. i. pp. 125, 213; vol. ii. pp. 336 sqq. See also the
+collected references in L. Geiger, _Petrarca_, p. 272, note 3. In
+Petrarch we already find complaints of the many ruined and neglected
+buildings, which he enumerates one by one (_De Rem. Utriusque Fort._
+lib. i. dial. 118), adding the remark that many statues were left from
+antiquity, but no paintings (l. c. 41).
+
+[409] _Dittamondo_, ii. cap. 3. The procession reminds one at times of
+the three kings and their suite in the old pictures. The description of
+the city (ii. cap. 31) is not without archæological value (Gregorovius,
+vi. 697, note 1). According to Polistoro (Murat. xxiv. col. 845),
+Niccolò and Ugo of Este journeyed in 1366 to Rome, ‘per vedere quelle
+magnificenze antiche, che al presente sipossono vedere in Roma.’
+
+[410] Gregorovius, v. 316 sqq. Parenthetically we may quote foreign
+evidence that Rome in the Middle Ages was looked upon as a quarry. The
+famous Abbot Sugerius, who about 1140 was in search of lofty pillars for
+the rebuilding of St. Denis, thought at first of nothing less then
+getting hold of the granite monoliths of the Baths of Diocletian, but
+afterwards changed his mind. See ‘Sugerii Libellus Alter,’ in Duchesne,
+_Hist. Franc. Scriptores_, iv. p. 352.
+
+[411] _Poggii Opera_, fol. 50 sqq. ‘Ruinarum Urbis Romæ Descriptio,’
+written about 1430, shortly before the death of Martin V. The Baths of
+Caracalla and Diocletian had then their pillars and coating of marble.
+See Gregorovius, vi. 700-705.
+
+[412] Poggio appears as one of the earliest collectors of inscriptions,
+in his letter in the _Vita Poggii_, Muratori, xx. col. 177, and as
+collector of busts, (col. 183, and letter in Shepherd-Tonelli, i. 258).
+See also _Ambros. Traversarii Epistolæ_, xxv. 42. A little book which
+Poggio wrote on inscriptions seems to have been lost. Shepherd, _Life of
+Poggio_, trad. Tonelli, i. 154 sqq.
+
+[413] Fabroni, _Cosmus_, Adnot. 86. From a letter of Alberto degli
+Alberti to Giovanni Medici. See also Gregorovius, vii. 557. For the
+condition of Rome under Martin V., see Platina, p. 227; and during the
+absence of Eugenius IV., see Vespasiano Fiorent., p. 21.
+
+[414] _Roma Instaurata_, written in 1447, and dedicated to the Pope;
+first printed, Rome, 1474.
+
+[415] See, nevertheless, his distichs in Voigt, _Wiederbelebung des
+Alterthums_, p. 275, note 2. He was the first Pope who published a Bull
+for the protection of old monuments (4 Kal. Maj. 1462), with penalties
+in case of disobedience. But these measures were ineffective. Comp.
+Gregorovius, vii. pp. 558 sqq.
+
+[416] What follows is from Jo. Ant. Campanus, _Vita Pii II._, in
+Muratori, iii. ii. col. 980 sqq. _Pii II. Commentarii_, pp. 48, 72 sqq.,
+206, 248 sqq., 501, and elsewhere.
+
+[417] First dated edition, Brixen, 1482.
+
+[418] Boccaccio, _Fiammetta_, cap. 5. _Opere_, ed. Montier, vi. 91.
+
+[419] His work, _Cyriaci Anconitani Itinerarium_, ed. Mehus, Florence,
+1742. Comp. Leandro Alberti, _Descriz. di tutta l’Italia_, fol. 285.
+
+[420] Two instances out of many: the fabulous origin of Milan in
+Manipulus (Murat. xl. col. 552), and that of Florence in Gio. Villani
+(who here, as elsewhere, enlarges on the forged chronicle of Ricardo
+Malespini), according to which Florence, being loyally Roman in its
+sentiments, is always in the right against the anti-Roman rebellious
+Fiesole (i. 9, 38, 41; ii. 2). Dante, _Inf._ xv. 76.
+
+[421] _Commentarii_, p. 206, in the fourth book.
+
+[421A] Mich. Cannesius, _Vita Pauli II._, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 993.
+Towards even Nero, son of Domitius Ahenobarbus, the author will not be
+impolite, on account of his connection with the Pope. He only says of
+him, ‘De quo verum Scriptores multa ac diversa commemorant.’ The family
+of Plato in Milan went still farther, and nattered itself on its descent
+from the great Athenian. Filelfo in a wedding speech, and in an encomium
+on the jurist Teodoro Plato, ventured to make this assertion; and a
+Giovanantonio Plato put the inscription on a portrait in relief carved
+by him in 1478 (in the court of the Pal. Magenta at Milan): ‘Platonem
+suum, a quo originem et ingenium refert.’
+
+[422] See on this point, Nangiporto, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1094;
+Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1951; Matarazzo, in the
+_Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 180. Nangiporto, however, admits that it was
+no longer possible to decide whether the corpse was male or female.
+
+[423] As early as Julius II. excavations were made in the hope of
+finding statues. Vasari, xi. p. 302, _V. di Gio. da Udine_. Comp.
+Gregorovius, viii. 186.
+
+[424] The letter was first attributed to Castiglione, _Lettere di Negozi
+del Conte Bald. Castiglione_, Padua, 1736 and 1769, but proved to be
+from the hand of Raphael by Daniele Francesconi in 1799. It is printed
+from a Munich MS. in Passavant, _Leben Raphael’s_, iii. p. 44. Comp.
+Gruyer _Raphael et l’Antiquité_, 1864, i. 435-457.
+
+[425] _Lettere Pittoriche_, ii. 1, Tolomei to Landi, 14 Nov., 1542.
+
+[426] He tried ‘curis animique doloribus quacunque ratione aditum
+intercludere;’ music and lively conversation charmed him, and he hoped
+by their means to live longer. _Leonis X. Vita Anonyma_, in Roscoe, ed.
+Bossi, xii. p. 169.
+
+[427] This point is referred to in the _Satires_ of Ariosto. See the
+first (‘Perc’ ho molto,’ &c.), and the fourth ‘Poiche, Annibale’).
+
+[428] Ranke, _Päpste_, i. 408 sqq. ‘_Lettere dei Principi_, p. 107.
+Letter of Negri, September 1, 1522 ... ‘tutti questi cortigiani esausti
+da Papa Leone e falliti.’ They avenged themselves after the death of Leo
+by satirical verses and inscriptions.
+
+[429] _Pii II. Commentarii_, p. 251 in the 5th book. Comp. Sannazaro’s
+elegy, ‘Ad Ruinas Cumarum urbis vetustissimæ’ (_Opera_, fol. 236 sqq.).
+
+[430] Polifilo (i.e. Franciscus Columna) ‘Hypnerotomachia, ubi humana
+omnia non nisi somnum esse docet atque obiter plurima scita sane quam
+digna commemorat,’ Venice, Aldus Manutius, 1499. Comp. on this
+remarkable book and others, A. Didot, _Alde Manuce_, Paris, 1875, pp.
+132-142; and Gruyer, _Raphael et l’Antiquité_, i. pp. 191 sqq.; J.
+Burckhardt, _Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien_, pp. 43 sqq., and
+the work of A. Ilg, Vienna, 1872.
+
+[431] While all the Fathers of the Church and all the pilgrims speak
+only of a cave. The poets, too, do without the palace. Comp. Sannazaro,
+_De Partu Virginis_, l. ii.
+
+[432] Chiefly from Vespasiano Fiorentine, in the first vol. of the
+_Spicileg. Romanum_, by Mai, from which edition the quotations in this
+book are made. New edition by Bartoli, Florence, 1859. The author was a
+Florentine bookseller and copying agent, about and after the middle of
+the fifteenth century.
+
+[433] Comp. Petr. _Epist. Fam._ ed. Fracass. l. xviii. 2, xxiv. 12, var.
+25, with the notes of Fracassetti in the Italian translation, vol. iv.
+92-101, v. 196 sqq., where the fragment of a translation of Homer before
+the time of Pilato is also given.
+
+[434] Forgeries, by which the passion for antiquity was turned to the
+profit or amusement of rogues, are well known to have been not uncommon.
+See the articles in the literary histories on Annius of Viterbo.
+
+[435] Vespas. Fiorent. p. 31. ‘Tommaso da Serezana usava dire, che dua
+cosa farebbe, se egli potesse mai spendere, ch’era in libri e murare. E
+l’una e l’altra fece nel suo pontificato.’ With respect to his
+translation, see Æen. Sylvius, _De Europa_, cap. 58, p. 459, and
+Papencordt, _Ges. der Stadt Rom._ p. 502. See esp. Voigt, op. cit. book
+v.
+
+[436] Vespas. Fior. pp. 48 and 658, 665. Comp. J. Manetti, _Vita Nicolai
+V._, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 925 sqq. On the question whether and how
+Calixtus III. partly dispersed the library again, see Vespas. Fiorent.
+p. 284, with Mai’s note.
+
+[437] Vespas. Fior. pp. 617 sqq.
+
+[438] Vespas. Fior. pp. 457 sqq.
+
+[439] Vespas. Fiorent, p. 193. Comp. Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col.
+1185 sqq.
+
+[440] How the matter was provisionally treated is related in Malipiero,
+_Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor._ vii. ii. pp. 653, 655.
+
+[441] Vespas. Fior. pp. 124 sqq., and ‘Inventario della Libreria
+Urbinata compilata nel Secolo XV. da Federigo Veterano, bibliotecario di
+Federigo I. da Montefeltro Duca d’Urbino,’ given by C. Guasti in tbe
+_Giornale Storico degli Archivi Toscani_, vi. (1862), 127-147 and vii.
+(1863) 46-55, 130-154. For contemporary opinions on the library, see
+Favre, _Mélanges d’Hist. Lit._ i. 127, note 6. The following is the
+substance of Dr. Geiger’s remarks on the subject of the old authors:--
+
+For the Medicean Library comp. _Delle condicioni e delle vicende della
+libreria medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508 ricerche di Enea Piccolomini_,
+Arch. stor. ital., 265 sqq., 3 serie, vol. xix. pp. 101-129,254-281, xx.
+51-94, xxi. 102-112, 282-296. Dr. Geiger does not undertake an estimate
+of the relative values of the various rare and almost unknown works
+contained in the library, nor is he able to state where they are now to
+be found. He remarks that information as to Greece is much fuller than
+as to Italy, which is a characteristic mark of the time. The catalogue
+contains editions of the Bible, of single books of it, with text and
+annotations, also Greek and Roman works in their then most complete
+forms, together with some Hebrew books--_tractatus quidam rabbinorum
+hebr._--with much modern work, chiefly in Latin, and with not a little
+in Italian.
+
+Dr. Geiger doubts the absolute accuracy of Vespasiano Fiorentino’s
+catalogue of the library at Urbino. See the German edition, i. 313, 314.
+[S.G.C.M.]
+
+[442] Perhaps at the capture of Urbino by the troops of Cæsar Borgia.
+The existence of the manuscript has been doubted; but I cannot believe
+that Vespasiano would have spoken of the gnomic extracts from Menander,
+which do not amount to more than a couple of hundred verses, as ‘tutte
+le opere,’ nor have mentioned them in the list of comprehensive
+manuscripts, even though he had before him only our present Pindar and
+Sophocles. It is not inconceivable that this Menander may some day come
+to light.
+
+[The catalogue of the library at Urbino (see foregoing note), which
+dates back to the fifteenth century, is not perfectly in accordance with
+Vespasiano’s report, and with the remarks of Dr. Burckhardt upon it. As
+an official document, it deserves greater credit than Vespasiano’s
+description, which, like most of his descriptions, cannot be acquitted
+of a certain inaccuracy in detail and tendency to over-colouring. In
+this catalogue no mention is made of the manuscript of Menander. Mai’s
+doubt as to its existence is therefore justified. Instead of ‘all the
+works of Pindar,’ we here find: ‘Pindaris Olimpia et Pithia.’ The
+catalogue makes no distinction between ancient and modern books,
+contains the works of Dante (among others, _Comœdiæ Thusco Carmine_),
+and Boccaccio, in a very imperfect form; those of Petrarch, however, in
+all completeness. It may be added that this catalogue mentions many
+humanistic writings which have hitherto remained unknown and unprinted,
+that it contains collections of the privileges of the princes of
+Montefeltro, and carefully enumerates the dedications offered by
+translators or original writers to Federigo of Urbino.--L. G.]
+
+[443] For what follows and in part for what has gone before,
+see W. Wattenbach, _Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter_, 2nd. ed. Leipzig,
+1875, pp. 392 sqq., 405 sqq., 505. Comp. also the poem, _De Officio
+Scribæ_, of Phil. Beroaldus, who, however, is rather speaking of the
+public scrivener.]
+
+[444] When Piero de’ Medici, at the death of Matthias Corvinus,
+the book-loving King of Hungary, declared that the ‘scrittori’ must now
+lower their charges, since they would otherwise find no further
+employment (Scil. except in Italy), he can only have meant the Greek
+copyists, as the caligraphists, to whom one might be tempted to refer
+his words, continued to be numerous throughout all Italy. Fabroni,
+_Laurent. Magn._ Adnot. 156 Comp. Adnot. 154.]
+
+[445] Gaye, _Carteggio_, i. p. 164. A letter of the year 1455
+under Calixtus III. The famous miniature Bible of Urbino is written by a
+Frenchman, a workman of Vespasiano’s. See D’Agincourt, _La Peinture_,
+tab. 78. On German copyists in Italy, see further G. Campori, _Artisti
+Italiani e Stranieri negli Stati Estensi_, Modena, 1855, p. 277, and
+_Giornale di Erudizione Artistica_, vol. ii. pp. 360 sqq. Wattenbach,
+_Schriftwesen_, 411, note 5. For German printers, see below.]
+
+[446] Vespas. Fior. p. 335.]
+
+[447] Ambr. Trav. _Epist._ i. p. 63. The Pope was equally
+serviceable to the libraries of Urbino and Pesaro (that of Aless.
+Sforza, p. 38). Comp. Arch. Stor. ital. xxi. 103-106. The Bible and
+Commentaries on it; the Fathers of the Church; Aristotle, with his
+commentators, including Averroes and Avicenna; Moses Maimonides; Latin
+translations of Greek philosophers; the Latin prose writers; of the
+poets only Virgil, Statius, Ovid, and Lucan are mentioned.]
+
+[448] Vespas. Fior. p. 129.]
+
+[449] ‘Artes--Quis Labor est fessis demptus ab Articulis’ in a
+poem by Robertus Ursus about 1470, _Rerum Ital. Script, ex Codd.
+Fiorent._ tom, ii. col. 693. He rejoices rather too hastily over the
+rapid spread of classical literature which was hoped for. Comp. Libri,
+_Hist. des Sciences Mathématiques_, ii. 278 sqq. (See also the eulogy of
+Lor. Valla, _Hist. Zeitschr._ xxxii. 62.) For the printers at Rome (the
+first were Germans: Hahn, Pannartz, Schweinheim), see Gaspar. Veron.
+_Vita Pauli II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1046; and Laire, _Spec. Hist.
+Typographiæ Romanae, xv. sec._ Romæ, 1778; Gregorovius, vii. 525-33. For
+the first Privilegium in Venice, see Marin Sanudo, in Muratori, xxii.
+col. 1189.]
+
+[450] Something of the sort had already existed in the age of
+manuscripts. See Vespas. Fior. p. 656, on the _Cronaco del Mondo_ of
+Zembino of Pistoia.]
+
+[451] Fabroni, _Laurent. Magn._ Adnot. 212. It happened in the
+case of the libel. _De Exilio_.]
+
+[452] Even in Petrarch the consciousness of this superiority of
+Italians over Greeks is often to be noticed: _Epp. Fam._ lib. i. ep. 3;
+_Epp. Sen._ lib. xii. ep. 2; he praises the Greeks reluctantly:
+_Carmina_, lib. iii. 30 (ed. Rossetti, vol. ii. p. 342). A century
+later, Æneas Sylvius writes (Comm. to Panormita, ‘De Dictis et Factis
+Alfonsi,’ Append.): ‘Alfonsus tanto est Socrate major quanto gravior
+Romanus homo quam Græcus putatur.’ In accordance with this feeling the
+study of Greek was thought little of. From a document made use of below,
+written about 1460, it appears that Porcellio and Tomaso Seneca tried to
+resist the rising influence of Greek. Similarly, Paolo Cortese (1490)
+was averse to Greek, lest the hitherto exclusive authority of Latin
+should be impaired, _De Hominibus Doctis_, p. 20. For Greek studies in
+Italy, see esp. the learned work of Favre, _Mélanges d’Hist. Liter._ i.
+_passim_.]
+
+[453] See above p. 187, and comp. C. Voigt, _Wiederbelebung_,
+323 sqq.]
+
+[454] The dying out of these Greeks is mentioned by Pierius
+Valerian, _De Infelicitate Literat._ in speaking of Lascaris. And Paulus
+Jovius, at the end of his _Elogia Literaria_, says of the Germans, ‘Quum
+literæ non latinæ modo cum pudore nostro, sed græcæ et hebraicæ in eorum
+terras fatali commigratione transierint’ (about 1450). Similarly, sixty
+years before (1482), Joh. Argyropulos had exclaimed, when he heard young
+Reuchlin translate Thucydides in his lecture-room at Rome, ‘Græcia
+nostra exilio transvolavit Alpes.’ Geiger, _Reuchlin_ (Lpzg. 1871), pp.
+26 sqq. Burchhardt, 273. A remarkable passage is to be found in Jov.
+Pontanus, _Antonius_, opp. iv. p. 203: ‘In Græcia magis nunc Turcaicum
+discas quam Græcum. Quicquid enim doctorum habent Græcæ disciplinæ, in
+Italia nobiscum victitat.]
+
+[455] Ranke, _Päpste_, i. 486 sqq. Comp. the end of this part
+of our work.]
+
+[456] Tommaso Gar, _Relazioni della Corte di Roma_, i. pp. 338,
+379.]
+
+[457] George of Trebizond, teacher of rhetoric at Venice, with
+a salary of 150 ducats a year (see Malipiero, _Arch. Stor._ vii. ii. p.
+653). For the Greek chair at Perugia, see _Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 19
+of the Introduction. In the case of Rimini, there is some doubt whether
+Greek was taught or not. Comp. _Anecd. Litt._ ii. p. 300. At Bologna,
+the centre of juristic studies, Aurispa had but little success. Details
+on the subject in Malagola.]
+
+[458] Exhaustive information on the subject in the admirable
+work of A. F. Didot, _Alde Manuce et l’Héllenisme à Venise_, Paris,
+1875.]
+
+[459] For what follows see A. de Gubernatis, _Matériaux pour
+servir à l’Histoire des Études Orientales en Italie_, Paris, Florence,
+&c., 1876. Additions by Soave in the _Bolletino Italiano degli Studi
+Orientali_, i. 178 sqq. More precise details below.]
+
+[460] See below.]
+
+[461] See _Commentario della Vita di Messer Gianozzo Manetti,
+scritto da Vespasiano Bisticci_, Torino, 1862, esp. pp. 11, 44, 91 sqq.]
+
+[462] Vesp. Fior. p. 320. A. Trav. _Epist._ lib. xi. 16.]
+
+[463] Platina, _Vita Sixti IV._ p. 332.]
+
+[464] Benedictus Faleus, _De Origine Hebraicarum Græcarum
+Latinarumque Literarum_, Naples, 1520.]
+
+[465] For Dante, see Wegele, _Dante_, 2nd ed. p. 268, and
+Lasinio, _Dante e le Lingue semitiche_ in the _Rivista Orientale_ (Flor.
+1867-8). On Poggio, _Opera_, p. 297; Lion. Bruni, _Epist._ lib. ix. 12,
+comp. Gregorovius, vii. 555, and Shepherd-Tonelli, _Vita di Poggio_, i.
+65. The letter of Poggio to Niccoli, in which he treats of Hebrew, has
+been lately published in French and Latin under the title, _Les Bains de
+Bade par Pogge_, by Antony Méray, Paris, 1876. Poggio desired to know on
+what principles Jerome translated the Bible, while Bruni maintained
+that, now that Jerome’s translation was in existence, distrust was shown
+to it by learning Hebrew. For Manetti as a collector of Hebrew MSS. see
+Steinschneider, in the work quoted below. In the library at Urbino there
+were in all sixty-one Hebrew manuscripts. Among them a Bible ‘opus
+mirabile et integrum, cum glossis mirabiliter scriptus in modo avium,
+arborum et animalium in maximo volumine, ut vix a tribus hominibus
+feratur.’ These, as appears from Assemanni’s list, are now mostly in the
+Vatican. On the first printing in Hebrew, see Steinschneider and Cassel,
+_Jud. Typographic in Esch. u. Gruber, Realencyclop._ sect. ii. bd. 28,
+p. 34, and _Catal. Bodl._ by Steinschneider, 1852-60, pp. 2821-2866. It
+is characteristic that of the two first printers one belonged to Mantua,
+the other to Reggio in Calabria, so that the printing of Hebrew books
+began almost contemporaneously at the two extremities of Italy. In
+Mantua the printer was a Jewish physician, who was helped by his wife.
+It may be mentioned as a curiosity that in the _Hypnerotomachia_ of
+Polifilo, written 1467, printed 1499, fol. 68 _a_, there is a short
+passage in Hebrew; otherwise no Hebrew occurs in the Aldine editions
+before 1501. The Hebrew scholars in Italy are given by De Gubernatis (p.
+80), but authorities are not quoted for them singly. (Marco Lippomanno
+is omitted; comp. Steinschneider in the book given below.) Paolo de
+Canale is mentioned as a learned Hebraist by Pier. Valerian. _De Infel.
+Literat._ ed. Mencken, p. 296; in 1488 Professor in Bologna, _Mag.
+Vicentius_; comp. _Costituzione, discipline e riforme dell’antico studio
+Bolognese. Memoria del Prof. Luciano Scarabelli_, Piacenza, 1876; in
+1514 Professor in Rome, Agarius Guidacerius, acc. to Gregorovius, viii.
+292, and the passages there quoted. On Guid. see Steinschneider,
+_Bibliogr. Handbuch_, Leipzig, 1859, pp. 56, 157-161.]
+
+[466] The literary activity of the Jews in Italy is too great
+and of too wide an influence to be passed over altogether in silence.
+The following paragraphs, which, not to overload the text, I have
+relegated to the notes, are wholly the substance of communications made
+me by Dr. M. Steinschneider, of Berlin, to whom I [Dr. Ludwig Geiger]
+here take the opportunity of expressing my thanks for his constant and
+friendly help. He has given exhaustive evidence on the subject in his
+profound and instructive treatise, ‘Letteratura Italiana dei Giudei,’ in
+the review _Il Buonarotti_, vols. vi. viii. xi. xii.; Rome, 1871-77
+(also printed separately); to which, once for all, I refer the reader.
+
+There were many Jews living in Rome at the time of the Second Temple.
+They had so thoroughly adopted the language and civilisation prevailing
+in Italy, that even on their tombs they used not Hebrew, but Latin and
+Greek inscriptions (communicated by Garucci, see Steinschneider, _Hebr.
+Bibliogr._ vi. p. 102, 1863). In Lower Italy, especially, Greek learning
+survived during the Middle Ages among the inhabitants generally, and
+particularly among the Jews, of whom some are said to have taught at the
+University of Salerno, and to have rivalled the Christians in literary
+productiveness (comp. Steinschneider, ‘Donnolo,’ in Virchow’s _Archiv_,
+bd. 39, 40). This supremacy of Greek culture lasted till the Saracens
+conquered Lower Italy. But before this conquest the Jews of Middle Italy
+had been striving to equal or surpass their bretheren of the South.
+Jewish learning centred in Rome, and from there spread, as early as the
+sixteenth century, to Cordova, Kairowan, and South Germany. By means of
+these emigrants, Italian Judaism became the teacher of the whole race.
+Through its works, especially through the work _Aruch_ of Nathan ben
+Jechiel (1101), a great dictionary to the Talmud, the Midraschim, and
+the Thargum, ‘which, though not informed by a genuine scientific spirit,
+offers so rich a store of matter and rests on such early authorities,
+that its treasures have even now not been wholly exhausted,’ it
+exercised indirectly a great influence (Abraham Geiger, _Das Judenthum
+und seine Geschichte_, Breslau, bd. ii. 1865, p. 170; and the same
+author’s _Nachgelassene Schriften_, bd. ii. Berlin, 1875, pp. 129 and
+154). A little later, in the thirteenth century, the Jewish literature
+in Italy brought Jews and Christians into contact, and received through
+Frederick II., and still more perhaps through his son Manfred, a kind of
+official sanction. Of this contact we have evidence in the fact that an
+Italian, Niccolò di Giovinazzo, studied with a Jew, Moses ben Salomo,
+the Latin translation of the famous work of Maimonides, _More Nebuchim_;
+of this sanction, in the fact that the Emperor, who was distinguished
+for his freethinking as much as for his fondness for Oriental studies,
+probably was the cause of this Latin translation being made, and
+summoned the famous Anatoli from Provence into Italy, to translate works
+of Averroes into Hebrew (comp. Steinschneider, _Hebr. Bibliogr._ xv. 86,
+and Renan, _L’Averroes et l’Averroisme_, third edition, Paris, 1866, p.
+290). These measures prove the acquaintance of early Jews with Latin,
+which rendered intercourse possible between them and Christians--an
+intercourse which bore sometimes a friendly and sometimes a polemical
+character. Still more than Anatoli, Hillel b. Samuel, in the latter half
+of the thirteenth century, devoted himself to Latin literature; he
+studied in Spain, returned to Italy, and here made many translations
+from Latin into Hebrew; among them of writings of Hippocrates in a Latin
+version. (This was printed 1647 by Gaiotius, and passed for his own.) In
+this translation he introduced a few Italian words by way of
+explanation, and thus perhaps, or by his whole literary procedure, laid
+himself open to the reproach of despising Jewish doctrines.
+
+But the Jews went further than this. At the end of the thirteenth and in
+the fourteenth centuries, they drew so near to Christian science and to
+the representatives of the culture of the Renaissance, that one of them,
+Giuda Romano, in a series of hitherto unprinted writings, laboured
+zealously at the scholastic philosophy, and in one treatise used Italian
+words to explain Hebrew expressions. He is one of the first to do so
+(Steinschneider, _Giuda Romano_, Rome, 1870). Another, Giuda’s cousin
+Manoello, a friend of Dante, wrote in imitation of him a sort of Divine
+Comedy in Hebrew, in which he extols Dante, whose death he also bewailed
+in an Italian sonnet (Abraham Geiger, _Jüd. Zeitsch._ v. 286-331,
+Breslau, 1867). A third, Mose Riete, born towards the end of the
+century, wrote works in Italian (a specimen in the Catalogue of Hebrew
+MSS., Leyden, 1858). In the fifteenth century we can clearly recognise
+the influence of the Renaissance in Messer Leon, a Jewish writer, who,
+in his _Rhetoric_, uses Quintilian and Cicero, as well as Jewish
+authorities. One of the most famous Jewish writers in Italy in the
+fifteenth century was Eliah del Medigo, a philosopher who taught
+publicly as a Jew in Padua and Florence, and was once chosen by the
+Venetian Senate as arbitrator in a philosophical dispute (Abr. Geiger,
+_Nachgelassene Schriften_, Berlin, 1876, bd. iii. 3). Eliah del Medigo
+was the teacher of Pico della Mirandola; besides him, Jochanan Alemanno
+(comp. Steinschneider, _Polem. u. Apolog. Lit._ Lpzg. 1877, anh. 7, §
+25). The list of learned Jews in Italy may be closed by Kalonymos ben
+David and Abraham de Balmes (d. 1523), to whom the greater part of the
+translations of Averroes from Hebrew into Latin is due, which were still
+publicly read at Padua in the seventeenth century. To this scholar may
+be added the Jewish Aldus, Gerson Soncino, who not only made his press
+the centre of Jewish printing, but, by publishing Greek works,
+trespassed on the ground of the great Aldus himself (Steinschneider,
+_Gerson Soncino und Aldus Manutius_, Berlin, 1858).
+
+[467] Pierius Valerian. _De Infelic. Lit._ ed. Mencken, 301, speaking of
+Mongajo. Gubernatis, p. 184, identifies him with Andrea Alpago, of
+Bellemo, said to have also studied Arabian literature, and to have
+travelled in the East. On Arabic studies generally, Gubernatis, pp. 173
+sqq. For a translation made 1341 from Arabic into Italian, comp.
+Narducci, _Intorno ad una tradizione italiana di una composizione
+astronomica di Alfonso X. rè di Castiglia_, Roma 1865. On Ramusio, see
+Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 250.
+
+[468] Gubernatis, p. 188. The first book contains Christian prayers in
+Arabic; the first Italian translations of the Koran appeared in 1547. In
+1499 we meet with a few not very successful Arabic types in the work of
+Polifilo, b. 7 _a_. For the beginnings of Egyptian studies, see
+Gregorovius, viii. p. 304.
+
+[469] Especially in the important letter of the year 1485 to Ermolao
+Barbaro, in _Ang. Politian. Epistolæ_, l. ix. Comp. Jo. Pici, _Oratio de
+Hominis Dignitate_. For this discourse, see the end of part iv.; on Pico
+himself more will be given in part vi. chap. 4.
+
+[470] Their estimate of themselves is indicated by Poggio (_De
+Avaritia_, fol. 2), according to whom only such persons could say that
+they had lived (_se vixisse_) who had written learned and eloquent books
+in Latin or translated Greek into Latin.
+
+[471] Esp. Libri, _Histoires des Sciences Mathém._ ii. 159 sqq., 258
+sqq.
+
+[472] _Purgatorio_, xviii. contains striking instances. Mary hastens
+over the mountains, Cæsar to Spain; Mary is poor and Fabricius
+disinterested. We may here remark on the chronological introduction of
+the Sibyls into the profane history of antiquity as attempted by Uberti
+in his _Dittamondo_ (i. cap. 14, 15), about 1360.
+
+[473] The first German translation of the _Decameron_, by H. Steinhovel,
+was printed in 1472, and soon became popular. The translations of the
+whole _Decameron_ were almost everywhere preceded by those of the story
+of Griselda, written in Latin by Petrarch.
+
+[474] These Latin writings of Boccaccio have been admirably discussed
+recently by Schück, _Zur Characteristik des ital. Hum. im 14 und 15
+Jahrh._ Breslau, 1865; and in an article in Fleckeisen and Masius,
+_Jahrbücher fur Phil. und Pädag._ bd. xx. (1874).
+
+[475] ‘Poeta,’ even in Dante (_Vita Nuova_, p. 47), means only the
+writer of Latin verses, while for Italian the expressions ‘Rimatore,
+Dicitore per rima,’ are used. It is true that the names and ideas became
+mixed in course of time.
+
+[476] Petrarch, too, at the height of his fame complained in moments of
+melancholy that his evil star decreed him to pass his last years among
+scoundrels (_extremi fures_). In the imaginary letter to Livy, _Epp.
+Fam._ ed. Fracass. lib. xxiv. ep. 8. That Petrarch defended poetry, and
+how, is well known (comp. Geiger, _Petr._ 113-117). Besides the enemies
+who beset him in common with Boccaccio, he had to face the doctors
+(comp. _Invectivæ in Medicum Objurgantem_, lib. i. and ii.).
+
+[477] Boccaccio, in a later letter to Jacobus Pizinga (_Opere Volgari_,
+vol. xvi.), confines himself more strictly to poetry properly so called.
+And yet he only recognises as poetry that which treated of antiquity,
+and ignores the Troubadours.
+
+[478] Petr. _Epp. Senil._ lib. i. ep. 5.
+
+[479] Boccaccio (_Vita di Dante_, p. 50): ‘La quale (laurea) non scienza
+accresce ma è dell’acquistata certissimo testimonio e ornamento.’
+
+[480] _Paradiso_, xxv. 1 sqq. Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 50. ‘Sopra
+le fonti di San Giovanni si era disporto di coronare.’ Comp. _Paradiso_,
+i. 25.
+
+[481] See Boccaccio’s letter to him in the _Opere Volgari_, vol. xvi. p.
+36: ‘Si præstet Deus, concedente senatu Romuleo.’ ...
+
+[482] Matt. Villani, v. 26. There was a solemn procession on horseback
+round the city, when the followers of the Emperor, his ‘baroni,’
+accompanied the poet. Boccaccio, l. c. Petrarch: _Invectivæ contra Med.
+Præf._ See also _Epp. Fam. Volgarizzate da Fracassetti_, iii. 128. For
+the speech of Zanobi at the coronation, Friedjung, l. c. 308 sqq. Fazio
+degli Uberti was also crowned, but it is not known where or by whom.
+
+[483] Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 185.
+
+[484] Vespas. Fiorent. pp. 575, 589. _Vita Jan. Manetti_, in Murat. xx.
+col. 543. The celebrity of Lionardo Aretino was in his lifetime so great
+that people came from all parts merely to see him; a Spaniard fell on
+his knees before him.--Vesp. p. 568. For the monument of Guarino, the
+magistrate of Ferrara allowed, in 1461, the then considerable sum of 100
+ducats. On the coronation of poets in Italy there is a good summary of
+notices in Favre, _Mélanges d’Hist. Lit._ (1856) i. 65 sqq.
+
+[485] Comp. Libri, _Histoire des Sciences Mathém._ ii. p. 92 sqq.
+Bologna, as is well known, was older. Pisa flourished in the fourteenth
+century, fell through the wars with Florence, and was afterwards
+restored by Lorenzo Magnifico, ‘ad solatium veteris amissæ libertatis,’
+as Giovio says, _Vita Leonis X._ l. i. The university of Florence (comp.
+Gaye, _Carteggio_, i. p. 461 to 560 _passim_; _Matteo Villani_, i. 8;
+vii. 90), which existed as early as 1321, with compulsory attendance for
+the natives of the city, was founded afresh after the Black Death in
+1848, and endowed with an income of 2,500 gold florins, fell again into
+decay, and was refounded in 1357. The chair for the explanation of
+Dante, established in 1373 at the request of many citizens, was
+afterwards commonly united with the professorship of philology and
+rhetoric, as when Filelfo held it.
+
+[486] This should be noticed in the lists of professors, as in that of
+the University of Pavia in 1400 (Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 290),
+where (among others) no less than twenty jurists appear.
+
+[487] Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col. 990.
+
+[488] Fabroni, _Laurent. Magn._ Adnot. 52, in the year 1491.
+
+[489] Allegretto, _Diari Sanesi_, in Murat. xiii. col. 824.
+
+[490] Filelfo, when called to the newly founded University of Pisa,
+demanded at least 500 gold florins. Comp. Fabroni, _Laur. Magn._ ii. 75
+sqq. The negotiations were broken off, not only on account of the high
+salary asked for.
+
+[491] Comp. Vespasian. Fiorent. pp. 271, 572, 582, 625. _Vita. Jan.
+Manetti_, in Murat. xx. col. 531 sqq.
+
+[492] Vespas. Fiorent. p. 1460. Prendilacqua (a pupil of Vitt.),
+_Intorno alla Vita di V. da F._, first ed. by Natale dalle Laste, 1774,
+translated by Giuseppe Brambilla, Como, 1871. C. Rosmini, _Idea
+dell’ottimo Precettore nella Vita e Disciplina di Vittorino da Feltre e
+de’ suoi Discepoli_, Bassano, 1801. Later works by Racheli (Milan,
+1832), and Venoit (Paris, 1853).
+
+[493] Vespas. Fior. p. 646, of which, however, C. Rosmini, _Vita e
+Disciplina di Guarino Veronese e de’ suoi Discepoli_, Brescia, 1856 (3
+vols.), says that it is (ii. 56), ‘formicolante di errori di fatto.’
+
+[494] For these and for Guarino generally, see Facius, _De Vir.
+Illustribus_, p. 17 sqq.; and Cortesius, _De Hom. Doctis_, p. 13. Both
+agree that the scholars of the following generation prided themselves on
+having been pupils of Guarino; but while Fazio praises his works,
+Cortese thinks that he would have cared better for his fame if he had
+written nothing. Guarino and Vittorino were friends and helped one
+another in their studies. Their contemporaries were fond of comparing
+them, and in this comparison Guarino commonly held the first place
+(Sabellico, _Dial. de Lingu. Lat. Reparata_, in Rosmini, ii. 112).
+Guarino’s attitude with regard to the ‘Ermafrodito’ is remarkable; see
+Rosmini, ii. 46 sqq. In both these teachers an unusual moderation in
+food and drink was observed; they never drank undiluted wine: in both
+the principles of education were alike; they neither used corporal
+punishment; the hardest penalty which Vittorino inflicted was to make
+the boy kneel and lie upon the ground in the presence of his
+fellow-pupils.
+
+[495] To the Archduke Sigismond, _Epist._ 105, p. 600, and to King
+Ladislaus Postumus, p. 695; the latter as _Tractatus de Liberorum
+Educatione_ (1450).
+
+[496] P. 625. On Niccoli, see further a speech of Poggio, _Opera_, ed.
+1513, fol. 102 sqq.; and a life by Manetti in his book, _De Illustribus
+Longaevis_.
+
+[497] The following words of Vespasiano are untranslatable: ‘A vederlo
+in tavola cosi antico come era, era una gentilezza.’
+
+[498] _Ibid._ p. 495.
+
+[499] According to Vespas. p. 271, learned men were in the habit of
+meeting here for discussion.
+
+[500] Of Niccoli it may be further remarked that, like Vittorino, he
+wrote nothing, being convinced that he could not treat of anything in as
+perfect a form as he desired; that his senses were so delicately poised
+that he ‘neque rudentem asinum, neque secantem serram, neque muscipulam
+vagientem sentire audireve poterat.’ But the less favourable sides of
+Niccoli’s character must not be forgotten. He robbed his brother of his
+sweetheart Benvenuta, roused the indignation of Lionardo Aretino by this
+act, and was embittered by the girl against many of his friends. He took
+ill the refusal to lend him books, and had a violent quarrel with
+Guarino on this account. He was not free from a petty jealousy, under
+the influence of which he tried to drive Chrysoloras, Poggio, and
+Filelfo away from Florence.
+
+[501] See his _Vita_, by Naldus Naldi, in Murat. xx. col. 532 sqq. See
+further Vespasiano Bisticci, _Commentario della Vita di Messer Giannozzo
+Manetti_, first published by P. Fanfani in _Collezione di Opere inedite
+o rare_, vol. ii. Torino, 1862. This ‘Commentario’ must be distinguished
+from the short ‘Vita’ of Manetti by the same author, in which frequent
+reference is made to the former. Vespasiano was on intimate terms with
+Giannozzo Manetti, and in the biography tried to draw an ideal picture
+of a statesman for the degenerate Florence. Vesp. is Naldi’s authority.
+Comp. also the fragment in Galetti, _Phil. Vill. Liber Flor._ 1847, pp.
+129-138. Half a century after his death Manetti was nearly forgotten.
+Comp. Paolo Cortese, p. 21.
+
+[502] The title of the work, in Latin and Italian, is given in Bisticci,
+_Commentario_, pp. 109, 112.
+
+[503] What was known of Plato before can only have been fragmentary. A
+strange discussion on the antagonism of Plato and Aristotle took place
+at Ferrara in 1438, between Ugo of Siena and the Greeks who came to the
+Council. Comp. Æneas Sylvius, _De Europa_, cap. 52 (_Opera_, p. 450).
+
+[504] In Niccolò Valori, _Life of Lorenzo the Magnificent_. Comp.
+Vespas. Fiorent. p. 426. The first supporters of Argyropulos were the
+Acciajuoli. _Ib._ 192: Cardinal Bessarion and his parallels between
+Plato and Aristotle. _Ib._ 223: Cusanus as Platonist. _Ib._ 308: The
+Catalonian Narciso and his disputes with Argyropulos. _Ib._ 571: Single
+Dialogues of Plato, translated by Lionardo Aretino. _Ib._ 298: The
+rising influence of Neoplatonism. On Marsilio Ficino, see Reumont,
+_Lorenzo de’ Medici_, ii. 27 sqq.
+
+[505] Varchi, _Stor. Fior._ p. 321. An admirable sketch of character.
+
+[506] The lives of Guarino and Vittorino by Rosmini mentioned above (p.
+213, note 1; and 215, note 1), as well as the life of Poggio by
+Shepherd, especially in the enlarged Italian translation of Tonelli (2
+vols. Florence, 1825); the Correspondence of Poggio, edited by the same
+writer (2 vols. Flor. 1832); and the letters of Poggio in Mai’s
+_Spicilegium_, tom. x. Rome, 1844, pp. 221-272, all contain much on this
+subject.
+
+[507] _Epist. 39_; _Opera_, p. 526, to Mariano Socino.
+
+[508] We must not be misled by the fact that along with all this
+complaints were frequently heard of the inadequacy of princely patronage
+and of the indifference of many princes to their fame. See e.g. Bapt.
+Mantan, Eclog. v. as early as the fifteenth century; and Ambrogio
+Traversari, _De Infelicitate Principum_. It was impossible to satisfy
+all.
+
+[509] For the literary and scientific patronage of the popes down to the
+end of the fifteenth century, see Gregorovius, vols. vii. and viii. For
+Pius II., see Voigt, _En. Silvio als Papst Pius II._ bd. iii. (Berlin,
+1863), pp. 406-440.
+
+[510] Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De Poetis Nostri Temporis_, speaking of the
+_Sphaerulus_ of Camerino. The worthy man did not finish it in time, and
+his work lay for forty years in his desk. For the scanty payments made
+by Sixtus IV., comp. Pierio Valer. _De Infelic. Lit._ on Theodoras Gaza.
+He received for a translation and commentary of a work of Aristotle
+fifty gold florins, ‘ab eo a quo se totum inauratum iri speraverat.’ On
+the deliberate exclusion of the humanists from the cardinalate by the
+popes before Leo, comp. Lor. Grana’s funeral oration on Cardinal Egidio,
+_Anecdot. Litt._ iv. p. 307.
+
+[511] The best are to be found in the _Deliciae Poetarum Italorum_, and
+in the Appendices to the various editions of Roscoe, _Leo X._ Several
+poets and writers, like Alcyonius, _De Exilio_, ed. Menken, p. 10, say
+frankly that they praise Leo in order themselves to become immortal.
+
+[512] Paul. Jov. _Elogia_ speaking of Guido Posthumus.
+
+[513] Pierio Valeriano in his _Simia_.
+
+[514] See the elegy of Joh. Aurelius Mutius in the _Deliciae Poetarum
+Italorum_.
+
+[515] The well-known story of the purple velvet purse filled with
+packets of gold of various sizes, in which Leo used to thrust his hand
+blindly, is in Giraldi _Hecatommithi_, vi. nov. 8. On the other hand,
+the Latin ‘improvisatori,’ when their verses were too faulty, were
+whipped. Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De Poetis Nostri Temp. Opp._ ii. 398
+(Basil, 1580).
+
+[516] Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi. iv. 181.
+
+[517] Vespas. Fior. p. 68 sqq. For the translations from Greek made by
+Alfonso’s orders, see p. 93; _Vita Jan. Manetti_, in Murat. xx. col. 541
+sqq., 450 sqq., 495. Panormita, _Dicta et Facta Alfonsi_, with the notes
+by Æneas Sylvius, ed. by Jacob Spiegel, Basel, 1538.
+
+[518] Even Alfonso was not able to please everybody--Poggio, for
+example. See Shepherd-Tonelli, _Poggio_ ii. 108 sqq. and Poggio’s letter
+to Facius in _Fac. de Vir. Ill._ ed. Mehus, p. 88, where he writes of
+Alfonso: ‘Ad ostentationem quædam facit quibus videatur doctis viris
+favere;’ and Poggio’s letter in Mai, _Spicil._ tom. x. p. 241.
+
+[519] Ovid. _Amores_, iii. 11, vs. ii.; Jovian. Pontan. _De Principe_.
+
+[520] _Giorn. Napolet._ in Murat. xxi. col. 1127.
+
+[521] Vespas. Fior. pp. 3, 119 sqq. ‘Volle aver piena notizia d’ogni
+cosa, cosi sacra come gentile.’
+
+[522] The last Visconti divided his interest between Livy, the French
+chivalrous romances, Dante, and Petrarch. The humanists who presented
+themselves to him with the promise ‘to make him famous,’ were generally
+sent away after a few days. Comp. _Decembrio_, in Murat. xx. col. 1114.
+
+[523] Paul. Jov. _Vita Alfonsi Ducis_.
+
+[524] On Collenuccio at the court of Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro (son of
+Alessandro, p. 28), who finally, in 1508, put him to death, see p. 135,
+note 4. At the time of the last Ordelaffi at Forli, the place was
+occupied by Codrus Urceus (1477-80); death-bed complaint of C. U. _Opp._
+Ven. 1506, fol. liv.; for his stay in Forli, _Sermo_, vi. Comp. Carlo
+Malagola, _Della Vita di C. U._ Bologna, 1877, Ap. iv. Among the
+instructed despots, we may mention Galeotto Manfreddi of Faenza,
+murdered in 1488 by his wife, and some of the Bentivoglio family at
+Bologna.
+
+[525] _Anecdota Literar._ ii. pp. 305 sqq., 405. Basinius of Parma
+ridicules Porcellio and Tommaso Seneca; they are needy parasites, and
+must play the soldier in their old age, while he himself was enjoying an
+‘ager’ and a ‘villa.’
+
+[526] For details respecting these graves, see Keyssler, _Neueste
+Reisen_, s. 924.
+
+[527] _Pii II. Comment._ l. ii. p. 92. By history he means all that has
+to do with antiquity. Cortesius also praises him highly, p. 34 sqq.
+
+[528] Fabroni, _Costnus_, Adnot. 118. Vespasian. Fior. _passim_. An
+important passage respecting the demands made by the Florentines on
+their secretaries (‘quod honor apud Florentinos magnus habetur,’ says B.
+Facius, speaking of Poggio’s appointment to the secretaryship, _De Vir.
+Ill._ p. 17), is to be found in Æneas Sylvius, _De Europâ_, cap. 54
+(_Opera_, p. 454).
+
+[529] See Voigt, _En. Silvio als Papst Pius II._ bd. iii. 488 sqq., for
+the often-discussed and often-misunderstood change which Pius II. made
+with respect to the Abbreviators.
+
+[530] Comp. the statement of Jacob Spiegel (1521) given in the reports
+of the Vienna Academy, lxxviii. 333.
+
+[531] _Anecdota Lit._ i. p. 119 sqq. A plea (‘Actio ad Cardinales
+Deputatos’) of Jacobus Volaterranus in the name of the Secretaries, no
+doubt of the time of Sixtus IV. (Voigt, l. c. 552, note). The humanistic
+claims of the ‘advocati consistoriales’ rested on their oratory, as that
+of the Secretaries on their correspondence.
+
+[532] The Imperial chancery under Frederick III. was best known to Æneas
+Sylvius. Comp. _Epp._ 23 and 105; _Opera_, pp. 516 and 607.
+
+[533] The letters of Bembo and Sadoleto have been often printed; those
+of the former, e.g. in the _Opera_, Basel, 1556, vol. ii., where the
+letters written in the name of Leo X. are distinguished from private
+letters; those of the latter most fully, 5 vols. Rome, 1760. Some
+additions to both have been given by Carlo Malagola in the review _Il
+Baretti_, Turin, 1875. Bembo’s _Asolani_ will be spoken of below;
+Sadoleto’s significance for Latin style has been judged as follows by a
+contemporary, Petrus Alcyonius, _De Exilio_, ed. Menken, p. 119: ‘Solus
+autem nostrorum temporum aut certe cum paucis animadvertit elocutionem
+emendatam et latinam esse fundamentum oratoris; ad eamque obtinendam
+necesse esse latinam linguam expurgare quam inquinarunt nonnulli
+exquisitarum literarum omnino rudes et nullius judicii homines, qui
+partim a circumpadanis municipiis, partim ex transalpinis provinciis, in
+hanc urbem confluxerunt. Emendavit igitur ‘eruditissimus hic vir
+corruptam et vitiosam linguæ latinæ consuetudinem, pura ac integra
+loquendi ratione.’
+
+[534] Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 449, for the letter of Isabella of
+Aragon to her father, Alfonso of Naples; fols. 451, 464, two letters of
+the Moor to Charles VIII. Compare the story in the _Lettere Pittoriche_,
+iii. 86 (Sebastiano del Piombo to Aretino), how Clement VII., during the
+sack of Rome, called his learned men round him, and made each of them
+separately write a letter to Charles V.
+
+[535] For the correspondence of the period in general, see Voigt,
+_Wiederbelebung_, 414-427.
+
+[536] Bembo thought it necessary to excuse himself for writing in
+Italian: ‘Ad Sempronium,’ _Bembi Opera_, Bas. 1556, vol. iii. 156 sqq.
+
+[537] On the collection of the letters of Aretino, see above, pp. 164
+sqq., and the note. Collections of Latin letters had been printed even
+in the fifteenth century.
+
+[538] Comp. the speeches in the _Opera_ of Philelphus, Sabellicus,
+Beroaldus, &c.; and the writings and lives of Giann. Manetti, Æneas
+Sylvius, and others.
+
+[539] B. F. _De Viris Illustribus_, ed. Mehus, p. 7. Manetti, as Vesp.
+Bisticci, _Commentario_, p. 51, states, delivered many speeches in
+Italian, and then afterwards wrote them out in Latin. The scholars of
+the fifteenth century, e.g. Paolo Cortese, judge the achievements of the
+past solely from the point of view of ‘Eloquentia.’
+
+[540] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 198, 205.
+
+[541] _Pii II. Comment._ l. i. p. 10.
+
+[542] The success of the fortunate orator was great, and the humiliation
+of the speaker who broke down before distinguished audiences no less
+great. Examples of the latter in Petrus Crinitus, _De Honestâ
+Disciplinâ_, v. cap. 3. Comp. Vespas. Fior. pp. 319, 430.
+
+[543] _Pii II. Comment._ l. iv. p. 205. There were some Romans, too, who
+awaited him at Viterbo. ‘Singuli per se verba facere, ne alius alio
+melior videretur, cum essent eloquentiâ ferme pares.’ The fact that the
+Bishop of Arezzo was not allowed to speak in the name of the general
+embassy of the Italian states to the newly chosen Alexander VI., is
+seriously placed by Guicciardini (at the beginning of book i.) among the
+causes which helped to produce the disaster of 1494.
+
+[544] Told by Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col. 1160.
+
+[545] _Pii II. Comment._ l. ii. p. 107. Comp. p. 87. Another oratorical
+princess, Madonna Battista Montefeltro, married to a Malatesta,
+harangued Sigismund and Martin. Comp. _Arch. Stor._ iv. i. p. 442, note.
+
+[546] _De Expeditione in Turcas_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 68. ‘Nihil enim
+Pii concionantis majestate sublimius.’ Not to speak of the naïve
+pleasure with which Pius describes his own triumphs, see Campanus, _Vita
+Pii II._, in Murat. iii. ii. _passim_. At a later period these speeches
+were judged less admiringly. Comp. Voigt, _Enea Silvio_, ii. 275 sqq.
+
+[547] Charles V., when unable on one occasion to follow the flourishes
+of a Latin orator at Genoa, replied in the ear of Giovio: ‘Ah, my tutor
+Adrian was right, when he told me I should be chastened for my childish
+idleness in learning Latin.’ Paul. Jov. _Vita Hadriani VI._ Princes
+replied to these speeches through their official orators; Frederick III.
+through Enea Silvio, in answer to Giannozzo Manetti. Vesp. Bist.
+_Comment._ p. 64.
+
+[548] Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis Nostri Temp._ speaking of
+Collenuccio. Filelfo, a married layman, delivered an introductory speech
+in the Cathedral at Como for the Bishop Scarampi, in 1460. Rosmini,
+_Filelfo_, ii. 122, iii. 147.
+
+[549] Fabroni, _Cosmus_, Adnot. 52.
+
+[550] Which, nevertheless, gave some offence to Jac. Volaterranus (in
+Murat. xxiii. col. 171) at the service in memory of Platina.
+
+[551] _Anecdota Lit._ i. p. 299, in Fedra’s funeral oration on Lod.
+Podacataro, whom Guarino commonly employed on these occasions. Guarino
+himself delivered over fifty speeches at festivals and funerals, which
+are enumerated in Rosmini, _Guarino_, ii. 139-146. Burckhardt, 332. Dr.
+Geiger here remarks that Venice also had its professional orators. Comp.
+G. Voigt, ii. 425.
+
+[552] Many of these opening lectures have been preserved in the works of
+Sabellicus, Beroaldus Major, Codrus Urceus, &c. In the works of the
+latter there are also some poems which he recited ‘in principio studii.’
+
+[553] The fame of Pomponazzo’s delivery is preserved in Paul. Jov.
+_Elogia Vir. Doct._ p. 134. In general, it seems that the speeches, the
+form of which was required to be perfect, were learnt by heart. In the
+case of Giannozzo Manetti we know positively that it was so on one
+occasion (_Commentario_, 39). See, however, the account p. 64, with the
+concluding statement that Manetti spoke better _impromptu_ than Aretino
+with preparation. We are told of Codrus Urceus, whose memory was weak,
+that he read his orations (_Vita_, at the end of his works. Ven. 1506,
+fol. lxx.). The following passage will illustrate the exaggerated value
+set on oratory: ‘Ausim affirmare perfectum oratorem (si quisquam modo
+sit perfectus orator) ita facile posse nitorem, lætitiam, lumina et
+umbras rebus dare quas oratione exponendas suscipit, ut pictorem suis
+coloribus et pigmentis facere videmus.’ (Petr. Alcyonius, _De Exilio_,
+ed. Menken, p. 136.)
+
+[554] Vespas. Fior. p. 103. Comp. p. 598, where he describes how
+Giannozzo Manetti came to him in the camp.
+
+[555] _Archiv. Stor._ xv. pp. 113, 121. Canestrini’s Introduction, p. 32
+sqq. Reports of two such speeches to soldiers; the first, by Alamanni,
+is wonderfully fine and worthy of the occasion (1528).
+
+[556] On this point see Faustinus Terdoceus, in his satire _De Triumpho
+Stultitiae_, lib. ii.
+
+[557] Both of these extraordinary cases occur in Sabellicus, _Opera_,
+fol. 61-82. _De Origine et Auctu Religionis_, delivered at Verona from
+the pulpit before the barefoot friars; and _De Sacerdotii Laudibus_,
+delivered at Venice.
+
+[558] Jac. Volaterrani. _Diar. Roman._ in Murat. xxiii. _passim_. In
+col. 173 a remarkable sermon before the court, though in the absence of
+Sixtus IV., is mentioned. Pater Paolo Toscanella thundered against the
+Pope, his family, and the cardinals. When Sixtus heard of it, he smiled.
+
+[559] Fil. Villani, _Vitae_, ed. Galetti, p. 30.
+
+[560] See above, p. 237, note 3.
+
+[561] Georg. Trapezunt, _Rhetorica_, the first complete system of
+instruction. Æn. Sylvius, _Artis Rhetoricae Praecepta_, in the _Opera_,
+p. 992. treats purposely only of the construction of sentences and the
+position of words. It is characteristic as an instance of the routine
+which was followed. He names several other theoretical writers who are
+some of them no longer known. Comp. C. Voigt, ii. 262 sqq.
+
+[562] His life in Murat. xx. is full of the triumphs of his eloquence.
+Comp. Vespas. Fior. 592 sqq., and _Commentario_, p. 30. On us these
+speeches make no great impression, e.g. that at the coronation of
+Frederick III. in Freher-Struve, _Script. Rer. Germ._ iii. 4-19. Of
+Manetti’s oration at the burial of Lion. Aretino, Shepherd-Tonelli says
+(_Poggio_, ii. 67 sqq.): ‘L’orazione ch’ei compose, è ben la cosa la più
+meschina che potesse udirsi, piena di puerilità volgare nello stile,
+irrelevante negli argomenti e d’una prolissità insopportabile.’
+
+[563] _Annales Placentini_, in Murat. xx. col. 918.
+
+[564] _E.g._ Manetti. Comp. Vesp. _Commentario_, p. 30; so, too,
+Savonarola Comp. Perrens, _Vie de Savonarole_, i. p. 163. The shorthand
+writers, however, could not always follow him, or, indeed, any rapid
+‘Improvisatori.’ Savonarola preached in Italian. See Pasq. Villari:
+_Vita di Savonarola_.
+
+[565] It was by no means one of the best (_Opuscula Beroaldi_, Basel,
+1509, fol. xviii.-xxi). The most remarkable thing in it is the flourish
+at the end: ‘Esto tibi ipsi archetypon et exemplar, teipsum imitare,’
+etc.
+
+[566] Letters and speeches of this kind were written by Alberto di
+Ripalta; comp. the _Annales Placentini_, written by his father Antonius
+and continued by himself, in Murat. xx. col. 914 sqq., where the pedant
+gives an instructive account of his own literary career.
+
+[567] _Pauli Jovii Dialogus de Viris Litteris Illustribus_, in
+Tiraboschi, tom. vii. parte iv. Yet he says some ten years later, at the
+close of the _Elogia Litteraria_: ‘Tenemus adhuc (after the leadership
+in philology had passed to the Germans) sincerae et constantis
+eloquentiae munitam arcem,’ etc. The whole passage, given in German in
+Gregorovius, viii. 217 sqq. is important, as showing the view taken of
+Germany by an Italian, and is again quoted below in this connection.
+
+[568] A special class is formed by the semi-satirical dialogues, which
+Collenuccio, and still more Pontano, copied from Lucian. Their example
+stimulated Erasmus and Hutten. For the treatises properly so-called
+parts of the ethical writings of Plutarch may have served as models.
+
+[569] See below, part iv. chap. 5.
+
+[570] Comp. the epigram of Sannazaro:
+
+    ‘Dum patriam laudat, damnat dum Poggius hostem,
+      Nec malus est civis, nec bonus historicus.’
+
+
+[571] Benedictus: _Caroli VIII. Hist._ in Eccard, Scriptt. vi. col.
+1577.
+
+[572] Petrus Crinitus deplores this contempt, _De honesta disciplina_,
+l. xviii. cap. 9. The humanists here resemble the writers in the decline
+of antiquity, who also severed themselves from their own age. Comp.
+Burckhardt, _Die Zeit Constantin’s des Grossen_. See for the other side
+several declarations of Poggio in Voigt, _Wiederbelebung_, p. 443 sqq.
+
+[573] Lorenzo Valla, in the preface to the _Historia Ferdinandi Regis
+Arag._; in opposition to him, Giacomo Zeno in the _Vita Caroli Zeni_,
+Murat. xix. p. 204. See, too, Guarino, in Rosmini, ii. 62 sqq., 177 sqq.
+
+[574] In the letter to Pizinga, _Opere Volgari_, vol. xvi. p. 38. With
+Raph. Volaterranus, l. xxi. the intellectual world begins in the
+fourteenth century. He is the same writer whose early books contain so
+many notices--excellent for his time--of the history of all countries.
+
+[575] Here, too, Petrarch cleared the way. See especially his critical
+investigation of the Austrian Charter, claiming to descend from Cæsar.
+_Epp. Sen._ xvi. 1.
+
+[576] Like that of Giannozzo Manetti in the presence of Nicholas V., of
+the whole Papal court, and of a great concourse of strangers from all
+parts. Comp. Vespas. Fior. p. 591, and more fully in the _Commentario_,
+pp. 37-40.
+
+[577] In fact, it was already said that Homer alone contained the whole
+of the arts and sciences--that he was an encyclopædia. Comp. _Codri
+Urcei Opera_, Sermo xiii. at the end. It is true that we met with a
+similar opinion in several ancient writers. The words of C. U. (Sermo
+xiii., habitus in laudem liberalium artium; _Opera_, ed. Ven. 1506, fol.
+xxxviii. _b_) are as follows: ‘Eia ergo bono animo esto; ego graecas
+litteras tibi exponam; et praecipue divinum Homerum, a quo ceu fonte
+perenni, ut scribit Naso, vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis. Ab Homero
+grammaticum dicere poteris, ab Homero rhetoricam, ab Homero medicinam,
+ab Homero astrologiam, ab Homero fabulas, ab Homero historias, ab Homero
+mores, ab Homero philosophorum dogmata, ab Homero artem militarem, ab
+Homero coquinariam, ab Homero architecturam, ab Homero regendarum urbium
+modum percipies; et in summa, quidquid boni quidquid honesti animus
+hominis discendi cupidus optare potest, in Homero facile poteris
+invenire.’ To the same effect ‘Sermo’ vii. and viii. _Opera_, fol. xxvi.
+sqq., which treat of Homer only.
+
+[578] A cardinal under Paul II. had his cooks instructed in the Ethics
+of Aristotle. Comp. Gaspar. Veron. _Vita Pauli II._ in Muratori, iii.
+ii. col. 1034.
+
+[579] For the study of Aristotle in general, a speech of Hermolaus
+Barbarus is specially instructive.
+
+[580] Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 898.
+
+[581] Vasari, xi. pp. 189, 257. _Vite di Sodoma e di Garofalo._ It is
+not surprising that the profligate women at Rome took the most
+harmonious ancient names--Julia, Lucretia, Cassandra, Portia, Virginia,
+Penthesilea, under which they appear in Aretino. It was, perhaps, then
+that the Jews took the names of the great Semitic enemies of the
+Romans--Hannibal, Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, which even now they commonly bear
+in Rome. [This last assertion cannot be maintained. Neither Zunz, _Namen
+der Juden_, Leipzig, 1837, reprinted in Zunz _Gesammelte Schriften_,
+Berlin, 1876, nor Steinschneider in his collection in _Il Buonarotti_,
+ser. ii. vol. vi. 1871, pp. 196-199, speaks of any Jew of that period
+who bore these names, and even now, according to the enquiries of Prince
+Buoncompagni from Signer Tagliacapo, in charge of the Jewish archives in
+Rome, there are only a few who are named Asdrubale, and none Amilcare or
+Annibale. L. G.] Burckhardt, 352. A careful choice of names is
+recommended by L. B. Alberti, _Della familia_, opp. ii. p. 171. Maffeo
+Vegio (_De educatione liberorum._ lib. i. c. x.) warns his readers
+against the use of _nomina indecora barbara aut nova, aut quae gentilium
+deorum sunt_. Names like ‘Nero’ disgrace the bearer; while others such
+as Cicero, Brutus, Naso, Maro, can be used _qualiter per se parum
+venusta propter tamen eximiam illorum virtutem_.
+
+[582]
+
+    ‘Quasi che ‘l nome i buon giudici inganni,
+     E che quel meglio t’ abbia a far poeta,
+     Che non farà lo studio di molt’ anni!’
+
+So jests Ariosto, to whom fortune had certainly given a harmonious name,
+in the _Seventh Satire_, vs. 64.
+
+[583] Or after those of Bojardo, which are in part the same as his.
+
+[584] The soldiers of the French army in 1512 were ‘omnibus diris ad
+inferos devocati!’ The honest canon, Tizio, who, in all seriousness,
+pronounced a curse from Macrobius against foreign troops, will be spoken
+of further on.
+
+[585] _De infelicitate principum_, in Poggii _Opera_, fol. 152: ‘Cujus
+(Dantis) exstat poema praeclarum, neque, si literis Latinis constaret,
+ullâ ex parte poetis superioribus (the ancients) postponendum.’
+According to Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 74, ‘Many wise men’ even
+then discussed the question why Dante had not written in Latin.
+Cortesius (_De hominibus doctis_, p. 7) complains: ‘Utinam tam bene
+cogitationes suas Latinus litteris mandare potuisset, quam bene patrium
+sermonem illustravit!’ He makes the same complaint in speaking of
+Petrarch and Boccaccio.
+
+[586] His work _De vulgari eloquio_ was for long almost unknown, and,
+valuable as it is to us, could never have exercised the influence of the
+_Divina Commedia_.
+
+[587] To know how far this fanaticism went, we have only to refer to
+Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis nostri temporis_, _passim_. Vespasiano
+Bisticci is one of the few Latin writers of that time who openly
+confessed that they knew little of Latin (_Commentario della vita di G.
+Manetti_, p. 2), but he knew enough to introduce Latin sentences here
+and there in his writings, and to read Latin letters (_ibid._ 96, 165).
+In reference to this exclusive regard for Latin, the following passage
+may be quoted from Petr. Alcyonius, _De exilio_, ed. Menken, p. 213. He
+says that if Cicero could rise up and behold Rome, ‘Omnium maxime illum
+credo perturbarent ineptiae quorumdam qui, amisso studio veteris linguae
+quae eadem hujus urbis et universae Italiae propria erat, dies noctesque
+incumbunt in linguam Geticam aut Dacicam discendam eandemque omni
+ratione ampliendam, cum Goti, Visigothi et Vandali (qui erant olim Getae
+et Daci) eam in Italos invexerant, ut artes et linguam et nomen Romanum
+delerent.’
+
+[588] There were regular stylistic exercises, as in the _Orationes_ of
+the elder Beroaldus, where there are two tales of Boccaccio, and even a
+‘Canzone’ of Petrarch translated into Latin.
+
+[589] Comp. Petrarch’s letter from the earth to illustrious shades
+below. _Opera_, p. 704 sqq. See also p. 372 in the work _De rep. optime
+administranda_: ‘Sic esse doleo, sed sic est.’
+
+[590] A burlesque picture of the fanatical purism prevalent in Rome is
+given by Jovian. Pontanus in his _Antonius_.
+
+[591] _Hadriani (Cornetani) Card. S. Chrysogoni de sermone latino
+liber_, especially the introduction. He finds in Cicero and his
+contemporaries Latinity in its absolute form (_an sich_). The same
+Codrus Urceus, who found in Homer the sum of all science (see above, p.
+249, note 1) says (_Opp._ ed. 1506, fol. lxv.): ‘Quidquid temporibus
+meis aut vidi aut studui libens omne illud Cicero mihi felici dedit
+omine,’ and goes so far as to say in another poem (_ibid._): ‘Non habet
+huic similem doctrinae Graecia mater.’
+
+[592] Paul. Jov. _Elogia doct. vir._ p. 187 sqq., speaking of Bapt.
+Pius.
+
+[593] Paul Jov. _Elogia_, on Naugerius. Their ideal, he says, was:
+‘Aliquid in stylo proprium, quod peculiarem ex certâ notâ mentis
+effigiem referret, ex naturae genio effinxisse.’ Politian, when in a
+hurry, objected to write his letters in Latin. Comp. Raph. Volat.
+_Comment. urban._ l. xxi. Politian to Cortesius (_Epist._ lib. viii. ep.
+16): ‘Mihi vero longe honestior tauri facies, aut item leonis, quam
+simiae videtur;’ to which Cortesius replied: ‘Ego malo esse assecla et
+simia Ciceronis quam alumnus.’ For Pico’s opinion on the Latin language,
+see the letter quoted above, p. 202.
+
+[594] Paul. Jov. _Dialogus de viris literis illustribus_, in Tiraboschi,
+ed. Venez. 1766, tom. vii. p. iv. It is well known that Giovio was long
+anxious to undertake the great work which Vasari accomplished. In the
+dialogue mentioned above it is foreseen and deplored that Latin would
+now altogether lose its supremacy.
+
+[595] In the ‘Breve’ of 1517 to Franc. de’ Rosi, composed by Sadoleto,
+in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, vi. p. 172.
+
+[596] Gasp. Veronens. _Vita Pauli II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1031. The
+plays of Seneca and Latin translations of Greek dramas were also
+performed.
+
+[597] At Ferrara, Plautus was played chiefly in the Italian adaptations
+of Collenuccio, the younger Guarino, and others, and principally for the
+sake of the plots. Isabella Gonzaga took the liberty of finding him
+dull. For Latin comedy in general, see R. Peiper in Fleckeisen and
+Masius, _Neue Jahrb. für Phil. u. Pädag._, Lpzg. 1874, xx. 131-138, and
+_Archiv für Literaturgesch_. v. 541 sqq. On Pomp. Laetus, see _Sabellici
+Opera_, Epist. l. xi. fol. 56 sqq., and below, at the close of Part III.
+
+[598] Comp. Burckhardt. _Gesch. der Renaissance in Italien_, 38-41.
+
+[599] For what follows see _Deliciae poetarum Italorum_; Paul. Jov.
+_Elogia_; Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis nostri temporis_; and the
+Appendices to Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi.
+
+[600] There are two new editions of the poem, that of Pingaud (Paris,
+1872), and that of Corradini (Padua, 1874). In 1874 two Italian
+translations also appeared by G. B. Gaudo and A. Palesa. On the
+_Africa_, compare L. Geiger: _Petrarca_, pp. 122 sqq., and p. 270, note
+7.
+
+[601] Filippo Villani, _Vite_, ed. Galetti, p. 16.
+
+[602] _Franc. Aleardi Oratio in laudem Franc. Sfortiae_, in Marat. xxv.
+col. 384. In comparing Scipio with Caesar, Guarino and Cyriacus
+Anconitanus held the latter, Poggio (_Opera_, epp. fol. 125, 134 sqq.)
+the former, to be the greater. For Scipio and Hannibal in the miniatures
+of Attavante, see Vasari, iv. 41. _Vita di Fiesole_. The names of both
+used for Picinino and Sforza. See p. 99. There were great disputes as to
+the relative greatness of the two. Shepherd-Tonelli, i. 262 sqq. and
+Rosmini: Guarino, ii. 97-111.
+
+[603] The brilliant exceptions, where rural life is treated
+realistically, will also be mentioned below.
+
+[604] Printed in Mai, _Spicilegium Romanum_, vol. viii. pp. 488-504;
+about 500 hexameter verses. Pierio Valeriano followed out the myth in
+his poetry. See his _Carpio_, in the _Deliciae poetarum Italorum_. The
+frescoes of Brusasorci in the Pal. Murari at Verona represent the
+subject of the _Sarca_.
+
+[605] Newly edited and translated by Th. A. Fassnacht in _Drei Perlen
+der neulateinischen Poesie_. Leutkirch and Leipzig, 1875. See further,
+Goethe’s _Werke_ (Hempel’sche Ausgabe), vol. xxxii. pp. 157 and 411.
+
+[606] _De sacris diebus._
+
+[607] E.g. in his eighth eclogue.
+
+[608] There are two unfinished and unprinted Sforziads, one by the
+elder, the other by the younger Filelfo. On the latter, see Favre,
+_Mélanges d’Hist. Lit._ i. 156; on the former, see Rosmini, _Filelfo_,
+ii. 157-175. It is said to be 12,800 lines long, and contains the
+passage: ‘The sun falls in love with Bianca.’
+
+[609] Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, viii. 184. A poem in a similar
+style, xii. 130. The poem of Angilbert on the Court of Charles the Great
+curiously reminds us of the Renaissance. Comp. Pertz. _Monum._ ii.
+
+[610] Strozzi, _Poetae_, p. 31 sqq. ‘Caesaris Borgiae ducis epicedium.’
+
+[611]
+
+    ‘Pontificem addiderat, flammis lustralibus omneis
+     Corporis ablutum labes, Dis Juppiter ipsis,’ etc.
+
+
+[612] This was Ercole II. of Ferrara, b. April 4, 1508, probably either
+shortly before or shortly after the composition of this poem. ‘Nascere,
+magne puer, matri expectate patrique,’ is said near the end.
+
+[613] Comp. the collections of the _Scriptores_ by Schardius, Freher,
+&c., and see above p. 126, note 1.
+
+[614] Uzzano, see _Archiv._ iv. i. 296. Macchiavelli, _i Decennali_. The
+life of Savonarola, under the title _Cedrus Libani_, by Fra Benedetto.
+_Assedio di Piombino_, Murat. xxv. We may quote as a parallel the
+_Teuerdank_ and other northern works in rhyme (new ed. of that by
+Haltaus, Quedlinb. and Leipzig, 1836). The popular historical songs of
+the Germans, which were produced in great abundance in the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries, may be compared with these Italian poems.
+
+[615] We may remark of the _Coltivazione_ of L. Alamanni, written in
+Italian ‘versi sciolti,’ that all the really poetical and enjoyable
+passages are directly or indirectly borrowed from the ancients (an old
+ed., Paris, 1540; new ed. of the works of A., 2 vols., Florence, 1867).
+
+[616] E.g. by C. G. Weise, Leipzig, 1832. The work, divided into twelve
+books, named after the twelve constellations, is dedicated to Hercules
+II. of Ferrara. In the dedication occur the remarkable words: ‘Nam quem
+alium patronum in totâ Italiâ invenire possum, cui musae cordisunt, qui
+carmen sibi oblatum aut intelligat, aut examine recto expendere sciat?’
+Palingenius uses ‘Juppiter’ and ‘Deus’ indiscriminately.
+
+[617] L. B. Alberti’s first comic poem, which purported to be by an
+author Lepidus, was long considered as a work of antiquity.
+
+[618] In this case (see below, p. 266, note 2) of the introduction to
+Lucretius, and of Horace, _Od._ iv. 1.
+
+[619] The invocation of a patron saint is an essentially pagan
+undertaking, as has been noticed at p. 57. On a more serious occasion,
+comp. Sannazaro’s Elegy: ‘In festo die divi Nazarii martyris.’ Sann.
+_Elegiae_, 1535, fol. 166 sqq.
+
+[620]
+
+    Si satis ventos tolerasse et imbres
+    Ac minas fatorum hominumque fraudes
+    Da Pater tecto salientem avito
+        Cernere fumum!
+
+
+[621] _Andr. Naugerii, Orationes duae carminaque aliquot_, Venet. 1530,
+4^o. The few ‘Carmina’ are to be found partly or wholly in the
+_Deliciae_. On N. and his death, see Pier. Val. _De inf. lit._ ed.
+Menken, 326 sqq.
+
+[622] Compare Petrarch’s greeting to Italy, written more than a century
+earlier (1353) in _Petr. Carmina Minora_, ed. Rossetti, ii. pp. 266 sqq.
+
+[623] To form a notion of what Leo X. could swallow, see the prayer of
+Guido Postumo Silvestri to Christ, the Virgin, and all the Saints, that
+they would long spare this ‘numen’ to earth, since heaven had enough of
+such already. Printed in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, v. 337.
+
+[624] Molza’s _Poesie volgari e Latine_, ed. by Pierantonio Serassi,
+Bergamo 1747.
+
+[625] Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 36.
+
+[626] Sannazaro ridicules a man who importuned him with such forgeries:
+‘Sint vetera haec aliis, mî nova semper erunt.’ (Ad Rufum, _Opera_,
+1535, fol. 41 _a_.)
+
+[627] ‘De mirabili urbe Venetiis’ (_Opera_, fol. 38 b):
+
+    Viderat Adriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis
+      Stare urbem et toto ponere jura mari:
+    Nunc mihi Tarpejas quantum vis Juppiter arceis
+      Objice et illa tui mœnia Martis ait,
+    Si pelago Tybrim praefers, urbem aspice utramque
+      Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse deos.
+
+
+[628] _Lettere de’principi_, i. 88, 98.
+
+[629] Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p. 508. At the end
+we read, in reference to the bull as the arms of the Borgia:
+
+    ‘Merge, Tyber, vitulos animosas ultor in undas;
+      Bos cadat inferno victima magna Jovi!’
+
+
+[630] On the whole affair, see Roscoe, _Leone X._, ed. Bossi, vii. 211,
+viii. 214 sqq. The printed collection, now rare, of these _Coryciana_ of
+the year 1524 contains only the Latin poems; Vasari saw another book in
+the possession of the Augustinians in which were sonnets. So contagious
+was the habit of affixing poems, that the group had to be protected by a
+railing, and even hidden altogether. The change of Goritz into ‘Corycius
+senex’ is suggested by Virgil, _Georg._ iv. 127. For the miserable end
+of the man at the sack of Rome, see Pierio Valeriano, _De infelic.
+literat._ ed. Menken, p. 369.
+
+[631] The work appeared first in the _Coryciana_, with introductions by
+Silvanus and Corycius himself; also reprinted in the Appendices to
+Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, and in the _Deliciae_. Comp. Paul. Jov.
+_Elogia_, speaking of Arsillus. Further, for the great number of the
+epigrammatists, see Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, l. c. One of the most biting
+pens was Marcantonio Casanova. Among the less known, Jo. Thomas
+Muscanius (see _Deliciae_) deserves mention. On Casanova, see Pier.
+Valer. _De infel. lit._ ed. Menken, p. 376 sqq.; and Paul. Jov.
+_Elogia_, p. 142 sqq., who says of him: ‘Nemo autem eo simplicitate ac
+innocentiâ vitae melior;’ Arsillus (l. c.) speaks of his ‘placidos
+sales.’ Some few of his poems in the _Coryciana_, J. 3 _a_ sqq. L. 1
+_a_, L. 4 _b_.
+
+[632] Marin Sanudo, in the _Vite de’duchi di Venezia_, Murat. xii.
+quotes them regularly.
+
+[633] Scardeonius, _De urb. Patav. antiq._ (Graev. thes. vi. 11, col.
+270), names as the inventor a certain Odaxius of Padua, living about the
+middle of the fifteenth century. Mixed verses of Latin and the language
+of the country are found much earlier in many parts of Europe.
+
+[634] It must not be forgotten that they were very soon printed with
+both the old Scholia and modern commentaries.
+
+[635] Ariosto, _Satira_, vii. Date 1531.
+
+[636] Of such children we meet with several, yet I cannot give an
+instance in which they were demonstrably so treated. The youthful
+prodigy Giulio Campagnola was not one of those who were forced with an
+ambitious object. Comp. Scardeonius, _De urb. Patav. antiq._ in Graev.
+thes. vi. 3, col. 276. For the similar case of Cecchino Bracci, d. 1445
+in his fifteenth year, comp. Trucchi, _Poesie Ital. inedite_, iii. p.
+229. The father of Cardano tried ‘memoriam artificialem instillare,’ and
+taught him, when still a child, the astrology of the Arabians. See
+Cardanus, _De propria vita_ cap. 34. Manoello may be added to the list,
+unless we are to take his expression, ‘At the age of six years I am as
+good as at eighty,’ as a meaningless phrase. Comp. _Litbl. des Orients_,
+1843, p. 21.
+
+[637] Bapt. Mantuan. _De calamitatibus temporum_, l. i.
+
+[638] Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _Progymnasma adversus literas et literatos_.
+_Opp._ ed. Basil. 1580, ii. 422-445. Dedications 1540-1541; the work
+itself addressed to Giov. Franc. Pico, and therefore finished before
+1533.
+
+[639] Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _Hercules_. The dedication is a striking
+evidence of the first threatening movements of the Inquisition.
+
+[640] He passed, as we have seen, for the last protector of the
+scholars.
+
+[641] _De infelicitate literatorum._ On the editions, see above, p. 86,
+note 4. Pier. Val., after leaving Rome, lived long in a good position as
+professor at Padua. At the end of his work he expresses the hope that
+Charles V. and Clement VII. would bring about a better time for the
+scholars.
+
+[642] Comp. Dante, _Inferno_, xiii. 58 sqq., especially 93 sqq., where
+Petrus de Vineis speaks of his own suicide.
+
+[643] Pier. Valer. pp. 397 sqq., 402. He was the uncle of the writer.
+
+[644] Cœlii Calcagnini, _Opera_, ed. Basil. 1544, p. 101, in the Seventh
+Book of the Epistles, No. 27, letter to Jacob Ziegler. Comp. Pierio Val.
+_De inf. lit._ ed. Menken, p. 369 sqq.
+
+[645] _M. Ant. Sabellici Opera_, Epist. l. xi. fol. 56. See, too, the
+biography in the _Elogia_ of Paolo Giovio, p. 76 sqq. The former
+appeared separately at Strasburg in 1510, under the title Sabellicus:
+_Vita Pomponii Laeti_.
+
+[646] Jac. Volaterran. _Diar. Rom._ in Muratori. xxiii. col. 161, 171,
+185. _Anecdota literaria_, ii. pp. 168 sqq.
+
+[647] Paul. Jov. _De Romanis piscibus_, cap. 17 and 34.
+
+[648] Sadoleti, Epist. 106, of the year 1529.
+
+[649] Anton. Galatei, Epist. 10 and 12, in Mai, _Spicileg. Rom._ vol.
+viii.
+
+[650] This was the case even before the middle of the century. Comp.
+Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis nostri temp._ ii.
+
+[651] Luigi Bossi, _Vita di Cristoforo Colombo_, in which there is a
+sketch of earlier Italian journeys and discoveries, p. 91 sqq.
+
+[652] See on this subject a treatise by Pertz. An inadequate account is
+to be found in Æneas Sylvius, _Europae status sub Frederico III. Imp._
+cap. 44 (in Freher’s _Scriptores_, ed. 1624, vol. ii. p. 87). On Æn. S.
+see Peschel o.c. 217 sqq.
+
+[653] Comp. O. Peschel, _Geschichte der Erdkunde_, 2nd edit., by Sophus
+Ruge, Munich, 1877, p. 209 sqq. _et passim_.
+
+[654] _Pii II. Comment._ l. i. p. 14. That he did not always observe
+correctly, and sometimes filled up the picture from his fancy, is
+clearly shown, e.g., by his description of Basel. Yet his merit on the
+whole is nevertheless great. On the description of Basel see G. Voigt;
+Enea Silvio, i. 228; on E. S. as Geographer, ii. 302-309. Comp. i. 91
+sqq.
+
+[655] In the sixteenth century, Italy continued to be the home of
+geographical literature, at a time when the discoverers themselves
+belonged almost exclusively to the countries on the shores of the
+Atlantic. Native geography produced in the middle of the century the
+great and remarkable work of Leandro Alberti, _Descrizione di tutta
+l’Italia_, 1582. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the maps in
+Italy were in advance of those of other countries. See Wieser: _Der
+Portulan des Infanten Philipp II. von Spanien_ in _Sitzungsberichte der
+Wien. Acad. Phil. Hist. Kl._ Bd. 82 (1876), pp. 541 sqq. For the
+different Italian maps and voyages of discovery, see the excellent work
+of Oscar Peschel: _Abhandl. zur Erd-und Völkerkunde_ (Leipzig, 1878).
+Comp. also, _inter alia_: Berchet, _Il planisfero di Giovanni Leandro
+del’anno 1452 fa-simil nella grandezza del’ original Nota illustrativa_,
+16 S. 4^o. Venezia, 1879. Comp. Voigt, ii. 516; and G. B. de Rossi,
+_Piante iconogrofiche di Roma anteriori al secolo XVI._ Rome, 1879. For
+Petrarch’s attempt to draw out a map of Italy, comp. Flavio Biondo:
+_Italia illustrata_ (ed. Basil.), p. 352 sqq.; also _Petr. Epist. var.
+LXI._ ed. Fracass. iii. 476. A remarkable attempt at a map of Europe,
+Asia and Africa is to be found on the obverse of a medal of Charles IV.
+of Anjou, executed by Francesco da Laurana in 1462.
+
+[656] Libri, _Histoire des Sciences Mathématiques en Italie_. 4 vols.
+Paris, 1838.
+
+[657] To pronounce a conclusive judgment on this point, the growth of
+the habit of collecting observations, in other than the mathematical
+sciences, would need to be illustrated in detail. But this lies outside
+the limits of our task.
+
+[658] Libri, op. cit. ii. p. 174 sqq. See also Dante’s treatise, _De
+aqua et terra_; and W. Schmidt, _Dante’s Stellung in der Geschichte der
+Cosmographie_, Graz, 1876. The passages bearing on geography and natural
+science from the _Tesoro_ of Brunetto Latini are published separately:
+_Il trattato della Sfera di S. Br. L._, by Bart. Sorio (Milan, 1858),
+who has added B. L.’s system of historical chronology.
+
+[659] Scardeonius, _De urb. Patav. antiq._ in _Graevii Thesaur. ant.
+Ital._ tom. vi. pars iii. col. 227. A. died in 1312 during the
+investigation; his statue was burnt. On Giov. Sang. see op. cit. col.
+228 sqq. Comp. on him, Fabricius, _Bibl. Lat._ s. v. Petrus de Apono.
+Sprenger in _Esch. u. Gruber_, i. 33. He translated (a. 1292-1293)
+astrological works of Abraham ibn Esra, printed 1506.
+
+[660] See below, part vi. chapter 2.
+
+[661] See the exaggerated complaints of Libri, op. cit. ii. p. 258 sqq.
+Regrettable as it may be that a people so highly gifted did not devote
+more of its strength to the natural sciences, we nevertheless believe
+that it pursued, and in part attained, still more important ends.
+
+[662] On the studies of the latter in Italy, comp. the thorough
+investigation by C. Malagola in his work on Codro Urceo (Bologna, 1878,
+cap. vii. 360-366).
+
+[663] Italians also laid out botanical gardens in foreign countries,
+e.g. Angelo, of Florence, a contemporary of Petrarch, in Prag.
+Friedjung: _Carl IV._ p. 311, note 4.
+
+[664] _Alexandri Braccii descriptio horti Laurentii Med._, printed as
+Appendix No. 58 to Roscoe’s _Life of Lorenzo_. Also to be found in the
+Appendices to Fabroni’s _Laurentius_.
+
+[665] _Mondanarii Villa_, printed in the _Poemata aliquot insignia
+illustr. poetar. recent._
+
+[666] On the zoological garden at Palermo under Henry VI., see Otto de
+S. Blasio ad a. 1194. That of Henry I. of England in the park of
+Woodstock (Guliel. Malmes. p. 638) contained lions, leopards, camels,
+and a porcupine, all gifts of foreign princes.
+
+[667] As such he was called, whether painted or carved in stone,
+‘Marzocco.’ At Pisa eagles were kept. See the commentators on Dante,
+_Inf._ xxxiii. 22. The falcon in Boccaccio, _Decam._ v. 9. See for the
+whole subject: _Due trattati del governo e delle infermità degli
+uccelli, testi di lingua inediti_. Rome, 1864. They are works of the
+fourteenth century, possibly translated from the Persian.
+
+[668] See the extract from Ægid. Viterb. in Papencordt, _Gesch. der
+Stadt Rom im Mittelalter_, p. 367, note, with an incident of the year
+1328. Combats of wild animals among themselves and with dogs served to
+amuse the people on great occasions. At the reception of Pius II. and of
+Galeazzo Maria Sforza at Florence, in 1459, in an enclosed space on the
+Piazza della Signoria, bulls, horses, boars, dogs, lions, and a giraffe
+were turned out together, but the lions lay down and refused to attack
+the other animals. Comp. _Ricordi di Firenze, Rer. Ital. script. ex
+Florent. codd._ tom. ii. col. 741. A different account in _Vita Pii II._
+Murat. iii. ii. col. 976. A second giraffe was presented to Lorenzo the
+Magnificent by the Mameluke Sultan Kaytbey. Comp. Paul. Jov. _Vita
+Leonis X._ l. i. In Lorenzo’s menagerie one magnificent lion was
+especially famous, and his destruction by the other lions was reckoned a
+presage of the death of his owner.
+
+[669] Gio. Villani, x. 185, xi. 66. Matteo Villani, iii. 90, v. 68. It
+was a bad omen if the lions fought, and worse still if they killed one
+another. Com. Varchi, _Stor. fiorent._ iii. p. 143. Matt. V. devotes the
+first of the two chapters quoted to prove (1) that lions were born in
+Italy, and (2) that they came into the world alive.
+
+[670] _Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 77, year 1497. A pair
+of lions once escaped from Perugia; _ibid._ xvi. i. p. 382, year 1434.
+Florence, for example, sent to King Wladislaw of Poland (May, 1406), a
+pair of lions _ut utriusque sexus animalia ad procreandos catulos
+haberetis_. The accompanying statement is amusing in a diplomatic
+document: ‘Sunt equidem hi leones Florentini, et satis quantum natura
+promittere potuit mansueti, depositâ feritate, quam insitam habent,
+hique in Gætulorum regionibus nascuntur et Indorum, in quibus multitudo
+dictorum animalium evalescit, sicuti prohibent naturales. Et cum leonum
+complexio sit frigoribus inimica, quod natura sagax ostendit, natura in
+regionibus aestu ferventibus generantur, necessarium est, quod vostra
+serenitas, si dictorum animalium vitam et sobolis propagationem, ut
+remur, desiderat, faciat provideri, quod in locis calidis educentur et
+maneant. Conveniunt nempe cum regia majestate leones quoniam leo græce
+latine rex dicitur. Sicut enim rex dignitate potentia, magnanimitate
+ceteros homines antecellit, sic leonis generositas et vigor
+imperterritus animalia cuncta praesit. Et sicut rex, sic leo adversus
+imbecilles et timidos clementissimum se ostendit, et adversus inquietos
+et tumidos terribilem se offert animadversione justissima.’ (_Cod.
+epistolaris sæculi. Mon. med. ævi hist. res gestas Poloniæ illustr._
+Krakau, 1876, p. 25.)
+
+[671] Gage, _Carteggio_, i. p. 422, year 1291. The Visconti used trained
+leopards for hunting hares, which were started by little dogs. See v.
+Kobel, _Wildanger_, p. 247, where later instances of hunting with
+leopards are mentioned.
+
+[672] _Strozzii poetae_, p. 146: _De leone Borsii Ducis_. The lion
+spares the hare and the small dog, imitating (so says the poet) his
+master. Comp. the words fol. 188, ‘et inclusis condita septa feris,’ and
+fol. 193, an epigram of fourteen lines, ‘in leporarii ingressu quam
+maximi;’ see _ibid._ for the hunting-park.
+
+[673] _Cron. di Perugia_, l. c. xvi. ii. p. 199. Something of the same
+kind is to be found in Petrarch, _De remed. utriusque fortunae_, but
+less clearly expressed. Here Gaudium, in the conversation with Ratio,
+boasts of owning monkeys and ‘ludicra animalia.’
+
+[674] Jovian. Pontan. _De magnificentia._ In the zoological garden of
+the Cardinal of Aquileja, at Albano, there were, in 1463, peacocks and
+Indian fowls and Syrian goats with long ears. _Pii II. Comment._ l. xi.
+p. 562 sqq.
+
+[675] _Decembrio_, ap. Muratori, xx. col. 1012.
+
+[676] Brunetti Latini, _Tesor._ (ed. Chabaille, Paris, 1863), lib. i. In
+Petrarch’s time there were no elephants in Italy. ‘Itaque et in Italia
+avorum memoria unum Frederico Romanorum principi fuisse et nunc Egyptio
+tyranno nonnisi unicum esse fama est.’ _De rem. utr. fort._ i. 60.
+
+[677] The details which are most amusing, in Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, on
+Tristanus Acunius. On the porcupines and ostriches in the Pal. Strozzi,
+see Rabelais, _Pantagruel_, iv. chap. 11. Lorenzo the Magnificent
+received a giraffe from Egypt through some merchants, Baluz. _Miscell._
+iv. 416. The elephant sent to Leo was greatly bewailed by the people
+when it died, its portrait was painted, and verses on it were written by
+the younger Beroaldus.
+
+[678] Comp. Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, p. 234, speaking of Francesco Gonzaga.
+For the luxury at Milan in this respect, see Bandello, Parte II. Nov. 3
+and 8. In the narrative poems we also sometimes hear the opinion of a
+judge of horses. Comp. Pulci, _Morgante_, xv. 105 sqq.
+
+[679] Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, speaking of Hipp. Medices.
+
+[680] At this point a few notices on slavery in Italy at the time of the
+Renaissance will not be out of place. A short, but important, passage in
+Jovian. Pontan. _De obedientia_, l. iii. cap. i.: ‘An homo, cum liber
+natura sit, domino parere debeat?’ In North Italy there were no slaves.
+Elsewhere, even Christians, as well as Circassians and Bulgarians, were
+bought from the Turks, and made to serve till they had earned their
+ransom. The negroes, on the contrary, remained slaves; but it was not
+permitted, at least in the kingdom of Naples, to emasculate them. The
+word ‘moro’ signifies any dark-skinned man; the negro was called ‘moro
+nero.’--Fabroni, _Cosmos_, Adn. 110: Document on the sale of a female
+Circassian slave (1427); Adn. 141: List of the female slaves of
+Cosimo.--Nantiporto, Murat. iii. ii. col. 1106: Innocent VIII. received
+100 Moors as a present from Ferdinand the Catholic, and gave them to
+cardinals and other great men (1488).--Marsuccio, _Novelle_, 14: sale of
+slaves; do. 24 and 25: negro slaves who also (for the benefit of their
+owner?) work as ‘facchini,’ and gain the love of the women; do. 48 Moors
+from Tunis caught by Catalans and sold at Pisa.--Gaye, _Carteggio_, i.
+360: manumission and reward of a negro slave in a Florentine will
+(1490).--Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, sub Franc. Sfortia; Porzio, _Congiura_,
+iii. 195; and Comines, _Charles VIII._ chap. 18: negroes as gaolers and
+executioners of the House of Aragon in Naples.--Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, sub
+Galeatio: negroes as followers of the prince on his excursions.--Æneæ
+Sylvii, _Opera_, p. 456: a negro slave as a musician.--Paul. Jov. _De
+piscibus_, cap 3: a (free?) negro as diver and swimming-master at
+Genoa.--Alex. Benedictus, _De Carolo VIII._ in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii.
+col. 1608: a negro (Æthiops) as superior officer at Venice, according to
+which we are justified in thinking of Othello as a negro.--Bandello,
+Parte III. Nov. 21: when a slave at Genoa deserved punishment he was
+sold away to Iviza, one of the Balearic isles, to carry salt.
+
+The foregoing remarks, although they make no claim to completeness, may
+be allowed to stand as they are in the new edition, on account of the
+excellent selection of instances they contain, and because they have not
+met with sufficient notice in the works upon the subject. Latterly a
+good deal has been written on the slave-trade in Italy. The very curious
+book of Filippo Zamboni: _Gli Ezzelini, Dante e gli Schiavi, ossia Roma
+e la Schiavitù personale domestica. Con documenti inediti. Seconda
+edizione aumentata_ (Vienna, 1870), does not contain what the title
+promises, but gives, p. 241 sqq., valuable information on the
+slave-trade; p. 270, a remarkable document on the buying and selling of
+a female slave; p. 282, a list of various slaves (with the place were
+they were bought and sold, their home, age, and price) in the thirteenth
+and three following centuries. A treatise by Wattenbach: _Sklavenhandel
+im Mittelalter_ (_Anzeiger für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit_, 1874, pp.
+37-40) refers only in part to Italy: Clement V. decides in 1309 that the
+Venetian prisoners should be made slaves of; in 1501, after the capture
+of Capua, many Capuan women were sold at Rome for a low price. In the
+_Monum. historica Slavorum meridionalium_, ed. Vinc. Macusceo, tom. i.
+Warsaw, 1874, we read at p. 199 a decision (Ancona, 1458) that the
+‘Greci, Turci, Tartari, Sarraceni, Bossinenses, Burgari vel Albanenses,’
+should be and always remain slaves, unless their masters freed them by a
+legal document. Egnatius, _Exempl. ill. vir._ Ven. fol. 246 _a_, praises
+Venice on the ground that ‘servorum Venetis ipsis nullum unquam usum
+extitisse;’ but, on the other hand, comp. Zamboni, p. 223, and
+especially Vincenzo Lazari: ‘Del traffico e delle condizioni degli
+schiavi, in Venezia nel tempo di mezzo,’ in _Miscellanea di Stor. Ital._
+Torino, 1862, vol. i. 463-501.
+
+[681] It is hardly necessary to refer the reader to the famous chapters
+on this subject in Humboldt’s _Kosmos_.
+
+[682] See on this subject the observations of Wilhelm Grimm, quoted by
+Humboldt in the work referred to.
+
+[683] Carmina Burana, p. 162, _De Phyllide et Flora_, str. 66.
+
+[684] It would be hard to say what else he had to do at the top of the
+Bismantova in the province of Reggio, _Purgat._ iv. 26. The precision
+with which he brings before us all the parts of his supernatural world
+shows a remarkable sense of form and space. That there was a belief in
+the existence of hidden treasures on the tops of mountains, and that
+such spots were regarded with superstitious terror, may be clearly
+inferred from the _Chron. Novaliciense_, ii. 5, in Pertz, _Script._
+vii., and _Monum. hist. patriae, Script._ iii.
+
+[685] Besides the description of Baiæ in the _Fiammetta_, of the grove
+in the Ameto, etc., a passage in the _De genealogia deorum_, xiv. 11, is
+of importance, where he enumerates a number of rural beauties--trees,
+meadows, brooks, flocks and herds, cottages, etc.--and adds that these
+things ‘animum mulcent;’ their effect is ‘mentem in se colligere.’
+
+[686] Flavio Biondo, _Italia Illustrata_ (ed. Basil), p. 352 sqq. Comp.
+_Epist. Var._ ed. Fracass. (lat.) iii. 476. On Petrarch’s plan of
+writing a great geographical work, see the proofs given by Attilio
+Hortis, _Accenni alle Scienze Naturali nelle Opere di G. Boccacci_,
+Trieste, 1877, p. 45 sqq.
+
+[687] Although he is fond of referring to them: e.g. _De vita solitaria_
+(_Opera_, ed. Basil, 1581), esp. p. 241, where he quotes the description
+of a vine-arbour from St. Augustine.
+
+[688] _Epist. famil._ vii. 4. ‘Interea utinam scire posses, quanta, cum
+voluptate solivagus et liber, inter montes et nemora, inter fontes et
+flumina, inter libros et maximorum hominum ingenia respiro, quamque me
+in ea, quae ante sunt, cum Apostolo extendens et praeterita oblivisci
+nitor et praesentia non videre.’ Comp. vi. 3, o. c. 316 sqq. esp. 334
+sqq. Comp. L. Geiger: _Petrarca_, p. 75, note 5, and p. 269.
+
+[689] ‘Jacuit sine carmine sacro.’ Comp. _Itinerar. Syriacum, Opp._ p.
+558.
+
+[690] He distinguishes in the _Itinerar. Syr._ p. 357, on the Riviera di
+Levante: ‘colles asperitate gratissima et mira fertilitate conspicuos.’
+On the port of Gaeta, see his _De remediis utriusque fortunae_, i. 54.
+
+[691] _Letter to Posterity_: ‘Subito loco specie percussus.’
+Descriptions of great natural events: A Storm at Naples, 1343: _Epp.
+fam._ i. 263 sqq.; An Earthquake at Basel, 1355, _Epp. seniles_, lib. x.
+2, and _De rem. utr. fort._ ii. 91.
+
+[692] _Epist. fam._ ed. Fracassetti, i. 193 sqq.
+
+[693] _Il Dittamondo_, iii. cap. 9.
+
+[694] _Dittamondo_, iii. cap. 21, iv. cap. 4. Papencordt, _Gesch. der
+Stadt Rom_, says that the Emperor Charles IV. had a strong taste for
+beautiful scenery, and quotes on this point Pelzel, _Carl IV._ p. 456.
+(The two other passages, which he quotes, do not say the same.) It is
+possible that the Emperor took this fancy from intercourse with the
+humanists (see above, pp. 141-2). For the interest taken by Charles in
+natural science see H. Friedjung, op. cit. p. 224, note 1.
+
+[695] We may also compare Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 310: ‘Homo fuit
+(Pius II.) verus, integer, apertus; nil habuit ficti, nil simulati’--an
+enemy of hypocrisy and superstition, courageous and consistent. See
+Voigt, ii. 261 sqq. and iii. 724. He does not, however, give an analysis
+of the character of Pius.
+
+[696] The most important passages are the following: _Pii II. P. M.
+Commentarii_, l. iv. p. 183; spring in his native country; l. v. p. 251;
+summer residence at Tivoli; l. vi. p. 306: the meal at the spring of
+Vicovaro; l. viii. p. 378: the neighbourhood of Viterbo; p. 387: the
+mountain monastery of St. Martin; p. 388: the Lake of Bolsena; l. ix. p.
+396: a splendid description of Monte Amiata; l. x. p. 483: the situation
+of Monte Oliveto; p. 497: the view from Todi; l. xi. p. 554: Ostia and
+Porto; p. 562: description of the Alban Hills; l. xii. p. 609: Frascati
+and Grottaferrata; comp. 568-571.
+
+[697] So we must suppose it to have been written, not Sicily.
+
+[698] He calls himself, with an allusion to his name: ‘Silvarum amator
+et varia videndi cupidus.’
+
+[699] On Leonbattista Alberti’s feeling for landscapes see above, p. 136
+sqq. Alberti, a younger contemporary of Æneas Silvius (_Trattato del
+Governo della Famiglia_, p. 90; see above, p. 132, note 1), is delighted
+when in the country with ‘the bushy hills,’ ‘the fair plains and rushing
+waters.’ Mention may here be made of a little work _Ætna_, by P. Bembus,
+first published at Venice, 1495, and often printed since, in which,
+among much that is rambling and prolix, there are remarkable
+geographical descriptions and notices of landscapes.
+
+[700] A most elaborate picture of this kind in Ariosto; his sixth canto
+is all foreground.
+
+[701] He deals differently with his architectural framework, and in this
+modern decorative art can learn something from him even now.
+
+[702] _Lettere Pittoriche_, iii. 36, to Titian, May, 1544.
+
+[703] _Strozzii Poetae_, in the _Erotica_, l. vi. fol. 183; in the poem:
+‘Hortatur se ipse, ut ad amicam properet.’
+
+[704] Comp. Thausing: _Dürer_, Leipzig, 1876, p. 166.
+
+[705] These striking expressions are taken from the seventh volume of
+Michelet’s _Histoire de France_ (Introd.).
+
+[706] Tomm. Gar, _Relaz. della Corte di Roma_, i. pp. 278 and 279. In
+the Rel. of Soriano, year 1533.
+
+[707] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 295 sqq. The word ‘saturnico’ means
+‘unhappy’ as well as ‘bringing misfortune.’ For the influence of the
+planets on human character in general, see Corn. Agrippa, _De occulta
+philosophia_, c. 52.
+
+[708] See Trucchi, _Poesie Italiane inedite_, i. p 165 sqq.
+
+[709] Blank verse became at a later time the usual form for dramatic
+compositions. Trissino, in the dedication of his _Sofonisba_ to Leo X.,
+expressed the hope that the Pope would recognise this style for what it
+was--as better, nobler, and _less easy_ than it looked. Roscoe, _Leone_
+X., ed. Bossi, viii. 174.
+
+[710] Comp. e.g. the striking forms adopted by Dante, _Vita Nuova_, ed.
+Witte, p. 13 sqq., 16 sqq. Each has twenty irregular lines; in the
+first, one rhyme occurs eight times.
+
+[711] Trucchi, op. cit. i. 181 sqq.
+
+[712] These were the ‘Canzoni’ and Sonnets which every blacksmith and
+donkey-driver sang and parodied--which made Dante not a little angry.
+(Comp. Franco Sachetti, Nov. 114, 115.) So quickly did these poems find
+their way among the people.
+
+[713] _Vita Nuova_, ed. Witte, pp. 81, 82 sqq. ‘Deh peregrini,’ _ibid._
+116.
+
+[714] For Dante’s psychology, the beginning of _Purg._ iv. is one of the
+most important passages. See also the parts of the _Convito_ bearing on
+the subject.
+
+[715] The portraits of the school of Van Eyck would prove the contrary
+for the North. They remained for a long period far in advance of all
+descriptions in words.
+
+[716] Printed in the sixteenth volume of his _Opere Volgari_. See M.
+Landau, _Giov. Boccaccio_ (Stuttg. 1877), pp. 36-40; he lays special
+stress on B.’s dependence on Dante and Petrarch.
+
+[717] In the song of the shepherd Teogape, after the feast of Venus,
+_Opp._ ed. Montier, vol. xv. 2. p. 67 sqq. Comp. Landau, 58-64; on the
+_Fiammetta_, see Landau, 96-105.
+
+[718] The famous Lionardo Aretino, the leader of the humanists at the
+beginning of the fifteenth century, admits, ‘Che gli antichi Greci
+d’umanita e di gentilezza di cuore abbino avanzanto di gran lunga i
+nostri Italiani;’ but he says it at the beginning of a novel which
+contains the sentimental story of the invalid Prince Antiochus and his
+step-mother Stratonice--a document of an ambiguous and half-Asiatic
+character. (Printed as an Appendix to the _Cento Novelle Antiche_.)
+
+[719] No doubt the court and prince received flattery enough from their
+occasional poets and dramatists.
+
+[720] Comp. the contrary view taken by Gregorovius, _Gesch. Roms_, vii.
+619.
+
+[721] Paul. Jovius, _Dialog. de viris lit. illustr._, in Tiraboschi,
+tom. vii. iv. Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis nostri temp._
+
+[722] Isabella Gonzaga to her husband, Feb. 3, 1502, _Arch. Stor._
+Append. ii. p. 306 sqq. Comp. Gregorovius, _Lucrezia Borgia_, i.
+256-266, ed. 3. In the French _Mystères_ the actors themselves first
+marched before the audience in procession, which was called the
+‘montre.’
+
+[723] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 404. Other passages
+referring to the stage in that city, cols. 278, 279, 282 to 285, 361,
+380, 381, 393, 397, from which it appears that Plautus was the dramatist
+most popular on these occasions, that the performances sometimes lasted
+till three o’clock in the morning, and were even given in the open air.
+The ballets were without any meaning or reference to the persons present
+and the occasion solemnized. Isabella Gonzaga, who was certainly at the
+time longing for her husband and child, and was dissatisfied with the
+union of her brother with Lucrezia, spoke of the ‘coldness and
+frostiness’ of the marriage and the festivities which attended it.
+
+[724] _Strozzii Poetæ_, fol. 232, in the fourth book of the _Æolosticha_
+of Tito Strozza. The lines run:
+
+    ‘Ecce superveniens rerum argumenta retexit
+      Mimus, et ad populum verba diserta refert.
+     Tum similes habitu formaque et voce Menæchmi
+      Dulcibus oblectant lumina nostra modis.’
+
+The _Menæchmi_ was also given at Ferrara in 1486, at the cost of more
+than 1,000 ducats. Murat. xxiv. 278.
+
+[725] Franc. Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 169. The passage in the original
+is as follows: ‘Si sono anco spesso recitate delle tragedie con grandi
+apparecchi, comporte da poeti antichi o da moderni. Alle quali per la
+fama degli apparati concorrevano le genti estere e circonvicine per
+vederle e udirle. Ma hoggi le feste da particolari si fanno fra i
+parenti et essendosi la città regolata per se medesima da certi anni in
+quà, si passano i tempi del Carnovale in comedie e in altri più lieti e
+honorati diletti.’ The passage is not thoroughly clear.
+
+[726] This must be the meaning of Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 168, when
+he complains that the ‘recitanti’ ruined the comedies ‘con invenzioni o
+personaggi troppo ridicoli.’
+
+[727] Sansovino, l. c.
+
+[728] Scardeonius, _De urb. Patav. antiq._, in Graevius, Thes. vi. iii.
+col. 288 sqq. An important passage for the literature of the dialects
+generally. One of the passages is as follows: ‘Hinc ad recitandas
+comœdias socii scenici et gregales et æmuli fuere nobiles juvenes
+Patavini, Marcus Aurelius Alvarotus quem in comœdiis suis Menatum
+appellitabat, et Hieronymus Zanetus quem Vezzam, et Castegnola quem
+Billoram vocitabat, et alii quidam qui sermonem agrestium imitando præ
+ceteris callebant.’
+
+[729] That the latter existed as early as the fifteenth century may be
+inferred from the _Diario Ferrerese_, Feb. 2nd, 1501: ‘Il duca Hercole
+fece una festa di Menechino secondo il suo uso.’ Murat. xxiv. col. 393.
+There cannot be a confusion with the Menæchmi of Plautus, which is
+correctly written, l. c. col. 278. See above, p. 318, note 2.
+
+[730] Pulci mischievously invents a solemn old-world legend for his
+story of the giant Margutte (_Morgante_, canto xix. str. 153 sqq.). The
+critical introduction of Limerno Pitocco is still droller (_Orlandino_,
+cap. i. str. 12-22).
+
+[731] The _Morgante_ was written in 1460 and the following years, and
+first printed at Venice in 1481. Last ed. by P. Sermolli, Florence,
+1872. For the tournaments, see part v. chap. i. See, for what follows,
+Ranke: _Zur Geschichte der italienischen Poesie_, Berlin, 1837.
+
+[732] The _Orlando inamorato_ was first printed in 1496.
+
+[733] _L’Italia liberata da Goti_, Rome, 1547.
+
+[734] See above, p. 319, and Landau’s _Boccaccio_, 64-69. It must,
+nevertheless, be observed that the work of Boccaccio here mentioned was
+written before 1344, while that of Petrarch was written after Laura’s
+death, that is, after 1348.
+
+[735] Vasari, viii. 71, in the Commentary to the _Vita di Rafaelle_.
+
+[736] Much of this kind our present taste could dispense with in the
+_Iliad_.
+
+[737] First edition, 1516.
+
+[738] The speeches inserted are themselves narratives.
+
+[739] As was the case with Pulci, _Morgante_, canto xix. str. 20 sqq.
+
+[740] The _Orlandino_, first edition, 1526.
+
+[741] Radevicus, _De gestis Friderici imp._, especially ii. 76. The
+admirable _Vita Henrici IV._ contains very little personal description,
+as is also the case with the _Vita Chuonradi imp._ by Wipo.
+
+[742] The librarian Anastasius (middle of ninth century) is here meant.
+The whole collection of the lives of the Popes (_Liber Pontificalis_)
+was formerly ascribed to him, but erroneously. Comp. Wattenbach,
+_Deutschland’s Geschichtsquellen_, i. 223 sqq. 3rd ed.
+
+[743] Lived about the same time as Anastasius; author of a history of
+the bishopric of Ravenna. Wattenbach, l. c. 227.
+
+[744] How early Philostratus was used in the same way, I am unable to
+say. Suetonius was no doubt taken as a model in times still earlier.
+Besides the life of Charles the Great, written by Eginhard, examples
+from the twelfth century are offered by William of Malmesbury in his
+descriptions of William the Conqueror (p. 446 sqq., 452 sqq.), of
+William II. (pp. 494, 504), and of Henry I. (p. 640).
+
+[745] See the admirable criticism in Landau, _Boccaccio_, 180-182.
+
+[746] See above, p. 131. The original (Latin) was first published in
+1847 at Florence, by Galletti, with the title, _Philippi Villani Liber
+de civitatis Florentiae famosis civibus_; an old Italian translation has
+been often printed since 1747, last at Trieste, 1858. The first book,
+which treats of the earliest history of Florence and Rome, has never
+been printed. The chapter in Villani, _De semipoetis_, i.e. those who
+wrote in prose as well as in verse, or those who wrote poems besides
+following some other profession, is specially interesting.
+
+[747] Here we refer the reader to the biography of L. B. Alberti, from
+which extracts are given above (p. 136), and to the numerous Florentine
+biographies in Muratori, in the _Archivio Storico_, and elsewhere. The
+life of Alberti is probably an autobiography, l. c. note 2.
+
+[748] _Storia Fiorentina_, ed. F. L. Polidori, Florence, 1838.
+
+[749] _De viris illustribus_, in the publications of the _Stuttgarter
+liter. Vereins_, No. i. Stuttg. 1839. Comp. C. Voigt, ii. 324. Of the
+sixty-five biographies, twenty-one are lost.
+
+[750] His _Diarium Romanum_ from 1472 to 1484, in Murat. xiii. 81-202.
+
+[751] _Ugolini Verini poetae Florentini_ (a contemporary of Lorenzo, a
+pupil of Landinus, fol. 13, and teacher of Petrus Crinitus, fol. 14),
+_De illustratione urbis Florentinae libri tres_, Paris, 1583, deserves
+mention, esp. lib. 2. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio are spoken of and
+characterised without a word of blame. For several women, see fol. 11.
+
+[752] _Petri Candidi Decembrii Vita Philippi Mariae Vicecomitis_, in
+Murat. xx. Comp above, p. 38.
+
+[753] See above, p. 225.
+
+[754] On Comines, see above, p. 96, note 1. While Comines, as is there
+indicated, partly owes his power of objective criticism to intercourse
+with Italians, the German humanists and statesmen, notwithstanding the
+prolonged residence of some of them in Italy, and their diligent and
+often most successful study of the classical world, acquired little or
+nothing of the gift of biographical representation or of the analysis of
+character. The travels, biographies, and historical sketches of the
+German humanists in the fifteenth, and often in the early part of the
+sixteenth centuries, are mostly either dry catalogues or empty,
+rhetorical declamations.
+
+[755] See above, p. 96.
+
+[756] Here and there we find exceptions. Letters of Hutten, containing
+autobiographical notices, bits of the chronicle of Barth. Sastrow, and
+the _Sabbata_ of Joh. Kessler, introduce us to the inward conflicts of
+the writers, mostly, however, bearing the specifically religious
+character of the Reformation.
+
+[757] Among northern autobiographies we might, perhaps, select for
+comparison that of Agrippa d’Aubigné (though belonging to a later
+period) as a living and speaking picture of human individuality.
+
+[758] Written in his old age, about 1576. On Cardano as an investigator
+and discoverer, see Libri, _Hist. des Sciences Mathém._ iii. p. 167 sqq.
+
+[759] E.g. the execution of his eldest son, who had taken vengeance for
+his wife’s infidelity by poisoning her (cap. 27, 50).
+
+[760] _Discorsi della Vita Sobria_, consisting of the ‘trattato,’ of a
+‘compendio,’ of an ‘esortazione,’ and of a ‘lettera’ to Daniel Barbaro.
+The book has been often reprinted.
+
+[761] Was this the villa of Codevico mentioned above, p. 321?
+
+[762] In some cases very early; in the Lombard cities as early as the
+twelfth century. Comp. Landulfus senior, _Ricobaldus_, and (in Murat.
+x.) the remarkable anonymous work, _De laudibus Papiae_, of the
+fourteenth century. Also (in Murat. i.) _Liber de Situ urbis Mediol._
+Some notices on Italian local history in O. Lorenzo, _Deutschland’s
+Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter seit dem 13ten Jahr_. Berlin, 1877; but
+the author expressly refrains from an original treatment of the subject.
+
+[763] _Li Tresors_, ed. Chabaille, Paris, 1863, pp. 179-180. Comp.
+_ibid._ p. 577 (lib. iii. p. ii. c. 1).
+
+[764] On Paris, which was a much more important place to the mediæval
+Italian than to his successor a hundred years later, see _Dittamondo_,
+iv. cap. 18. The contrast between France and Italy is accentuated by
+Petrarch in his _Invectivae contra Gallum_.
+
+[765] Savonarola, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1186 (above, p. 145). On Venice,
+see above, p. 62 sqq. The oldest description of Rome, by Signorili
+(MS.), was written in the pontificate of Martin V. (1417); see
+Gregorovius, vii. 569; the oldest by a German is that of H. Muffel
+(middle of fifteenth century), ed. by Voigt, Tübingen, 1876.
+
+[766] The character of the restless and energetic Bergamasque, full of
+curiosity and suspicion, is charmingly described in Bandello, parte i.
+nov. 34.
+
+[767] E.g. Varchi, in the ninth book of the _Storie Fiorentine_ (vol.
+iii. p. 56 sqq.).
+
+[768] Vasari, xii. p. 158. _V. di Michelangelo_, at the beginning. At
+other times mother nature is praised loudly enough, as in the sonnet of
+Alfons de’ Pazzi to the non-Tuscan Annibal Caro (in Trucchi, l. c. iii.
+p. 187):
+
+    ‘Misero il Varchi! e più infelici noi,
+     Se a vostri virtudi accidentali
+     Aggiunto fosse ‘l natural, ch’è in noi!’
+
+
+[769] _Forcianae Quaestiones, in quibus varia Italorum ingenia
+explicantur multaque alia scitu non indigna._ Autore Philalette
+Polytopiensi cive. Among them, _Mauritii Scaevae Carmen_.
+
+    ‘Quos hominum mores varios quas denique mentes
+        Diverso profert Itala terra solo,
+     Quisve vinis animus, mulierum et strenua virtus
+        Pulchre hoc exili codice lector habes.’
+
+Neapoli excudebat Martinus de Ragusia, Anno MDXXXVI. This little work,
+made use of by Ranke, _Päpste_, i. 385, passes as being from the hand of
+Ortensio Landi (comp. Tiraboschi, vii. 800 to 812), although in the work
+itself no hint is given of the author. The title is explained by the
+circumstance that conversations are reported which were held at Forcium,
+a bath near Lucca, by a large company of men and women, on the question
+whence it comes that there are such great differences among mankind. The
+question receives no answer, but many of the differences among the
+Italians of that day are noticed--in studies, trade, warlike skill (the
+point quoted by Ranke), the manufacture of warlike implements, modes of
+life, distinctions in costume, in language, in intellect, in loving and
+hating, in the way of winning affection, in the manner of receiving
+guests, and in eating. At the close, come some reflections on the
+differences among philosophical systems. A large part of the work is
+devoted to women--their differences in general, the power of their
+beauty, and especially the question whether women are equal or inferior
+to men. The work has been made use of in various passages below. The
+following extract may serve as an example (fol. 7 _b_ sqq.):--‘Aperiam
+nunc quæ sint in consilio aut dando aut accipiendo dissimilitudo.
+Præstant consilio Mediolanenses, sed aliorum gratia potius quam sua.
+Sunt nullo consilio Genuenses. Rumor est Venetos abundare. Sunt perutili
+consilio Lucenses, idque aperte indicarunt, cum in tanto totius Italiæ
+ardore, tot hostibus circumsepti suam libertatem, ad quam nati videntur
+semper tutati sint, nulla, quidem, aut capitis aut fortunarum ratione
+habita. Quis porro non vehementer admiretur? Quis callida consilia non
+stupeat? Equidem quotiescunque cogito, quanta prudentia ingruentes
+procellas evitarint, quanta solertia impendentia pericula effugerint,
+adducor in stuporem. Lucanis vero summum est studium, eos deludere qui
+consilii captandi gratia adeunt, ipsi vero omnia inconsulte ac temere
+faciunt. Brutii optimo sunt consilio, sed ut incommodent, aut perniciem
+afferant, in rebus quæ magnæ deliberationis dictu mirum quam stupidi
+sint, eisdem plane dotibus instructi sunt Volsci quod ad cædes et furta
+paulo propensiores sint. Pisani bono quidem sunt consilio, sed parum
+constanti, si quis diversum ab eis senserit, mox acquiescunt, rursus si
+aliter suadeas, mutabunt consilium, illud in caussa fuit quod tam duram
+ac diutinam obsidionem ad extremum usque non pertulerint. Placentini
+utrisque abundant consiliis, scilicet salutaribus ac pernitiosis, non
+facile tamen ab iis impetres pestilens consilium, apud Regienses neque
+consilii copiam invenies. Si sequare Mutinensium consilia, raro cedet
+infeliciter, sunt enim peracutissimo consilio, et voluntate plane bona.
+Providi sunt Florentini (si unumquemque seorsum accipias) si vero simul
+conjuncti sint, non admodum mihi consilia eorum probabuntur; feliciter
+cedunt Senensium consilia, subita sunt Perusinorum; salutaria
+Ferrariensium, fideli sunt consilio Veronenses, semper ambigui sunt in
+consiliis aut dandis aut accipiendis Patavini. Sunt pertinaces in eo
+quod cœperint consilio Bergomates, respuunt omnium consilia Neapolitani,
+sunt consultissimi Bononienses.’
+
+[770] _Commentario delle più notabili e mostruose cose d’Italia et altri
+luoghi, di Lingua Aramea in Italiana tradotta. Con un breve Catalogo
+degli inventori delle cose che si mangiano et beveno, novamente
+ritrovato._ In Venetia 1553 (first printed 1548, based on a journey
+taken by Ortensio Landi through Italy in 1543 and 1544). That Landi was
+really the author of this _Commentario_ is clear from the concluding
+remarks of Nicolo Morra (fol. 46 _a_): ‘Il presente commentario nato del
+constantissimo cervello di M. O. L.;’ and from the signature of the
+whole (fol. 70 _a_): SVISNETROH SVDNAL, ROTUA TSE, ‘Hortensius Landus
+autor est.’ After a declaration as to Italy from the mouth of a
+mysterious grey-haired sage, a journey is described from Sicily through
+Italy to the East. All the cities of Italy are more or less fully
+discussed: that Lucca should receive special praise is intelligible from
+the writer’s way of thinking. Venice, where he claims to have been much
+with Pietro Aretino (p. 166), and Milan are described in detail, and in
+connexion with the latter the maddest stories are told (fol. 25 sqq.).
+There is no want of such elsewhere--of roses which flower all the year
+round, stars which shine at midday, birds which are changed into men,
+and men with bulls’ heads on their shoulders, mermen, and men who spit
+fire from their mouths. Among all these there are often authentic bits
+of information, some of which will be used in the proper place; short
+mention is made of the Lutherans (fol. 32 _a_, 38 _a_), and frequent
+complaints are heard of the wretched times and unhappy state of Italy.
+We there read (fol. 22 _a_): ‘Son questi quelli Italiani li quali in un
+fatto d’armi uccisero ducento mila Francesi? sono finalmente quelli che
+di tutto il mondo s’impadronirono? Hai quanto (per quel che io vego)
+degenerati sono. Hai quanto dissimili mi paiono dalli antichi padri
+loro, liquali et singolar virtu di cuore e disciplina militare
+ugualmente monstrarno havere.’ On the catalogue of eatables which is
+added, see below.
+
+[771] _Descrizione di tutta l’Italia._
+
+[772] Satirical lists of cities are frequently met with later, e.g.
+Macaroneide, _Phantas._ ii. For France, Rabelais, who knew the
+Macaroneide, is the chief source of all the jests and malicious
+allusions of this local sort.
+
+[773] It is true that many decaying literatures are full of painfully
+minute descriptions. See e.g. in Sidonius Apollinaris the descriptions
+of a Visigoth king (_Epist._ i. 2), of a personal enemy (_Epist._ iii.
+13), and in his poems the types of the different German tribes.
+
+[774] On Filippo Villani, see p. 330.
+
+[775] _Parnasso teatrale_, Lipsia, 1829. Introd. p. vii.
+
+[776] The reading is here evidently corrupt. The passage is as follows
+(_Ameto_, Venezia, 1856, p. 54): ‘Del mezo de’ quali non camuso naso in
+linea diretta discende, quanto ad aquilineo non essere dimanda il
+dovere.’
+
+[777] ‘Due occhi ladri nel loro movimento.’ The whole work is rich in
+such descriptions.
+
+[778] The charming book of songs by Giusto dei Conti, _La bella Mano_
+(best ed. Florence, 1715), does not tell us as many details of this
+famous hand of his beloved as Boccaccio in a dozen passages of the
+_Ameto_ of the hands of his nymphs.
+
+[779] ‘Della bellezza delle donne,’ in the first vol. of the _Opere di
+Firenzuola_, Milano, 1802. For his view of bodily beauty as a sign of
+beauty of soul, comp. vol. ii. pp. 48 to 52, in the ‘ragionamenti’
+prefixed to his novels. Among the many who maintain this doctrine,
+partly in the style of the ancients, we may quote one, Castiglione, _Il
+Cortigiana_, l. iv. fol. 176.
+
+[780] This was a universal opinion, not only the professional opinion of
+painters. See below.
+
+[781] This may be an opportunity for a word on the eyes of Lucrezia
+Borgia, taken from the distichs of a Ferrarese court-poet, Ercole
+Strozza (_Strozzii Poetae_, fol. 85-88). The power of her glance is
+described in a manner only explicable in an artistic age, and which
+would not now be permitted. Sometimes it turns the beholder to fire,
+sometimes to stone. He who looks long at the sun, becomes blind; he who
+beheld Medusa, became a stone; but he who looks at the countenance of
+Lucrezia
+
+    ‘Fit primo intuitu cæcus et inde lapis.’
+
+Even the marble Cupid sleeping in her halls is said to have been
+petrified by her gaze:
+
+    ‘Lumine Borgiado saxificatur Amor.’
+
+Critics may dispute, if they please, whether the so-called Eros of
+Praxiteles or that of Michelangelo is meant, since she was the possessor
+of both.
+
+And the same glance appeared to another poet, Marcello Filosseno, only
+mild and lofty, ‘mansueto e altero’ (Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, vii.
+p. 306).
+
+Comparisons with ideal figures of antiquity occur (p. 30). Of a boy ten
+years old we read in the _Orlandino_ (ii. str. 47), ‘ed ha capo romano.’
+Referring to the fact that the appearance of the temples can be
+altogether changed by the arrangement of the hair, Firenzuola makes a
+comical attack on the overcrowding of the hair with flowers, which
+causes the head to ‘look like a pot of pinks or a quarter of goat on the
+spit.’ He is, as a rule, thoroughly at home in caricature.
+
+[782] For the ideal of the ‘Minnesänger,’ see Falke, _Die deutsche
+Trachten- und Modenwelt_, i. pp. 85 sqq.
+
+[783] On the accuracy of his sense of form, p. 290.
+
+[784] _Inferno_, xxi. 7; _Purgat._ xiii. 61.
+
+[785] We must not take it too seriously, if we read (in Platina, _Vitae
+Pontiff._ p. 310) that he kept at his court a sort of buffoon, the
+Florentine Greco, ‘hominem certe cujusvis mores, naturam, linguam cum
+maximo omnium qui audiebant risu facile exprimentem.’
+
+[786] _Pii. II. Comment._ viii. p. 391.
+
+[787] Two tournaments must be distinguished, Lorenzo’s in 1468 and
+Guiliano’s in 1475 (a third in 1481?). See Reumont, _L. M._ i. 264 sqq.
+361, 267, note 1; ii. 55, 67, and the works there quoted, which settle
+the old dispute on these points. The first tournament is treated in the
+poem of Luca Pulci, ed. _Ciriffo Calvaneo di Luca Pulci Gentilhuomo
+Fiorentino, con la Giostra del Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici_. Florence,
+1572, pp. 75, 91; the second in an unfinished poem of Ang. Poliziano,
+best ed. Carducci, _Le Stanze, l’Orfeo e le Rime di M. A. P._ Florence,
+1863. The description of Politian breaks off at the setting out of
+Guiliano for the tournament. Pulci gives a detailed account of the
+combatants and the manner of fighting. The description of Lorenzo is
+particularly good (p. 82).
+
+[788] This so-called ‘Caccia’ is printed in the Commentary to
+Castiglione’s _Eclogue_ from a Roman MS. _Lettere del conte B.
+Castiglione_, ed. Pierantonio Lerassi (Padua, 1771), ii. p. 269.
+
+[789] See the _Serventese_ of Giannozzo of Florence, in Trucchi, _Poesie
+italiane inedite_, ii. p. 99. The words are many of them quite
+unintelligible, borrowed really or apparently from the languages of the
+foreign mercenaries. Macchiavelli’s description of Florence during the
+plague of 1527 belongs, to certain extent, to this class of works. It is
+a series of living, speaking pictures of a frightful calamity.
+
+[790] According to Boccaccio (_Vita di Dante_, p. 77), Dante was the
+author of two eclogues, probably written in Latin. They are addressed to
+Joh. de Virgiliis. Comp. Fraticelli, _Opp. min. di Dante_, i. 417.
+Petrarch’s bucolic poem in _P. Carmina minora_, ed. Bossetti, i. Comp.
+L. Geiger, _Petr._ 120-122 and 270, note 6, especially A. Hortis,
+_Scritti inediti di F. P._ Triest, 1874.
+
+[791] Boccaccio gives in his _Ameto_ (above, p. 344) a kind of mythical
+Decameron, and sometimes fails ludicrously to keep up the character. One
+of his nymphs is a good Catholic, and prelates shoot glances of unholy
+love at her in Rome. Another marries. In the _Ninfale fiesolano_ the
+nymph Mensola, who finds herself pregnant, takes counsel of an ‘old and
+wise nymph.’
+
+[792] In general the prosperity of the Italian peasants was greater then
+than that of the peasantry anywhere else in Europe. Comp. Sacchetti,
+nov. 88 and 222; L. Pulci in the _Beca da Dicamano_ (Villari,
+_Macchiavelli_, i. 198, note 2).
+
+[793] ‘Nullum est hominum genus aptius urbi,’ says Battista Mantovano
+(_Ecl._ viii.) of the inhabitants of the Monte Baldo and the Val.
+Cassina, who could turn their hands to anything. Some country
+populations, as is well known, have even now privileges with regard to
+certain occupations in the great cities.
+
+[794] Perhaps one of the strongest passages, _Orlandino_, cap. v. str.
+54-58. The tranquil and unlearned Vesp. Bisticci says (_Comm. sulla vita
+di Giov. Manetti_, p. 96): ‘Sono due ispezie di uomini difficili a
+supportare per la loro ignoranza; l’una sono i servi, la seconda i
+contadini.’
+
+[795] In Lombardy, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the nobles
+did not shrink from dancing, wrestling, leaping, and racing with the
+peasants. _Il Cortigiano_, l. ii. fol. 54. A. Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti)
+in the _Trattato del governo della famiglia_, p. 86, is an instance of a
+land-owner who consoles himself for the greed and fraud of his peasant
+tenantry with the reflection that he is thereby taught to bear and deal
+with his fellow-creatures.
+
+[796] Jovian. Pontan. _De fortitudine_, lib. ii.
+
+[797] The famous peasant-woman of the Valtellina--Bona Lombarda, wife of
+the Condottiere Pietro Brunoro--is known to us from Jacobus Bergomensis
+and from Porcellius, in Murat. xxv. col. 43.
+
+[798] On the condition of the Italian peasantry in general, and
+especially of the details of that condition in several provinces, we are
+unable to particularise more fully. The proportions between freehold and
+leasehold property, and the burdens laid on each in comparison with
+those borne at the present time, must be gathered from special works
+which we have not had the opportunity of consulting. In stormy times the
+country people were apt to have appalling relapses into savagery (_Arch.
+Stor._ xvi. i. pp. 451 sqq., ad. a. 1440; Corio, fol. 259; _Annales
+Foroliv._ in Murat. xxii. col. 227, though nothing in the shape of a
+general peasants’ war occurred. The rising near Piacenza in 1462 was of
+some importance and interest. Comp. Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 409;
+_Annales Placent._ in Murat. xx. col. 907; Sismondi, x. p. 138. See
+below, part vi. cap. 1.
+
+[799] _F. Bapt. Mantuani Bucolica seu Adolescentia in decem Eclogas
+divisa_; often printed, e.g. Strasburg, 1504. The date of composition is
+indicated by the preface, written in 1498, from which it also appears
+that the ninth and tenth eclogues were added later. In the heading to
+the tenth are the words, ‘post religionis ingressum;’ in that of the
+seventh, ‘cum jam autor ad religionem aspiraret.’ The eclogues by no
+means deal exclusively with peasant life; in fact, only two of them do
+so--the sixth, ‘disceptatione rusticorum et civium,’ in which the writer
+sides with the rustics; and the eighth, ‘de rusticorum religione.’ The
+others speak of love, of the relations between poets and wealthy men, of
+conversion to religion, and of the manners of the Roman court.
+
+[800] _Poesie di Lorenzo Magnifico_, i. p. 37 sqq. The remarkable poems
+belonging to the period of the German ‘Minnesänger,’ which bear the name
+of Neithard von Reuenthal, only depict peasant life in so far as the
+knight chooses to mix with it for his amusement. The peasants reply to
+the ridicule of Reuenthal in songs of their own. Comp. Karl Schroder,
+_Die höfische Dorfpoesie des deutschen Mittelalters_ in Rich. Gosche,
+_Jahrb. für Literaturgesch._ 1 vol. Berlin, 1875, pp. 45-98, esp. 75
+sqq.
+
+[801] _Poesie di Lor. Magn._ ii. 149.
+
+[802] In the _Deliciae poetar. ital._, and in the works of Politian.
+First separate ed. Florence, 1493. The didactic poem of Rucellai, _Le
+Api_, first printed 1519, and _La coltivazione_, Paris, 1546, contain
+something of the same kind.
+
+[803] _Poesie di Lor. Magnifico_, ii. 75.
+
+[804] The imitation of different dialects and of the manners of
+different districts spring from the same tendency. Comp. p. 155.
+
+[805] _Jo. Pici oratio de hominis dignitate._ The passage is as follows:
+‘Statuit tandem optimus opifex ut cui dari nihil proprium poterat
+commune esset quidquid privatum singulis fuerat. Igitur hominem accepit
+indiscretae opus imaginis atque in mundi posito meditullio sic est
+allocutus; Nec certam sedem, nec propriam faciem, nec munus ullum
+peculiare tibi dedimus, O Adam, ut quam sedem, quam faciem, quae munera
+tute optaveris, ea pro voto pro tua sententia habeas et possideas.
+Definita caeteris natura inter praescriptas a nobis leges coercetur, tu
+nullis augustiis coercitus pro tuo arbitrio, in cujus manus te posui,
+tibi illam praefinies. Medium te mundi posui ut circumspiceres inde
+commodius quidquid est in mundo. Nec te caelestem neque terrenum, neque
+mortalem neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius
+honorariusque plastes et fictor in quam malueris tute formam effingas.
+Poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare, poteris in superiora
+quae sunt divina ex tui animi sententia regenerari. O summam dei patris
+liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis felicitatem. Cui datum id
+habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta simulatque nascuntur id
+secum afferunt, ut ait Lucilius, e bulga matris quod possessura sunt;
+supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt quod sunt futuri
+in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae
+vitæ germina indidit pater; quæ quisque excoluerit illa adolescent et
+fructus suos ferent in illo. Si vegetalia, planta fiet, si sensualia,
+obbrutescet, si rationalia, coeleste evadet animal, si intellectualia,
+angelus erit et dei filius, et si nulla creaturarum sorte contentus in
+unitatis centrum suae se receperit, unus cum deo spiritus factus in
+solitaria patris caligine qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus
+antestabit.’
+
+The speech first appears in the _commentationes_ of Jo. Picus without
+any special title; the heading ‘de hominis dignitate’ was added later.
+It is not altogether suitable, since a great part of the discourse is
+devoted to the defence of the peculiar philosophy of Pico, and the
+praise of, the Jewish Cabbalah. On Pico, see above, p. 202 sqq.; and
+below; part. vi. chap. 4. More than two hundred years before, Brunetto
+Latini (_Tesoro_, lib. i. cap. 13, ed. Chabaille, p. 20) had said:
+‘Toutes choses dou ciel en aval sont faites pour l’ome; mais li hom at
+faiz pour lui meisme.’ The words seemed to a contemporary to have too
+much human pride in them, and he added: ‘e por Dieu amer et servir et
+por avoir la joie pardurable.’
+
+[806] An allusion to the fall of Lucifer and his followers.
+
+[807] The habit among the Piedmontese nobility of living in their
+castles in the country struck the other Italians as exceptional.
+Bandello, parte ii. nov. 7 (?).
+
+[808] This was the case long before printing. A large number of
+manuscripts, and among them the best, belonged to Florentine artisans.
+If it had not been for Savonarola’s great bonfire, many more of them
+would be left.
+
+[809] Dante, _De monarchia_, l. ii. cap. 3.
+
+[810] _Paradiso_, xvi. at the beginning.
+
+[811] Dante, _Convito_, nearly the whole _Trattato_, iv., and elsewhere.
+Brunetto Latini says (_Il tesoro_, lib. i. p. ii. cap. 50, ed.
+Chabaille, p. 343): ‘De ce (la vertu) nasqui premierement la nobleté de
+gentil gent, non pas de ses ancêtres;’ and he warns men (lib. ii. p. ii.
+cap. 196, p. 440) that they may lose true nobility by bad actions.
+Similarly Petrarch, _de rem. utr. fort._ lib. i. dial. xvii.: ‘Verus
+nobilis non nascitur, sed fit.’
+
+[812] _Poggi Opera, Dial. de nobilitate._ Aristotle’s view is expressly
+combatted by B. Platina, _De vera nobilitate_.
+
+[813] This contempt of noble birth is common among the humanists. See
+the severe passages in Æn. Sylvius, _Opera_, pp. 84 (_Hist. bohem._ cap.
+2) and 640. (_Stories of Lucretia and Euryalus._)
+
+[814] This is the case in the capital itself. See Bandello, parte ii.
+nov. 7; _Joviani Pontani Antonius_, where the decline of energy in the
+nobility is dated from the coming of the Aragonese dynasty.
+
+[815] Throughout Italy it was universal that the owner of large landed
+property stood on an equality with the nobles. It is only flattery when
+J. A. Campanus adds to the statement of Pius II. (_Commentarii_, p. 1),
+that as a boy he had helped his poor parents in their rustic labours,
+the further assertion that he only did so for his amusement, and that
+this was the custom of the young nobles (Voigt, ii. 339).
+
+[816] For an estimate of the nobility in North Italy, Bandello, with his
+repeated rebukes of _mésalliances_, is of importance (parte i. nov. 4,
+26; parte iii. nov. 60). For the participation of the nobles in the
+games of the peasants, see above.
+
+[817] The severe judgment of Macchiavelli, _Discorsi_, i. 55, refers
+only to those of the nobility who still retained feudal rights, and who
+were thoroughly idle and politically mischievous. Agrippa of Nettesheim,
+who owes his most remarkable ideas chiefly to his life in Italy, has a
+chapter on the nobility and princes (_De Incert. et Vanit. Scient._ cap,
+80), the bitterness of which exceeds anything to be met with elsewhere,
+and is due to the social ferment then prevailing in the North. A passage
+at p. 213 is as follows: ‘Si ... nobilitatis primordia requiramus,
+comperiemus hanc nefaria perfidia et crudelitate partam, si ingressum
+spectemus, reperiemus hanc mercenaria militia et latrociniis auctam.
+Nobilitas revera nihil aliud est quam robusta improbitas atque dignitas
+non nisi scelere quaesita benedictio et hereditas pessimorom
+quorumcunque filiorum.’ In giving the history of the nobility he makes a
+passing reference to Italy (p. 227).
+
+[818] Massuccio, nov. 19 (ed. Settembrini, Nap. 1874, p. 220). The first
+ed. of the novels appeared in 1476.
+
+[819] Jacopo Pitti to Cosimo I., _Archiv. Stor._ iv. ii. p. 99. In North
+Italy the Spanish rule brought about the same results. Bandello, parte
+ii. nov. 40, dates from this period.
+
+[820] When, in the fifteenth century, Vespasiano Fiorentino (pp. 518,
+632) implies that the rich should not try to increase their inherited
+fortune, but should spend their whole annual income, this can only, in
+the mouth of a Florentine, refer to the great landowners.
+
+[821] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 153. Comp. nov. 82 and 150.
+
+[822] ‘Che la cavalleria è morta.’
+
+[823] Poggius, _De Nobilitate_, fol. 27. See above, p. 19. Ænea Silvio
+(_Hist. Fried. III._ ed. Kollar, p. 294) finds fault with the readiness
+with which Frederick conferred knighthood in Italy.
+
+[824] Vasari, iii. 49, and note. _Vita di Dello._ The city of Florence
+claimed the right of conferring knighthood. On the ceremonies of this
+kind in 1378 and 1389, see Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 444 sqq.
+
+[825] Senarega, _De Reb. Gen._ in Murat. xxiv. col. 525. At a wedding of
+Joh. Adurnus with Leonora di Sanseverino, ‘certamina equestria in
+Sarzano edita sunt ... proposita et data victoribus praemia. Ludi
+multiformes in palatio celebrati a quibus tanquam a re nova pendebat
+plebs et integros dies illis spectantibus impendebat.’ Politian writes
+to Joh. Picus of the cavalry exercise of his pupils (_Aug. Pol. Epist._
+lib. xii. ep. 6): ‘Tu tamen a me solos fieri poetas aut oratores putas,
+at ego non minus facio bellatores.’ Ortensio Landi in the _Commentario_,
+fol. 180, tells of a duel between two soldiers at Correggio with a fatal
+result, reminding one of the old gladiatorial combats. The writer, whose
+imagination is generally active, gives us here the impression of
+truthfulness. The passages quoted show that knighthood was not
+absolutely necessary for these public contests.
+
+[826] Petrarch, _Epist. Senil._ xi. 13, to Ugo of Este. Another passage
+in the _Epist. Famil._ lib. v. ep. 6, Dec. 1st, 1343, describes the
+disgust he felt at seeing a knight fall at a tournament in Naples. For
+legal prescriptions as to the tournament at Naples, see Fracassetti’s
+Italian translation of Petrarch’s letters, Florence, 1864, ii. p. 34. L.
+B. Alberti also points out the danger, uselessness, and expense of
+tournaments. _Della Famiglia, Op. Volg._ ii. 229.
+
+[827] Nov. 64. With reference to this practice, it is said expressly in
+the _Orlandino_ (ii. str. 7), of a tournament under Charlemagne: ‘Here
+they were no cooks and scullions, but kings, dukes, and marquises, who
+fought.’
+
+[828] This is one of the oldest parodies of the tournament. Sixty years
+passed before Jacques Cœur, the burgher-minister of finance under
+Charles VII., gave a tournament of donkeys in the courtyard of his
+palace at Bourges (about 1450). The most brilliant of all these
+parodies--the second canto of the _Orlandino_ just quoted--was not
+published till 1526.
+
+[829] Comp. the poetry, already quoted, of Politian and Luca Pulci (p.
+349, note 3). Further, Paul. Jov., _Vita Leonis X._ l. i.; Macchiavelli,
+_Storie Fiorent._, l. vii.; Paul. Jov. _Elog._, speaking of Pietro de’
+Medici, who neglected his public duties for these amusements, and of
+Franc. Borbonius, who lost his life in them; Vasari, ix. 219, _Vita di
+Granacci_. In the _Morgante_ of Pulci, written under the eyes of
+Lorenzo, the knights are comical in their language and actions, but
+their blows are sturdy and scientific. Bojardo, too, writes for those
+who understand the tournament and the art of war. Comp. p. 323. In
+earlier Florentine history we read of a tournament in honour of the king
+of France, c. 1380, in Leon. Aret., _Hist. Flor._ lib. xi. ed. Argent,
+p. 222. The tournaments at Ferrara in 1464 are mentioned in the _Diario
+Ferrar._ in Murat. xxiv. col. 208; at Venice, see Sansovino, _Venezia_,
+fol. 153 sqq.; at Bologna in 1470 and after, see Bursellis, _Annal.
+Bonon._ Muratori xxiii. col. 898, 903, 906, 908, 911, where it is
+curious to note the odd mixture of sentimentalism attaching to the
+celebration of Roman triumphs; ‘ut antiquitas Romana renovata
+videretur,’ we read in one place. Frederick of Urbino (p. 44 sqq.) lost
+his right eye at a tournament ‘ab ictu lanceae.’ On the tournament as
+held at that time in northern countries, see Olivier de la Marche,
+_Mémoires_, _passim_, and especially cap. 8, 9, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, &c.
+
+[830] Bald. Castiglione. _Il Cortigiano_, l. i. fol. 18.
+
+[831] Paul. Jovii, _Elogia_, sub tit. Petrus Gravina, Alex. Achillinus,
+Balth. Castellio, &c. pp. 138 sqq. 112 sqq. 143 sqq.
+
+[832] Casa, _Il Galateo_, p. 78.
+
+[833] See on this point the Venetian books of fashions, and Sansovino,
+_Venezia_, fol. 150 sqq. The bridal dress at the betrothal--white, with
+the hair falling freely on the shoulders--is that of Titian’s Flora. The
+‘Proveditori alle pompe’ at Venice established 1514. Extracts from their
+decisions in Armand Baschet, _Souvenirs d’une Mission_, Paris, 1857.
+Prohibition of gold-embroidered garments in Venice, 1481, which had
+formerly been worn even by the bakers’ wives; they were now to be
+decorated ‘gemmis unionibus,’ so that ‘frugalissimus ornatus’ cost 4,000
+gold florins. M. Ant. Sabellici, _Epist._ lib. iii. (to M. Anto.
+Barbavarus).
+
+[834] Jovian. Pontan. _De Principe_: ‘Utinam autem non eo impudentiae
+perventum esset, ut inter mercatorem et patricium nullum sit in vestitu
+ceteroque ornatu discrimen. Sed haec tanta licentia reprehendi potest,
+coerceri non potest, quanquam mutari vestes sic quotidie videamus, ut
+quas quarto ante mense in deliciis habebamus, nunc repudiemus et tanquam
+veteramenta abjiciamus. Quodque tolerari vix potest, nullum fere
+vestimenti genus probatur, quod e Galliis non fuerit adductum, in quibus
+levia pleraque in pretio sunt, tametsi nostri persaepe homines modum
+illis et quasi formulam quandam praescribant.’
+
+[835] See e.g. the _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 297, 320,
+376, sqq., in which the last German fashions are spoken of; the
+chronicler says, ‘Che pareno buffoni tali portatori.’
+
+[836] This interesting passage from a very rare work may be here quoted.
+See above, p. 83 note 1. The historical event referred to is the
+conquest of Milan by Antonio Leiva, the general of Charles V., in 1522.
+‘Olim splendidissime vestiebant Mediolanenses. Sed postquam Carolus
+Cæsar in eam urbem tetram et monstruosam Bestiam immisit, it a consumpti
+et exhausti sunt, ut vestimentorum splendorem omnium maxime oderint, et
+quemadmodum ante illa durissima Antoniana tempora nihil aliud fere
+cogitabant quam de mutandis vestibus, nunc alia cogitant ac in mente
+versant. Non potuit tamen illa Leviana rabies tantum perdere, neque illa
+in exhausta depraedandi libidine tantum expilare, quin a re familiari
+adhuc belle parati fiant atque ita vestiant quemadmodum decere
+existimant. Et certe nisi illa Antonii Levae studia egregios quosdam
+imitatores invenisset, meo quidem judicio, nulli cederent. Neapolitani
+nimium exercent in vestitu sumptus. Genuensium vestitum perelegantem
+judico neque sagati sunt neque togati. Ferme oblitus eram Venetorum. Ii
+togati omnes. Decet quidem ille habitus adulta aetate homines, juvenes
+vero (si quid ego judico) minime utuntur panno quem ipsi vulgo Venetum
+appellant, ita probe confecto ut perpetuo durare existimes, saepissime
+vero eas vestes gestant nepotes, quas olim tritavi gestarunt. Noctu
+autem dum scortantur ac potant, Hispanicis palliolis utuntur.
+Ferrarienses ac Mantuani nihil tam diligenter curant, quam ut pileos
+habeant aureis quibusdam frustillis adornatos, atque nutanti capite
+incedunt seque quovis honore dignos existimant, Lucenses neque superbo,
+neque abjecto vestitu. Florentinorum habitus mihi quidem ridiculus
+videtur. Reliquos omitto, ne nimius sim.’ Ugolinus Verinus, ‘de
+illustratione urbis Florentiae’ says of the simplicity of the good old
+time:
+
+            ‘Non externis advecta Britannis
+    Lana erat in pretio, non concha aut coccus in usu.’
+
+
+[837] Comp. the passages on the same subject in Falke, _Die deutsche
+Trachten- und Modenwelt_, Leipzig, 1858.
+
+[838] On the Florentine women, see the chief references in Giov.
+Villani, x. 10 and 150 (Regulations as to dress and their repeal);
+Matteo Villani, i. 4 (Extravagant living in consequence of the plague).
+In the celebrated edict on fashions of the year 1330, embroidered
+figures only were allowed on the dresses of women, to the exclusion of
+those which were painted (dipinto). What was the nature of these
+decorations appears doubtful. There is a list of the arts of the
+toilette practised by women in Boccaccio, _De Cas. Vir. Ill._ lib. i.
+cap. 18, ‘in mulieres.’
+
+[839] Those of real hair were called ‘capelli morti.’ Wigs were also
+worn by men, as by Giannozzo Manetti, _Vesp. Bist. Commentario_, p. 103;
+so at least we explain this somewhat obscure passage. For an instance of
+false teeth made of ivory, and worn, though only for the sake of clear
+articulation, by an Italian prelate, see Anshelm, _Berner Chronik_, iv.
+p. 30 (1508). Ivory teeth in Boccaccio, l. c.: ‘Dentes casu sublatos
+reformare ebore fuscatos pigmentis gemmisque in albedinem revocare
+pristinam.’
+
+[840] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1874: Allegretto, in
+Murat. xxiii. col. 823. For the writers on Savonarola, see below.
+
+[841] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 152: ‘Capelli biondissimi per forza di
+sole.’ Comp. p. 89, and the rare works quoted by Yriarte, ‘_Vie d’un
+Patricien de Venise_’ (1874), p. 56.
+
+[842] As was the case in Germany too. _Poesie satiriche_, p. 119. From
+the satire of Bern. Giambullari, ‘Per prendere moglie’ (pp. 107-126), we
+can form a conception of the chemistry of the toilette, which was
+founded largely on superstition and magic.
+
+[843] The poets spared no pains to show the ugliness, danger, and
+absurdity of these practices. Comp. Ariosto, _Sat._ iii. 202 sqq.;
+Aretino, _Il Marescalco_, atto ii. scena 5; and several passages in the
+_Ragionamenti_; Giambullari, l. c. Phil. Beroald. sen. _Garmina_. Also
+Filelfo in his Satires (Venice, 1502, iv. 2-5 sqq.).
+
+[844] Cennino Cennini, _Trattato della Pittura_, gives in cap. 161 a
+recipe for painting the face, evidently for the purpose of mysteries or
+masquerades, since, in cap. 162, he solemnly warns his readers against
+the general use of cosmetics and the like, which was peculiarly common,
+as he tells us (p. 146 sqq.), in Tuscany.
+
+[845] Comp. _La Nencia di Barberino_, str. 20 and 40. The lover promises
+to bring his beloved cosmetics from the town (see on this poem of
+Lorenzo dei Medici, above, p. 101).
+
+[846] Agnolo Pandolfini, _Trattato della Governo della Famiglia_, p.
+118. He condemns this practice most energetically.
+
+[847] Tristan. Caracciolo, in Murat. xxii. col. 87. Bandello, parte ii.
+nov. 47.
+
+[848] Cap. i. to Cosimo: “Quei cento scudi nuovi e profumati che l’altro
+di mi mandaste a donare.” Some objects which date from that period have
+not yet lost their odour.
+
+[849] Vespasiano Fiorent. p. 453, in the life of Donato Acciajuoli, and
+p. 625, in the life of Niccoli. See above, vol. i. p. 303 sqq.
+
+[850] Giraldi, _Hecatommithi_, Introduz. nov. 6. A few notices on the
+Germans in Italy may not here be out of place. On the fear of German
+invasion, see p. 91, note 2; on Germans as copyists and printers, p. 193
+sqq. and the notes; on the ridicule of Hadrian VI. as a German, p. 227
+and notes. The Italians were in general ill-disposed to the Germans, and
+showed their ill-will by ridicule. Boccaccio (_Decam._ viii. 1) says:
+‘Un Tedesco in soldo prò della persona è assai leale a coloro ne’ cui
+servigi si mattea; il che rade volte suole de’ Tedeschi avenire.’ The
+tale is given as an instance of German cunning. The Italian humanists
+are full of attacks on the German barbarians, and especially those who,
+like Poggio, had seen Germany. Comp. Voigt, _Wiederbelebung_, 374 sqq.;
+Geiger, _Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Italien Zeit des
+Humanismus_ in _Zeitschrift für deutsche Culturgeschichte_, 1875, pp.
+104-124; see also Janssen, _Gesch. der deutschen Volkes_, i. 262. One of
+the chief opponents of the Germans was Joh. Ant. Campanus. See his
+works, ed. Mencken, who delivered a discourse ‘De Campani odio in
+Germanos.’ The hatred of the Germans was strengthened by the conduct of
+Hadrian VI., and still more by the conduct of the troops at the sack of
+Rome (Gregorovius, viii. 548, note). Bandello III. nov. 30, chooses the
+German as the type of the dirty and foolish man (see iii. 51, for
+another German). When an Italian wishes to praise a German he says, as
+Petrus Alcyonius in the dedication to his dialogue _De Exilio_, to
+Nicolaus Schomberg, p. 9: ‘Itaque etsi in Misnensi clarissima Germaniæ
+provincia illustribus natalibus ortus es, tamen in Italiae luce
+cognosceris.’ Unqualified praise is rare, e.g. of German women at the
+time of Marius, _Cortigiano_, iii. cap. 33.
+
+It must be added that the Italians of the Renaissance, like the Greeks
+of antiquity, were filled with aversion for all barbarians. Boccaccio,
+_De claris Mulieribus_, in the article ‘Carmenta,’ speaks of ‘German
+barbarism, French savagery, English craft, and Spanish coarseness.’
+
+[851] Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, p. 289, who, however, makes no mention of the
+German education. Maximilian could not be induced, even by celebrated
+women, to change his underclothing.
+
+[852] Æneas Sylvius (_Vitae Paparum_, ap. Murat. iii. ii. col. 880)
+says, in speaking of Baccano: ‘Pauca sunt mapalia, eaque hospitia
+faciunt Theutonici; hoc hominum genus totam fere Italiam hospitalem
+facit; ubi non repereris hos, neque diversorium quaeras.’
+
+[853] Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 21. Padua, about the year 1450, boasted of
+a great inn--the ‘Ox’--like a palace, containing stabling for two
+hundred horses. Michele Savonarola, in Mur. xxiv. col. 1175. At
+Florence, outside the Porta San Gallo, there was one of the largest and
+most splendid inns then known, but which served, it seems, only as a
+place of amusement for the people of the city. Varchi, _Stor. Fior._
+iii. p. 86. At the time of Alexander VI. the best inn at Rome was kept
+by a German. See the remarkable notices taken from the MS. of Burcardus
+in Gregorovius, vii. 361, note 2. Comp. _ibid._ p. 93, notes 2 and 3.
+
+[854] Comp. e.g. the passages in Sebastian Brant’s _Narrenschiff_, in
+the Colloquies of Erasmus, in the Latin poem of Grobianus, &c., and
+poems on behaviour at table, where, besides descriptions of bad habits,
+rules are given for good behaviour. For one of these, see C. Weller,
+_Deutsche Gedichte der Jahrhunderts_, Tübingen, 1875.
+
+[855] The diminution of the ‘burla’ is evident from the instances in the
+_Cortigiano_, l. ii. fol. 96. The Florence practical jokes kept their
+ground tenaciously. See, for evidence, the tales of Lasca (Ant. Franc.
+Grazini, b. 1503, d. 1582), which appeared at Florence in 1750.
+
+[856] For Milan, see Bandello, parte i. nov. 9. There were more than
+sixty carriages with four, and numberless others with two, horses, many
+of them carved and richly gilt and with silken tops. Comp. _ibid._ nov.
+4. Ariosto, _Sat._ iii. 127.
+
+[857] Bandello, parte i. nov. 3, iii. 42, iv. 25.
+
+[858] _De Vulgari Eloquio_, ed. Corbinelli, Parisiis, 1577. According to
+Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 77, it was written shortly before his
+death. He mentions in the _Convito_ the rapid and striking changes which
+took place during his lifetime in the Italian language.
+
+[859] See on this subject the investigations of Lionardo Aretino
+(_Epist._ ed. Mehus. ii. 62 sqq. lib. vi. 10) and Poggio (_Historiae
+disceptativae convivales tres_, in the _Opp._ fol. 14 sqq.), whether in
+earlier times the language of the people and of scholars was the same.
+Lionardo maintains the negative; Poggio expressly maintains the
+affirmative against his predecessor. See also the detailed argument of
+L. B. Alberti in the introduction to _Della Famiglia_, book iii., on the
+necessity of Italian for social intercourse.
+
+[860] The gradual progress which this dialect made in literature and
+social intercourse could be tabulated without difficulty by a native
+scholar. It could be shown to what extent in the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries the various dialects kept their places, wholly or
+partly, in correspondence, in official documents, in historical works,
+and in literature generally. The relations between the dialects and a
+more or less impure Latin, which served as the official language, would
+also be discussed. The modes of speech and pronunciation in the
+different cities of Italy are noticed in Landi, _Forcianae Quaestiones_,
+fol. 7 _a._ Of the former he says: ‘Hetrusci vero quanquam caeteris
+excellant, effugere tamen non possunt, quin et ipsi ridiculi sint, aut
+saltem quin se mutuo lacerent;’ as regards pronunciation, the Sienese,
+Lucchese, and Florentines are specially praised; but of the Florentines
+it is said: ‘Plus (jucunditatis) haberet si voces non ingurgitaret aut
+non ita palato lingua jungeretur.’
+
+[861] It is so felt to be by Dante, _De Vulgari Eloquio_.
+
+[862] Tuscan, it is true, was read and written long before this in
+Piedmont--but very little reading and writing was done at all.
+
+[863] The place, too, of the dialect in the usage of daily life was
+clearly understood. Gioviano Pontano ventured especially to warn the
+prince of Naples against the use of it (Jov. Pontan. _De Principe_). The
+last Bourbons were notoriously less scrupulous in this respect. For the
+way in which a Milanese Cardinal, who wished to retain his native
+dialect in Rome was ridiculed, see Bandello, parte ii. nov. 31.
+
+[864] Bald. Castiglione, _Il Cortigiano_, l. i. fol. 27 sqq. Throughout
+the dialogue we are able to gather the personal opinion of the writer.
+The opposition to Petrarch and Boccaccio is very curious (Dante is not
+once mentioned). We read that Politian, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and others
+were also Tuscans, and as worthy of imitation as they, ‘e forse di non
+minor dottrina e guidizio.’
+
+[865] There was a limit, however, to this. The satirists introduce bits
+of Spanish, and Folengo (under the pseudonym Limerno Pitocco, in his
+_Orlandino_) of French, but only by way of ridicule. It is an
+exceptional fact that a street in Milan, which at the time of the French
+(1500 to 1512, 1515 to 1522) was called Rue Belle, now bears the name
+Rugabella. The long Spanish rule has left almost no traces on the
+language, and but rarely the name of some governor in streets and public
+buildings. It was not till the eighteenth century that, together with
+French modes of thought, many French words and phrases found their way
+into Italian. The purism of our century is still busy in removing them.
+
+[866] Firenzuola, _Opera_, i. in the preface to the discourse on female
+beauty, and ii. in the _Ragionamenti_ which precede the novels.
+
+[867] Bandello, parte i. _Proemio_, and nov. 1 and 2. Another Lombard,
+the before-mentioned Teofilo Folengo in his _Orlandino_, treats the
+whole matter with ridicule.
+
+[868] Such a congress appears to have been held at Bologna at the end of
+1531 under the presidency of Bembo. See the letter of Claud. Tolomai, in
+Firenzuola, _Opere_, vol. ii. append. p. 231 sqq. But this was not so
+much a matter of purism, but rather the old quarrel between Lombards and
+Tuscans.
+
+[869] Luigi Cornaro complains about 1550 (at the beginning of his
+_Trattato della Vita Sobria_) that latterly Spanish ceremonies and
+compliments, Lutheranism and gluttony had been gaining ground in Italy.
+With moderation in respect to the entertainment offered to guests, the
+freedom and ease of social intercourse disappeared.
+
+[870] Vasari, xii. p. 9 and 11, _Vita di Rustici_. For the School for
+Scandal of needy artists, see xi. 216 sqq., _Vita d’Aristotile_.
+Macchiavelli’s _Capitoli_ for a circle of pleasure-seekers (_Opere
+minori_, p. 407) are a ludicrous caricature of these social statutes.
+The well-known description of the evening meeting of artists in Rome in
+Benvenuto Cellini, i. cap. 30 is incomparable.
+
+[871] Which must have been taken about 10 or 11 o’clock. See Bandello,
+parte ii. nov. 10.
+
+[872] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 309, calls the ladies ‘alquante
+ministre di Venere.’
+
+[873] Biographical information and some of her letters in A. v.
+Reumont’s _Briefe heiliger und gottesfürchtiger Italiener_. Freiburg
+(1877) p. 22 sqq.
+
+[874] Important passages: parte i. nov. 1, 3, 21, 30, 44; ii. 10, 34,
+55; iii. 17, &c.
+
+[875] Comp. _Lorenzo Magn. dei Med., Poesie_, i. 204 (the Symposium);
+291 (the Hawking-Party). Roscoe, _Vita di Lorenzo_, iii. p. 140, and
+append. 17 to 19.
+
+[876] The title ‘Simposio’ is inaccurate; it should be called, ‘The
+return from the Vintage.’ Lorenzo, in a parody of Dante’s Hell, gives an
+amusing account of his meeting in the Via Faenza all his good friends
+coming back from the country more or less tipsy. There is a most comical
+picture in the eighth chapter of Piovanno Arlotto, who sets out in
+search of his lost thirst, armed with dry meat, a herring, a piece of
+cheese, a sausage, and four sardines, ‘e tutte si cocevan nel sudore.’
+
+[877] On Cosimo Ruccellai as centre of this circle at the beginning of
+the sixteenth century, see Macchiavelli, _Arte della Guerra_, l. i.
+
+[878] _Il Cortigiano_, l. ii. fol. 53. See above pp. 121, 139.
+
+[879] Caelius Calcagninus (_Opere_, p. 514) describes the education of a
+young Italian of position about the year 1506, in the funeral speech on
+Antonio Costabili: first, ‘artes liberales et ingenuae disciplinae; tum
+adolescentia in iis exercitationibus acta, quæ ad rem militarem corpus
+et animum praemuniunt. Nunc gymnastae (i.e. the teachers of gymnastics)
+operam dare, luctari, excurrere, natare, equitare, venari, aucupari, ad
+palum et apud lanistam ictus inferre aut declinare, caesim punctimve
+hostem ferire, hastam vibrare, sub armis hyemen juxta et aestatem
+traducere, lanceis occursare, veri ac communis Martis simulacra
+imitari.’ Cardanus (_De prop. Vita_, c. 7) names among his gymnastic
+exercises the springing on to a wooden horse. Comp. Rabelais,
+_Gargantua_, i. 23, 24, for education in general, and 35 for gymnastic
+art. Even for the philologists, Marsilius Ficinus (_Epist._ iv. 171
+Galeotto) requires gymnastics, and Maffeo Vegio (_De Puerorum
+Educatione_, lib. iii. c. 5) for boys.
+
+[880] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 172 sqq. They are said to have arisen
+through the rowing out to the Lido, where the practice with the crossbow
+took place. The great regatta on the feast of St. Paul was prescribed by
+law from 1315 onwards. In early times there was much riding in Venice,
+before the streets were paved and the level wooden bridges turned into
+arched stone ones. Petrarch (_Epist. Seniles_, iv. 4) describes a
+brilliant tournament held in 1364 on the square of St. Mark, and the
+Doge Steno, about the year 1400, had as fine a stable as any prince in
+Italy. But riding in the neighbourhood of the square was prohibited as a
+rule after the year 1291. At a later time the Venetians naturally had
+the name of bad riders. See Ariosto, _Sat._ v. 208.
+
+[881] See on this subject: _Ueber den Einfluss der Renaissance auf die
+Entwickelung der Musik_, by Bernhard Loos, Basel, 1875, which, however,
+hardly offers for this period more than is given here. On Dante’s
+position with regard to music, and on the music to Petrarch’s and
+Boccaccio’s poems, see Trucchi, _Poesie Ital. inedite_, ii. p. 139. See
+also _Poesie Musicali dei Secoli XIV., XV. e XVI. tratte da vari codici
+per cura di Antonio Cappelli_, Bologna, 1868. For the theorists of the
+fourteenth century, Filippo Villani, _Vite_, p. 46, and Scardeonius, _De
+urb. Pativ. antiq._ in Graev. Thesaur, vi. iii. col. 297. A full account
+of the music at the court of Frederick of Urbino, is to be found in
+_Vespes. Fior._ p. 122. For the children’s chapel (ten children 6 to 8
+years old whom F. had educated in his house, and who were taught
+singing), at the court of Hercules I., see _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat.
+xxiv. col. 359. Out of Italy it was still hardly allowable for persons
+of consequence to be musicians; at the Flemish court of the young
+Charles V. a serious dispute took place on the subject. See Hubert.
+Leod. _De Vita Frid. II. Palat._ l. iii. Henry VIII. of England is an
+exception, and also the German Emperor Maximilian, who favoured music as
+well as all other arts. Joh. Cuspinian, in his life of the Emperor,
+calls him ‘Musices singularis amator’ and adds, ‘Quod vel hinc maxime
+patet, quod nostra aetate musicorum principes omnes, in omni genere
+musices omnibusque instrumentis in ejus curia, veluti in fertilissimo
+agro succreverant. Scriberem catalogum musicorum quos novi, nisi
+magnitudinem operis vererer.’ In consequence of this, music was much
+cultivated at the University of Vienna. The presence of the musical
+young Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan contributed to this result. See
+Aschbach, _Gesch. der Wiener Universität_ (1877), vol. ii. 79 sqq.
+
+A remarkable and comprehensive passage on music is to be found, where we
+should not expect it, in the Maccaroneide, Phant. xx. It is a comic
+description of a quartette, from which we see that Spanish and French
+songs were often sung, that music already had its enemies (1520), and
+that the chapel of Leo X. and the still earlier composer, Josquin des
+Près, whose principal works are mentioned, were the chief subjects of
+enthusiasm in the musical world of that time. The same writer (Folengo)
+displays in his _Orlandino_ (iii. 23 &c.), published under the name
+Limerno Pitocco, a musical fanaticism of a thoroughly modern sort.
+
+Barth. Facius, _De Vir. Ill._ p. 12, praises Leonardus Justinianus as a
+composer, who produced love-songs in his youth, and religious pieces in
+his old age. J. A. Campanus (_Epist._ i. 4, ed. Mencken) extols the
+musician Zacarus at Teramo and says of him, ‘Inventa pro oraculis
+habentur.’ Thomas of Forli ‘musicien du pape’ in _Burchardi Diarium_,
+ed. Leibnitz, pp. 62 sqq.
+
+[882] _Leonis Vita anonyma_, in Roscoe, ed. Bossi, xii. p. 171. May he
+not be the violinist in the Palazzo Sciarra? A certain Giovan Maria da
+Corneto is praised in the _Orlandino_ (Milan, 1584, iii. 27).
+
+[883] Lomazzo, _Trattato dell’Arte della Pittura_, &c. p. 347. The text,
+however, does not bear out the last statement, which perhaps rests on a
+misunderstanding of the final sentence, ‘Et insieme vi si possono
+gratiosamente rappresentar convitti et simili abbellimenti, che il
+pittore leggendo i poeti e gli historici può trovare copiosamente et
+anco essendo ingenioso et ricco d’invenzione può per se stesso
+imaginare?’ Speaking of the lyre, he mentions Lionardo da Vinci and
+Alfonso (Duke?) of Ferrara. The author includes in his work all the
+celebrities of the age, among them several Jews. The most complete list
+of the famous musicians of the sixteenth century, divided into an
+earlier and a later generation, is to be found in Rabelais, in the ‘New
+Prologue’ to the fourth book. A virtuoso, the blind Francesco of
+Florence (d. 1390), was crowned at Venice with a wreath of laurel by the
+King of Cyprus.
+
+[884] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 138. The same people naturally
+collected books of music. Sansovino’s words are, ‘è vera cosa che la
+musica ha la sua propria sede in questa città.’
+
+[885] The ‘Academia de’ Filarmonici’ at Verona is mentioned by Vasari,
+xi. 133, in the life of Sanmichele. Lorenzo Magnifico was in 1480
+already the centre of a School of Harmony consisting of fifteen members,
+among them the famous organist and organ-builder Squarcialupi. See
+Delecluze, _Florence et ses Vicissitudes_, vol. ii. p. 256, and Reumont,
+_L. d. M._ i. 177 sqq., ii. 471-473. Marsilio Ficino took part in these
+exercises and gives in his letters (_Epist._ i. 73, iii. 52, v. 15)
+remarkable rules as to music. Lorenzo seems to have transmitted his
+passion for music to his son Leo X. His eldest son Pietro was also
+musical.
+
+[886] _Il Cortigiano_, fol. 56, comp. fol. 41.
+
+[887] Quatro viole da arco’--a high and, except in Italy, rare
+achievement for amateurs.
+
+[888] Bandello, parte i. nov. 26. The song of Antonio Bologna in the
+House of Ippolita Bentivoglio. Comp. iii. 26. In these delicate days,
+this would be called a profanation of the holiest feelings. (Comp. the
+last song of Britannicus, Tacit. _Annal._ xiii. 15.) Recitations
+accompanied by the lute or ‘viola’ are not easy to distinguish, in the
+accounts left us, from singing properly so-called.
+
+[889] Scardeonius, l. c.
+
+[890] For biographies of women, see above, p. 147 and note 1. Comp. the
+excellent work of Attilio Hortis: _Le Donne Famose, descritte da
+Giovanni Boccacci_. Trieste, 1877.
+
+[891] E.g. in Castiglione, _Il Cortigiano_. In the same strain Francesco
+Barbaro, _De Re Uxoria_; Poggio, _An Seni sit Uxor ducenda_, in which
+much evil is said of women; the ridicule of Codro Urceo, especially his
+remarkable discourse, _An Uxor sit ducenda_ (_Opera_, 1506, fol.
+xviii.-xxi.), and the sarcasms of many of the epigrammatists. Marcellus
+Palingenius, (vol. i. 304) recommends celibacy in various passages, lib.
+iv. 275 sqq., v. 466-585; as a means of subduing disobedient wives he
+recommends to married people,
+
+                  ‘Tu verbera misce
+    Tergaque nunc duro resonent pulsata bacillo.’
+
+Italian writers on the woman’s side are Benedetto da Cesena, _De Honore
+Mulierum_, Venice, 1500, Dardano, _La defesa della Donna_, Ven. 1554,
+_Per Donne Romane_. ed. Manfredi, Bol. 1575. The defence of, or attack
+on, women, supported by instances of famous or infamous women down to
+the time of the writer, was also treated by the Jews, partly in Italian
+and partly in Hebrew; and in connection with an earlier Jewish
+literature dating from the thirteenth century, we may mention Abr.
+Sarteano and Eliah Gennazzano, the latter of whom defended the former
+against the attacks of Abigdor (for their MS. poems about year 1500,
+comp. Steinschneider, _Hebr. Bibliogr._ vi. 48).
+
+[892] Addressed to Annibale Maleguccio, sometimes numbered as the 5th or
+the 6th.
+
+[893] When the Hungarian Queen Beatrice, a Neapolitan princess, came to
+Vienna in 1485, she was addressed in Latin, and ‘arrexit diligentissime
+aures domina regina saepe, cum placide audierat, subridendo.’ Aschbach,
+o. c. vol. ii. 10 note.
+
+[894] The share taken by women in the plastic arts was insignificant.
+The learned Isotta Nogarola deserves a word of mention. On her
+intercourse with Guarino, see Rosmini, ii. 67 sqq.; with Pius II. see
+Voigt, iii. 515 sqq.
+
+[895] It is from this point of view that we must judge of the life of
+Allessandra de’ Bardi in Vespasiano Fiorentino (Mai, _Spicileg._ rom. i.
+p. 593 sqq.) The author, by the way, is a great ‘laudator temporis
+acti,’ and it must not be forgotten that nearly a hundred years before
+what he calls the good old time, Boccaccio wrote the _Decameron_. On the
+culture and education of the Italian women of that day, comp. the
+numerous facts quoted in Gregorovius, _Lucrezia Borgia_. There is a
+catalogue of the books possessed by Lucrezia in 1502 and 3 (Gregorovius,
+ed. 3, i. 310, ii. 167), which may be considered characteristic of the
+Italian women of the period. We there find a Breviary; a little book
+with the seven psalms and some prayers; a parchment book with gold
+miniature, called _De Coppelle alla Spagnola_; the printed letters of
+Catherine of Siena; the printed epistles and gospels in Italian; a
+religious book in Spanish; a MS. collection of Spanish odes, with the
+proverbs of Domenico Lopez; a printed book, called _Aquila Volante_; the
+_Mirror of Faith_ printed in Italian; an Italian printed book called
+_The Supplement of Chronicles_; a printed Dante, with commentary; an
+Italian book on philosophy; the legends of the saints in Italian; an old
+book _De Ventura_; a Donatus; a Life of Christ in Spanish; a MS.
+Petrarch, on duodecimo parchment. A second catalogue of the year 1516
+contains no secular books whatever.
+
+[896] Ant. Galateo, _Epist. 3_, to the young Bona Sforza, the future
+wife of Sigismund of Poland: ‘Incipe aliquid de viro sapere, quoniam ad
+imperandum viris nata es.... Ita fac, ut sapientibus viris placeas, ut
+te prudentes et graves viri admirentur, et vulgi et muliercularum studia
+et judicia despicias,’ &c. A remarkable letter in other respects also
+(Mai. _Spicileg. Rom._ viii. p. 532).
+
+[897] She is so called in the _Chron. Venetum_, in Muratori, xxiv. col.
+121 sqq. (in the account of her heroic defence, _ibid._ col. 121 she is
+called a virago). Comp. Infessura in Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1981,
+and _Arch. Stor._ append. ii. p. 250, and Gregorovius, vii. 437 note 1.
+
+[898] Contemporary historians speak of her more than womanly intellect
+and eloquence. Comp. Ranke’s _Filippo Strozzi_, in _Historisch-biographische
+Studien_, p. 371 note 2.
+
+[899] And rightly so, sometimes. How ladies should behave while such
+tales are telling, we learn from _Cortigiano_, l. iii. fol. 107. That
+the ladies who were present at his dialogues must have known how to
+conduct themselves in case of need, is shown by the strong passage, l.
+ii. fol. 100. What is said of the ‘Donna di Palazzo’--the counterpart of
+the Cortigiano--that she should neither avoid frivolous company nor use
+unbecoming language, is not decisive, since she was far more the servant
+of the princess than the Cortigiano of the prince. See Bandello, i. nov.
+44. Bianca d’Este tells the terrible love-story of her ancestor, Niccolò
+of Ferrara, and Parisina. The tales put into the mouths of the women in
+the _Decameron_ may also serve as instances of this indelicacy. For
+Bandello, see above, p. 145; and Landau, _Beitr. z. Gesch. der Ital.
+Nov._ Vienna, 1875, p. 102. note 32.
+
+[900] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 152 sqq. How highly the travelled
+Italians valued the freer intercourse with girls in England and the
+Netherlands is shown by Bandello, ii. nov. 44, and iv. nov. 27. For the
+Venetian women and the Italian women generally, see the work of Yriarte,
+pp. 50 sqq.
+
+[901] Paul. Jov. _De Rom. Piscibus_, cap. 5; Bandello, parte iii. nov.
+42. Aretino, in the _Ragionamento del Zoppino_, p. 327, says of a
+courtesan: ‘She knows by heart all Petrarch and Boccaccio, and many
+beautiful verses of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and a thousand other authors.’
+
+[902] Bandello, ii. 51, iv. 16.
+
+[903] Bandello, iv. 8.
+
+[904] For a characteristic instance of this, see Giraldi, _Hecatomithi_,
+vi nov. 7.
+
+[905] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1997. The public
+women only, not the kept women, are meant. The number, compared with the
+population of Rome, is certainly enormous, perhaps owing to some
+clerical error. According to Giraldi, vi. 7, Venice was exceptionally
+rich ‘di quella sorte di donne che cortigiane son dette;’ see also the
+epigram of Pasquinus (Gregor. viii. 279, note 2); but Rome did not stand
+behind Venice (Giraldi, _Introduz._ nov. 2). Comp. the notice of the
+‘meretrices’ in Rome (1480) who met in a church and were robbed of their
+jewels and ornaments, Murat. xxii. 342 sqq., and the account in
+_Burchardi, Diarium_, ed. Leibnitz, pp. 75-77, &c. Landi (_Commentario_,
+fol. 76) mentions Rome, Naples, and Venice as the chief seats of the
+‘cortigiane;’ _ibid._ 286, the fame of the women of Chiavenna is to be
+understood ironically. The _Quaestiones Forcianae_, fol. 9, of the same
+author give most interesting information on love and love’s delights,
+and the style and position of women in the different cities of Italy. On
+the other hand, Egnatius (_De Exemp. III. Vir._ Ven. fol. 212 _b_ sqq.)
+praises the chastity of the Venetian women, and says that the
+prostitutes come every year from Germany. Corn. Agr. _de van.
+Scientiae_, cap. 63 (_Opp._ ed. Lugd. ii. 158) says: ‘Vidi ego nuper
+atque legi sub titulo “Cortosanæ” Italica lingua editum et Venetiis
+typis excusum de arte meretricia dialogum, utriusque Veneris omnium
+flagitiosissimum et dignissimum, qui ipse cum autore suo ardeat.’ Ambr.
+Traversari (_Epist._ viii. 2 sqq.) calls the beloved of Niccolò Niccoli
+‘foemina fidelissima.’ In the _Lettere dei Principi_, i. 108 (report of
+Negro, Sept. 1, 1522) the ‘donne Greche’ are described as ‘fonte di ogni
+cortesia et amorevolezza.’ A great authority, esp. for Siena, is the
+_Hermaphroditus_ of Panormitanus. The enumeration of the ‘lenae
+lupaeque’ in Florence (ii. 37) is hardly fictitious; the line there
+occurs:
+
+    ‘Annaque _Theutonico_ tibi si dabit obvia cantu.’
+
+
+[906] Were these wandering knights really married?
+
+[907] _Trattato del Governo della Famiglia._ See above, p. 132, note 1.
+Pandolfini died in 1446, L. B. Alberti, by whom the work was really
+written, in 1472.
+
+[908] A thorough history of ‘flogging’ among the Germanic and Latin
+races treated with some psychological power, would be worth volumes of
+dispatches and negotiations. (A modest beginning has been made by
+Lichtenberg, _Vermischte Schriften_, v. 276-283.) When, and through what
+influence, did flogging become a daily practice in the German household?
+Not till after Walther sang: ‘Nieman kan mit gerten kindes zuht
+beherten.’
+
+In Italy beating ceased early; Maffeo Vegio (d. 1458) recommends (_De
+Educ. Liber._ lib. i. c. 19) moderation in flogging, but adds:
+‘Caedendos magis esse filios quam pestilentissmis blanditiis laetandos.’
+At a later time a child of seven was no longer beaten. The little Roland
+(_Orlandino_, cap. vii. str. 42) lays down the principle:
+
+    ‘Sol gli asini si ponno bastonare,
+     Se una tal bestia fussi, patirei.’
+
+The German humanists of the Renaissance, like Rudolf Agricola and
+Erasmus, speak decisively against flogging, which the elder
+schoolmasters regarded as an indispensable means of education. In the
+biographies of the _Fahrenden Schüler_ at the close of the fifteenth
+century (_Platter’s Lebensbeschriebung_, ed. Fechter, Basel, 1840;
+_Butzbach’s Wanderbuch_, ed. Becher, Regensburg, 1869) there are gross
+examples of the corporal punishment of the time.
+
+[909] But the taste was not universal. J. A. Campanus (_Epist._ iv. 4)
+writes vigorously against country life. He admits: ‘Ego si rusticus
+natus non essem, facile tangerer voluptate;’ but since he was born a
+peasant, ‘quod tibi deliciae, mihi satietas est.’
+
+[910] Giovanni Villani, xi. 93, our principal authority for the building
+of villas before the middle of the fourteenth century. The villas were
+more beautiful than the town houses, and great exertions were made by
+the Florentines to have them so, ‘onde erano tenuti matti.’
+
+[911] _Trattato del Governo della Famiglia_ (Torino, 1829), pp. 84, 88.
+
+[912] See above, part iv. chap. 2. Petrarch was called ‘Silvanus,’ on
+the ground of his dislike of the town and love of the country. _Epp.
+Fam._ ed. Fracass. ii. 87 sqq. Guarino’s description of a villa to
+Gianbattista Candrata, in Rosmini, ii. 13 sqq., 157 sqq. Poggio, in a
+letter to Facius (_De Vir. Ill._ p. 106): ‘Sum enim deditior senectutis
+gratia rei rusticæ quam antea.’ See also Poggio, _Opp._ (1513), p 112
+sqq.; and Shepherd-Tonelli, i. 255 and 261. Similarly Maffeo Vegio (_De
+Lib. Educ._ vi. 4), and B. Platina at the beginning of his dialogue, ‘De
+Vera Nobilitate.’ Politian’s descriptions of the country-houses of the
+Medici in Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 73, 87. For the Farnesina, see
+Gregorovius, viii. 114.
+
+[913] Comp. J. Burckhardt, _Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien_
+(Stuttg. 1868), pp. 320-332.
+
+[914] Compare pp. 47 sqq., where the magnificence of the festivals is
+shown to have been a hindrance to the higher development of the drama.
+
+[915] In comparison with the cities of the North.
+
+[916] The procession at the feast of Corpus Christi was not established
+at Venice until 1407; Cecchetti, _Venezia e la Corte di Roma_, i. 108.
+
+[917] The festivities which took place when Visconti was made Duke of
+Milan, 1395 (Corio, fol. 274), had, with all their splendour, something
+of mediæval coarseness about them, and the dramatic element was wholly
+wanting. Notice, too, the relative insignificance of the processions in
+Pavia during the fourteenth century (_Anonymus de Laudibus Papiae_, in
+Murat. xi. col. 34 sqq.).
+
+[918] Gio. Villani, viii. 70.
+
+[919] See e.g. Infessura, in Eccard, _Scrippt._ ii. col. 1896; Corio,
+fols. 417, 421.
+
+[920] The dialogue in the Mysteries was chiefly in octaves, the
+monologue in ‘terzine.’ For the Mysteries, see J. L. Klein, _Geschichte
+der Ital. Dramas_, i. 153 sqq.
+
+[921] We have no need to refer to the realism of the schoolmen for proof
+of this. About the year 970 Bishop Wibold of Cambray recommended to his
+clergy, instead of dice, a sort of spiritual bézique, with fifty-six
+abstract names represented by as many combinations of cards. ‘Gesta
+Episcopori Cameracens.’ in _Mon. Germ._ SS. vii. p. 433.
+
+[922] E.g. when he found pictures on metaphors. At the gate of Purgatory
+the central broken step signifies contrition of heart (_Purg._ ix. 97),
+though the slab through being broken loses its value as a step. And
+again (_Purg._ xviii. 94), the idle in this world have to show their
+penitence by running in the other, though running could be a symbol of
+flight.
+
+[923] _Inferno_, ix. 61; _Purgat._ viii. 19.
+
+[924] _Poesie Satiriche_, ed. Milan, p. 70 sqq. Dating from the end of
+the fourteenth century.
+
+[925] The latter e.g. in the _Venatio_ of the Cardinal Adriano da
+Corneto (Strasburg, 1512; often printed). Ascanio Sforza is there
+supposed to find consolation for the fall of his house in the pleasures
+of the chase. See above, p. 261.
+
+[926] More properly 1454. See Olivier de la Marche, _Mémoires_, chap.
+29.
+
+[927] For other French festivals, see e.g. Juvénal des Ursins (Paris,
+1614), ad. a. 1389 (entrance of Queen Isabella); John de Troyes, ad. a.
+1461) (often printed) (entrance of Louis XI.). Here, too, we meet with
+living statues, machines for raising bodies, and so forth; but the whole
+is confused and disconnected, and the allegories are mostly
+unintelligible. The festivals at Lisbon in 1452, held at the departure
+of the Infanta Eleonora, the bride of the Emperor Frederick III., lasted
+several days and were remarkable for their magnificence. See
+Freher-Struve, _Rer. German. Script._ ii. fol. 51--the report of Nic.
+Lauckmann.
+
+[928] A great advantage for those poets and artists who knew how to use
+it.
+
+[929] Comp. Bartol. Gambia, _Notizie intorno alle Opere di Feo Belcari_,
+Milano, 1808; and especially the introduction to the work, _Le
+Rappresentazioni di Feo Belcari ed altre di lui Poesie_, Firenze, 1833.
+As a parallel, see the introduction of the bibliophile Jacob to his
+edition of Pathelin (Paris, 1859).
+
+[930] It is true that a Mystery at Siena on the subject of the Massacre
+of the Innocents closed with a scene in which the disconsolate mothers
+seized one another by the hair. Della Valle, _Lettere Sanesi_, iii. p.
+53. It was one of the chief aims of Feo Belcari (d. 1484), of whom we
+have spoken, to free the Mysteries from these monstrosities.
+
+[931] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 72.
+
+[932] Vasari, iii. 232 sqq.: _Vita di Brunellesco_; v. 36 sqq.: _Vita
+del Cecca_. Comp. v. 32, _Vita di Don Bartolommeo_.
+
+[933] _Arch. Stor._ append. ii. p. 310. The Mystery of the Annunciation
+at Ferrara, on the occasion of the wedding of Alfonso, with fireworks
+and flying apparatus. For an account of the representation of Susanna,
+John the Baptist, and of a legend, at the house of the Cardinal Riario,
+see Corio, fol. 417. For the Mystery of Constantine the Great in the
+Papal Palace at the Carnival, 1484, see Jac. Volaterran. (Murat. xxiii.
+col. 194). The chief actor was a Genoese born and educated at
+Constantinople.
+
+[934] Graziani, _Cronaca di Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi. 1. p. 598. At the
+Crucifixion, a figure was kept ready and put in the place of the actor.
+
+[935] For this, see Graziani, l. c. and _Pii II. Comment._ l. viii. pp.
+383, 386. The poetry of the fifteenth century sometimes shows the same
+coarseness. A ‘canzone’ of Andrea da Basso traces in detail the
+corruption of the corpse of a hard-hearted fair one. In a monkish drama
+of the twelfth century King Herod was put on the stage with the worms
+eating him (_Carmina Burana_, pp. 80 sqq.). Many of the German dramas of
+the seventeenth century offer parallel instances.
+
+[936] Allegretto, _Diarii Sanesi_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 767.
+
+[937] Matarazzo, _Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 36. The monk had previously
+undertaken a voyage to Rome to make the necessary studies for the
+festival.
+
+[938] Extracts from the ‘Vergier d’honneur,’ in Roscoe, _Leone X._, ed.
+Bossi, i. p. 220, and iii. p. 263.
+
+[939] _Pii II. Comment._ l. viii. pp. 382 sqq. Another gorgeous
+celebration of the ‘Corpus Domini’ is mentioned by Bursellis, _Annal.
+Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 911, for the year 1492. The
+representations were from the Old and New Testaments.
+
+[940] On such occasions we read, ‘Nulla di muro si potea vedere.’
+
+[941] The same is true of many such descriptions.
+
+[942] Five kings with an armed retinue, and a savage who fought with a
+(tamed?) lion; the latter, perhaps, with an allusion to the name of the
+Pope--Sylvius.
+
+[943] Instances under Sixtus IV., Jac. Volaterr. in Murat. xxiii. col.
+135 (bombardorum et sclopulorum crepitus), 139. At the accession of
+Alexander VI. there were great salvos of artillery. Fireworks, a
+beautiful invention due to Italy, belong, like festive decorations
+generally, rather to the history of art than to our present work. So,
+too, the brilliant illuminations we read of in connexion with many
+festivals, and the hunting-trophies and table-ornaments. (See p. 319.
+The elevation of Julius II. to the Papal throne was celebrated at Venice
+by three days’ illumination. Brosch, _Julius II._ p. 325, note 17.)
+
+[944] Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 772. See, besides, col. 770, for
+the reception of Pius II. in 1459. A paradise, or choir of angels, was
+represented, out of which came an angel and sang to the Pope, ‘in modo
+che il Papa si commosse a lagrime per gran tenerezza da si dolci
+parole.’
+
+[945] See the authorities quoted in Favre, _Mélanges d’Hist. Lit._ i.
+138; Corio, fol. 417 sqq. The _menu_ fills almost two closely printed
+pages. ‘Among other dishes a mountain was brought in, out of which
+stepped a living man, with signs of astonishment to find himself amid
+this festive splendour; he repeated some verses and then disappeared’
+(Gregorovius, vii. 241). Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1896;
+_Strozzii Poetae_, fol. 193 sqq. A word or two may here be added on
+eating and drinking. Leon. Aretino (_Epist._ lib. iii. ep. 18) complains
+that he had to spend so much for his wedding feast, garments, and so
+forth, that on the same day he had concluded a ‘matrimonium’ and
+squandered a ‘patrimonium.’ Ermolao Barbaro describes, in a letter to
+Pietro Cara, the bill of fare at a wedding-feast at Trivulzio’s (_Angeli
+Politiani Epist._ lib. iii.). The list of meats and drinks in the
+Appendix to Landi’s _Commentario_ (above) is of special interest. Landi
+speaks of the great trouble he had taken over it, collecting it from
+five hundred writers. The passage is too long to be quoted (we there
+read: ‘Li antropofagi furono i primi che mangiassero carne humana’).
+Poggio (_Opera_, 1513, fol. 14 sqq.) discusses the question’: ‘Uter
+alteri gratias debeat pro convivio impenso, isne qui vocatus est ad
+convivium an qui vocavit?’ Platina wrote a treatise ‘De Arte
+Coquinaria,’ said to have been printed several times, and quoted under
+various titles, but which, according to his own account (_Dissert.
+Vossiane_, i. 253 sqq.), contains more warnings against excess than
+instructions on the art in question.
+
+[946] Vasari, ix. p. 37, _Vita di Puntormo_, tells how a child, during
+such a festival at Florence in the year 1513, died from the effects of
+the exertion--or shall we say, of the gilding? The poor boy had to
+represent the ‘golden age’!
+
+[947] Phil. Beroaldi, _Nuptiae Bentivolorum_, in the _Orationes Ph. B._
+Paris, 1492, c. 3 sqq. The description of the other festivities at this
+wedding is very remarkable.
+
+[948] M. Anton. Sabellici, _Epist._ l. iii. fol. 17.
+
+[949] Amoretti, _Memorie, &c. su. Lionardo da Vinci_, pp. 38 sqq.
+
+[950] To what extent astrology influenced even the festivals of this
+century is shown by the introduction of the planets (not described with
+sufficient clearness) at the reception of the ducal brides at Ferrara.
+_Diario Ferrarese_, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 248, ad. a. 1473; col. 282,
+ad. a. 1491. So, too, at Mantua, _Arch. Stor._ append. ii. p. 233.
+
+[951] _Annal. Estens._ in Murat. xx. col. 468 sqq. The description is
+unclear and printed from an incorrect transcript.
+
+[952] We read that the ropes of the machine used for this purpose were
+made to imitate garlands.
+
+[953] Strictly the ship of Isis, which entered the water on the 5th of
+March, as a symbol that navigation was reopened. For analogies in the
+German religion, see Jac. Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_.
+
+[954] _Purgatorio_, xxix. 43 to the end, and xxx. at the beginning.
+According to v. 115, the chariot is more splendid than the triumphal
+chariot of Scipio, of Augustus, and even of the Sun-God.
+
+[955] Ranke, _Gesch. der Roman. und German. Völker_, ed. 2, p. 95. P.
+Villari, _Savonarola_.
+
+[956] Fazio degli Uberti, _Dittamondo_ (lib. ii. cap. 3), treats
+specially ‘del modo del triumphare.’
+
+[957] Corio, fol. 401: ‘dicendo tali cose essere superstitioni de’ Re.’
+Comp. Cagnola, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 127, who says that the duke
+declined from modesty.
+
+[958] See above, vol. i. p. 315 sqq.; comp. i. p. 15, note 1. ‘Triumphus
+Alfonsi,’ as appendix to the _Dicta et Facta_ of Panormita, ed. 1538,
+pp. 129-139, 256 sqq. A dislike to excessive display on such occasions
+was shown by the gallant Comneni. Comp. Cinnamus, i. 5, vi. 1.
+
+[959] The position assigned to Fortune is characteristic of the naïveté
+of the Renaissance. At the entrance of Massimiliano Sforza into Milan
+(1512), she stood as the chief figure of a triumphal arch _above_ Fama,
+Speranza, Audacia, and Penitenza, all represented by living persons.
+Comp. Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 305.
+
+[960] The entrance of Borso of Este into Reggio, described above (p.
+417), shows the impression which Alfonso’s triumph had made in all
+Italy,. On the entrance of Cæsar Borgia into Rome in 1500, see
+Gregorovius, vii. 439.
+
+[961] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. 260 sqq. The author says expressly, ‘le
+quali cose da li triumfanti Romani se soliano anticamente usare.’
+
+[962] Her three ‘capitoli’ in terzines, _Anecd. Litt._ iv. 461 sqq.
+
+[963] Old paintings of similar scenes are by no means rare, and no doubt
+often represent masquerades actually performed. The wealthy classes soon
+became accustomed to drive in chariots at every public solemnity. We
+read that Annibale Bentivoglio, eldest son of the ruler of Bologna,
+returned to the palace after presiding as umpire at the regular military
+exercises, ‘cum triumpho more romano.’ Bursellis, l. c. col. 909. ad. a.
+1490.
+
+[964] The remarkable funeral of Malatesta Baglione, poisoned at Bologna
+in 1437 (Graziani, _Arch. Stor._ xvi. i. p. 413), reminds us of the
+splendour of an Etruscan funeral. The knights in mourning, however, and
+other features of the ceremony, were in accordance with the customs of
+the nobility throughout Europe. See e.g. the funeral of Bertrand
+Duguesclin, in Juvénal des Ursins, ad. a. 1389. See also Graziani, l. c.
+p. 360.
+
+[965] Vasari, ix. p. 218, _Vita di Granacci_. On the triumphs and
+processions in Florence, see Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 433.
+
+[966] Mich. Cannesius, _Vita Pauli II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 118 sqq.
+
+[967] Tommasi, _Vita di Caesare Borgia_, p. 251.
+
+[968] Vasari ix. p. 34 sqq., _Vita di Puntormo_. A most important
+passage of its kind.
+
+[969] Vasari, viii. p. 264, _Vita di Andrea del Sarto_.
+
+[970] Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 783. It was reckoned a bad omen
+that one of the wheels broke.
+
+[971] _M. Anton. Sabellici Epist._ l. iii. letter to M. Anton.
+Barbavarus. He says: ‘Vetus est mos civitatis in illustrium hospitum
+adventu eam navim auro et purpura insternere.’
+
+[972] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 151 sqq. The names of these
+corporations were: Pavoni, Accessi, Eterni, Reali, Sempiterni. The
+academies probably had their origin in these guilds.
+
+[973] Probably in 1495. Comp. _M. Anton. Sabellici Epist._ l. v. fol.
+28; last letter to M. Ant. Barbavarus.
+
+[974] ‘Terræ globum socialibus signis circunquaque figuratum,’ and
+‘quinis pegmatibus, quorum singula foederatorum regum, principumque suas
+habuere effigies et cum his ministros signaque in auro affabre caelata.’
+
+[975] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1093, 2000; Mich.
+Cannesius, _Vita Pauli II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1012; Platina.
+_Vitae Pontiff._ p. 318; Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xiii. col. 163, 194;
+Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, sub Juliano Cæsarino. Elsewhere, too, there were
+races for women, _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 384: comp.
+Gregorovius, vi. 690 sqq., vii. 219, 616 sqq.
+
+[976] Once under Alexander VI. from October till Lent. See Tommasi, l.
+c. p. 322.
+
+[977] Baluz. _Miscell._ iv. 517 (comp. Gregorovius, vii. 288 sqq.).
+
+[978] _Pii II. Comment._ l. iv. p. 211.
+
+[979] Nantiporto, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1080. They wished to thank him
+for a peace which he had concluded, but found the gates of the palace
+closed and troops posted in all the open places.
+
+[980] ‘Tutti i trionfi, carri, mascherate, o canti carnascialeschi.’
+Cosmopoli, 1750. Macchiavelli, _Opere Minori_, p. 505; Vasari, vii. p.
+115 sqq. _Vita di Piero di Cosimo_, to whom a chief part in the
+development of these festivities is ascribed. Comp. B. Loos (above, p.
+154, note 1) p. 12 sqq. and Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 443 sqq., where the
+authorities are collected which show that the Carnival was soon
+restrained. Comp. ibid ii. p. 24.
+
+[981] _Discorsi_, l. i. c. 12. Also c. 55: Italy is more corrupt than
+all other countries; then come the French and Spaniards.
+
+[982] Paul. Jov. _Viri Illustres_: Jo. Gal. Vicecomes. Comp. p. 12 sqq.
+and notes.
+
+[983] On the part filled by the sense of honour in the modern world, see
+Prévost-Paradol, _La France Nouvelle_, liv. iii. chap. 2.
+
+[984] Compare what Mr. Darwin says of blushing in the ‘Expression of the
+Emotions,’ and of the relations between shame and conscience.
+
+[985] Franc. Guicciardini, _Ricordi Politici e Civili_, n. 118 (_Opere
+inedite_, vol. i.).
+
+[986] His closest counterpart is Merlinus Coccajus (Teofilo Folengo),
+whose _Opus Maccaronicorum_ Rabelais certainly knew, and quotes more
+than once (_Pantagruel_, l. ii. ch. 1. and ch. 7, at the end). It is
+possible that Merlinus Coccajus may have given the impulse which
+resulted in Pantagruel and Gargantua.
+
+[987] _Gargantua_, l. i. cap. 57.
+
+[988] That is, well-born in the higher sense of the word, since
+Rabelais, son of the innkeeper of Chinon, has here no motive for
+assigning any special privilege to the nobility. The preaching of the
+Gospel, which is spoken of in the inscription at the entrance to the
+monastery, would fit in badly with the rest of the life of the inmates;
+it must be understood in a negative sense, as implying defiance of the
+Roman Church.
+
+[989] See extracts from his diary in Delécluze, _Florence et ses
+Vicissitudes_, vol. 2.
+
+[990] Infessura, ap. Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1992. On F. C. see
+above, p. 108.
+
+[991] This opinion of Stendhal (_La Chartreuse de Parme_, ed. Delahays,
+p. 335) seems to me to rest on profound psychological observation.
+
+[992] Graziani, _Cronaca di Perugia_, for the year 1437 (_Arch. Stor._
+xvi. i. p. 415).
+
+[993] Giraldi, _Hecatommithi_, i. nov. 7.
+
+[994] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1892, for the year 1464.
+
+[995] Allegretto, _Diari Sanisi_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 837. Allegretto
+was himself present when the oath was taken, and had no doubt of its
+efficacy.
+
+[996] Those who leave vengeance to God are ridiculed by Pulci,
+_Morgante_, canto xxi. str. 83 sqq., 104 sqq.
+
+[997] Guicciardini, _Ricordi_, l. c. n. 74.
+
+[998] Thus Cardanus (_De Propria Vita_, cap. 13) describes himself as
+very revengeful, but also as ‘verax, memor beneficiorum, amans
+justitiæ.’
+
+[999] It is true that when the Spanish rule was fully established the
+population fell off to a certain extent. Had this fact been due to the
+demoralisation of the people, it would have appeared much earlier.
+
+[1000] Giraldi, _Hecatommithi_, iii. nov. 2. In the same strain,
+_Cortigiano_, l. iv. fol. 180.
+
+[1001] A shocking instance of vengeance taken by a brother at Perugia in
+the year 1455, is to be found in the chronicle of Graziani (_Arch.
+Stor._ xvi. p. 629). The brother forces the gallant to tear out the
+sister’s eyes, and then beats him from the place. It is true that the
+family was a branch of the Oddi, and the lover only a cordwainer.
+
+[1002] Bandello, parte i. nov. 9 and 26. Sometimes the wife’s confessor
+is bribed by the husband and betrays the adultery.
+
+[1003] See above p. 394, and note 1.
+
+[1004] As instance, Bandello, part i. nov. 4.
+
+[1005] ‘Piaccia al Signore Iddio che non si ritrovi,’ say the women in
+Giraldi (iii. nov. 10), when they are told that the deed may cost the
+murderer his head.
+
+[1006] This is the case, for example, with Gioviano Pontano (_De
+Fortitudine_, l. ii.). His heroic Ascolans, who spend their last night
+in singing and dancing, the Abruzzian mother, who cheers up her son on
+his way to the gallows, &c., belong probably to brigand families, but he
+forgets to say so.
+
+[1007] _Diarium Parmense_, in Murat. xxii. col. 330 to 349 _passim_. The
+sonnet, col. 340.
+
+[1008] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 312. We are reminded of
+the gang led by a priest, which for some time before the year 1837
+infested western Lombardy.
+
+[1009] Massuccio, nov. 29. As a matter of course, the man has luck in
+his amours.
+
+[1010] If he appeared as a corsair in the war between the two lines of
+Anjou for the possession of Naples, he may have done so as a political
+partisan, and this, according to the notions of the time, implied no
+dishonour. The Archbishop Paolo Fregoso of Genoa, in the second half of
+the fifteenth century probably allowed himself quite as much freedom, or
+more. Contemporaries and later writers, e.g. Aretino and Poggio, record
+much worse things of John. Gregorovius, vi. p. 600.
+
+[1011] Poggio, _Facetiae_, fol. 164. Anyone familiar with Naples at the
+present time, may have heard things as comical, though bearing on other
+sides of human life.
+
+[1012] _Jovian. Pontani Antonius_: ‘Nec est quod Neapoli quam hominis
+vita minoris vendatur.’ It is true he thinks it was not so under the
+House of Anjou, ‘sicam ab iis (the Aragonese) accepimus.’ The state of
+things about the year 1534 is described by Benvenuto Cellini, i. 70.
+
+[1013] Absolute proof of this cannot be given, but few murders are
+recorded, and the imagination of the Florentine writers at the best
+period is not filled with the suspicion of them.
+
+[1014] See on this point the report of Fedeli, in Alberi, _Relazioni
+Serie_, ii. vol. i. pp. 353 sqq.
+
+[1015] M. Brosch (_Hist. Zeitschr._ bd. 27, p. 295 sqq.) has collected
+from the Venetian archives five proposals, approved by the council, to
+poison the Sultan (1471-1504), as well as evidence of the plan to murder
+Charles VIII. (1495) and of the order given to the Proveditor at Faenza
+to have Cæsar Borgia put to death (1504).
+
+[1016] Dr. Geiger adds several conjectural statements and references on
+this subject. It may be remarked that the suspicion of poisoning, which
+I believe to be now generally unfounded, is often expressed in certain
+parts of Italy with regard to any death not at once to be accounted
+for.--[The Translator.]
+
+[1017] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptor._ ii. col. 1956.
+
+[1018] _Chron. Venetum_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 131. In northern countries
+still more wonderful things were believed as to the art of poisoning in
+Italy. See _Juvénal des Ursins_, ad. ann. 1382 (ed. Buchon, p. 336), for
+the lancet of the poisoner, whom Charles of Durazzo took into his
+service; whoever looked at it steadily, died.
+
+[1019] Petr. Crinitus, _De Honesta Disciplina_, l. xviii. cap. 9.
+
+[1020] _Pii II. Comment._ l. xi. p. 562. Joh. Ant. Campanus, _Vita Pii
+II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 988.
+
+[1021] Vasari, ix. 82, _Vita di Rosso_. In the case of unhappy marriages
+it is hard to say whether there were more real or imaginary instances of
+poisoning. Comp. Bandello, ii. nov. 5 and 54: ii. nov. 40 is more
+serious. In one and the same city of Western Lombardy, the name of which
+is not given, lived two poisoners. A husband, wishing to convince
+himself of the genuineness of his wife’s despair, made her drink what
+she believed to be poison, but which was really coloured water,
+whereupon they were reconciled. In the family of Cardanus alone four
+cases of poisoning occurred (_De Propria Vita_, cap. 30, 50). Even at a
+banquet given at the coronation of a pope each cardinal brought his own
+cupbearer with him, and his own wine, ‘probably because they knew from
+experience that otherwise they would run the risk of being poisoned.’
+And this usage was general at Rome, and practised ‘sine injuria
+invitantis!’ Blas Ortiz, _Itinerar. Hadriani VI._ ap. Baluz. Miscell.
+ed. Mansi, i. 380.
+
+[1022] For the magic arts used against Leonello of Ferrara, see _Diario
+Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 194, ad a. 1445. When the sentence was
+read in the public square to the author of them, a certain Benato, a man
+in other respects of bad character, a noise was heard in the air and the
+earth shook, so that many people fled away or fell to the ground; this
+happened because Benato ‘havea chiamato e scongiurato il diavolo.’ What
+Guicciardini (l. i.) says of the wicked arts practised by Ludovico Moro
+against his nephew Giangaleazzo, rests on his own responsibility. On
+magic, see below, cap. 4.
+
+[1023] Ezzelino da Romano might be put first, were it not that he rather
+acted under the influence of ambitious motives and astrological
+delusions.
+
+[1024] _Giornali Napoletani_, in Murat. xxi. col. 1092 ad a. 1425.
+According to the narrative this deed seems to have been committed out of
+mere pleasure in cruelty. Br., it is true, believed neither in God nor
+in the saints, and despised and neglected all the precepts and
+ceremonies of the Church.
+
+[1025] _Pii II. Comment._ l. vii. p. 338.
+
+[1026] Jovian. Pontan. _De Immanitate_, cap. 17, where he relates how
+Malatesta got his own daughter with child--and so forth.
+
+[1027] Varchi, _Storie Fiorentine_, at the end. (When the work is
+published without expurgations, as in the Milanese edition.)
+
+[1028] On which point feeling differs according to the place and the
+people. The Renaissance prevailed in times and cities where the tendency
+was to enjoy life heartily. The general darkening of the spirits of
+thoughtful men did not begin to show itself till the time of the foreign
+supremacy in the sixteenth century.
+
+[1029] What is termed the spirit of the Counter-Reformation was
+developed in Spain some time before the Reformation itself, chiefly
+through the sharp surveillance and partial reorganisation of the Church
+under Ferdinand and Isabella. The principal authority on this subject is
+Gomez, _Life of Cardinal Ximenes_, in Rob. Belus, _Rer. Hispan.
+Scriptores_, 3 vols. 1581.
+
+[1030] It is to be noticed that the novelists and satirists scarcely
+ever mention the bishops, although they might, under altered names, have
+attacked them like the rest. They do so, however, e.g. in Bandello, ii.
+nov. 45; yet in ii. 40, he describes a virtuous bishop. Gioviano Pontano
+in the _Charon_ introduces the ghost of a luxurious bishop with a
+‘duck’s walk.’
+
+[1031] Foscolo, _Discorso sul testo del Decamerone_, ‘Ma dei preti in
+dignità niuno poteva far motto senza pericolo; onde ogni frate fu l’irco
+delle iniquita d’Israele,’ &c. Timotheus Maffeus dedicates a book
+against the monks to Pope Nicholas V.; Facius, _De Vir. Ill._ p. 24.
+There are specially strong passages against the monks and clergy in the
+work of Palingenius already mentioned iv. 289, v. 184 sqq., 586 sqq.
+
+[1032] Bandello prefaces ii. nov. i. with the statement that the vice of
+avarice was more discreditable to priests than to any other class of
+men, since they had no families to provide for. On this ground he
+justifies the disgraceful attack made on a parsonage by two soldiers or
+brigands at the orders of a young gentleman, on which occasion a sheep
+was stolen from the stingy and gouty old priest. A single story of this
+kind illustrates the ideas in which men lived and acted better than all
+the dissertations in the world.
+
+[1033] Giov. Villani, iii. 29, says this clearly a century later.
+
+[1034] _L’Ordine._ Probably the tablet with the inscription I. H. S. is
+meant.
+
+[1035] He adds, ‘and in the _seggi_,’ i.e. the clubs into which the
+Neapolitan nobility was divided. The rivalry of the two orders is often
+ridiculed, e.g. Bandello, iii. nov. 14.
+
+[1036] Nov. 6, ed. Settembrini, p. 83, where it is remarked that in the
+Index of 1564 a book is mentioned, _Matrimonio delli Preti e delle
+Monache_.
+
+[1037] For what follows, see Jovian. Pontan. _De Sermone_, l. ii. cap.
+17, and Bandello, parte i. nov. 32. The fury of brother Franciscus, who
+attempted to work upon the king by a vision of St. Cataldus, was so
+great at his failure, and the talk on the subject so universal, ‘ut
+Italia ferme omnis ipse in primis Romanus pontifex de tabulæ hujus
+fuerit inventione sollicitus atque anxius.’
+
+[1038] Alexander VI. and Julius II., whose cruel measures, however, did
+not appear to the Venetian ambassadors Giustiniani and Soderini as
+anything but a means of extorting money. Comp. M. Brosch, _Hist.
+Zeitscher._ bd. 37.
+
+[1039] Panormita, _De Dictis et Factis Alphonsi_, lib. ii. Æneas Sylvius
+in his commentary to it (_Opp._ ed. 1651, p. 79) tells of the detection
+of a pretended faster, who was said to have eaten nothing for four
+years.
+
+[1040] For which reason they could be openly denounced in the
+neighbourhood of the court. See Jovian. Pontan. _Antonius_ and _Charon_.
+One of the stories is the same as in Massuccio, nov. ii.
+
+[1041] See for one example the eighth canto of the _Macaroneide_.
+
+[1042] The story in Vasari, v. p. 120, _Vita di Sandro Botticelli_ shows
+that the Inquisition was sometimes treated jocularly. It is true that
+the ‘Vicario’ here mentioned may have been the archbishop’s deputy
+instead of the inquisitor’s.
+
+[1043] Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ ap. Murat. xxiii. col. 886, cf. 896.
+Malv. died 1468; his ‘beneficium’ passed to his nephew.
+
+[1044] See p. 88 sqq. He was abbot at Vallombrosa. The passage, of which
+we give a free translation, is to be found _Opere_, vol. ii. p. 209, in
+the tenth novel. See an inviting description of the comfortable life of
+the Carthusians in the _Commentario d’Italia_, fol. 32 sqq. quoted at p.
+84.
+
+[1045] Pius II. was on principle in favour of the abolition of the
+celibacy of the clergy. One of his favourite sentences was,
+‘Sacerdotibus magna ratione sublatus nuptias majori restituendas
+videri.’ Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 311.
+
+[1046] Ricordi, n. 28, in the _Opere inedite_, vol. i.
+
+[1047] Ricordi, n. i. 123, 125.
+
+[1048] See the _Orlandino_, cap. vi. str. 40 sqq.; cap. vii. str. 57;
+cap. viii. str. 3 sqq., especially 75.
+
+[1049] _Diaria Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 362.
+
+[1050] He had with him a German and a Slavonian interpreter. St. Bernard
+had to use the same means when he preached in the Rhineland.
+
+[1051] Capistrano, for instance, contented himself with making the sign
+of the cross over the thousands of sick persons brought to him, and with
+blessing them in the name of the Trinity and of his master San
+Bernadino, after which some of them not unnaturally got well. The
+Brescian chronicle puts it in this way, ‘He worked fine miracles, yet
+not so many as were told of him’ (Murat. xxi.).
+
+[1052] So e.g. Poggio, _De Avaritia_, in the _Opera_, fol. 2. He says
+they had an easy matter of it, since they said the same thing in every
+city, and sent the people away more stupid than they came. Poggio
+elsewhere (_Epist._ ed. Tonelli i. 281) speaks of Albert of Sarteano as
+‘doctus’ and ‘perhumanus.’ Filelfo defended Bernadino of Siena and a
+certain Nicolaus, probably out of opposition to Poggio (_Sat._ ii. 3,
+vi. 5) rather than from liking for the preachers. Filelfo was a
+correspondent of A. of Sarteano. He also praises Roberto da Lecce in
+some respects, but blames him for not using suitable gestures and
+expressions, for looking miserable when he ought to look cheerful, and
+for weeping too much and thus offending the ears and tastes of his
+audience. Fil. _Epist._ Venet. 1502, fol. 96 _b_.
+
+[1053] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 72. Preachers who fail are a constant
+subject of ridicule in all the novels.
+
+[1054] Compare the well-known story in the _Decamerone_ vi. nov. 10.
+
+[1055] In which case the sermons took a special colour. See Malipiero,
+_Ann. Venet. Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. p. 18. _Chron. Venet._ in Murat.
+xxiv. col. 114. _Storia Bresciana_, in Murat. xxi. col. 898. Absolution
+was freely promised to those who took part in, or contributed money for
+the crusade.
+
+[1056] _Storia Bresciana_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 865 sqq. On the first
+day 10,000 persons were present, 2,000 of them strangers.
+
+[1057] Allegretto, _Diari Sanesi_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 819 sqq. (July
+13 to 18, 1486); the preacher was Pietro dell’Osservanza di S.
+Francesco.
+
+[1058] Infessura (in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1874) says: ‘Canti,
+brevi, sorti.’ The first may refer to song-books, which actually were
+burnt by Savonarola. But Graziani (_Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi.
+i., p. 314) says on a similar occasion, ‘brieve incanti,’ when we must
+without doubt read ‘brevi e incanti,’ and perhaps the same emendation is
+desirable in Infessura, whose ‘sorti’ point to some instrument of
+superstition, perhaps a pack of cards for fortune-telling. Similarly
+after the introduction of printing, collections were made of all the
+attainable copies of Martial, which then were burnt. Bandello, iii. 10.
+
+[1059] See his remarkable biography in _Vespasiano Fiorent._ p. 244
+sqq., and that by Æneas Sylvius, _De Viris Illustr._ p. 24. In the
+latter we read: ‘Is quoque in tabella pictum nomen Jesus deferebat,
+hominibusque adorandum ostendebat multumque suadebat ante ostia domorum
+hoc nomen depingi.’
+
+[1060] Allegretto, l. c. col. 823. A preacher excited the people against
+the judges (if instead of ‘giudici’ we are not to read ‘giudei’), upon
+which they narrowly escaped being burnt in their houses. The opposite
+party threatened the life of the preacher in return.
+
+[1061] Infessura, l. c. In the date of the witch’s death there seems to
+be a clerical error. How the same saint caused an ill-famed wood near
+Arezzo to be cut down, is told in Vasari, iii. 148, _Vita di Parri
+Spinelli_. Often, no doubt, the penitential zeal of the hearers went no
+further than such outward sacrifices.
+
+[1062] ‘Pareva che l’aria si fendesse,’ we read somewhere.
+
+[1063] Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 166 sqq. It is not
+expressly said that he interfered with this feud, but it can hardly be
+doubted that he did so. Once (1445), when Jacopo della Marca had but
+just quitted Perugia after an extraordinary success, a frightful
+_vendetta_ broke out in the family of the Ranieri. Comp. Graziani, l. c.
+p. 565 sqq. We may here remark that Perugia was visited by these
+preachers remarkably often, comp. pp. 597, 626, 631, 637, 647.
+
+[1064] Capistrano admitted fifty soldiers after one sermon, _Stor.
+Bresciana_, l. c. Graziani, l. c. p. 565 sqq. Æn. Sylvius (_De Viris
+Illustr._ p. 25), when a young man, was once so affected by a sermon of
+San Bernadino as to be on the point of joining his Order. We read in
+Graziani of a convert quitting the order; he married, ‘e fu magiore
+ribaldo, che non era prima.’
+
+[1065] That there was no want of disputes between the famous
+Observantine preachers and their Dominican rivals is shown by the
+quarrel about the blood of Christ which was said to have fallen from the
+cross to the earth (1462). See Voigt. _Enea Silvio_ iii. 591 sqq. Fra
+Jacopo della Marca, who would not yield to the Dominican Inquisitor, is
+criticised by Pius II. in his detailed account (_Comment._ l. xi. p.
+511), with delicate irony: ‘Pauperiem pati, et famam et sitim et
+corporis cruciatum et mortem pro Christi nomine nonnulli possunt;
+jacturam nominis vel minimam ferre recusant tanquam sua deficiente fama
+Dei quoque gloria pereat.’
+
+[1066] Their reputation oscillated even then between two extremes. They
+must be distinguished from the hermit-monks. The line was not always
+clearly drawn in this respect. The Spoletans, who travelled about
+working miracles, took St. Anthony and St. Paul as their patrons, the
+latter on account of the snakes which they carried with them. We read of
+the money they got from the peasantry even in the thirteenth century by
+a sort of clerical conjuring. Their horses were trained to kneel down at
+the name of St. Anthony. They pretended to collect for hospitals
+(Massuccio, nov. 18; Bandello iii., nov. 17). Firenzuola in his _Asino
+d’Oro_ makes them play the part of the begging priests in Apulejus.
+
+[1067] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 357. Burigozzo, _ibid._ p. 431 sqq.
+
+[1068] Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 856 sqq. The quotation was:
+‘Ecce venio cito et velociter. Estote parati.’
+
+[1069] Matteo Villani, viii. cap. 2 sqq. He first preached against
+tyranny in general, and then, when the ruling house of the Beccaria
+tried to have him murdered, he began to preach a change of government
+and constitution, and forced the Beccaria to fly from Pavia (1357). See
+Petrarch, _Epp. Fam._ xix. 18, and A. _Hortis, Scritti Inediti di F. P._
+174-181.
+
+[1070] Sometimes at critical moments the ruling house itself used the
+services of monks to exhort the people to loyalty. For an instance of
+this kind at Ferrara, see Sanudo (Murat. xxii. col. 1218). A preacher
+from Bologna reminded the people of the benefits they had received from
+the House of Este, and of the fate that awaited them at the hands of the
+victorious Venetians.
+
+[1071] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 251. Other fanatical anti-French
+preachers, who appeared after the expulsion of the French, are mentioned
+by Burigozzo, _ibid._ pp. 443, 449, 485; ad a. 1523, 1526, 1529.
+
+[1072] Jac. Pitti, _Storia Fior._ l. ii. p. 112.
+
+[1073] Perrens, _Jérôme Savonarole_, two vols. Perhaps the most
+systematic and sober of all the many works on the subject. P. Villari,
+_La Storia di Girol. Savonarola_ (two vols. 8vo. Firenze, Lemonnier).
+The view taken by the latter writer differs considerably from that
+maintained in the text. Comp. also Ranke in _Historisch-biographische
+Studien_, Lpzg. 1878, pp. 181-358. On Genaz. see Vill. i. 57 sqq. ii.
+343 sqq. Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 522-526, 533 sqq.
+
+[1074] Sermons on Haggai; close of sermon 6.
+
+[1075] Savonarola was perhaps the only man who could have made the
+subject cities free and yet kept Tuscany together. But he never seems to
+have thought of doing so. Pisa he hated like a genuine Florentine.
+
+[1076] A remarkable contrast to the Sienese who in 1483 solemnly
+dedicated their distracted city to the Madonna. Allegretto, in Murat.
+xxiii. col. 815.
+
+[1077] He says of the ‘impii astrologi’: ‘non è dar disputar (con loro)
+altrimenti che col fuoco.’
+
+[1078] See Villari on this point.
+
+[1079] See the passage in the fourteenth sermon on Ezechiel, in Perrens,
+o. c. vol. i. 30 note.
+
+[1080] With the title, _De Rusticorum Religione_. See above p. 352.
+
+[1081] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 109, where there is more of the same kind.
+
+[1082] Bapt. Mantuan. _De Sacris Diebus_, l. ii. exclaims:--
+
+    Ista superstitio, ducens a Manibus ortum
+    Tartareis, sancta de religione facessat
+    Christigenûm! vivis epulas date, sacra sepultis.
+
+A century earlier, when the army of John XXII. entered the Marches to
+attack the Ghibellines, the pretext was avowedly ‘eresia’ and
+‘idolatria.’ Recanti, which surrendered voluntarily, was nevertheless
+burnt, ‘because idols had been worshipped there,’ in reality, as a
+revenge for those whom the citizens had killed. Giov. Villani, ix. 139,
+141. Under Pius II. we read of an obstinate sun-worshipper, born at
+Urbino. Æn. Sylv. _Opera_, p. 289. _Hist. Rer. ubique Gestar._ c. 12.
+More wonderful still was what happened in the Forum in Rome under Leo X.
+(more properly in the interregnum between Hadrian and Leo. June 1522,
+Gregorovius, viii. 388). To stay the plague, a bull was solemnly offered
+up with pagan rites. Paul. Jov. _Hist._ xxi. 8.
+
+[1083] See Sabellico, _De Situ Venetae Urbis_. He mentions the names of
+the saints, after the manner of many philologists, without the addition
+of ‘sanctus’ or ‘divus,’ but speaks frequently of different relics, and
+in the most respectful tone, and even boasts that he kissed several of
+them.
+
+[1084] _De Laudibus Patavii_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1149 to 1151.
+
+[1085] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. pp. 408 sqq. Though he is by no means a
+freethinker, he still protests against the causal nexus.
+
+[1086] _Pii II. Comment._ l. viii. pp. 352 sqq. ‘Verebatur Pontifex, ne
+in honore tanti apostoli diminute agere videretur,’ &c.
+
+[1087] Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 187. The Pope excused
+himself on the ground of Louis’ great services to the Church, and by the
+example of other Popes, e.g. St. Gregory, who had done the like. Louis
+was able to pay his devotion to the relic, but died after all. The
+Catacombs were at that time forgotten, yet even Savonarola (l. c. col.
+1150) says of Rome: ‘Velut ager Aceldama Sanctorum habita est.’
+
+[1088] Bursellis, _Annal. Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 905. It was one
+of the sixteen patricians, Bartol. della Volta, d. 1485 or 1486.
+
+[1089] Vasari, iii. 111 sqq. note. _Vita di Ghiberti._
+
+[1090] Matteo Villani, iii. 15 and 16.
+
+[1091] We must make a further distinction between the Italian cultus of
+the bodies of historical saints of recent date, and the northern
+practice of collecting bones and relics of a sacred antiquity. Such
+remains were preserved in great abundance in the Lateran, which, for
+that reason, was of special importance for pilgrims. But on the tombs of
+St. Dominic and St. Anthony of Padua rested, not only the halo of
+sanctity, but the splendour of historical fame.
+
+[1092] The remarkable judgment in his _De Sacris Diebus_, the work of
+his later years, refers both to sacred and profane art (l. i.). Among
+the Jews, he says, there was a good reason for prohibiting all graven
+images, else they would have relapsed into the idolatry or devil-worship
+of the nations around them:
+
+    Nunc autem, postquam penitus natura Satanum
+    Cognita, et antiqua sine majestate relicta est,
+    Nulla ferunt nobis statuae discrimina, nullos
+    Fert pictura dolos; jam sunt innoxia signa;
+    Sunt modo virtutum testes monimentaque laudum
+    Marmora, et aeternae decora immortalia famae.
+
+
+[1093] Battista Mantovano complains of certain ‘nebulones’ (_De Sacris
+Diebus_, l. v.) who would not believe in the genuineness of the Sacred
+Blood at Mantua. The same criticism which called in question the
+Donation of Constantine was also, though indirectly, hostile to the
+belief in relics.
+
+[1094] Especially the famous prayer of St. Bernard, _Paradiso_, xxxiii.
+1, ‘Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio.’
+
+[1095] Perhaps we may add Pius II., whose elegy on the Virgin is printed
+in the _Opera_, p. 964, and who from his youth believed himself to be
+under her special protection. Jac. Card. Papiens. ‘De Morte Pii,’ _Opp._
+p. 656.
+
+[1096] That is, at the time when Sixtus IV. was so zealous for the
+Immaculate Conception. _Extravag. Commun._ l. iii. tit. xii. He founded,
+too, the Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, and the
+Feasts of St. Anne and St. Joseph. See Trithem. _Ann. Hirsaug._ ii. p.
+518.
+
+[1097] The few frigid sonnets of Vittoria on the Madonna are most
+instructive in this respect (n. 85 sqq. ed. P. Visconti, Rome, 1840).
+
+[1098] Bapt. Mantuan. _De Sacris Diebus_, l. v., and especially the
+speech of the younger Pico, which was intended for the Lateran Council,
+in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, viii. p. 115. Comp. p. 121, note 3.
+
+[1099] _Monach. Paduani Chron._ l. iii. at the beginning. We there read
+of this revival: ‘Invasit primitus Perusinos, Romanes postmodum, deinde
+fere Italiæ populos universos.’ Guil. Ventura (_Fragmenta de Gestis
+Astensium_ in _Mon. Hist. Patr. SS._ tom. iii. col. 701) calls the
+Flagellant pilgrimage ‘admirabilis Lombardorum commotio;’ hermits came
+forth from their cells and summoned the cities to repent.
+
+[1100] G. Villani, viii. 122, xi. 23. The former were not received in
+Florence, the latter were welcomed all the more readily.
+
+[1101] Corio, fol. 281. Leon. Aretinus, _Hist. Flor._ lib. xii. (at the
+beginning) mentions a sudden revival called forth by the processions of
+the ‘dealbati’ from the Alps to Lucca, Florence, and still farther.
+
+[1102] Pilgrimages to distant places had already become very rare. Those
+of the princes of the House of Este to Jerusalem, St. Jago, and Vienne
+are enumerated in Murat. xxiv. col. 182, 187, 190, 279. For that of
+Rinaldo Albizzi to the Holy Land, see Macchiavelli, _Stor. Fior._ l. v.
+Here, too, the desire of fame is sometimes the motive. The chronicler
+Giov. Cavalcanti (_Ist. Fiorentine_, ed. Polidori, ii. 478) says of
+Lionardo Fescobaldi, who wanted to go with a companion (about the year
+1400) to the Holy Sepulchre: ‘Stimarono di eternarsi nella mente degli
+uomini futuri.’
+
+[1103] Bursellis, _Annal. Bon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 890.
+
+[1104] Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 855 sqq. The report had got
+about that it had rained blood outside the gate. All rushed forth, yet
+‘gli uomini di guidizio non lo credono.’
+
+[1105] Burigozzo, _Arch. Stor._ iii. 486. For the misery which then
+prevailed in Lombardy, Galeazzo Capello (_De Rebus nuper in Italia
+Gestis_) is the best authority. Milan suffered hardly less than Rome did
+in the sack of 1527.
+
+[1106] It was also called ‘l’arca del testimonio,’ and people told how
+it was ‘conzado’ (constructed) ‘con gran misterio.’
+
+[1107] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 317, 322, 323, 326, 386,
+401.
+
+[1108] ‘Ad uno santo homo o santa donna,’ says the chronicle. Married
+men were forbidden to keep concubines.
+
+[1109] The sermon was especially addressed to them; after it a Jew was
+baptised, ‘ma non di quelli’ adds the annalist, ‘che erano stati a udire
+la predica.’
+
+[1110] ‘Per buono rispetto a lui noto e perchè sempre è buono a star
+bene con Iddio,’ says the annalist. After describing the arrangements,
+he adds resignedly: ‘La cagione perchè sia fatto et si habbia a fare non
+s’intende, basta che ogni bene è bene.’
+
+[1111] He is called ‘Messo del Cancellieri del Duca.’ The whole thing
+was evidently intended to appear the work of the court only, and not of
+any ecclesiastical authority.
+
+[1112] See the quotations from Pico’s _Discourse on the Dignity of Man_
+above, pp. 354-5.
+
+[1113] Not to speak of the fact that a similar tolerance or indifference
+was not uncommon among the Arabians themselves.
+
+[1114] So in the _Decameron_. Sultans without name in Massuccio nov. 46,
+48, 49; one called ‘Rè di Fes,’ another ‘Rè di Tunisi.’ In _Dittamondo_,
+ii. 25, we read, ‘il buono Saladin.’ For the Venetian alliance with the
+Sultan of Egypt in the year 1202, see G. Hanotaux in the _Revue
+Historique_ iv. (1877) pp. 74-102. There were naturally also many
+attacks on Mohammedanism. For the Turkish woman baptized first in Venice
+and again in Rome, see Cechetti i. 487.
+
+[1115] _Philelphi Epistolae_, Venet. 1502 fol. 90 _b._ sqq.
+
+[1116] _Decamerone_ i. nov. 3. Boccaccio is the first to name the
+Christian religion, which the others do not. For an old French authority
+of the thirteenth century, see Tobler, _Li di dou Vrai Aniel_, Leipzig,
+1871. For the Hebrew story of Abr. Abulafia (b. 1241 in Spain, came to
+Italy about 1290 in the hope of converting the Pope to Judaism), in
+which two servants claim each to hold the jewel buried for the son, see
+Steinschneider, _Polem. und Apol. Lit. der Arab. Sprache_, pp. 319 and
+360. From these and other sources we conclude that the story originally
+was less definite than as we now have it (in Abul. e.g. it is used
+polemically against the Christians), and that the doctrine of the
+equality of the three religions is a later addition. Comp. Reuter,
+_Gesch. der Relig. Aufklärung im M. A._ (Berlin, 1877), iii. 302 sqq.
+390.
+
+[1117] _De Tribus Impostoribus_, the name of a work attributed to
+Frederick II. among many other people, and which by no means answers the
+expectations raised by the title. Latest ed. by Weller, Heilbronn, 1876.
+The nationality of the author and the date of composition are both
+disputed. See Reuter, op. cit. ii. 273-302.
+
+[1118] In the mouth, nevertheless, of the fiend Astarotte, canto xxv.
+str. 231 sqq. Comp. str. 141 sqq.
+
+[1119] Canto xxviii. str. 38 sqq.
+
+[1120] Canto xviii. str. 112 to the end.
+
+[1121] Pulci touches, though hastily, on a similar conception in his
+Prince Chiaristante (canto xxi. str. 101 sqq., 121 sqq., 145 sqq., 163
+sqq.), who believes nothing and causes himself and his wife to be
+worshipped. We are reminded of Sigismondo Malatesta (p. 245).
+
+[1122] Giov. Villani, iv. 29, vi. 46. The name occurs as early as 1150
+in Northern countries. It is defined by William of Malmesbury (iii. 237,
+ed. Londin, 1840): ‘Epicureorum ... qui opinantur animam corpore solutam
+in aerem evanescere, in auras effluere.’
+
+[1123] See the argument in the third book of Lucretius. The name of
+Epicurean was afterwards used as synonymous with freethinker. Lorenzo
+Valla (_Opp._ 795 sqq.) speaks as follows of Epicurus: ‘Quis eo parcior,
+quis contentior, quis modestior, et quidem in nullo philosophorum omnium
+minus invenio fuisse vitiorum, plurimique honesti viri cum Graecorum,
+tum Romanorum, Epicurei fuerunt.’ Valla was defending himself to
+Eugenius IV. against the attacks of Fra Antonio da Bitonto and others.
+
+[1124] _Inferno_, vii. 67-96.
+
+[1125] _Purgatorio_, xvi. 73. Compare the theory of the influence of the
+planets in the _Convito_. Even the fiend Astarotte in Pulci (_Morgante_,
+xxv. str. 150) attests the freedom of the human will and the justice of
+God.
+
+[1126] Comp. Voigt, _Wiederbelebung_, 165-170.
+
+[1127] _Vespasiano Fiorent._ pp. 26, 320, 435, 626, 651. Murat. xx. col.
+532.
+
+[1128] In Platina’s introd. to his Life of Christ the religious
+influence of the Renaissance is curiously exemplified (_Vitæ Paparum_,
+at the beginning): Christ, he says, fully attained the fourfold Platonic
+‘nobilitas’ according to his ‘genus’: ‘quem enim ex gentilibus habemus
+qui gloria et nomine cum David et Salomone, quique sapientia et doctrina
+cum Christo ipso conferri merito debeat et possit?’ Judaism, like
+classical antiquity, was also explained on a Christian hypothesis. Pico
+and Pietro Galatino endeavoured to show that Christian doctrine was
+foreshadowed in the Talmud and other Jewish writings.
+
+[1129] On Pomponazzo, see the special works; among others, Bitter,
+_Geschichte der Philosophie_, bd. ix.
+
+[1130] Paul. Jovii, _Elog. Lit._ p. 90. G. M. was, however, compelled to
+recant publicly. His letter to Lorenzo (May 17, 1478) begging him to
+intercede with the Pope, ‘satis enim poenarum dedi,’ is given by
+Malagola, Codro Urceo, p. 433.
+
+[1131] _Codri Urcei Opera_, with his life by Bart. Bianchini; and in his
+philological lectures, pp. 65, 151, 278, &c.
+
+[1132] On one occasion he says, ‘In Laudem Christi:’
+
+    Phoebum alii vates musasque Jovemque sequuntur,
+        At mihi pro vero nomine Christus erit.
+
+He also (fol. x. _b_) attacks the Bohemians. Huss and Jerome of Prague
+are defended by Poggio in his famous letter to Lion. Aretino, and placed
+on a level with Mucius Scaevola and Socrates.
+
+[1133] ‘Audi virgo ea quae tibi mentis compos et ex animo dicam. Si
+forte cum ad ultimum vitae finem pervenero supplex accedam ad te spem
+oratum, ne me audias neve inter tuos accipias oro; cum infernis diis in
+aeternum vitam degere decrevi.’
+
+[1134] ‘Animum meum seu animam’--a distinction by which philology used
+then to perplex theology.
+
+[1135] Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 311: ‘Christianam fidem si miraculis
+non esset confirmata, honestate sua recipi debuisse.’ It may be
+questioned whether all that Platina attributes to the Pope is in fact
+authentic.
+
+[1136] Preface to the _Historia Ferdinandi I._ (_Hist. Ztschr._ xxxiii.
+61) and _Antid. in Pogg._ lib. iv. _Opp._ p. 256 sqq. Pontanus (_De
+Sermone_, i. 18) says that Valla did not hesitate ‘dicere profiterique
+palam habere se quoque in Christum spicula.’ Pontano, however, was a
+friend of Valla’s enemies at Naples.
+
+[1137] Especially when the monks improvised them in the pulpit. But the
+old and recognised miracles did not remain unassailed. Firenzuola
+(_Opere_, vol. ii. p. 208, in the tenth novel) ridicules the Franciscans
+of Novara, who wanted to spend money which they had embezzled, in adding
+a chapel to their church, ‘dove fusse dipinta quella bella storia,
+quando S. Francesco predicava agli uccelli nel deserto; e quando ei fece
+la santa zuppa, e che l’agnolo Gabriello gli portò i zoccoli.’
+
+[1138] Some facts about him are to be found in Bapt. Mantuan. _De
+Patientia_, l. iii. cap. 13.
+
+[1139] Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 915.
+
+[1140] How far these blasphemous utterances sometimes went, has been
+shown by Gieseler (_Kirchengeschichte_, ii. iv. § 154, anm.) who quotes
+several striking instances.
+
+[1141] Voigt, _Enea Silvio_, iii. 581. It is not known what happened to
+the Bishop Petro of Aranda who (1500) denied the Divinity of Christ and
+the existence of Hell and Purgatory, and denounced indulgences as a
+device of the popes invented for their private advantage. For him, see
+_Burchardi Diarium_, ed. Leibnitz, p. 63 sqq.
+
+[1142] Jov. Pontanus, _De Fortuna_, _Opp._ i. 792-921. Comp. _Opp._ ii.
+286.
+
+[1143] Æn. Sylvii, _Opera_, p. 611.
+
+[1144] Poggius, _De Miseriis Humanae Conditionis_.
+
+[1145] Caracciolo, _De Varietate Fortunae_, in Murat. xxii., one of the
+most valuable writings of a period rich in such works. On Fortune in
+public processions, see p. 421.
+
+[1146] _Leonis X. Vita Anonyma_, in Roscoe, ed. Bossi, xii. p. 153.
+
+[1147] Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 909: ‘Monimentum
+hoc conditum a Joanne Bentivolo secundo patriae rectore, cui virtus et
+fortuna cuncta quæ optari possunt affatim praestiterunt.’ It is still
+not quite certain whether this inscription was outside, and visible to
+everybody, or, like another mentioned just before, hidden on one of the
+foundation stones. In the latter case, a fresh idea is involved. By this
+secret inscription, which perhaps only the chronicler knew of, Fortune
+is to be magically bound to the building.
+
+[According to the words of the chronicle, the inscription cannot have
+stood on the walls of the newly built tower. The exact spot is
+uncertain.--L.G.]
+
+[1148] ‘Quod nimium gentilitatis amatores essemus.’ Paganism, at least
+in externals, certainly went rather far. Inscriptions lately found in
+the Catacombs show that the members of the Academy described themselves
+as ‘sacerdotes,’ and called Pomponius Lætus ‘pontifex maximus;’ the
+latter once addressed Platina as ‘pater sanctissimus.’ Gregorovius, vii.
+578.
+
+[1149] While the plastic arts at all events distinguished between angels
+and ‘putti,’ and used the former for all serious purposes. In the
+_Annal. Estens._ Murat. xx. col. 468, the ‘amorino’ is naively called
+‘instar Cupidinis angelus.’ Comp. the speech made before Leo X. (1521),
+in which the passage occurs: ‘Quare et te non jam Juppiter, sed Virgo
+Capitolina Dei parens quæ hujus urbis et collis reliquis præsides,
+Romamque et Capitolium tutaris.’ Greg. viii. 294.
+
+[1150] Della Valle, _Lettere Sanesi_, iii. 18.
+
+[1151] Macrob. _Saturnal._ iii. 9. Doubtless the canon did not omit the
+gestures there prescribed. Comp. Gregorovius, viii. 294, for Bembo. For
+the paganism thus prevalent in Rome, see also Ranke, _Päpste_, i. 73
+sqq. Comp. also Gregorovius, viii. 268.
+
+[1152] _Monachus Paduan._ l. ii. ap. Urstisius, _Scriptt._ i. pp. 598,
+599, 602, 607. The last Visconti (p. 37) had also a number of these men
+in his service (Comp. Decembrio, in Murat. xx. col. 1017): he undertook
+nothing without their advice. Among them was a Jew named Helias.
+Gasparino da Barzizzi once addressed him: ‘Magna vi astrorum fortuna
+tuas res reget.’ G. B. _Opera_, ed. Furietto, p. 38.
+
+[1153] E.g. Florence, where Bonatto filled the office for a long period.
+See too Matteo Villani, xi. 3, where the city astrologer is evidently
+meant.
+
+[1154] Libri, _Hist. des Sciences Mathém._ ii. 52, 193. At Bologna this
+professorship is said to have existed in 1125. Comp. the list of
+professors at Pavia, in Corio, fol. 290. For the professorship at the
+Sapienza under Leo X., see Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, v. p. 283.
+
+[1155] J. A. Campanus lays stress on the value and importance of
+astrology, and concludes with the words: ‘Quamquam Augustinus
+sanctissimus ille vir quidem ac doctissimus, sed fortassis ad fidem
+religionemque propensior negat quicquam vel boni vel mali astrorum
+necessitate contingere.’ ‘Oratio initio studii Perugiæ habita,’ compare
+_Opera_, Rome, 1495.
+
+[1156] About 1260 Pope Alexander IV. compelled a Cardinal (and
+shamefaced astrologer) Bianco to bring out a number of political
+prophecies. Giov. Villani, vi. 81.
+
+[1157] _De Dictis, &c. Alfonsi, Opera_, p. 493. He held it to be
+‘pulchrius quam utile.’ Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 310. For Sixtus IV.
+comp. Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 173, 186. He caused the
+hours for audiences, receptions, and the like, to be fixed by the
+‘planetarii.’ In the _Europa_, c. 49, Pius II. mentions that Baptista
+Blasius, an astronomer from Cremona, had prophesied the misfortunes of
+Fr. Foscaro ‘tanquam prævidisset.’
+
+[1158] Brosch, _Julius II._ (Gotha, 1878), pp. 97 and 323.
+
+[1159] P. Valeriano, _De Infel. Lit._ (318-324) speaks of Fr. Friuli,
+who wrote on Leo’s horoscope, and ‘abditissima quæque anteactæ ætatis et
+uni ipsi cognita principi explicuerat quæque incumberent quæque futura
+essent ad unguem ut eventus postmodum comprobavit, in singulos fere dies
+prædixerat.’
+
+[1160] Ranke, _Päpste_, i. 247.
+
+[1161] _Vespas. Fiorent._ p. 660, comp. 341. _Ibid._ p. 121, another
+Pagolo is mentioned as court mathematician and astrologer of Federigo of
+Montefeltro. Curiously enough, he was a German.
+
+[1162] Firmicus Maternus, _Matheseos Libri_ viii. at the end of the
+second book.
+
+[1163] In Bandello, iii. nov. 60, the astrologer of Alessandro
+Bentivoglio, in Milan, confessed himself a poor devil before the whole
+company.
+
+[1164] It was in such a moment of resolution that Ludovico Moro had the
+cross with this inscription made, which is now in the Minster at Chur.
+Sixtus IV. too once said that he would try if the proverb was true. On
+this saying of the astrologer Ptolemæus, which B. Fazio took to be
+Virgilian, see Laur. Valla, _Opera_, p. 461.
+
+[1165] The father of Piero Capponi, himself an astrologer, put his son
+into trade lest he should get the dangerous wound in the head which
+threatened him. _Vita di P. Capponi, Arch. Stor._ iv. ii. 15. For an
+instance in the life of Cardanus, see p. 334. The physician and
+astrologer Pierleoni of Spoleto believed that he would be drowned,
+avoided in consequence all watery places, and refused brilliant
+positions offered him at Venice and Padua. Paul. Jov. _Elog. Liter._ pp.
+67 sqq. Finally he threw himself into the water, in despair at the
+charge brought against him of complicity in Lorenzo’s death, and was
+actually drowned. Hier. Aliottus had been told to be careful in his
+sixty-second year, as his life would then be in danger. He lived with
+great circumspection, kept clear of the doctors, and the year passed
+safely. H. A. _Opuscula_ (Arezzo, 1769), ii. 72. Marsilio Ficino, who
+despised astrology (_Opp._ p. 772) was written to by a friend (_Epist._
+lib. 17): ‘Praeterea me memini a duobus vestrorum astrologis audivisse,
+te ex quadam siderum positione antiquas revocaturum philosophorum
+sententias.’
+
+[1166] For instances in the life of Ludovico Moro, see Senarega, in
+Murat, xxiv. col. 518, 524. Benedictus, in Eccard, ii. col. 1623. And
+yet his father, the great Francesco Sforza, had despised astrology, and
+his grandfather Giacomo had not at any rate followed its warnings.
+Corio, fol. 321, 413.
+
+[1167] For the facts here quoted, see _Annal. Foroliviens_. in Murat.
+xxii. col. 233 sqq. (comp. col. 150). Leonbattista Alberti endeavoured
+to give a spiritual meaning to the ceremony of laying the foundation.
+_Opere Volgari_, tom. iv. p. 314 (or _De Re Ædific_. 1. i.). For Bonatto
+see Filippo Villani, _Vite_ and _Delia Vita e delle Opere di Guido
+Bonati, Astrologo e Astronomo del Secolo Decimoterzo, raccolte da E.
+Boncompagni_, Rome 1851. B.’s great work, _De Astronomia_, lib. x. has
+been often printed.
+
+[1168] In the horoscopes of the second foundation of Florence (Giov.
+Villani, iii. 1. under Charles the Great) and of the first of Venice
+(see above, p. 62), an old tradition is perhaps mingled with the poetry
+of the Middle Ages.
+
+[1169] For one of these victories, see the remarkable passage quoted
+from Bonatto in Steinschneider, in the _Zeitschr. d. D. Morg. Ges._ xxv.
+p. 416. On B. comp. _ibid._ xviii. 120 sqq.
+
+[1170] _Ann. Foroliv._ 235-238. Filippo Villani, _Vite._ Macchiavelli,
+_Stor. Fior._ l. i. When constellations which augured victory appeared,
+Bonatto ascended with his book and astrolabe to the tower of San
+Mercuriale above the Piazza, and when the right moment came gave the
+signal for the great bell to be rung. Yet it was admitted that he was
+often wide of the mark, and foresaw neither his own death nor the fate
+of Montefeltro. Not far from Cesena he was killed by robbers, on his way
+back to Forli from Paris and from Italian universities where he had been
+lecturing. As a weather prophet he was once overmatched and made game of
+by a countryman.
+
+[1171] Matteo Villani, xi. 3; see above, p. 508.
+
+[1172] Jovian. Pontan. _De Fortitudine_, l. i. See p. 511 note 1, for
+the honourable exception made by the first Sforza.
+
+[1173] Paul. Jov. _Elog._ sub v. Livianus, p. 219.
+
+[1174] Who tells it us himself. Benedictus, in Eccard, ii. col. 1617.
+
+[1175] In this sense we must understand the words of Jac. Nardi, _Vita
+d’Ant. Giacomini_, p. 65. The same pictures were common on clothes and
+household utensils. At the reception of Lucrezia Borgia in Ferrara, the
+mule of the Duchess of Urbino wore trappings of black velvet with
+astrological figures in gold. _Arch. Stor. Append._ ii. p. 305.
+
+[1176] Æn. Sylvius, in the passage quoted above p. 508; comp. _Opp._
+481.
+
+[1177] Azario, in Corio, fol. 258.
+
+[1178] Considerations of this kind probably influenced the Turkish
+astrologers who, after the battle of Nicopolis, advised the Sultan
+Bajazet I. to consent to the ransom of John of Burgundy, since ‘for his
+sake much Christian blood would be shed.’ It was not difficult to
+foresee the further course of the French civil war. _Magn. Chron.
+Belgicum_, p. 358. _Juvénal des Ursins_, ad. a. 1396.
+
+[1179] Benedictus, in Eccard, ii. col. 1579. It was said of King
+Ferrante in 1493 that he would lose his throne ‘sine cruore sed sola
+fama’--which actually happened.
+
+[1180] Comp. Steinschneider, _Apokalypsen mit polemischer Tendenz_, D.
+M. G. Z. xxviii. 627 sqq. xxix. 261.
+
+[1181] Bapt. Mantuan. _De Patientia_, l. iii. cap. 12.
+
+[1182] Giov. Villani, x. 39, 40. Other reasons also existed, e.g. the
+jealousy of his colleagues. Bonatto had taught the same, and had
+explained the miracle of Divine Love in St. Francis as the effect of the
+planet Mars. Comp. Jo. Picus, _Adv. Astrol._ ii. 5.
+
+[1183] They were painted by Miretto at the beginning of the fifteenth
+century. Acc. to Scardeonius they were destined ‘ad indicandum
+nascentium naturas per gradus et numeros’--a more popular way of
+teaching than we can now well imagine. It was astrology ‘à la portèe de
+tout le monde.’
+
+[1184] He says (_Orationes_, fol. 35, ‘In Nuptias’) of astrology: ‘haec
+efficit ut homines parum a Diis distare videantur’! Another enthusiast
+of the same time is Jo. Garzonius, _De Dignitate Urbis Bononiae_, in
+Murat. xxi. col. 1163.
+
+[1185] Petrarca, _Epp. Seniles_, iii. 1 (p. 765) and elsewhere. The
+letter in question was written to Boccaccio. On Petrarch’s polemic
+against the astrologers, see Geiger. _Petr._ 87-91 and 267, note 11.
+
+[1186] Franco Sacchetti (nov. 151) ridicules their claims to wisdom.
+
+[1187] Gio. Villani, iii. x. 39. Elsewhere he appears as a devout
+believer in astrology, x. 120, xii. 40.
+
+[1188] In the passage xi. 3.
+
+[1189] Gio. Villani, xi. 2, xii. 58.
+
+[1190] The author of the _Annales Placentini_ (in Murat. xx. col. 931),
+the same Alberto di Ripalta mentioned at p. 241, took part in this
+controversy. The passage is in other respects remarkable, since it
+contains the popular opinion with regard to the nine known comets, their
+colour, origin, and significance. Comp. Gio. Villani, xi. 67. He speaks
+of a comet as the herald of great and generally disastrous events.
+
+[1191] Paul. Jov. _Vita Leonis_ xx. l. iii. where it appears that Leo
+himself was a believer at least in premonitions and the like, see above
+p. 509.
+
+[1192] Jo. Picus Mirand. _Adversus Astrologos_, libri xii.
+
+[1193] Acc. to Paul, Jov. _Elog. Lit._ sub tit. Jo. Picus, the result he
+achieved was ‘ut subtilium disciplinarum professores a scribendo
+deterruisse videatur.’
+
+[1194] _De Rebus Caelestibus_, libri xiv. (_Opp._ iii. 1963-2591). In
+the twelfth book, dedicated to Paolo Cortese, he will not admit the
+latter’s refutation of astrology. Ægidius, _Opp._ ii. 1455-1514. Pontano
+had dedicated his little work _De Luna_ (_Opp._ iii. 2592) to the same
+hermit Egidio (of Viterbo?)
+
+[1195] For the latter passage, see p. 1486. The difference between
+Pontano and Pico is thus put by Franc. Pudericus, one of the
+interlocutors in the dialogue (p. 1496): ‘Pontanus non ut Johannes Picus
+in disciplinam ipsam armis equisque, quod dicitur, irrumpit, cum illam
+tueatur, ut cognitu maxime dignam ac pene divinam, sed astrologos
+quosdam, ut parum cautos minimeque prudentes insectetur et rideat.’
+
+[1196] In S. Maria del Popolo at Rome. The angels remind us of Dante’s
+theory at the beginning of the _Convito_.
+
+[1197] This was the case with Antonio Galateo who, in a letter to
+Ferdinand the Catholic (Mai, _Spicileg. Rom._ vol. viii. p. 226, ad a.
+1510), disclaims astrology with violence, and in another letter to the
+Count of Potenza (_ibid._ p. 539) infers from the stars that the Turks
+would attack Rhodes the same year.
+
+[1198] _Ricordi_, l. c. n. 57.
+
+[1199] Many instances of such superstitions in the case of the last
+Visconti are mentioned by Decembrio (Murat. xx. col. 1016 sqq.). Odaxius
+says in his speech at the burial of Guidobaldo (_Bembi Opera_, i. 598
+sqq.), that the gods had announced his approaching death by
+thunderbolts, earthquakes, and other signs and wonders.
+
+[1200] Varchi, _Stor. Fior._ l. iv. (p. 174); prophecies and
+premonitions were then as rife in Florence as at Jerusalem during the
+siege. Comp. _ibid._ iii. 143, 195; iv. 43, 177.
+
+[1201] Matarazzo, _Archiv. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 208.
+
+[1202] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. 324, for the year 1514.
+
+[1203] For the Madonna dell’Arbore in the Cathedral at Milan, and what
+she did in 1515, see Prato, l. c. p. 327. He also records the discovery
+of a dead dragon as thick as a horse in the excavations for a mortuary
+chapel near S. Nazaro. The head was taken to the Palace of the Triulzi
+for whom the chapel was built.
+
+[1204] ‘Et fuit mirabile quod illico pluvia cessavit.’ _Diar. Parmense_
+in Murat. xxii. col. 280. The author shares the popular hatred of the
+usurers. Comp. col. 371.
+
+[1205] _Conjurationis Pactianae Commentarius_, in the appendices to
+Roscoe’s _Lorenzo_. Politian was in general an opponent of astrology.
+The saints were naturally able to cause the rain to cease. Comp. Æneas
+Sylvius, in his life of Bernadino da Siena (_De Vir. Ill._ p. 25):
+‘jussit in virtute Jesu nubem abire, quo facto solutis absque pluvia
+nubibus, prior serenitas rediit’.
+
+[1206] _Poggi Facetiae_, fol. 174. Æn. Sylvius (_De Europa_, c. 53, 54,
+_Opera_, pp. 451, 455) mentions prodigies which may have really
+happened, such as combats between animals and strange appearances in the
+sky, and mentions them chiefly as curiosities, even when adding the
+results attributed to them. Similarly Antonio Ferrari (il Galateo), _De
+Situ Iapygiae_, p. 121, with the explanation: ‘Et hae, ut puto, species
+erant earum rerum quæ longe aberant atque ab eo loco in quo species
+visae sunt minime poterant.’
+
+[1207] _Poggi Facetiae_, fol. 160. Comp. Pausanias, ix. 20.
+
+[1208] Varchi, iii 195. Two suspected persons decided on flight in 1529,
+because they opened the Æneid at book iii. 44. Comp. Rabelais,
+_Pantagruel_, iii. 10.
+
+[1209] The imaginations of the scholars, such as the ‘splendor’ and the
+‘spiritus’ of Cardanus, and the ‘dæmon familiaris’ of his father, may be
+taken for what they are worth. Comp. Cardanus, _De Propria Vita_, cap.
+4, 38, 47. He was himself an opponent of magic; cap. 39. For the
+prodigies and ghosts he met with, see cap. 37, 41. For the terror of
+ghosts felt by the last Visconti, see Decembrio, in Murat. xx. col.
+1016.
+
+[1210] ‘Molte fiate i morti guastano le creature.’ Bandello, ii. nov. 1.
+We read (Galateo, p. 177) that the ‘animæ’ of wicked men rise from the
+grave, appear to their friends and acquaintances, ‘animalibus vexi,
+pueros sugere ac necare, deinde in sepulcra reverti.’
+
+[1211] Galateo, l. c. We also read (p. 119) of the ‘Fata Morgana’ and
+other similar appearances.
+
+[1212] Bandello, iii. nov. 20. It is true that the ghost was only a
+lover wishing to frighten the occupier of the palace, who was also the
+husband of the beloved lady. The lover and his accomplices dressed
+themselves up as devils; one of them, who could imitate the cry of
+different animals, had been sent for from a distance.
+
+[1213] Graziani, _Arch. Stor._ xvi. i. p. 640, ad a. 1467. The guardian
+died of fright.
+
+[1214] _Balth. Castilionii Carmina_; Prosopopeja Lud. Pici.
+
+[1215] Alexandri ab Alexandro, _Dierum Genialium_, libri vi. (Colon.
+1539), is an authority of the first rank for these subjects, the more so
+as the author, a friend of Pontanus and a member of his academy, asserts
+that what he records either happened to himself, or was communicated to
+him by thoroughly trustworthy witnesses. Lib. vi. cap. 19: two evil men
+and a monk are attacked by devils, whom they recognise by the shape of
+their feet, and put to flight, partly by force and partly by the sign of
+the cross. Lib. vi. cap. 21: A servant, cast into prison by a cruel
+prince on account of a small offence, calls upon the devil, is
+miraculously brought out of the prison and back again, visits meanwhile
+the nether world, shows the prince his hand scorched by the flames of
+Hell, tells him on behalf of a departed spirit certain secrets which had
+been communicated to the latter, exhorts him to lay aside his cruelty,
+and dies soon after from the effects of the fright. Lib. ii. c. 19, iii.
+15, v. 23: Ghosts of departed friends, of St. Cataldus, and of unknown
+beings in Rome, Arezzo and Naples. Lib. ii. 22, iii. 8: Appearances of
+mermen and mermaids at Naples, in Spain, and in the Peloponnesus; in the
+latter case guaranteed by Theodore Gaza and George of Trebizond.
+
+[1216] Gio. Villani, xi. 2. He had it from the Abbot of Vallombrosa, to
+whom the hermit had communicated it.
+
+[1217] Another view of the Dæmons was given by Gemisthos Pletho, whose
+great philosophical work οἱ νὁμοι, of which only fragments are now left
+(ed. Alexander, Paris, 1858), was probably known more fully to the
+Italians of the fifteenth century, either by means of copies or of
+tradition, and exercised undoubtedly a great influence on the
+philosophical, political, and religious culture of the time. According
+to him the dæmons, who belong to the third order of the gods, are
+preserved from all error, and are capable of following in the steps of
+the gods who stand above them; they are spirits who bring to men the
+good things ‘which come down from Zeus through the other gods in order;
+they purify and watch over man, they raise and strengthen his heart.’
+Comp. Fritz Schultze, _Gesch. der Philosophie der Renaissance_, Jena,
+1874.
+
+[1218] Yet but little remained of the wonders attributed to her. For
+probably the last metamorphosis of a man into an ass, in the eleventh
+century under Leo IX., see Giul. Malmesbur. ii. 171.
+
+[1219] This was probably the case with the possessed woman, who in 1513
+at Ferrara and elsewhere was consulted by distinguished Lombards as to
+future events. Her name was Rodogine. See Rabelais, _Pantagruel_, iv.
+58.
+
+[1220] Jovian. Pontan. Antonius.
+
+[1221] How widespread the belief in witches then was, is shown by the
+fact that in 1483 Politian gave a ‘praelectio’ ‘in priora Aristotelis
+Analytica cui titulus Lamia’ (Italian trans. by Isidore del Lungo, Flor.
+1864) Comp. Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 75-77. Fiesole, according to this,
+was, in a certain sense, a witches’ nest.
+
+[1222] Graziani, _Arch. Stor._ xvi. i. p. 565, ad a. 1445, speaking of a
+witch at Nocera, who only offered half the sum, and was accordingly
+burnt. The law was aimed at such persons as ‘facciono le fature overo
+venefitie overo encantatione d’ommunde spirite a nuocere,’ l. c. note 1,
+2.
+
+[1223] Lib. i. ep. 46, _Opera_, p. 531 sqq. For ‘umbra’ p. 552 read
+‘Umbria,’ and for ‘lacum’ read ‘locum.’
+
+[1224] He calls him later on: ‘Medicus Ducis Saxoniæ, homo tum dives tum
+potens.’
+
+[1225] In the fourteenth century there existed a kind of hell-gate near
+Ansedonia in Tuscany. It was a cave, with footprints of men and animals
+in the sand, which whenever they were effaced, reappeared the next day.
+Uberti. _Il Dittamondo_, l. iii. cap. 9.
+
+[1226] _Pii II. Comment._ l. i. p. 10.
+
+[1227] Benv. Cellini, l. i. cap. 65.
+
+[1228] _L’Italia Liberata da’ Goti_, canto xiv. It may be questioned
+whether Trissino himself believed in the possibility of his description,
+or whether he was not rather romancing. The same doubt is permissible in
+the case of his probable model, Lucan (book vi.), who represents the
+Thessalian witch conjuring up a corpse before Sextus Pompejus.
+
+[1229] _Septimo Decretal_, lib. v. tit. xii. It begins: ‘Summis
+desiderantes affectibus’ &c. I may here remark that a full consideration
+of the subject has convinced me that there are in this case no grounds
+for believing in a survival of pagan beliefs. To satisfy ourselves that
+the imagination of the mendicant friars is solely responsible for this
+delusion, we have only to study, in the Memoirs of Jacques du Clerc, the
+so-called trial of the Waldenses of Arras in the year 1459. A century’s
+prosecutions and persecutions brought the popular imagination into such
+a state that witchcraft was accepted as a matter of course and
+reproduced itself naturally.
+
+[1230] Of Alexander VI., Leo X., Hadrian VI.
+
+[1231] Proverbial as the country of witches, e.g. _Orlandino_, i. 12.
+
+[1232] E.g. Bandello, iii. nov. 29, 52. Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. 409.
+Bursellis, _Ann. Bon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 897, mentions the
+condemnation of a prior in 1468, who kept a ghostly brothel: ‘cives
+Bononienses coire faciebat cum dæmonibus in specie puellarum.’ He
+offered sacrifices to the dæmons. See for a parallel case, Procop.
+_Hist. Arcana_, c. 12, where a real brothel is frequented by a dæmon,
+who turns the other visitors out of doors. The Galateo (p. 116) confirms
+the existence of the belief in witches: ‘volare per longinquas regiones,
+choreas per paludes dicere et dæmonibus cnogredi, ingredi et egredi per
+clausa ostia et foramina.’
+
+[1233] For the loathsome apparatus of the witches’ kitchens, see
+_Maccaroneide_, Phant. xvi. xxi., where the whole procedure is
+described.
+
+[1234] In the _Ragionamento del Zoppino_. He is of opinion that the
+courtesans learn their arts from certain Jewish women, who are in
+possession of ‘malie.’ The following passage is very remarkable. Bembo
+says in the life of Guidobaldo (_Opera_, i. 614): ‘Guid. constat sive
+corporis et naturae vitio, seu quod vulgo creditum est, actibus magicis
+ab Octaviano patruo propter regni cupiditatem impeditum, quarum omnino
+ille artium expeditissimus habebatur, nulla cum femina coire unquam in
+tota vita potuisse, nec unquam fuisse ad rem uxoriam idoneum.’
+
+[1235] Varchi, _Stor. Fior._ ii. p. 153.
+
+[1236] Curious information is given by Landi, in the _Commentario_, fol.
+36 a and 37 _a_, about two magicians, a Sicilian and a Jew; we read of
+magical mirrors, of a death’s-head speaking, and of birds stopped short
+in their flight.
+
+[1237] Stress is laid on this reservation. Corn. Agrippa, _De Occulta
+Philosophia_, cap. 39.
+
+[1238] _Septimo Decretal_, l. c.
+
+[1239] _Zodiacus Vitae_, xv. 363-549, comp. x. 393 sqq.
+
+[1240] _Ibid._ ix. 291 sqq.
+
+[1241] _Ibid._ x. 770 sqq.
+
+[1242] The mythical type of the magician among the poets of the time was
+Malagigi. Speaking of him, Pulci (_Morgante_, canto xxiv. 106 sqq.)
+gives his theoretical view of the limits of dæmonic and magic influence.
+It is hard to say how far he was in earnest. Comp. canto xxi.
+
+[1243] Polydorus Virgilius was an Italian by birth, but his work _De
+Prodigiis_ treats chiefly of superstition in England, where his life was
+passed. Speaking of the prescience of the dæmons, he makes a curious
+reference to the sack of Rome in 1527.
+
+[1244] Yet murder is hardly ever the end, and never, perhaps, the means.
+A monster like Gilles de Retz (about 1440) who sacrificed more than 100
+children to the dæmons has scarcely a distant counterpart in Italy.
+
+[1245] See the treatise of Roth ‘Ueber den Zauberer Virgilius’ in
+Pfeiffer’s _Germania_, iv., and Comparetti’s _Virgil in the Middle
+Ages_. That Virgil began to take the place of the older Telestæ may be
+explained partly by the fact that the frequent visits made to his grave
+even in the time of the Empire struck the popular imagination.
+
+[1246] Uberti, _Dittamondo_, 1. iii. cap. 4.
+
+[1247] For what follows, see Gio. Villani, i. 42, 60, ii. 1, iii. v. 38,
+xi. He himself does not believe such godless superstitions. Comp. Dante,
+_Inferno_ xiii. 146.
+
+[1248] According to a fragment given in Baluz. Miscell ix. 119, the
+Perugians had a quarrel in ancient times with the Ravennates, ‘et
+militem marmoreum qui juxta Ravennam se continue volvebat ad solem
+usurpaverunt et ad eorum civitatem virtuosissime transtulerunt.’
+
+[1249] The local belief on the matter is given in _Annal. Forolivens_.
+Murat. xxii. col. 207, 238; more fully in Fil. Villani, _Vite_, p 33.
+
+[1250] Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 320: ‘Veteres potius hac in re quam
+Petrum, Anacletum, et Linum imitatus.’
+
+[1251] Which it is easy to recognise e.g. in Sugerius, _De Consecratione
+Ecclesiae_ (Duchesne, _Scriptores_, iv. 355) and in _Chron.
+Petershusanum_, i. 13 and 16.
+
+[1252] Comp. the _Calandra_ of Bibiena.
+
+[1253] Bandello, iii. nov. 52. Fr. Filelfo (_Epist. Venet._ lib. 34,
+fol. 240 sqq.) attacks nercromancy fiercely. He is tolerably free from
+superstition (_Sat._ iv. 4) but believes in the ‘mali effectus,’ of a
+comet (_Epist._ fol. 246 _b_).
+
+[1254] Bandello, iii. 29. The magician exacts a promise of secrecy
+strengthened by solemn oaths, in this case by an oath at the high altar
+of S. Petronio at Bologna, at a time when no one else was in the church.
+There is a good deal of magic in the _Maccaroneide_, Phant. xviii.
+
+[1255] Benv. Cellini, i. cap. 64.
+
+[1256] Vasari, viii. 143, _Vita di Andrea da Fiesole_. It was Silvio
+Cosini, who also ‘went after magical formulæ and other follies.’
+
+[1257] Uberti, _Dittamondo_, iii. cap. 1. In the March of Ancona he
+visits Scariotto, the supposed birthplace of Judas, and observes: ‘I
+must not here pass over Mount Pilatus, with its lake, where throughout
+the summer the guards are changed regularly. For he who understands
+magic comes up hither to have his books consecrated, whereupon, as the
+people of the place say, a great storm arises.’ (The consecration of
+books, as has been remarked, p. 527, is a special ceremony, distinct
+from the rest.) In the sixteenth century the ascent of Pilatus near
+Luzern was forbidden ‘by lib und guot,’ as Diebold Schilling records. It
+was believed that a ghost lay in the lake on the mountain, which was the
+spirit of Pilate. When people ascended the mountain or threw anything
+into the lake, fearful storms sprang up.
+
+[1258] _De Obsedione Tiphernatium_, 1474 (Rer. Ital. Scrippt. ex
+Florent. codicibus, tom. ii.).
+
+[1259] This superstition, which was widely spread among the soldiery
+(about 1520), is ridiculed by Limerno Pitocco, in the _Orlandino_, v.
+60.
+
+[1260] Paul. Jov. _Elog. Lit._ p. 106, sub voce ‘Cocles.’
+
+[1261] It is the enthusiastic collector of portraits who is here
+speaking.
+
+[1262] From the stars, since Gauricus did not know physiognomy. For his
+own fate he had to refer to the prophecies of Cocle, since his father
+had omitted to draw his horoscope.
+
+[1263] Paul. Jov. l. c. p. 100 sqq. s. v. Tibertus.
+
+[1264] The most essential facts as to these side-branches of divination,
+are given by Corn. Agrippa, _De Occulta Philosophia_, cap. 57.
+
+[1265] Libri, _Hist. des Sciences Mathém._ ii. 122.
+
+[1266] ‘Novi nihil narro, mos est publicus’ (_Remed. Utr. Fort._ p. 93),
+one of the lively passages of this book, written ‘ab irato.’
+
+[1267] Chief passage in Trithem. _Ann. Hirsaug._ ii. 286 sqq.
+
+[1268] ‘Neque enim desunt,’ Paul. Jov. _Elog. Lit._ p. 150, s. v. ‘Pomp,
+Gauricus;’ comp. ibid. p. 130, s. v. Aurel. Augurellus, _Maccaroneide_.
+Phant. xii.
+
+[1269] In writing a history of Italian unbelief it would be necessary to
+refer to the so-called Averrhoism, which was prevalent in Italy and
+especially in Venice, about the middle of the fourteenth century. It was
+opposed by Boccaccio and Petrarch in various letters, and by the latter
+in his work: _De Sui Ipsius et Aliorum Ignorantia_. Although Petrarch’s
+opposition may have been increased by misunderstanding and exaggeration,
+he was nevertheless fully convinced that the Averrhoists ridiculed and
+rejected the Christian religion.
+
+[1270] Ariosto, _Sonetto_, 34: ‘Non credere sopra il tetto.’ The poet
+uses the words of an official who had decided against him in a matter of
+property.
+
+[1271] We may here again refer to Gemisthos Plethon, whose disregard of
+Christianity had an important influence on the Italians, and
+particularly on the Florentines of that period.
+
+[1272] _Narrazione del Caso del Boscoli, Arch. Stor._ i. 273 sqq. The
+standing phrase was ‘non aver fede;’ comp. Vasari, vii. 122, _Vita di
+Piero di Cosimo_.
+
+[1273] Jovian. Pontan. _Charon_, _Opp._ ii. 1128-1195.
+
+[1274] _Faustini Terdocei Triumphus Stultitiae_, l. ii.
+
+[1275] E.g. Borbone Morosini about 1460; comp. Sansovino, _Venezia_ l.
+xiii. p. 243. He wrote ‘de immortalite animæ ad mentem Aristotelis.’
+Pomponius Lætus, as a means of effecting his release from prison,
+pointed to the fact that he had written an epistle on the immortality of
+the soul. See the remarkable defence in Gregorovius, vii. 580 sqq. See
+on the other hand Pulci’s ridicule of this belief in a sonnet, quoted by
+Galeotti, _Arch. Stor. Ital._ n. s. ix. 49 sqq.
+
+[1276] _Vespas. Fiorent._ p. 260.
+
+[1277] _Orationes Philelphi_, fol. 8.
+
+[1278] _Septimo Decretal._ lib. v. tit. iii. cap. 8.
+
+[1279] Ariosto, _Orlando_, vii. 61. Ridiculed in _Orlandino_, iv. 67,
+68. Cariteo, a member of the Neapolitan Academy of Pontanus, uses the
+idea of the pre-existence of the soul in order to glorify the House of
+Aragon. Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, ii. 288.
+
+[1280] Orelli, ad Cic. _De Republ._ l. vi. Comp. Lucan, _Pharsalia_, at
+the beginning.
+
+[1281] Petrarca, _Epp. Fam._ iv. 3, iv. 6.
+
+[1282] Fil. Villani, _Vite_, p. 15. This remarkable passage is as
+follows: ‘Che agli uomini fortissimi poichè hanno vinto le mostruose
+fatiche della terra, debitamente sieno date le stelle.’
+
+[1283] _Inferno_, iv. 24 sqq. Comp. _Purgatorio_, vii. 28, xxii. 100.
+
+[1284] This pagan heaven is referred to in the epitaph on the artist
+Niccolò dell’Arca:
+
+    ‘Nunc te Praxiteles, Phidias, Polycletus adora
+        Miranturque tuas, o Nicolae, manus.’
+
+In Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ Murat. xxiii. col. 912.
+
+[1285] In his late work _Actius_.
+
+[1286] Cardanus, _De Propria Vita_, cap. 13: ‘Non pœnitere ullius rei
+quam voluntarie effecerim, etiam quæ male cessisset;’ else I should be
+of all men the most miserable.
+
+[1287] _Discorsi_, ii. cap. 2.
+
+[1288] _Del Governo della Famiglia_, p. 114.
+
+[1289] Comp. the short ode of M. Antonio Flaminio in the _Coryciana_
+(see p. 269):
+
+    Dii quibus tam Corycius venusta
+    Signa, tam dives posuit sacellum,
+    Ulla si vestros animos piorum
+        Gratia tangit,
+
+    Vos jocos risusque senis faceti
+    Sospites servate diu; senectam
+    Vos date et semper viridem et Falerno
+        Usque madentem.
+
+    At simul longo satiatus ævo
+    Liquerit terras, dapibus Deorum
+    Lætus intersit, potiore mutans
+        Nectare Bacchum.
+
+
+[1290] Firenzuola, _Opere_, iv. p. 147 sqq.
+
+[1291] Nic. Valori, _Vita di Lorenzo_, _passim_. For the advice to his
+son Cardinal Giovanni, see Fabroni, _Laurentius_, adnot. 178, and the
+appendices to Roscoe’s _Leo X._
+
+[1292] _Jo. Pici Vita_, auct. Jo. Franc. Pico. For his ‘Deprecatio ad
+Deum,’ see _Deliciae Poetarum Italorum_.
+
+[1293] _Orazione_, Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi viii. 120 (Magno Dio per
+la cui costante legge); hymn (oda il sacro inno tutta la natura) in
+Fabroni,’ _Laur._ adnot. 9; _L’Altercazione_, in the _Poesie di Lor.
+Magn._ i. 265. The other poems here named are quoted in the same
+collection.
+
+[1294] If Pulci in his _Morgante_ is anywhere in earnest with religion,
+he is so in canto xvi. str. 6. This deistic utterance of the fair pagan
+Antea is perhaps the plainest expression of the mode of thought
+prevalent in Lorenzo’s circle, to which tone the words of the dæmon
+Astarotte (quoted above p. 494) form in a certain sense the complement.
+
+
+
+
+Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
+
+belonged orginally to Florentine=> belonged originally to Florentine {pg
+204}
+
+the Citadal of Milan=> the Citadel of Milan {pg 38}
+
+nature of Lndovico Moro=> nature of Ludovico Moro {pg 43}
+
+Die Kriegskunt als Kunst=> Die Kriegskunst als Kunst {pg 98 fn 210}
+
+to to take any interest=> to take any interest {pg 101}
+
+of its vasals, the legitimate=> of its vassals, the legitimate {pg 125}
+
+do so by imfamous deeds=> do so by infamous deeds {pg 152}
+
+forged chroncle of Ricardo Malespini=> forged chronicle of Ricardo
+Malespini {pg 182 fn 420}
+
+fight its way amongt he heathen=> fight its way among the heathen {pg
+206}
+
+to the annoyance of to Petrarch=> to the annoyance of Petrarch {pg 208}
+
+was familar with the writings=> was familiar with the writings {pg 227}
+
+now altogether lose it supremacy=> now altogether lose its supremacy {pg
+255 fn 594}
+
+The plays of Platus and Terence=> The plays of Plautus and Terence {pg
+242}
+
+and minged with the general mourning=> and mingled with the general
+mourning {pg 296}
+
+compelled them for awhile to see=> compelled them for a while to see {pg
+298}
+
+I go for awhile=> I go for a while {pg 336}
+
+Jo. Pici oratio de hominis dignatate=> Jo. Pici oratio de hominis
+dignitate {pg 354 fn 805}
+
+he gives us a humorout description=> he gives us a humorous description
+{pg 387}
+
+Cronaco di Perugia, Arch. Stor.=> Cronaca di Perugia, Arch. Stor. {pg
+413 fn 934}
+
+eyes of Delio and Atellano=> eyes of Delio and Attelano {pg 444}
+
+Guilia Gonzaga, 385;=> Giulia Gonzaga, 385; {pg 552}
+
+futherers of, 217-229.=> furtherers of, 217-229. {pg 554}
+
+Illigitimacy, indifference to, 21, 22.=> Illegitimacy, indifference to,
+21, 22. {pg 554}
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in
+Italy, by Jacob Burckhardt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, by 
+Jacob Burckhardt
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
+
+Author: Jacob Burckhardt
+
+Translator: S. G. C. (Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore)
+
+Release Date: October 20, 2014 [EBook #2074]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CIVILISATION OF THE RENAISSANCE  ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
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+
+
+                                  THE
+                          CIVILISATION OF THE
+                              RENAISSANCE
+                               IN ITALY
+
+                                  By
+                           JACOB BURCKHARDT
+                       AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY
+                          S. G. C. MIDDLEMORE
+
+                   LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
+                    NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+Dr. BURCKHARDT'S work on the Renaissance in Italy is too well known, not
+only to students of the period, but now to a wider circle of readers,
+for any introduction to be necessary. The increased interest which has
+of late years, in England, been taken in this and kindred subjects, and
+the welcome which has been given to the works of other writers upon
+them, encourage me to hope that in publishing this translation I am
+meeting a want felt by some who are either unable to read German at all,
+or to whom an English version will save a good deal of time and trouble.
+
+The translation is made from the third edition of the original, recently
+published in Germany, with slight additions to the text, and large
+additions to the notes, by Dr. LUDWIG GEIGER, of Berlin. It also
+contains some fresh matter communicated by Dr. BURCKHARDT to Professor
+DIEGO VALBUSA of Mantua, the Italian translator of the book. To all
+three gentlemen my thanks are due for courtesy shown, or help given to
+me in the course of my work.
+
+In a few cases, where Dr. GEIGER'S view differs from that taken by Dr.
+BURCKHARDT, I have called attention to the fact by bracketing Dr.
+GEIGER'S opinion and adding his initials.
+
+THE TRANSLATOR.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+_THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART_
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+Political condition of Italy in the thirteenth century                 4
+
+The Norman State under Frederick II.                                   5
+
+Ezzelino da Romano                                                     7
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+Finance and its relation to culture                                    8
+
+The ideal of the absolute ruler                                        9
+
+Inward and outward dangers                                            10
+
+Florentine estimate of the tyrants                                    11
+
+The Visconti                                                          12
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+Intervention and visits of the emperors                               18
+
+Want of a fixed law of succession. Illegitimacy                       20
+
+Founding of States by Condottieri                                     22
+
+Relations of Condottieri to their employers                           23
+
+The family of Sforza                                                  24
+
+Giacomo Piccinino                                                     25
+
+Later attempts of the Condottieri                                     26
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE PETTY TYRANNIES.
+
+The Baglioni of Perugia                                               28
+
+Massacre in the year 1500                                             31
+
+Malatesta, Pico, and Petrucci                                         33
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE GREATER DYNASTIES.
+
+The Aragonese at Naples                                               35
+
+The last Visconti at Milan                                            38
+
+Francesco Sforza and his luck                                         39
+
+Galeazzo Maria and Ludovic Moro                                       40
+
+The Gonzaga at Mantua                                                 43
+
+Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino                               44
+
+The Este at Ferrara                                                   46
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.
+
+The later Guelphs and Ghibellines                                     55
+
+The conspirators                                                      56
+
+Murders in church                                                     57
+
+Influence of ancient tyrannicide                                      57
+
+Catiline as an ideal                                                  59
+
+Florentine view of tyrannicide                                        59
+
+The people and tyrannicide                                            60
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.
+
+Venice in the fifteenth century                                       62
+
+The inhabitants                                                       63
+
+Dangers from the poor nobility                                        64
+
+Causes of the stability of Venice                                     65
+
+The Council of Ten and political trials                               66
+
+Relations with the Condottieri                                        67
+
+Optimism of Venetian foreign policy                                   68
+
+Venice as the home of statistics                                      69
+
+Retardation of the Renaissance                                        71
+
+Medi�val devotion to reliques                                         72
+
+Florence from the fourteenth century                                  73
+
+Objectivity of political intelligence                                 74
+
+Dante as a politician                                                 75
+
+Florence as the home of statistics: the two Villanis                  76
+
+Higher form of statistics                                             77
+
+Florentine constitutions and the historians                           82
+
+Fundamental vice of the State                                         82
+
+Political theorists                                                   83
+
+Macchiavelli and his views                                            84
+
+Siena and Genoa                                                       86
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.
+
+Envy felt towards Venice                                              88
+
+Relations to other countries: sympathy with France                    89
+
+Plan for a balance of power                                           90
+
+Foreign intervention and conquests                                    91
+
+Alliances with the Turks                                              92
+
+Counter-influence of Spain                                            94
+
+Objective treatment of politics                                       95
+
+Art of diplomacy                                                      96
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+WAR AS A WORK OF ART.
+
+Firearms                                                              98
+
+Professional warriors and dilettanti                                  99
+
+Horrors of war                                                       101
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.
+
+Relation of the Papacy to Italy and foreign countries                103
+
+Disturbances in Rome from the time of Nicholas V.                    104
+
+Sixtus IV. master of Rome                                            105
+
+States of the Nipoti in Romagna                                      107
+
+Cardinals belonging to princely houses                               107
+
+Innocent VIII. and his son                                           108
+
+Alexander VI. as a Spaniard                                          109
+
+Relations with foreign countries                                     110
+
+Simony                                                               111
+
+C�sar Borgia and his relations to his father                         111
+
+C�sar's plans and acts                                               112
+
+Julius II. as Saviour of the Papacy                                  117
+
+Leo X. His relations with other States                               120
+
+Adrian VI.                                                           121
+
+Clement VII. and the sack of Rome                                    122
+
+Reaction consequent on the latter                                    123
+
+The Papacy of the Counter-Reformation                                124
+
+Conclusion. The Italian patriots                                     125
+
+
+PART II.
+
+_THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+The medi�val man                                                     129
+
+The awakening of personality                                         129
+
+The despot and his subjects                                          130
+
+Individualism in the Republics                                       131
+
+Exile and cosmopolitanism                                            132
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+The many-sided men                                                   134
+
+The universal men                                                    136
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME.
+
+Dante's feeling about fame                                           139
+
+The celebrity of the Humanists: Petrarch                             141
+
+Cultus of birthplace and graves                                      142
+
+Cultus of the famous men of antiquity                                143
+
+Literature of local fame: Padua                                      143
+
+Literature of universal fame                                         146
+
+Fame given or refused by the writers                                 150
+
+Morbid passion for fame                                              152
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MODERN WIT AND SATIRE.
+
+Its connection with individualism                                    154
+
+Florentine wit: the novel                                            155
+
+Jesters and buffoons                                                 156
+
+Leo X. and his witticisms                                            157
+
+Poetical parodies                                                    158
+
+Theory of wit                                                        159
+
+Railing and reviling                                                 161
+
+Adrian VI. as scapegoat                                              162
+
+Pietro Aretino                                                       164
+
+
+PART III.
+
+_THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
+
+Widened application of the word 'Renaissance'                        171
+
+Antiquity in the Middle Ages                                         172
+
+Latin poetry of the twelfth century in Italy                         173
+
+The spirit of the fourteenth century                                 175
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+ROME, THE CITY OF RUINS.
+
+Dante, Petrarch, Uberti                                              177
+
+Rome at the time of Poggio                                           179
+
+Nicholas V., and Pius II. as an antiquarian                          180
+
+Antiquity outside Rome                                               181
+
+Affiliation of families and cities on Rome                           182
+
+The Roman corpse                                                     183
+
+Excavations and architectural plans                                  184
+
+Rome under Leo X.                                                    184
+
+Sentimental effect of ruins                                          185
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE OLD AUTHORS.
+
+Their diffusion in the fourteenth century                            187
+
+Discoveries in the fifteenth century                                 188
+
+The libraries                                                        189
+
+Copyists and 'Scrittori'                                             192
+
+Printing                                                             194
+
+Greek scholarship                                                    195
+
+Oriental scholarship                                                 197
+
+Pico's view of antiquity                                             202
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+Its inevitable victory                                               203
+
+Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio                                       205
+
+Coronation of the poets                                              207
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS.
+
+Position of the Humanists at the Universities                        211
+
+Latin schools                                                        213
+
+Freer education: Vittorino da Feltre                                 213
+
+Guarino of Verona                                                    215
+
+The education of princes                                             216
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE FURTHERERS OF HUMANISM.
+
+Florentine citizens: Niccoli and Manetti                             217
+
+The earlier Medici                                                   220
+
+Humanism at the Courts                                               222
+
+The Popes from Nicholas V. onwards                                   223
+
+Alfonso of Naples                                                    225
+
+Frederick of Urbino                                                  227
+
+The Houses of Sforza and Este                                        227
+
+Sigismodo Malatesta                                                  228
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUITY. LATIN CORRESPONDENCE AND ORATIONS.
+
+The Papal Chancery                                                   230
+
+Letter-writing                                                       232
+
+The orators                                                          233
+
+Political, diplomatic, and funeral orations                          236
+
+Academic and military speeches                                       237
+
+Latin sermons                                                        238
+
+Form and matter of the speeches                                      239
+
+Passion for quotation                                                240
+
+Imaginary speeches                                                   241
+
+Decline of eloquence                                                 242
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+LATIN TREATISES AND HISTORY.
+
+Value of Latin                                                       243
+
+Researches on the Middle Ages: Blondus                               245
+
+Histories in Italian; their antique spirit                           246
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+GENERAL LATINISATION OF CULTURE.
+
+Ancient names                                                        250
+
+Latinised social relations                                           251
+
+Claims of Latin to supremacy                                         252
+
+Cicero and the Ciceronians                                           253
+
+Latin conversation                                                   254
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MODERN LATIN POETRY.
+
+Epic poems on ancient history: The 'Africa'                          258
+
+Mythic poetry                                                        259
+
+Christian epics: Sannazaro                                           260
+
+Poetry on contemporary subjects                                      261
+
+Introduction of mythology                                            262
+
+Didactic poetry: Palingenius                                         263
+
+Lyric poetry and its limits                                          264
+
+Odes on the saints                                                   265
+
+Elegies and the like                                                 266
+
+The epigram                                                          267
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+FALL OF THE HUMANISTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+The accusations and the amount of truth they contained               272
+
+Misery of the scholars                                               277
+
+Type of the happy scholar                                            278
+
+Pomponius Laetus                                                     279
+
+The Academies                                                        280
+
+PART IV.
+
+_THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+JOURNEYS OF THE ITALIANS.
+
+Columbus                                                             286
+
+Cosmographical purpose in travel                                     287
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+NATURAL SCIENCE IN ITALY.
+
+Empirical tendency of the nation                                     289
+
+Dante and astronomy                                                  290
+
+Attitude of the Church towards natural science                       290
+
+Influence of Humanism                                                291
+
+Botany and gardens                                                   292
+
+Zoology and collections of foreign animals                           293
+
+Human menagerie of Ippolito Medici                                   296
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL BEAUTY.
+
+Landscapes in the Middle Ages                                        299
+
+Petrarch and his ascents of mountains                                301
+
+Uberti's 'Dittamondo'                                                302
+
+The Flemish school of painting                                       302
+
+�neas Sylvius and his descriptions                                   303
+
+Nature in the poets and novelists                                    305
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF MAN.--SPIRITUAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY.
+
+Popular psychological ground-work. The temperaments                  309
+
+Value of unrhymed poetry                                             310
+
+Value of the Sonnet                                                  310
+
+Dante and the 'Vita Nuova'                                           312
+
+The 'Divine Comedy'                                                  312
+
+Petrarch as a painter of the soul                                    314
+
+Boccaccio and the Fiammetta                                          315
+
+Feeble development of tragedy                                        315
+
+Scenic splendour, the enemy of the drama                             316
+
+The intermezzo and the ballet                                        317
+
+Comedies and masques                                                 320
+
+Compensation afforded by music                                       321
+
+Epic romances                                                        321
+
+Necessary subordination of the descriptions of character             323
+
+Pulci and Bojardo                                                    323
+
+Inner law of their compositions                                      324
+
+Ariosto and his style                                                325
+
+Folengo and parody                                                   326
+
+Contrast offered by Tasso                                            327
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+BIOGRAPHY.
+
+Advance of Italy on the Middle Ages                                  328
+
+Tuscan biographers                                                   330
+
+Biography in other parts of Italy                                    332
+
+Autobiography; �neas Sylvius                                         333
+
+Benvenuto Cellini                                                    333
+
+Girolamo Cardano                                                     334
+
+Luigi Cornaro                                                        335
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE DESCRIPTION OF NATIONS AND CITIES.
+
+The 'Dittamondo'                                                     339
+
+Descriptions in the sixteenth century                                339
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTWARD MAN.
+
+Boccaccio on Beauty                                                  344
+
+Ideal of Firenzuola                                                  345
+
+His general definitions                                              345
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+DESCRIPTIONS OF LIFE IN MOVEMENT.
+
+�neas Sylvius and others                                             349
+
+Conventional bucolic poetry from the time of Petrarch                350
+
+Genuine poetic treatment of country life                             351
+
+Battista Mantovano, Lorenzo Magnifico, Pulci                         352
+
+Angelo Poliziano                                                     353
+
+Man, and the conception of humanity                                  354
+
+Pico della Mirandola on the dignity of man                           354
+
+
+PART V.
+
+_SOCIETY AND FESTIVALS._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE EQUALISATION OF CLASSES.
+
+Contrast to the Middle Ages                                          359
+
+Common life of nobles and burghers in the cities                     359
+
+Theoretical criticism of noble birth                                 360
+
+The nobles in different parts of Italy                               362
+
+The nobility and culture                                             363
+
+Bad influence of Spain                                               363
+
+Knighthood since the Middle Ages                                     364
+
+The tournaments and the caricature of them                           365
+
+Noble birth as a requisite of the courtier                           367
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+OUTWARD REFINEMENT OF LIFE.
+
+Costume and fashions                                                 369
+
+The toilette of women                                                371
+
+Cleanliness                                                          374
+
+The 'Galateo' and good manners                                       375
+
+Comfort and elegance                                                 376
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LANGUAGE AS THE BASIS OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.
+
+Development of an ideal language                                     378
+
+Its wide diffusion                                                   379
+
+The Purists                                                          379
+
+Their want of success                                                382
+
+Conversation                                                         383
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE HIGHER FORMS OF SOCIETY.
+
+Rules and statutes                                                   384
+
+The novelists and their society                                      384
+
+The great lady and the drawing-room                                  385
+
+Florentine society                                                   386
+
+Lorenzo's descriptions of his own circle                             387
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE PERFECT MAN OF SOCIETY.
+
+His love-making                                                      388
+
+His outward and spiritual accomplishments                            389
+
+Bodily exercises                                                     389
+
+Music                                                                390
+
+The instruments and the Virtuosi                                     392
+
+Musical dilettantism in society                                      393
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
+
+Their masculine education and poetry                                 396
+
+Completion of their personality                                      397
+
+The Virago                                                           398
+
+Women in society                                                     399
+
+The culture of the prostitutes                                       399
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+DOMESTIC ECONOMY.
+
+Contrast to the Middle Ages                                          402
+
+Agnolo Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti)                                    402
+
+The villa and country life                                           404
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE FESTIVALS.
+
+Their origin in the mystery and the procession                       406
+
+Advantages over foreign countries                                    408
+
+Historical representatives of abstractions                           409
+
+The Mysteries                                                        411
+
+Corpus Christi at Viterbo                                            414
+
+Secular representations                                              415
+
+Pantomimes and princely receptions                                   417
+
+Processions and religious Trionfi                                    419
+
+Secular Trionfi                                                      420
+
+Regattas and processions on water                                    424
+
+The Carnival at Rome and Florence                                    426
+
+
+PART VI.
+
+_MORALITY AND RELIGION._
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MORALITY.
+
+Limits of criticism                                                  431
+
+Italian consciousness of demoralization                              432
+
+The modern sense of honour                                           433
+
+Power of the imagination                                             435
+
+The passion for gambling and for vengeance                           436
+
+Breach of the marriage tie                                           441
+
+Position of the married woman                                        442
+
+Spiritualization of love                                             445
+
+General emancipation from moral restraints                           446
+
+Brigandage                                                           448
+
+Paid assassination: poisoning                                        450
+
+Absolute wickedness                                                  453
+
+Morality and individualism                                           454
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.
+
+Lack of a reformation                                                457
+
+Relations of the Italian to the Church                               457
+
+Hatred of the hierarchy and the monks                                458
+
+The mendicant orders                                                 462
+
+The Dominican Inquisition                                            462
+
+The higher monastic orders                                           463
+
+Sense of dependence on the Church                                    465
+
+The preachers of repentance                                          466
+
+Girolamo Savonarola                                                  473
+
+Pagan elements in popular belief                                     479
+
+Faith in reliques                                                    481
+
+Mariolatry                                                           483
+
+Oscillations in public opinion                                       485
+
+Epidemic religious revivals                                          485
+
+Their regulation by the police at Ferrara                            487
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+RELIGION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
+
+Inevitable subjectivity                                              490
+
+Worldliness                                                          492
+
+Tolerance of Mohammedanism                                           492
+
+Equivalence of all religions                                         494
+
+Influence of antiquity                                               495
+
+The so-called Epicureans                                             496
+
+The doctrine of free will                                            497
+
+The pious Humanists                                                  499
+
+The less pronounced Humanists                                        499
+
+Codrus Urceus                                                        500
+
+The beginnings of religious criticism                                501
+
+Fatalism of the Humanists                                            503
+
+Their pagan exterior                                                 504
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITIONS.
+
+Astrology                                                            507
+
+Its extension and influence                                          508
+
+Its opponents in Italy                                               515
+
+Pico's opposition and influence                                      516
+
+Various superstitions                                                518
+
+Superstition of the Humanists                                        519
+
+Ghosts of the departed                                               522
+
+Belief in d�mons                                                     523
+
+The Italian witch                                                    524
+
+Witches' nest at Norcia                                              526
+
+Influence and limits of Northern witchcraft                          528
+
+Witchcraft of the prostitutes                                        529
+
+The magicians and enchanters                                         530
+
+The d�mons on the way to Rome                                        531
+
+Special forms of magic: the Telesmata                                533
+
+Magic at the laying of foundation-stones                             534
+
+The necromancer in poetry                                            535
+
+Benvenuto Cellini's tale                                             536
+
+Decline of magic                                                     537
+
+Special branches of the superstition                                 538
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+GENERAL DISINTEGRATION OF BELIEF.
+
+Last confession of Boscoli                                           543
+
+Religious disorder and general scepticism                            543
+
+Controversy as to immortality                                        545
+
+The pagan heaven                                                     545
+
+The Homeric life to come                                             546
+
+Evaporation of Christian doctrine                                    547
+
+Italian Thei                                                         548
+
+
+
+
+_PART I._
+
+THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+This work bears the title of an essay in the strictest sense of the
+word. No one is more conscious than the writer with what limited means
+and strength he has addressed himself to a task so arduous. And even if
+he could look with greater confidence upon his own researches, he would
+hardly thereby feel more assured of the approval of competent judges. To
+each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilisation present a
+different picture; and in treating of a civilisation which is the mother
+of our own, and whose influence is still at work among us, it is
+unavoidable that individual judgment and feeling should tell every
+moment both on the writer and on the reader. In the wide ocean upon
+which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the
+same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other
+hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application,
+but lead also to essentially different conclusions. Such indeed is the
+importance of the subject, that it still calls for fresh investigation,
+and may be studied with advantage from the most varied points of view.
+Meanwhile we are content if a patient hearing be granted us, and if this
+book be taken and judged as a whole. It is the most serious difficulty
+of the history of civilisation that a great intellectual process must be
+broken up into single, and often into what seem arbitrary categories, in
+order to be in any way intelligible. It was formerly our intention to
+fill up the gaps in this book by a special work on the 'Art of the
+Renaissance,'--an intention, however, which we have been able only to
+fulfil[1] in part.
+
+The struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen left Italy in a
+political condition which differed essentially from that of other
+countries of the West. While in France, Spain and England the feudal
+system was so organised that, at the close of its existence, it was
+naturally transformed into a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it
+helped to maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy
+had shaken it off almost entirely. The Emperors of the fourteenth
+century, even in the most favourable case, were no longer received and
+respected as feudal lords, but as possible leaders and supporters of
+powers already in existence; while the Papacy,[2] with its creatures and
+allies, was strong enough to hinder national unity in the future, not
+strong enough itself to bring about that unity. Between the two lay a
+multitude of political units--republics and despots--in part of long
+standing, in part of recent origin, whose existence was founded simply
+on their power to maintain it.[3] In them for the first time we detect
+the modern political spirit of Europe, surrendered freely to its own
+instincts, often displaying the worst features of an unbridled egoism,
+outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture.
+But, wherever this vicious tendency is overcome or in any way
+compensated, a new fact appears in history--the state as the outcome of
+reflection and calculation, the state as a work of art. This new life
+displays itself in a hundred forms, both in the republican and in the
+despotic states, and determines their inward constitution, no less than
+their foreign policy. We shall limit ourselves to the consideration of
+the completer and more clearly defined type, which is offered by the
+despotic states.
+
+The internal condition of the despotically governed states had a
+memorable counterpart in the Norman Empire of Lower Italy and Sicily,
+after its transformation by the Emperor Frederick II.[4] Bred amid
+treason and peril in the neighbourhood of the Saracens, Frederick, the
+first ruler of the modern type who sat upon a throne, had early
+accustomed himself, both in criticism and action, to a thoroughly
+objective treatment of affairs. His acquaintance with the internal
+condition and administration of the Saracenic states was close and
+intimate; and the mortal struggle in which he was engaged with the
+Papacy compelled him, no less than his adversaries, to bring into the
+field all the resources at his command. Frederick's measures (especially
+after the year 1231) are aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal
+state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of
+will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree
+to the exchequer. He centralised, in a manner hitherto unknown in the
+West, the whole judicial and political administration by establishing
+the right of appeal from the feudal courts, which he did not, however,
+abolish, to the imperial judges. No office was henceforth to be filled
+by popular election, under penalty of the devastation of the offending
+district and of the enslavement of its inhabitants. Excise duties were
+introduced; the taxes, based on a comprehensive assessment, and
+distributed in accordance with Mohammedan usages, were collected by
+those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is
+impossible to obtain any money from Orientals. Here, in short, we find,
+not a people, but simply a disciplined multitude of subjects; who were
+forbidden, for example, to marry out of the country without special
+permission, and under no circumstances were allowed to study abroad. The
+University of Naples was the first we know of to restrict the freedom of
+study, while the East, in these respects at all events, left its youth
+unfettered. It was after the example of Mohammedan rulers that Frederick
+traded on his own account in all parts of the Mediterranean, reserving
+to himself the monopoly of many commodities, and restricting in various
+ways the commerce of his subjects. The Fatimite Caliphs, with all their
+esoteric unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of
+the differences in the religious faith of their people; Frederick, on
+the other hand, crowned his system of government by a religious
+inquisition, which will seem the more reprehensible when we remember
+that in the persons of the heretics he was persecuting the
+representatives of a free municipal life. Lastly, the internal police,
+and the kernel of the army for foreign service, was composed of Saracens
+who had been brought over from Sicily to Nocera and Luceria--men who
+were deaf to the cry of misery and careless of the ban of the Church. At
+a later period the subjects, by whom the use of weapons had long been
+forgotten, were passive witnesses of the fall of Manfred and of the
+seizure of the government by Charles of Anjou; the latter continued to
+use the system which he found already at work.
+
+At the side of the centralising Emperor appeared an usurper of the most
+peculiar kind: his vicar and son-in-law, Ezzelino da Romano. He stands
+as the representative of no system of government or administration, for
+all his activity was wasted in struggles for supremacy in the eastern
+part of Upper Italy; but as a political type he was a figure of no less
+importance for the future than his imperial protector Frederick. The
+conquests and usurpations which had hitherto taken place in the Middle
+Ages rested on real or pretended inheritance and other such claims, or
+else were effected against unbelievers and excommunicated persons. Here
+for the first time the attempt was openly made to found a throne by
+wholesale murder and endless barbarities, by the adoption, in short, of
+any means with a view to nothing but the end pursued. None of his
+successors, not even C�sar Borgia, rivalled the colossal guilt of
+Ezzelino; but the example once set was not forgotten, and his fall led
+to no return of justice among the nations, and served as no warning to
+future transgressors.
+
+It was in vain at such a time that St. Thomas Aquinas, a born subject of
+Frederick, set up the theory of a constitutional monarchy, in which the
+prince was to be supported by an upper house named by himself, and a
+representative body elected by the people; in vain did he concede to
+the people the right of revolution.[5] Such theories found no echo
+outside the lecture-room, and Frederick and Ezzelino were and remain for
+Italy the great political phenomena of the thirteenth century. Their
+personality, already half legendary, forms the most important subject of
+'The Hundred Old Tales,' whose original composition falls certainly
+within this century.[6] In them Frederick is already represented as
+possessing the right to do as he pleased with the property of his
+subjects, and exercises on all, even on criminals, a profound influence
+by the force of his personality; Ezzelino is spoken of with the awe
+which all mighty impressions leave behind them. His person became the
+centre of a whole literature from the chronicle of eyewitnesses to the
+half-mythical tragedy[7] of later poets.
+
+Immediately after the fall of Frederick and Ezzelino, a crowd of tyrants
+appeared upon the scene. The struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline was
+their opportunity. They came forward in general as Ghibelline leaders,
+but at times and under conditions so various that it is impossible not
+to recognise in the fact a law of supreme and universal necessity. The
+means which they used were those already familiar in the party struggles
+of the past--the banishment or destruction of their adversaries and of
+their adversaries' households.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+
+The tyrannies, great and small, of the fourteenth century afford
+constant proof that examples such as these were not thrown away. Their
+misdeeds cried forth loudly and have been circumstantially told by
+historians. As states depending for existence on themselves alone, and
+scientifically organised with a view to this object, they present to us
+a higher interest than that of mere narrative.
+
+The deliberate adaptation of means to ends, of which no prince out of
+Italy had at that time a conception, joined to almost absolute power
+within the limits of the state, produced among the despots both men and
+modes of life of a peculiar character.[8] The chief secret of government
+in the hands of the prudent ruler lay in leaving the incidence of
+taxation so far as possible where he found it, or as he had first
+arranged it. The chief sources of income were: a land tax, based on a
+valuation; definite taxes on articles of consumption and duties on
+exported and imported goods; together with the private fortune of the
+ruling house. The only possible increase was derived from the growth of
+business and of general prosperity. Loans, such as we find in the free
+cities, were here unknown; a well-planned confiscation was held a
+preferable means of raising money, provided only that it left public
+credit unshaken--an end attained, for example, by the truly Oriental
+practice of deposing and plundering the director of the finances.[9]
+
+Out of this income the expenses of the little court, of the body-guard,
+of the mercenary troops, and of the public buildings were met, as well
+as of the buffoons and men of talent who belonged to the personal
+attendants of the prince. The illegitimacy of his rule isolated the
+tyrant and surrounded him with constant danger; the most honourable
+alliance which he could form was with intellectual merit, without regard
+to its origin. The liberality of the northern princes of the thirteenth
+century was confined to the knights, to the nobility which served and
+sang. It was otherwise with the Italian despot. With his thirst of fame
+and his passion for monumental works, it was talent, not birth, which he
+needed. In the company of the poet and the scholar he felt himself in a
+new position, almost, indeed, in possession of a new legitimacy.
+
+No prince was more famous in this respect than the ruler of Verona, Can
+Grande della Scala, who numbered among the illustrious exiles whom he
+entertained at his court representatives of the whole of Italy.[10] The
+men of letters were not ungrateful. Petrarch, whose visits at the courts
+of such men have been so severely censured, sketched an ideal picture of
+a prince of the fourteenth century.[11] He demands great things from his
+patron, the lord of Padua, but in a manner which shows that he holds him
+capable of them. 'Thou must not be the master but the father of thy
+subjects, and must love them as thy children; yea, as members of thy
+body.[12] Weapons, guards, and soldiers thou mayest employ against the
+enemy--with thy subjects goodwill is sufficient. By citizens, of course,
+I mean those who love the existing order; for those who daily desire
+change are rebels and traitors, and against such a stern justice may
+take its course.'
+
+Here follows, worked out in detail, the purely modern fiction of the
+omnipotence of the state. The prince is to be independent of his
+courtiers, but at the same time to govern with simplicity and modesty;
+he is to take everything into his charge, to maintain and restore
+churches and public buildings, to keep up the municipal police,[13] to
+drain the marshes, to look after the supply of wine and corn; he is to
+exercise a strict justice, so to distribute the taxes that the people
+can recognise their necessity and the regret of the ruler to be
+compelled to put his hands in the pockets of others; he is to support
+the sick and the helpless, and to give his protection and society to
+distinguished scholars, on whom his fame in after ages will depend.
+
+But whatever might be the brighter sides of the system, and the merits
+of individual rulers, yet the men of the fourteenth century were not
+without a more or less distinct consciousness of the brief and uncertain
+tenure of most of these despotisms. Inasmuch as political institutions
+like these are naturally secure in proportion to the size of the
+territory in which they exist, the larger principalities were constantly
+tempted to swallow up the smaller. Whole hecatombs of petty rulers were
+sacrificed at this time to the Visconti alone. As a result of this
+outward danger an inward ferment was in ceaseless activity; and the
+effect of the situation on the character of the ruler was generally of
+the most sinister kind. Absolute power, with its temptations to luxury
+and unbridled selfishness, and the perils to which he was exposed from
+enemies and conspirators, turned him almost inevitably into a tyrant in
+the worst sense of the word. Well for him if he could trust his nearest
+relations! But where all was illegitimate, there could be no regular law
+of inheritance, either with regard to the succession or to the division
+of the ruler's property; and consequently the heir, if incompetent or a
+minor, was liable in the interest of the family itself to be supplanted
+by an uncle or cousin of more resolute character. The acknowledgment or
+exclusion of the bastards was a fruitful source of contest; and most of
+these families in consequence were plagued with a crowd of discontented
+and vindictive kinsmen. This circumstance gave rise to continual
+outbreaks of treason and to frightful scenes of domestic bloodshed.
+Sometimes the pretenders lived abroad in exile, and like the Visconti,
+who practised the fisherman's craft on the Lake of Garda,[14] viewed the
+situation with patient indifference. When asked by a messenger of his
+rival when and how he thought of returning to Milan, he gave the reply,
+'By the same means as those by which I was expelled, but not till his
+crimes have outweighed my own.' Sometimes, too, the despot was
+sacrificed by his relations, with the view of saving the family, to the
+public conscience which he had too grossly outraged.[15] In a few cases
+the government was in the hands of the whole family, or at least the
+ruler was bound to take their advice; and here, too, the distribution of
+property and influence often led to bitter disputes.
+
+The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent hatred of the
+Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the pomp and display with which
+the despot was perhaps less anxious to gratify his own vanity than to
+impress the popular imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to
+an adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge Aguello
+of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden sceptre, and show
+himself at the window of his house, 'as relics are shown.' reclining on
+embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or emperor, by
+kneeling attendants.[16] More often, however, the old Florentines speak
+on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and
+characterised well the vulgarity and commonplace which mark the ambition
+of the new princes.[17] 'What mean their trumpets and their bells,
+their horns and their flutes; but come, hangman--come, vultures?' The
+castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is a lofty and
+solitary building, full of dungeons and listening-tubes,[18] the home of
+cruelty and misery. Misfortune is foretold to all who enter the service
+of the despot,[19] who even becomes at last himself an object of pity:
+he must needs be the enemy of all good and honest men; he can trust no
+one, and can read in the faces of his subjects the expectation of his
+fall. 'As despotisms rise, grow, and are consolidated, so grows in their
+midst the hidden element which must produce their dissolution and
+ruin.'[20] But the deepest ground of dislike has not been stated;
+Florence was then the scene of the richest development of human
+individuality, while for the despots no other individuality could be
+suffered to live and thrive but their own and that of their nearest
+dependents. The control of the individual was rigorously carried out,
+even down to the establishment of a system of passports.[21]
+
+The astrological superstitions and the religious unbelief of many of the
+tyrants gave, in the minds of their contemporaries, a peculiar colour to
+this awful and God-forsaken existence. When the last Carrara could no
+longer defend the walls and gates of the plague-stricken Padua, hemmed
+in on all sides by the Venetians (1405), the soldiers of the guard heard
+him cry to the devil 'to come and kill him.'
+
+The most complete and instructive type of the tyranny of the fourteenth
+century is to be found unquestionably among the Visconti of Milan, from
+the death of the Archbishop Giovanni onwards (1354). The family likeness
+which shows itself between Bernab� and the worst of the Roman Emperors
+is unmistakable;[22] the most important public object was the prince's
+boar-hunting; whoever interfered with it was put to death with torture;
+the terrified people were forced to maintain 5,000 boar-hounds, with
+strict responsibility for their health and safety. The taxes were
+extorted by every conceivable sort of compulsion; seven daughters of the
+prince received a dowry of 100,000 gold florins apiece; and an enormous
+treasure was collected. On the death of his wife (1384) an order was
+issued 'to the subjects' to share his grief, as once they had shared his
+joy, and to wear mourning for a year. The _coup de main_ (1385) by which
+his nephew Giangaleazzo got him into his power--one of those brilliant
+plots which make the heart of even late historians beat more
+quickly[23]--was strikingly characteristic of the man. Giangaleazzo,
+despised by his relations on account of his religion and his love of
+science, resolved on vengeance, and, leaving the city under pretext of a
+pilgrimage, fell upon his unsuspecting uncle, took him prisoner, forced
+his way back into the city at the head of an armed band, seized on the
+government, and gave up the palace of Bernab� to general plunder.
+
+In Giangaleazzo that passion for the colossal which was common to most
+of the despots shows itself on the largest scale. He undertook, at the
+cost of 300,000 golden florins, the construction of gigantic dykes, to
+divert in case of need the Mincio from Mantua and the Brenta from Padua,
+and thus to render these cities defenceless.[24] It is not impossible,
+indeed, that he thought of draining away the lagoons of Venice. He
+founded that most wonderful of all convents, the Certosa of Pavia,[25]
+and the cathedral of Milan, 'which exceeds in size and splendour all
+the churches of Christendom.' The Palace in Pavia, which his father
+Galeazzo began and which he himself finished, was probably by far the
+most magnificent of the princely dwellings of Europe. There he
+transferred his famous library, and the great collection of relics of
+the saints, in which he placed a peculiar faith. King Winceslaus made
+him Duke (1395); he was hoping for nothing less than the Kingdom of
+Italy[26] or the Imperial crown, when (1402) he fell ill and died. His
+whole territories are said to have paid him in a single year, besides
+the regular contribution of 1,200,000 gold florins, no less than 800,000
+more in extraordinary subsidies. After his death the dominions which he
+had brought together by every sort of violence fell to pieces; and for a
+time even the original nucleus could with difficulty be maintained by
+his successors. What might have become of his sons Giovanni Maria (died
+1412) and Filippo Maria (died 1417), had they lived in a different
+country and among other traditions, cannot be said. But, as heirs of
+their house, they inherited that monstrous capital of cruelty and
+cowardice which had been accumulated from generation to generation.
+
+Giovanni Maria, too, is famed for his dogs, which were no longer,
+however, used for hunting, but for tearing human bodies. Tradition has
+preserved their names, like those of the bears of the Emperor
+Valentinian I.[27] In May, 1409, when war was going on, and the starving
+populace cried to him in the streets, _Pace! Pace!_ he let loose his
+mercenaries upon them, and 200 lives were sacrificed; under penalty of
+the gallows it was forbidden to utter the words _pace_ and _guerra_, and
+the priests were ordered, instead of _dona nobis pacem_, to say
+_tranquillitatem_! At last a band of conspirators took advantage of the
+moment when Facino Cane, the chief Condottiere of the insane ruler, lay
+ill at Pavia, and cut down Giovan Maria in the church of San Gottardo at
+Milan; the dying Facino on the same day made his officers swear to stand
+by the heir Filippo Maria, whom he himself urged his wife[28] to take
+for a second husband. His wife, Beatrice di Tenda, followed his advice.
+We shall have occasion to speak of Filippo Maria later on.
+
+And in times like these Cola di Rienzi was dreaming of founding on the
+rickety enthusiasm of the corrupt population of Rome a new state which
+was to comprise all Italy. By the side of rulers such as those whom we
+have described, he seems no better than a poor deluded fool.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+
+The despotisms of the fifteenth century show an altered character. Many
+of the less important tyrants, and some of the greater, like the Scala
+and the Carrara, had disappeared, while the more powerful ones,
+aggrandized by conquest, had given to their systems each its
+characteristic development. Naples for example received a fresh and
+stronger impulse from the new Arragonese dynasty. A striking feature of
+this epoch is the attempt of the Condottieri to found independent
+dynasties of their own. Facts and the actual relations of things, apart
+from traditional estimates, are alone regarded; talent and audacity win
+the great prizes. The petty despots, to secure a trustworthy support,
+begin to enter the service of the larger states, and become themselves
+Condottieri, receiving in return for their services money and impunity
+for their misdeeds, if not an increase of territory. All, whether small
+or great, must exert themselves more, must act with greater caution and
+calculation, and must learn to refrain from too wholesale barbarities;
+only so much wrong is permitted by public opinion as is necessary for
+the end in view, and this the impartial bystander certainly finds no
+fault with. No trace is here visible of that half-religious loyalty by
+which the legitimate princes of the West were supported; personal
+popularity is the nearest approach we can find to it. Talent and
+calculation are the only means of advancement. A character like that of
+Charles the Bold, which wore itself out in the passionate pursuit of
+impracticable ends, was a riddle to the Italian. 'The Swiss were only
+peasants, and if they were all killed, that would be no satisfaction for
+the Burgundian nobles who might fall in the war. If the Duke got
+possession of all Switzerland without a struggle, his income would not
+be 5,000 ducats the greater.'[29] The medi�val features in the
+character of Charles, his chivalrous aspirations and ideals, had long
+become unintelligible to the Italian. The diplomatists of the South,
+when they saw him strike his officers and yet keep them in his service,
+when he maltreated his troops to punish them for a defeat, and then
+threw the blame on his counsellors in the presence of the same troops,
+gave him up for lost.[30] Louis XI., on the other hand, whose policy
+surpasses that of the Italian princes in their own style, and who was an
+avowed admirer of Francesco Sforza, must be placed in all that regards
+culture and refinement far below these rulers.
+
+Good and evil lie strangely mixed together in the Italian States of the
+fifteenth century. The personality of the ruler is so highly developed,
+often of such deep significance, and so characteristic of the conditions
+and needs of the time, that to form an adequate moral judgment on it is
+no easy task.[31]
+
+The foundation of the system was and remained illegitimate, and nothing
+could remove the curse which rested upon it. The imperial approval or
+investiture made no change in the matter, since the people attached
+little weight to the fact, that the despot had bought a piece of
+parchment somewhere in foreign countries, or from some stranger passing
+through his territory.[32] If the Emperor had been good for anything--so
+ran the logic of uncritical common sense--he would never have let the
+tyrant rise at all. Since the Roman expedition of Charles IV., the
+emperors had done nothing more in Italy than sanction a tyranny which
+had arisen without their help; they could give it no other practical
+authority than what might flow from an imperial charter. The whole
+conduct of Charles in Italy was a scandalous political comedy. Matteo
+Villani[33] relates how the Visconti escorted him round their territory,
+and at last out of it; how he went about like a hawker selling his wares
+(privileges, etc.) for money; what a mean appearance he made in Rome,
+and how at the end, without even drawing the sword, he returned with
+replenished coffers across the Alps. Nevertheless, patriotic enthusiasts
+and poets, full of the greatness of the past, conceived high hopes at
+his coming, which were afterwards dissipated by his pitiful conduct.
+Petrarch, who had written frequent letters exhorting the Emperor to
+cross the Alps, to give back to Rome its departed greatness, and to set
+up a new universal empire, now, when the Emperor, careless of these
+high-flying projects, had come at last, still hoped to see his dreams
+realized, strove unweariedly, by speech and writing, to impress the
+Emperor with them, but was at length driven away from him with disgust
+when he saw the imperial authority dishonoured by the submission of
+Charles to the Pope.[34] Sigismund came, on the first occasion at least
+(1414), with the good intention of persuading John XXIII. to take part
+in his council; it was on that journey, when Pope and Emperor were
+gazing from the lofty tower of Cremona on the panorama of Lombardy, that
+their host, the tyrant Gabino Fondolo, was seized with the desire to
+throw them both over. On his second visit Sigismund came as a mere
+adventurer, giving no proof whatever of his imperial prerogative, except
+by crowning Beccadelli as a poet; for more than half a year he remained
+shut up in Siena, like a debtor in gaol, and only with difficulty, and
+at a later period, succeeded in being crowned in Rome. And what can be
+thought of Frederick III.? His journeys to Italy have the air of
+holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the expense of those who wanted
+him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity it flattered to
+entertain an emperor. The latter was the case with Alfonso of Naples,
+who paid 150,000 florins for the honour of an imperial visit.[35] At
+Ferrara,[36] on his second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a
+whole day without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty
+titles; he created knights, counts, doctors, notaries--counts, indeed,
+of different degrees, as, for instance, counts palatine, counts with the
+right to create doctors up to the number of five, counts with the right
+to legitimatise bastards, to appoint notaries, and so forth. The
+Chancellor, however, expected in return for the patents in question a
+gratuity which was thought excessive at Ferrara.[37] The opinion of
+Borso, himself created Duke of Modena and Reggio in return for an annual
+payment of 4,000 gold florins, when his imperial patron was distributing
+titles and diplomas to all the little court, is not mentioned. The
+humanists, then the chief spokesmen of the age, were divided in opinion
+according to their personal interests, while the Emperor was greeted by
+some[38] of them with the conventional acclamations of the poets of
+imperial Rome. Poggio[39] confessed that he no longer knew what the
+coronation meant; in the old times only the victorious Inperator was
+crowned, and then he was crowned with laurel.[40]
+
+With Maximilian I. begins not only the general intervention of foreign
+nations, but a new imperial policy with regard to Italy. The first
+step--the investiture of Ludovico Moro with the duchy of Milan and the
+exclusion of his unhappy nephew--was not of a kind to bear good fruits.
+According to the modern theory of intervention, when two parties are
+tearing a country to pieces, a third may step in and take its share, and
+on this principle the empire acted. But right and justice were appealed
+to no longer. When Louis XII. was expected in Genoa (1502), and the
+imperial eagle was removed from the hall of the ducal palace and
+replaced by painted lilies, the historian, Senarega[41] asked what after
+all, was the meaning of the eagle which so many revolutions had spared,
+and what claims the empire had upon Genoa. No one knew more about the
+matter than the old phrase that Genoa was a _camera imperii_. In fact,
+nobody in Italy could give a clear answer to any such questions. At
+length, when Charles V. held Spain and the empire together, he was able
+by means of Spanish forces to make good imperial claims; but it is
+notorious that what he thereby gained turned to the profit, not of the
+empire, but of the Spanish monarchy.
+
+Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of
+the fifteenth century, was the public indifference to legitimate birth,
+which to foreigners--for example, to Comines--appeared so remarkable.
+The two things went naturally together. In northern countries, as in
+Burgundy, the illegitimate offspring were provided for by a distinct
+class of appanages, such as bishoprics and the like; in Portugal an
+illegitimate line maintained itself on the throne only by constant
+effort; in Italy, on the contrary, there no longer existed a princely
+house where, even in the direct line of descent, bastards were not
+patiently tolerated. The Aragonese monarchs of Naples belonged to the
+illegitimate line, Aragon itself falling to the lot of the brother of
+Alfonso I. The great Frederick of Urbino was, perhaps, no Montefeltro at
+all. When Pius II. was on his way to the Congress of Mantua (1459),
+eight bastards of the house of Este rode to meet him at Ferrara, among
+them the reigning duke Borso himself and two illegitimate sons of his
+illegitimate brother and predecessor Leonello.[42] The latter had also
+had a lawful wife, herself an illegitimate daughter of Alfonso I. of
+Naples by an African woman.[43] The bastards were often admitted to the
+succession where the lawful children were minors and the dangers of the
+situation were pressing; and a rule of seniority became recognised,
+which took no account of pure or impure birth. The fitness of the
+individual, his worth and his capacity, were of more weight than all the
+laws and usages which prevailed elsewhere in the West. It was the age,
+indeed, in which the sons of the Popes were founding dynasties. In the
+sixteenth century, through the influence of foreign ideas and of the
+counter-reformation which then began, the whole question was judged more
+strictly: Varchi discovers that the succession of the legitimate
+children 'is ordered by reason, and is the will of heaven from
+eternity.'[44] Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici founded his claim to the
+lordship of Florence on the fact that he was perhaps the fruit of a
+lawful marriage, and at all events son of a gentlewoman, and not, like
+Duke Alessandro, of a servant girl.[45] At this time began those
+morganatic marriages of affection which in the fifteenth century, on
+grounds either of policy or morality, would have had no meaning at all.
+
+But the highest and the most admired form of illegitimacy in the
+fifteenth century was presented by the Condottiere, who, whatever may
+have been his origin, raised himself to the position of an independent
+ruler. At bottom, the occupation of Lower Italy by the Normans in the
+eleventh century was of this character. Such attempts now began to keep
+the peninsula in a constant ferment.
+
+It was possible for a Condottiere to obtain the lordship of a district
+even without usurpation, in the case when his employer, through want of
+money or troops, provided for him in this way;[46] under any
+circumstances the Condottiere, even when he dismissed for the time the
+greater part of his forces, needed a safe place where he could establish
+his winter quarters, and lay up his stores and provisions. The first
+example of a captain thus portioned is John Hawkwood, who was invested
+by Gregory XI. with the lordship of Bagnacavallo and Cotignola.[47] When
+with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian armies and leaders appeared upon the
+scene, the chances of founding a principality, or of increasing one
+already acquired, became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian
+outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan after the
+death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two sons was chiefly
+aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms founded by the
+Condottieri; and from the greatest of them, Facino Cane, the house of
+Visconti inherited, together with his widow, a long list of cities, and
+400,000 golden florins, not to speak of the soldiers of her first
+husband whom Beatrice di Tenda brought with her.[48] From henceforth
+that thoroughly immoral relation between the governments and their
+Condottieri, which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became
+more and more common. An old story[49]--one of those which are true and
+not true, everywhere and nowhere--describes it as follows: The citizens
+of a certain town (Siena seems to be meant) had once an officer in their
+service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took
+counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their
+power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At
+last one of them rose and said, 'Let us kill him and then worship him as
+our patron saint.' And so they did, following the example set by the
+Roman senate with Romulus. In fact, the Condottieri had reason to fear
+none so much as their employers; if they were successful, they became
+dangerous, and were put out of the way like Robert Malatesta just after
+the victory he had won for Sixtus IV. (1482); if they failed, the
+vengeance of the Venetians on Carmagnola[50] showed to what risks they
+were exposed (1432). It is characteristic of the moral aspect of the
+situation, that the Condottieri had often to give their wives and
+children as hostages, and notwithstanding this, neither felt nor
+inspired confidence. They must have been heroes of abnegation, natures
+like Belisarius himself, not to be cankered by hatred and bitterness;
+only the most perfect goodness could save them from the most monstrous
+iniquity. No wonder then if we find them full of contempt for all sacred
+things, cruel and treacherous to their fellows--men who cared nothing
+whether or no they died under the ban of the Church. At the same time,
+and through the force of the same conditions, the genius and capacity
+of many among them attained the highest conceivable development, and won
+for them the admiring devotion of their followers; their armies are the
+first in modern history in which the personal credit of the leader is
+the one moving power. A brilliant example is shown in the life of
+Francesco Sforza;[51] no prejudice of birth could prevent him from
+winning and turning to account when he needed it a boundless devotion
+from each individual with whom he had to deal; it happened more than
+once that his enemies laid down their arms at the sight of him, greeting
+him reverently with uncovered heads, each honouring in him 'the common
+father of the men-at-arms.' The race of the Sforza has this special
+interest, that from the very beginning of its history we seem able to
+trace its endeavours after the crown.[52] The foundation of its fortune
+lay in the remarkable fruitfulness of the family; Francesco's father,
+Jacopo, himself a celebrated man, had twenty brothers and sisters, all
+brought up roughly at Cotignola, near Faenza, amid the perils of one of
+the endless Romagnole 'vendette' between their own house and that of the
+Pasolini. The family dwelling was a mere arsenal and fortress; the
+mother and daughters were as warlike as their kinsmen. In his thirteenth
+year Jacopo ran away and fled to Panicale to the Papal Condottiere
+Boldrino--the man who even in death continued to lead his troops, the
+word of order being given from the bannered tent in which the embalmed
+body lay, till at last a fit leader was found to succeed him. Jacopo,
+when he had at length made himself a name in the service of different
+Condottieri, sent for his relations, and obtained through them the same
+advantages that a prince derives from a numerous dynasty. It was these
+relations who kept the army together when he lay a captive in the Castel
+dell'Uovo at Naples; his sister took the royal envoys prisoners with her
+own hands, and saved him by this reprisal from death. It was an
+indication of the breadth and the range of his plans that in monetary
+affairs Jacopo was thoroughly trustworthy; even in his defeats he
+consequently found credit with the bankers. He habitually protected the
+peasants against the licence of his troops, and reluctantly destroyed or
+injured a conquered city. He gave his well-known mistress, Lucia, the
+mother of Francesco, in marriage to another in order to be free from a
+princely alliance. Even the marriages of his relations were arranged on
+a definite plan. He kept clear of the impious and profligate life of his
+contemporaries, and brought up his son Francesco to the three rules:
+'Let other men's wives alone; strike none of your followers, or, if you
+do, send the injured man far away; don't ride a hard-mouthed horse, or
+one that drops his shoe.' But his chief source of influence lay in the
+qualities, if not of a great general, at least of a great soldier. His
+frame was powerful, and developed by every kind of exercise; his
+peasant's face and frank manners won general popularity; his memory was
+marvellous, and after the lapse of years could recall the names of his
+followers, the number of their horses, and the amount of their pay. His
+education was purely Italian: he devoted his leisure to the study of
+history, and had Greek and Latin authors translated for his use.
+Francesco, his still more famous son, set his mind from the first on
+founding a powerful state, and through brilliant generalship and a
+faithlessness which hesitated at nothing, got possession of the great
+city of Milan (1447-1450).
+
+His example was contagious. �neas Sylvius wrote about this time:[53] 'In
+our change-loving Italy, where nothing stands firm, and where no ancient
+dynasty exists, a servant can easily become a king.' One man in
+particular, who styled himself 'the man of fortune,' filled the
+imagination of the whole country: Giacomo Piccinino, the son of Niccol�.
+It was a burning question of the day if he, too, would succeed in
+founding a princely house. The greater states had an obvious interest in
+hindering it, and even Francesco Sforza thought it would be all the
+better if the list of self-made sovereigns were not enlarged. But the
+troops and captains sent against him, at the time, for instance, when
+he was aiming at the lordship of Siena, recognised their interest in
+supporting him:[54] 'If it were all over with him, we should have to go
+back and plough our fields.' Even while besieging him at Orbetello, they
+supplied him with provisions; and he got out of his straits with honour.
+But at last fate overtook him. All Italy was betting on the result, when
+(1465), after a visit to Sforza at Milan, he went to King Ferrante at
+Naples. In spite of the pledges given, and of his high connections, he
+was murdered in the Castel dell'Uovo.[55] Even the Condottieri, who had
+obtained their dominions by inheritance, never felt themselves safe.
+When Roberto Malatesta and Frederick of Urbino died on the same day
+(1482), the one at Rome, the other at Bologna, it was found[56] that
+each had recommended his state to the care of the other. Against a class
+of men who themselves stuck at nothing, everything was held to be
+permissible. Francesco Sforza, when quite young, had married a rich
+Calabrian heiress, Polissena Russa, Countess of Montalto, who bore him a
+daughter; an aunt poisoned both mother and child, and seized the
+inheritance.[57]
+
+From the death of Piccinino onwards, the foundations of new States by
+the Condottieri became a scandal not to be tolerated. The four great
+Powers, Naples, Milan, the Papacy, and Venice, formed among themselves a
+political equilibrium which refused to allow of any disturbance. In the
+States of the Church, which swarmed with petty tyrants, who in part
+were, or had been, Condottieri, the nephews of the Popes, since the time
+of Sixtus IV., monopolised the right to all such undertakings. But at
+the first sign of a political crisis, the soldiers of fortune appeared
+again upon the scene. Under the wretched administration of Innocent
+VIII. it was near happening that a certain Boccalino, who had formerly
+served in the Burgundian army, gave himself and the town of Osimo, of
+which he was master, up to the Turkish forces;[58] fortunately, through
+the intervention of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he proved willing to be
+paid off, and took himself away. In the year 1495, when the wars of
+Charles VIII. had turned Italy upside down, the Condottiere Vidovero, of
+Brescia, made trial of his strength:[59] he had already seized the town
+of Cesena and murdered many of the nobles and the burghers; but the
+citadel held out, and he was forced to withdraw. He then, at the head of
+a band lent him by another scoundrel, Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, son
+of the Roberto already spoken of, and Venetian Condottiere, wrested the
+town of Castelnuovo from the Archbishop of Ravenna. The Venetians,
+fearing that worse would follow, and urged also by the Pope, ordered
+Pandolfo, 'with the kindest intentions,' to take an opportunity of
+arresting his good friend: the arrest was made, though 'with great
+regret,' whereupon the order came to bring the prisoner to the gallows.
+Pandolfo was considerate enough to strangle him in prison, and then show
+his corpse to the people. The last notable example of such usurpers is
+the famous Castellan of Musso, who during the confusion in the Milanese
+territory which followed the battle of Pavia (1525), improvised a
+sovereignty on the Lake of Como.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE PETTY TYRANNIES.
+
+
+It may be said in general of the despotisms of the fifteenth century
+that the greatest crimes are most frequent in the smallest states. In
+these, where the family was numerous and all the members wished to live
+in a manner befitting their rank, disputes respecting the inheritance
+were unavoidable. Bernardo Varano of Camerino put (1434) two of his
+brothers to death,[60] wishing to divide their property among his sons.
+Where the ruler of a single town was distinguished by a wise, moderate,
+and humane government, and by zeal for intellectual culture, he was
+generally a member of some great family, or politically dependent on it.
+This was the case, for example, with Alessandro Sforza,[61] Prince of
+Pesaro, brother of the great Francesco, and stepfather of Frederick of
+Urbino (d. 1473). Prudent in administration, just and affable in his
+rule, he enjoyed, after years of warfare, a tranquil reign, collected a
+noble library, and passed his leisure in learned or religious
+conversation. A man of the same class was Giovanni II., Bentivoglio of
+Bologna (1462-1506), whose policy was determined by that of the Este and
+the Sforza. What ferocity and bloodthirstiness is found, on the other
+hand, among the Varani of Camerino, the Malatesta of Rimini, the
+Manfreddi of Faenza, and above all among the Baglioni of Perugia. We
+find a striking picture of the events in the last-named family towards
+the close of the fifteenth century, in the admirable historical
+narratives of Graziani and Materazzo.[62]
+
+The Baglioni were one of those families whose rule never took the shape
+of an avowed despotism. It was rather a leadership exercised by means
+of their vast wealth and of their practical influence in the choice of
+public officers. Within the family one man was recognised as head; but
+deep and secret jealousy prevailed among the members of the different
+branches. Opposed to the Baglioni stood another aristocratic party, led
+by the family of the Oddi. In 1487 the city was turned into a camp, and
+the houses of the leading citizens swarmed with bravos; scenes of
+violence were of daily occurrence. At the burial of a German student,
+who had been assassinated, two colleges took arms against one another;
+sometimes the bravos of the different houses even joined battle in the
+public square. The complaints of the merchants and artisans were vain;
+the Papal Governors and _Nipoti_ held their tongues, or took themselves
+off on the first opportunity. At last the Oddi were forced to abandon
+Perugia, and the city became a beleaguered fortress under the absolute
+despotism of the Baglioni, who used even the cathedral as barracks.
+Plots and surprises were met with cruel vengeance; in the year 1491,
+after 130 conspirators, who had forced their way into the city, were
+killed and hung up at the Palazzo Comunale, thirty-five altars were
+erected in the square, and for three days mass was performed and
+processions held, to take away the curse which rested on the spot. A
+nephew of Innocent VIII. was in open day run through in the street. A
+nephew of Alexander VI., who was sent to smooth matters over, was
+dismissed with public contempt. All the while the two leaders of the
+ruling house, Guido and Ridolfo, were holding frequent interviews with
+Suor Colomba of Rieti, a Dominican nun of saintly reputation and
+miraculous powers, who under penalty of some great disaster ordered them
+to make peace--naturally in vain. Nevertheless the chronicle takes the
+opportunity to point out the devotion and piety of the better men in
+Perugia during this reign of terror. When in 1494 Charles VIII.
+approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and
+near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity, that every house in
+the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled, the
+peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the
+fresh-grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts
+grew fat on the bodies of the slain, on so-called 'Christian flesh.'
+When Alexander VI. withdrew (1495) into Umbria before Charles VIII.,
+then returning from Naples, it occurred to him, when at Perugia, that he
+might now rid himself of the Baglioni once for all; he proposed to Guido
+a festival or tournament, or something else of the same kind, which
+would bring the whole family together. Guido, however, was of opinion,
+'that the most impressive spectacle of all would be to see the whole
+military force of Perugia collected in a body,' whereupon the Pope
+abandoned his project. Soon after, the exiles made another attack, in
+which nothing but the personal heroism of the Baglioni won them the
+victory. It was then that Simonetto Baglione, a lad of scarcely
+eighteen, fought in the square with a handful of followers against
+hundreds of the enemy: he fell at last with more than twenty wounds, but
+recovered himself when Astorre Baglione came to his help, and mounting
+on horseback in gilded armour with a falcon on his helmet, 'like Mars in
+bearing and in deeds, plunged into the struggle.'
+
+At that time Raphael, a boy of twelve years of age, was at school under
+Pietro Perugino. The impressions of these days are perhaps immortalised
+in the small, early pictures of St. Michael and St. George: something of
+them, it may be, lives eternally in the great painting of St. Michael:
+and if Astorre Baglione has anywhere found his apotheosis, it is in the
+figure of the heavenly horseman in the Heliodorus.
+
+The opponents of the Baglioni were partly destroyed, partly scattered in
+terror, and were henceforth incapable of another enterprise of the kind.
+After a time a partial reconciliation took place, and some of the exiles
+were allowed to return. But Perugia became none the safer or more
+tranquil: the inward discord of the ruling family broke out in frightful
+excesses. An opposition was formed against Guido and Ridolfo and their
+sons Gianpaolo, Simonetto, Astorre, Gismondo, Gentile, Marcantonio and
+others, by two great-nephews, Grifone and Carlo Barciglia; the latter of
+the two was also nephew of Varano, Prince of Camerino, and brother of
+one of the former exiles, Ieronimo della Penna. In vain did Simonetto,
+warned by sinister presentiment, entreat his uncle on his knees to allow
+him to put Penna to death: Guido refused. The plot ripened suddenly on
+the occasion of the marriage of Astorre with Lavinia Colonna, at
+Midsummer 1500. The festival began and lasted several days amid gloomy
+forebodings, whose deepening effect is admirably described by Matarazzo.
+Varano fed and encouraged them with devilish ingenuity: he worked upon
+Grifone by the prospect of undivided authority, and by stories of an
+imaginary intrigue of his wife Zenobia with Gianpaolo. Finally each
+conspirator was provided with a victim. (The Baglioni lived all of them
+in separate houses, mostly on the site of the present castle.) Each
+received fifteen of the bravos at hand; the remainder were set on the
+watch. In the night of July 15 the doors were forced, and Guido,
+Astorre, Simonetto, and Gismondo were murdered; the others succeeded in
+escaping.
+
+As the corpse of Astorre lay by that of Simonetto in the street, the
+spectators, 'and especially the foreign students,' compared him to an
+ancient Roman, so great and imposing did he seem. In the features of
+Simonetto could still be traced the audacity and defiance which death
+itself had not tamed. The victors went round among the friends of the
+family, and did their best to recommend themselves; they found all in
+tears and preparing to leave for the country. Meantime the escaped
+Baglioni collected forces without the city, and on the following day
+forced their way in, Gianpaolo at their head, and speedily found
+adherents among others whom Barciglia had been threatening with death.
+When Grifone fell into their hands near S. Ercolono. Gianpaolo handed
+him over for execution to his followers. Barciglia and Penna fled to
+Varano, the chief author of the tragedy, at Camerino; and in a moment,
+almost without loss, Gianpaolo became master of the city.
+
+Atalanta, the still young and beautiful mother of Grifone, who the day
+before had withdrawn to a country house with the latter's wife Zenobia
+and two children of Gianpaolo, and more than once had repulsed her son
+with a mother's curse, now returned with her step-daughter in search of
+the dying man. All stood aside as the two women approached, each man
+shrinking from being recognised as the slayer of Grifone, and dreading
+the malediction of the mother. But they were deceived: she herself
+besought her son to pardon him who had dealt the fatal blow, and he died
+with her blessing. The eyes of the crowd followed the two women
+reverently as they crossed the square with blood-stained garments. It
+was Atalanta for whom Raphael afterwards painted the world-famed
+'Deposition,' with which she laid her own maternal sorrows at the feet
+of a yet higher and holier suffering.
+
+The cathedral, in the immediate neighbourhood of which the greater part
+of this tragedy had been enacted, was washed with wine and consecrated
+afresh. The triumphal arch, erected for the wedding, still remained
+standing, painted with the deeds of Astorre and with the laudatory
+verses of the narrator of these events, the worthy Matarazzo.
+
+A legendary history, which is simply the reflection of these atrocities,
+arose out of the early days of the Baglioni. All the members of this
+family from the beginning were reported to have died an evil
+death--twenty-seven on one occasion together; their houses were said to
+have been once before levelled to the ground, and the streets of Perugia
+paved with the bricks--and more of the same kind. Under Paul III. the
+destruction of their palaces really took place.[63]
+
+For a time they seem to have formed good resolutions, to have brought
+their own party into order, and to have protected the public officials
+against the arbitrary acts of the nobility. But the old curse broke out
+again like a smouldering fire. Gianpaolo was enticed to Rome under Leo
+X., and there beheaded; one of his sons, Orazio, who ruled in Perugia
+for a short time only, and by the most violent means, as the partisan of
+the Duke of Urbino (himself threatened by the Pope), once more repeated
+in his own family the horrors of the past. His uncle and three cousins
+were murdered, whereupon the Duke sent him word that enough had been
+done.[64] His brother, Malatesta Baglione, the Florentine general, has
+made himself immortal by the treason of 1530; and Malatesta's son
+Ridolfo, the last of the house, attained, by the murder of the legate
+and the public officers in the year 1534, a brief but sanguinary
+authority.
+
+Here and there we meet with the names of the rulers of Rimini.
+Unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high culture, have been
+seldom so combined in one individual as in Sigismondo Malatesta (d.
+1467).[65] But the accumulated crimes of such a family must at last
+outweigh all talent, however great, and drag the tyrant into the abyss.
+Pandolfo, Sigismondo's nephew, who has been mentioned already, succeeded
+in holding his ground, for the sole reason that the Venetians refused to
+abandon their Condottiere, whatever guilt he might be chargeable with;
+when his subjects (1497), after ample provocation,[66] bombarded him in
+his castle at Rimini, and afterwards allowed him to escape, a Venetian
+commissioner brought him back, stained as he was with fratricide and
+every other abomination. Thirty years later the Malatesta were penniless
+exiles. In the year 1527, as in the time of C�sar Borgia, a sort of
+epidemic fell on the petty tyrants: few of them outlived this date, and
+none to their own good. At Mirandola, which was governed by
+insignificant princes of the house of Pico, lived in the year 1533 a
+poor scholar, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, who had fled from the sack of Rome
+to the hospitable hearth of the aged Giovanni Francesco Pico, nephew of
+the famous Giovanni; the discussions as to the sepulchral monument which
+the prince was constructing for himself gave rise to a treatise, the
+dedication of which bears the date of April in this year. The postscript
+is a sad one.[67]--'In October of the same year the unhappy prince was
+attacked in the night and robbed of life and throne by his brother's
+son; and I myself escaped narrowly, and am now in the deepest misery.'
+
+A pseudo-despotism without characteristic features, such as Pandolfo
+Petrucci exercised from the year 1490 in Siena, then torn by faction, is
+hardly worth a closer consideration. Insignificant and malicious, he
+governed with the help of a professor of jurisprudence and of an
+astrologer, and frightened his people by an occasional murder. His
+pastime in the summer months was to roll blocks of stone from the top of
+Monte Amiata, without caring what or whom they hit. After succeeding,
+where the most prudent failed, in escaping from the devices of C�sar
+Borgia, he died at last forsaken and despised. His sons maintained a
+qualified supremacy for many years afterwards.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE GREATER DYNASTIES.
+
+
+In treating of the chief dynasties of Italy, it is convenient to discuss
+the Aragonese, on account of its special character, apart from the rest.
+The feudal system, which from the days of the Normans had survived in
+the form of a territorial supremacy of the Barons, gave a distinctive
+colour to the political constitution of Naples; while elsewhere in
+Italy, excepting only in the southern part of the ecclesiastical
+dominion, and in a few other districts, a direct tenure of land
+prevailed, and no hereditary powers were permitted by the law. The great
+Alfonso, who reigned in Naples from 1435 onwards (d. 1458), was a man of
+another kind than his real or alleged descendants. Brilliant in his
+whole existence, fearless in mixing with his people, mild and generous
+towards his enemies, dignified and affable in intercourse, modest
+notwithstanding his legitimate royal descent, admired rather than blamed
+even for his old man's passion for Lucrezia d'Alagna, he had the one bad
+quality of extravagance,[68] from which, however, the natural
+consequence followed. Unscrupulous financiers were long omnipotent at
+Court, till the bankrupt king robbed them of their spoils; a crusade was
+preached, as a pretext for taxing the clergy; the Jews were forced to
+save themselves from conversion and other oppressive measures by
+presents and the payment of regular taxes; when a great earthquake
+happening in the Abruzzi, the survivors were compelled to make good the
+contributions of the dead. On the other hand, he abolished unreasonable
+taxes, like that on dice, and aimed at relieving his poorer subjects
+from the imposts which pressed most heavily upon them. By such means
+Alfonso was able to entertain distinguished guests with unrivalled
+splendour; he found pleasure in ceaseless expense, even for the benefit
+of his enemies, and in rewarding literary work knew absolutely no
+measure. Poggio received 500 pieces of gold for translating Xenophon's
+'Cyrop�deia.'
+
+Ferrante,[69] who succeeded him, passed as his illegitimate son by a
+Spanish lady, but was not improbably the son of a half-caste Moor of
+Valentia. Whether it was his blood or the plots formed against his life
+by the barons which embittered and darkened his nature, it is certain
+that he was equalled in ferocity by none among the princes of his time.
+Restlessly active, recognised as one of the most powerful political
+minds of the day, and free from the vices of the profligate, he
+concentrated all his powers, among which must be reckoned profound
+dissimulation and an irreconcileable spirit of vengeance, on the
+destruction of his opponents. He had been wounded in every point in
+which a ruler is open to offence; for the leaders of the barons, though
+related to him by marriage, were yet the allies of his foreign enemies.
+Extreme measures became part of his daily policy. The means for this
+struggle with his barons, and for his external wars, were exacted in the
+same Mohammedan fashion which Frederick II. had introduced: the
+Government alone dealt in oil and wine; the whole commerce of the
+country was put by Ferrante into the hands of a wealthy merchant,
+Francesco Coppola, who had entire control of the anchorage on the coast,
+and shared the profits with the King. Deficits were made up by forced
+loans, by executions and confiscations, by open simony, and by
+contributions levied on the ecclesiastical corporations. Besides
+hunting, which he practised regardless of all rights of property, his
+pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him,
+either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in
+the costume which they wore in their lifetime.[70] He would chuckle in
+talking of the captives with his friends, and made no secret whatever of
+the museum of mummies. His victims were mostly men whom he had got into
+his power by treachery; some were even seized while guests at the royal
+table. His conduct to his first minister, Antonello Petrucci, who had
+grown sick and grey in his service, and from whose increasing fear of
+death he extorted present after present, was literally devilish. At
+length the suspicion of complicity with the last conspiracy of the
+barons gave the pretext for his arrest and execution. With him died
+Coppola. The way in which all this is narrated in Caracciolo and Porzio
+makes one's hair stand on end. The elder of the King's sons, Alfonso,
+Duke of Calabria, enjoyed in later years a kind of co-regency with his
+father. He was a savage, brutal profligate--described by Comines as 'the
+cruelest, worst, most vicious and basest man ever seen'--who in point of
+frankness alone had the advantage of Ferrante, and who openly avowed his
+contempt for religion and its usages.[71] The better and nobler features
+of the Italian despotisms are not to be found among the princes of this
+line; all that they possessed of the art and culture of their time
+served the purposes of luxury or display. Even the genuine Spaniards
+seem to have almost always degenerated in Italy; but the end of this
+cross-bred house (1494 and 1503) gives clear proof of a want of blood.
+Ferrante died of mental care and trouble; Alfonso accused his brother
+Federigo, the only honest member of the family, of treason, and insulted
+him in the vilest manner. At length, though he had hitherto passed for
+one of the ablest generals in Italy, he lost his head and fled to
+Sicily, leaving his son, the younger Ferrante, a prey to the French and
+to domestic treason. A dynasty which had ruled as this had done must at
+least have sold its life dear, if its children were ever to hope for a
+restoration. But, as Comines one-sidedly, and yet on the whole rightly
+observes on this occasion, '_Jamais homme cruel ne fut hardi_.'
+
+The despotism of the Dukes of Milan, whose government from the time of
+Giangaleazzo onwards was an absolute monarchy of the most thorough-going
+sort, shows the genuine Italian character of the fifteenth century. The
+last of the Visconti, Filippo Maria (1412-1447), is a character of
+peculiar interest, and of which fortunately an admirable description[72]
+has been left us. What a man of uncommon gifts and high position can be
+made by the passion of fear, is here shown with what may be called a
+mathematical completeness. All the resources of the State were devoted
+to the one end of securing his personal safety, though happily his cruel
+egoism did not degenerate into a purposeless thirst for blood. He lived
+in the Citadel of Milan, surrounded by magnificent gardens, arbours, and
+lawns. For years he never set foot in the city, making his excursions
+only in the country, where lay several of his splendid castles; the
+flotilla which, drawn by the swiftest horses, conducted him to them
+along canals constructed for the purpose, was so arranged as to allow of
+the application of the most rigorous etiquette. Whoever entered the
+citadel was watched by a hundred eyes; it was forbidden even to stand at
+the window, lest signs should be given to those without. All who were
+admitted among the personal followers of the Prince were subjected to a
+series of the strictest examinations; then, once accepted, were charged
+with the highest diplomatic commissions, as well as with the humblest
+personal services--both in this Court being alike honourable. And this
+was the man who conducted long and difficult wars, who dealt habitually
+with political affairs of the first importance, and every day sent his
+plenipotentiaries to all parts of Italy. His safety lay in the fact that
+none of his servants trusted the others, that his Condottieri were
+watched and misled by spies, and that the ambassadors and higher
+officials were baffled and kept apart by artificially nourished
+jealousies, and in particular by the device of coupling an honest man
+with a knave. His inward faith, too, rested upon opposed and
+contradictory systems; he believed in blind necessity, and in the
+influence of the stars, and offering prayers at one and the same time to
+helpers of every sort;[73] he was a student of the ancient authors, as
+well as of French tales of chivalry. And yet the same man, who would
+never suffer death to be mentioned in his presence,[74] and caused his
+dying favourites to be removed from the castle, that no shadow might
+fall on the abode of happiness, deliberately hastened his own death by
+closing up a wound, and, refusing to be bled, died at last with dignity
+and grace.
+
+His step-son and successor, the fortunate Condottiere Francesco Sforza
+(1450-1466, see p. 24), was perhaps of all the Italians of the fifteenth
+century the man most after the heart of his age. Never was the triumph
+of genius and individual power more brilliantly displayed than in him;
+and those who would not recognise his merit were at least forced to
+wonder at him as the spoilt child of fortune. The Milanese claimed it
+openly as an honour to be governed by so distinguished a master; when he
+entered the city the thronging populace bore him on horseback into the
+cathedral, without giving him the chance to dismount.[75] Let us listen
+to the balance-sheet of his life, in the estimate of Pope Pius II., a
+judge in such matters:[76] 'In the year 1459, when the Duke came to the
+congress at Mantua, he was 60 (really 58) years old; on horseback he
+looked like a young man; of a lofty and imposing figure, with serious
+features, calm and affable in conversation, princely in his whole
+bearing, with a combination of bodily and intellectual gifts unrivalled
+in our time, unconquered on the field of battle,--such was the man who
+raised himself from a humble position to the control of an empire. His
+wife was beautiful and virtuous, his children were like the angels of
+heaven; he was seldom ill, and all his chief wishes were fulfilled. And
+yet he was not without misfortune. His wife, out of jealousy, killed his
+mistress; his old comrades and friends, Troilo and Brunoro, abandoned
+him and went over to King Alfonso; another, Ciarpollone, he was forced
+to hang for treason; he had to suffer it that his brother Alessandro set
+the French upon him; one of his sons formed intrigues against him, and
+was imprisoned; the March of Ancona, which he had won in war, he lost
+again in the same way. No man enjoys so unclouded a fortune, that he has
+not somewhere to struggle with adversity. He is happy who has but few
+troubles.' With this negative definition of happiness the learned Pope
+dismisses the reader. Had he been able to see into the future, or been
+willing to stop and discuss the consequences of an uncontrolled
+despotism, one prevading fact would not have escaped his notice--the
+absence of all guarantee for the future. Those children, beautiful as
+angels, carefully and thoroughly educated as they were, fell victims,
+when they grew up, to the corruption of a measureless egoism. Galeazzo
+Maria (1466-1476), solicitous only of outward effect, took pride in the
+beauty of his hands, in the high salaries he paid, in the financial
+credit he enjoyed, in his treasure of two million pieces of gold, in the
+distinguished people who surrounded him, and in the army and birds of
+chase which he maintained. He was fond of the sound of his own voice,
+and spoke well, most fluently, perhaps, when he had the chance of
+insulting a Venetian ambassador.[77] He was subject to caprices, such as
+having a room painted with figures in a single night; and, what was
+worse, to fits of senseless debauchery and of revolting cruelty to his
+nearest friends. To a handful of enthusiasts, at whose head stood Giov.
+Andrea di Lampugnano, he seemed a tyrant too bad to live; they murdered
+him,[78] and thereby delivered the State into the power of his brothers,
+one of whom, Ludovico il Moro, threw his nephew into prison, and took
+the government into his own hands. From this usurpation followed the
+French intervention, and the disasters which befell the whole of Italy.
+
+The Moor is the most perfect type of the despot of that age, and, as a
+kind of natural product, almost disarms our moral judgment.
+Notwithstanding the profound immorality of the means he employed, he
+used them with perfect ingenuousness; no one would probably have been
+more astonished than himself to learn, that for the choice of means as
+well as of ends a human being is morally responsible; he would rather
+have reckoned it as a singular virtue that, so far as possible, he had
+abstained from too free a use of the punishment of death. He accepted as
+no more than his due the almost fabulous respect of the Italians for his
+political genius.[79] In 1496 he boasted that the Pope Alexander was his
+chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his Condottiere, Venice his
+chamberlain, and the King of France his courier, who must come and go at
+his bidding.[80] With marvellous presence of mind he weighed, even in
+his last extremity, all possible means of escape, and at length decided,
+to his honour, to trust to the goodness of human nature; he rejected the
+proposal of his brother, the Cardinal Ascanio, who wished to remain in
+the Citadel of Milan, on the ground of a former quarrel: 'Monsignore,
+take it not ill, but I trust you not, brother though you be;' and
+appointed to the command of the castle, 'that pledge of his return,' a
+man to whom he had always done good, but who nevertheless betrayed
+him.[81] At home the Moor was a good and useful ruler, and to the last
+he reckoned on his popularity both in Milan and in Como. In former years
+(after 1496) he had overstrained the resources of his State, and at
+Cremona had ordered, out of pure expediency, a respectable citizen, who
+had spoken against the new taxes, to be quietly strangled. Since that
+time, in holding audiences, he kept his visitors away from his person by
+means of a bar, so that in conversing with him they were compelled to
+speak at the top of their voices.[82] At his court, the most brilliant
+in Europe, since that of Burgundy had ceased to exist, immorality of the
+worst kind was prevalent: the daughter was sold by the father, the wife
+by the husband, the sister by the brother.[83] The Prince himself was
+incessantly active, and, as son of his own deeds, claimed relationship
+with all who, like himself, stood on their personal merits--with
+scholars, poets, artists, and musicians. The academy which he
+founded[84] served rather for his own purposes than for the instruction
+of scholars; nor was it the fame of the distinguished men who surrounded
+him which he heeded, so much as their society and their services. It is
+certain that Bramante was scantily paid at first;[85] Lionardo, on the
+other hand, was up to 1496 suitably remunerated--and besides, what kept
+him at the court, if not his own free will? The world lay open to him,
+as perhaps to no other mortal man of that day; and if proof were wanting
+of the loftier element in the nature of Ludovico Moro, it is found in
+the long stay of the enigmatic master at his court. That afterwards
+Lionardo entered the service of C�sar Borgia and Francis I. was probably
+due to the interest he felt in the unusual and striking character of the
+two men.
+
+After the fall of the Moor--he was captured in April 1500 by the French,
+after his return from his flight to Germany--his sons were badly brought
+up among strangers, and showed no capacity for carrying out his
+political testament. The elder, Massimiliano, had no resemblance to him;
+the younger, Francesco, was at all events not without spirit. Milan,
+which in those years changed its rulers so often, and suffered so
+unspeakably in the change, endeavoured to secure itself against a
+reaction. In the year 1512 the French, retreating before the arms of
+Maximilian and the Spaniards, were induced to make a declaration that
+the Milanese had taken no part in their expulsion, and, without being
+guilty of rebellion, might yield themselves to a new conqueror.[86] It
+is a fact of some political importance that in such moments of
+transition the unhappy city, like Naples at the flight of the Aragonese,
+was apt to fall a prey to gangs of (often highly aristocratic)
+scoundrels.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The house of Gonzaga at Mantua and that of Montefeltro of Urbino were
+among the best ordered and richest in men of ability during the second
+half of the fifteenth century. The Gonzaga were a tolerably harmonious
+family; for a long period no murder had been known among them, and their
+dead could be shown to the world without fear. The Marquis Francesco
+Gonzaga[87] and his wife, Isabella of Este, in spite of some few
+irregularities, were a united and respectable couple, and brought up
+their sons to be successful and remarkable men at a time when their
+small but most important State was exposed to incessant danger. That
+Francesco, either as statesman or as soldier, should adopt a policy of
+exceptional honesty, was what neither the Emperor, nor Venice, nor the
+King of France could have expected or desired; but certainly since the
+battle at Taro (1495), so far as military honour was concerned, he felt
+and acted as an Italian patriot, and imparted the same spirit to his
+wife. Every deed of loyalty and heroism, such as the defence of Faenza
+against C�sar Borgia, she felt as a vindication of the honour of Italy.
+Our judgment of her does not need to rest on the praises of the artists
+and writers who made the fair princess a rich return for her patronage;
+her own letters show her to us as a woman of unshaken firmness, full of
+kindliness and humorous observation. Bembo, Bandello, Ariosto, and
+Bernardo Tasso sent their works to this court, small and powerless as it
+was, and empty as they found its treasury. A more polished and charming
+circle was not to be seen in Italy, since the dissolution (1508) of the
+old Court of Urbino; and in one respect, in freedom of movement, the
+society of Ferrara was inferior to that of Mantua. In artistic matters
+Isabella had an accurate knowledge, and the catalogue of her small but
+choice collection can be read by no lover of art without emotion.
+
+In the great Federigo (1444-1482), whether he were a genuine Montefeltro
+or not, Urbino possessed a brilliant representative of the princely
+order. As a Condottiere--and in this capacity he served kings and popes
+for thirty years after he became prince--he shared the political
+morality of soldiers of fortune, a morality of which the fault does not
+rest with them alone; as ruler of his little territory he adopted the
+plan of spending at home the money he had earned abroad, and taxing his
+people as lightly as possible. Of him and his two successors, Guidobaldo
+and Francesco Maria, we read: 'They erected buildings, furthered the
+cultivation of the land, lived at home, and gave employment to a large
+number of people: their subjects loved them.'[88] But not only the
+state, but the court too, was a work of art and organization, and this
+in every sense of the word. Federigo had 500 persons in his service; the
+arrangements of the court were as complete as in the capitals of the
+greatest monarchs, but nothing was wasted; all had its object, and all
+was carefully watched and controlled. The court was no scene of vice and
+dissipation: it served as a school of military education for the sons of
+other great houses, the thoroughness of whose culture and instruction
+was made a point of honour by the Duke. The palace which he built, if
+not one of the most splendid, was classical in the perfection of its
+plan; there was placed the greatest of his treasures, the celebrated
+library.[89] Feeling secure in a land where all gained profit or
+employment from his rule, and where none were beggars, he habitually
+went unarmed and almost unaccompanied; alone among the princes of his
+time he ventured to walk in an open park, and to take his frugal meals
+in an open chamber, while Livy, or in time of fasting, some devotional
+work, was read to him. In the course of the same afternoon he would
+listen to a lecture on some classical subject, and thence would go to
+the monastery of the Clarisse and talk of sacred things through the
+grating with the abbess. In the evening he would overlook the martial
+exercises of the young people of his court on the meadow of St.
+Francesco, known for its magnificent view, and saw to it well that all
+the feats were done in the most perfect manner. He strove always to be
+affable and accessible to the utmost degree, visiting the artisans who
+worked for him in their shops, holding frequent audiences, and, if
+possible, attending to the requests of each individual on the same day
+that they were presented. No wonder that the people, as he walked along
+the street, knelt down and cried: 'Dio ti mantenga, signore!' He was
+called by thinking people 'the light of Italy.'[90] His gifted son
+Guidobaldo,[91] visited by sickness and misfortune of every kind, was
+able at the last (1508) to give his state into the safe hands of his
+nephew Francesco Maria (nephew also of Pope Julius II.), who, at least,
+succeeded in preserving the territory from any permanent foreign
+occupation. It is remarkable with what confidence Guidobaldo yielded and
+fled before C�sar Borgia and Francesco before the troops of Leo X.; each
+knew that his restoration would be all the easier and the more popular
+the less the country suffered through a fruitless defence. When Ludovico
+made the same calculation at Milan, he forgot the many grounds of hatred
+which existed against him. The court of Guidobaldo has been made
+immortal as the high school of polished manners by Baldassar
+Castiglione, who represented his eclogue Thyrsis before, and in honour
+of that society (1506), and who afterwards (1518) laid the scena of the
+dialogue of his 'Cortigiano' in the circle of the accomplished Duchess
+Elisabetta Gonzaga.
+
+The government of the family of Este at Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio
+displays curious contrasts of violence and popularity.[92] Within the
+palace frightful deeds were perpetrated; a princess was beheaded (1425)
+for alleged adultery with a step-son;[93] legitimate and illegitimate
+children fled from the court, and even abroad their lives were
+threatened by assassins sent in pursuit of them (1471). Plots from
+without were incessant; the bastard of a bastard tried to wrest the
+crown from the lawful heir, Hercules I.: this latter is said afterwards
+(1493) to have poisoned his wife on discovering that she, at the
+instigation of her brother Ferrante of Naples, was going to poison him.
+This list of tragedies is closed by the plot of two bastards against
+their brothers, the ruling Duke Alfonso I. and the Cardinal Ippolito
+(1506), which was discovered in time, and punished with imprisonment for
+life. The financial system in this State was of the most perfect kind,
+and necessarily so, since none of the large or second-rate powers of
+Italy were exposed to such danger and stood in such constant need of
+armaments and fortifications. It was the hope of the rulers that the
+increasing prosperity of the people would keep pace with the increasing
+weight of taxation, and the Marquis Niccol� (d. 1441) used to express
+the wish that his subjects might be richer than the people of other
+countries. If the rapid increase of the population be a measure of the
+prosperity actually attained, it is certainly a fact of importance that
+in the year 1497, notwithstanding the wonderful extension of the
+capital, no houses were to be let.[94] Ferrara is the first really
+modern city in Europe; large and well-built quarters sprang up at the
+bidding of the ruler: here, by the concentration of the official classes
+and the active promotion of trade, was formed for the first time a true
+capital; wealthy fugitives from all parts of Italy, Florentines
+especially, settled and built their palaces at Ferrara. But the indirect
+taxation, at all events, must have reached a point at which it could
+only just be borne. The Government, it is true, took measures of
+alleviation which were also adopted by other Italian despots, such as
+Galeazzo Maria Sforza: in time of famine corn was brought from a
+distance and seems to have been distributed gratuitously;[95] but in
+ordinary times it compensated itself by the monopoly, if not of corn, of
+many other of the necessaries of life--fish, salt meat, fruit, and
+vegetables, which last were carefully planted on and near the walls of
+the city. The most considerable source of income, however, was the
+annual sale of public offices, a usage which was common throughout
+Italy, and about the working of which at Ferrara we have more precise
+information. We read, for example, that at the new year 1502 the
+majority of the officials bought their places at 'prezzi salati;' public
+servants of the most various kinds, custom-house officers, bailiffs
+(massari), notaries, 'podest�,' judges, and even captains, _i.e._,
+lieutenant-governors of provincial towns, are quoted by name. As one of
+the 'devourers of the people' who paid dearly for their places, and who
+were 'hated worse than the devil,' Tito Strozza--let us hope not the
+famous Latin poet--is mentioned. About the same time every year the
+dukes were accustomed to make a round of visits in Ferrara, the so
+called 'andar per ventura,' in which they took presents from, at any
+rate, the more wealthy citizens. The gifts, however, did not consist of
+money, but of natural products.
+
+It was the pride of the duke[96] for all Italy to know that at Ferrara
+the soldiers received their pay and the professors of the University
+their salary not a day later than it was due; that the soldiers never
+dared lay arbitrary hands on citizen or peasant; that the town was
+impregnable to assault; and that vast sums of coined money were stored
+up in the citadel. To keep two sets of accounts seemed unnecessary; the
+Minister of Finance was at the same time manager of the ducal household.
+The buildings erected by Borso (1430-1471), by Hercules I. (till 1505),
+and by Alfonso I. (till 1534), were very numerous, but of small size:
+they are characteristic of a princely house which, with all its love of
+splendour--Borso never appeared but in embroidery and jewels--indulged
+in no ill-considered expense. Alfonso may perhaps have foreseen the fate
+which was in store for his charming little villas, the Belvedere with
+its shady gardens, and Montana with its fountains and beautiful
+frescoes.
+
+It is undeniable that the dangers to which these princes were constantly
+exposed developed in them capacities of a remarkable kind. In so
+artificial a world only a man of consummate address could hope to
+succeed; each candidate for distinction was forced to make good his
+claims by personal merit and show himself worthy of the crown he sought.
+Their characters are not without dark sides; but in all of them lives
+something of those qualities which Italy then pursued as its ideal. What
+European monarch of the time so laboured for his own culture as, for
+instance, Alfonso I.? His travels in France, England, and the
+Netherlands were undertaken for the purpose of study: by means of them
+he gained an accurate knowledge of the industry and commerce of these
+countries.[97] It is ridiculous to reproach him with the turner's work
+which he practised in his leisure hours, connected as it was with his
+skill in the casting of cannon, and with the unprejudiced freedom with
+which he surrounded himself by masters of every art. The Italian princes
+were not, like their contemporaries in the North, dependent on the
+society of an aristocracy which held itself to be the only class worth
+consideration, and which infected the monarch with the same conceit. In
+Italy the prince was permitted and compelled to know and to use men of
+every grade in society; and the nobility, though by birth a caste, were
+forced in social intercourse to stand upon their personal qualifications
+alone. But this is a point which we shall discuss more fully in the
+sequel.
+
+The feeling of the Ferrarese towards the ruling house was a strange
+compound of silent dread, of the truly Italian sense of well-calculated
+interest, and of the loyalty of the modern subject: personal admiration
+was transformed into a new sentiment of duty. The city of Ferrara raised
+in 1451 a bronze equestrian statue to their Prince Niccol�, who had died
+ten years earlier; Borso (1454) did not scruple to place his own statue,
+also of bronze, but in a sitting posture, hard by in the market; in
+addition to which the city, at the beginning of his reign, decreed to
+him a 'marble triumphal pillar.' And when he was buried the whole people
+felt as if God himself had died a second time.[98] A citizen, who, when
+abroad from Venice, had spoken ill of Borso in public, was informed on
+his return home, and condemned to banishment and the confiscation of his
+goods; a loyal subject was with difficulty restrained from cutting him
+down before the tribunal itself, and with a rope round his neck the
+offender went to the duke and begged for a full pardon. The government
+was well provided with spies, and the duke inspected personally the
+daily list of travellers which the innkeepers were strictly ordered to
+present. Under Borso,[99] who was anxious to leave no distinguished
+stranger unhonoured, this regulation served a hospitable purpose;
+Hercules I.[100] used it simply as a measure of precaution. In Bologna,
+too, it was then the rule, under Giovanni II. Bentivoglio, that every
+passing traveller who entered at one gate must obtain a ticket in order
+to go out at another.[101] An unfailing means of popularity was the
+sudden dismissal of oppressive officials. When Borso arrested in person
+his chief and confidential counsellors, when Hercules I. removed and
+disgraced a tax-gatherer, who for years had been sucking the blood of
+the people, bonfires were lighted and the bells were pealed in their
+honour. With one of his servants, however, Hercules let things go too
+far. The director of the police, or by whatever name we should choose to
+call him (Capitano di Giustizia), was Gregorio Zampante of Lucca--a
+native being unsuited for an office of this kind. Even the sons and
+brothers of the duke trembled before this man; the fines he inflicted
+amounted to hundreds and thousands of ducats, and torture was applied
+even before the hearing of a case: bribes were accepted from wealthy
+criminals, and their pardon obtained from the duke by false
+representations. Gladly would the people have paid any sum to this ruler
+for sending away the 'enemy of God and man.' But Hercules had knighted
+him and made him godfather to his children; and year by year Zampante
+laid by 2,000 ducats. He dared only eat pigeons bred in his own house,
+and could not cross the street without a band of archers and bravos. It
+was time to get rid of him; in 1490 two students and a converted Jew
+whom he had mortally offended, killed him in his house while taking his
+siesta, and then rode through the town on horses held in waiting,
+raising the cry, 'Come out! come out! we have slain Zampante!' The
+pursuers came too late, and found them already safe across the frontier.
+Of course it now rained satires--some of them in the form of sonnets,
+others of odes.
+
+It was wholly in the spirit of this system that the sovereign imposed
+his own respect for useful servants on the court and on the people. When
+in 1469 Borso's privy councillor Ludovico Casella died, no court of law
+or place of business in the city, and no lecture-room at the University,
+was allowed to be open: all had to follow the body to S. Domenico, since
+the duke intended to be present. And, in fact, 'the first of the house
+of Este who attended the corpse of a subject' walked, clad in black,
+after the coffin, weeping, while behind him came the relatives of
+Casella, each conducted by one of the gentlemen of the Court: the body
+of the plain citizen was carried by nobles from the church into the
+cloister, where it was buried. Indeed this official sympathy with
+princely emotion first came up in the Italian States.[102] At the root
+of the practice may be a beautiful, humane sentiment; the utterance of
+it, especially in the poets, is, as a rule, of equivocal sincerity. One
+of the youthful poems of Ariosto,[103] on the Death of Lionora of
+Aragon, wife of Hercules I., contains besides the inevitable graveyard
+flowers, which are scattered in the elegies of all ages, some thoroughly
+modern features: 'This death had given Ferrara a blow which it would not
+get over for years: its benefactress was now its advocate in heaven,
+since earth was not worthy of her; truly, the angel of Death did not
+come to her, as to us common mortals, with blood-stained scythe, but
+fair to behold (onesta), and with so kind a face that every fear was
+allayed.' But we meet, also, with a sympathy of a different kind.
+Novelists, depending wholly on the favour of their patrons, tell us the
+love-stories of the prince, even before his death, in a way which, to
+later times, would seem the height of indiscretion, but which then
+passed simply as an innocent compliment. Lyrical poets even went so far
+as to sing the illicit flames of their lawfully married lords, _e.g._
+Angelo Poliziano, those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Gioviano
+Pontano, with a singular gusto, those of Alfonso of Calabria. The poem
+in question[105] betrays unconsciously the odious disposition of the
+Aragonese ruler; in these things too, he must needs be the most
+fortunate, else woe be to those who are more successful! That the
+greatest artists, for example Lionardo, should paint the mistresses of
+their patrons was no more than a matter of course.
+
+But the house of Este was not satisfied with the praises of others; it
+undertook to celebrate them itself. In the Palazzo Schifanoja Borso
+caused himself to be painted in a series of historical representations,
+and Hercules kept the anniversary of his accession to the throne by a
+procession which was compared to the feast of Corpus Christi; shops were
+closed as on Sunday; in the centre of the line walked all the members of
+the princely house (bastards included) clad in embroidered robes. That
+the crown was the fountain of honour and authority, that all personal
+distinction flowed from it alone, had been long[106] expressed at this
+court by the Order of the Golden Spur--an order which had nothing in
+common with medi�val chivalry. Hercules I. added to the spur a sword, a
+gold-laced mantle, and a grant of money, in return for which there is no
+doubt that regular service was required.
+
+The patronage of art and letters for which this court has obtained a
+world-wide reputation, was exercised through the University, which was
+one of the most perfect in Italy, and by the gift of places in the
+personal or official service of the prince; it involved consequently no
+additional expense. Bojardo, as a wealthy country gentleman and high
+official, belonged to this class. At the time when Ariosto began to
+distinguish himself, there existed no court, in the true sense of the
+word, either at Milan or Florence, and soon there was none either at
+Urbino or at Naples. He had to content himself with a place among the
+musicians and jugglers of Cardinal Ippolito till Alfonso took him into
+his service. It was otherwise at a later time with Torquato Tasso, whose
+presence at court was jealously sought after.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.
+
+
+In face of this centralised authority, all legal opposition within the
+borders of the state was futile. The elements needed for the restoration
+of a republic had been for ever destroyed, and the field prepared for
+violence and despotism. The nobles, destitute of political rights, even
+where they held feudal possessions, might call themselves Guelphs or
+Ghibellines at will, might dress up their bravos in padded hose and
+feathered caps[107] or how else they pleased; thoughtful men like
+Macchiavelli[108] knew well enough that Milan and Naples were too
+'corrupt' for a republic. Strange judgments fall on these two so-called
+parties, which now served only to give an official sanction to personal
+and family disputes. An Italian prince, whom Agrippa of Nettesheim[109]
+advised to put them down, replied that their quarrels brought him in
+more than 12,000 ducats a year in fines. And when in the year 1500,
+during the brief return of Ludovico Moro to his States, the Guelphs of
+Tortona summoned a part of the neighbouring French army into the city,
+in order to make an end once for all of their opponents, the French
+certainly began by plundering and ruining the Ghibellines, but finished
+by doing the same to their hosts, till Tortona was utterly laid
+waste.[110] In Romagna, the hotbed of every ferocious passion, these two
+names had long lost all political meaning. It was a sign of the
+political delusion of the people that they not seldom believed the
+Guelphs to be the natural allies of the French and the Ghibellines of
+the Spaniards. It is hard to see that those who tried to profit by this
+error got much by doing so. France, after all her interventions, had to
+abandon the peninsula at last, and what became of Spain, after she had
+destroyed Italy, is known to every reader.
+
+But to return to the despots of the Renaissance. A pure and simple mind,
+we might think, would perhaps have argued that, since all power is
+derived from God, these princes, if they were loyally and honestly
+supported by all their subjects, must in time themselves improve and
+lose all traces of their violent origin. But from characters and
+imaginations inflamed by passion and ambition, reasoning of this kind
+could not be expected. Like bad physicians, they thought to cure the
+disease by removing the symptoms, and fancied that if the tyrant were
+put to death, freedom would follow of itself. Or else, without
+reflecting even to this extent, they sought only to give a vent to the
+universal hatred, or to take vengeance for some family misfortune or
+personal affront. Since the governments were absolute, and free from all
+legal restraints, the opposition chose its weapons with equal freedom.
+Boccaccio declares openly[111] 'Shall I call the tyrant king or prince,
+and obey him loyally as my lord? No, for he is the enemy of the
+commonwealth. Against him I may use arms, conspiracies, spies, ambushes
+and fraud; to do so is a sacred and necessary work. There is no more
+acceptable sacrifice than the blood of a tyrant.' We need not occupy
+ourselves with individual cases; Macchiavelli,[112] in a famous chapter
+of his 'Discorsi,' treats of the conspiracies of ancient and modern
+times from the days of the Greek tyrants downwards, and classifies them
+with cold-blooded indifference according to their various plans and
+results. We need make but two observations, first on the murders
+committed in church, and next on the influence of classical antiquity.
+So well was the tyrant guarded that it was almost impossible to lay
+hands upon him elsewhere than at solemn religious services; and on no
+other occasion was the whole family to be found assembled together. It
+was thus that the Fabrianese[113] murdered (1435) the members of their
+ruling house, the Chiavistelli, during high mass, the signal being given
+by the words of the Creed, 'Et incarnatus est.' At Milan the Duke Giovan
+Maria Visconti (1412) was assassinated at the entrance of the church of
+San Gottardo, Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476) in the church of Santo
+Stefano, and Ludovico Moro only escaped (1484) the daggers of the
+adherents of the widowed Duchess Bona, through entering the church of
+Sant' Ambrogio by another door than that by which he was expected. There
+was no intentional impiety in the act; the assassins of Galeazzo did not
+fail to pray before the murder to the patron saint of the church, and to
+listen devoutly to the first mass. It was, however, one cause of the
+partial failure of the conspiracy of the Pazzi against Lorenzo and
+Guiliano Medici (1478), that the brigand Montesecco, who had bargained
+to commit the murder at a banquet, declined to undertake it in the
+Cathedral of Florence. Certain of the clergy 'who were familiar with the
+sacred place, and consequently had no fear' were induced to act in his
+stead.[114]
+
+As to the imitation of antiquity, the influence of which on moral, and
+more especially on political, questions we shall often refer to, the
+example was set by the rulers themselves, who, both in their conception
+of the state and in their personal conduct, took the old Roman empire
+avowedly as their model. In like manner their opponents, when they set
+to work with a deliberate theory, took pattern by the ancient
+tyrannicides. It may be hard to prove that in the main point--in forming
+the resolve itself--they consciously followed a classical example; but
+the appeal to antiquity was no mere phrase. The most striking
+disclosures have been left us with respect to the murderers of Galeazzo
+Sforza--Lampugnani, Olgiati, and Visconti.[115] Though all three had
+personal ends to serve, yet their enterprise may be partly ascribed to a
+more general reason. About this time Cola de' Montani, a humanist and
+professor of eloquence, had awakened among many of the young Milanese
+nobility a vague passion for glory and patriotic achievements, and had
+mentioned to Lampugnani and Olgiati his hope of delivering Milan.
+Suspicion was soon aroused against him: he was banished from the city,
+and his pupils were abandoned to the fanaticism he had excited. Some ten
+days before the deed they met together and took a solemn oath in the
+monastery of Sant' Ambrogio. 'Then,' says Olgiati, 'in a remote corner I
+raised my eyes before the picture of the patron saint, and implored his
+help for ourselves and for all _his_ people.' The heavenly protector of
+the city was called on to bless the undertaking, as was afterwards St.
+Stephen, in whose church it was fulfilled. Many of their comrades were
+now informed of the plot, nightly meetings were held in the house of
+Lampugnani, and the conspirators practised for the murder with the
+sheaths of their daggers. The attempt was successful, but Lampugnani was
+killed on the spot by the attendants of the duke; the others were
+captured: Visconti was penitent, but Olgiati through all his tortures
+maintained that the deed was an acceptable offering to God, and
+exclaimed while the executioner was breaking his ribs, 'Courage,
+Girolamo! thou wilt long be remembered; death is bitter, but glory is
+eternal.'[116]
+
+But however idealistic the object and purpose of such conspiracies may
+appear, the manner in which they were conducted betrays the influence of
+that worst of all conspirators, Catiline--a man in whose thoughts
+freedom had no place whatever. The annals of Siena tells us expressly
+that the conspirators were students of Sallust, and the fact is
+indirectly confirmed by the confession of Olgiati.[117] Elsewhere, too,
+we meet with the name of Catiline, and a more attractive pattern of the
+conspirator, apart from the end he followed, could hardly be discovered.
+
+Among the Florentines, whenever they got rid of, or tried to get rid of,
+the Medici, tyrannicide was a practice universally accepted and
+approved. After the flight of the Medici in 1494, the bronze group of
+Donatello[118]--Judith with the dead Holofernes--was taken from their
+collection and placed before the Palazzo della Signoria, on the spot
+where the 'David' of Michael Angelo now stands, with the inscription,
+'Exemplum salutis public� cives posuere 1495.'[119] No example was more
+popular than that of the younger Brutus, who, in Dante,[120] lies with
+Cassius and Judas Iscariot in the lowest pit of hell, because of his
+treason to the empire. Pietro Paolo Boscoli, whose plot against
+Guiliano, Giovanni, and Guilio Medici failed (1513), was an enthusiastic
+admirer of Brutus, and in order to follow his steps, only waited to find
+a Cassius. Such a partner he met with in Agostino Capponi. His last
+utterances in prison[121]--a striking evidence of the religious feeling
+of the time--show with what an effort he rid his mind of these classical
+imaginations, in order to die like a Christian. A friend and the
+confessor both had to assure him that St. Thomas Aquinas condemned
+conspirators absolutely; but the confessor afterwards admitted to the
+same friend that St. Thomas drew a distinction and permitted
+conspiracies against a tyrant who had forced himself on a people against
+their will. After Lorenzino Medici had murdered the Duke Alessandro
+(1537), and then escaped, an apology for the deed appeared,[122] which
+is probably his own work, and certainly composed in his interest, and in
+which he praises tyrannicide as an act of the highest merit; on the
+supposition that Alessandro was a legitimate Medici, and, therefore,
+related to him, if only distantly, he boldly compares himself with
+Timoleon, who slew his brother for his country's sake. Others, on the
+same occasion, made use of the comparison with Brutus, and that Michael
+Angelo himself, even late in life, was not unfriendly to ideas of this
+kind, may be inferred from his bust of Brutus in the Uffizi. He left it
+unfinished, like nearly all his works, but certainly not because the
+murder of C�sar was repugnant to his feeling, as the couplet beneath
+declares.
+
+A popular radicalism in the form in which it is opposed to the
+monarchies of later times, is not to be found in the despotic states of
+the Renaissance. Each individual protested inwardly against despotism,
+but was rather disposed to make tolerable or profitable terms with it,
+than to combine with others for its destruction. Things must have been
+as bad as at Camerino, Fabriano, or Rimini (p. 28), before the citizens
+united to destroy or expel the ruling house. They knew in most cases
+only too well that this would but mean a change of masters. The star of
+the Republics was certainly on the decline.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.
+
+
+The Italian municipalities had, in earlier days, given signal proof of
+that force which transforms the city into the state. It remained only
+that these cities should combine in a great confederation; and this idea
+was constantly recurring to Italian statesmen, whatever differences of
+form it might from time to time display. In fact, during the struggles
+of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great and formidable leagues
+actually were formed by the cities; and Sismondi (ii. 174) is of opinion
+that the time of the final armaments of the Lombard confederation
+against Barbarossa was the moment when a universal Italian league was
+possible. But the more powerful states had already developed
+characteristic features which made any such scheme impracticable. In
+their commercial dealings they shrank from no measures, however extreme,
+which might damage their competitors; they held their weaker neighbours
+in a condition of helpless dependence--in short, they each fancied they
+could get on by themselves without the assistance of the rest, and thus
+paved the way for future usurpation. The usurper was forthcoming when
+long conflicts between the nobility and the people, and between the
+different factions of the nobility, had awakened the desire for a strong
+government, and when bands of mercenaries ready and willing to sell
+their aid to the highest bidder had superseded the general levy of the
+citizens which party leaders now found unsuited to their purposes.[123]
+The tyrants destroyed the freedom of most of the cities; here and there
+they were expelled, but not thoroughly, or only for a short time; and
+they were always restored, since the inward conditions were favourable
+to them, and the opposing forces were exhausted.
+
+Among the cities which maintained their independence are two of deep
+significance for the history of the human race: Florence, the city of
+incessant movement, which has left us a record of the thoughts and
+aspirations of each and all who, for three centuries, took part in this
+movement, and Venice, the city of apparent stagnation and of political
+secrecy. No contrast can be imagined stronger than that which is offered
+us by these two, and neither can be compared to anything else which the
+world has hitherto produced.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Venice recognised itself from the first as a strange and mysterious
+creation--the fruits of a higher power than human ingenuity. The solemn
+foundation of the city was the subject of a legend. On March 25, 413, at
+mid-day the emigrants from Padua laid the first stone at the Rialto,
+that they might have a sacred, inviolable asylum amid the devastations
+of the barbarians. Later writers attributed to the founders the
+presentiment of the future greatness of the city; M. Antonio Sabellico,
+who has celebrated the event in the dignified flow of his hexameters,
+makes the priest, who completes the act of consecration, cry to heaven,
+'When we hereafter attempt great things, grant us prosperity! Now we
+kneel before a poor altar; but if our vows are not made in vain, a
+hundred temples, O God, of gold and marble shall arise to Thee.'[124]
+The island city at the end of the fifteenth century was the jewel-casket
+of the world. It is so described by the same Sabellico,[125] with its
+ancient cupolas, its leaning towers, its inlaid marble fa�ades, its
+compressed splendour, where the richest decoration did not hinder the
+practical employment of every corner of space. He takes us to the
+crowded Piazza before S. Giacometto at the Rialto, where the business of
+the world is transacted, not amid shouting and confusion, but with the
+subdued hum of many voices; where in the porticos round the square[126]
+and in those of the adjoining streets sit hundreds of money-changers and
+goldsmiths, with endless rows of shops and warehouses above their heads.
+He describes the great Fondaco of the Germans beyond the bridge, where
+their goods and their dwellings lay, and before which their ships are
+drawn up side by side in the canal; higher up is a whole fleet laden
+with wine and oil, and parallel with it, on the shore swarming with
+porters, are the vaults of the merchants; then from the Rialto to the
+square of St. Mark come the inns and the perfumers' cabinets. So he
+conducts the reader from one quarter of the city to another till he
+comes at last to the two hospitals which were among those institutions
+of public utility nowhere so numerous as at Venice. Care for the people,
+in peace as well as in war, was characteristic of this government, and
+its attention to the wounded, even to those of the enemy, excited the
+admiration of other states.[127] Public institutions of every kind found
+in Venice their pattern; the pensioning of retired servants was carried
+out systematically, and included a provision for widows and orphans.
+Wealth, political security, and acquaintance with other countries, had
+matured the understanding of such questions. These slender fair-haired
+men,[128] with quiet cautious steps, and deliberate speech, differed but
+slightly in costume and bearing from one another; ornaments, especially
+pearls, were reserved for the women and girls. At that time the general
+prosperity, notwithstanding the losses sustained from the Turks, was
+still dazzling; the stores of energy which the city possessed and the
+prejudice in its favour diffused throughout Europe, enabled it at a much
+later time to survive the heavy blows which were inflicted by the
+discovery of the sea route to the Indies, by the fall of the Mamelukes
+in Egypt, and by the war of the League of Cambray.
+
+Sabellico, born in the neighbourhood of Tivoli, and accustomed to the
+frank loquacity of the scholars of his day, remarks elsewhere[129] with
+some astonishment, that the young nobles who came of a morning to hear
+his lectures could not be prevailed on to enter into political
+discussions: 'When I ask them what people think, say, and expect about
+this or that movement in Italy, they all answer with one voice that they
+know nothing about the matter.' Still, in spite of the strict
+inquisition of the state, much was to be learned from the more corrupt
+members of the aristocracy by those who were willing to pay enough for
+it. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there were traitors
+among the highest officials;[130] the popes, the Italian princes, and
+even second-rate Condottieri in the service of the government had
+informers in their pay, sometimes with regular salaries; things went so
+far that the Council of Ten found it prudent to conceal important
+political news from the Council of the Pregadi, and it was even supposed
+that Ludovico Moro had control of a definite number of votes among the
+latter. Whether the hanging of single offenders and the high
+rewards--such as a life-pension of sixty ducats paid to those who
+informed against them--were of much avail, it is hard to decide; one of
+the chief causes of this evil, the poverty of many of the nobility,
+could not be removed in a day. In the year 1492 a proposal was urged by
+two of that order, that the state should annually spend 70,000 ducats
+for the relief of those poorer nobles who held no public office; the
+matter was near coming before the Great Council, in which it might have
+had a majority, when the Council of Ten interfered in time and banished
+the two proposers for life to Nicosia in Cyprus.[131] About this time a
+Soranzo was hung, though not at Venice itself, for sacrilege, and a
+Contarini put in chains for burglary; another of the same family came in
+1499 before the Signory, and complained that for many years he had been
+without an office, that he had only sixteen ducats a year and nine
+children, that his debts amounted to sixty ducats, that he knew no trade
+and had lately been turned on to the streets. We can understand why some
+of the wealthier nobles built houses, sometimes whole rows of them, to
+provide free lodging for their needy comrades. Such works figure in
+wills among deeds of charity.[132]
+
+But if the enemies of Venice ever founded serious hopes upon abuses of
+this kind, they were greatly in error. It might be thought that the
+commercial activity of the city, which put within reach of the humblest
+a rich reward for their labour, and the colonies on the Eastern shores
+of the Mediterranean, would have diverted from political affairs the
+dangerous elements of society. But had not the political history of
+Genoa, notwithstanding similar advantages, been of the stormiest? The
+cause of the stability of Venice lies rather in a combination of
+circumstances which were found in union nowhere else. Unassailable from
+its position, it had been able from the beginning to treat of foreign
+affairs with the fullest and calmest reflection, and ignore nearly
+altogether the parties which divided the rest of Italy, to escape the
+entanglement of permanent alliances, and to set the highest price on
+those which it thought fit to make. The keynote of the Venetian
+character was, consequently, a spirit of proud and contemptuous
+isolation, which, joined to the hatred felt for the city by the other
+states of Italy, gave rise to a strong sense of solidarity within. The
+inhabitants meanwhile were united by the most powerful ties of interest
+in dealing both with the colonies and with the possessions on the
+mainland, forcing the population of the latter, that is, of all the
+towns up to Bergamo, to buy and sell in Venice alone. A power which
+rested on means so artificial could only be maintained by internal
+harmony and unity; and this conviction was so widely diffused among the
+citizens that the conspirator found few elements to work upon. And the
+discontented, if there were such, were held so far apart by the division
+between the noble and the burgher, that a mutual understanding was not
+easy. On the other hand, within the ranks of the nobility itself,
+travel, commercial enterprise, and the incessant wars with the Turks
+saved the wealthy and dangerous from that fruitful source of
+conspiracies--idleness. In these wars they were spared, often to a
+criminal extent, by the general in command, and the fall of the city was
+predicted by a Venetian Cato, if this fear of the nobles 'to give one
+another pain' should continue at the expense of justice.[133]
+Nevertheless this free movement in the open air gave the Venetian
+aristocracy, as a whole, a healthy bias.
+
+And when envy and ambition called for satisfaction an official victim
+was forthcoming, and legal means and authorities were ready. The moral
+torture, which for years the Doge Francesco Foscari (d. 1457) suffered
+before the eyes of all Venice, is a frightful example of a vengeance
+possible only in an aristocracy. The Council of Ten, which had a hand in
+everything, which disposed without appeal of life and death, of
+financial affairs and military appointments, which included the
+Inquisitors among its number, and which overthrew Foscari, as it had
+overthrown so many powerful men before,--this Council was yearly chosen
+afresh from the whole governing body, the Gran Consilio, and was
+consequently the most direct expression of its will. It is not probable
+that serious intrigues occurred at these elections, as the short
+duration of the office and the accountability which followed rendered it
+an object of no great desire. But violent and mysterious as the
+proceedings of this and other authorities might be, the genuine Venetian
+courted rather than fled their sentence, not only because the Republic
+had long arms, and if it could not catch him might punish his family,
+but because in most cases it acted from rational motives and not from a
+thirst for blood.[134] No state, indeed, has ever exercised a greater
+moral influence over its subjects, whether abroad or at home. If
+traitors were to be found among the Pregadi, there was ample
+compensation for this in the fact that every Venetian away from home was
+a born spy for his government. It was a matter of course that the
+Venetian cardinals at Rome sent home news of the transactions of the
+secret papal consistories. The Cardinal Domenico Grimani had the
+despatches intercepted in the neighbourhood of Rome (1500) which Ascanio
+Sforza was sending to his brother Ludovico Moro, and forwarded them to
+Venice; his father, then exposed to a serious accusation, claimed public
+credit for this service of his son before the Gran Consilio; in other
+words, before all the world.[135]
+
+The conduct of the Venetian government to the Condottieri in its pay has
+been spoken of already. The only further guarantee of their fidelity
+which could be obtained lay in their great number, by which treachery
+was made as difficult as its discovery was easy. In looking at the
+Venetian army list, one is only surprised that among forces of such
+miscellaneous composition any common action was possible. In the
+catalogue for the campaign of 1495 we find 15,526 horsemen, broken up
+into a number of small divisions.[136] Gonzaga of Mantua alone had as
+many as 1,200, and Gioffredo Borgia 740; then follow six officers with a
+contingent of 600 to 700, ten with 400, twelve with 400 to 200, fourteen
+or thereabouts with 200 to 100, nine with 80, six with 50 to 60, and so
+forth. These forces were partly composed of old Venetian troops, partly
+of veterans led by Venetian city or country nobles; the majority of the
+leaders were, however, princes and rulers of cities or their relatives.
+To these forces must be added 24,000 infantry--we are not told how they
+were raised or commanded--with 3,300 additional troops, who probably
+belonged to the special services. In time of peace the cities of the
+mainland were wholly unprotected or occupied by insignificant garrisons.
+Venice relied, if not exactly on the loyalty, at least on the good sense
+of its subjects; in the war of the League of Cambray (1509) it absolved
+them, as is well known, from their oath of allegiance, and let them
+compare the amenities of a foreign occupation with the mild government
+to which they had been accustomed. As there had been no treason in their
+desertion of St. Mark, and consequently no punishment was to be feared,
+they returned to their old masters with the utmost eagerness. This war,
+we may remark parenthetically, was the result of a century's outcry
+against the Venetian desire for aggrandisement. The Venetians, in fact,
+were not free from the mistake of those over-clever people who will
+credit their opponents with no irrational and inconsiderate
+conduct.[137] Misled by this optimism, which is, perhaps, a peculiar
+weakness of aristocracies, they had utterly ignored not only the
+preparations of Mohammed II. for the capture of Constantinople, but even
+the armaments of Charles VIII., till the unexpected blow fell at
+last.[138] The League of Cambray was an event of the same character, in
+so far as it was clearly opposed to the interest of the two chief
+members, Louis XII. and Julius II. The hatred of all Italy against the
+victorious city seemed to be concentrated in the mind of the Pope, and
+to have blinded him to the evils of foreign intervention; and as to the
+policy of Cardinal Amboise and his king, Venice ought long before to
+have recognised it as a piece of malicious imbecility, and to have been
+thoroughly on its guard. The other members of the League took part in it
+from that envy which may be a salutary corrective to great wealth and
+power, but which in itself is a beggarly sentiment. Venice came out of
+the conflict with honour, but not without lasting damage.
+
+A power, whose foundations were so complicated, whose activity and
+interests filled so wide a stage, cannot be imagined without a
+systematic oversight of the whole, without a regular estimate of means
+and burdens, of profits and losses. Venice can fairly make good its
+claim to be the birthplace of statistical science, together, perhaps,
+with Florence, and followed by the more enlightened despotisms. The
+feudal state of the Middle Ages knew of nothing more than catalogues of
+signorial rights and possessions (Urbaria); it looked on production as a
+fixed quantity, which it approximately is, so long as we have to do with
+landed property only. The towns, on the other hand, throughout the West
+must from very early times have treated production, which with them
+depended on industry and commerce, as exceedingly variable; but, even in
+the most flourishing times of the Hanseatic League, they never got
+beyond a simple commercial balance-sheet. Fleets, armies, political
+power and influence fall under the debit and credit of a trader's
+ledger. In the Italian States a clear political consciousness, the
+pattern of Mohammedan administration, and the long and active exercise
+of trade and commerce, combined to produce for the first time a true
+science of statistics.[139] The absolute monarchy of Frederick II. in
+Lower Italy was organised with the sole object of securing a
+concentrated power for the death-struggle in which he was engaged. In
+Venice, on the contrary, the supreme objects were the enjoyment of life
+and power, the increase of inherited advantages, the creation of the
+most lucrative forms of industry, and the opening of new channels for
+commerce.
+
+The writers of the time speak of these things with the greatest
+freedom.[140] We learn that the population of the city amounted in the
+year 1422 to 190,000 souls; the Italians were, perhaps, the first to
+reckon, not according to hearths, or men able to bear arms, or people
+able to walk, and so forth, but according to 'anim�,' and thus to get
+the most neutral basis for further calculation. About this time,[141]
+when the Florentines wished to form an alliance with Venice against
+Filippo Maria Visconti, they were for the moment refused, in the belief,
+resting on accurate commercial returns, that a war between Venice and
+Milan, that is, between seller and buyer, was foolish. Even if the duke
+simply increased his army, the Milanese, through the heavier taxation
+they must pay, would become worse customers. 'Better let the Florentines
+be defeated, and then, used as they are to the life of a free city, they
+will settle with us and bring their silk and woollen industry with them,
+as the Lucchese did in their distress.' The speech of the dying Doge
+Mocenigo (1423) to a few of the senators whom he had sent for to his
+bedside[142] is still more remarkable. It contains the chief elements of
+a statistical account of the whole resources of Venice. I cannot say
+whether or where a thorough elucidation of this perplexing document
+exists; by way of illustration, the following facts may be quoted. After
+repaying a war-loan of four million ducats, the public debt ('il monte')
+still amounted to six million ducats; the current trade reached (so it
+seems) ten millions, which yielded, the text informs us, a profit of
+four millions. The 3,000 'navigli,' the 300 'navi,' and the 45 galleys
+were manned respectively by 17,000, 8,000, and 11,000 seamen (more than
+200 for each galley). To these must be added 16,000 shipwrights. The
+houses in Venice were valued at seven millions, and brought in a rent of
+half a million.[143] There were 1,000 nobles whose income ranged from 70
+to 4,000 ducats. In another passage the ordinary income of the state in
+that same year is put at 1,100,000 ducats; through the disturbance of
+trade caused by the wars it sank about the middle of the century to
+800,000 ducats.[144]
+
+If Venice, by this spirit of calculation, and by the practical turn
+which she gave it, was the first fully to represent one important side
+of modern political life, in that culture, on the other hand, which
+Italy then prized most highly she did not stand in the front rank. The
+literary impulse, in general, was here wanting, and especially that
+enthusiasm for classical antiquity which prevailed elsewhere.[145] The
+aptitude of the Venetians, says Sabellico, for philosophy and eloquence
+was in itself not less remarkable than for commerce and politics; but
+this aptitude was neither developed in themselves nor rewarded in
+strangers as it was rewarded elsewhere in Italy. Filelfo, summoned to
+Venice not by the state, but by private individuals, soon found his
+expectations deceived; and George of Trebizond, who, in 1459, laid the
+Latin translation of Plato's Laws at the feet of the Doge, and was
+appointed professor of philology with a yearly salary of 150 ducats, and
+finally dedicated his 'Rhetoric' to the Signoria,[146] soon left the
+city in dissatisfaction. Literature, in fact, like the rest at Venice,
+had mostly a practical end in view. If, accordingly, we look through the
+history of Venetian literature which Francesco Sansovino has appended to
+his well-known book,[147] we shall find in the fourteenth century almost
+nothing but history, and special works on theology, jurisprudence, and
+medicine; and in the fifteenth century, till we come to Ermolao Barbaro
+and Aldo Manucci, humanistic culture is, for a city of such importance,
+most scantily represented. Similarly we find comparatively few traces of
+the passion, elsewhere so strong, for collecting books and manuscripts;
+and the valuable texts which formed part of Petrarch's legacies were so
+badly preserved that soon all traces of them were lost. The library
+which Cardinal Bessarion bequeathed to the state (1468) narrowly escaped
+dispersion and destruction. Learning was certainly cultivated at the
+University of Padua, where, however, the physicians and the jurists--the
+latter as the authors of legal opinions--received by far the highest
+pay. The share of Venice in the poetical creations of the country was
+long insignificant, till, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, her
+deficiences were made good.[148] Even the art of the Renaissance was
+imported into the city from without, and it was not before the end of
+the fifteenth century that she learned to move in this field with
+independent freedom and strength. But we find more striking instances
+still of intellectual backwardness. This Government, which had the
+clergy so thoroughly in its control, which reserved to itself the
+appointment to all important ecclesiastical offices, and which, one time
+after another, dared to defy the court of Rome, displayed an official
+piety of a most singular kind.[149] The bodies of saints and other
+reliques imported from Greece after the Turkish conquest were bought at
+the greatest sacrifices and received by the Doge in solemn
+procession.[150] For the coat without a seam it was decided (1455) to
+offer 10,000 ducats, but it was not to be had. These measures were not
+the fruit of any popular excitement, but of the tranquil resolutions of
+the heads of the Government, and might have been omitted without
+attracting any comment, and at Florence, under similar circumstances,
+would certainly have been omitted. We shall say nothing of the piety of
+the masses, and of their firm belief in the indulgences of an Alexander
+VI. But the state itself, after absorbing the Church to a degree unknown
+elsewhere, had in truth a certain ecclesiastical element in its
+composition, and the Doge, the symbol of the state, appeared in twelve
+great processions ('andate')[151] in a half-clerical character. They
+were almost all festivals in memory of political events, and competed in
+splendour with the great feasts of the Church; the most brilliant of
+all, the famous marriage with the sea, fell on Ascension Day.
+
+The most elevated political thought and the most varied forms of human
+development are found united in the history of Florence, which in this
+sense deserves the name of the first modern state in the world. Here the
+whole people are busied with what in the despotic cities is the affair
+of a single family. That wondrous Florentine spirit, at once keenly
+critical and artistically creative, was incessantly transforming the
+social and political condition of the state, and as incessantly
+describing and judging the change. Florence thus became the home of
+political doctrines and theories, of experiments and sudden changes, but
+also, like Venice, the home of statistical science, and alone and above
+all other states in the world, the home of historical representation in
+the modern sense of the phrase. The spectacle of ancient Rome and a
+familiarity with its leading writers were not without influence;
+Giovanni Villani[152] confesses that he received the first impulse to
+his great work at the jubilee of the year 1300, and began it immediately
+on his return home. Yet how many among the 200,000 pilgrims of that year
+may have been like him in gifts and tendencies and still did not write
+the history of their native cities! For not all of them could encourage
+themselves with the thought: 'Rome is sinking; my native city is rising,
+and ready to achieve great things, and therefore I wish to relate its
+past history, and hope to continue the story to the present time, and
+as long as my life shall last.' And besides the witness to its past,
+Florence obtained through its historians something further--a greater
+fame than fell to the lot of any other city of Italy.[153]
+
+Our present task is not to write the history of this remarkable state,
+but merely to give a few indications of the intellectual freedom and
+independence for which the Florentines were indebted to this
+history.[154]
+
+In no other city of Italy were the struggles of political parties so
+bitter, of such early origin, and so permanent. The descriptions of
+them, which belong, it is true, to a somewhat later period, give clear
+evidence of the superiority of Florentine criticism.
+
+And what a politician is the great victim of these crises, Dante
+Alighieri, matured alike by home and by exile! He uttered his scorn of
+the incessant changes and experiments in the constitution of his native
+city in verses of adamant, which will remain proverbial so long as
+political events of the same kind recur;[155] he addressed his home in
+words of defiance and yearning which must have stirred the hearts of his
+countrymen. But his thoughts ranged over Italy and the whole world; and
+if his passion for the Empire, as he conceived it, was no more than an
+illusion, it must yet be admitted that the youthful dreams of a new-born
+political speculation are in his case not without a poetical grandeur.
+He is proud to be the first who had trod this path,[156] certainly in
+the footsteps of Aristotle, but in his own way independently. His ideal
+emperor is a just and humane judge, dependent on God only, the heir of
+the universal sway of Rome to which belonged the sanction of nature, of
+right and of the will of God. The conquest of the world was, according
+to this view, rightful, resting on a divine judgment between Rome and
+the other nations of the earth, and God gave his approval to this
+empire, since under it he became Man, submitting at his birth to the
+census of the Emperor Augustus, and at his death to the judgment of
+Pontius Pilate. We may find it hard to appreciate these and other
+arguments of the same kind, but Dante's passion never fails to carry us
+with him. In his letters he appears as one of the earliest
+publicists,[157] and is perhaps the first layman to publish political
+tracts in this form. He began early. Soon after the death of Beatrice he
+addressed a pamphlet on the state of Florence 'to the Great ones of the
+Earth,' and the public utterances of his later years, dating from the
+time of his banishment, are all directed to emperors, princes, and
+cardinals. In these letters and in his book 'De Vulgari Eloquio' the
+feeling, bought with such bitter pains, is constantly recurring that
+the exile may find elsewhere than in his native place an intellectual
+home in language and culture, which cannot be taken from him. On this
+point we shall have more to say in the sequel.
+
+To the two Villani, Giovanni as well as Matteo, we owe not so much deep
+political reflexion as fresh and practical observations, together with
+the elements of Florentine statistics and important notices of other
+states. Here too trade and commerce had given the impulse to economical
+as well as political science. Nowhere else in the world was such
+accurate information to be had on financial affairs. The wealth of the
+Papal court at Avignon, which at the death of John XXII. amounted to
+twenty-five millions of gold florins, would be incredible on any less
+trustworthy authority.[158] Here only, at Florence, do we meet with
+colossal loans like that which the King of England contracted from the
+Florentine houses of Bardi and Peruzzi, who lost to his Majesty the sum
+of 1,365,000 gold florins (1338)--their own money and that of their
+partners--and nevertheless recovered from the shock.[159] Most important
+facts are here recorded as to the condition of Florence at this
+time:[160] the public income (over 300,000 gold florins) and
+expenditure; the population of the city, here only roughly estimated,
+according to the consumption of bread, in 'bocche,' _i.e._ mouths, put
+at 90,000, and the population of the whole territory; the excess of 300
+to 500 male children among the 5,800 to 6,000 annually baptized;[161]
+the school-children, of whom 8,000 to 10,000 learned reading, 1,000 to
+1,200 in six schools arithmetic; and besides these, 600 scholars who
+were taught Latin grammar and logic in four schools. Then follow the
+statistics of the churches and monasteries; of the hospitals, which held
+more than a thousand beds; of the wool-trade, with its most valuable
+details; of the mint, the provisioning of the city, the public
+officials, and so on.[162] Incidentally we learn many curious facts;
+how, for instance, when the public funds ('monte') were first
+established, in the year 1353, the Franciscans spoke from the pulpit in
+favour of the measure, the Dominicans and Augustinians against it.[163]
+The economical results of the black death were and could be observed and
+described nowhere else in all Europe as in this city.[164] Only a
+Florentine could have left it on record how it was expected that the
+scanty population would have made everything cheap, and how instead of
+that labour and commodities doubled in price; how the common people at
+first would do no work at all, but simply give themselves up to
+enjoyment; how in the city itself servants and maids were not to be had
+except at extravagant wages; how the peasants would only till the best
+lands, and left the rest uncultivated; and how the enormous legacies
+bequeathed to the poor at the time of the plague seemed afterwards
+useless, since the poor had either died or had ceased to be poor.
+Lastly, on the occasion of a great bequest, by which a childless
+philanthropist left six 'danari' to every beggar in the city, the
+attempt is made to give a comprehensive statistical account of
+Florentine mendicancy.[165]
+
+This statistical view of things was at a later time still more highly
+cultivated at Florence. The noteworthy point about it is that, as a
+rule, we can perceive its connection with the higher aspects of history,
+with art, and with culture in general. An inventory of the year
+1422[166] mentions, within the compass of the same document, the
+seventy-two exchange offices which surrounded the 'Mercato Nuovo;' the
+amount of coined money in circulation (two million golden florins); the
+then new industry of gold spinning; the silk wares; Filippo Brunellesco,
+then busy in digging classical architecture from its grave; and Lionardo
+Aretino, secretary of the republic, at work at the revival of ancient
+literature and eloquence; lastly, it speaks of the general prosperity of
+the city, then free from political conflicts, and of the good fortune of
+Italy, which had rid itself of foreign mercenaries. The Venetian
+statistics quoted above (p. 70), which date from about the same year,
+certainly give evidence of larger property and profits and of a more
+extensive scene of action; Venice had long been mistress of the seas
+before Florence sent out its first galleys (1422) to Alexandria. But no
+reader can fail to recognise the higher spirit of the Florentine
+documents. These and similar lists recur at intervals of ten years,
+systematically arranged and tabulated, while elsewhere we find at best
+occasional notices. We can form an approximate estimate of the property
+and the business of the first Medici; they paid for charities, public
+buildings, and taxes from 1434 to 1471 no less than 663,755 gold
+florins, of which more than 400,000 fell on Cosimo alone, and Lorenzo
+Magnifico was delighted that the money had been so well spent.[167] In
+1472 we have again a most important and in its way complete view of the
+commerce and trades of this city,[168] some of which may be wholly or
+partly reckoned among the fine arts--such as those which had to do with
+damasks and gold or silver embroidery, with woodcarving and 'intarsia,'
+with the sculpture of arabesques in marble and sandstone, with portraits
+in wax, and with jewellery and work in gold. The inborn talent of the
+Florentines for the systematisation of outward life is shown by their
+books on agriculture, business, and domestic economy, which are markedly
+superior to those of other European people in the fifteenth century. It
+has been rightly decided to publish selections of these works,[169]
+although no little study will be needed to extract clear and definite
+results from them. At all events, we have no difficulty in recognising
+the city, where dying parents begged the Government in their wills to
+fine their sons 1,000 florins if they declined to practise a regular
+profession.[170]
+
+For the first half of the sixteenth century probably no state in the
+world possesses a document like the magnificent description of Florence
+by Varchi.[171] In descriptive statistics, as in so many things besides,
+yet another model is left to us, before the freedom and greatness of the
+city sank into the grave.[172]
+
+This statistical estimate of outward life is, however, uniformly
+accompanied by the narrative of political events to which we have
+already referred.
+
+Florence not only existed under political forms more varied than those
+of the free states of Italy and of Europe generally, but it reflected
+upon them far more deeply. It is a faithful mirror of the relations of
+individuals and classes to a variable whole. The pictures of the great
+civic democracies in France and in Flanders, as they are delineated in
+Froissart, and the narratives of the German chroniclers of the
+fourteenth century, are in truth of high importance; but in
+comprehensiveness of thought and in the rational development of the
+story, none will bear comparison with the Florentines. The rule of the
+nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with the
+proletariate, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy, the
+primacy of a single house, the theocracy of Savonarola, and the mixed
+forms of government which prepared the way for the Medicean
+despotism--all are so described that the inmost motives of the actors
+are laid bare to the light.[173] At length Macchiavelli in his
+Florentine history (down to 1492) represents his native city as a living
+organism and its development as a natural and individual process; he is
+the first of the moderns who has risen to such a conception. It lies
+without our province to determine whether and in what points
+Macchiavelli may have done violence to history, as is notoriously the
+case in his life of Castruccio Castracane--a fancy picture of the
+typical despot. We might find something to say against every line of the
+'Istorie Fiorentine,' and yet the great and unique value of the whole
+would remain unaffected. And his contemporaries and successors, Jacopo
+Pitti, Guicciardini, Segni, Varchi, Vettori, what a circle of
+illustrious names! And what a story it is which these masters tell us!
+The great and memorable drama of the last decades of the Florentine
+republic is here unfolded. The voluminous record of the collapse of the
+highest and most original life which the world could then show may
+appear to one but as a collection of curiosities, may awaken in another
+a devilish delight at the shipwreck of so much nobility and grandeur, to
+a third may seem like a great historical assize; for all it will be an
+object of thought and study to the end of time. The evil, which was for
+ever troubling the peace of the city, was its rule over once powerful
+and now conquered rivals like Pisa--a rule of which the necessary
+consequence was a chronic state of violence. The only remedy, certainly
+an extreme one and which none but Savonarola could have persuaded
+Florence to accept, and that only with the help of favourable chances,
+would have been the well-timed resolution of Tuscany into a federal
+union of free cities. At a later period this scheme, then no more than
+the dream of a past age, brought (1548) a patriotic citizen of Lucca to
+the scaffold.[174] From this evil and from the ill-starred Guelph
+sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which familiarised it with
+foreign intervention, came all the disasters which followed. But who
+does not admire the people, which was wrought up by its venerated
+preacher to a mood of such sustained loftiness, that for the first time
+in Italy it set the example of sparing a conquered foe, while the whole
+history of its past taught nothing but vengeance and extermination? The
+glow which melted patriotism into one with moral regeneration may seem,
+when looked at from a distance, to have soon passed away; but its best
+results shine forth again in the memorable siege of 1529-30. They were
+'fools,' as Guicciardini then wrote, who drew down this storm upon
+Florence, but he confesses himself that they achieved things which
+seemed incredible; and when he declares that sensible people would have
+got out of the way of the danger, he means no more than that Florence
+ought to have yielded itself silently and ingloriously into the hands of
+its enemies. It would no doubt have preserved its splendid suburbs and
+gardens, and the lives and prosperity of countless citizens; but it
+would have been the poorer by one of its greatest and most ennobling
+memories.
+
+In many of their chief merits the Florentines are the pattern and the
+earliest type of Italians and modern Europeans generally; they are so
+also in many of their defects. When Dante compares the city which was
+always mending its constitution with the sick man who is continually
+changing his posture to escape from pain, he touches with the comparison
+a permanent feature of the political life of Florence. The great modern
+fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be manufactured by a
+combination of existing forces and tendencies,[175] was constantly
+cropping up in stormy times; even Macchiavelli is not wholly free from
+it. Constitutional artists were never wanting who by an ingenious
+distribution and division of political power, by indirect elections of
+the most complicated kind, by the establishment of nominal offices,
+sought to found a lasting order of things, and to satisfy or to deceive
+the rich and the poor alike. They na�vely fetch their examples from
+classical antiquity, and borrow the party names 'ottimati,'
+'aristocrazia,'[176] as a matter of course. The world since then has
+become used to these expressions and given them a conventional European
+sense, whereas all former party names were purely national, and either
+characterised the cause at issue or sprang from the caprice of accident.
+But how a name colours or discolours a political cause!
+
+But of all who thought it possible to construct a state, the greatest
+beyond all comparison was Macchiavelli.[177] He treats existing forces
+as living and active, takes a large and an accurate view of alternative
+possibilities, and seeks to mislead neither himself nor others. No man
+could be freer from vanity or ostentation; indeed, he does not write for
+the public, but either for princes and administrators or for personal
+friends. The danger for him does not lie in an affectation of genius or
+in a false order of ideas, but rather in a powerful imagination which he
+evidently controls with difficulty. The objectivity of his political
+judgment is sometimes appalling in its sincerity; but it is the sign of
+a time of no ordinary need and peril, when it was a hard matter to
+believe in right, or to credit others with just dealing. Virtuous
+indignation at his expense is thrown away upon us who have seen in what
+sense political morality is understood by the statesmen of our own
+century. Macchiavelli was at all events able to forget himself in his
+cause. In truth, although his writings, with the exception of very few
+words, are altogether destitute of enthusiasm, and although the
+Florentines themselves treated him at last as a criminal,[178] he was a
+patriot in the fullest meaning of the word. But free as he was, like
+most of his contemporaries, in speech and morals, the welfare of the
+state was yet his first and last thought.
+
+His most complete programme for the construction of a new political
+system at Florence is set forth in the memorial to Leo X.,[179] composed
+after the death of the younger Lorenzo Medici, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519),
+to whom he had dedicated his 'Prince.' The state was by that time in
+extremities and utterly corrupt, and the remedies proposed are not
+always morally justifiable; but it is most interesting to see how he
+hopes to set up the republic in the form of a moderate democracy, as
+heiress to the Medici. A more ingenious scheme of concessions to the
+Pope, to the Pope's various adherents, and to the different Florentine
+interests, cannot be imagined; we might fancy ourselves looking into the
+works of a clock. Principles, observations, comparisons, political
+forecasts, and the like are to be found in numbers in the 'Discorsi,'
+among them flashes of wonderful insight. He recognises, for example, the
+law of a continuous though not uniform development in republican
+institutions, and requires the constitution to be flexible and capable
+of change, as the only means of dispensing with bloodshed and
+banishments. For a like reason, in order to guard against private
+violence and foreign interference--'the death of all freedom'--he wishes
+to see introduced a judicial procedure ('accusa') against hated
+citizens, in place of which Florence had hitherto had nothing but the
+court of scandal. With a masterly hand the tardy and involuntary
+decisions are characterised, which at critical moments play so important
+a part in republican states. Once, it is true, he is misled by his
+imagination and the pressure of events into unqualified praise of the
+people, which chooses its officers, he says, better than any prince, and
+which can be cured of its errors by 'good advice.'[180] With regard to
+the government of Tuscany, he has no doubt that it belongs to his native
+city, and maintains, in a special 'Discorso' that the reconquest of Pisa
+is a question of life or death; he deplores that Arezzo, after the
+rebellion of 1502, was not razed to the ground; he admits in general
+that Italian republics must be allowed to expand freely and add to their
+territory in order to enjoy peace at home, and not to be themselves
+attacked by others, but declares that Florence had always begun at the
+wrong end, and from the first made deadly enemies of Pisa, Lucca, and
+Siena, while Pistoja, 'treated like a brother,' had voluntarily
+submitted to her.[181]
+
+It would be unreasonable to draw a parallel between the few other
+republics which still existed in the fifteenth century and this unique
+city--the most important workshop of the Italian, and indeed of the
+modern European spirit. Siena suffered from the gravest organic
+maladies, and its relative prosperity in art and industry must not
+mislead us on this point. �neas Sylvius[182] looks with longing from his
+native town over to the 'merry' German imperial cities, where life is
+embittered by no confiscations of land and goods, by no arbitrary
+officials, and by no political factions.[183] Genoa scarcely comes
+within range of our task, as before the time of Andrea Doria it took
+almost no part in the Renaissance. Indeed, the inhabitant of the Riviera
+was proverbial among Italians for his contempt of all higher
+culture.[184] Party conflicts here assumed so fierce a character, and
+disturbed so violently the whole course of life, that we can hardly
+understand how, after so many revolutions and invasions, the Genoese
+ever contrived to return to an endurable condition. Perhaps it was owing
+to the fact that nearly all who took part in public affairs were at the
+same time almost without exception active men of business.[185] The
+example of Genoa shows in a striking manner with what insecurity wealth
+and vast commerce, and with what internal disorder the possession of
+distant colonies, are compatible.
+
+Lucca is of small significance in the fifteenth century.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.
+
+
+As the majority of the Italian states were in their internal
+constitution works of art, that is, the fruit of reflection and careful
+adaptation, so was their relation to one another and to foreign
+countries also a work of art. That nearly all of them were the result of
+recent usurpations, was a fact which exercised as fatal an influence in
+their foreign as in their internal policy. Not one of them recognised
+another without reserve; the same play of chance which had helped to
+found and consolidate one dynasty might upset another. Nor was it always
+a matter of choice with the despot whether to keep quiet or not. The
+necessity of movement and aggrandisement is common to all illegitimate
+powers. Thus Italy became the scene of a 'foreign policy' which
+gradually, as in other countries also, acquired the position of a
+recognised system of public law. The purely objective treatment of
+international affairs, as free from prejudice as from moral scruples,
+attained a perfection which sometimes is not without a certain beauty
+and grandeur of its own. But as a whole it gives us the impression of a
+bottomless abyss.
+
+Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption and treason make up the
+outward history of Italy at this period. Venice in particular was long
+accused on all hands of seeking to conquer the whole peninsula, or
+gradually so to reduce its strength that one state after another must
+fall into her hands.[186] But on a closer view it is evident that this
+complaint did not come from the people, but rather from the courts and
+official classes, which were commonly abhorred by their subjects, while
+the mild government of Venice had secured for it general confidence.
+Even Florence,[187] with its restive subject cities, found itself in a
+false position with regard to Venice, apart from all commercial jealousy
+and from the progress of Venice in Romagna. At last the League of
+Cambray actually did strike a serious blow at the state (p. 68), which
+all Italy ought to have supported with united strength.
+
+The other states, also, were animated by feelings no less unfriendly,
+and were at all times ready to use against one another any weapon which
+their evil conscience might suggest. Ludovico Moro, the Aragonese kings
+of Naples, and Sixtus IV.--to say nothing of the smaller powers--kept
+Italy in a state of constant and perilous agitation. It would have been
+well if the atrocious game had been confined to Italy; but it lay in the
+nature of the case that intervention and help should at last be sought
+from abroad--in particular from the French and the Turks.
+
+The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the side of
+France. Florence had never ceased to confess with shocking _na�vet�_ its
+old Guelph preference for the French.[188] And when Charles VIII.
+actually appeared on the south of the Alps, all Italy accepted him with
+an enthusiasm which to himself and his followers seemed
+unaccountable.[189] In the imagination of the Italians, to take
+Savonarola for an example, the ideal picture of a wise, just, and
+powerful saviour and ruler was still living, with the difference that he
+was no longer the emperor invoked by Dante, but the Capetian king of
+France. With his departure the illusion was broken; but it was long
+before all understood how completely Charles VIII., Louis XII., and
+Francis I. had mistaken their true relation to Italy, and by what
+inferior motives they were led. The princes, for their part, tried to
+make use of France in a wholly different way. When the Franco-English
+wars came to an end, when Louis XI. began to cast about his diplomatic
+nets on all sides, and Charles of Burgundy to embark on his foolish
+adventures, the Italian Cabinets came to meet them at every point. It
+became clear that the intervention of France was only a question of
+time, even though the claims on Naples and Milan had never existed, and
+that the old interference with Genoa and Piedmont was only a type of
+what was to follow. The Venetians, in fact, expected it as early as
+1642.[190] The mortal terror of the Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan during
+the Burgundian war, in which he was apparently the ally of Charles as
+well as of Louis, and consequently had reason to dread an attack from
+both, is strikingly shown in his correspondence.[191] The plan of an
+equilibrium of the four chief Italian powers, as understood by Lorenzo
+the Magnificent, was but the assumption of a cheerful optimistic spirit,
+which had outgrown both the recklessness of an experimental policy and
+the superstitions of Florentine Guelphism, and persisted in hoping the
+best. When Louis XI. offered him aid in the war against Ferrante of
+Naples and Sixtus IV., he replied, 'I cannot set my own advantage above
+the safety of all Italy; would to God it never came into the mind of the
+French kings to try their strength in this country! Should they ever do
+so, Italy is lost.'[192] For the other princes, the King of France was
+alternately a bugbear to themselves and their enemies, and they
+threatened to call him in whenever they saw no more convenient way out
+of their difficulties. The Popes, in their turn, fancied that they could
+make use of France without any danger to themselves, and even Innocent
+VIII. imagined that he could withdraw to sulk in the North, and return
+as a conqueror to Italy at the head of a French army.[193]
+
+Thoughtful men, indeed, foresaw the foreign conquest long before the
+expedition of Charles VIII.[194] And when Charles was back again on the
+other side of the Alps, it was plain to every eye that an era of
+intervention had begun. Misfortune now followed on misfortune; it was
+understood too late that France and Spain, the two chief invaders, had
+become great European powers, that they would be no longer satisfied
+with verbal homage, but would fight to the death for influence and
+territory in Italy. They had begun to resemble the centralised Italian
+states, and indeed to copy them, only on a gigantic scale. Schemes of
+annexation or exchange of territory were for a time indefinitely
+multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of
+Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held
+the Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the
+philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the
+barbarians all came to a bad end.
+
+Alliances were at the same time formed with the Turks too, with as
+little scruple or disguise; they were reckoned no worse than any other
+political expedients. The belief in the unity of Western Christendom had
+at various times in the course of the Crusades been seriously shaken,
+and Frederick II. had probably outgrown it. But the fresh advance of the
+Oriental nations, the need and the ruin of the Greek Empire, had revived
+the old feeling, though not in its former strength, throughout Western
+Europe. Italy, however, was a striking exception to this rule. Great as
+was the terror felt for the Turks, and the actual danger from them,
+there was yet scarcely a government of any consequence which did not
+conspire against other Italian states with Mohammed II. and his
+successors. And when they did not do so, they still had the credit of
+it; nor was it worse than the sending of emissaries to poison the
+cisterns of Venice, which was the charge brought against the heirs of
+Alfonso King of Naples.[195] From a scoundrel like Sigismondo Malatesta
+nothing better could be expected than that he should call the Turks
+into Italy.[196] But the Aragonese monarchs of Naples, from whom
+Mohammed--at the instigation, we read, of other Italian governments,
+especially of Venice[197]--had once wrested Otranto (1480), afterwards
+hounded on the Sultan Bajazet II. against the Venetians.[198] The same
+charge was brought against Ludovico Moro. 'The blood of the slain, and
+the misery of the prisoners in the hands of the Turks, cry to God for
+vengeance against him,' says the state historian. In Venice, where the
+government was informed of everything, it was known that Giovanni
+Sforza, ruler of Pesaro, the cousin of the Moor, had entertained the
+Turkish ambassadors on their way to Milan.[199] The two most respectable
+among the Popes of the fifteenth century, Nicholas V. and Pius II., died
+in the deepest grief at the progress of the Turks, the latter indeed
+amid the preparations for a crusade which he was hoping to lead in
+person; their successors embezzled the contributions sent for this
+purpose from all parts of Christendom, and degraded the indulgences
+granted in return for them into a private commercial speculation.[200]
+Innocent VIII. consented to be gaoler to the fugitive Prince Djem, for a
+salary paid by the prisoner's brother Bajazet II., and Alexander VI.
+supported the steps taken by Ludovico Moro in Constantinople to further
+a Turkish assault upon Venice (1498), whereupon the latter threatened
+him with a Council.[201] It is clear that the notorious alliance
+between Francis I. and Soliman II. was nothing new or unheard of.
+
+Indeed, we find instances of whole populations to whom it seemed no
+particular crime to go over bodily to the Turks. Even if it were only
+held out as a threat to oppressive governments, this is at least a proof
+that the idea had become familiar. As early as 1480 Battista Mantovano
+gives us clearly to understand that most of the inhabitants of the
+Adriatic coast foresaw something of this kind, and that Ancona in
+particular desired it.[202] When Romagna was suffering from the
+oppressive government of Leo X., a deputy from Ravenna said openly to
+the Legate, Cardinal Guilio Medici: 'Monsignore, the honourable Republic
+of Venice will not have us, for fear of a dispute with the Holy See; but
+if the Turk comes to Ragusa we will put ourselves into his hands.'[203]
+
+It was a poor but not wholly groundless consolation for the enslavement
+of Italy then begun by the Spaniards, that the country was at least
+secured from the relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it
+under the Turkish rule.[204] By itself, divided as it was, it could
+hardly have escaped this fate.
+
+If, with all these drawbacks, the Italian statesmanship of this period
+deserves our praise, it is only on the ground of its practical and
+unprejudiced treatment of those questions which were not affected by
+fear, passion, or malice. Here was no feudal system after the northern
+fashion, with its artificial scheme of rights; but the power which each
+possessed he held in practice as in theory. Here was no attendant
+nobility to foster in the mind of the prince the medi�val sense of
+honour, with all its strange consequences; but princes and counsellors
+were agreed in acting according to the exigencies of the particular case
+and to the end they had in view. Towards the men whose services were
+used and towards allies, come from what quarter they might, no pride of
+caste was felt which could possibly estrange a supporter; and the class
+of the Condottieri, in which birth was a matter of indifference, shows
+clearly enough in what sort of hands the real power lay; and lastly, the
+Government, in the hands of an enlightened despot, had an incomparably
+more accurate acquaintance with its own country and that of its
+neighbours, than was possessed by northern contemporaries, and estimated
+the economical and moral capacities of friend and foe down to the
+smallest particular. The rulers were, notwithstanding grave errors, born
+masters of statistical science. With such men negotiation was possible;
+it might be presumed that they would be convinced and their opinion
+modified when practical reasons were laid before them. When the great
+Alfonso of Naples was (1434) a prisoner of Filippo Maria Visconti, he
+was able to satisfy his gaoler that the rule of the House of Anjou
+instead of his own at Naples would make the French masters of Italy;
+Filippo Maria set him free without ransom and made an alliance with
+him.[205] A northern prince would scarcely have acted in the same way,
+certainly not one whose morality in other respects was like that of
+Visconti. What confidence was felt in the power of self-interest is
+shown by the celebrated visit which Lorenzo the Magnificent, to the
+universal astonishment of the Florentines, paid the faithless Ferrante
+at Naples--a man who would be certainly tempted to keep him a prisoner,
+and was by no means too scrupulous to do so.[206] For to arrest a
+powerful monarch, and then to let him go alive, after extorting his
+signature and otherwise insulting him, as Charles the Bold did to Louis
+XI. at P�ronne (1468), seemed madness to the Italians;[207] so that
+Lorenzo was expected to come back covered with glory, or else not to
+come back at all. The art of political persuasion was at this time
+raised to a point--especially by the Venetian ambassadors--of which
+northern nations first obtained a conception from the Italians, and of
+which the official addresses give a most imperfect idea. These are mere
+pieces of humanistic rhetoric. Nor, in spite of an otherwise ceremonious
+etiquette, was there in case of need any lack of rough and frank
+speaking in diplomatic intercourse.[208] A man like Macchiavelli appears
+in his 'Legazioni' in an almost pathetic light. Furnished with scanty
+instructions, shabbily equipped, and treated as an agent of inferior
+rank, he never loses his gift of free and wide observation or his
+pleasure in picturesque description. From that time Italy was and
+remained the country of political 'Istruzioni' and 'Relazioni.' There
+was doubtless plenty of diplomatic ability in other states, but Italy
+alone at so early a period has preserved documentary evidence of it in
+considerable quantity. The long despatch on the last period of the life
+of Ferrante of Naples (January 17, 1494), written by the hand of Pontano
+and addressed to the Cabinet of Alexander VI., gives us the highest
+opinion of this class of political writing, although it is only quoted
+incidentally and as one of many written. And how many other despatches,
+as important and as vigorously written, in the diplomatic intercourse of
+this and later times, still remain unknown or unedited![209]
+
+A special division of this work will treat of the study of man
+individually and nationally, which among the Italians went hand in hand
+with the study of the outward conditions of human life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+WAR AS A WORK OF ART.
+
+
+It must here be briefly indicated by what steps the art of war assumed
+the character of a product of reflection.[210] Throughout the countries
+of the West the education of the individual soldier in the middle ages
+was perfect within the limits of the then prevalent system of defence
+and attack: nor was there any want of ingenious inventors in the arts of
+besieging and of fortification. But the development both of strategy and
+of tactics was hindered by the character and duration of military
+service, and by the ambition of the nobles, who disputed questions of
+precedence in the face of the enemy, and through simple want of
+discipline caused the loss of great battles like Cr�cy and Maupertuis.
+Italy, on the contrary, was the first country to adopt the system of
+mercenary troops, which demanded a wholly different organisation; and
+the early introduction of fire-arms did its part in making war a
+democratic pursuit, not only because the strongest castles were unable
+to withstand a bombardment, but because the skill of the engineer, of
+the gun-founder, and of the artillerist--men belonging to another class
+than the nobility--was now of the first importance in a campaign. It was
+felt, with regret, that the value of the individual, which had been the
+soul of the small and admirably-organised bands of mercenaries, would
+suffer from these novel means of destruction, which did their work at a
+distance; and there were Condottieri who opposed to the utmost the
+introduction at least of the musket, which had been lately invented in
+Germany.[211] We read that Paolo Vitelli,[212] while recognising and
+himself adopting the cannon, put out the eyes and cut off the hands of
+the captured 'schioppettieri,' of the enemy, because he held it unworthy
+that a gallant, and it might be noble, knight should be wounded and laid
+low by a common, despised foot soldier. On the whole, however, the new
+discoveries were accepted and turned to useful account, till the
+Italians became the teachers of all Europe, both in the building of
+fortifications and in the means of attacking them.[213] Princes like
+Federigo of Urbino and Alfonso of Ferrara acquired a mastery of the
+subject compared to which the knowledge even of Maximilian I. appears
+superficial. In Italy, earlier than elsewhere, there existed a
+comprehensive science and art of military affairs; here, for the first
+time, that impartial delight is taken in able generalship for its own
+sake, which might, indeed, be expected from the frequent change of party
+and from the wholly unsentimental mode of action of the Condottieri.
+During the Milano-Venetian war of 1451 and 1452, between Francesco
+Sforza and Jacopo Piccinino, the headquarters of the latter were
+attended by the scholar Gian Antonio Porcello dei Pandoni, commissioned
+by Alfonso of Naples to write a report of the campaign.[214] It is
+written, not in the purest, but in a fluent Latin, a little too much in
+the style of the humanistic bombast of the day, is modelled on C�sar's
+Commentaries, and interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like.
+Since for the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether
+Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater,[215] Piccinino through
+the whole book must needs be called Scipio and Sforza Hannibal. But
+something positive had to be reported too respecting the Milanese army;
+the sophist presented himself to Sforza, was led along the ranks,
+praised highly all that he saw, and promised to hand it down to
+posterity.[216] Apart from him the Italian literature of the day is rich
+in descriptions of wars and strategic devices, written for the use of
+educated men in general as well as of specialists, while the
+contemporary narratives of northerners, such as the 'Burgundian War' by
+Diebold Schelling, still retain the shapelessness and matter-of-fact
+dryness of a mere chronicle. The greatest _dilettante_ who has ever
+treated in that character[217] of military affairs, was then busy
+writing his 'Arte della Guerra.' But the development of the individual
+soldier found its most complete expression in those public and solemn
+conflicts between one or more pairs of combatants which were practised
+long before the famous 'Challenge of Barletta'[218] (1503). The victor
+was assured of the praises of poets and scholars, which were denied to
+the Northern warrior. The result of these combats was no longer regarded
+as a Divine judgment, but as a triumph of personal merit, and to the
+minds of the spectators seemed to be both the decision of an exciting
+competition and a satisfaction for the honour of the army or the
+nation.[219]
+
+It is obvious that this purely rational treatment of warlike affairs
+allowed, under certain circumstances, of the worst atrocities, even in
+the absence of a strong political hatred, as, for instance, when the
+plunder of a city had been promised to the troops. After the four days'
+devastation of Piacenza, which Sforza was compelled to permit to his
+soldiers (1447), the town long stood empty, and at last had to be
+peopled by force.[220] Yet outrages like these were nothing compared
+with the misery which was afterwards brought upon Italy by foreign
+troops, and most of all by the Spaniards, in whom perhaps a touch of
+Oriental blood, perhaps familiarity with the spectacles of the
+Inquisition, had unloosed the devilish element of human nature. After
+seeing them at work at Prato, Rome, and elsewhere, it is not easy to
+take any interest of the higher sort in Ferdinand the Catholic and
+Charles V., who knew what these hordes were, and yet unchained them. The
+mass of documents which are gradually brought to light from the cabinets
+of these rulers will always remain an important source of historical
+information; but from such men no fruitful political conception can be
+looked for.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.
+
+
+The Papacy and the dominions of the Church[221] are creations of so
+peculiar a kind, that we have hitherto, in determining the general
+characteristics of Italian states, referred to them only occasionally.
+The deliberate choice and adaptation of political expedients, which
+gives so great an interest to the other states, is what we find least of
+all at Rome, since here the spiritual power could constantly conceal or
+supply the defects of the temporal. And what fiery trials did this state
+undergo in the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century,
+when the Papacy was led captive to Avignon! All, at first, was thrown
+into confusion; but the Pope had money, troops, and a great statesman
+and general, the Spaniard Alboronoz, who again brought the
+ecclesiastical state into complete subjection. The danger of a final
+dissolution was still greater at the time of the schism, when neither
+the Roman nor the French Pope was rich enough to reconquer the
+newly-lost state; but this was done under Martin V., after the unity of
+the Church was restored, and done again under Eugenius IV., when the
+same danger was renewed. But the ecclesiastical state was and remained a
+thorough anomaly among the powers of Italy; in and near Rome itself, the
+Papacy was defied by the great families of the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli,
+and Anguillara; in Umbria, in the Marches, and in Romagna, those civic
+republics had almost ceased to exist, for whose devotion the Papacy had
+showed so little gratitude; their place had been taken by a crowd of
+princely dynasties, great or small, whose loyalty and obedience
+signified little. As self-dependent powers, standing on their own
+merits, they have an interest of their own; and from this point of view
+the most important of them have been already discussed (pp. 28 sqq., 44
+sqq.).
+
+Nevertheless, a few general remarks on the Papacy can hardly be
+dispensed with. New and strange perils and trials came upon it in the
+course of the fifteenth century, as the political spirit of the nation
+began to lay hold upon it on various sides, and to draw it within the
+sphere of its action. The least of these dangers came from the populace
+or from abroad; the most serious had their ground in the characters of
+the Popes themselves.
+
+Let us, for this moment, leave out of consideration the countries beyond
+the Alps. At the time when the Papacy was exposed to mortal danger in
+Italy, it neither received nor could receive the slightest assistance
+either from France, then under Louis XI., or from England, distracted by
+the wars of the Roses, or from the then disorganized Spanish monarchy,
+or from Germany, but lately betrayed at the Council of Basel. In Italy
+itself there were a certain number of instructed and even uninstructed
+people, whose national vanity was flattered by the Italian character of
+the Papacy; the personal interests of very many depended on its having
+and retaining this character; and vast masses of the people still
+believed in the virtue of the Papal blessing and consecration;[222]
+among them notorious transgressors like that Vitellozzo Vitelli, who
+still prayed to be absolved by Alexander VI., when the Pope's son had
+him slaughtered.[223] But all these grounds of sympathy put together
+would not have sufficed to save the Papacy from its enemies, had the
+latter been really in earnest, and had they known how to take advantage
+of the envy and hatred with which the institution was regarded.
+
+And at the very time when the prospect of help from without was so
+small, the most dangerous symptoms appeared within the Papacy itself.
+Living, as it now did, and acting in the spirit of the secular Italian
+principalities, it was compelled to go through the same dark experiences
+as they; but its own exceptional nature gave a peculiar colour to the
+shadows.
+
+As far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, small account was taken
+of its internal agitations, so many were the Popes who had returned
+after being expelled by popular tumult, and so greatly did the presence
+of the Curia minister to the interests of the Roman people. But Rome not
+only displayed at times a specific anti-papal radicalism,[224] but in
+the most serious plots which were then contrived, gave proof of the
+working of unseen hands from without. It was so in the case of the
+conspiracy of Stefano Porcaro against Nicholas V. (1453), the very Pope
+who had done most for the prosperity of the city, but who, by enriching
+the cardinals, and transforming Rome into a papal fortress, had aroused
+the discontent of the people.[225] Porcaro aimed at the complete
+overthrow of the papal authority, and had distinguished accomplices,
+who, though their names are not handed down to us,[226] are certainly
+to be looked for among the Italian governments of the time. Under the
+pontificate of the same man, Lorenzo Valla concluded his famous
+declamation against the gift of Constantine, with the wish for the
+speedy secularisation of the States of the Church.[227]
+
+The Catilinarian gang, with which Pius II. had to contend[228] (1460),
+avowed with equal frankness their resolution to overthrow the government
+of the priests, and its leader, Tiburzio, threw the blame on the
+soothsayers, who had fixed the accomplishment of his wishes for this
+very year. Several of the chief men of Rome, the Prince of Tarentum, and
+the Condottiere Jacopo Piccinino, were accomplices and supporters of
+Tiburzio. Indeed, when we think of the booty which was accumulated in
+the palaces of wealthy prelates--the conspirators had the Cardinal of
+Aquileia especially in view--we are surprised that, in an almost
+unguarded city, such attempts were not more frequent and more
+successful. It was not without reason that Pius II. preferred to reside
+anywhere rather than in Rome, and even Paul II.[229] was exposed to no
+small anxiety through a plot formed by some discharged abbreviators,
+who, under the command of Platina, besieged the Vatican for twenty days.
+The Papacy must sooner or later have fallen a victim to such
+enterprises, if it had not stamped out the aristocratic factions under
+whose protection these bands of robbers grew to a head.
+
+This task was undertaken by the terrible Sixtus IV. He was the first
+Pope who had Rome and the neighbourhood thoroughly under his control,
+especially after his successful attack on the House of Colonna, and
+consequently, both in his Italian policy and in the internal affairs of
+the Church, he could venture to act with a defiant audacity, and to set
+at nought the complaints and threats to summon a council which arose
+from all parts of Europe. He supplied himself with the necessary funds
+by simony, which suddenly grew to unheard-of proportions, and which
+extended from the appointment of cardinals down to the granting of the
+smallest favours.[230] Sixtus himself had not obtained the papal dignity
+without recourse to the same means.
+
+A corruption so universal might sooner or later bring disastrous
+consequences on the Holy See, but they lay in the uncertain future. It
+was otherwise with nepotism, which threatened at one time to destroy the
+Papacy altogether. Of all the 'nipoti,' Cardinal Pietro Riario enjoyed
+at first the chief and almost exclusive favour of Sixtus. He soon drew
+upon him the eyes of all Italy,[231] partly by the fabulous luxury of
+his life, partly through the reports which were current of his
+irreligion and his political plans. He bargained with Duke Galeazzo
+Maria of Milan (1473), that the latter should become King of Lombardy,
+and then aid him with money and troops to return to Rome and ascend the
+papal throne; Sixtus, it appears, would have voluntarily yielded it to
+him.[232] This plan, which, by making the Papacy hereditary, would have
+ended in the secularization of the papal state, failed through the
+sudden death of Pietro. The second 'nipote,' Girolamo Riario, remained a
+layman, and did not seek the Pontificate. From this time the 'nipoti,'
+by their endeavours to found principalities for themselves, became a new
+source of confusion to Italy. It had already happened that the Popes
+tried to make good their feudal claims on Naples in favour of their
+relatives;[233] but since the failure of Calixtus III. such a scheme was
+no longer practicable, and Girolamo Riario, after the attempt to conquer
+Florence (and who knows how many other places) had failed, was forced to
+content himself with founding a state within the limits of the papal
+dominions themselves. This was, in so far, justifiable, as Romagna, with
+its princes and civic despots, threatened to shake off the papal
+supremacy altogether, and ran the risk of shortly falling a prey to
+Sforza or the Venetians, when Rome interfered to prevent it. But who, at
+times and in circumstances like these, could guarantee the continued
+obedience of 'nipoti' and their descendants, now turned into sovereign
+rulers, to Popes with whom they had no further concern? Even in his
+lifetime the Pope was not always sure of his own son or nephew, and the
+temptation was strong to expel the 'nipote' of a predecessor and replace
+him by one of his own. The reaction of the whole system on the Papacy
+itself was of the most serious character; all means of compulsion,
+whether temporal or spiritual, were used without scruple for the most
+questionable ends, and to these all the other objects of the Apostolic
+See were made subordinate. And when they were attained, at whatever cost
+of revolutions and proscriptions, a dynasty was founded which had no
+stronger interest than the destruction of the Papacy.
+
+At the death of Sixtus, Girolamo was only able to maintain himself in
+his usurped principality of Forli and Imola by the utmost exertions of
+his own, and by the aid of the House of Sforza. He was murdered in 1488.
+In the conclave (1484) which followed the death of Sixtus--that in which
+Innocent VIII. was elected--an incident occurred which seemed to furnish
+the Papacy with a new external guarantee. Two cardinals, who, at the
+same time, were princes of ruling houses, Giovanni d'Aragona, son of
+King Ferrante, and Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Moor, sold their votes
+with the most shameless effrontery;[234] so that, at any rate, the
+ruling houses of Naples and Milan became interested, by their
+participation in the booty, in the continuance of the papal system. Once
+again, in the following Conclave, when all the cardinals but five sold
+themselves, Ascanio received enormous sums in bribes, not without
+cherishing the hope that at the next election he would himself be the
+favoured candidate.[235]
+
+Lorenzo the Magnificent, on his part, was anxious that the House of
+Medici should not be sent away with empty hands. He married his daughter
+Maddalena to the son of the new Pope--the first who publicly
+acknowledged his children--Franceschetto Cyb�, and expected not only
+favours of all kinds for his own son, Cardinal Giovanni, afterwards Leo
+X., but also the rapid promotion of his son-in-law.[236] But with
+respect to the latter, he demanded impossibilities. Under Innocent VIII.
+there was no opportunity for the audacious nepotism by which states had
+been founded, since Franceschetto himself was a poor creature who, like
+his father the Pope, sought power only for the lowest purpose of
+all--the acquisition and accumulation of money.[237] The manner,
+however, in which father and son practised this occupation must have led
+sooner or later to a final catastrophe--the dissolution of the state. If
+Sixtus had filled his treasury by the rule of spiritual dignities and
+favours, Innocent and his son, for their part, established an office for
+the sale of secular favours, in which pardons for murder and
+manslaughter were sold for large sums of money. Out of every fine 150
+ducats were paid into the papal exchequer, and what was over to
+Franceschetto. Rome, during the latter part of this pontificate, swarmed
+with licensed and unlicensed assassins; the factions, which Sixtus had
+begun to put down, were again as active as ever; the Pope, well guarded
+in the Vatican, was satisfied with now and then laying a trap, in which
+a wealthy misdoer was occasionally caught. For Franceschetto the chief
+point was to know by what means, when the Pope died, he could escape
+with well-filled coffers. He betrayed himself at last, on the occasion
+of a false report (1490) of his father's death; he endeavoured to carry
+off all the money in the papal treasury, and when this proved
+impossible, insisted that, at all events, the Turkish prince, Djem,
+should go with him, and serve as a living capital, to be advantageously
+disposed of, perhaps to Ferrante of Naples.[238] It is hard to estimate
+the political possibilities of remote periods, but we cannot help asking
+ourselves the question, if Rome could have survived two or three
+pontificates of this kind. Even with reference to the believing
+countries of Europe, it was imprudent to let matters go so far that not
+only travellers and pilgrims, but a whole embassy of Maximilian, King of
+the Romans, were stripped to their shirts in the neighbourhood of Rome,
+and that envoys had constantly to turn back without setting foot within
+the city.
+
+Such a condition of things was incompatible with the conception of power
+and its pleasures which inspired the gifted Alexander VI. (1492-1503),
+and the first event that happened was the restoration, at least
+provisionally, of public order, and the punctual payment of every
+salary.
+
+Strictly speaking, as we are now discussing phases of Italian
+civilization, this pontificate might be passed over, since the Borgias
+are no more Italian than the House of Naples. Alexander spoke Spanish in
+public with C�sar; Lucretia, at her entrance to Ferrara, where she wore
+a Spanish costume, was sung to by Spanish buffoons; their confidential
+servants consisted of Spaniards, as did also the most ill-famed company
+of the troops of C�sar in the war of 1500; and even his hangman, Don
+Micheletto, and his poisoner, Sebastian Pinzon,[239] seem to have been
+of the same nation. Among his other achievements, C�sar, in true Spanish
+fashion, killed, according to the rules of the craft, six wild bulls in
+an enclosed court. But the Roman corruption, which seemed to culminate
+in this family, was already far advanced when they came to the city.
+
+What they were and what they did has been often and fully
+described.[240] Their immediate purpose, which, in fact, they attained,
+was the complete subjugation of the pontifical state. All the petty
+despots,[241] who were mostly more or less refractory vassals of the
+Church, were expelled or destroyed; and in Rome itself the two great
+factions were annihilated, the so-called Guelph Orsini as well as the
+so-called Ghibelline Colonna. But the means employed were of so
+frightful a character, that they must certainly have ended in the ruin
+of the Papacy, had not the contemporaneous death of both father and son
+by poison suddenly intervened to alter the whole aspect of the
+situation. The moral indignation of Christendom was certainly no great
+source of danger to Alexander; at home he was strong enough to extort
+terror and obedience; foreign rulers were won over to his side, and
+Louis XII. even aided him to the utmost of his power. The mass of the
+people throughout Europe had hardly a conception of what was passing in
+Central Italy. The only moment which was really fraught with
+danger--when Charles VIII. was in Italy--went by with unexpected
+fortune, and even then it was not the Papacy as such that was in peril,
+but Alexander, who risked being supplanted by a more respectable
+Pope.[242] The great, permanent, and increasing danger for the Papacy
+lay in Alexander himself, and, above all, in his son C�sar Borgia.
+
+In the nature of the father, ambition, avarice, and sensuality were
+combined with strong and brilliant qualities. All the pleasures of power
+and luxury he granted himself from the first day of his pontificate in
+the fullest measure. In the choice of means to this end he was wholly
+without scruple; it was known at once that he would more than compensate
+himself for the sacrifices which his election had involved,[243] and
+that the simony of the seller would far exceed the simony of the buyer.
+It must be remembered that the vice-chancellorship and other offices
+which Alexander had formerly held had taught him to know better and turn
+to more practical account the various sources of revenue than any other
+member of the Curia. As early as 1494, a Carmelite, Adam of Genoa, who
+had preached at Rome against simony, was found murdered in his bed with
+twenty wounds. Hardly a single cardinal was appointed without the
+payment of enormous sums of money.
+
+But when the Pope in course of time fell under the influence of his son
+C�sar Borgia, his violent measures assumed that character of devilish
+wickedness which necessarily reacts upon the ends pursued. What was done
+in the struggle with the Roman nobles and with the tyrants of Romagna
+exceeded in faithlessness and barbarity even that measure to which the
+Aragonese rulers of Naples had already accustomed the world; and the
+genius for deception was also greater. The manner in which C�sar
+isolated his father, murdering brother, brother-in-law, and other
+relations or courtiers, whenever their favour with the Pope or their
+position in any other respect became inconvenient to him, is literally
+appalling. Alexander was forced to acquiesce in the murder of his
+best-loved son, the Duke of Gandia, since he himself lived in hourly
+dread of C�sar.[244]
+
+What were the final aims of the latter? Even in the last months of his
+tyranny, when he had murdered the Condottieri at Sinigaglia, and was to
+all intents and purposes master of the ecclesiastical state (1503) those
+who stood near him gave the modest reply, that the Duke merely wished to
+put down the factions and the despots, and all for the good of the
+Church only; that for himself he desired nothing more than the lordship
+of the Romagna, and that he had earned the gratitude of all the
+following Popes by ridding them of the Orsini and Colonna.[245] But no
+one will accept this as his ultimate design. The Pope Alexander himself,
+in his discussions with the Venetian ambassador, went farther than this,
+when committing his son to the protection of Venice: 'I will see to it,'
+he said, 'that one day the Papacy shall belong either to him or to
+you.'[246] C�sar certainly added that no one could become Pope without
+the consent of Venice, and for this end the Venetian cardinals had only
+to keep well together. Whether he referred to himself or not we are
+unable to say; at all events, the declaration of his father is
+sufficient to prove his designs on the pontifical throne. We further
+obtain from Lucrezia Borgia a certain amount of indirect evidence, in so
+far as certain passages in the poems of Ercole Strozza may be the echo
+of expressions which she as Duchess of Ferrara may easily have permitted
+herself to use. Here too C�sar's hopes of the Papacy are chiefly spoken
+of;[247] but now and then a supremacy over all Italy is hinted at,[248]
+and finally we are given to understand that as temporal ruler C�sar's
+projects were of the greatest, and that for their sake he had formerly
+surrendered his cardinalate.[249] In fact, there can be no doubt
+whatever that C�sar, whether chosen Pope or not after the death of
+Alexander, meant to keep possession of the pontifical state at any cost,
+and that this, after all the enormities he had committed, he could not
+as Pope have succeeded in doing permanently. He, if anybody, could have
+secularised the States of the Church, and he would have been forced to
+do so in order to keep them.[250] Unless we are much deceived, this is
+the real reason of the secret sympathy with which Macchiavelli treats
+the great criminal; from C�sar, or from nobody, could it be hoped that
+he 'would draw the steel from the wound,' in other words, annihilate the
+Papacy--the source of all foreign intervention and of all the divisions
+of Italy. The intriguers who thought to divine C�sar's aims, when
+holding out to him hopes of the kingdom of Tuscany, seem to have been
+dismissed with contempt.[251]
+
+But all logical conclusions from his premisses are idle, not because of
+the unaccountable genius which in fact characterized him as little as it
+did the Duke of Friedland, but because the means which he employed were
+not compatible with any large and consistent course of action. Perhaps,
+indeed, in the very excess of his wickedness some prospect of salvation
+for the Papacy may have existed even without the accident which put an
+end to his rule.
+
+Even if we assume that the destruction of the petty despots in the
+pontifical state had gained for him nothing but sympathy, even if we
+take as proof of his great projects the army, composed of the best
+soldiers and officers in Italy, with Lionardo da Vinci as chief
+engineer, which followed his fortunes in 1503, other facts nevertheless
+wear such a character of unreason that our judgment, like that of
+contemporary observers, is wholly at a loss to explain them. One fact of
+this kind is the devastation and maltreatment of the newly won state,
+which C�sar still intended to keep and to rule over.[252] Another is
+the condition of Rome and of the Curia in the last decades of the
+pontificate. Whether it were that father and son had drawn up a formal
+list of proscribed persons,[253] or that the murders were resolved upon
+one by one, in either case the Borgias were bent on the secret
+destruction of all who stood in their way or whose inheritance they
+coveted. Of this money and movable goods formed the smallest part; it
+was a much greater source of profit for the Pope that the incomes of the
+clerical dignitaries in question were suspended by their death, and that
+he received the revenues of their offices while vacant, and the price of
+these offices when they were filled by the successors of the murdered
+men. The Venetian ambassador, Paolo Capello[254] announces in the year
+1500: 'Every night four or five murdered men are discovered--bishops,
+prelates and others--so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being
+destroyed by the Duke (C�sar).' He himself used to wander about Rome in
+the night time with his guards,[255] and there is every reason to
+believe that he did so not only because, like Tiberius, he shrank from
+showing his now repulsive features by daylight, but also to gratify his
+insane thirst for blood, perhaps even on the persons of those unknown to
+him.
+
+As early as the year 1499 the despair was so great and so general that
+many of the Papal guards were waylaid and put to death.[256] But those
+whom the Borgias could not assail with open violence, fell victims to
+their poison. For the cases in which a certain amount of discretion
+seemed requisite, a white powder[257] of an agreeable taste was made use
+of, which did not work on the spot, but slowly and gradually, and which
+could be mixed without notice in any dish or goblet. Prince Djem had
+taken some of it in a sweet draught, before Alexander surrendered him to
+Charles VIII. (1495), and at the end of their career father and son
+poisoned themselves with the same powder by accidentally tasting a
+sweetmeat intended for a wealthy cardinal, probably Adrian of
+Corneto.[258] The official epitomiser of the history of the Popes,
+Onufrio Panvinio,[259] mentions three cardinals, Orsini, Ferrerio, and
+Michiel, whom Alexander caused to be poisoned, and hints at a fourth,
+Giovanni Borgia, whom C�sar took into his own charge--though probably
+wealthy prelates seldom died in Rome at that time without giving rise to
+suspicions of this sort. Even tranquil students who had withdrawn to
+some provincial town were not out of reach of the merciless poison. A
+secret horror seemed to hang about the Pope; storms and thunderbolts,
+crushing in walls and chambers, had in earlier times often visited and
+alarmed him; in the year 1500,[260] when these phenomena were repeated,
+they were held to be 'cosa diabolica.' The report of these events seems
+at last, through the well-attended jubilee[261] of 1500, to have been
+carried far and wide throughout the countries of Europe, and the
+infamous traffic in indulgences did what else was needed to draw all
+eyes upon Rome.[262] Besides the returning pilgrims, strange white-robed
+penitents came from Italy to the North, among them disguised fugitives
+from the Papal State, who are not likely to have been silent. Yet none
+can calculate how far the scandal and indignation of Christendom might
+have gone, before they became a source of pressing danger to Alexander.
+'He would,' says Panvinio elsewhere,[263] 'have put all the other rich
+cardinals and prelates out of the way, to get their property, had he
+not, in the midst of his great plans for his son, been struck down by
+death.' And what might not C�sar have achieved if, at the moment when
+his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sick-bed! What a
+conclave would that have been, in which, armed with all his weapons, he
+had extorted his election from a college whose numbers he had
+judiciously reduced by poison--and this at a time when there was no
+French army at hand! In pursuing such a hypothesis the imagination loses
+itself in an abyss.
+
+Instead of this followed the conclave in which Pius III. was elected,
+and, after his speedy death, that which chose Julius II.--both elections
+the fruits of a general reaction.
+
+Whatever may have been the private morals of Julius II. in all essential
+respects he was the saviour of the Papacy. His familiarity with the
+course of events since the pontificate of his uncle Sixtus had given him
+a profound insight into the grounds and conditions of the Papal
+authority. On these he founded his own policy, and devoted to it the
+whole force and passion of his unshaken soul. He ascended the steps of
+St. Peter's chair without simony and amid general applause, and with him
+ceased, at all events, the undisguised traffic in the highest offices of
+the Church. Julius had favourites, and among them were some the reverse
+of worthy, but a special fortune put him above the temptation to
+nepotism. His brother, Giovanni della Rovere, was the husband of the
+heiress of Urbino, sister of the last Montefeltro Guidobaldo, and from
+this marriage was born, in 1491, a son, Francesco Maria della Rovere,
+who was at the same time Papal 'nipote' and lawful heir to the duchy of
+Urbino. What Julius elsewhere acquired, either on the field of battle or
+by diplomatic means, he proudly bestowed on the Church, not on his
+family; the ecclesiastical territory, which he found in a state of
+dissolution, he bequeathed to his successor completely subdued, and
+increased by Parma and Piacenza. It was not his fault that Ferrara too
+was not added to the dominions of the Church. The 700,000 ducats, which
+were stored up in the castle of St. Angelo, were to be delivered by the
+governor to none but the future Pope. He made himself heir of the
+cardinals, and, indeed, of all the clergy who died in Rome, and this by
+the most despotic means; but he murdered or poisoned none of them.[264]
+That he should himself lead his forces to battle was for him an
+unavoidable necessity, and certainly did him nothing but good at a time
+when a man in Italy was forced to be either hammer or anvil, and when
+personality was a greater power than the most indisputable right. If,
+despite all his high-sounding 'Away with the barbarians!' he
+nevertheless contributed more than any man to the firm settlement of the
+Spaniards in Italy, he may have thought it a matter of indifference to
+the Papacy, or even, as things stood, a relative advantage. And to whom,
+sooner than to Spain, could the Church look for a sincere and lasting
+respect,[265] in an age when the princes of Italy cherished none but
+sacrilegious projects against her? Be this as it may, the powerful,
+original nature, which could swallow no anger and conceal no genuine
+good-will, made on the whole the impression most desirable in his
+situation--that of the 'Pontefice terribile.' He could even, with a
+comparatively clear conscience, venture to summon a council to Rome, and
+so bid defiance to that outcry for a council which was raised by the
+opposition all over Europe. A ruler of this stamp needed some great
+outward symbol of his conceptions; Julius found it in the reconstruction
+of St. Peter's. The plan of it, as Bramante wished to have it, is
+perhaps the grandest expression of power in unity which can be imagined.
+In other arts besides architecture the face and the memory of the Pope
+live on in their most ideal form, and it is not without significance
+that even the Latin poetry of those days gives proof of a wholly
+different enthusiasm for Julius than that shown for his predecessors.
+The entrance into Bologna, at the end of the 'Iter Julii Secundi,' by
+the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, has a splendour of its own, and Giovan
+Antonio Flaminio,[266] in one of the finest elegies, appealed to the
+patriot in the Pope to grant his protection to Italy.
+
+In a constitution of his Lateran Council, Julius had solemnly denounced
+the simony of the Papal elections.[267] After his death in 1513, the
+money-loving cardinals tried to evade the prohibition by proposing that
+the endowments and offices hitherto held by the chosen candidate should
+be equally divided among themselves, in which case they would have
+elected the best-endowed cardinal, the incompetent Rafael Riario.[268]
+But a reaction, chiefly arising from the younger members of the Sacred
+College, who, above all things, desired a liberal Pope, rendered the
+miserable combination futile; Giovanni Medici was elected--the famous
+Leo X.
+
+We shall often meet with him in treating of the noonday of the
+Renaissance; here we wish only to point out that under him the Papacy
+was again exposed to great inward and outward dangers. Among these we
+do not reckon the conspiracy of the Cardinals Petrucci, De Saulis,
+Riario, and Corneto (1517) which at most could have occasioned a change
+of persons, and to which Leo found the true antidote in the unheard-of
+creation of thirty-nine new cardinals, a measure which had the
+additional advantage of rewarding, in some cases at least, real
+merit.[269]
+
+But some of the paths which Leo allowed himself to tread during the
+first two years of his office were perilous to the last degree. He
+seriously endeavoured to secure, by negotiation, the kingdom of Naples
+for his brother Giuliano, and for his nephew Lorenzo a powerful North
+Italian state, to comprise Milan, Tuscany, Urbino, and Ferrara.[270] It
+is clear that the Pontifical State, thus hemmed in on all sides, would
+have become a mere Medicean appanage, and that, in fact, there would
+have been no further need to secularise it.
+
+The plan found an insuperable obstacle in the political conditions of
+the time. Giuliano died early. To provide for Lorenzo, Leo undertook to
+expel the Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere from Urbino, but reaped from
+the war nothing but hatred and poverty, and was forced, when in 1519
+Lorenzo followed his uncle to the grave, to hand over the hardly-won
+conquests to the Church.[271] He did on compulsion and without credit
+what, if it had been done voluntarily, would have been to his lasting
+honour. What, partly alone, and partly in alternate negotiations with
+Francis I. and Charles V., he attempted against Alfonso of Ferrara, and
+actually achieved against a few petty despots and Condottieri, was
+assuredly not of a kind to raise his reputation. And this was at a time
+when the monarchs of the West were yearly growing more and more
+accustomed to political gambling on a colossal scale, of which the
+stakes were this or that province of Italy.[272] Who could guarantee
+that, since the last decades had seen so great an increase of their
+power at home, their ambition could stop short of the States of the
+Church? Leo himself witnessed the prelude of what was fulfilled in the
+year 1527; a few bands of Spanish infantry appeared--of their own
+accord, it seems--at the end of 1520, on the borders of the Pontifical
+territory, with a view of laying the Pope under contribution,[273] but
+were driven back by the Papal forces. The public feeling, too, against
+the corruptions of the hierarchy had of late years been drawing rapidly
+to a head, and men with an eye for the future, like the younger Pico
+della Mirandola, called urgently for reform.[274] Meantime Luther had
+already appeared upon the scene.
+
+Under Adrian VI. (1522-1523), the few and timid improvements, carried
+out in the face of the great German Reformation, came too late. He could
+do little more than proclaim his horror of the course which things had
+taken hitherto, of simony, nepotism, prodigality, brigandage, and
+profligacy. The danger from the side of the Lutherans was by no means
+the greatest; an acute observer from Venice, Girolamo Negro, uttered his
+fears that a speedy and terrible disaster would befall the city of Rome
+itself.[275]
+
+Under Clement VII. the whole horizon of Rome was filled with vapours,
+like that leaden veil which the scirocco draws over the Campagna, and
+which makes the last months of summer so deadly. The Pope was no less
+detested at home than abroad. Thoughtful people were filled with
+anxiety,[276] hermits appeared upon the streets and squares of Rome,
+foretelling the fate of Italy and of the world, and calling the Pope by
+the name of Antichrist;[277] the faction of the Colonna raised its head
+defiantly; the indomitable Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, whose mere
+existence[278] was a permanent menace to the Papacy, ventured to
+surprise the city in 1526, hoping with the help of Charles V., to become
+Pope then and there, as soon as Clement was killed or captured. It was
+no piece of good fortune for Rome that the latter was able to escape to
+the Castle of St. Angelo, and the fate for which himself was reserved
+may well be called worse than death.
+
+By a series of those falsehoods, which only the powerful can venture on,
+but which bring ruin upon the weak, Clement brought about the advance of
+the Germano-Spanish army under Bourbon and Frundsberg (1527). It is
+certain[279] that the Cabinet of Charles V. intended to inflict on him a
+severe castigation, and that it could not calculate beforehand how far
+the zeal of its unpaid hordes would carry them. It would have been vain
+to attempt to enlist men in Germany without paying any bounty, if it had
+not been well known that Rome was the object of the expedition. It may
+be that the written orders to Bourbon will be found some day or other,
+and it is not improbable that they will prove to be worded mildly. But
+historical criticism will not allow itself to be led astray. The
+Catholic King and Emperor owed it to his luck and nothing else, that
+Pope and cardinals were not murdered by his troops. Had this happened,
+no sophistry in the world could clear him of his share in the guilt. The
+massacre of countless people of less consequence, the plunder of the
+rest, and all the horrors of torture and traffic in human life, show
+clearly enough what was possible in the 'Sacco di Roma.'
+
+Charles seems to have wished to bring the Pope, who had fled a second
+time to the Castle of St. Angelo, to Naples, after extorting from him
+vast sums of money, and Clement's flight to Orvieto must have happened
+without any connivance on the part of Spain.[280] Whether the Emperor
+ever thought seriously of the secularisation of the States of the
+Church,[281] for which everybody was quite prepared, and whether he was
+really dissuaded from it by the representations of Henry VIII. of
+England, will probably never be made clear.
+
+But if such projects really existed, they cannot have lasted long: from
+the devastated city arose a new spirit of reform both in Church and
+State. It made itself felt in a moment. Cardinal Sadoleto, one witness
+of many, thus writes: 'If through our suffering a satisfaction is made
+to the wrath and justice of God, if these fearful punishments again open
+the way to better laws and morals, then is our misfortune perhaps not of
+the greatest.... What belongs to God He will take care of; before us
+lies a life of reformation, which no violence can take from us. Let us
+so rule our deeds and thoughts as to seek in God only the true glory of
+the priesthood and our own true greatness and power.'[282]
+
+In point of fact, this critical year, 1527, so far bore fruit, that the
+voices of serious men could again make themselves heard. Rome had
+suffered too much to return, even under a Paul III., to the gay
+corruption of Leo X.
+
+The Papacy, too, when its sufferings became so great, began to excite a
+sympathy half religious and half political. The kings could not tolerate
+that one of their number should arrogate to himself the rights of Papal
+gaoler, and concluded (August 18, 1527) the Treaty of Amiens, one of the
+objects of which was the deliverance of Clement. They thus, at all
+events, turned to their own account the unpopularity which the deeds of
+the Imperial troops had excited. At the same time the Emperor became
+seriously embarrassed, even in Spain, where the prelates and grandees
+never saw him without making the most urgent remonstrances. When a
+general deputation of the clergy and laity, all clothed in mourning, was
+projected, Charles, fearing that troubles might arise out of it, like
+those of the insurrection quelled a few years before, forbad the
+scheme.[283] Not only did he not dare to prolong the maltreatment of the
+Pope, but he was absolutely compelled, even apart from all
+considerations of foreign politics, to be reconciled with the Papacy
+which he had so grievously wounded. For the temper of the German people,
+which certainly pointed to a different course, seemed to him, like
+German affairs generally, to afford no foundation for a policy. It is
+possible, too, as a Venetian maintains,[284] that the memory of the sack
+of Rome lay heavy on his conscience, and tended to hasten that expiation
+which was sealed by the permanent subjection of the Florentines to the
+Medicean family of which the Pope was a member. The 'nipote' and new
+Duke, Alessandro Medici, was married to the natural daughter of the
+Emperor.
+
+In the following years the plan of a Council enabled Charles to keep the
+Papacy in all essential points under his control, and at one and the
+same time to protect and to oppress it. The greatest danger of
+all--secularisation--the danger which came from within, from the Popes
+themselves and their 'nipoti,' was adjourned for centuries by the German
+Reformation. Just as this alone had made the expedition against Rome
+(1527) possible and successful, so did it compel the Papacy to become
+once more the expression of a world-wide spiritual power, to raise
+itself from the soulless debasement in which it lay, and to place itself
+at the head of all the enemies of this reformation. The institution thus
+developed during the latter years of Clement VII., and under Paul III.,
+Paul IV., and their successors, in the face of the defection of half
+Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which avoided all the great
+and dangerous scandals of former times, particularly nepotism, with its
+attempts at territorial aggrandisement,[285] and which, in alliance with
+the Catholic princes, and impelled by a new-born spiritual force, found
+its chief work in the recovery of what had been lost. It only existed
+and is only intelligible in opposition to the seceders. In this sense it
+can be said with perfect truth that, the moral salvation of the Papacy
+is due to its mortal enemies. And now its political position, too,
+though certainly under the permanent tutelage of Spain, became
+impregnable; almost without effort it inherited, on the extinction of
+its vassals, the legitimate line of Este and the house of Della Rovere,
+the duchies of Ferrara and Urbino. But without the Reformation--if,
+indeed, it is possible to think it away--the whole ecclesiastical State
+would long ago have passed into secular hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In conclusion, let us briefly consider the effect of these political
+circumstances on the spirit of the nation at large.
+
+It is evident that the general political uncertainty in Italy during the
+fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was of a kind to excite in the
+better spirits of the time a patriotic disgust and opposition. Dante and
+Petrarch,[286] in their day, proclaimed loudly a common Italy, the
+object of the highest efforts of all her children. It may be objected
+that this was only the enthusiasm of a few highly-instructed men, in
+which the mass of the people had no share; but it can hardly have been
+otherwise even in Germany, although in name at least that country was
+united, and recognised in the Emperor one supreme head. The first
+patriotic utterances of German Literature, if we except some verses of
+the 'Minnes�nger,' belong to the humanists of the time of Maximilian
+I.[287] and after, and read like an echo of Italian declamations, or
+like a reply to Italian criticism on the intellectual immaturity of
+Germany. And yet, as a matter of fact, Germany had been long a nation in
+a truer sense than Italy ever was since the Roman days. France owes the
+consciousness of its national unity mainly to its conflicts with the
+English, and Spain has never permanently succeeded in absorbing
+Portugal, closely related as the two countries are. For Italy, the
+existence of the ecclesiastical State, and the conditions under which
+alone it could continue, were a permanent obstacle to national unity, an
+obstacle whose removal seemed hopeless. When, therefore, in the
+political intercourse of the fifteenth century, the common fatherland is
+sometimes emphatically named, it is done in most cases to annoy some
+other Italian State.[288] The first decades of the sixteenth century,
+the years when the Renaissance attained its fullest bloom, were not
+favourable to a revival of patriotism; the enjoyment of intellectual and
+artistic pleasures, the comforts and elegancies of life, and the supreme
+interests of self-development, destroyed or hampered the love of
+country. But those deeply serious and sorrowful appeals to national
+sentiment were not heard again till later, when the time for unity had
+gone by, when the country was inundated with Frenchmen and Spaniards,
+and when a German army had conquered Rome. The sense of local patriotism
+may be said in some measure to have taken the place of this feeling,
+though it was but a poor equivalent for it.
+
+
+
+
+_PART II._
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+
+In the character of these states, whether republics or despotisms, lies,
+not the only, but the chief reason for the early development of the
+Italian. To this it is due that he was the first-born among the sons of
+modern Europe.
+
+In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness--that which was
+turned within as that which was turned without--lay dreaming or half
+awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and
+childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen
+clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a
+race, people, party, family, or corporation--only through some general
+category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an _objective_
+treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this
+world became possible. The _subjective_ side at the same time asserted
+itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual
+_individual_,[289] and recognised himself as such. In the same way the
+Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian
+had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew
+themselves only as members of a race. It will not be difficult to show
+that this result was owing above all to the political circumstances of
+Italy.
+
+In far earlier times we can here and there detect a development of free
+personality which in Northern Europe either did not occur at all, or
+could not display itself in the same manner. The band of audacious
+wrongdoers in the sixteenth century described to us by Luidprand, some
+of the contemporaries of Gregory VII., and a few of the opponents of the
+first Hohenstaufen, show us characters of this kind. But at the close of
+the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality; the
+charm laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a thousand figures
+meet us each in its own special shape and dress. Dante's great poem
+would have been impossible in any other country of Europe, if only for
+the reason that they all still lay under the spell of race. For Italy
+the august poet, through the wealth of individuality which he set forth,
+was the most national herald of his time. But this unfolding of the
+treasures of human nature in literature and art--this many-sided
+representation and criticism--will be discussed in separate chapters;
+here we have to deal only with the psychological fact itself. This fact
+appears in the most decisive and unmistakeable form. The Italians of the
+fourteenth century knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any
+shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and
+seeming[290] unlike his neighbours.[291]
+
+Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the highest degree the
+individuality not only of the tyrant or Condottiere himself,[292] but
+also of the men whom he protected or used as his tools--the secretary,
+minister, poet, and companion. These people were forced to know all the
+inward resources of their own nature, passing or permanent; and their
+enjoyment of life was enhanced and concentrated by the desire to obtain
+the greatest satisfaction from a possibly very brief period of power and
+influence.
+
+But even the subjects whom they ruled over were not free from the same
+impulse. Leaving out of account those who wasted their lives in secret
+opposition and conspiracies, we speak of the majority who were content
+with a strictly private station, like most of the urban population of
+the Byzantine empire and the Mohammedan states. No doubt it was often
+hard for the subjects of a Visconti to maintain the dignity of their
+persons and families, and multitudes must have lost in moral character
+through the servitude they lived under. But this was not the case with
+regard to individuality; for political impotence does not hinder the
+different tendencies and manifestations of private life from thriving in
+the fullest vigour and variety. Wealth and culture, so far as display
+and rivalry were not forbidden to them, a municipal freedom which did
+not cease to be considerable, and a Church which, unlike that of the
+Byzantine or of the Mohammedan world, was not identical with the
+State--all these conditions undoubtedly favoured the growth of
+individual thought, for which the necessary leisure was furnished by the
+cessation of party conflicts. The private man, indifferent to politics,
+and busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a
+_dilettante_, seems to have been first fully formed in these despotisms
+of the fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course, be
+required on such a point. The novelists, from whom we might expect
+information, describe to us oddities in plenty, but only from one point
+of view and in so far as the needs of the story demand. Their scene,
+too, lies chiefly in the republican cities.
+
+In the latter, circumstances were also, but in another way, favourable
+to the growth of individual character. The more frequently the governing
+party was changed, the more the individual was led to make the utmost of
+the exercise and enjoyment of power. The statesmen and popular leaders,
+especially in Florentine history,[293] acquired so marked a personal
+character, that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a parallel to
+them in contemporary history, hardly even in Jacob von Arteveldt.
+
+The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand, often came into
+a position like that of the subjects of the despotic States, with the
+difference that the freedom or power already enjoyed, and in some cases
+the hope of recovering them, gave a higher energy to their
+individuality. Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for
+instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446), whose work on domestic
+economy[294] is the first complete programme of a developed private
+life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the
+dangers and thanklessness of public life[295] is in its way a true
+monument of the age.
+
+Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the
+exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. 'In all our more
+populous cities,' says Giovanni Pontano,[296] 'we see a crowd of people
+who have left their homes of their own free-will; but a man takes his
+virtues with him wherever he goes.' And, in fact, they were by no means
+only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native
+place voluntarily, because they found its political or economical
+condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the
+Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.
+
+The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in
+itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as we have already said,
+finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond
+even this in the words, 'My country is the whole world.'[297] And when
+his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote
+back: 'Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars;
+everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing
+ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people. Even my
+bread will not fail me.'[298] The artists exult no less defiantly in
+their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. 'Only he who has
+learned everything,' says Ghiberti,[299] 'is nowhere a stranger; robbed
+of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every
+country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.' In the same
+strain an exiled humanist writes: 'Wherever a learned man fixes his
+seat, there is home.[300]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
+
+
+An acute and practised eye might be able to trace, step by step, the
+increase in the number of complete men during the fifteenth century.
+Whether they had before them as a conscious object the harmonious
+development of their spiritual and material existence, is hard to say;
+but several of them attained it, so far as is consistent with the
+imperfection of all that is earthly. It may be better to renounce the
+attempt at an estimate of the share which fortune, character, and talent
+had in the life of Lorenzo Magnifico. But look at a personality like
+that of Ariosto, especially as shown in his satires. In what harmony are
+there expressed the pride of the man and the poet, the irony with which
+he treats his own enjoyments, the most delicate satire, and the deepest
+goodwill!
+
+When this impulse to the highest individual development[301] was
+combined with a powerful and varied nature, which had mastered all the
+elements of the culture of the age, then arose the 'all-sided
+man'--'l'uomo universale'--who belonged to Italy alone. Men there were
+of encyclop�dic knowledge in many countries during the Middle Ages, for
+this knowledge was confined within narrow limits; and even in the
+twelfth century there were universal artists, but the problems of
+architecture were comparatively simple and uniform, and in sculpture and
+painting the matter was of more importance than the form. But in Italy
+at the time of the Renaissance, we find artists who in every branch
+created new and perfect works, and who also made the greatest
+impression as men. Others, outside the arts they practised, were masters
+of a vast circle of spiritual interests.
+
+Dante, who, even in his lifetime, was called by some a poet, by others a
+philosopher, by others a theologian,[302] pours forth in all his
+writings a stream of personal force by which the reader, apart from the
+interest of the subject, feels himself carried away. What power of will
+must the steady, unbroken elaboration of the 'Divine Comedy' have
+required! And if we look at the matter of the poem, we find that in the
+whole spiritual or physical world there is hardly an important subject
+which the poet has not fathomed, and on which his utterances--often only
+a few words--are not the most weighty of his time. For the plastic arts
+he is of the first importance, and this for better reasons than the few
+references to contemporary artists--he soon became himself the source of
+inspiration.[303]
+
+The fifteenth century is, above all, that of the many-sided men. There
+is no biography which does not, besides the chief work of its hero,
+speak of other pursuits all passing beyond the limits of dilettantism.
+The Florentine merchant and statesman was often learned in both the
+classical languages; the most famous humanists read the ethics and
+politics of Aristotle to him and his sons;[304] even the daughters of
+the house were highly educated. It is in these circles that private
+education was first treated seriously. The humanist, on his side, was
+compelled to the most varied attainments, since his philological
+learning was not limited, as it now is, to the theoretical knowledge of
+classical antiquity, but had to serve the practical needs of daily life.
+While studying Pliny,[305] he made collections of natural history; the
+geography of the ancients was his guide in treating of modern geography,
+their history was his pattern in writing contemporary chronicles, even
+when composed in Italian; he not only translated the comedies of
+Plautus, but acted as manager when they were put on the stage; every
+effective form of ancient literature down to the dialogues of Lucian he
+did his best to imitate; and besides all this, he acted as magistrate,
+secretary, and diplomatist--not always to his own advantage.
+
+But among these many-sided men, some who may truly be called all-sided,
+tower above the rest. Before analysing the general phases of life and
+culture of this period, we may here, on the threshold of the fifteenth
+century, consider for a moment the figure of one of these giants--Leon
+Battista Alberti (b. 1404? d. 1472).[306] His biography,[307] which is
+only a fragment, speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no
+mention at all of his great significance in the history of architecture.
+We shall now see what he was, apart from these special claims to
+distinction.
+
+In all by which praise is won, Leon Battista was from his childhood the
+first. Of his various gymnastic feats and exercises we read with
+astonishment how, with his feet together, he could spring over a man's
+head; how, in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the air till it was
+heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled
+under him. In three things he desired to appear faultless to others, in
+walking, in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a master,
+and yet his compositions were admired by professional judges. Under the
+pressure of poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many
+years, till exhaustion brought on a severe illness. In his
+twenty-fourth year, finding his memory for words weakened, but his sense
+of facts unimpaired, he set to work at physics and mathematics. And all
+the while he acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity,
+cross-examining artists, scholars, and artisans of all descriptions,
+down to the cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their
+craft. Painting and modelling he practised by the way, and especially
+excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was
+excited by his mysterious 'camera obscura,'[308] in which he showed at
+one time the stars and the moon rising over rocky hills, at another wide
+landscapes with mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective, and
+with fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that which
+others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement
+which followed the laws of beauty for something almost divine.[309] To
+all this must be added his literary works, first of all those on art,
+which are landmarks and authorities of the first order for the
+Renaissance of Form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose
+writings--novels and other works--of which some have been taken for
+productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous
+dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life[310]
+in four books; various moral, philosophical, and historical works; and
+many speeches and poems, including a funeral oration on his dog.
+Notwithstanding his admiration for the Latin language, he wrote in
+Italian, and encouraged others to do the same; himself a disciple of
+Greek science, he maintained the doctrine, that without Christianity the
+world would wander in a labyrinth of error. His serious and witty
+sayings were thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many
+columns long, are quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew
+he imparted, as rich natures always do, without the least reserve,
+giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest spring of
+his nature has yet to be spoken of--the sympathetic intensity with which
+he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees
+and waving corn-fields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he
+honoured as 'a delight of nature,' and could never look at them enough.
+Perfectly-formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favoured by
+nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful
+landscape cured him.[311] No wonder that those who saw him in this close
+and mysterious communion with the world ascribed to him the gift of
+prophecy. He was said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the
+family of Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the Popes years
+before they happened, and to be able to read into the countenances and
+the hearts of men. It need not be added that an iron will pervaded and
+sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the
+Renaissance, he said, 'Men can do all things if they will.'
+
+And Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as
+the master to the _dilettante_. Would only that Vasari's work were here
+supplemented by a description like that of Alberti! The colossal
+outlines of Lionardo's nature can never be more than dimly and distantly
+conceived.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME.
+
+
+To this inward development of the individual corresponds a new sort of
+outward distinction--the modern form of glory.[312]
+
+In the other countries of Europe the different classes of society lived
+apart, each with its own medi�val caste sense of honour. The poetical
+fame of the Troubadours and Minnes�nger was peculiar to the knightly
+order. But in Italy social equality had appeared before the time of the
+tyrannies or the democracies. We there find early traces of a general
+society, having, as will be shown more fully later on, a common ground
+in Latin and Italian literature; and such a ground was needed for this
+new element in life to grow in. To this must be added that the Roman
+authors, who were now zealously studied, and especially Cicero, the most
+read and admired of all, are filled and saturated with the conception of
+fame, and that their subject itself--the universal empire of Rome--stood
+as a permanent ideal before the minds of Italians. From henceforth all
+the aspirations and achievements of the people were governed by a moral
+postulate, which was still unknown elsewhere in Europe.
+
+Here, again, as in all essential points, the first witness to be called
+is Dante. He strove for the poet's garland[313] with all the power of
+his soul. As publicist and man of letters, he laid stress on the fact
+that what he did was new, and that he wished not only to be, but to be
+esteemed the first in his own walks.[314] But even in his prose writings
+he touches on the inconveniences of fame; he knows how often personal
+acquaintance with famous men is disappointing, and explains how this is
+due partly to the childish fancy of men, partly to envy, and partly to
+the imperfections of the hero himself.[315] And in his great poem he
+firmly maintains the emptiness of fame, although in a manner which
+betrays that his heart was not set free from the longing for it. In
+Paradise the sphere of Mercury is the seat of such blessed ones[316] as
+on earth strove after glory and thereby dimmed 'the beams of true love.'
+It is characteristic that the lost souls in hell beg of Dante to keep
+alive for them their memory and fame on earth,[317] while those in
+Purgatory only entreat his prayers and those of others for their
+deliverance.[318] And in a famous passage,[319] the passion for
+fame--'lo gran desio dell'eccellenza'--is reproved for the reason that
+intellectual glory is not absolute, but relative to the times, and may
+be surpassed and eclipsed by greater successors.
+
+The new race of poet-scholars which arose soon after Dante quickly made
+themselves masters of this fresh tendency. They did so in a double
+sense, being themselves the most acknowledged celebrities of Italy, and
+at the same time, as poets and historians, consciously disposing of the
+reputation of others. An outward symbol of this sort of fame was the
+coronation of the poets, of which we shall speak later on.
+
+A contemporary of Dante, Albertinus Musattus or Mussattus, crowned poet
+at Padua by the bishop and rector, enjoyed a fame which fell little
+short of deification. Every Christmas Day the doctors and students of
+both colleges at the University came in solemn procession before his
+house with trumpets and, as it seems, with burning tapers, to salute
+him[320] and bring him presents. His reputation lasted till, in 1318, he
+fell into disgrace with the ruling tyrant of the House of Carrara.
+
+This new incense, which once was offered only to saints and heroes, was
+given in clouds to Petrarch, who persuaded himself in his later years
+that it was but a foolish and troublesome thing. His letter 'To
+Posterity'[321] is the confession of an old and famous man, who is
+forced to gratify the public curiosity. He admits that he wishes for
+fame in the times to come, but would rather be without it in his own
+day.[322] In his dialogue on fortune and misfortune,[323] the
+interlocutor, who maintains the futility of glory, has the best of the
+contest. But, at the same time, Petrarch is pleased that the autocrat of
+Byzantium[324] knows him as well by his writings as Charles IV.[325]
+knows him. And in fact, even in his lifetime, his fame extended far
+beyond Italy. And the emotion which he felt was natural when his
+friends, on the occasion of a visit to his native Arezzo (1350), took
+him to the house where he was born, and told him how the city had
+provided that no change should be made in it.[326] In former times the
+dwellings of certain great saints were preserved and revered in this
+way, like the cell of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Dominican convent at
+Naples, and the Portiuncula of St. Francis near Assisi; and one or two
+great jurists also enjoyed the half-mythical reputation which led to
+this honour. Towards the close of the fourteenth century the people at
+Bagnolo, near Florence, called an old building the 'Studio' of Accursius
+(b. about 1150), but, nevertheless, suffered it to be destroyed.[327] It
+is probable that the great incomes and the political influence which
+some jurists obtained as consulting lawyers made a lasting impression on
+the popular imagination.
+
+To the cultus of the birthplaces of famous men must be added that of
+their graves,[328] and, in the case of Petrarch, of the spot where he
+died. In memory of him Arqu� became a favourite resort of the Paduans,
+and was dotted with graceful little villas.[329] At this time there were
+no 'classic spots' in Northern Europe, and pilgrimages were only made to
+pictures and relics. It was a point of honour for the different cities
+to possess the bones of their own and foreign celebrities; and it is
+most remarkable how seriously the Florentines, even in the fourteenth
+century--long before the building of Santa Croce--laboured to make their
+cathedral a Pantheon. Accorso, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the
+jurist Zanobi della Strada were to have had magnificent tombs there
+erected to them.[330] Late in the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Magnifico
+applied in person to the Spoletans, asking them to give up the corpse of
+the painter Fra Filippo Lippi for the cathedral, and received the answer
+that they had none too many ornaments to the city, especially in the
+shape of distinguished people, for which reason they begged him to spare
+them; and, in fact, he had to be contented with erecting a
+cenotaph.[331] And even Dante, in spite of all the applications to which
+Boccaccio urged the Florentines with bitter emphasis,[332] remained
+sleeping tranquilly by the side of San Francesco at Ravenna, 'among
+ancient tombs of emperors and vaults of saints, in more honourable
+company than thou, O Home, couldst offer him.' It even happened that a
+man once took away unpunished the lights from the altar on which the
+crucifix stood, and set them by the grave, with the words, 'Take them;
+thou art more worthy of them than He, the Crucified One!'[333]
+
+And now the Italian cities began again to remember their ancient
+citizens and inhabitants. Naples, perhaps, had never forgotten its tomb
+of Virgil, since a kind of mythical halo had become attached to the
+name, and the memory of it had been revived by Petrarch and Boccaccio,
+who both stayed in the city.
+
+The Paduans, even in the sixteenth century, firmly believed that they
+possessed not only the genuine bones of their founder Antenor, but also
+those of the historian Livy.[334] 'Sulmona,' says Boccaccio,[335]
+'bewails that Ovid lies buried far away in exile; and Parma rejoices
+that Cassius sleeps within its walls.' The Mantuans coined a medal in
+1257 with the bust of Virgil, and raised a statue to represent him. In
+a fit of aristocratic insolence,[336] the guardian of the young Gonzaga,
+Carlo Malatesta, caused it to be pulled down in 1392, and was
+afterwards forced, when he found the fame of the old poet too strong
+for him, to set it up again. Even then, perhaps, the grotto, a couple of
+miles from the town, where Virgil was said to have meditated,[337] was
+shown to strangers, like the 'Scuola di Virgilio' at Naples. Como
+claimed both the Plinys[338] for its own, and at the end of the
+fifteenth century erected statues in their honour, sitting under
+graceful baldachins on the fa�ade of the cathedral.
+
+History and the new topography were now careful to leave no local
+celebrity unnoticed. At the same period the northern chronicles only
+here and there, among the list of popes, emperors, earthquakes, and
+comets, put in the remark, that at such a time this or that famous man
+'flourished.' We shall elsewhere have to show how, mainly under the
+influence of this idea of fame, an admirable biographical literature was
+developed. We must here limit ourselves to the local patriotism of the
+topographers who recorded the claims of their native cities to
+distinction.
+
+In the Middle Ages, the cities were proud of their saints and of the
+bones and relics in their churches.[339] With these the panegyrist of
+Padua in 1440, Michele Savonarola,[340] begins his list; from them he
+passes to 'the famous men who were no saints, but who, by their great
+intellect and force (_virtus_) deserve to be added (_adnecti_) to the
+saints'--just as in classical antiquity the distinguished man came close
+upon the hero.[341] The further enumeration is most characteristic of
+the time. First comes Antenor, the brother of Priam, who founded Padua
+with a band of Trojan fugitives; King Dardanus, who defeated Attila in
+the Euganean hills, followed him in pursuit, and struck him dead at
+Rimini with a chess-board; the Emperor Henry IV., who built the
+cathedral; a King Marcus, whose head was preserved in Monselice (_monte
+silicis arce_); then a couple of cardinals and prelates as founders of
+colleges, churches, and so forth; the famous Augustinian theologian, Fra
+Alberto; a string of philosophers beginning with Paolo Veneto and the
+celebrated Pietro of Albano; the jurist Paolo Padovano; then Livy and
+the poets Petrarch, Mussato, Lovato. If there is any want of military
+celebrities in the list, the poet consoles himself for it by the
+abundance of learned men whom he has to show, and by the more durable
+character of intellectual glory; while the fame of the soldier is buried
+with his body, or, if it lasts, owes its permanence only to the
+scholar.[342] It is nevertheless honourable to the city that foreign
+warriors lie buried here by their own wish, like Pietro de Rossi of
+Parma, Filippo Arcelli of Piacenza, and especially Gattamelata of Narni
+(d. 1642),[343] whose brazen equestrian statue, 'like a C�sar in
+triumph,' already stood by the church of the Santo. The author then
+names a crowd of jurists and physicians, among the latter two friends of
+Petrarch, Johannes ab Horologio and Jacob de Dondis, nobles 'who had not
+only, like so many others, received, but deserved, the honour of
+knighthood.' Then follows a list of famous mechanicians, painters, and
+musicians, which is closed by the name of a fencing-master Michele
+Rosso, who, as the most distinguished man in his profession, was to be
+seen painted in many places.
+
+By the side of these local temples of fame, which myth, legend, popular
+admiration, and literary tradition combined to create, the poet-scholars
+built up a great Pantheon of worldwide celebrity. They made collections
+of famous men and famous women, often in direct imitation of Cornelius
+Nepos, the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (_Mulierum_
+_virtutes_), Hieronymus (_De Viris Illustribus_), and others: or they
+wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies, as was
+done by Petrarch in his 'Trionfo della Fama,' and Boccaccio in the
+'Amorosa Visione,' with hundreds of names, of which three-fourths at
+least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages.[344]
+By-and-by this new and comparatively modern element was treated with
+greater emphasis; the historians began to insert descriptions of
+character, and collections arose of the biographies of distinguished
+contemporaries, like those of Filippo Villani, Vespasiano Fiorentino,
+Bartolommeo Facio, Paolo Cortese,[345] and lastly of Paolo Giovio.[346]
+
+The North of Europe, until Italian influence began to tell upon its
+writers--for instance, on Trithemius, the first German who wrote the
+lives of famous men--possessed only either legends of the saints, or
+descriptions of princes and churchmen partaking largely of the character
+of legends and showing no traces of the idea of fame, that is, of
+distinction won by a man's personal efforts. Poetical glory was still
+confined to certain classes of society, and the names of northern
+artists are only known to us at this period in so far as they were
+members of certain guilds or corporations.
+
+The poet-scholar in Italy had, as we have already said, the fullest
+consciousness that he was the giver of fame and immortality, or, if he
+chose, of oblivion.[347] Petrarch, notwithstanding all the idealism of
+his love to Laura, gives utterance to the feeling, that his sonnets
+confer immortality on his beloved as well as on himself.[348] Boccaccio
+complains of a fair one to whom he had done homage, and who remained
+hard-hearted in order that he might go on praising her and making her
+famous, and he gives her a hint that he will try the effect of a little
+blame.[349] Sannazaro, in two magnificent sonnets, threatens Alfonso of
+Naples with eternal obscurity on account of his cowardly flight before
+Charles VIII.[350] Angelo Poliziano seriously exhorts (1491) King John
+of Portugal[351] to think betimes of his immortality in reference to the
+new discoveries in Africa, and to send him materials to Florence, there
+to be put into shape (_operosius excolenda_), otherwise it would befall
+him as it had befallen all the others whose deeds, unsupported by the
+help of the learned, 'lie hidden in the vast heap of human frailty.' The
+king, or his humanistic chancellor, agreed to this, and promised that at
+least the Portuguese chronicles of African affairs should be translated
+into Italian, and sent to Florence to be done into Latin. Whether the
+promise was kept is not known. These pretensions are by no means so
+groundless as they may appear at first sight; for the form in which
+events, even the greatest, are told to the living and to posterity is
+anything but a matter of indifference. The Italian humanists, with their
+mode of exposition and their Latin style, had long the complete control
+of the reading world of Europe, and till last century the Italian poets
+were more widely known and studied than those of any other nation. The
+baptismal name of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci was given, on account
+of his book of travels--certainly at the proposal of its German
+translator into Latin, Martin Waldseem�ller (Hylacomylus)[352]--to a new
+quarter of the globe, and if Paolo Giovio, with all his superficiality
+and graceful caprice, promised himself immortality,[353] his expectation
+has not altogether been disappointed.
+
+Amid all these preparations outwardly to win and secure fame, the
+curtain is now and then drawn aside, and we see with frightful evidence
+a boundless ambition and thirst after greatness, independent of all
+means and consequences. Thus, in the preface to Macchiavelli's
+Florentine history, in which he blames his predecessors Lionardo Aretino
+and Poggio for their too considerate reticence with regard to the
+political parties in the city: 'They erred greatly and showed that they
+understood little the ambition of men and the desire to perpetuate a
+name. How many who could distinguish themselves by nothing praiseworthy,
+strove to do so by infamous deeds! Those writers did not consider that
+actions which are great in themselves, as is the case with the actions
+of rulers and of states, always seem to bring more glory than blame, of
+whatever kind they are and whatever the result of them may be.'[354] In
+more than one remarkable and dreadful undertaking the motive assigned by
+serious writers is the burning desire to achieve something great and
+memorable. This motive is not a mere extreme case of ordinary vanity,
+but something demonic, involving a surrender of the will, the use of any
+means, however atrocious, and even an indifference to success itself. In
+this sense, for example, Macchiavelli conceives the character of Stefano
+Porcaro (p. 104);[355] of the murderers of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (p.
+57), the documents tell us about the same; and the assassination of Duke
+Alessandro of Florence (1537) is ascribed by Varchi himself to the
+thirst for fame which tormented the murderer Lorenzino Medici (p. 60).
+Still more stress is laid on this motive by Paolo Giovio.[356]
+Lorenzino, according to him, pilloried by a pamphlet of Molza on
+account of the mutilation of some ancient statues at Rome, broods over
+a deed whose novelty shall make his disgrace forgotten, and ends by
+murdering his kinsman and prince. These are characteristic features of
+this age of overstrained and despairing passions and forces, and remind
+us of the burning of the temple of Diana at Ephesus in the time of
+Philip of Macedon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MODERN WIT AND SATIRE.
+
+
+The corrective, not only of this modern desire for fame, but of all
+highly developed individuality, is found in ridicule, especially when
+expressed in the victorious form of wit.[357] We read in the Middle Ages
+how hostile armies, princes, and nobles, provoked one another with
+symbolical insult, and how the defeated party was loaded with symbolical
+outrage. Here and there, too, under the influence of classical
+literature, wit began to be used as a weapon in theological disputes,
+and the poetry of Provence produced a whole class of satirical
+compositions. Even the Minnes�nger, as their political poems show, could
+adopt this tone when necessary.[358] But wit could not be an independent
+element in life till its appropriate victim, the developed individual
+with personal pretentions, had appeared. Its weapons were then by no
+means limited to the tongue and the pen, but included tricks and
+practical jokes--the so-called 'burle' and 'beffe'--which form a chief
+subject of many collections of novels.
+
+The 'Hundred Old Novels,' which must have been composed about the end of
+the thirteenth century, have as yet neither wit, the fruit of contrast,
+nor the 'burla,' for their subject;[359] their aim is merely to give
+simple and elegant expression to wise sayings and pretty stories or
+fables. But if anything proves the great antiquity of the collection, it
+is precisely this absence of satire. For with the fourteenth century
+comes Dante, who, in the utterance of scorn, leaves all other poets in
+the world far behind, and who, if only on account of his great picture
+of the deceivers,[360] must be called the chief master of colossal
+comedy. With Petrarch[361] begin the collections of witty sayings after
+the pattern of Plutarch (Apophthegmata, etc.).
+
+What stores of wit were concentrated in Florence during this century, is
+most characteristically shown in the novels of Franco Sacchetti. These
+are, for the most part, not stories but answers, given under certain
+circumstances--shocking pieces of _na�vet�_, with which silly folks,
+court-jesters, rogues, and profligate women make their retort. The
+comedy of the tale lies in the startling contrast of this real or
+assumed _na�vet�_ with conventional morality and the ordinary relations
+of the world--things are made to stand on their heads. All means of
+picturesque representation are made use of, including the introduction
+of certain North Italian dialects. Often the place of wit is taken by
+mere insolence, clumsy trickery, blasphemy, and obscenity; one or two
+jokes told of Condottieri[362] are among the most brutal and malicious
+which are recorded. Many of the 'burle' are thoroughly comic, but many
+are only real or supposed evidence of personal superiority, of triumph
+over another. How much people were willing to put up with, how often the
+victim was satisfied with getting the laugh on his side by a retaliatory
+trick, cannot be said; there was much heartless and pointless malice
+mixed up with it all, and life in Florence was no doubt often made
+unpleasant enough from this cause.[363] The inventors and retailers of
+jokes soon became inevitable figures,[364] and among them there must
+have been some who were classical--far superior to all the mere
+court-jesters, to whom competition, a changing public, and the quick
+apprehension of the audience, all advantages of life in Florence, were
+wanting. Some Florentine wits went starring among the despotic courts of
+Lombardy and Romagna,[365] and found themselves much better rewarded
+than at home, where their talent was cheap and plentiful. The better
+type of these people is the amusing man (l'uomo piacevole), the worse is
+the buffoon and the vulgar parasite who presents himself at weddings and
+banquets with the argument, 'If I am not invited, the fault is not
+mine.' Now and then the latter combine to pluck a young
+spendthrift,[366] but in general they are treated and despised as
+parasites, while wits of higher position bear themselves like princes,
+and consider their talent as something sovereign. Dolcibene, whom
+Charles IV., 'Imperator di Buem,' had pronounced to be the 'king of
+Italian jesters,' said to him at Ferrara: 'You will conquer the world,
+since you are my friend and the Pope's; you fight with the sword, the
+Pope with his bulls, and I with my tongue.'[367] This is no mere jest,
+but a foreshadowing of Pietro Aretino.
+
+The two most famous jesters about the middle of the fifteenth century
+were a priest near Florence, Arlotto (1483), for more refined wit
+('facezie'), and the court-fool of Ferrara, Gonnella, for buffoonery.
+We can hardly compare their stories with those of the Parson of
+Kalenberg and Till Eulenspiegel, since the latter arose in a different
+and half-mythical manner, as fruits of the imagination of a whole
+people, and touch rather on what is general and intelligible to all,
+while Arlotto and Gonnella were historical beings, coloured and shaped
+by local influences. But if the comparison be allowed, and extended to
+the jests of the non-Italian nations, we shall find in general that the
+joke in the French _fabliaux_,[368] as among the Germans, is chiefly
+directed to the attainment of some advantage or enjoyment; while the wit
+of Arlotto and the practical jokes of Gonnella are an end in themselves,
+and exist simply for the sake of the triumph of production. (Till
+Eulenspiegel again forms a class by himself, as the personified quiz,
+mostly pointless enough, of particular classes and professions). The
+court-fool of the Este saved himself more than once by his keen satire
+and refined modes of vengeance.[369]
+
+The type of the 'uomo piacevole' and the 'buffone' long survived the
+freedom of Florence. Under Duke Cosimo flourished Barlacchia, and at the
+beginning of the seventeenth century Francesco Ruspoli and Curzio
+Marignolli. In Pope Leo X., the genuine Florentine love of jesters
+showed itself strikingly. This prince, whose taste for the most refined
+intellectual pleasures was insatiable, endured and desired at his table
+a number of witty buffoons and jack-puddings, among them two monks and a
+cripple;[370] at public feasts he treated them with deliberate scorn as
+parasites, setting before them monkeys and crows in the place of savoury
+meats. Leo, indeed, showed a peculiar fondness for the 'burla'; it
+belonged to his nature sometimes to treat his own favourite
+pursuits--music and poetry--ironically, parodying them with his
+factotum, Cardinal Bibbiena.[371] Neither of them found it beneath him
+to fool an honest old secretary till he thought himself a master of the
+art of music. The Improvisatore, Baraballo of Gaeta, was brought so far
+by Leo's flattery, that he applied in all seriousness for the poet's
+coronation on the Capitol. On the anniversary of S. Cosmas and S.
+Damian, the patrons of the House of Medici, he was first compelled,
+adorned with laurel and purple, to amuse the papal guests with his
+recitations, and at last, when all were ready to split with laughter, to
+mount a gold-harnessed elephant in the court of the Vatican, sent as a
+present to Rome by Emanuel the Great of Portugal, while the Pope looked
+down from above through his eye-glass.[372] The brute, however, was so
+terrified by the noise of the trumpets and kettle-drums, and the cheers
+of the crowd, that there was no getting him over the bridge of S.
+Angelo.
+
+The parody of what is solemn or sublime, which here meets us in the case
+of a procession, had already taken an important place in poetry.[373] It
+was naturally compelled to choose victims of another kind than those of
+Aristophanes, who introduced the great tragedian into his plays. But the
+same maturity of culture which at a certain period produced parody among
+the Greeks, did the same in Italy. By the close of the fourteenth
+century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the
+same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this
+form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant
+invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo
+Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the
+'Inferno' ('Simposio' or 'I Beoni'). Luigi Pulei obviously imitates the
+Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Bojardo's are
+in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of
+the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was deliberately undertaken by the
+great parodist Teofilo Folengo (about 1520). Under the name of Limerno
+Pitocco, he composed the 'Orlandino,' in which chivalry appears only as
+a ludicrous setting for a crowd of modern figures and ideas. Under the
+name of Merlinus Coccajus he described the journeys and exploits of his
+phantastic vagabonds (also in the same spirit of parody) in half-Latin
+hexameters, with all the affected pomp of the learned Epos of the day.
+('Opus Macaronicorum'). Since then caricature has been constantly, and
+often brilliantly, represented on the Italian Parnassus.
+
+About the middle period of the Renaissance a theoretical analysis of wit
+was undertaken, and its practical application in good society was
+regulated more precisely. The theorist was Gioviano Pontano.[374] In his
+work on speaking, especially in the third and fourth books, he tries by
+means of the comparison of numerous jokes or 'faceti�' to arrive at a
+general principle. How wit should be used among people of position is
+taught by Baldassar Castiglione in his 'Cortigiano.'[375] Its chief
+function is naturally to enliven those present by the repetition of
+comic or graceful stories and sayings; personal jokes, on the contrary,
+are discouraged on the ground that they wound unhappy people, show too
+much honour to wrong-doers, and make enemies of the powerful and the
+spoiled children of fortune;[376] and even in repetition, a wide reserve
+in the use of dramatic gestures is recommended to the gentleman. Then
+follows, not only for purposes of quotation, but as patterns for future
+jesters, a large collection of puns and witty sayings, methodically
+arranged according to their species, among them some that are admirable.
+The doctrine of Giovanni della Casa, some twenty years later, in his
+guide to good manners, is much stricter and more cautious;[377] with a
+view to the consequences, he wishes to see the desire of triumph
+banished altogether from jokes and 'burle.' He is the herald of a
+reaction, which was certain sooner or later to appear.
+
+Italy had, in fact, become a school for scandal, the like of which the
+world cannot show, not even in France at the time of Voltaire. In him
+and his comrades there was assuredly no lack of the spirit of negation;
+but where, in the eighteenth century, was to be found the crowd of
+suitable victims, that countless assembly of highly and
+characteristically-developed human beings, celebrities of every kind,
+statesmen, churchmen, inventors, and discoverers, men of letters, poets
+and artists, all of whom then gave the fullest and freest play to their
+individuality? This host existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, and by its side the general culture of the time had educated
+a poisonous brood of impotent wits, of born critics and railers, whose
+envy called for hecatombs of victims; and to all this was added the envy
+of the famous men among themselves. In this the philologists notoriously
+led the way--Filelfo, Poggio, Lorenzo Valla, and others--while the
+artists of the fifteenth century lived in peaceful and friendly
+competition with one another. The history of art may take note of the
+fact.
+
+Florence, the great market of fame, was in this point, as we have said,
+in advance of other cities. 'Sharp eyes and bad tongues' is the
+description given of the inhabitants.[378] An easy-going contempt of
+everything and everybody was probably the prevailing tone of society.
+Macchiavelli, in the remarkable prologue to his 'Mandragola,' refers
+rightly or wrongly the visible decline of moral force to the general
+habit of evil speaking, and threatens his detractors with the news that
+he can say sharp things as well as they. Next to Florence comes the
+Papal court, which had long been a rendezvous of the bitterest and
+wittiest tongues. Poggio's 'Faceti�' are dated from the Chamber of Lies
+(_bugiale_) of the apostolic notaries; and when we remember the number
+of disappointed place-hunters, of hopeless competitors and enemies of
+the favourites, of idle, profligate prelates there assembled, it is
+intelligible how Rome became the home of the savage pasquinade as well
+as of more philosophical satire. If we add to this the wide-spread
+hatred borne to the priests, and the well-known instinct of the mob to
+lay any horror to the charge of the great, there results an untold mass
+of infamy.[379] Those who were able protected themselves best by
+contempt both of the false and true accusations, and by brilliant and
+joyous display.[380] More sensitive natures sank into utter despair when
+they found themselves deeply involved in guilt, and still more deeply in
+slander.[381] In course of time calumny became universal, and the
+strictest virtue was most certain of all to challenge the attacks of
+malice. Of the great pulpit orator, Fra Egidio of Viterbo, whom Leo made
+a cardinal on account of his merits, and who showed himself a man of the
+people and a brave monk in the calamity of 1527,[382] Giovio gives us to
+understand that he preserved his ascetic pallor by the smoke of wet
+straw and other means of the same kind. Giovio is a genuine Curial in
+these matters.[383] He generally begins by telling his story, then adds
+that he does not believe it, and then hints at the end that perhaps
+after all there may be something in it. But the true scape-goat of Roman
+scorn was the pious and moral Adrian VI. A general agreement seemed to
+be made to take him only on the comic side. Adrian had contemptuously
+referred to the La�coon group as 'idola antiquorum,' had shut up the
+entrance to the Belvedere, had left the works of Raphael unfinished, and
+had banished the poets and players from the court; it was even feared
+that he would burn some ancient statues to lime for the new church of
+St. Peter. He fell out from the first with the formidable Francesco
+Berni, threatening to have thrown into the Tiber not, as people
+said,[384] the statue of Pasquino, but the writers of the satires
+themselves. The vengeance for this was the famous 'Capitolo' against
+Pope Adriano, inspired not exactly by hatred, but by contempt for the
+comical Dutch barbarian;[385] the more savage menaces were reserved for
+the cardinals who had elected him. The plague, which then was prevalent
+in Rome, was ascribed to him;[386] Berni and others[387] sketch the
+environment of the Pope--the Germans by whom he was governed[388]--with
+the same sparkling untruthfulness with which the modern _feuilletoniste_
+turns black into white, and everything into anything. The biography
+which Paolo Giovio was commissioned to write by the Cardinal of Tortosa,
+and which was to have been a eulogy, is for any one who can read between
+the lines an unexampled piece of satire. It sounds ridiculous--at least
+for the Italians of that time--to hear how Adrian applied to the Chapter
+of Saragossa for the jaw-bone of St. Lambert; how the devout Spaniards
+decked him out till he looked 'like a right well-dressed Pope;' how he
+came in a confused and tasteless procession from Ostia to Rome, took
+counsel about burning or drowning Pasquino, would suddenly break off the
+most important business when dinner was announced; and lastly, at the
+end of an unhappy reign, how he died of drinking too much
+beer--whereupon the house of his physician was hung with garlands by
+midnight revellers, and adorned with the inscription, 'Liberatori Patri�
+S. P. Q. R.' It is true that Giovio had lost his money in the general
+confiscation of public funds, and had only received a benefice by way of
+compensation because he was 'no poet,' that is to say. no pagan.[389]
+But it was decreed that Adrian should be the last great victim. After
+the disaster which befell Rome in 1527, slander visibly declined along
+with the unrestrained wickedness of private life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But while it was still flourishing was developed, chiefly in Rome, the
+greatest railer of modern times, Pietro Aretino. A glance at his life
+and character will save us the trouble of noticing many less
+distinguished members of his class.
+
+We know him chiefly in the last thirty years of his life (1527-1557),
+which he passed in Venice, the only asylum possible for him. From hence
+he kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege, and
+here were delivered the presents of the foreign princes who needed or
+dreaded his pen. Charles V. and Francis I. both pensioned him at the
+same time, each hoping that Aretino would do some mischief to the other.
+Aretino flattered both, but naturally attached himself more closely to
+Charles, because he remained master in Italy. After the Emperor's
+victory at Tunis in 1535, this tone of adulation passed into the most
+ludicrous worship, in observing which it must not be forgotten that
+Aretino constantly cherished the hope that Charles would help him to a
+cardinal's hat. It is probable that he enjoyed special protection as
+Spanish agent, as his speech or silence could have no small effect on
+the smaller Italian courts and on public opinion in Italy. He affected
+utterly to despise the Papal court because he knew it so well; the true
+reason was that Rome neither could nor would pay him any longer.[390]
+Venice, which sheltered him, he was wise enough to leave unassailed. The
+rest of his relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar
+extortion.
+
+Aretino affords the first great instance of the abuse of publicity to
+such ends. The polemical writings which a hundred years earlier Poggio
+and his opponents interchanged, are just as infamous in their tone and
+purpose, but they were not composed for the press, but for a sort of
+private circulation. Aretino made all his profit out of a complete
+publicity, and in a certain sense may be considered the father of modern
+journalism. His letters and miscellaneous articles were printed
+periodically, after they had already been circulated among a tolerably
+extensive public.[391]
+
+Compared with the sharp pens of the eighteenth century, Aretino had the
+advantage that he was not burdened with principles, neither with
+liberalism nor philanthropy nor any other virtue, nor even with science;
+his whole baggage consisted of the well-known motto, 'Veritas odium
+parit.' He never, consequently, found himself in the false position of
+Voltaire, who was forced to disown his 'Pucelle' and conceal all his
+life the authorship of other works. Aretino put his name to all he
+wrote, and openly gloried in his notorious 'Ragionamenti.' His literary
+talent, his clear and sparkling style, his varied observation of men and
+things, would have made him a considerable writer under any
+circumstances destitute as he was of the power of conceiving a genuine
+work of art, such as a true dramatic comedy; and to the coarsest as well
+as the most refined malice he added a grotesque wit so brilliant that in
+some cases it does not fall short of that of Rabelais.[392]
+
+In such circumstances, and with such objects and means, he set to work
+to attack or circumvent his prey. The tone in which he appealed to
+Clement VII. not to complain or to think of vengeance,[393] but to
+forgive, at the moment when the wailings of the devastated city were
+ascending to the Castle of St. Angelo, where the Pope himself was a
+prisoner, is the mockery of a devil or a monkey. Sometimes, when he is
+forced to give up all hope of presents, his fury breaks out into a
+savage howl, as in the 'Capitolo' to the Prince of Salerno, who after
+paying him for some time refused to do so any longer. On the other
+hand, it seems that the terrible Pierluigi Farnese, Duke of Parma,
+never took any notice of him at all. As this gentleman had probably
+renounced altogether the pleasures of a good reputation, it was not easy
+to cause him any annoyance; Aretino tried to do so by comparing his
+personal appearance to that of a constable, a miller, and a baker.[394]
+Aretino is most comical of all in the expression of whining mendicancy,
+as in the 'Capitolo' to Francis I.; but the letters and poems made up of
+menaces and flattery cannot, notwithstanding all that is ludicrous in
+them, be read without the deepest disgust. A letter like that one of his
+written to Michelangelo in November 1545[395] is alone of its kind;
+along with all the admiration he expresses for the 'Last Judgment' he
+charges him with irreligion, indecency, and theft from the heirs of
+Julius II., and adds in a conciliating postscript, 'I only want to show
+you that if you are "divino," I am not "d'acqua."' Aretino laid great
+stress upon it--whether from the insanity of conceit or by way of
+caricaturing famous men--that he himself should be called divine, as one
+of his flatterers had already begun to do; and he certainly attained so
+much personal celebrity that his house at Arezzo passed for one of the
+sights of the place.[396] There were indeed whole months during which he
+never ventured to cross his threshold at Venice, lest he should fall in
+with some incensed Florentine like the younger Strozzi. Nor did he
+escape the cudgels and the daggers of his enemies,[397] although they
+failed to have the effect which Berni prophesied him in a famous sonnet.
+Aretino died in his house, of apoplexy.
+
+The differences he made in his modes of flattery are remarkable: in
+dealing with non-Italians he was grossly fulsome;[398] people like Duke
+Cosimo of Florence he treated very differently. He praised the beauty of
+the then youthful prince, who in fact did share this quality with
+Augustus in no ordinary degree; he praised his moral conduct, with an
+oblique reference to the financial pursuits of Cosimo's mother Maria
+Salviati, and concluded with a mendicant whine about the bad times and
+so forth. When Cosimo pensioned him,[399] which he did liberally,
+considering his habitual parsimony--to the extent, at last, of 160
+ducats a year--he had doubtless an eye to Aretino's dangerous character
+as Spanish agent. Aretino could ridicule and revile Cosimo, and in the
+same breath threaten the Florentine agent that he would obtain from the
+Duke his immediate recall; and if the Medicean prince felt himself at
+last to be seen through by Charles V. he would naturally not be anxious
+that Aretino's jokes and rhymes against him should circulate at the
+Imperial court. A curiously qualified piece of flattery was that
+addressed to the notorious Marquis of Marignano, who as Castellan of
+Musso (p. 27) had attempted to found an independent state. Thanking him
+for the gift of a hundred crowns, Aretino writes: 'All the qualities
+which a prince should have are present in you, and all men would think
+so, were it not that the acts of violence inevitable at the beginning of
+all undertakings cause you to appear a trifle rough (_aspro_).'[400]
+
+It has often been noticed as something singular that Aretino only
+reviled the world, and not God also. The religious belief of a man who
+lived as he did is a matter of perfect indifference, as are also the
+edifying writings which he composed for reasons of his own.[401] It is
+in fact hard to say why he should have been a blasphemer. He was no
+professor, or theoretical thinker or writer; and he could extort no
+money from God by threats or flattery, and was consequently never goaded
+into blasphemy by a refusal. A man like him does not take trouble for
+nothing.
+
+It is a good sign of the present spirit of Italy that such a character
+and such a career have become a thousand times impossible. But
+historical criticism will always find in Aretino an important study.
+
+
+
+
+_PART III._
+
+THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
+
+
+Now that this point in our historical view of Italian civilization has
+been reached, it is time to speak of the influence of antiquity, the
+'new birth' of which has been one-sidedly chosen as the name to sum up
+the whole period. The conditions which have been hitherto described
+would have sufficed, apart from antiquity, to upturn and to mature the
+national mind; and most of the intellectual tendencies which yet remain
+to be noticed would be conceivable without it. But both what has gone
+before and what we have still to discuss are coloured in a thousand ways
+by the influence of the ancient world; and though the essence of the
+phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival,
+it is only with and through this revival that they are actually
+manifested to us. The Renaissance would not have been the process of
+worldwide significance which it is, if its elements could be so easily
+separated from one another. We must insist upon it, as one of the chief
+propositions of this book, that it was not the revival of antiquity
+alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which
+achieved the conquest of the western world. The amount of independence
+which the national spirit maintained in this union varied according to
+circumstances. In the modern Latin literature of the period, it is very
+small, while in plastic art, as well as in other spheres, it is
+remarkably great; and hence the alliance between two distant epochs in
+the civilisation of the same people, because concluded on equal terms,
+proved justifiable and fruitful. The rest of Europe was free either to
+repel or else partly or wholly to accept the mighty impulse which came
+forth from Italy. Where the latter was the case we may as well be spared
+the complaints over the early decay of medi�val faith and civilisation.
+Had these been strong enough to hold their ground, they would be alive
+to this day. If those elegiac natures which long to see them return
+could pass but one hour in the midst of them, they would gasp to be back
+in modern air. That in a great historical process of this kind flowers
+of exquisite beauty may perish, without being made immortal in poetry or
+tradition is undoubtedly true; nevertheless, we cannot wish the process
+undone. The general result of it consists in this--that by the side of
+the Church which had hitherto held the countries of the West together
+(though it was unable to do so much longer) there arose a new spiritual
+influence which, spreading itself abroad from Italy, became the breath
+of life for all the more instructed minds in Europe. The worst that can
+be said of the movement is, that it was anti-popular, that through it
+Europe became for the first time sharply divided into the cultivated and
+uncultivated classes. The reproach will appear groundless when we
+reflect that even now the fact, though clearly recognised, cannot be
+altered. The separation, too, is by no means so cruel and absolute in
+Italy as elsewhere. The most artistic of her poets, Tasso, is in the
+hands of even the poorest.
+
+The civilisation of Greece and Rome, which, ever since the fourteenth
+century, obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life, as the source and
+basis of culture, as the object and ideal of existence, partly also as
+an avowed reaction against preceding tendencies--this civilisation had
+long been exerting a partial influence on medi�val Europe, even beyond
+the boundaries of Italy. The culture of which Charles the Great was a
+representative was, in face of the barbarism of the seventh and eighth
+centuries, essentially a Renaissance, and could appear under no other
+form. Just as in the Romanesque architecture of the North, beside the
+general outlines inherited from antiquity, remarkable direct imitations
+of the antique also occur, so too monastic scholarship had not only
+gradually absorbed an immense mass of materials from Roman writers, but
+the style of it, from the days of Eginhard onwards shows traces of
+conscious imitations.
+
+But the resuscitation of antiquity took a different form in Italy from
+that which it assumed in the North. The wave of barbarism had scarcely
+gone by before the people, in whom the former life was but half effaced,
+showed a consciousness of its past and a wish to reproduce it. Elsewhere
+in Europe men deliberately and with reflection borrowed this or the
+other element of classical civilisation; in Italy the sympathies both of
+the learned and of the people were naturally engaged on the side of
+antiquity as a whole, which stood to them as a symbol of past greatness.
+The Latin language, too, was easy to an Italian, and the numerous
+monuments and documents in which the country abounded facilitated a
+return to the past. With this tendency other elements--the popular
+character which time had now greatly modified, the political
+institutions imported by the Lombards from Germany, chivalry and other
+northern forms of civilisation, and the influence of religion and the
+Church--combined to produce the modern Italian spirit, which was
+destined to serve as the model and ideal for the whole western world.
+
+How antiquity began to work in plastic art, as soon as the flood of
+barbarism had subsided, is clearly shown in the Tuscan buildings of the
+twelfth and in the sculptures of the thirteenth centuries. In poetry,
+too, there will appear no want of similar analogies to those who hold
+that the greatest Latin poet of the twelfth century, the writer who
+struck the key-note of a whole class of Latin poems, was an Italian. We
+mean the author of the best pieces in the so-called 'Carmina Burana.' A
+frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, as whose patrons the gods of
+heathendom are invoked, while Catos and Scipios hold the place of the
+saints and heroes of Christianity, flows in full current through the
+rhymed verses. Reading them through at a stretch, we can scarcely help
+coming to the conclusion that an Italian, probably a Lombard, is
+speaking; in fact, there are positive grounds for thinking so.[402] To a
+certain degree these Latin poems of the 'Clerici vagantes' of the
+twelfth century, with all their remarkable frivolity, are, doubtless, a
+product in which the whole of Europe had a share; but the writer of the
+song 'De Phyllide et Flora'[403] and the '�stuans Interius' can have
+been a northerner as little as the polished Epicurean observer to whom
+we owe 'Dum Dian� vitrea sero lampas oritur.' Here, in truth, is a
+reproduction of the whole ancient view of life, which is all the more
+striking from the medi�val form of the verse in which it is set forth.
+There are many works of this and the following centuries, in which a
+careful imitation of the antique appears both in the hexameter and
+pentameter of the metre in the classical, often mythological, character
+of the subject, and which yet have not anything like the same spirit of
+antiquity about them. In the hexameter chronicles and other works of
+Gulielmus Apuliensis and his successors (from about 1100), we find
+frequent traces of a diligent study of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and
+Claudian; but this classical form is after all here a mere matter of
+arch�ology, as is the classical subject in collectors like Vincent of
+Beauvais, or in the mythological and allegorical writer, Alanus ab
+Insulis. The Renaissance is not a mere fragmentary imitation or
+compilation, but a new birth; and the signs of this are visible in the
+poems of the unknown 'Clericus' of the twelfth century.
+
+But the great and general enthusiasm of the Italians for classical
+antiquity did not display itself before the fourteenth century. For this
+a development of civic life was required, which took place only in
+Italy, and there not till then. It was needful that noble and burgher
+should first learn to dwell together on equal terms, and that a social
+world should arise (see p. 139) which felt the want of culture, and had
+the leisure and the means to obtain it. But culture, as soon as it freed
+itself from the fantastic bonds of the Middle Ages, could not at once
+and without help find its way to the understanding of the physical and
+intellectual world. It needed a guide, and found one in the ancient
+civilisation, with its wealth of truth and knowledge in every spiritual
+interest. Both the form and the substance of this civilisation were
+adopted with admiring gratitude; it became the chief part of the culture
+of the age.[404] The general condition of the country was favourable to
+this transformation. The medi�val empire, since the fall of the
+Hohenstaufen, had either renounced, or was unable to make good, its
+claims on Italy. The Popes had migrated to Avignon. Most of the
+political powers actually in existence owed their origin to violent and
+illegitimate means. The spirit of the people, now awakened to
+self-consciousness, sought for some new and stable ideal on which to
+rest. And thus the vision of the world-wide empire of Italy and Rome so
+possessed the popular mind, that Cola di Rienzi could actually attempt
+to put it in practice. The conception he formed of his task,
+particularly when tribune for the first time, could only end in some
+extravagant comedy; nevertheless, the memory of ancient Rome was no
+slight support to the national sentiment. Armed afresh with its culture,
+the Italian soon felt himself in truth citizen of the most advanced
+nation in the world.
+
+It is now our task to sketch this spiritual movement, not indeed in all
+its fulness, but in its most salient features, and especially in its
+first beginnings.[405]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+ROME, THE CITY OF RUINS.
+
+
+Rome itself, the city of ruins, now became the object of a wholly
+different sort of piety from that of the time when the 'Mirabilia Rom�'
+and the collection of William of Malmesbury were composed. The
+imaginations of the devout pilgrim, or of the seeker after marvels[406]
+and treasures, are supplanted in contemporary records by the interests
+of the patriot and the historian. In this sense we must understand
+Dante's words,[407] that the stones of the walls of Rome deserve
+reverence, and that the ground on which the city is built is more worthy
+than men say. The jubilees, incessant as they were, have scarcely left a
+single devout record in literature properly so called. The best thing
+that Giovanni Villani (p. 73) brought back from the jubilee of the year
+1300 was the resolution to write his history which had been awakened in
+him by the sight of the ruins of Rome. Petrarch gives evidence of a
+taste divided between classical and Christian antiquity. He tells us how
+often with Giovanni Colonna he ascended the mighty vaults of the Baths
+of Diocletian,[408] and there in the transparent air, amid the wide
+silence, with the broad panorama stretching far around them, they spoke,
+not of business, or political affairs, but of the history which the
+ruins beneath their feet suggested, Petrarch appearing in their
+dialogues as the partisan of classical, Giovanni of Christian antiquity;
+then they would discourse of philosophy and of the inventors of the
+arts. How often since that time, down to the days of Gibbon and Niebuhr,
+have the same ruins stirred men's minds to the same reflections!
+
+This double current of feeling is also recognisable in the 'Dittamondo'
+of Fazio degli Uberti, composed about the year 1360--a description of
+visionary travels, in which the author is accompanied by the old
+geographer Solinus, as Dante was by Virgil. They visit Bari in memory of
+St. Nicholas, and Monte Gargano of the archangel Michael, and in Rome
+the legends of Araceli and of Santa Maria in Trastevere are mentioned.
+Still, the pagan splendour of ancient Rome unmistakably exercises a
+greater charm upon them. A venerable matron in torn garments--Rome
+herself is meant--tells them of the glorious past, and gives them a
+minute description of the old triumphs;[409] she then leads the
+strangers through the city, and points out to them the seven hills and
+many of the chief ruins--'che comprender potrai, quanto fui bella.'
+
+Unfortunately this Rome of the schismatic and Avignonese popes was no
+longer, in respect of classical remains, what it had been some
+generations earlier. The destruction of 140 fortified houses of the
+Roman nobles by the senator Brancaleone in 1257 must have wholly altered
+the character of the most important buildings then standing; for the
+nobles had no doubt ensconced themselves in the loftiest and
+best-preserved of the ruins.[410] Nevertheless, far more was left than
+we now find, and probably many of the remains had still their marble
+incrustation, their pillared entrances, and their other ornaments, where
+we now see nothing but the skeleton of brickwork. In this state of
+things, the first beginnings of a topographical study of the old city
+were made.
+
+In Poggio's walks through Rome[411] the study of the remains themselves
+is for the first time more intimately combined with that of the ancient
+authors and inscriptions--the latter he sought out from among all the
+vegetation in which they were imbedded[412]--the writer's imagination is
+severely restrained, and the memories of Christian Rome carefully
+excluded. The only pity is that Poggio's work was not fuller and was not
+illustrated with sketches. Far more was left in his time than was found
+by Raphael eighty years later. He saw the tomb of C�cilia Metella and
+the columns in front of one of the temples on the slope of the Capitol
+first in full preservation, and then afterwards half destroyed, owing to
+that unfortunate quality which marble possesses of being easily burnt
+into lime. A vast colonnade near the Minerva fell piecemeal a victim to
+the same fate. A witness in the year 1443 tells us that this manufacture
+of lime still went on; 'which is a shame, for the new buildings are
+pitiful, and the beauty of Rome is in its ruins.'[413] The inhabitants
+of that day, in their peasants' cloaks and boots, looked to foreigners
+like cowherds; and in fact the cattle were pastured in the city up to
+the Banchi. The only opportunities for social gatherings were the
+services at church, on which occasion it was possible to get a sight of
+the beautiful women.
+
+In the last years of Eugenius IV. (d. 1447) Blondus of Forli wrote his
+'Roma Instaurata,' making use of Frontinus and of the old 'Libri
+Regionali,' as well as, it seems, of Anastasius. His object is not only
+the description of what existed, but still more the recovery of what was
+lost. In accordance with the dedication to the Pope, he consoles himself
+for the general ruin by the thought of the precious relics of the saints
+in which Rome was so rich.[414]
+
+With Nicholas V. (1447-1455) that new monumental spirit which was
+distinctive of the age of the Renaissance appeared on the papal throne.
+The new passion for embellishing the city brought with it on the one
+hand a fresh danger for the ruins, on the other a respect for them, as
+forming one of Rome's claims to distinction. Pius II. was wholly
+possessed by antiquarian enthusiasm, and if he speaks little of the
+antiquities of Rome,[415] he closely studied those of all other parts of
+Italy, and was the first to know and describe accurately the remains
+which abounded in the districts for miles around the capital.[416] It is
+true that, both as priest and cosmographer, he is interested alike in
+classical and Christian monuments and in the marvels of nature. Or was
+he doing violence to himself when he wrote that Nola was more highly
+honoured by the memory of St. Paulinus than by all its classical
+reminiscences and by the heroic struggle of Marcellus? Not, indeed, that
+his faith in relics was assumed; but his mind was evidently rather
+disposed to an inquiring interest in nature and antiquity, to a zeal for
+monumental works, to a keen and delicate observation of human life. In
+the last years of his Papacy, afflicted with the gout and yet in the
+most cheerful mood, he was borne in his litter over hill and dale to
+Tusculum, Alba, Tibur, Ostia, Falerii, and Ocriculum, and whatever he
+saw he noted down. He followed the line of the Roman roads and
+aqueducts, and tried to fix the boundaries of the old tribes who dwelt
+round the city. On an excursion to Tivoli with the great Federigo of
+Urbino the time was happily spent in talk on the military system of the
+ancients, and particularly on the Trojan war. Even on his journey to the
+Congress of Mantua (1459) he searched, though unsuccessfully, for the
+labyrinth of Clusium mentioned by Pliny, and visited the so-called villa
+of Virgil on the Mincio. That such a Pope should demand a classical
+Latin style from his abbreviators, is no more than might be expected. It
+was he who, in the war with Naples, granted an amnesty to the men of
+Arpinum, as countrymen of Cicero and Marius, after whom many of them
+were named. It was to him alone, as both judge and patron, that Blondus
+could dedicate his 'Roma Triumphans,' the first great attempt at a
+complete exposition of Roman antiquity.[417]
+
+Nor was the enthusiasm for the classical past of Italy confined at this
+period to the capital. Boccaccio[418] had already called the vast ruins
+of Bai� 'old walls, yet new for modern spirits;' and since this time
+they were held to be the most interesting sight near Naples. Collections
+of antiquities of all sorts now became common. Ciriaco of Ancona (d.
+1457), who explained (1433) the Roman monuments to the Emperor
+Sigismund, travelled, not only through Italy, but through other
+countries of the old world, Hellas, and the islands of the Archipelago,
+and even parts of Asia and Africa, and brought back with him countless
+inscriptions and sketches. When asked why he took all this trouble, he
+replied, 'To wake the dead.'[419] The histories of the various cities of
+Italy had from the earliest times laid claim to some true or imagined
+connection with Rome, had alleged some settlement or colonisation which
+started from the capital;[420] and the obliging manufacturers of
+pedigrees seem constantly to have derived various families from the
+oldest and most famous blood of Rome. So highly was the distinction
+valued, that men clung to it even in the light of the dawning criticism
+of the fifteenth century. When Pius II. was at Viterbo[421] he said
+frankly to the Roman deputies who begged him to return, 'Rome is as much
+at home as Siena, for my House, the Piccolomini, came in early times
+from the capital to Siena, as is proved by the constant use of the names
+�neas and Sylvius in my family.' He would probably have had no objection
+to be held a descendant of the Julii. Paul II., a Barbo of Venice, found
+his vanity flattered by deducing his House, notwithstanding an adverse
+pedigree, according to which it came from Germany, from the Roman
+Ahenobarbus, who led a colony to Parma, and whose successors were driven
+by party conflicts to migrate to Venice.[421A] That the Massimi claimed
+descent from Q. Fabius Maximus, and the Cornaro from the Cornelii,
+cannot surprise us. On the other hand, it is a strikingly exceptional
+fact for the sixteenth century that the novellist Bandello tried to
+connect his blood with a noble family of Ostrogoths (i. nov. 23).
+
+To return to Rome. The inhabitants, 'who then called themselves Romans,'
+accepted greedily the homage which was offered them by the rest of
+Italy. Under Paul II., Sixtus IV., and Alexander VI. magnificent
+processions formed part of the Carnival, representing the scene most
+attractive to the imagination of the time--the triumph of the Roman
+Imperator. The sentiment of the people expressed itself naturally in
+this shape and others like it. In this mood of public feeling, a report
+arose, that on April 15, 1485, the corpse of a young Roman lady of the
+classical period--wonderfully beautiful and in perfect preservation--had
+been discovered.[422] Some Lombard masons digging out an ancient tomb on
+an estate of the convent of Santa Maria Novella, on the Appian Way
+beyond the C�cilia Metella, were said to have found a marble sarcophagus
+with the inscription, 'Julia, daughter of Claudius.' On this basis the
+following story was built. The Lombards disappeared with the jewels and
+treasure which were found with the corpse in the sarcophagus. The body
+had been coated with an antiseptic essence, and was as fresh and
+flexible as that of a girl of fifteen the hour after death. It was said
+that she still kept the colours of life, with eyes and mouth half open.
+She was taken to the palace of the 'Conservatori' on the Capitol; and
+then a pilgrimage to see her began. Among the crowd were many who came
+to paint her; 'for she was more beautiful than can be said or written,
+and, were it said or written, it would not be believed by those who had
+not seen her.' By the order of Innocent VIII. she was secretly buried
+one night outside the Pincian Gate; the empty sarcophagus remained in
+the court of the 'Conservatori.' Probably a coloured mask of wax or some
+other material was modelled in the classical style on the face of the
+corpse, with which the gilded hair of which we read would harmonise
+admirably. The touching point in the story is not the fact itself, but
+the firm belief that an ancient body, which was now thought to be at
+last really before men's eyes, must of necessity be far more beautiful
+than anything of modern date.
+
+Meanwhile the material knowledge of old Rome was increased by
+excavations. Under Alexander VI. the so-called 'Grotesques,' that is,
+the mural decorations of the ancients, were discovered, and the Apollo
+of the Belvedere was found at Porto d'Anzo. Under Julius II. followed
+the memorable discoveries of the La�coon, of the Venus of the Vatican,
+of the Torso, of the Cleopatra.[423] The palaces of the nobles and the
+cardinals began to be filled with ancient statues and fragments. Raphael
+undertook for Leo X. that ideal restoration of the whole ancient city
+which his celebrated letter (1518 or 1519) speaks of.[424] After a
+bitter complaint over the devastations which had not even then ceased,
+and which had been particularly frequent under Julius II., he beseeches
+the Pope to protect the few relics which were left to testify to the
+power and greatness of that divine soul of antiquity whose memory was
+inspiration to all who were capable of higher things. He then goes on
+with penetrating judgment to lay the foundations of a comparative
+history of art, and concludes by giving the definition of an
+architectural survey which has been accepted since his time; he requires
+the ground plan, section, and elevation separately of every building
+that remained. How arch�ology devoted itself after his day to the study
+of the venerated city and grew into a special science, and how the
+Vitruvian Academy at all events proposed to itself great aims,[425]
+cannot here be related. Let us rather pause at the days of Leo X., under
+whom the enjoyment of antiquity combined with all other pleasures to
+give to Roman life a unique stamp and consecration.[426] The Vatican
+resounded with song and music, and their echoes were heard through the
+city as a call to joy and gladness, though Leo did not succeed thereby
+in banishing care and pain from his own life, and his deliberate
+calculation to prolong his days by cheerfulness was frustrated by an
+early death.[427] The Rome of Leo, as described by Paolo Giovio, forms a
+picture too splendid to turn away from, unmistakable as are also its
+darker aspects--the slavery of those who were struggling to rise; the
+secret misery of the prelates, who, notwithstanding heavy debts, were
+forced to live in a style befitting their rank; the system of literary
+patronage, which drove men to be parasites or adventurers; and, lastly,
+the scandalous maladministration of the finances of the state.[428] Yet
+the same Ariosto who knew and ridiculed all this so well, gives in the
+sixth satire a longing picture of his expected intercourse with the
+accomplished poets who would conduct him through the city of ruins, of
+the learned counsel which he would there find for his own literary
+efforts, and of the treasures of the Vatican library. These, he says,
+and not the long-abandoned hope of Medicean protection, were the real
+baits which attracted him, when he was asked to go as Ferrarese
+ambassador to Rome.
+
+But the ruins within and outside Rome awakened not only arch�ological
+zeal and patriotic enthusiasm, but an elegiac or sentimental melancholy.
+In Petrarch and Boccaccio we find touches of this feeling (pp. 177,
+181). Poggio (p. 181) often visited the temple of Venus and Rome, in the
+belief that it was that of Castor and Pollux, where the senate used so
+often to meet, and would lose himself in memories of the great orators
+Crassus, Hortensius, Cicero. The language of Pius II., especially in
+describing Tivoli, has a thoroughly sentimental ring,[429] and soon
+afterwards (1467) appeared the first pictures of ruins, with, a
+commentary by Polifilo.[430] Ruins of mighty arches and colonnades, half
+hid in plane-trees, laurels, cypresses, and brushwood, figure in his
+pages. In the sacred legends it became the custom, we can hardly say
+how, to lay the scene of the birth of Christ in the ruins of a
+magnificent palace.[431] That artificial ruins became afterwards a
+necessity of landscape gardening, is only a practical consequence of
+this feeling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE OLD AUTHORS.
+
+
+But the literary bequests of antiquity, Greek as well as Latin, were of
+far more importance than the architectural, and indeed than all the
+artistic remains which it had left. They were held in the most absolute
+sense to be the springs of all knowledge. The literary conditions of
+that age of great discoveries have been often set forth; no more can be
+here attempted than to point out a few less-known features of the
+picture.[432]
+
+Great as was the influence of the old writers on the Italian mind in the
+fourteenth century and before, yet that influence was due rather to the
+wide diffusion of what had long been known, than to the discovery of
+much that was new. The most popular Latin poets, historians, orators,
+and letter-writers, together with a number of Latin translations of
+single works of Aristotle, Plutarch, and a few other Greek authors,
+constituted the treasure from which a few favoured individuals in the
+time of Petrarch and Boccaccio drew their inspiration. The former, as is
+well known, owned and kept with religious care a Greek Homer, which he
+was unable to read. A complete Latin translation of the 'Iliad' and
+'Odyssey,' though a very bad one, was made at Petrarch's suggestion and
+with Boccaccio's help by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato.[433] But
+with the fifteenth century began the long list of new discoveries, the
+systematic creation of libraries by means of copies, and the rapid
+multiplication of translations from the Greek.[434]
+
+Had it not been for the enthusiasm of a few collectors of that age, who
+shrank from no effort or privation in their researches, we should
+certainly possess only a small part of the literature, especially that
+of the Greeks, which is now in our hands. Pope Nicholas V., when only a
+simple monk, ran deeply into debt through buying manuscripts or having
+them copied. Even then he made no secret of his passion for the two
+great interests of the Renaissance, books and buildings.[435] As Pope he
+kept his word. Copyists wrote and spies searched for him through half
+the world. Perotto received 500 ducats for the Latin translation of
+Polybius; Guarino, 1,000 gold florins for that of Strabo, and he would
+have been paid 500 more but for the death of the Pope. Filelfo was to
+have received 10,000 gold florins for a metrical translation of Homer,
+and was only prevented by the Pope's death from coming from Milan to
+Rome. Nicholas left a collection of 5,000, or, according to another way
+of calculating, of 9,000 volumes,[436] for the use of the members of the
+Curia, which became the foundation of the library of the Vatican. It was
+to be preserved in the palace itself, as its noblest ornament, like the
+library of Ptolemy Philadelphus at Alexandria. When the plague (1450)
+drove him and his court to Fabriano, whence then, as now, the best paper
+was procured, he took his translators and compilers with him, that he
+might run no risk of losing them.
+
+The Florentine Niccol� Niccoli,[437] a member of that accomplished
+circle of friends which surrounded the elder Cosimo de Medici, spent his
+whole fortune in buying books. At last, when his money was all gone, the
+Medici put their purse at his disposal for any sum which his purpose
+might require. We owe to him the completion of Ammianus Marcellinus, of
+the 'De Oratore' of Cicero, the text of Lucretius which still has most
+authority, and other works; he persuaded Cosimo to buy the best
+manuscript of Pliny from a monastery at L�beck. With noble confidence he
+lent his books to those who asked for them, allowed all comers to study
+them in his own house, and was ready to converse with the students on
+what they had read. His collection of 800 volumes, valued at 6,000 gold
+florins, passed after his death, through Cosimo's intervention, to the
+monastery of San Marco, on the condition that it should be accessible to
+the public, and is now one of the jewels of the Laurentian library.
+
+Of the two great book-finders, Guarino and Poggio, the latter,[438] on
+the occasion of the Council of Constanz and acting partly as the agent
+of Niccoli, searched industriously among the abbeys of South Germany. He
+there discovered six orations of Cicero, and the first complete
+Quintilian, that of St. Gall, now at Z�rich; in thirty-two days he is
+said to have copied the whole of it in a beautiful handwriting. He was
+able to make important additions to Silius Italicus, Manilius,
+Lucretius, Valerius, Flaccus, Asconius, Pedianus, Columella, Celsus,
+Aulus, Gellius, Statius, and others; and with the help of Lionardo
+Aretino he unearthed the last twelve comedies of Plautus, as well as the
+Verrine orations, the 'Brutus' and the 'De Oratore' of Cicero.
+
+The famous Greek, Cardinal Bessarion,[439] in whom patriotism was
+mingled with a zeal for letters, collected, at a great sacrifice (30,000
+gold florins), 600 manuscripts of pagan and Christian authors. He then
+looked round for some receptacle where they could safely lie until his
+unhappy country, if she ever regained her freedom, could reclaim her
+lost literature. The Venetian government declared itself ready to erect
+a suitable building, and to this day the library of St. Mark retains a
+part of these treasures.[440]
+
+The formation of the celebrated Medicean library has a history of its
+own, into which we cannot here enter. The chief collector for Lorenzo
+Magnifico was Johannes Lascaris. It is well known that the collection,
+after the plundering in the year 1494, had to be recovered piecemeal by
+the Cardinal Giovanni Medici, afterwards Leo X.
+
+The library of Urbino,[441] now in the Vatican, was wholly the work of
+the great Frederick of Montefeltro (p. 44 sqq.). As a boy he had begun
+to collect; in after years he kept thirty or forty 'scrittori' employed
+in various places, and spent in the course of time no less than 30,000
+ducats on the collection. It was systematically extended and completed,
+chiefly by the help of Vespasiano, and his account of it forms an ideal
+picture of a library of the Renaissance. At Urbino there were catalogues
+of the libraries of the Vatican, of St. Mark at Florence, of the
+Visconti at Pavia, and even of the library at Oxford. It was noted with
+pride that in richness and completeness none could rival Urbino.
+Theology and the Middle Ages were perhaps most fully represented. There
+was a complete Thomas Aquinas, a complete Albertus Magnus, a complete
+Buenaventura. The collection, however, was a many-sided one, and
+included every work on medicine which was then to be had. Among the
+'moderns' the great writers of the fourteenth century--Dante and
+Boccaccio, with their complete works--occupied the first place. Then
+followed twenty-five select humanists, invariably with both their Latin
+and Italian writings and with all their translations. Among the Greek
+manuscripts the Fathers of the Church far outnumbered the rest; yet in
+the list of the classics we find all the works of Sophocles, all of
+Pindar, and all of Menander. The last must have quickly disappeared from
+Urbino,[442] else the philologists would have soon edited it. There were
+men, however, in this book-collecting age who raised a warning voice
+against the vagaries of the passion. These were not the enemies of
+learning, but its friends, who feared that harm would come from a
+pursuit which had become a mania. Petrarch himself protested against the
+fashionable folly of a useless heaping up of books; and in the same
+century Giovanni Manzini ridiculed Andreolo de Ochis, a septuagenarian
+from Brescia, who was ready to sacrifice house and land, his wife and
+himself, to add to the stores of his library.
+
+We have, further, a good deal of information as to the way in which
+manuscripts and libraries were multiplied.[443] The purchase of an
+ancient manuscript, which contained a rare, or the only complete, or the
+only existing text of an old writer, was naturally a lucky accident of
+which we need take no further account. Among the professional copyists
+those who understood Greek took the highest place, and it was they
+especially who bore the honourable name of 'scrittori.' Their number was
+always limited, and the pay they received very large.[444] The rest,
+simply called 'copisti,' were partly mere clerks who made their living
+by such work, partly schoolmasters and needy men of learning, who
+desired an addition to their income, partly monks, or even nuns, who
+regarded the pursuit as a work pleasing to God. In the early stages of
+the Renaissance the professional copyists were few and untrustworthy;
+their ignorant and dilatory ways were bitterly complained of by
+Petrarch. In the fifteenth century they were more numerous, and brought
+more knowledge to their calling, but in accuracy of work they never
+attained the conscientious precision of the old monks. They seem to have
+done their work in a sulky and perfunctory fashion, seldom putting their
+signatures at the foot of the codices, and showed no traces of that
+cheerful humour, or of that proud consciousness of a beneficent
+activity, which often surprises us in the French and German manuscripts
+of the same period. This is more curious, as the copyists at Rome in the
+time of Nicholas V. were mostly Germans or Frenchmen[445]--'barbarians'
+as the Italian humanists called them, probably men who were in search of
+favours at the papal court, and who kept themselves alive meanwhile by
+this means. When Cosimo de' Medici was in a hurry to form a library for
+his favourite foundation, the Badia below Fiesole, he sent for
+Vespasiano, and received from him the advice to give up all thoughts of
+purchasing books, since those which were worth getting could not be had
+easily, but rather to make use of the copyists; whereupon Cosimo
+bargained to pay him so much a day, and Vespasiano, with forty-five
+writers under him, delivered 200 volumes in twenty-two months.[446] The
+catalogue of the works to be copied was sent to Cosimo by Nicholas
+V.[447] who wrote it with his own hand. Ecclesiastical literature and
+the books needed for the choral services naturally held the chief place
+in the list.
+
+The handwriting was that beautiful modern Italian which was already in
+use in the preceding century, and which makes the sight of one of the
+books of that time a pleasure. Pope Nicholas V., Poggio, Giannozzo
+Manetti, Niccol� Niccoli, and other distinguished scholars, themselves
+wrote a beautiful hand, and desired and tolerated none other. The
+decorative adjuncts, even when miniatures formed no part of them, were
+full of taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts,
+with the light and graceful scrolls which begin and end the lines. The
+material used to write on, when the work was ordered by great or wealthy
+people, was always parchment; the binding, both in the Vatican and at
+Urbino, was a uniform crimson velvet with silver clasps. Where there was
+so much care to show honour to the contents of a book by the beauty of
+its outward form, it is intelligible that the sudden appearance of
+printed books was greeted at first with anything but favour. The envoys
+of Cardinal Bessarion, when they saw for the first time a printed book
+in the house of Constantino Lascaris, laughed at the discovery 'made
+among the barbarians in some German city,' and Frederick of Urbino
+'would have been ashamed to own a printed book.'[448]
+
+But the weary copyists--not those who lived by the trade, but the many
+who were forced to copy a book in order to have it--rejoiced at the
+German invention,[449] 'notwithstanding the praises and encouragements
+which the poets awarded to caligraphy.' It was soon applied in Italy to
+the multiplication first of the Latin and then of the Greek authors, and
+for a long period nowhere but in Italy, yet it spread with by no means
+the rapidity which might have been expected from the general enthusiasm
+for these works. After a while the modern relation between author and
+publisher began to develop itself,[450] and under Alexander VI., when it
+was no longer easy to destroy a book, as Cosimo could make Filelfo
+promise to do,[451] the prohibitive censorship made its appearance.
+
+The growth of textual criticism which accompanied the advancing study of
+languages and antiquity, belongs as little to the subject of this book
+as the history of scholarship in general. We are here occupied, not with
+the learning of the Italians in itself, but with the reproduction of
+antiquity in literature and life. One word more on the studies
+themselves may still be permissible.
+
+Greek scholarship was chiefly confined to Florence and to the fifteenth
+and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It was never so general as
+Latin scholarship, partly because of the far greater difficulties which
+it involved, partly and still more because of the consciousness of Roman
+supremacy and an instinctive hatred of the Greeks more than
+counterbalanced the attractions which Greek literature had for the
+Italians.[452]
+
+The impulse which proceeded from Petrarch and Boccaccio, superficial as
+was their own acquaintance with Greek, was powerful, but did not tell
+immediately on their contemporaries;[453] on the other hand, the study
+of Greek literature died out about the year 1520[454] with the last of
+the colony of learned Greek exiles, and it was a singular piece of
+fortune that northerners like Agricola, Reuchlin, Erasmus, the Stephani,
+and Bud�us had meanwhile made themselves masters of the language. That
+colony had begun with Manuel Chrysoloras and his relation John, and with
+George of Trebizond. Then followed, about and after the time of the
+conquest of Constantinople, John Argyropulos, Theodore Gaza, Demetrios
+Chalcondylas, who brought up his sons Theophilos and Basilios to be
+excellent Hellenists, Andronikos Kallistos, Marcos Musuros and the
+family of the Lascaris, not to mention others. But after the subjection
+of Greece by the Turks was completed, the succession of scholars was
+maintained only by the sons of the fugitives and perhaps here and there
+by some Candian or Cyprian refugee. That the decay of Hellenistic
+studies began about the time of the death of Leo X. was owing partly to
+a general change of intellectual attitude,[455] and to a certain satiety
+of classical influences which now made itself felt; but its coincidence
+with the death of the Greek fugitives was not wholly a matter of
+accident. The study of Greek among the Italians appears, if we take the
+year 1500 as our standard, to have been pursued with extraordinary zeal.
+The youths of that day learned to speak the language, and half a century
+later, like the Popes Paul III. and Paul IV., they could still do so in
+their old age.[456] But this sort of mastery of the study presupposes
+intercourse with native Greeks.
+
+Besides Florence, Rome and Padua nearly always maintained paid teachers
+of Greek, and Verona, Ferrara, Venice, Perugia, Pavia and other cities
+occasional teachers.[457] Hellenistic studies owed a priceless debt to
+the press of Aldo Manucci at Venice, where the most important and
+voluminous writers were for the first time printed in the original. Aldo
+ventured his all in the enterprise; he was an editor and publisher whose
+like the world has rarely seen.[458]
+
+Along with this classical revival, Oriental studies now assumed
+considerable proportions.[459] Dante himself set a high value on Hebrew,
+though we cannot suppose that he understood it. From the fifteenth
+century onwards scholars were no longer content merely to speak of it
+with respect, but applied themselves to a thorough study of it. This
+scientific interest in the language was, however, from the beginning
+either furthered or hindered by religious considerations. Poggio, when
+resting from the labours of the Council of Constance, learnt Hebrew at
+that place and at Baden from a baptized Jew, whom he describes as
+'stupid, peevish, and ignorant, like most converted Jews;' but he had to
+defend his conduct against Lionardo Bruni, who endeavoured to prove to
+him that Hebrew was useless or even injurious. The controversial
+writings of the great Florentine statesman and scholar, Giannozzo
+Manetti[460] (d. 1459) against the Jews afford an early instance of a
+complete mastery of their language and science. His son Agnolo was from
+his childhood instructed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The father, at the
+bidding of Nicholas V., translated the Psalms, but had to defend the
+principles of his translation in a work addressed to Alfonso.
+Commissioned by the same Pope, who had offered a reward of 5,000 ducats
+for the discovery of the original Hebrew text of the Evangelist Matthew,
+he made a collection of Hebrew manuscripts, which is still preserved in
+the Vatican, and began a great apologetic work against the Jews.[461]
+The study of Hebrew was thus enlisted in the service of the Church. The
+Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari learnt the language,[462] and Pope
+Sixtus IV., who erected the building for the Vatican library, and added
+to the collection extensive purchases of his own, took into his service
+'scrittori' (_librarios_) for Hebrew as well as for Greek and
+Latin.[463] The study of the language now became more general; Hebrew
+manuscripts were collected, and in some libraries, like that of Urbino,
+formed a specially valuable part of the rich treasure there stored up;
+the printing of Hebrew books began in Italy in 1475, and made the study
+easier both to the Italians themselves and to the other nations of
+Europe, who for many years drew their supply from Italy. Soon there was
+no good-sized town where there were not individuals who were masters of
+the language and many anxious to learn it, and in 1488 a chair for
+Hebrew was founded at Bologna, and another in 1514 at Rome. The study
+became so popular that it was even preferred to Greek.[464][465]
+
+Among all those who busied themselves with Hebrew in the fifteenth
+century, no one was of more importance than Pico della Mirandola. He was
+not satisfied with a knowledge of the Hebrew grammar and Scriptures, but
+penetrated into the Jewish Cabbalah and even made himself familiar with
+the literature of the Talmud. That such pursuits, though they may not
+have gone very far, were at all possible to him, he owed to his Jewish
+teachers. Most of the instruction in Hebrew was in fact given by Jews,
+some of whom, though generally not till after conversion to
+Christianity, became distinguished University professors and
+much-esteemed writers.[466]
+
+Among the Oriental languages, Arabic was studied as well as Hebrew. The
+science of medicine, no longer satisfied with the older Latin
+translations of the great Arabian physicians, had constant recourse to
+the originals, to which an easy access was offered by the Venetian
+consulates in the East, where Italian doctors were regularly kept. But
+the Arabian scholarship of the Renaissance is only a feeble echo of the
+influence which Arabian civilisation in the Middle Ages exercised over
+Italy and the whole cultivated world--an influence which not only
+preceded that of the Renaissance, but in some respects was hostile to
+it, and which did not surrender without a struggle the place which it
+had long and vigorously asserted. Hieronimo Ramusio, a Venetian
+physician, translated a great part of Avicenna from the Arabic and died
+at Damascus in 1486. Andrea Mongajo of Belluno,[467] a disciple of the
+same Avicenna, lived long at Damascus, learnt Arabic, and improved on
+his master. The Venetian government afterwards appointed him as
+professor of this subject at Padua. The example set by Venice was
+followed by other governments. Princes and wealthy men rivalled one
+another in collecting Arabic manuscripts. The first Arabian
+printing-press was begun at Fano under Julius II. and consecrated in
+1514 under Leo X.[468]
+
+We must here linger for a moment over Pico della Mirandola, before
+passing on to the general effects of humanism. He was the only man who
+loudly and vigorously defended the truth and science of all ages against
+the one-sided worship of classical antiquity.[469] He knew how to value
+not only Averroes and the Jewish investigators, but also the scholastic
+writers of the Middle Ages, according to the matter of their writings.
+He seems to hear them say, 'We shall live for ever, not in the schools
+of word-catchers, but in the circle of the wise, where they talk not of
+the mother of Andromache or of the sons of Niobe, but of the deeper
+causes of things human and divine; he who looks closely will see that
+even the barbarians had intelligence (_mercurium_), not on the tongue
+but in the breast.' Himself writing a vigorous and not inelegant Latin,
+and a master of clear exposition, he despised the purism of pedants and
+the current over-estimate of borrowed forms, especially when joined, as
+they often are, with one-sidedness, and involving indifference to the
+wider truth of the things themselves. Looking at Pico, we can guess at
+the lofty flight which Italian philosophy would have taken had not the
+counter-reformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the
+people.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+
+Who now were those who acted as mediators between their own age and a
+venerated antiquity, and made the latter a chief element in the culture
+of the former?
+
+They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing one face
+to-day and another to-morrow; but they clearly felt themselves, and it
+was fully recognised by their time, that they formed a wholly new
+element in society. The 'clerici vagantes' of the twelfth century, whose
+poetry we have already referred to (p. 174), may perhaps be taken as
+their forerunner--the same unstable existence, the same free and more
+than free views of life, and the germs at all events of the same pagan
+tendencies in their poetry. But now, as competitor with the whole
+culture of the Middle Ages, which was essentially clerical and was
+fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilisation, founding
+itself on that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages. Its
+active representatives became influential[470] because they knew what
+the ancients knew, because they tried to write as the ancients wrote,
+because they began to think, and soon to feel, as the ancients thought
+and felt. The tradition to which they devoted themselves passed at a
+thousand points into genuine reproduction.
+
+Some modern writers deplore the fact that the germs of a far more
+independent and essentially national culture, such as appeared in
+Florence about the year 1300, were afterwards so completely swamped by
+the humanists.[471] There was then, we are told, nobody in Florence who
+could not read; even the donkey-men sang the verses of Dante; the best
+Italian manuscripts which we possess belonged originally to Florentine
+artisans; the publication of a popular encyclop�dia, like the 'Tesoro'
+of Brunette Latini, was then possible; and all this was founded on a
+strength and soundness of character due to the universal participation
+in public affairs, to commerce and travel, and to the systematic
+reprobation of idleness. The Florentines, it is urged, were at that time
+respected and influential throughout the whole world, and were called in
+that year, not without reason, by Pope Boniface VIII., 'the fifth
+element.' The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralysed
+native impulses. Henceforth men looked to antiquity only for the
+solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink
+into mere quotation. Nay, the very fall of civil freedom is partly to be
+ascribed to all this, since the new learning rested on obedience to
+authority, sacrificed municipal rights to Roman law, and thereby both
+sought and found the favour of the despots.
+
+These charges will occupy us now and then at a later stage of our
+inquiry, when we shall attempt to reduce them to their true value, and
+to weigh the losses against the gains of this movement. For the present
+we must confine ourselves to showing how the civilisation even of the
+vigorous fourteenth century necessarily prepared the way for the
+complete victory of humanism, and how precisely the greatest
+representatives of the national Italian spirit were themselves the men
+who opened wide the gate for the measureless devotion to antiquity in
+the fifteenth century.
+
+To begin with Dante. If a succession of men of equal genius had presided
+over Italian culture, whatever elements their natures might have
+absorbed from the antique, they still could not fail to retain a
+characteristic and strongly-marked national stamp. But neither Italy nor
+Western Europe produced another Dante, and he was and remained the man
+who first thrust antiquity into the foreground of national culture. In
+the 'Divine Comedy' he treats the ancient and the Christian worlds, not
+indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one another. Just as,
+at an earlier period of the Middle Ages types and antitypes were sought
+in the history of the Old and New Testaments, so does Dante constantly
+bring together a Christian and a pagan illustration of the same
+fact.[472] It must be remembered that the Christian cycle of history and
+legend was familiar, while the ancient was relatively unknown, was full
+of promise and of interest, and must necessarily have gained the upper
+hand in the competition for public sympathy when there was no longer a
+Dante to hold the balance between the two.
+
+Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a
+great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather to
+the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that
+he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavoured by his voluminous
+historical and philosophical writings not to supplant but to make known
+the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises on
+matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is
+unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without
+handbooks. Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his Latin writings
+would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and
+thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tell us, he
+would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in
+blotting them out from the memory of men.
+
+It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was
+known of the 'Decameron'[473] north of the Alps, he was famous all over
+Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology,
+geography, and biography.[474] One of these, 'De Genealogia Deorum,'
+contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in
+which he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with
+regard to the age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to
+'poesia,' as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole
+mental activity of the poet-scholars.[475] This it is whose enemies he
+so vigorously combats--the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for
+anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian, to whom Helicon,
+the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the
+greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to
+be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically,
+but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and
+immorality.[476] Then follows the defence of poetry, the proof that the
+poetry of the ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing
+mendacious, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and
+allegorical meanings which we must always attribute to it, and of that
+calculated obscurity which is intended to repel the dull minds of the
+ignorant.
+
+And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work,[477] the
+writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to paganism.
+The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the Early Church had to
+fight its way among the heathen. Now--praised be Jesus Christ!--true
+religion was strengthened, paganism destroyed, and the victorious Church
+in possession of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and
+study paganism almost (_fere_) without danger. Boccaccio, however, did
+not hold this liberal view consistently. The ground of his apostasy lay
+partly in the mobility of his character, partly in the still powerful
+and widespread prejudice that classical pursuits were unbecoming in a
+theologian. To these reasons must be added the warning given him in the
+name of the dead Pietro Petroni by the monk Gioacchino Ciani to give up
+his pagan studies under pain of early death. He accordingly determined
+to abandon them, and was only brought back from this cowardly resolve by
+the earnest exhortations of Petrarch, and by the latter's able
+demonstration that humanism was reconcileable with religion.[478]
+
+There was thus a new cause in the world and a new class of men to
+maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to have stopped
+short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself deliberately,
+and conceded the first place to purely national elements of culture. No
+conviction was more firmly rooted in the popular mind, than that
+antiquity was the highest title to glory which Italy possessed.
+
+There was a symbolical ceremony familiar to this generation of
+poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it--the
+coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The origin of this
+system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of the ceremony
+never became fixed. It was a public demonstration, an outward and
+visible expression of literary enthusiasm,[479] and naturally its form
+was variable. Dante, for instance, seems to have understood it in the
+sense of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath
+in the baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other
+Florentine children, he had received baptism.[480] He could, says his
+biographer, have anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but
+desired it nowhere but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned.
+From the same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and
+was held to be inherited by the ancient Romans from the Greeks. The
+most recent source to which the practices could be referred is to be
+found in the Capitoline contests of musicians, poets, and other artists,
+founded by Domitian in imitation of the Greeks and celebrated every five
+years, which may possibly have survived for a time the fall of the Roman
+Empire; but as few other men would venture to crown themselves, as Dante
+desired to do, the question arises, to whom did this office belong?
+Albertino Mussato (p. 140) was crowned at Padua in 1310 by the bishop
+and the rector of the University. The University of Paris, the rector of
+which was then a Florentine (1341), and the municipal authorities of
+Rome, competed for the honour of crowning Petrarch. His self-elected
+examiner, King Robert of Anjou, would gladly have performed the ceremony
+at Naples, but Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the
+senator of Rome. This honour was long the highest object of ambition,
+and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian
+magistrate.[481] Then came the Italian journey of Charles IV., whom it
+amused to flatter the vanity of ambitious men, and impress the ignorant
+multitude by means of gorgeous ceremonies. Starting from the fiction
+that the coronation of poets was a prerogative of the old Roman
+emperors, and consequently was no less his own, he crowned (May 15,
+1355) the Florentine scholar, Zanobi della Strada, at Pisa, to the
+annoyance of Petrarch, who complained that 'the barbarian laurel had
+dared adorn the man loved by the Ausonian Muses,' and to the great
+disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognise this 'laurea Pisana' as
+legitimate.[482] Indeed it might be fairly asked with what right this
+stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in judgment on the merits
+of Italian poets. But from henceforth the emperors crowned poets
+wherever they went on their travels; and in the fifteenth century the
+popes and other princes assumed the same right, till at last no regard
+whatever was paid to place or circumstances. In Rome, under Sixtus IV.,
+the academy[483] of Pomponius L�tus gave the wreath on its own
+authority. The Florentines had the good taste not to crown their famous
+humanists till after death. Carlo Aretino and Lionardo Aretino were thus
+crowned; the eulogy of the first was pronounced by Matteo Palmieri, of
+the latter by Giannozzo Manetti, before the members of the council and
+the whole people, the orator standing at the head of the bier, on which
+the corpse lay clad in a silken robe.[484] Carlo Aretino was further
+honoured by a tomb in Santa Croce, which is among the most beautiful in
+the whole course of the Renaissance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS.
+
+
+The influence of antiquity on culture, of which we have now to speak,
+presupposes that the new learning had gained possession of the
+universities. This was so, but by no means to the extent and with the
+results which might have been expected.
+
+Few of the Italian universities[485] show themselves in their full
+vigour till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the increase
+of wealth rendered a more systematic care for education possible. At
+first there were generally three sorts of professorships--one for civil
+law, another for canonical law, the third for medicine; in course of
+time professorships of rhetoric, of philosophy, and of astronomy were
+added, the last commonly, though not always, identical with astrology.
+The salaries varied greatly in different cases. Sometimes a capital sum
+was paid down. With the spread of culture competition became so active
+that the different universities tried to entice away distinguished
+teachers from one another, under which circumstances Bologna is said to
+have sometimes devoted the half of its public income (20,000 ducats) to
+the university. The appointments were as a rule made only for a certain
+time,[486] sometimes for only half a year, so that the teachers were
+forced to lead a wandering life, like actors. Appointments for life
+were, however, not unknown. Sometimes the promise was exacted not to
+teach elsewhere what had already been taught at one place. There were
+also voluntary, unpaid professors.
+
+Of the chairs which have been mentioned, that of rhetoric was especially
+sought by the humanist; yet it depended only on his familiarity with the
+matter of ancient learning whether or no he could aspire to those of
+law, medicine, philosophy, or astronomy. The inward conditions of the
+science of the day were as variable as the outward conditions of the
+teacher. Certain jurists and physicians received by far the largest
+salaries of all, the former chiefly as consulting lawyers for the suits
+and claims of the state which employed them. In Padua a lawyer of the
+fifteenth century received a salary of 1,000 ducats,[487] and it was
+proposed to appoint a celebrated physician with a yearly payment of
+2,000 ducats, and the right of private practice,[488] the same man
+having previously received 700 gold florins at Pisa. When the jurist
+Bartolommeo Socini, professor at Pisa, accepted a Venetian appointment
+at Padua, and was on the point of starting on his journey, he was
+arrested by the Florentine government and only released on payment of
+bail to the amount of 18,000 gold florins.[489] The high estimation in
+which these branches of science were held makes it intelligible why
+distinguished philologists turned their attention to law and medicine,
+while on the other hand specialists were more and more compelled to
+acquire something of a wide literary culture. We shall presently have
+occasion to speak of the work of the humanists in other departments of
+practical life.
+
+Nevertheless, the position of the philologists, as such, even where the
+salary was large,[490] and did not exclude other sources of income, was
+on the whole uncertain and temporary, so that one and the same teacher
+could be connected with a great variety of institutions. It is evident
+that change was desired for its own sake, and something fresh expected
+from each new comer, as was natural at a time when science was in the
+making, and consequently depended to no small degree on the personal
+influence of the teacher. Nor was it always the case that a lecturer on
+classical authors really belonged to the university of the town where he
+taught. Communication was so easy, and the supply of suitable
+accommodation, in monasteries and elsewhere, was so abundant, that a
+private undertaking was often practicable. In the first decades of the
+fifteenth century,[491] when the University of Florence was at its
+greatest brilliance, when the courtiers of Eugenius IV., and perhaps
+even of Martin V. thronged to the lecture-rooms, when Carlo Aretino and
+Filelfo were competing for the largest audience, there existed, not only
+an almost complete university among the Augustinians of Santo Spirito,
+not only an association of scholars among the Camaldolesi of the Angeli,
+but individuals of mark, either singly or in common, arranged to provide
+philosophical and philological teaching for themselves and others.
+Linguistic and antiquarian studies in Rome had next to no connection
+with the university (Sapienza), and depended almost exclusively either
+on the favour of individual popes and prelates, or on the appointments
+made in the Papal chancery. It was not till Leo X. (1513) that the great
+reorganisation of the Sapienza took place, with its eighty-eight
+lecturers, among whom there were able men, though none of the first
+rank, at the head of the arch�ological department. But this new
+brilliancy was of short duration. We have already spoken briefly of the
+Greek and Hebrew professorships in Italy (pp. 195 sqq.).
+
+To form an accurate picture of the method of scientific instruction,
+then pursued, we must turn away our eyes as far as possible from our
+present academic system. Personal intercourse between the teachers and
+the taught, public disputations, the constant use of Latin and often of
+Greek, the frequent changes of lecturers and the scarcity of books, gave
+the studies of that time a colour which we cannot represent to
+ourselves without effort.
+
+There were Latin schools in every town of the least importance, not by
+any means merely as preparatory to higher education, but because, next
+to reading, writing, and arithmetic, the knowledge of Latin was a
+necessity; and after Latin came logic. It is to be noted particularly
+that these schools did not depend on the Church, but on the
+municipality; some of them, too, were merely private enterprises.
+
+This school system, directed by a few distinguished humanists, not only
+attained a remarkable perfection of organisation, but became an
+instrument of higher education in the modern sense of the phrase. With
+the education of the children of two princely houses in North Italy
+institutions were connected which may be called unique of their kind.
+
+At the court of Giovan Francesco Gonzaga at Mantua (reg. 1407 to 1444)
+appeared the illustrious Vittorino da Feltre[492] (b. 1397, d. 1446),
+otherwise Vittore dai Rambaldoni--he preferred to be called a Mantuan
+rather than a Feltrese--one of those men who devote their whole life to
+an object for which their natural gifts constitute a special vocation.
+He wrote almost nothing, and finally destroyed the few poems of his
+youth which he had long kept by him. He studied with unwearied industry;
+he never sought after titles, which, like all outward distinctions, he
+scorned; and he lived on terms of the closest friendship with teachers,
+companions, and pupils, whose goodwill he knew how to preserve. He
+excelled in bodily no less than in mental exercises, was an admirable
+rider, dancer, and fencer, wore the same clothes in winter as in summer,
+walked in nothing but sandals even during the severest frost, and lived
+so that till his old age he was never ill. He so restrained his
+passions, his natural inclination to sensuality and anger, that he
+remained chaste his whole life through, and hardly ever hurt any one by
+a hard word.
+
+He directed the education of the sons and daughters of the princely
+house, and one of the latter became under his care a woman of learning.
+When his reputation extended far and wide over Italy, and members of
+great and wealthy families came from long distances, even from Germany,
+in search of his instructions, Gonzaga was not only willing that they
+should be received, but seems to have held it an honour for Mantua to be
+the chosen school of the aristocratic world. Here for the first time
+gymnastics and all noble bodily exercises were treated along with
+scientific instruction as indispensable to a liberal education. Besides
+these pupils came others, whose instruction Vittorino probably held to
+be his highest earthly aim, the gifted poor, often as many as seventy
+together, whom he supported in his house and educated, 'per l'amore di
+Dio,' along with the high-born youths who here learned to live under the
+same roof with untitled genius. The greater the crowd of pupils who
+flocked to Mantua, the more teachers were needed to impart the
+instruction which Vittorino only directed--an instruction which aimed at
+giving each pupil that sort of learning which he was most fitted to
+receive. Gonzaga paid him a yearly salary of 240 gold florins, built him
+besides a splendid house, 'La Giocosa,' in which the master lived with
+his scholars, and contributed to the expenses caused by the poorer
+pupils. What was still further needed Vittorino begged from princes and
+wealthy people, who did not always, it is true, give a ready ear to his
+entreaties, and forced him by their hardheartedness to run into debt.
+Yet in the end he found himself in comfortable circumstances, owned a
+small property in town and an estate in the country, where he stayed
+with his pupils during the holidays, and possessed a famous collection
+of books which he gladly lent or gave away, though he was not a little
+angry when they were taken without leave. In the early morning he read
+religious books, then scourged himself and went to church; his pupils
+were also compelled to go to church, like him, to confess once a month,
+and to observe fast days most strictly. His pupils respected him, but
+trembled before his glance. When they did anything wrong, they were
+punished immediately after the offence. He was honoured by all
+contemporaries no less than by his pupils, and people took the journey
+to Mantua merely to see him.
+
+More stress was laid on pure scholarship by Guarino of Verona[493]
+(1370-1460), who in the year 1429 was called to Ferrara by Niccol�
+d'Este to educate his son Lionello, and who, when his pupil was nearly
+grown up in 1436, began to teach at the university as professor of
+eloquence and of the ancient languages. While still acting as tutor to
+Lionello, he had many other pupils from various parts of the country,
+and in his own house a select class of poor scholars, whom he partly or
+wholly supported. His evening hours till far into the night were devoted
+to hearing lessons or to instructive conversation. His house, too, was
+the home of a strict religion and morality. Guarino was a student of the
+Bible, and lived in friendly intercourse with pious contemporaries,
+though he did not hesitate to write a defence of pagan literature
+against them. It signified little to him or to Vittorino that most of
+the humanists of their day deserved small praise in the matter of morals
+or religion. It is inconceivable how Guarino, with all the daily work
+which fell upon him, still found time to write translations from the
+Greek and voluminous original works.[494] He was wanting in that wise
+self-restraint and kindly sweetness which graced the character of
+Vittorino, and was easily betrayed into a violence of temper which led
+to frequent quarrels with his learned contemporaries.
+
+Not only in these two courts, but generally throughout Italy, the
+education of the princely families was in part and for certain years in
+the hands of the humanists, who thereby mounted a step higher in the
+aristocratic world. The writing of treatises on the education of
+princes, formerly the business of theologians, fell now within their
+province.
+
+From the time of Pier Paolo Vergerio the Italian princes were well taken
+care of in this respect, and the custom was transplanted into Germany by
+�neas Sylvius, who addressed detailed exhortations to two young German
+princes of the House of Habsburg[495] on the subject of their further
+education, in which they are both urged, as might be expected, to
+cultivate and nurture humanism, but are chiefly bidden to make
+themselves able rulers and vigorous, hardy warriors. Perhaps �neas was
+aware that in addressing these youths he was talking in the air, and
+therefore took measures to put his treatise into public circulation. But
+the relations of the humanists to the rulers will be discussed
+separately.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE FURTHERERS OF HUMANISM.
+
+
+We have here first to speak of those citizens, mostly Florentines, who
+made antiquarian interests one of the chief objects of their lives, and
+who were themselves either distinguished scholars, or else distinguished
+_dilettanti_ who maintained the scholars. (Comp. pp. 193 sqq.) They were
+of peculiar significance during the period of transition at the
+beginning of the fifteenth century, since it was in them that humanism
+first showed itself practically as an indispensable element in daily
+life. It was not till after this time that the popes and princes began
+seriously to occupy themselves with it.
+
+Niccol� Niccoli and Giannozzo Manetti have been already spoken of more
+than once. Niccoli is described to us by Vespasiano[496] as a man who
+would tolerate nothing around him out of harmony with his own classical
+spirit. His handsome long-robed figure, his kindly speech, his house
+adorned with the noblest remains of antiquity, made a singular
+impression. He was scrupulously cleanly in everything, most of all at
+table, where ancient vases and crystal goblets stood before him on the
+whitest linen.[497] The way in which he won over a pleasure-loving young
+Florentine to intellectual interests is too charming not to be here
+described.[498] Piero de' Pazzi, son of a distinguished merchant, and
+himself destined to the same calling, fair to behold, and much given to
+the pleasures of the world, thought about anything rather than
+literature. One day, as he was passing the Palazzo del Podest�,[499]
+Niccol� called the young man to him, and although they had never before
+exchanged a word, the youth obeyed the call of one so respected. Niccol�
+asked him who his father was. He answered, 'Messer Andrea de' Pazzi.'
+When he was further asked what his pursuit was, Piero replied, as young
+people are wont to do, 'I enjoy myself' ('attendo a darmi buon tempo').
+Niccol� said to him, 'As son of such a father, and so fair to look upon,
+it is a shame that thou knowest nothing of the Latin language, which
+would be so great an ornament to thee. If thou learnest it not, thou
+wilt be good for nothing, and as soon as the flower of youth is over,
+wilt be a man of no consequence' (_virt�_). When Piero heard this, he
+straightway perceived that it was true, and said that he would gladly
+take pains to learn, if only he had a teacher. Whereupon Niccol�
+answered that he would see to that. And he found him a learned man for
+Latin and Greek, named Pontano, whom Piero treated as one of his own
+house, and to whom he paid 100 gold florins a year. Quitting all the
+pleasures in which he had hitherto lived, he studied day and night, and
+became a friend of all learned men and a noble-minded statesman. He
+learned by heart the whole '�neid' and many speeches of Livy, chiefly on
+the way between Florence and his country house at Trebbio.[500]
+Antiquity was represented in another and higher sense by Giannozzo
+Manetti (1393-1459).[501] Precocious from his first years, he was
+hardly more than a child when he had finished his apprenticeship in
+commerce, and became book-keeper in a bank. But soon the life he led
+seemed to him empty and perishable, and he began to yearn after science,
+through which alone man can secure immortality. He then busied himself
+with books as few laymen had done before him, and became, as has been
+said (p. 209), one of the most profound scholars of his time. When
+appointed by the government as its representative magistrate and
+tax-collector at Pescia and Pistoja, he fulfilled his duties in
+accordance with the lofty ideal with which his religious feeling and
+humanistic studies combined to inspire him. He succeeded in collecting
+the most unpopular taxes which the Florentine state imposed, and
+declined payment for his services. As provincial governor he refused all
+presents, abhorred all bribes, checked gambling, kept the country well
+supplied with corn, required from his subordinates strict obedience and
+thorough disinterestedness, was indefatigable in settling law-suits
+amicably, and did wonders in calming inflamed passions by his goodness.
+The Pistojese loved and reverenced him as a saint, and were never able
+to discover to which of the two political parties he leaned; when his
+term of office was over, both sent ambassadors to Florence to beg that
+it might be prolonged. As if to symbolise the common rights and
+interests of all, he spent his leisure hours in writing the history of
+the city, which was preserved, bound in a purple cover, as a sacred
+relic in the town-hall.[502] When he took his leave the city presented
+him with a banner bearing the municipal arms and a splendid silver
+helmet. On diplomatic missions to Venice, Rome, and King Alfonso,
+Manetti represented, as at Pistoja, the interests of his native city,
+watching vigilantly over its honour, but declining the distinctions
+which were offered to him, obtained great glory by his speeches and
+negotiations, and acquired by his prudence and foresight the name of a
+prophet.
+
+For further information as to the learned citizens of Florence at this
+period the reader must all the more be referred to Vespasiano, who knew
+them all personally, because the tone and atmosphere in which he writes,
+and the terms and conditions on which he mixed in their society, are of
+even more importance than the facts which he records. Even in a
+translation, and still more in the brief indications to which we are
+here compelled to limit ourselves, this chief merit of his book is lost.
+Without being a great writer, he was thoroughly familiar with the
+subject he wrote on, and had a deep sense of its intellectual
+significance.
+
+If we seek to analyse the charm which the Medici of the fifteenth
+century, especially Cosimo the Elder (d. 1464) and Lorenzo the
+Magnificent (d. 1492) exercised over Florence and over all their
+contemporaries, we shall find that it lay less in their political
+capacity than in their leadership in the culture of the age. A man in
+Cosimo's position--a great merchant and party leader, who also had on
+his side all the thinkers, writers, and investigators, a man who was the
+first of the Florentines by birth and the first of the Italians by
+culture--such a man was to all intents and purposes already a prince. To
+Cosimo belongs the special glory of recognising in the Platonic
+philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought,[503] of
+inspiring his friends with the same belief, and thus of fostering within
+humanistic circles themselves another and a higher resuscitation of
+antiquity. The story is known to us minutely.[504] It all hangs on the
+calling of the learned Johannes Argyropulos, and on the personal
+enthusiasm of Cosimo himself in his last years, which was such, that the
+great Marsilio Ficino could style himself, as far as Platonism was
+concerned, the spiritual son of Cosimo. Under Pietro Medici, Ficino was
+already at the head of a school; to him Pietro's son and Cosimo's
+grandson, the illustrious Lorenzo, came over from the Peripatetics.
+Among his most distinguished fellow-scholars were Bartolommeo Valori,
+Donato Acciajuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini. The enthusiastic teacher
+declares in several passages of his writings that Lorenzo had sounded
+all the depths of the Platonic philosophy, and had uttered his
+conviction that without Plato it would be hard to be a good Christian or
+a good citizen. The famous band of scholars which surrounded Lorenzo was
+united together, and distinguished from all other circles of the kind,
+by this passion for a higher and idealistic philosophy. Only in such a
+world could a man like Pico della Mirandola feel happy. But perhaps the
+best thing of all that can be said about it is, that, with all this
+worship of antiquity, Italian poetry found here a sacred refuge, and
+that of all the rays of light which streamed from the circle of which
+Lorenzo was the centre, none was more powerful than this. As a
+statesman, let each man judge him as he pleases; a foreigner will
+hesitate to pronounce what was due to human guilt and what to
+circumstances in the fate of Florence, but no more unjust charge was
+ever made than that in the field of culture Lorenzo was the protector of
+Mediocrity, that through his fault Lionardo da Vinci and the
+mathematician Fra Luca Pacciolo lived abroad, and that Toscanella,
+Vespucci, and others at least remained unsupported. He was not, indeed,
+a man of universal mind; but of all the great men who have striven to
+favour and promote spiritual interests, few certainly have been so
+many-sided, and in none probably was the inward need to do so equally
+deep.
+
+The age in which we live is loud enough in proclaiming the worth of
+culture, and especially of the culture of antiquity. But the
+enthusiastic devotion to it, the recognition that the need of it is the
+first and greatest of all needs, is nowhere to be found but among the
+Florentines of the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth
+centuries. On this point we have indirect proof which precludes all
+doubt. It would not have been so common to give the daughters of the
+house a share in the same studies, had they not been held to be the
+noblest of earthly pursuits; exile would not have been turned into a
+happy retreat, as was done by Palla Strozzi; nor would men who indulged
+in every conceivable excess have retained the strength and the spirit to
+write critical treatises on the 'Natural History' of Pliny like Filippo
+Strozzi.[505] Our business here is not to deal out either praise or
+blame, but to understand the spirit of the age in all its vigorous
+individuality.
+
+Besides Florence, there were many cities of Italy where individuals and
+social circles devoted all their energies to the support of humanism and
+the protection of the scholars who lived among them. The correspondence
+of that period is full of references to personal relations of this
+kind.[506] The feeling of the instructed classes set strongly and almost
+exclusively in this direction.
+
+But it is now time to speak of humanism at the Italian courts. The
+natural alliance between the despot and the scholar, each relying solely
+on his personal talent, has already been touched upon (p. 9); that the
+latter should avowedly prefer the princely courts to the free cities,
+was only to be expected from the higher pay which they there received.
+At a time when the great Alfonso of Aragon seemed likely to become
+master of all Italy, �neas Sylvius wrote to another citizen of
+Siena:[507] 'I had rather that Italy attained peace under his rule than
+under that of the free cities, for kingly generosity rewards excellence
+of every kind.[508] Too much stress has latterly been laid on the
+unworthy side of this relation, and the mercenary flattery to which it
+gave rise, just as formerly the eulogies of the humanists led to a too
+favourable judgment on their patrons. Taking all things together, it is
+greatly to the honour of the latter that they felt bound to place
+themselves at the head of the culture of their age and country,
+one-sided though this culture was. In some of the popes,[509] the
+fearlessness of the consequences to which the new learning might lead
+strikes us as something truly, but unconsciously, imposing. Nicholas V.
+was confident of the future of the Church, since thousands of learned
+men supported her. Pius II. was far from making such splendid sacrifices
+for humanism as were made by Nicholas, and the poets who frequented his
+court were few in number; but he himself was much more the personal head
+of the republic of letters than his predecessor, and enjoyed his
+position without the least misgiving. Paul II. was the first to dread
+and mistrust the culture of his secretaries, and his three successors,
+Sixtus, Innocent, and Alexander, accepted dedications and allowed
+themselves to be sung to the hearts' content of the poets--there even
+existed a 'Borgiad,' probably in hexameters[510]--but were too busy
+elsewhere, and too occupied in seeking other foundations for their
+power, to trouble themselves much about the poet-scholars. Julius II.
+found poets to eulogise him, because he himself was no mean subject for
+poetry (p. 117), but he does not seem to have troubled himself much
+about them. He was followed by Leo X., 'as Romulus by Numa'--in other
+words after the warlike turmoil of the first pontificate, a new one was
+hoped for wholly given to the muses. The enjoyment of elegant Latin
+prose and melodious verse was part of the programme of Leo's life, and
+his patronage certainly had the result that his Latin poets have left us
+a living picture of that joyous and brilliant spirit of the Leonine
+days, with which the biography of Jovius is filled, in countless
+epigrams, elegies, odes, and orations.[511] Probably in all European
+history there is no prince who, in proportion to the few striking events
+of his life, has received such manifold homage. The poets had access to
+him chiefly about noon, when the musicians had ceased playing;[512] but
+one of the best among them[513] tells us how they also pursued him when
+he walked in his garden or withdrew to the privacy of his chamber, and
+if they failed to catch him there, would try to win him with a mendicant
+ode or elegy, filled, as usual, with the whole population of
+Olympus.[514] For Leo, prodigal of his money, and disliking to be
+surrounded by any but cheerful faces, displayed a generosity in his
+gifts which was fabulously exaggerated in the hard times that
+followed.[515] His reorganisation of the Sapienza (p. 212) has been
+already spoken of. In order not to underrate Leo's influence on humanism
+we must guard against being misled by the toy-work that was mixed up
+with it, and must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the apparent
+irony with which he himself sometimes treated these matters (p. 157).
+Our judgment must rather dwell on the countless spiritual possibilities
+which are included in the word 'stimulus,' and which, though they cannot
+be measured as a whole, can still, on closer study, be actually followed
+out in particular cases. Whatever influence in Europe the Italian
+humanists have had since 1520 depends in some way or other on the
+impulse which was given by Leo. He was the Pope who in granting
+permission to print the newly found Tacitus,[516] could say that the
+great writers were a rule of life and a consolation in misfortune; that
+helping learned men and obtaining excellent books had ever been one of
+his highest aims; and that he now thanked heaven that he could benefit
+the human race by furthering the publication of this book.
+
+The sack of Rome in the year 1527 scattered the scholars no less than
+the artists in every direction, and spread the fame of the great
+departed M�cenas to the furthest boundaries of Italy.
+
+Among the secular princes of the fifteenth century, none displayed such
+enthusiasm for antiquity as Alfonso the Great of Aragon, King of Naples
+(see p. 35). It appears that his zeal was thoroughly unaffected, and
+that the monuments and writings of the ancient world made upon him, from
+the time of his arrival in Italy, an impression deep and powerful enough
+to reshape his life. Possibly he was influenced by the example of his
+ancestor Robert, Petrarch's great patron, whom he may have wished to
+rival or surpass. With strange readiness he surrendered the stubborn
+Aragon to his brother, and devoted himself wholly to his new
+possessions. He had in his service,[517] either successively or
+together, George of Trebizond, the younger Chrysoloras, Lorenzo Valla,
+Bartolommeo Facio and Antonio Panormita, of whom the two latter were his
+historians; Panormita daily instructed the King and his court in Livy,
+even during military expeditions. These men cost him yearly 20,000 gold
+florins. He gave Panormita 1,000 for his work: Facio received for the
+'Historia Alfonsi,' besides a yearly income of 500 ducats, a present of
+1,500 more when it was finished, with the words, 'It is not given to pay
+you, for your work would not be paid for if I gave you the fairest of my
+cities; but in time I hope to satisfy you.'[518] When he took Giannozzo
+Manetti as his secretary on the most brilliant conditions, he said to
+him, 'My last crust I will share with you.' When Giannozzo first came to
+bring the congratulations of the Florentine government on the marriage
+of Prince Ferrante, the impression he made was so great, that the King
+sat motionless on the throne, 'like a brazen statue, and did not even
+brush away a fly, which had settled on his nose at the beginning of the
+oration.' In restoring the castle, he took Vitruvius as his guide;
+wherever he went, he had the ancient classics with him; he looked on a
+day as lost in which he had read nothing; when he was reading, he
+suffered no disturbance, not even the sound of music; and he despised
+all contemporary princes who were not either scholars or the patrons of
+learning. His favourite haunt seems to have been the library of the
+castle at Naples, which he opened himself if the librarian was absent,
+and where he would sit at a window overlooking the bay, and listen to
+learned debates on the Trinity. For he was profoundly religious, and had
+the Bible, as well as Livy and Seneca, read to him, till after fourteen
+perusals he knew it almost by heart. He gave to those who wished to be
+nuns the money for their entrance to the monastery, was a zealous
+churchgoer, and listened with great attention to the sermon. Who can
+fully understand the feeling with which he regarded the supposititious
+remains (p. 143) of Livy at Padua? When, by dint of great entreaties, he
+obtained an arm-bone of the skeleton from the Venetians, and received it
+with solemn pomp at Naples, how strangely Christian and pagan sentiment
+must have been blended in his heart! During a campaign in the Abruzzi,
+when the distant Sulmona, the birthplace of Ovid, was pointed out to
+him, he saluted the spot and returned thanks to its tutelary genius. It
+gladdened him to make good the prophecy of the great poet as to his
+future fame.[519] Once indeed, at his famous entry into the conquered
+city of Naples (1443), he himself chose to appear before the world in
+ancient style. Not far from the market a breach forty ells wide was made
+in the wall, and through this he drove in a gilded chariot like a Roman
+Triumphator.[520] The memory of the scene is preserved by a noble
+triumphal arch of marble in the Castello Nuovo. His Neapolitan
+successors (p. 37) inherited as little of this passion for antiquity as
+of his other good qualities.
+
+Alfonso was far surpassed in learning by Frederick of Urbino[521]--the
+great pupil of the great teacher Vittorino da Feltre--who had but few
+courtiers around him, squandered nothing, and in his appropriation of
+antiquity, as in all other things, went to work considerately. It was
+for him and for Nicholas V. that most of the translations from the
+Greek, and a number of the best commentaries and other such works, were
+written. He spent much on the scholars whose services he used, but spent
+it to good purpose. There were no traces of the official poet at Urbino,
+where the Duke himself was the most learned in the whole court.
+Classical antiquity, indeed, only formed a part of his culture. An
+accomplished ruler, captain, and gentleman, he had mastered the greater
+part of the science of the day, and this with a view to its practical
+application. As a theologian, he was able to compare Scotus with
+Aquinas, and was familiar with the writings of the old fathers of the
+Eastern and Western Churches, the former in Latin translations. In
+philosophy, he seems to have left Plato altogether to his contemporary
+Cosimo, but he knew thoroughly not only the 'Ethics' and 'Politics' of
+Aristotle but the 'Physics' and some other works. The rest of his
+reading lay chiefly among the ancient historians, all of whom he
+possessed; these, and not the poets, 'he was always reading and having
+read to him.'
+
+The Sforza,[522] too, were all of them men of more or less learning and
+patrons of literature; they have been already referred to in passing
+(pp. 38 sqq.). Duke Francesco probably looked on humanistic culture as a
+matter of course in the education of his children, if only for
+political reasons. It was felt universally to be an advantage if the
+Prince could mix with the most instructed men of his time on an equal
+footing. Ludovico Moro, himself an excellent Latin scholar, showed an
+interest in intellectual matters which extended far beyond classical
+antiquity (p. 41 sqq.).
+
+Even the petty despots strove after similar distinctions, and we do them
+injustice by thinking that they only supported the scholars at their
+courts as a means of diffusing their own fame. A ruler like Borso of
+Ferrara (p. 49), with all his vanity, seems by no means to have looked
+for immortality from the poets, eager as they were to propitiate him
+with a 'Borseid' and the like. He had far too proud a sense of his own
+position as a ruler for that. But intercourse with learned men, interest
+in antiquarian matters, and the passion for elegant Latin correspondence
+were a necessity for the princes of that age. What bitter complaints are
+those of Duke Alfonso, competent as he was in practical matters, that
+his weakliness in youth had forced him to seek recreation in manual
+pursuits only![523] or was this merely an excuse to keep the humanists
+at a distance? A nature like his was not intelligible even to
+contemporaries.
+
+Even the most insignificant despots of Romagna found it hard to do
+without one or two men of letters about them. The tutor and secretary
+were often one and the same person, who sometimes, indeed, acted as a
+kind of court factotum.[524] We are apt to treat the small scale of
+these courts as a reason for dismissing them with a too ready contempt,
+forgetting that the highest spiritual things are not precisely matters
+of measurement.
+
+Life and manners at the court of Rimini must have been a singular
+spectacle under the bold pagan Condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta. He had
+a number of scholars around him, some of whom he provided for liberally,
+even giving them landed estates, while others earned at least a
+livelihood as officers in his army.[525] In his citadel--'arx
+Sismundea'--they used to hold discussions, often of a very venomous
+kind, in the presence of the 'rex,' as they termed him. In their Latin
+poems they sing his praises and celebrate his amour with the fair
+Isotta, in whose honour and as whose monument the famous rebuilding of
+San Francesco at Rimini took place--'Div� Isott� Sacrum.' When the
+humanists themselves came to die, they were laid in or under the
+sarcophagi with which the niches of the outside walls of the church were
+adorned, with an inscription testifying that they were laid here at the
+time when Sigismundus, the son of Pandulfus, ruled.[526] It is hard for
+us nowadays to believe that a monster like this prince felt learning and
+the friendship of cultivated people to be a necessity of life; and yet
+the man who excommunicated him, made war upon him, and burnt him in
+effigy, Pope Pius II., says: 'Sigismund knew history and had a great
+store of philosophy; he seemed born to all that he undertook.[527]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUITY: LATIN CORRESPONDENCE AND ORATIONS.
+
+
+There were two purposes, however, for which the humanist was as
+indispensable to the republics as to princes or popes, namely, the
+official correspondence of the state, and the making of speeches on
+public and solemn occasions.
+
+Not only was the secretary required to be a competent Latinist, but
+conversely, only a humanist was credited with the knowledge and ability
+necessary for the post of secretary. And thus the greatest men in the
+sphere of science during the fifteenth century mostly devoted a
+considerable part of their lives to serve the state in this capacity. No
+importance was attached to a man's home or origin. Of the four great
+Florentine secretaries who filled the office between 1427 and 1465,[528]
+three belonged to the subject city of Arezzo, namely, Lionardo (Bruni),
+Carlo (Marsuppini), and Benedetto Accolti; Poggio was from Terra Nuova,
+also in Florentine territory. For a long period, indeed, many of the
+highest officers of state were on principle given to foreigners.
+Lionardo, Poggio, and Giannozzo Manetti were at one time or another
+private secretaries to the popes, and Carlo Aretino was to have been so.
+Blondus of Forli, and, in spite of everything, at last even Lorenzo
+Valla, filled the same office. From the time of Nicholas V. and Pius II.
+onwards,[529] the Papal chancery continued more and more to attract the
+ablest men, and this was still the case even under the last popes of
+the fifteenth century, little as they cared for letters. In Platina's
+'History of the Popes,' the life of Paul II. is a charming piece of
+vengeance taken by a humanist on the one Pope who did not know how to
+behave to his chancery--to that circle 'of poets and orators who
+bestowed on the Papal court as much glory as they received from it.' It
+is delightful to see the indignation of these haughty and wealthy
+gentlemen, who knew as well as the Pope himself how to use their
+position to plunder foreigners,[530] when some squabble about precedence
+happened, when, for instance, the 'Advocati consistoriales' claimed
+equal or superior rank to theirs.[531] The Apostle John, to whom the
+'Secreta coelestia' were revealed; the secretary of Porsenna, whom Mucius
+Sc�vola mistook for the king; M�cenas, who was private secretary to
+Augustus; the archbishops, who in Germany were called chancellors, are
+all appealed to in turn.[532] 'The apostolic secretaries have the most
+weighty business of the world in their hands. For who but they decide on
+matters of the Catholic faith, who else combat heresy, re-establish
+peace, and mediate between great monarchs? who but they write the
+statistical accounts of Christendom? It is they who astonish kings,
+princes, and nations by what comes forth from the Pope. They write
+commands and instructions for the legates, and receive their orders only
+from the Pope, on whom they wait day and night.' But the highest summit
+of glory was only attained by the two famous secretaries and stylists of
+Leo X.: Pietro Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto.[533]
+
+All the chanceries did not turn out equally elegant documents. A
+leathern official style, in the impurest of Latin, was very common. In
+the Milanese documents preserved by Corio there is a remarkable contrast
+between this sort of composition and the few letters written by members
+of the princely house, which must have been written, too, in moments of
+critical importance.[534] They are models of pure Latinity. To maintain
+a faultless style under all circumstances was a rule of good breeding,
+and a result of habit. Besides these officials, private scholars of all
+kinds naturally had correspondence of their own. The object of
+letter-writing was seldom what it is nowadays, to give information as to
+the circumstances of the writer, or news of other people; it was rather
+treated as a literary work done to give evidence of scholarship and to
+win the consideration of those to whom it was addressed. These letters
+began early to serve the purpose of learned disquisition; and Petrarch,
+who introduced this form of letter-writing, revived the forms of the old
+epistolary style, putting the classical 'thou' in place of the 'you' of
+medi�val Latin. At a later period letters became collections of
+neatly-turned phrases, by which subjects were encouraged or humiliated,
+colleagues flattered or insulted, and patrons eulogised or begged
+from.[535]
+
+The letters of Cicero, Pliny, and others, were at this time diligently
+studied as models. As early as the fifteenth century a mass of forms and
+instructions for Latin correspondence had appeared, as accessory to the
+great grammatical and lexicographic works, the mass of which is
+astounding to us even now when we look at them in the libraries. But
+just as the existence of these helps tempted many to undertake a task to
+which they had no vocation, so were the really capable men stimulated to
+a more faultless excellence, till at length the letters of Politian, and
+at the beginning of the sixteenth century those of Pietro Bembo,
+appeared, and took their place as unrivalled masterpieces, not only of
+Latin style in general, but also of the more special art of
+letter-writing.
+
+Together with these there appeared in the sixteenth century the
+classical style of Italian correspondence, at the head of which stands
+Bembo again.[536] Its form is wholly modern, and deliberately kept free
+from Latin influence, and yet its spirit is thoroughly penetrated and
+possessed by the ideas of antiquity. These letters, though partly of a
+confidential nature, are mostly written with a view to possible
+publication in the future, and always on the supposition that they might
+be worth showing on account of their elegance. After the year 1530,
+printed collections began to appear, either the letters of miscellaneous
+correspondents in irregular succession, or of single writers; and the
+same Bembo whose fame was so great as a Latin correspondent won as high
+a position in his own language.[537]
+
+But, at a time and among a people where 'listening' was among the chief
+pleasures of life, and where every imagination was filled with the
+memory of the Roman senate and its great speakers, the orator occupied a
+far more brilliant place than the letter-writer.[538] Eloquence had
+shaken off the influence of the Church, in which it had found a refuge
+during the Middle Ages, and now became an indispensable element and
+ornament of all elevated lives. Many of the social hours which are now
+filled with music were then given to Latin or Italian oratory; and yet
+Bartolommeo Fazio complained that the orators of his time were at a
+disadvantage compared with those of antiquity; of three kinds of oratory
+which were open to the latter, one only was left to the former, since
+forensic oratory was abandoned to the jurists, and the speeches in the
+councils of the government had to be delivered in Italian.[539]
+
+The social position of the speaker was a matter of perfect indifference;
+what was desired was simply the most cultivated humanistic talent. At
+the court of Borso of Ferrara, the Duke's physician, Jeronimo da
+Castello, was chosen to deliver the congratulatory address on the visits
+of Frederick III. and of Pius II.[540] Married laymen ascended the
+pulpits of the churches at any scene of festivity or mourning, and even
+on the feast-days of the saints. It struck the non-Italian members of
+the Council of Basel as something strange, that the Archbishop of Milan
+should summon �neas Sylvius, who was then unordained, to deliver a
+public discourse at the feast of Saint Ambrogius; but they suffered it
+in spite of the murmurs of the theologians, and listened to the speaker
+with the greatest curiosity.[541]
+
+Let us glance for a moment at the most frequent and important occasions
+of public speaking.
+
+It was not for nothing, in the first place, that the ambassadors from
+one state to another received the title of orators. Whatever else might
+be done in the way of secret negotiation, the envoy never failed to make
+a public appearance and deliver a public speech, under circumstances of
+the greatest possible pomp and ceremony.[542] As a rule, however
+numerous the embassy might be, one individual spake for all; but it
+happened to Pius II., a critic before whom all were glad to be heard, to
+be forced to sit and listen to a whole deputation, one after
+another.[543] Learned princes who had the gift of speech were themselves
+fond of discoursing in Latin or Italian. The children of the House of
+Sforza were trained to this exercise. The boy Galeazzo Maria delivered
+in 1455 a fluent speech before the Great Council at Venice,[544] and his
+sister Ippolita saluted Pope Pius II. with a graceful address at the
+Congress of Mantua.[545] Pius himself through all his life did much by
+his oratory to prepare the way for his final elevation to the Papal
+chair. Great as he was both as scholar and diplomatist, he would
+probably never have become Pope without the fame and the charm of his
+eloquence. 'For nothing was more lofty than the dignity of his
+oratory.'[546] Without doubt this was a reason why multitudes held him
+to be the fittest man for the office, even before his election.
+
+Princes were also commonly received on public occasions with speeches,
+which sometimes lasted for hours. This happened of course only when the
+prince was known as a lover of eloquence,[547] or wished to pass for
+such, and when a competent speaker was present, whether university
+professor, official, ecclesiastic, physician, or court-scholar.
+
+Every other political opportunity was seized with the same eagerness,
+and according to the reputation of the speaker, the concourse of the
+lovers of culture was great or small. At the yearly change of public
+officers, and even at the consecration of new bishops, a humanist was
+sure to come forward, and sometimes addressed his audience in hexameters
+or Sapphic verses.[548] Often a newly appointed official was himself
+forced to deliver a speech more or less relevant to his department, as
+for instance, on justice; and lucky for him if he were well up in his
+part! At Florence even the Condottieri, whatever their origin or
+education might be, were compelled to accommodate themselves to the
+popular sentiment, and on receiving the insignia of their office, were
+harangued before the assembled people by the most learned secretary of
+state.[549] It seems that beneath or close to the Loggia dei Lanzi--the
+porch where the government was wont to appear solemnly before the
+people--a tribune or platform (_rostra ringhiera_) was erected for such
+purposes.
+
+Anniversaries, especially those of the death of princes, were commonly
+celebrated by memorial speeches. Even the funeral oration strictly
+so-called was generally entrusted to a humanist, who delivered it in
+church, clothed in a secular dress; nor was it only princes, but
+officials, or persons otherwise distinguished, to whom this honour was
+paid.[550] This was also the case with the speeches delivered at
+weddings or betrothals, with the difference that they seem to have been
+made in the palace, instead of in church, like that of Filelfo at the
+betrothal of Anna Sforza with Alfonso of Este in the castle of Milan. It
+is still possible that the ceremony may have taken place in the chapel
+of the castle. Private families of distinction no doubt also employed
+such wedding orators as one of the luxuries of high life. At Ferrara,
+Guarino was requested on these occasions to send some one or other of
+his pupils.[551] The church simply took charge of the religious
+ceremonies at weddings and funerals.
+
+The academical speeches, both those made at the installation of a new
+teacher and at the opening of a new course of lectures,[552] were
+delivered by the professor himself, and treated as occasions of great
+rhetorical display. The ordinary university lectures also usually had an
+oratorical character.[553]
+
+With regard to forensic eloquence, the quality of the audience
+determined the form of speech. In case of need it was enriched with all
+sorts of philosophical and antiquarian learning.
+
+As a special class of speeches we may mention the addresses made in
+Italian on the battle-field, either before or after the combat.
+Frederick of Urbino[554] was esteemed a classic in this style; he used
+to pass round among his squadrons as they stood drawn up in order of
+battle, inspiring them in turn with pride and enthusiasm. Many of the
+speeches in the military historians of the fifteenth century, as for
+instance in Porcellius (p. 99), may be, in fact at least, imaginary, but
+may be also in part faithful representations of words actually spoken.
+The addresses again which were delivered to the Florentine Militia,[555]
+organised in 1506 chiefly through the influence of Macchiavelli, and
+which were spoken first at reviews, and afterwards at special annual
+festivals, were of another kind. They were simply general appeals to the
+patriotism of the hearers, and were addressed to the assembled troops in
+the church of each quarter of the city by a citizen in armour, sword in
+hand.
+
+Finally, the oratory of the pulpit began in the fifteenth century to
+lose its distinctive peculiarities. Many of the clergy had entered into
+the circle of classical culture, and were ambitious of success in it.
+The street-preacher Bernardino da Siena, who even in his lifetime passed
+for a saint and who was worshipped by the populace, was not above taking
+lessons in rhetoric from the famous Guarino, although he had only to
+preach in Italian. Never indeed was more expected from preachers than at
+that time--especially from the Lenten preachers; and there were not a
+few audiences which could not only tolerate, but which demanded a strong
+dose of philosophy from the pulpit.[556] But we have here especially to
+speak of the distinguished occasional preachers in Latin. Many of their
+opportunities had been taken away from them, as has been observed, by
+learned laymen. Speeches on particular saints' days, at weddings and
+funerals, or at the installation of a bishop, and even the introductory
+speech at the first mass of a clerical friend, or the address at the
+festival of some religious order, were all left to laymen.[557] But at
+all events at the Papal court in the fifteenth century, whatever the
+occasion might be, the preachers were generally monks. Under Sixtus IV.,
+Giacomo da Volterra regularly enumerates these preachers, and criticises
+them according to the rules of the art.[558] Fedra Inghirami, famous as
+an orator under Julius II., had at least received holy orders and was
+canon at St. John Lateran; and besides him, elegant Latinists were now
+common enough among the prelates. In this matter, as in others, the
+exaggerated privileges of the profane humanists appear lessened in the
+sixteenth century--on which point we shall presently speak more fully.
+
+What now was the subject and general character of these speeches? The
+national gift of eloquence was not wanting to the Italians of the Middle
+Ages, and a so-called 'rhetoric' belonged from the first to the seven
+liberal arts; but so far as the revival of the ancient methods is
+concerned, this merit must be ascribed, according to Filippo
+Villani,[559] to the Florentine Bruno Casini, who died of the plague in
+1348. With the practical purpose of fitting his countrymen to speak with
+ease and effect in public, he treated, after the pattern of the
+ancients, invention, declamation, bearing, and gesticulation, each in
+its proper connection. Elsewhere too we read of an oratorical training
+directed solely to practical application. No accomplishment was more
+highly esteemed than the power of elegant improvisation in Latin.[560]
+The growing study of Cicero's speeches and theoretical writings, of
+Quintilian and of the imperial panegyrists, the appearance of new and
+original treatises,[561] the general progress of antiquarian learning,
+and the stores of ancient matter and thought which now could and must
+be drawn from--all combined to shape the character of the new eloquence.
+
+This character nevertheless differed widely according to the individual.
+Many speeches breathe a spirit of true eloquence, especially those which
+keep to the matter treated of; of this kind is the mass of what is left
+to us of Pius II. The miraculous effects produced by Giannozzo
+Manetti[562] point to an orator the like of whom has not been often
+seen. His great audiences as envoy before Nicholas V. and before the
+Doge and Council of Venice were events not to be soon forgotten. Many
+orators, on the contrary, would seize the opportunity, not only to
+flatter the vanity of distinguished hearers, but to load their speeches
+with an enormous mass of antiquarian rubbish. How it was possible to
+endure this infliction for two and even three hours, can only be
+understood when we take into account the intense interest then felt in
+everything connected with antiquity, and the rarity and defectiveness of
+treatises on the subject at a time when printing was but little
+diffused. Such orations had at least the value which we have claimed (p.
+232) for many of Petrarch's letters. But some speakers went too far.
+Most of Filelfo's speeches are an atrocious patchwork of classical and
+biblical quotations, tacked on to a string of commonplaces, among which
+the great people he wishes to flatter are arranged under the head of the
+cardinal virtues, or some such category, and it is only with the
+greatest trouble, in his case and in that of many others, that we can
+extricate the few historical notices of value which they really contain.
+The speech, for instance, of a scholar and professor of Piacenza at the
+reception of the Duke Galeazzo Maria, in 1467, begins with Julius C�sar,
+then proceeds to mix up a mass of classical quotations with a number
+from an allegorical work by the speaker himself, and concludes with
+some exceedingly indiscreet advice to the ruler.[563] Fortunately it was
+late at night, and the orator had to be satisfied with handing his
+written panegyric to the prince. Filelfo begins a speech at a betrothal
+with the words: 'Aristotle, the peripatetic.' Others start with P.
+Cornelius Scipio, and the like, as though neither they nor their hearers
+could wait a moment for a quotation. At the end of the fifteenth century
+public taste suddenly improved, chiefly through Florentine influence,
+and the practice of quotation was restricted within due limits. Many
+works of reference were now in existence, in which the first comer could
+find as much as he wanted of what had hitherto been the admiration of
+princes and people.
+
+As most of the speeches were written out beforehand in the study, the
+manuscripts served as a means of further publicity afterwards. The great
+extemporaneous speakers, on the other hand, were attended by shorthand
+writers.[564] We must further remember, that all the orations which have
+come down to us were not intended to be actually delivered. The
+panegyric, for example, of the elder Beroaldus on Ludovico Moro was
+presented to him in manuscript.[565] In fact, just as letters were
+written addressed to all conceivable persons and parts of the world as
+exercises, as formularies, or even to serve a controversial end, so
+there were speeches for imaginary occasions[566] to be used as models
+for the reception of princes, bishops, and other dignitaries.
+
+For oratory, as for the other arts, the death of Leo X. (1521) and the
+sack of Rome (1527) mark the epoch of decadence. Giovio,[567] but just
+escaped from the desolation of the eternal city, describes, not
+exhaustively, but on the whole truly, the causes of this decline.
+
+'The plays of Plautus and Terence, once a school of Latin style for the
+educated Romans, are banished to make room for Italian comedies.
+Graceful speakers no longer find the recognition and reward which they
+once did. The Consistorial advocates no longer prepare anything but the
+introductions to their speeches, and deliver the rest--a confused
+muddle--on the inspiration of the moment. Sermons and occasional
+speeches have sunk to the same level. If a funeral oration is wanted for
+a cardinal or other great personage, the executors do not apply to the
+best orators in the city, to whom they would have to pay a hundred
+pieces of gold, but they hire for a trifle the first impudent pedant
+whom they come across, and who only wants to be talked of whether for
+good or ill. The dead, they say, is none the wiser if an ape stands in a
+black dress in the pulpit, and beginning with a hoarse, whimpering
+mumble, passes little by little into a loud howling. Even the sermons
+preached at great papal ceremonies are no longer profitable, as they
+used to be. Monks of all orders have again got them into their hands,
+and preach as if they were speaking to the mob. Only a few years ago a
+sermon at mass before the Pope, might easily lead the way to a
+bishopric.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+LATIN TREATISES AND HISTORY.
+
+
+From the oratory and the epistolary writings of the humanists, we shall
+here pass on to their other creations, which were all, to a greater or
+less extent, reproductions of antiquity.
+
+Among these must be placed the treatise, which often took the shape of a
+dialogue.[568] In this case it was borrowed directly from Cicero. In
+order to do anything like justice to this class of literature--in order
+not to throw it aside at first sight as a bore--two things must be taken
+into consideration. The century which escaped from the influence of the
+Middle Ages felt the need of something to mediate between itself and
+antiquity in many questions of morals and philosophy; and this need was
+met by the writer of treatises and dialogues. Much which appears to us
+as mere commonplace in their writings, was for them and their
+contemporaries a new and hardly-won view of things upon which mankind
+had been silent since the days of antiquity. The language too, in this
+form of writing, whether Italian or Latin, moved more freely and
+flexibly than in historical narrative, in letters, or in oratory, and
+thus became in itself the source of a special pleasure. Several Italian
+compositions of this kind still hold their place as patterns of style.
+Many of these works have been, or will be mentioned on account of their
+contents; we here refer to them as a class. From the time of Petrarch's
+letters and treatises down to near the end of the fifteenth century, the
+heaping up of learned quotations, as in the case of the orators, is the
+main business oi most of these writers. The whole style, especially in
+Italian, was then suddenly clarified, till, in the 'Asolani,' of Bembo,
+and the 'Vita Sobria,' of Luigi Cornaro,[569] a classical perfection was
+reached. Here too the decisive fact was, that antiquarian matter of
+every kind had meantime begun to be deposited in encyclop�dic works (now
+printed), and no longer stood in the way of the essayist.
+
+It was inevitable too that the humanistic spirit should control the
+writing of history. A superficial comparison of the histories of this
+period with the earlier chronicles, especially with works so full of
+life, colour, and brilliancy as those of the Villani, will lead us
+loudly to deplore the change. How insipid and conventional appear by
+their side the best of the humanists, and particularly their immediate
+and most famous successors among the historians of Florence, Lionardo
+Aretino and Poggio![570] The enjoyment of the reader is incessantly
+marred by the sense that, in the classical phrases of Facius,
+Sabellicus, Folieta, Senarega, Platina in the chronicles of Mantua,
+Bembo in the annals of Venice, and even of Giovio in his histories, the
+best local and individual colouring and the full sincerity of interest
+in the truth of events have been lost. Our mistrust is increased when we
+hear that Livy, the pattern of this school of writers, was copied just
+where he is least worthy of imitation--on the ground, namely,[571] 'that
+he turned a dry and naked tradition into grace and richness.' In the
+same place we meet with the suspicious declaration, that it is the
+function of the historian--just as if he were one with the poet--to
+excite, charm, or overwhelm the reader. We must further remember that
+many humanistic historians knew but little of what happened outside
+their own sphere, and this little they were often compelled to adapt to
+the taste of their patrons and employers. We ask ourselves finally,
+whether the contempt for modern things, which these same humanists
+sometimes avowed openly[572] must not necessarily have had an
+unfortunate influence on their treatment of them. Unconsciously the
+reader finds himself looking with more interest and confidence on the
+unpretending Latin and Italian annalists, like those of Bologna and
+Ferrara, who remained true to the old style, and still more grateful
+does he feel to the best of the genuine chroniclers who wrote in
+Italian--to Marin Sanudo, Corio, and Infessura--who were followed at the
+beginning of the sixteenth century by that new and illustrious band of
+great national historians who wrote in their mother tongue.
+
+Contemporary history, no doubt, was written far better in the language
+of the day than when forced into Latin. Whether Italian was also more
+suitable for the narrative of events long past, or for historical
+research, is a question which admits, for that period, of more answers
+than one. Latin was, at that time, the 'Lingua franca' of instructed
+people, not only in an international sense, as a means of intercourse
+between Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians, but also in an
+interprovincial sense. The Lombard, the Venetian, and the Neapolitan
+modes of writing, though long modelled on the Tuscan, and bearing but
+slight traces of the dialect, were still not recognised by the
+Florentines. This was of less consequence in local contemporary
+histories, which were sure of readers at the place where they were
+written, than in the narratives of the past, for which a larger public
+was desired. In these the local interests of the people had to be
+sacrificed to the general interests of the learned. How far would the
+influence of a man like Blondus of Forli have reached if he had written
+his great monuments of learning in the dialect of the Romagna? They
+would have assuredly sunk into neglect, if only through the contempt of
+the Florentines, while written in Latin they exercised the profoundest
+influence on the whole European world of learning. And even the
+Florentines in the fifteenth century wrote Latin, not only because their
+minds were imbued with humanism, but in order to be more widely read.
+
+Finally, there exist certain Latin essays in contemporary history, which
+stand on a level with the best Italian works of the kind. When the
+continuous narrative after the manner of Livy--that Procrustean bed of
+so many writers--is abandoned, the change is marvellous. The same
+Platina and Giovio, whose great histories we only read because and so
+far as we must, suddenly come forward as masters in the biographical
+style. We have already spoken of Tristan Caracciolo, of the biographical
+works of Facius and of the Venetian topography of Sabellico, and others
+will be mentioned in the sequel. Historical composition, like letters
+and oratory, soon had its theory. Following the example of Cicero, it
+proclaims with pride the worth and dignity of history, boldly claims
+Moses and the Evangelists as simple historians, and concludes with
+earnest exhortations to strict impartiality and love of truth.[573]
+
+The Latin treatises on past history were naturally concerned, for the
+most part, with classical antiquity. What we are more surprised to find
+among these humanists are some considerable works on the history of the
+Middle Ages. The first of this kind was the chronicle of Matteo Palmieri
+(449-1449), beginning where Prosper Aquitanus ceases, the style of which
+was certainly an offence to later critics like Paolo Cortese. On opening
+the 'Decades' of Blondus of Forli, we are surprised to find a universal
+history, 'ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii,' as in Gibbon, full of
+original studies on the authors of each century, and occupied, through
+the first 300 folio pages, with early medi�val history down to the death
+of Frederick II. And this when in Northern countries nothing more was
+wanted than chronicles of the popes and emperors, and the 'Fasciculus
+temporum.' We cannot here stay to show what writings Blondus made use
+of, and where he found his materials, though this justice will some day
+be done to him by the historians of literature. This book alone would
+entitle us to say that it was the study of antiquity which made the
+study of the Middle Ages possible, by first training the mind to habits
+of impartial historical criticism. To this must be added, that the
+Middle Ages were now over for Italy, and that the Italian mind could the
+better appreciate them, because it stood outside them. It cannot,
+nevertheless, be said that it at once judged them fairly, and still less
+that it judged them with piety. In art a fixed prejudice showed itself
+against all that those centuries had created, and the humanists date the
+new era from the time of their own appearance. 'I begin,' says
+Boccaccio,[574] 'to hope and believe that God has had mercy on the
+Italian name, since I see that His infinite goodness puts souls into the
+breasts of the Italians like those of the ancients--souls which seek
+fame by other means than robbery and violence, but rather, on the path
+of poetry, which makes men immortal.' But this narrow and unjust temper
+did not preclude investigation in the minds of the more gifted men, at a
+time, too, when elsewhere in Europe any such investigation would have
+been out of the question. A historical criticism[575] of the Middle Ages
+was practicable, just because the rational treatment of all subjects by
+the humanists had trained the historical spirit. In the fifteenth
+century this spirit had so far penetrated the history even of the
+individual cities of Italy, that the stupid fairy tales about the origin
+of Florence, Venice, and Milan vanished, while at the same time, and
+long after, the chronicles of the North were stuffed with this fantastic
+rubbish, destitute for the most part of all poetical value, and invented
+as late as the fourteenth century.
+
+The close connection between local history and the sentiment of glory
+has already been touched on in reference to Florence (part i. chap.
+vii.). Venice would not be behind-hand. Just as a great rhetorical
+triumph of the Florentines[576] would cause a Venetian embassy to write
+home post-haste for an orator to be sent after them, so too the
+Venetians felt the need of a history which would bear comparison with
+those of Lionardo Aretino and Poggio. And it was to satisfy this
+feeling that, in the fifteenth century, after negotiations with Giovanni
+Maria Filelfo and others had failed, the 'Decades' of Sabellico
+appeared, and in the sixteenth the 'Historia rerum Venetarum' of Pietro
+Bembo, both written at the express charge of the republic, the latter a
+continuation of the former.
+
+The great Florentine historians at the beginning of the sixteenth
+century (pp. 81 sqq.) were men of a wholly different kind from the
+Latinists Bembo and Giovio. They wrote Italian, not only because they
+could not vie with the Ciceronian elegance of the philologists, but
+because, like Macchiavelli, they could only record in a living tongue
+the living results of their own immediate observations--and we may add
+in the case of Macchiavelli, of his observation of the past--and
+because, as in the case of Guicciardini, Varchi, and many others, what
+they most desired was, that their view of the course of events should
+have as wide and deep a practical effect as possible. Even when they
+only write for a few friends, like Francesco Vettori, they feel an
+inward need to utter their testimony on men and events, and to explain
+and justify their share in the latter.
+
+And yet, with all that is characteristic in their language and style,
+they were powerfully affected by antiquity, and, without its influence,
+would be inconceivable. They were not humanists, but they had passed
+through the school of humanism, and they have in them more of the spirit
+of the ancient historians than most of the imitators of Livy. Like the
+ancients, they were citizens who wrote for citizens.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+GENERAL LATINISATION OF CULTURE.
+
+
+We cannot attempt to trace the influence of humanism in the special
+sciences. Each has its own history, in which the Italian investigators
+of this period, chiefly through their rediscovery of the results
+attained by antiquity,[577] mark a new epoch, with which the modern
+period of the science in question begins with more or less distinctness.
+With regard to philosophy, too, we must refer the reader to the special
+historical works on the subject. The influence of the old philosophers
+on Italian culture will appear at times immense, at times
+inconsiderable; the former, when we consider how the doctrines of
+Aristotle, chiefly drawn from the Ethics[578] and Politics--both widely
+diffused at an early period--became the common property of educated
+Italians, and how the whole method of abstract thought was governed by
+him;[579] the latter, when we remember how slight was the dogmatic
+influence of the old philosophies, and even of the enthusiastic
+Florentine Platonists, on the spirit of the people at large. What looks
+like such an influence is generally no more than a consequence of the
+new culture in general, and of the special growth and development of the
+Italian mind. When we come to speak of religion, we shall have more to
+say on this head. But in by far the greater number of cases, we have to
+do, not with the general culture of the people, but with the utterances
+of individuals or of learned circles; and here, too, a distinction must
+be drawn between the true assimilation of ancient doctrines and
+fashionable make-believe. For with many antiquity was only a fashion,
+even among very learned people.
+
+Nevertheless, all that looks like affectation to our age, need not then
+have been actually so. The giving of Greek and Latin names to children,
+for example, is better and more respectable than the present practice of
+taking them, especially the female names, from novels. When the
+enthusiasm for the ancient world was greater than for the saints, it was
+simple and natural enough that noble families called their sons
+Agamemnon, Tydeus, and Achilles,[580] and that a painter named his son
+Apelles and his daughter Minerva.[581] Nor will it appear unreasonable
+that, instead of a family name, which people were often glad to get rid
+of, a well-sounding ancient name was chosen. A local name, shared by all
+residents in the place, and not yet transformed into a family name, was
+willingly given up, especially when its religious associations made it
+inconvenient; Filippo da San Gemignano called himself Callimachus. The
+man, misunderstood and insulted by his family, who made his fortune as a
+scholar in foreign cities, could afford, even if he were a Sanseverino,
+to change his name to Julius Pomponius Laetus. Even the simple
+translation of a name into Latin or Greek, as was almost uniformly the
+custom in Germany, may be excused to a generation which spoke and wrote
+Latin, and which needed names that could be not only declined, but used
+with facility in verse and prose. What was blameworthy and ridiculous
+was, the change of half a name, baptismal or family, to give it a
+classical sound and a new sense. Thus Giovanni was turned into Jovianus
+or Janus, Pietro to Petreius or Pierius, Antonio to Aonius, Sannazzaro
+to Syncerus, Luca Grasso to Lucius Crassus. Ariosto, who speaks with
+such derision of all this,[582] lived to see children called after his
+own heroes and heroines.[583]
+
+Nor must we judge too severely the Latinisation of many usages of social
+life, such as the titles of officials, of ceremonies, and the like, in
+the writers of the period. As long as people were satisfied with a
+simple, fluent Latin style, as was the case with most writers from
+Petrarch to �neas Sylvius, this practice was not so frequent and
+striking; it became inevitable when a faultless, Ciceronian Latin was
+demanded. Modern names and things no longer harmonised with the style,
+unless they were first artificially changed. Pedants found a pleasure in
+addressing municipal counsellors as 'Patres Conscripti,' nuns as
+'Virgines Vestales,' and entitling every saint 'Divus' or 'Deus;' but
+men of better taste, such as Paolo Giovio, only did so when and because
+they could not help it. But as Giovio does it naturally, and lays no
+special stress upon it, we are not offended if, in his melodious
+language, the cardinals appear as 'Senatores,' their dean as 'Princeps
+Senatus,' excommunication as 'Dirae,'[584] and the carnival as
+'Lupercalia.' This example of this author alone is enough to warn us
+against drawing a hasty inference from these peculiarities of style as
+to the writer's whole mode of thinking.
+
+The history of Latin composition cannot here be traced in detail. For
+fully two centuries the humanists acted as if Latin were, and must
+remain, the only language worthy to be written. Poggio[585] deplores
+that Dante wrote his great poem in Italian; and Dante, as is well known,
+actually made the attempt in Latin, and wrote the beginning of the
+'Inferno' first in hexameters. The whole future of Italian poetry hung
+on his not continuing in the same style,[586] but even Petrarch relied
+more on his Latin poetry than on the Sonnets and 'Canzoni,' and Ariosto
+himself was desired by some to write his poem in Latin. A stronger
+coercion never existed in literature;[587] but poetry shook it off for
+the most part, and it may be said, without the risk of too great
+optimism, that it was well for Italian poetry to have had both means of
+expressing itself. In both something great and characteristic was
+achieved, and in each we can see the reason why Latin or Italian was
+chosen. Perhaps the same may be said of prose. The position and
+influence of Italian culture throughout the world depended on the fact
+that certain subjects were treated in Latin[588]--'urbi et orbi'--while
+Italian prose was written best of all by those to whom it cost an inward
+struggle not to write in Latin.
+
+From the fourteenth century Cicero was recognised universally as the
+purest model of prose. This was by no means due solely to a
+dispassionate opinion in favour of his choice of language, of the
+structure of his sentences, and of his style of composition, but rather
+to the fact that the Italian spirit responded fully and instinctively to
+the amiability of the letter-writer, to the brilliancy of the orator,
+and to the lucid exposition of the philosophical thinker. Even Petrarch
+recognised clearly the weakness of Cicero as a man and a statesman,[589]
+though he respected him too much to rejoice over them. After Petrarch's
+time, the epistolary style was formed entirely on the pattern of Cicero;
+and the rest, with the exception of the narrative style, followed the
+same influence. Yet the true Ciceronianism, which rejected every phrase
+which could not be justified out of the great authority, did not appear
+till the end of the fifteenth century, when the grammatical writings of
+Lorenzo Valla had begun to tell on all Italy, and when the opinions of
+the Roman historians of literature had been sifted and compared.[590]
+Then every shade of difference in the style of the ancients was studied
+with closer and closer attention, till the consoling conclusion was at
+last reached, that in Cicero alone was the perfect model to be found,
+or, if all forms of literature were to be embraced, in 'that immortal
+and almost heavenly age of Cicero.'[591] Men like Pietro Bembo and
+Pierio Valeriano now turned all their energies to this one object. Even
+those who had long resisted the tendency, and had formed for themselves
+an archaic style from the earlier authors,[592] yielded at last, and
+joined in the worship of Cicero. Longolius, at Bembo's advice,
+determined to read nothing but Cicero for five years long, and finally
+took an oath to use no word which did not occur in this author. It was
+this temper which broke out at last in the great war among the scholars,
+in which Erasmus and the elder Scaliger led the battle.
+
+For all the admirers of Cicero were by no means so one-sided as to
+consider him the only source of language. In the fifteenth century,
+Politian and Ermolao Barbaro made a conscious and deliberate effort to
+form a style of their own,[593] naturally on the basis of their
+'overflowing' learning, though they failed to inspire their pupils with
+a similar desire for independence; and our informant of this fact, Paolo
+Giovio, pursued the same end. He first attempted, not always
+successfully, but often with remarkable power and elegance, and at no
+small cost of effort, to reproduce in Latin a number of modern,
+particularly of �sthetic, ideas. His Latin characteristics of the great
+painters and sculptors of his time contain a mixture of the most
+intelligent and of the most blundering interpretation.[594] Even Leo X.,
+who placed his glory in the fact, 'ut lingua latina nostra pontificatu
+dicatur factu auctior,'[595] was inclined to a liberal and not too
+exclusive Latinity, which, indeed, was in harmony with his
+pleasure-loving nature. He was satisfied when the Latin which he had to
+read and hear was lively, elegant, and idiomatic. Then, too, Cicero
+offered no model for Latin conversation, so that here other gods had to
+be worshipped beside him. The want was supplied by representations of
+the comedies of Plautus and Terence, frequent both in and out of Rome,
+which for the actors were an incomparable exercise in Latin as the
+language of daily life. The impulse to the study of the old Latin
+comedies and to modern imitations of them was given by the discovery of
+plays by Plautus in the 'Cod. Ursinianus,' which was brought to Rome in
+1428 or 1429. A few years later, in the pontificate of Paul II., the
+learned Cardinal of Teano[596] (probably Niccol� Forteguerra of Pistoja)
+became famous for his critical labours in this branch of scholarship. He
+set to work upon the most defective plays of Plautus, which were
+destitute even of the list of the characters, and went carefully through
+the whole remains of this author, chiefly with an eye to the language.
+Possibly it was he who gave the first impulse for the public
+representations of these plays. Afterwards Pomponius Laetus took up the
+same subject, and acted as manager when Plautus was put on the stage in
+the houses of great churchmen.[597] That these representations became
+less common after 1520, is mentioned by Giovio, as we have seen (p.
+242), among the causes of the decline of eloquence.
+
+We may mention, in conclusion, the analogy between Ciceronianism in
+literature and the revival of Vitruvius by the architects in the sphere
+of art.[598] And here, too, the law holds good which prevails elsewhere
+in the history of the Renaissance, that each artistic movement is
+preceded by a corresponding movement in the general culture of the age.
+In this case, the interval is not more than about twenty years, if we
+reckon from Cardinal Hadrian of Corneto (1505?) to the first avowed
+Vitruvians.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MODERN LATIN POETRY.
+
+
+The chief pride of the humanists is, however, their modern Latin poetry.
+It lies within the limits of our task to treat of it, at least in so far
+as it serves to characterise the humanistic movement.
+
+How favourable public opinion was to that form of poetry, and how nearly
+it supplanted all others, has been already shown (p. 252). We may be
+very sure that the most gifted and highly developed nation then existing
+in the world did not renounce the use of a language such as the Italian
+out of mere folly and without knowing what they were doing. It must have
+been a weighty reason which led them to do so.
+
+This cause was the devotion to antiquity. Like all ardent and genuine
+devotion it necessarily prompted men to imitation. At other times and
+among other nations we find many isolated attempts of the same kind. But
+only in Italy were the two chief conditions present which were needful
+for the continuance and development of neo-Latin poetry: a general
+interest in the subject among the instructed classes, and a partial
+reawakening of the old Italian genius among the poets themselves--the
+wondrous echo of a far-off strain. The best of what is produced under
+these conditions is not imitation, but free production. If we decline to
+tolerate any borrowed forms in art, if we either set no value on
+antiquity at all, or attribute to it some magical and unapproachable
+virtue, or if we will pardon no slips in poets who were forced, for
+instance, to guess or to discover a multitude of syllabic quantities,
+then we had better let this class of literature alone. Its best works
+were not created in order to defy criticism, but to give pleasure to the
+poet and to thousands of his contemporaries.[599]
+
+The least success of all was attained by the epic narratives drawn from
+the history or legends of antiquity. The essential conditions of a
+living epic poetry were denied, not only to the Romans who now served as
+models, but even to the Greeks after Homer. They could not be looked for
+among the Latins of the Renaissance. And yet the 'Africa' of
+Petrarch[600] probably found as many and as enthusiastic readers and
+hearers as any epos of modern times. The purpose and origin of the poem
+are not without interest. The fourteenth century recognised with sound
+historical tact the time of the second Punic war as the noon-day of
+Roman greatness; and Petrarch could not resist writing of this time. Had
+Silius Italicus been then discovered, Petrarch would probably have
+chosen another subject; but, as it was, the glorification of Scipio
+Africanus the Elder was so much in accordance with the spirit of the
+fourteenth century, that another poet, Zanobi di Strada, also proposed
+to himself the same task, and only from respect for Petrarch withdrew
+the poem with which he had already made great progress.[601] If any
+justification were needed for the 'Africa,' it lies in the fact that in
+Petrarch's time and afterwards Scipio was as much an object of public
+interest as if he were then alive, and that he was held by many to be a
+greater man than Alexander, Pompey, and C�sar.[602] How many modern
+epics treat of a subject at once so popular, so historical in its basis,
+and so striking to the imagination? For us, it is true, the poem is
+unreadable. For other themes of the same kind the reader may be referred
+to the histories of literature.
+
+A richer and more fruitful vein was discovered in expanding and
+completing the Greco-Roman mythology. In this too Italian poetry began
+early to take a part, beginning with the 'Teseide' of Boccaccio, which
+passes for his best poetical work. Under Martin V. Maffeo Vegio wrote in
+Latin a thirteenth book to the �neid; besides which we meet with many
+less considerable attempts, especially in the style of Claudian--a
+'Meleagris,' a 'Hesperis,' and so forth. Still more curious were the
+newly-invented myths, which peopled the fairest regions of Italy with a
+prim�val race of gods, nymphs, genii, and even shepherds, the epic and
+bucolic styles here passing into one another. In the narrative or
+conversational eclogue after the time of Petrarch, pastoral life was
+treated in a purely conventional manner,[603] as a vehicle of all
+possible feelings and fancies; and this point will be touched on again
+in the sequel. For the moment, we have only to do with the new myths. In
+them, more clearly than anywhere else, we see the double significance of
+the old gods to the men of the Renaissance. On the one hand, they
+replace abstract terms in poetry, and render allegorical figures
+superfluous; and, on the other, they serve as free and independent
+elements in art, as forms of beauty which can be turned to some account
+in any and every poem. The example was boldly set by Boccaccio, with his
+fanciful world of gods and shepherds who people the country round
+Florence in his 'Ninfale d'Ameto' and 'Ninfale Fiesolano.' Both these
+poems were written in Italian. But the masterpiece in this style was the
+'Sarca' of Pietro Bembo,[604] which tells how the rivergod of that name
+wooed the nymph Garda; of the brilliant marriage feast in a cave of
+Monte Baldo; of the prophecies of Manto, daughter of Tiresias; of the
+birth of the child Mincius; of the founding of Mantua; and of the future
+glory of Virgil, son of Mincius and of Maia, nymph of Andes. This
+humanistic rococo is set forth by Bembo in verses of great beauty,
+concluding with an address to Virgil, which any poet might envy him.
+Such works are often slighted as mere declamation. This is a matter of
+taste on which we are all free to form our own opinion.
+
+Further, we find long epic poems in hexameters on biblical or
+ecclesiastical subjects. The authors were by no means always in search
+of preferment or of papal favour. With the best of them, and even with
+less gifted writers, like Battista Mantovano, the author of the
+'Parthenice,' there was probably an honest desire to serve religion by
+their Latin verses--a desire with which their half-pagan conception of
+Catholicism harmonised well enough. Gyraldus goes through a list of
+these poets, among whom Vida, with his 'Christiad' and Sannazaro, with
+his three books, 'De partu Virginis,'[605] hold the first place.
+Sannazaro (b. 1458, d. 1530) is impressive by the steady and powerful
+flow of his verse, in which Christian and pagan elements are mingled
+without scruple, by the plastic vigour of his description, and by the
+perfection of his workmanship. He could venture to introduce Virgil's
+fourth eclogue into his song of the shepherds at the manger (III. 200
+sqq.) without fearing a comparison. In treating of the unseen world, he
+sometimes gives proofs of a boldness worthy of Dante, as when King David
+in the Limbo of the Patriarchs rises up to sing and prophesy (I. 236
+sqq.), or when the Eternal, sitting on the throne clad in a mantle
+shining with pictures of all the elements, addresses the heavenly host
+(III. 17 sqq). At other times he does not hesitate to weave the whole
+classical mythology into his subject, yet without spoiling the harmony
+of the whole, since the pagan deities are only accessory figures, and
+play no important part in the story. To appreciate the artistic genius
+of that age in all its bearings, we must not refuse to notice such works
+as these. The merit of Sannazaro will appear the greater, when we
+consider that the mixture of Christian and pagan elements is apt to
+disturb us much more in poetry than in the plastic arts. The latter can
+still satisfy the eye by beauty of form and colour, and in general are
+much more independent of the significance of the subject than poetry.
+With them, the imagination is interested chiefly in the form, with
+poetry, in the matter. Honest Battista Mantovano in his calendar of the
+festivals,[606] tried another expedient. Instead of making the gods and
+demigods serve the purposes of sacred history, he put them, as the
+Fathers of the Church did, in active opposition to it. When the angel
+Gabriel salutes the Virgin at Nazareth, Mercury flies after him from
+Carmel, and listens at the door. He then announces the result of his
+eavesdropping to the assembled gods, and stimulates them thereby to
+desperate resolutions. Elsewhere,[607] it is true, in his writings,
+Thetis, Ceres, �olus, and other pagan deities pay willing homage to the
+glory of the Madonna.
+
+The fame of Sannazaro, the number of his imitators, the enthusiastic
+homage which was paid to him by the greatest men--by Bembo, who wrote
+his epitaph, and by Titian, who painted his portrait--all show how dear
+and necessary he was to his age. On the threshold of the Reformation he
+solved for the Church the problem, whether it were possible for a poet
+to be a Christian as well as a classic; and both Leo and Clement were
+loud in their thanks for his achievements.
+
+And, finally, contemporary history was now treated in hexameters or
+distichs, sometimes in a narrative and sometimes in a panegyrical style,
+but most commonly to the honour of some prince or princely family. We
+thus meet with a Sforziad,[608] a Borseid, a Laurentiad, a Borgiad (see
+p. 223), a Triulziad, and the like. The object sought after was
+certainly not attained; for those who became famous and are now immortal
+owe it to anything rather than to this sort of poems, to which the world
+has always had an ineradicable dislike, even when they happen to be
+written by good poets. A wholly different effect is produced by smaller,
+simpler and more unpretentious scenes from the lives of distinguished
+men, such as the beautiful poem on Leo X.'s 'Hunt at Palo,'[609] or the
+'Journey of Julius II.' by Hadrian of Corneto (p. 119). Brilliant
+descriptions of hunting-parties are found in Ercole Strozza, in the
+above-mentioned Hadrian, and in others; and it is a pity that the modern
+reader should allow himself to be irritated or repelled by the adulation
+with which they are doubtless filled. The masterly treatment and the
+considerable historical value of many of these most graceful poems,
+guarantee to them a longer existence than many popular works of our own
+day are likely to attain.
+
+In general, these poems are good in proportion to the sparing use of the
+sentimental and the general. Some of the smaller epic poems, even of
+recognised masters, unintentionally produce, by the ill-timed
+introduction of mythological elements, an impression that is
+indescribably ludicrous. Such, for instance, is the lament of Ercole
+Strozza[610] on C�sar Borgia. We there listen to the complaint of Rome,
+who had set all her hopes on the Spanish Popes Calixtus III. and
+Alexander VI., and who saw her promised deliverer in C�sar. His history
+is related down to the catastrophe of 1503. The poet then asks the Muse
+what were the counsels of the gods at that moment,[611] and Crato tells
+how, upon Olympus, Pallas took the part of the Spaniards, Venus of the
+Italians, how both then embrace the knees of Jupiter, how thereupon he
+kisses them, soothes them, and explains to them that he can do nothing
+against the fate woven by the Parc�, but that the divine promises will
+be fulfilled by the child of the House of Este-Borgia.[612] After
+relating the fabulous origin of both families, he declares that he can
+confer immortality on C�sar as little as he could once, in spite of all
+entreaties, on Memnon or Achilles; and concludes with the consoling
+assurance that C�sar, before his own death, will destroy many people in
+war. Mars then hastens to Naples to stir up war and confusion, while
+Pallas goes to Nepi, and there appears to the dying C�sar under the form
+of Alexander VI. After giving him the good advice to submit to his fate
+and be satisfied with the glory of his name, the papal goddess vanishes
+'like a bird.'
+
+Yet we should needlessly deprive ourselves of an enjoyment, which is
+sometimes very great, if we threw aside everything in which classical
+mythology plays a more or less appropriate part. Here, as in painting
+and sculpture, art has often ennobled what is in itself purely
+conventional. The beginnings of parody are also to be found by lovers of
+that class of literature (pp. 159 sqq.) _e.g._ in the Macaroneid--to
+which the comic Feast of the Gods, by Giovanni Bellini, forms an early
+parallel.
+
+Many, too, of the narrative poems in hexameters are merely exercises, or
+adaptations of histories in prose, which latter the reader will prefer,
+where he can find them. At last, everything--every quarrel and every
+ceremony--came to be put into verse, and this even by the German
+humanists of the Reformation.[613] And yet it would be unfair to
+attribute this to mere want of occupation, or to an excessive facility
+in stringing verses together. In Italy, at all events, it was rather due
+to an abundant sense of style, as is further proved by the mass of
+contemporary reports, histories, and even pamphlets, in the 'terza
+rima.' Just as Niccol� da Uzzano published his scheme for a new
+constitution, Macchiavelli his view of the history of his own time, a
+third, the life of Savonarola, and a fourth, the siege of Piombino by
+Alfonso the Great,[614] in this difficult metre, in order to produce a
+stronger effect, so did many others feel the need of hexameters, in
+order to win their special public. What was then tolerated and demanded,
+in this shape, is best shown by the didactic poetry of the time. Its
+popularity in the fifteenth century is something astounding. The most
+distinguished humanists were ready to celebrate in Latin hexameters the
+most commonplace, ridiculous, or disgusting themes, such as the making
+of gold, the game of chess, the management of silkworms, astrology, and
+venereal diseases (_morbus gallicus_), to say nothing of many long
+Italian poems of the same kind. Nowadays this class of poems is
+condemned unread, and how far, as a matter of fact, they are really
+worth the reading, we are unable to say.[615] One thing is certain, that
+epochs far above our own in the sense of beauty--the Renaissance and the
+Greco-Roman world--could not dispense with this form of poetry. It may
+be urged in reply, that it is not the lack of a sense of beauty, but the
+greater seriousness and the altered method of scientific treatment which
+renders the poetical form inappropriate, on which point it is
+unnecessary to enter.
+
+One of these didactic works has of late years been occasionally
+republished[616]--the 'Zodiac of Life,' by Marcellus Palingenius (Pier
+Angello Manzolli), a secret adherent of Protestantism at Ferrara,
+written about 1528. With the loftiest speculations on God, virtue, and
+immortality, the writer connects the discussion of many questions of
+practical life, and is, on this account, an authority of some weight in
+the history of morals. On the whole, however, his work must be
+considered as lying outside the boundaries of the Renaissance, as is
+further indicated by the fact that, in harmony with the serious didactic
+purpose of the poem, allegory tends to supplant mythology.
+
+But it was in lyric, and more particularly in elegiac poetry, that the
+poet-scholar came nearest to antiquity; and next to this, in epigram.
+
+In the lighter style, Catullus exercised a perfect fascination over the
+Italians. Not a few elegant Latin madrigals, not a few little satires
+and malicious epistles, are mere adaptations from him; and the death of
+parrots and lapdogs is bewailed, even where there is no verbal
+imitation, in precisely the tone and style of the verses on Lesbia's
+Sparrow. There are short poems of this sort, the date of which even a
+critic would be unable to fix,[617] in the absence of positive evidence
+that they are works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
+
+On the other hand, we can find scarcely an ode in the Sapphic or Alcaic
+metre, which does not clearly betray its modern origin. This is shown
+mostly by a rhetorical verbosity, rare in antiquity before the time of
+Statius, and by a singular want of the lyrical concentration which is
+indispensable to this style of poetry. Single passages in an ode,
+sometimes two or three strophes together, may look like an ancient
+fragment; but a longer extract will seldom keep this character
+throughout. And where it does so, as, for instance, in the fine Ode to
+Venus, by Andrea Navagero, it is easy to detect a simple paraphrase of
+ancient masterpieces.[618] Some of the ode-writers take the saints for
+their subject, and invoke them in verses tastefully modelled after the
+pattern of analogous odes of Horace and Catullus. This is the manner of
+Navagero, in the Ode to the Archangel Gabriel, and particularly of
+Sannazaro (p. 260), who goes still further in his appropriation of pagan
+sentiment. He celebrates above all his patron saint,[619] whose chapel
+was attached to his lovely villa on the shores of Posilippo, 'there
+where the waves of the sea drink up the stream from the rocks, and surge
+against the walls of the little sanctuary.' His delight is in the annual
+feast of S. Nazzaro, and the branches and garlands with which the chapel
+is hung on this day, seem to him like sacrificial gifts. Full of sorrow,
+and far off in exile, at St. Nazaire, on the banks of the Loire, with
+the banished Frederick of Aragon, he brings wreaths of box and oak
+leaves to his patron saint on the same anniversary, thinking of former
+years, when all the youth of Posilippo used to come forth to greet him
+on flower-hung boats, and praying that he may return home.[620]
+
+Perhaps the most deceptive likeness to the classical style is borne by a
+class of poems in elegiacs or hexameters, whose subject ranges from
+elegy, strictly so-called, to epigram. As the humanists dealt most
+freely of all with the text of the Roman elegiac poets, so they felt
+themselves most at home in imitating them. The elegy of Navagero
+addressed to the night, like other poems of the same age and kind, is
+full of points which remind us of his models; but it has the finest
+antique ring about it. Indeed Navagero[621] always begins by choosing a
+truly poetical subject, which he then treats, not with servile
+imitation, but with masterly freedom, in the style of the Anthology, of
+Ovid, of Catullus, or of the Virgilian eclogues. He makes a sparing use
+of mythology, only, for instance, to introduce a sketch of country life,
+in a prayer to Ceres and other rural divinities. An address to his
+country, on his return from an embassy to Spain, though left unfinished,
+might have been worthy of a place beside the 'Bella Italia, amate
+sponde' of Vincenzo Monti, if the rest had been equal to this beginning:
+
+    'Salve, cura De�m, mundi felicior ora,
+     Formosae Veneris dulces salvete recessus;
+     Ut vos post tantos animi mentisque labores
+     Aspicio lustroque libens, ut munere vestro
+     Sollicitas toto depello e pectore curas!'[622]
+
+The elegiac or hexametral form was that in which all higher sentiment
+found expression, both the noblest patriotic enthusiasm (see p. 119, the
+elegy on Julius II.) and the most elaborate eulogies on the ruling
+houses,[623] as well as the tender melancholy of a Tibullus. Francesco
+Mario Molza, who rivals Statius and Martial in his flattery of Clement
+VII. and the Farnesi, gives us in his elegy to his 'comrades,' written
+from a sick-bed, thoughts on death as beautiful and genuinely antique as
+can be found in any of the poets of antiquity, and this without
+borrowing anything worth speaking of from them.[624] The spirit and
+range of the Roman elegy were best understood and reproduced by
+Sannazaro, and no other writer of his time offers us so varied a choice
+of good poems in this style as he. We shall have occasion now and then
+to speak of some of these elegies in reference to the matter they treat
+of.
+
+The Latin epigram finally became in those days an affair of serious
+importance, since a few clever lines, engraved on a monument or quoted
+with laughter in society, could lay the foundation of a scholar's
+celebrity. This tendency showed itself early in Italy. When it was known
+that Guido della Polenta wished to erect a monument at Dante's grave,
+epitaphs poured in from all directions,[625] 'written by such as wished
+to _show themselves_, or to honour the dead poet, or to win the favour
+of Polenta.' On the tomb of the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti (d. 1354),
+in the Cathedral at Milan, we read at the foot of 36 hexameters: 'Master
+Gabrius de Zamoreis of Parma, Doctor of Laws, wrote these verses.' In
+course of time, chiefly under the influence of Martial, and partly of
+Catullus, an extensive literature of this sort was formed. It was held
+the greatest of all triumphs, when an epigram was mistaken for a genuine
+copy from some old marble,[626] or when it was so good that all Italy
+learned it by heart, as happened in the case of some of Bembo's. When
+the Venetian government paid Sannazaro 600 ducats for a eulogy in three
+distichs,[627] no one thought it an act of generous prodigality. The
+epigram was prized for what it was, in truth, to all the educated
+classes of that age--the concentrated essence of fame. Nor, on the other
+hand, was any man then so powerful as to be above the reach of a
+satirical epigram, and even the most powerful needed, for every
+inscription which they set before the public eye, the aid of careful and
+learned scholars, lest some blunder or other should qualify it for a
+place in the collections of ludicrous epitaphs.[628] The epigraph and
+the epigram were branches of the same pursuit; the reproduction of the
+former was based on a diligent study of ancient monuments.
+
+The city of epigrams and inscriptions was, above all others, Rome. In
+this state without hereditary honours, each man had to look after his
+own immortality, and at the same time found the epigram an effective
+weapon against his competitors. Pius II. counts with satisfaction the
+distichs which his chief poet Campanus wrote on any event of his
+government which could be turned to poetical account. Under the
+following popes satirical epigrams came into fashion, and reached, in
+the opposition to Alexander VI. and his family, the highest pitch of
+defiant invective. Sannazaro, it is true, wrote his verses in a place of
+comparative safety, but others in the immediate neighbourhood of the
+court ventured on the most reckless attacks (p. 112). On one occasion
+when eight threatening distichs were found fastened to the door of the
+library,[629] Alexander strengthened his guard by 800 men; we can
+imagine what he would have done to the poet if he had caught him. Under
+Leo X., Latin epigrams were like daily bread. For complimenting or for
+reviling the pope, for punishing enemies and victims, named or unnamed,
+for real or imaginary subjects of wit, malice, grief, or contemplation,
+no form was held more suitable. On the famous group of the Virgin with
+Saint Anna and the Child, which Andrea Sansovino carved for S. Agostino,
+no less than 120 persons wrote Latin verses, not so much, it is true,
+from devotion, as from regard for the patron who ordered the work.[630]
+This man, Johann Goritz of Luxemburg, papal referendary of petitions,
+not only held a religious service on the feast of Saint Anna, but gave a
+great literary dinner in his garden on the slopes of the Capitol. It was
+then worth while to pass in review, in a long poem 'De poetis urbanis,'
+the whole crowd of singers who sought their fortune at the court of Leo.
+This was done by Franciscus Arsillus[631]--a man who needed the
+patronage neither of pope nor prince, and who dared to speak his mind,
+even against his colleagues. The epigram survived the pontificate of
+Paul III. only in a few rare echoes, while the epigraph continued to
+flourish till the seventeenth century, when it perished finally of
+bombast.
+
+In Venice, also, this form of poetry had a history of its own, which we
+are able to trace with the help of the 'Venezia' of Francesco Sansovino.
+A standing task for the epigram-writers was offered by the mottos
+(Brievi) on the pictures of the Doges in the great hall of the ducal
+palace--two or four hexameters, setting forth the most noteworthy facts
+in the government of each.[632] In addition to this, the tombs of the
+Doges in the fourteenth century bore short inscriptions in prose,
+recording merely facts, and beside them turgid hexameters or leonine
+verses. In the fifteenth century more care was taken with the style; in
+the sixteenth century it is seen at its best; and then soon after came
+pointless antithesis, prosopopoeia, false pathos, praise of abstract
+qualities--in a word, affectation and bombast. A good many traces of
+satire can be detected, and veiled criticism of the living is implied in
+open praise of the dead. At a much later period we find a few instances
+of a deliberate recurrence to the old, simple style.
+
+Architectural works and decorative works in general were constructed
+with a view to receiving inscriptions, often in frequent repetition;
+while the Northern Gothic seldom, and with difficulty, offered a
+suitable place for them, and in sepulchral monuments, for example, left
+free only the most exposed parts--namely the edges.
+
+By what has been said hitherto we have, perhaps, failed to convince the
+reader of the characteristic value of this Latin poetry of the Italians.
+Our task was rather to indicate its position and necessity in the
+history of civilisation. In its own day, a caricature of it
+appeared[633]--the so-called maccaronic poetry. The masterpiece of this
+style, the 'opus maccaronicorum,' was written by Merlinus Coccaius
+(Teofilo Folengo of Mantua). We shall now and then have occasion to
+refer to the matter of this poem. As to the form--hexameter and other
+verses, made up of Latin words and Italian words with Latin endings--its
+comic effect lies chiefly in the fact that these combinations sound
+like so many slips of the tongue, or the effusions of an over-hasty
+Latin 'improvisatore.' The German imitations do not give the smallest
+notion of this effect.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+FALL OF THE HUMANISTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+
+After a brilliant succession of poet-scholars had, since the beginning
+of the fourteenth century, filled Italy and the world with the worship
+of antiquity, had determined the forms of education and culture, had
+often taken the lead in political affairs and had, to no small extent,
+reproduced ancient literature--at length in the sixteenth century,
+before their doctrines and scholarship had lost hold of the public mind,
+the whole class fell into deep and general disgrace. Though they still
+served as models to the poets, historians, and orators, personally no
+one would consent to be reckoned of their number. To the two chief
+accusations against them--that of malicious self-conceit, and that of
+abominable profligacy--a third charge of irreligion was now loudly added
+by the rising powers of the Counter-reformation.
+
+Why, it may be asked, were not these reproaches, whether true or false,
+heard sooner? As a matter of fact, they were heard at a very early
+period, but the effect they produced was insignificant, for the plain
+reason that men were far too dependent on the scholars for their
+knowledge of antiquity--that the scholars were personally the possessors
+and diffusers of ancient culture. But the spread of printed editions of
+the classics,[634] and of large and well-arranged hand-books and
+dictionaries, went far to free the people from the necessity of personal
+intercourse with the humanists, and, as soon as they could be but partly
+dispensed with, the change in popular feeling became manifest. It was a
+change under which the good and bad suffered indiscriminately.
+
+The first to make these charges were certainly the humanists
+themselves. Of all men who ever formed a class, they had the least sense
+of their common interests, and least respected what there was of this
+sense. All means were held lawful, if one of them saw a chance of
+supplanting another. From literary discussion they passed with
+astonishing suddenness to the fiercest and the most groundless
+vituperation. Not satisfied with refuting, they sought to annihilate an
+opponent. Something of this must be put to the account of their position
+and circumstances; we have seen how fiercely the age, whose loudest
+spokesmen they were, was borne to and fro by the passion for glory and
+the passion for satire. Their position, too, in practical life was one
+that they had continually to fight for. In such a temper they wrote and
+spoke and described one another. Poggio's works alone contain dirt
+enough to create a prejudice against the whole class--and these 'Opera
+Poggii' were just those most often printed, on the north, as well as on
+the south, side of the Alps. We must take care not to rejoice too soon,
+when we meet among these men a figure which seems immaculate; on further
+inquiry there is always a danger of meeting with some foul charge,
+which, even when it is incredible, still discolours the picture. The
+mass of indecent Latin poems in circulation, and such things as the
+ribaldry on the subject of his own family, in Pontano's dialogue,
+'Antonius,' did the rest to discredit the class. The sixteenth century
+was not only familiar with all these ugly symptoms, but had also grown
+tired of the type of the humanist. These men had to pay both for the
+misdeeds they had done, and for the excess of honour which had hitherto
+fallen to their lot. Their evil fate willed it that the greatest poet of
+the nation wrote of them in a tone of calm and sovereign contempt.[635]
+
+Of the reproaches which combined to excite so much hatred, many were
+only too well founded. Yet a clear and unmistakable tendency to
+strictness in matters of religion and morality was alive in many of the
+philologists, and it is a proof of small knowledge of the period, if the
+whole class is condemned. Yet many, and among them the loudest speakers,
+were guilty.
+
+Three facts explain, and perhaps diminish their guilt: the overflowing
+excess of favour and fortune, when the luck was on their side: the
+uncertainty of the future, in which luxury or misery depended on the
+caprice of a patron or the malice of an enemy; and finally, the
+misleading influence of antiquity. This undermined their morality,
+without giving them its own instead; and in religious matters, since
+they could never think of accepting the positive belief in the old gods,
+it affected them only on the negative and sceptical side. Just because
+they conceived of antiquity dogmatically--that is, took it as the model
+for all thought and action--its influence was here pernicious. But that
+an age existed, which idolised the ancient world and its products with
+an exclusive devotion, was not the fault of individuals. It was the work
+of a historical providence, and all the culture of the ages which have
+followed, and of the ages to come, rests upon the fact that it was so,
+and that all the ends of life but this one were then deliberately put
+aside.
+
+The career of the humanists was, as a rule, of such a kind that only the
+strongest characters could pass through it unscathed. The first danger
+came, in some cases, from the parents, who sought to turn a precocious
+child into a miracle of learning,[636] with an eye to his future
+position in that class which then was supreme. Youthful prodigies,
+however, seldom rise above a certain level; or, if they do, are forced
+to achieve their further progress and development at the cost of the
+bitterest trials. For an ambitious youth, the fame and the brilliant
+position of the humanists were a perilous temptation; it seemed to him
+that he too 'through inborn pride could no longer regard the low and
+common things of life.' He was thus led to plunge into a life of
+excitement and vicissitude, in which exhausting studies, tutorships,
+secretaryships, professorships, offices in princely households, mortal
+enmities and perils, luxury and beggary, boundless admiration and
+boundless contempt, followed confusedly one upon the other, and in which
+the most solid worth and learning were often pushed aside by superficial
+impudence. But the worst of all was, that the position of the humanist
+was almost incompatible with a fixed home, since it either made frequent
+changes of dwelling necessary for a livelihood, or so affected the mind
+of the individual that he could never be happy for long in one place. He
+grew tired of the people, and had no peace among the enmities which he
+excited, while the people themselves in their turn demanded something
+new (p. 211). Much as this life reminds us of the Greek sophists of the
+Empire, as described to us by Philostratus, yet the position of the
+sophists was more favourable. They often had money, or could more easily
+do without it than the humanists, and as professional teachers of
+rhetoric, rather than men of learning, their life was freer and simpler.
+But the scholar of the Renaissance was forced to combine great learning
+with the power of resisting the influence of ever-changing pursuits and
+situations. Add to this the deadening effect of licentious excess,
+and--since do what he might, the worst was believed of him--a total
+indifference to the moral laws recognised by others. Such men can hardly
+be conceived to exist without an inordinate pride. They needed it, if
+only to keep their heads above water, and were confirmed in it by the
+admiration which alternated with hatred in the treatment they received
+from the world. They are the most striking examples and victims of an
+unbridled subjectivity.
+
+The attacks and the satirical pictures began, as we have said, at an
+early period. For all strongly marked individuality, for every kind of
+distinction, a corrective was at hand in the national taste for
+ridicule. And in this case the men themselves offered abundant and
+terrible materials which satire had but to make use of. In the fifteenth
+century, Battista Mantovano, in discoursing of the seven monsters,[637]
+includes the humanists, with many others, under the head 'Superbia.' He
+describes how, fancying themselves children of Apollo, they walk along
+with affected solemnity and with sullen, malicious looks, now gazing at
+their own shadow, now brooding over the popular praise they hunted
+after, like cranes in search of food. But in the sixteenth century the
+indictment was presented in full. Besides Ariosto, their own historian
+Gyraldus[638] gives evidence of this, whose treatise, written under Leo
+X., was probably revised about the year 1540. Warning examples from
+ancient and modern times of the moral disorder and the wretched
+existence of the scholars meet us in astonishing abundance, and along
+with these accusations of the most serious nature are brought formally
+against them. Among these are anger, vanity, obstinacy, self-adoration,
+a dissolute private life, immorality of all descriptions, heresy,
+atheism; further, the habit of speaking without conviction, a sinister
+influence on government, pedantry of speech, thanklessness towards
+teachers, and abject flattery of the great, who first give the scholar a
+taste of their favours and then leave him to starve. The description is
+closed by a reference to the golden age, when no such thing as science
+existed on the earth. Of these charges, that of heresy soon became the
+most dangerous, and Gyraldus himself, when he afterwards republished a
+perfectly harmless youthful work,[639] was compelled to take refuge
+beneath the mantle of Duke Hercules II. of Ferrara,[640] since men now
+had the upper hand who held that people had better spend their time on
+Christian themes than on mythological researches. He justifies himself
+on the ground that the latter, on the contrary, were at such a time
+almost the only harmless branches of study, as they deal with subjects
+of a perfectly neutral character.
+
+But if it is the duty of the historian to seek for evidence in which
+moral judgment is tempered by human sympathy, he will find no authority
+comparable in value to the work so often quoted of Pierio
+Valeriano,[641] 'On the Infelicity of the Scholar.' It was written
+under the gloomy impressions left by the sack of Rome, which seems to
+the writer, not only the direct cause of untold misery to the men of
+learning, but, as it were, the fulfilment of an evil destiny which had
+long pursued them. Pierio is here led by a simple and, on the whole,
+just feeling. He does not introduce a special power, which plagued the
+men of genius on account of their genius, but he states facts, in which
+an unlucky chance often wears the aspect of fatality. Not wishing to
+write a tragedy or to refer events to the conflict of higher powers, he
+is content to lay before us the scenes of every-day life. We are
+introduced to men, who in times of trouble lose, first their incomes,
+and then their places; to others, who in trying to get two appointments,
+miss both; to unsociable misers, who carry about their money sewn into
+their clothes, and die mad when they are robbed of it; to others, who
+accept well-paid offices, and then sicken with a melancholy, longing for
+their lost freedom. We read how some died young of a plague or fever,
+and how the writings which had cost them so much toil were burnt with
+their bed and clothes; how others lived in terror of the murderous
+threats of their colleagues; how one was slain by a covetous servant,
+and another caught by highwaymen on a journey, and left to pine in a
+dungeon, because unable to pay his ransom. Many died of unspoken grief
+for the insults they received and the prizes of which they were
+defrauded. We are told of the death of a Venetian, because his son, a
+youthful prodigy, was dead; and the mother and brothers followed, as if
+the lost child drew them all after him. Many, especially Florentines,
+ended their lives by suicide;[642] others through the secret justice of
+a tyrant. Who, after all, is happy?--and by what means? By blunting all
+feeling for such misery? One of the speakers in the dialogue in which
+Pierio clothed his argument, can give an answer to these questions--the
+illustrious Gasparo Contarini, at the mention of whose name we turn with
+the expectation to hear at least something of the truest and deepest
+which was then thought on such matters. As a type of the happy scholar,
+he mentions Fra Urbano Valeriano of Belluno,[643] who was for years
+teacher of Greek at Venice, who visited Greece and the East, and towards
+the close of his life travelled, now through this country, now through
+that, without ever mounting a horse; who never had a penny of his own,
+rejected all honours and distinctions, and after a gay old age, died in
+his eighty-fourth year, without, if we except a fall from a ladder,
+having ever known an hour of sickness. And what was the difference
+between such a man and the humanists? The latter had more free will,
+more subjectivity, than they could turn to purposes of happiness. The
+mendicant friar, who had lived from his boyhood in the monastery, and
+never eaten or slept except by rule, ceased to feel the compulsion under
+which he lived. Through the power of this habit he led, amid all outward
+hardships, a life of inward peace, by which he impressed his hearers far
+more than by his teaching. Looking at him, they could believe that it
+depends on ourselves whether we bear up against misfortune or surrender
+to it. 'Amid want and toil he was happy, because he willed to be so,
+because he had contracted no evil habits, was not capricious,
+inconstant, immoderate; but was always contented with little or
+nothing.' If we heard Contarini himself, religious motives would no
+doubt play a part in the argument--but the practical philosopher in
+sandals speaks plainly enough. An allied character, but placed in other
+circumstances, is that of Fabio Calvi of Ravenna, the commentator of
+Hippocrates.[644] He lived to a great age in Rome, eating only pulse
+'like the Pythagoreans,' and dwelt in a hovel little better than the tub
+of Diogenes. Of the pension, which Pope Leo gave him, he spent enough to
+keep body and soul together, and gave the rest away. He was not a
+healthy man, like Fra Urbano, nor is it likely that, like him, he died
+with a smile on his lips. At the age of ninety, in the sack of Rome, he
+was dragged away by the Spaniards, who hoped for a ransom, and died of
+hunger in a hospital. But his name has passed into the kingdom of the
+immortals, for Raphael loved the old man like a father, and honoured him
+as a teacher, and came to him for advice in all things. Perhaps they
+discoursed chiefly of the projected restoration of ancient Rome (p.
+184), perhaps of still higher matters. Who can tell what a share Fabio
+may have had in the conception of the School of Athens, and in other
+great works of the master?
+
+We would gladly close this part of our essay with the picture of some
+pleasing and winning character. Pomponius Laetus, of whom we shall
+briefly speak, is known to us principally through the letter of his
+pupil Sabellicus,[645] in which an antique colouring is purposely given
+to his character. Yet many of its features are clearly recognisable. He
+was (p. 251) a bastard of the House of the Neapolitan Sanseverini,
+princes of Salerno, whom he nevertheless refused to recognise, writing,
+in reply to an invitation to live with them, the famous letter:
+'Pomponius Laetus cognatis et propinquis suis, salutem. Quod petitis
+fieri non potest. Valete.' An insignificant little figure, with small,
+quick eyes, and quaint dress, he lived during the last decades of the
+fifteenth century, as professor in the University of Rome, either in his
+cottage in a garden on the Esquiline hill, or in his vineyard on the
+Quirinal. In the one he bred his ducks and fowls; the other he
+cultivated according to the strictest precepts of Cato, Varro, and
+Columella. He spent his holidays in fishing or bird-catching in the
+Campagna, or in feasting by some shady spring or on the banks of the
+Tiber. Wealth and luxury he despised. Free himself from envy and
+uncharitable speech, he would not suffer them in others. It was only
+against the hierarchy that he gave his tongue free play, and passed,
+till his latter years, for a scorner of religion altogether. He was
+involved in the persecution of the humanists begun by Pope Paul II., and
+surrendered to this pontiff by the Venetians; but no means could be
+found to wring unworthy confessions from him. He was afterwards
+befriended and supported by popes and prelates, and when his house was
+plundered in the disturbances under Sixtus IV., more was collected for
+him than he had lost. No teacher was more conscientious. Before daybreak
+he was to be seen descending the Esquiline with his lantern, and on
+reaching his lecture-room found it always filled to overflowing with
+pupils who had come at midnight to secure a place. A stutter compelled
+him to speak with care, but his delivery was even and effective. His few
+works give evidence of careful writing. No scholar treated the text of
+ancient authors more soberly and accurately. The remains of antiquity
+which surrounded him in Rome touched him so deeply, that he would stand
+before them as if entranced, or would suddenly burst into tears at the
+sight of them. As he was ready to lay aside his own studies in order to
+help others, he was much loved and had many friends; and at his death,
+even Alexander VI. sent his courtiers to follow the corpse, which was
+carried by the most distinguished of his pupils. The funeral service in
+the Araceli was attended by forty bishops and by all the foreign
+ambassadors.
+
+It was Laetus who introduced and conducted the representations of
+ancient, chiefly Plautine, plays in Rome (p. 255). Every year, he
+celebrated the anniversary of the foundation of the city by a festival,
+at which his friends and pupils recited speeches and poems. Such
+meetings were the origin of what acquired, and long retained, the name
+of the Roman Academy. It was simply a free union of individuals, and was
+connected with no fixed institution. Besides the occasions mentioned, it
+met[646] at the invitation of a patron, or to celebrate the memory of a
+deceased member, as of Platina. At such times, a prelate belonging to
+the academy would first say mass; Pomponio would then ascend the pulpit
+and deliver a speech; some one else would then follow him and recite an
+elegy. The customary banquet, with declamations and recitations,
+concluded the festival, whether joyous or serious, and the academicians,
+notably Platina himself, early acquired the reputation of epicures.[647]
+At other times, the guests performed farces in the old Atellan style. As
+a free association of very varied elements, the academy lasted in its
+original form down to the sack of Rome, and included among its guests
+Angelus Coloccius, Joh. Corycius (p. 269) and others. Its precise value
+as an element in the intellectual life of the people is as hard to
+estimate as that of any other social union of the same kind; yet a man
+like Sadoleto[648] reckoned it among the most precious memories of his
+youth. A large number of other academies appeared and passed away in
+many Italian cities, according to the number and significance of the
+humanists living in them, and to the patronage bestowed by the great and
+wealthy. Of these we may mention the Academy of Naples, of which
+Jovianus Pontanus was the centre, and which sent out a colony to
+Lecce,[649] and that of Pordenone, which formed the court of the
+Condottiere Alviano. The circle of Ludovico Moro, and its peculiar
+importance for that prince, has been already spoken of (p. 42).
+
+About the middle of the sixteenth century, these associations seem to
+have undergone a complete change. The humanists, driven in other spheres
+from their commanding position, and viewed askance by the men of the
+Counter-reformation, lost the control of the academies: and here, as
+elsewhere, Latin poetry was replaced by Italian. Before long every town
+of the least importance had its academy, with some strange, fantastic
+name,[650] and its own endowment and subscriptions. Besides the
+recitation of verses, the new institutions inherited from their
+predecessors the regular banquets and the representation of plays,
+sometimes acted by the members themselves, sometimes under their
+direction by young amateurs, and sometimes by paid players. The fate of
+the Italian stage, and afterwards of the opera, was long in the hands of
+these associations.
+
+
+
+
+_PART IV._
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+JOURNEYS OF THE ITALIANS.
+
+
+Freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked
+progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and
+been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned
+to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of
+it in speech and in form.
+
+On the journeys of the Italians to distant parts of the world, we can
+here make but a few general observations. The crusades had opened
+unknown distances to the European mind, and awakened in all the passion
+for travel and adventure. It may be hard to indicate precisely the point
+where this passion allied itself with, or became the servant of, the
+thirst for knowledge; but it was in Italy that this was first and most
+completely the case. Even in the crusades the interest of the Italians
+was wider than that of other nations, since they already were a naval
+power and had commercial relations with the East. From time immemorial
+the Mediterranean sea had given to the nations that dwelt on its shores
+mental impulses different from those which governed the peoples of the
+North; and never, from the very structure of their character, could the
+Italians be adventurers in the sense which the word bore among the
+Teutons. After they were once at home in all the eastern harbours of the
+Mediterranean, it was natural that the most enterprising among them
+should be led to join that vast international movement of the
+Mohammedans which there found its outlet. A new half of the world lay,
+as it were, freshly discovered before them. Or, like Polo of Venice,
+they were caught in the current of the Mongolian peoples, and carried on
+to the steps of the throne of the Great Khan. At an early period, we
+find Italians sharing in the discoveries made in the Atlantic ocean; it
+was the Genoese who, in the 13th century, found the Canary
+Islands.[651] In the same year, 1291, when Ptolemais, the last remnant
+of the Christian East, was lost, it was again the Genoese who made the
+first known attempt to find a sea-passage to the East Indies.[652]
+Columbus himself is but the greatest of a long list of Italians who, in
+the service of the western nations, sailed into distant seas. The true
+discoverer, however, is not the man who first chances to stumble upon
+anything, but the man who finds what he has sought. Such a one alone
+stands in a link with the thoughts and interests of his predecessors,
+and this relationship will also determine the account he gives of his
+search. For which reason the Italians, although their claim to be the
+first comers on this or that shore may be disputed, will yet retain
+their title to be pre-eminently the nation of discoverers for the whole
+latter part of the Middle Ages. The fuller proof of this assertion
+belongs to the special history of discoveries.[653] Yet ever and again
+we turn with admiration to the august figure of the great Genoese, by
+whom a new continent beyond the ocean was demanded, sought and found;
+and who was the first to be able to say: 'il mondo � poco'--the world is
+not so large as men have thought. At the time when Spain gave Alexander
+VI. to the Italians, Italy gave Columbus to the Spaniards. Only a few
+weeks before the death of that pope (July 7th, 1503), Columbus wrote
+from Jamaica his noble letter to the thankless Catholic kings, which the
+ages to come can never read without profound emotion. In a codicil to
+his will, dated Valladolid, May 4th, 1506, he bequeathed to 'his beloved
+home, the Republic of Genoa, the prayer-book which Pope Alexander had
+given him, and which in prison, in conflict, and in every kind of
+adversity had been to him the greatest of comforts.' It seems as if
+these words cast upon the abhorred name of Borgia one last gleam of
+grace and mercy.
+
+The development of geographical and the allied sciences among the
+Italians must, like the history of their voyages, be touched upon but
+very briefly. A superficial comparison of their achievements with those
+of other nations shows an early and striking superiority on their part.
+Where, in the middle of the fifteenth century, could be found, anywhere
+but in Italy, such an union of geographical, statistical, and historical
+knowledge as was found in �neas Sylvius? Not only in his great
+geographical work, but in his letters and commentaries, he describes
+with equal mastery landscapes, cities, manners, industries and products,
+political conditions and constitutions, wherever he can use his own
+observation or the evidence of eye-witnesses. What he takes from books
+is naturally of less moment. Even the short sketch[654] of that valley
+in the Tyrolese Alps, where Frederick III. had given him a benefice, and
+still more his description of Scotland, leaves untouched none of the
+relations of human life, and displays a power and method of unbiassed
+observation and comparison impossible in any but a countryman of
+Columbus, trained in the school of the ancients. Thousands saw and, in
+part, knew what he did, but they felt no impulse to draw a picture of
+it, and were unconscious that the world desired such pictures.
+
+In geography[655] as in other matters, it is vain to attempt to
+distinguish how much is to be attributed to the study of the ancients,
+and how much to the special genius of the Italians. They saw and treated
+the things of this world from an objective point of view, even before
+they were familiar with ancient literature, partly because they were
+themselves a half-ancient people, and partly because their political
+circumstances predisposed them to it; but they would not so rapidly have
+attained to such perfection had not the old geographers showed them the
+way. The influence of the existing Italian geographies on the spirit and
+tendencies of the travellers and discoverers was also inestimable. Even
+the simple 'dilettante' of a science--if in the present case we should
+assign to �neas Sylvius so low a rank--can diffuse just that sort of
+general interest in the subject which prepares for new pioneers the
+indispensable groundwork of a favourable predisposition in the public
+mind. True discoverers in any science know well what they owe to such
+mediation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+NATURAL SCIENCE IN ITALY.
+
+
+For the position of the Italians in the sphere of the natural sciences,
+we must refer the reader to the special treatises on the subject, of
+which the only one with which we are familiar is the superficial and
+depreciatory work of Libri.[656] The dispute as to the priority of
+particular discoveries concerns us all the less, since we hold that, at
+any time, and among any civilised people, a man may appear who, starting
+with very scanty preparation, is driven by an irresistible impulse into
+the path of scientific investigation, and through his native gifts
+achieves the most astonishing success. Such men were Gerbert of Rheims
+and Roger Bacon. That they were masters of the whole knowledge of the
+age in their several departments, was a natural consequence of the
+spirit in which they worked. When once the veil of illusion was torn
+asunder, when once the dread of nature and the slavery to books and
+tradition were overcome, countless problems lay before them for
+solution. It is another matter when a whole people takes a natural
+delight in the study and investigation of nature, at a time when other
+nations are indifferent, that is to say, when the discoverer is not
+threatened or wholly ignored, but can count on the friendly support
+of congenial spirits. That this was the case in Italy, is
+unquestionable.[657] The Italian students of nature trace with pride in
+the 'Divine Comedy' the hints and proofs of Dante's scientific interest
+in nature.[658] On his claim to priority in this or that discovery or
+reference, we must leave the men of science to decide; but every layman
+must be struck by the wealth of his observations on the external world,
+shown merely in his pictures and comparisons. He, more than any other
+modern poet, takes them from reality, whether in nature or human life,
+and uses them, never as mere ornament, but in order to give the reader
+the fullest and most adequate sense of his meaning. It is in astronomy
+that he appears chiefly as a scientific specialist, though it must not
+be forgotten that many astronomical allusions in his great poem, which
+now appear to us learned, must then have been intelligible to the
+general reader. Dante, learning apart, appeals to a popular knowledge of
+the heavens, which the Italians of his day, from the mere fact that they
+were a nautical people, had in common with the ancients. This knowledge
+of the rising and setting of the constellations has been rendered
+superfluous to the modern world by calendars and clocks, and with it has
+gone whatever interest in astronomy the people may once have had.
+Nowadays, with our schools and hand-books, every child knows--what Dante
+did not know--that the earth moves round the sun; but the interest once
+taken in the subject itself has given place, except in the case of
+astronomical specialists, to the most absolute indifference.
+
+The pseudo-science, which also dealt with the stars, proves nothing
+against the inductive spirit of the Italians of that day. That spirit
+was but crossed, and at times overcome, by the passionate desire to
+penetrate the future. We shall recur to the subject of astrology when we
+come to speak of the moral and religious character of the people.
+
+The Church treated this and other pseudo-sciences nearly always with
+toleration; and showed itself actually hostile even to genuine science
+only when a charge of heresy or necromancy was also in question--which
+certainly was often the case. A point which it would be interesting to
+decide is this: whether, and in what cases, the Dominican (and also the
+Franciscan) Inquisitors in Italy, were conscious of the falsehood of the
+charges, and yet condemned the accused, either to oblige some enemy of
+the prisoner or from hatred to natural science, and particularly to
+experiments. The latter doubtless occurred, but it is not easy to prove
+the fact. What helped to cause such persecutions in the North, namely,
+the opposition made to the innovators by the upholders of the received
+official, scholastic system of nature, was of little or no weight in
+Italy. Pietro of Albano, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, is
+well known to have fallen a victim to the envy of another physician, who
+accused him before the Inquisition of heresy and magic;[659] and
+something of the same kind may have happened in the case of his Paduan
+contemporary, Giovannino Sanguinnacci, who was known as an innovator in
+medical practice. He escaped, however, with banishment. Nor must it be
+forgotten that the inquisitorial power of the Dominicans was exercised
+less uniformly in Italy than in the North. Tyrants and free cities in
+the fourteenth century treated the clergy at times with such sovereign
+contempt, that very different matters from natural science went
+unpunished.[660] But when, with the fifteenth century, antiquity became
+the leading power in Italy, the breach it made in the old system was
+turned to account by every branch of secular science. Humanism,
+nevertheless, attracted to itself the best strength of the nation, and
+thereby, no doubt, did injury to the inductive investigation of
+nature.[661] Here and there the Inquisition suddenly started into life,
+and punished or burned physicians as blasphemers or magicians. In such
+cases it is hard to discover what was the true motive underlying the
+condemnation. And after all, Italy, at the close of the fifteenth
+century, with Paolo Toscanelli, Luca Paccioli and Lionardo da Vinci,
+held incomparably the highest place among European nations in
+mathematics and the natural sciences, and the learned men of every
+country, even Regiomontanus and Copernicus, confessed themselves its
+pupils.[662]
+
+A significant proof of the wide-spread interest in natural history is
+found in the zeal which showed itself at an early period for the
+collection and comparative study of plants and animals. Italy claims to
+be the first creator of botanical gardens, though possibly they may have
+served a chiefly practical end, and the claim to priority may be itself
+disputed.[663] It is of far greater importance that princes and wealthy
+men in laying out their pleasure-gardens, instinctively made a point of
+collecting the greatest possible number of different plants in all their
+species and varieties. Thus in the fifteenth century the noble grounds
+of the Medicean Villa Careggi appear from the descriptions we have of
+them to have been almost a botanical garden,[664] with countless
+specimens of different trees and shrubs. Of the same kind was a villa of
+the Cardinal Triulzio, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the
+Roman Campagna towards Tivoli,[665] with hedges made up of various
+species of roses, with trees of every description--the fruit-trees
+especially showing an astonishing variety--with twenty different sorts
+of vines and a large kitchen-garden. This is evidently something very
+different from the score or two of familiar medicinal plants, which were
+to be found in the garden of any castle or monastery in Western Europe.
+Along with a careful cultivation of fruit for the purposes of the table,
+we find an interest in the plant for its own sake, on account of the
+pleasure it gives to the eye. We learn from the history of art at how
+late a period this passion for botanical collections was laid aside, and
+gave place to what was considered the picturesque style of
+landscape-gardening.
+
+The collections, too, of foreign animals not only gratified curiosity,
+but served also the higher purposes of observation. The facility of
+transport from the southern and eastern harbours of the Mediterranean
+and the mildness of the Italian climate, made it practicable to buy the
+largest animals of the south, or to accept them as presents from the
+Sultans.[666] The cities and princes were especially anxious to keep
+live lions, even when the lion was not, as in Florence, the emblem of
+the state.[667] The lions' den was generally in or near the government
+palace, as in Perugia and Florence; in Rome, it lay on the slope of the
+Capitol. The beasts sometimes served as executioners of political
+judgments,[668] and no doubt, apart from this, they kept alive a certain
+terror in the popular mind. Their condition was also held to be ominous
+of good or evil. Their fertility, especially, was considered a sign of
+public prosperity, and no less a man than Giovanni Villani thought it
+worth recording that he was present at the delivery of a lioness.[669]
+The cubs were often given to allied states and princes, or to
+Condottieri, as a reward of valour.[670] In addition to the lions, the
+Florentines began very early to keep leopards, for which a special
+keeper was appointed.[671] Borso[672] of Ferrara used to set his lions
+to fight with bulls, bears, and wild boars.
+
+By the end of the fifteenth century, however, true menageries
+(serragli), now reckoned part of the suitable appointments of a court,
+were kept by many of the princes. 'It belongs to the position of the
+great,' says Matarazzo,[673] 'to keep horses, dogs, mules, falcons, and
+other birds, court-jesters, singers, and foreign animals.' The menagerie
+at Naples, in the time of Ferrante and others, contained a giraffe and a
+zebra, presented, it seems, by the ruler of Bagdad.[674] Filippo Maria
+Visconti possessed not only horses which cost him each 500 or 1,000
+pieces of gold, and valuable English dogs, but a number of leopards
+brought from all parts of the East; the expense of his hunting-birds
+which were collected from the countries of Northern Europe, amounted to
+3,000 pieces of gold a month.[675] 'The Cremonese say that the Emperor
+Frederick II. brought an elephant into their city, sent him from India
+by Prester John,' we read in Brunetto Latini; Petrarch records the dying
+out of the elephants in Italy.[676] King Emanuel the Great of Portugal
+knew well what he was about when he presented Leo X. with an elephant
+and a rhinoceros.[677] It was under such circumstances that the
+foundations of a scientific zoology and botany were laid.
+
+A practical fruit of these zoological studies was the establishment of
+studs, of which the Mantuan, under Francesco Gonzaga, was esteemed the
+first in Europe.[678] All interest in, and knowledge of the different
+breeds of horses is as old, no doubt, as riding itself, and the
+crossing of the European with the Asiatic must have been common from the
+time of the crusades. In Italy, a special inducement to perfect the
+breed was offered by the prizes at the horse-races held in every
+considerable town in the peninsula. In the Mantuan stables were found
+the infallible winners in these contests, as well as the best military
+chargers, and the horses best suited by their stately appearance for
+presents to great people. Gonzaga kept stallions and mares from Spain,
+Ireland, Africa, Thrace, and Cilicia, and for the sake of the last he
+cultivated the friendship of the Sultan. All possible experiments were
+here tried, in order to produce the most perfect animals.
+
+Even human menageries were not wanting. The famous Cardinal Ippolito
+Medici,[679] bastard of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, kept at his strange
+court a troop of barbarians who talked no less than twenty different
+languages, and who were all of them perfect specimens of their races.
+Among them were incomparable _voltigeurs_ of the best blood of the North
+African Moors, Tartar bowmen, Negro wrestlers, Indian divers, and Turks,
+who generally accompanied the Cardinal on his hunting expeditions. When
+he was overtaken by an early death (1535), this motley band carried the
+corpse on their shoulders from Itri to Rome, and mingled with the
+general mourning for the open-handed Cardinal their medley of tongues
+and violent gesticulations.[680]
+
+These scattered notices of the relations of the Italians to natural
+science, and their interest in the wealth and variety of the products of
+nature, are only fragments of a great subject. No one is more conscious
+than the author of the defects in his knowledge on this point. Of the
+multitude of special works in which the subject is adequately treated,
+even the names are but imperfectly known to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL BEAUTY.
+
+
+But, outside the sphere of scientific investigation, there is another
+way to draw near to nature. The Italians are the first among modern
+peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something
+beautiful.[681]
+
+The power to do so is always the result of a long and complicated
+development, and its origin is not easily detected, since a dim feeling
+of this kind may exist long before it shows itself in poetry and
+painting, and thereby becomes conscious of itself. Among the ancients,
+for example, art and poetry had gone through the whole circle of human
+interests, before they turned to the representation of nature, and even
+then the latter filled always a limited and subordinate place. And yet,
+from the time of Homer downwards, the powerful impression made by nature
+upon man is shown by countless verses and chance expressions. The
+Germanic races, which founded their states on the ruins of the Roman
+Empire, were thoroughly and specially fitted to understand the spirit of
+natural scenery; and though Christianity compelled them for a while to
+see in the springs and mountains, in the lakes and woods, which they had
+till then revered, the working of evil demons, yet this transitional
+conception was soon outgrown. By the year 1200, at the height of the
+Middle Ages, a genuine, hearty enjoyment of the external world was again
+in existence, and found lively expression in the minstrelsy of different
+nations,[682] which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the
+simple phenomena of nature--spring with its flowers, the green fields
+and the woods. But these pictures are all foreground without
+perspective. Even the crusaders, who travelled so far and saw so much,
+are not recognisable as such in these poems. The epic poetry, which
+describes armour and costumes so fully, does not attempt more than a
+sketch of outward nature; and even the great Wolfram von Eschenbach
+scarcely anywhere gives us an adequate picture of the scene on which his
+heroes move. From these poems it would never be guessed that their noble
+authors in all countries inhabited or visited lofty castles, commanding
+distant prospects. Even in the Latin poems of the wandering clerks (p.
+174), we find no traces of a distant view--of landscape properly so
+called--but what lies near is sometimes described with a glow and
+splendour which none of the knightly minstrels can surpass. What picture
+of the Grove of Love can equal that of the Italian poet--for such we
+take him to be--of the twelfth century?
+
+    'Immortalis fieret
+     Ibi manens homo;
+     Arbor ibi quaelibet
+     Suo gaudet pomo;
+     Viae myrrha, cinnamo
+     Fragrant, et amomo--
+     Conjectari poterat
+     Dominus ex domo,'[683] etc.
+
+To the Italian mind, at all events, nature had by this time lost its
+taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal powers. Saint
+Francis of Assisi, in his Hymn to the Sun, frankly praises the Lord for
+creating the heavenly bodies and the four elements.
+
+But the unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature on the human
+spirit begin with Dante. Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous
+lines the sense of the morning airs and the trembling light on the
+distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he
+makes the ascent of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of
+enjoying the view[684]--the first man, perhaps, since the days of
+antiquity who did so. In Boccaccio we can do little more than infer how
+country scenery affected him;[685] yet his pastoral romances show his
+imagination to have been filled with it. But the significance of nature
+for a receptive spirit is fully and clearly displayed by Petrarch--one
+of the first truly modern men. That clear soul--who first collected from
+the literature of all countries evidence of the origin and progress of
+the sense of natural beauty, and himself, in his 'Ansichten der Natur,'
+achieved the noblest masterpiece of description--Alexander von Humboldt,
+has not done full justice to Petrarch; and, following in the steps of
+the great reaper, we may still hope to glean a few ears of interest and
+value.
+
+Petrarch was not only a distinguished geographer--the first map of Italy
+is said to have been drawn by his direction[686]--and not only a
+reproducer of the sayings of the ancients,[687] but felt himself the
+influence of natural beauty. The enjoyment of nature is, for him, the
+favourite accompaniment of intellectual pursuits; it was to combine the
+two that he lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that
+he from time to time fled from the world and from his age.[688] We
+should do him wrong by inferring from his weak and undeveloped power of
+describing natural scenery that he did not feel it deeply. His picture,
+for instance, of the lovely Gulf of Spezzia and Porto Venere, which he
+inserts at the end of the sixth book of the 'Africa,' for the reason
+that none of the ancients or moderns had sung of it,[689] is no more
+than a simple enumeration, but the descriptions in letters to his
+friends of Rome, Naples, and other Italian cities in which he willingly
+lingered, are picturesque and worthy of the subject. Petrarch is also
+conscious of the beauty of rock scenery, and is perfectly able to
+distinguish the picturesqueness from the utility of nature.[690] During
+his stay among the woods of Reggio, the sudden sight of an impressive
+landscape so affected him that he resumed a poem which he had long laid
+aside.[691] But the deepest impression of all was made upon him by the
+ascent of Mont Ventoux, near Avignon.[692] An indefinable longing for a
+distant panorama grew stronger and stronger in him, till at length the
+accidental sight of a passage in Livy, where King Philip, the enemy of
+Rome, ascends the H�mus, decided him. He thought that what was not
+blamed in a grey-headed monarch, might be well _excused_ in a young man
+of private station. The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was
+unheard of, and there could be no thought of the companionship of
+friends or acquaintances. Petrarch took with him only his younger
+brother and two country people from the last place where he halted. At
+the foot of the mountain an old herdsman besought him to turn back,
+saying that he himself had attempted to climb it fifty years before, and
+had brought home nothing but repentance, broken bones, and torn clothes,
+and that neither before nor after had anyone ventured to do the same.
+Nevertheless, they struggled forward and upward, till the clouds lay
+beneath their feet, and at last they reached the top. A description of
+the view from the summit would be looked for in vain, not because the
+poet was insensible to it, but, on the contrary, because the impression
+was too over-whelming. His whole past life, with all its follies, rose
+before his mind; he remembered that ten years ago that day he had
+quitted Bologna a young man, and turned a longing gaze towards his
+native country; he opened a book which then was his constant companion,
+the 'Confessions of St. Augustine,' and his eye fell on the passage in
+the tenth chapter, 'and men go forth, and admire lofty mountains and
+broad seas, and roaring torrents, and the ocean, and the course of the
+stars, and forget their own selves while doing so.' His brother, to whom
+he read these words, could not understand why he closed the book and
+said no more.
+
+Some decades later, about 1360, Fazio degli Uberti describes in his
+rhyming geography[693] (p. 178), the wide panorama from the mountains of
+Auvergne, with the interest, it is true, of the geographer and
+antiquarian only, but still showing clearly that he himself had seen it.
+He must, however, have ascended far higher peaks, since he is familiar
+with facts which only occur at a height of 10,000 feet or more above the
+sea--mountain-sickness and its accompaniments--of which his imaginary
+comrade Solinus tries to cure him with a sponge dipped in an essence.
+The ascents of Parnassus and Olympus,[694] of which he speaks, are
+perhaps only fictions.
+
+In the fifteenth century, the great masters of the Flemish school,
+Hubert and Johann van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil from nature. Their
+landscapes are not merely the fruit of an endeavour to reflect the real
+world in art, but have, even if expressed conventionally, a certain
+poetical meaning--in short, a soul. Their influence on the whole art of
+the West is undeniable, and extended to the landscape-painting of the
+Italians, but without preventing the characteristic interest of the
+Italian eye for nature from finding its own expression.
+
+On this point, as in the scientific description of nature, �neas Sylvius
+is again one of the most weighty voices of his time. Even if we grant
+the justice of all that has been said against his character, we must
+nevertheless admit that in few other men was the picture of the age and
+its culture so fully reflected, and that few came nearer to the normal
+type of the men of the early Renaissance. It may be added
+parenthetically, that even in respect to his moral character he will not
+be fairly judged, if we listen solely to the complaints of the German
+Church, which his fickleness helped to baulk of the Council it so
+ardently desired.[695]
+
+He here claims our attention as the first who not only enjoyed the
+magnificence of the Italian landscape, but described it with enthusiasm
+down to its minutest details. The ecclesiastical State and the south of
+Tuscany--his native home--he knew thoroughly, and after he became pope
+he spent his leisure during the favourable season chiefly in excursions
+to the country. Then at last the gouty man was rich enough to have
+himself carried in a litter through the mountains and valleys; and when
+we compare his enjoyments with those of the popes who succeeded him,
+Pius, whose chief delight was in nature, antiquity, and simple, but
+noble, architecture, appears almost a saint. In the elegant and flowing
+Latin of his 'Commentaries' he freely tells us of his happiness.[696]
+
+His eye seems as keen and practised as that of any modern observer. He
+enjoys with rapture the panoramic splendour of the view from the summit
+of the Alban Hills--from the Monte Cavo--whence he could see the shores
+of St. Peter from Terracina and the promontory of Circe as far as Monte
+Argentaro, and the wide expanse of country round about, with the ruined
+cities of the past, and with the mountain-chains of central Italy
+beyond; and then his eye would turn to the green woods in the hollows
+beneath and the mountain-lakes among them. He feels the beauty of the
+position of Todi, crowning the vineyards and olive-clad slopes, looking
+down upon distant woods and upon the valley of the Tiber, where towns
+and castles rise above the winding river. The lovely hills about Siena,
+with villas and monasteries on every height, are his own home, and his
+descriptions of them are touched with a peculiar feeling. Single
+picturesque glimpses charm him too, like the little promontory of Capo
+di Monte that stretches out into the Lake of Bolsena. 'Rocky steps,' we
+read, 'shaded by vines, descend to the water's edge, where the evergreen
+oaks stand between the cliffs, alive with the song of thrushes.' On the
+path round the Lake of Nemi, beneath the chestnuts and fruit-trees, he
+feels that here, if anywhere, a poet's soul must awake--here in the
+hiding-place of Diana! He often held consistories or received
+ambassadors under huge old chestnut-trees, or beneath the olives on the
+green sward by some gurgling spring. A view like that of a narrowing
+gorge, with a bridge arched boldly over it, awakens at once his artistic
+sense. Even the smallest details give him delight through something
+beautiful, or perfect, or characteristic in them--the blue fields of
+waving flax, the yellow gorse which covers the hills, even tangled
+thickets, or single trees, or springs, which seem to him like wonders of
+nature.
+
+The height of his enthusiasm for natural beauty was reached during his
+stay on Monte Amiata, in the summer of 1462, when plague and heat made
+the lowlands uninhabitable. Half-way up the mountain, in the old Lombard
+monastery of San Salvatore, he and his court took up their quarters.
+There, between the chestnuts which clothe the steep declivity, the eye
+may wander over all southern Tuscany, with the towers of Siena in the
+distance. The ascent of the highest peak he left to his companions, who
+were joined by the Venetian envoy; they found at the top two vast blocks
+of stone one upon the other--perhaps the sacrificial altar of a
+pre-historical people--and fancied that in the far distance they saw
+Corsica and Sardinia[697] rising above the sea. In the cool air of the
+hills, among the old oaks and chestnuts, on the green meadows where
+there were no thorns to wound the feet, and no snakes or insects to hurt
+or to annoy, the pope passed days of unclouded happiness. For the
+'Segnatura,' which took place on certain days of the week, he selected
+on each occasion some new shady retreat[698] 'novas in convallibus
+fontes et novas inveniens umbras, qu� dubiam facerent electionem.' At
+such times the dogs would perhaps start a great stag from his lair, who,
+after defending himself a while with hoofs and antlers, would fly at
+last up the mountain. In the evening the pope was accustomed to sit
+before the monastery on the spot from which the whole valley of the
+Paglia was visible, holding lively conversations with the cardinals. The
+courtiers, who ventured down from the heights on their hunting
+expeditions, found the heat below intolerable, and the scorched plains
+like a very hell, while the monastery, with its cool, shady woods,
+seemed like an abode of the blessed.
+
+All this is genuine modern enjoyment, not a reflection of antiquity. As
+surely as the ancients themselves felt in the same manner, so surely,
+nevertheless, were the scanty expressions of the writers whom Pius knew
+insufficient to awaken in him such enthusiasm.[699]
+
+The second great age of Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of
+the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, as well as
+the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful
+effect of nature on the human mind. The first glance at the lyric poets
+of that time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is
+true, of natural scenery, are very rare, for the reason that, in this
+energetic age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something
+else to deal with. Bojardo and Ariosto paint nature vigorously, but as
+briefly as possible, and with no effort to appeal by their descriptions
+to the feelings of the reader,[700] which they endeavour to reach solely
+by their narrative and characters. Letter-writers and the authors of
+philosophical dialogues are, in fact, better evidence of the growing
+love of nature than the poets. The novelist Bandello, for example,
+observes rigorously the rules of his department of literature; he gives
+us in his novels themselves not a word more than is necessary on the
+natural scenery amid which the action of his tales takes place,[701] but
+in the dedications which always precede them we meet with charming
+descriptions of nature as the setting for his dialogues and social
+pictures. Among letter-writers, Aretino[702] unfortunately must be named
+as the first who has fully painted in words the splendid effect of light
+and shadow in an Italian sunset.
+
+We sometimes find the feeling of the poets, also, attaching itself with
+tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito Strozza, about the
+year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy[703] the dwelling of his mistress.
+We are shown an old ivy-clad house, half hidden in trees, and adorned
+with weather-stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel, much
+damaged by the violence of the river Po, which flowed hard by; not far
+off, the priest ploughs his few barren roods with borrowed cattle. This
+is no reminiscence of the Roman elegists, but true modern sentiment; and
+the parallel to it--a sincere, unartificial description of country life
+in general--will be found at the end of this part of our work.
+
+It may be objected that the German painters at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century succeed in representing with perfect mastery these
+scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht D�rer, in his
+engraving of the Prodigal Son.[704] But it is one thing if a painter,
+brought up in a school of realism, introduces such scenes, and quite
+another thing if a poet, accustomed to an ideal or mythological
+framework, is driven by inward impulse into realism. Besides which,
+priority in point of time is here, as in the descriptions of country
+life, on the side of the Italian poets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE DISCOVERY OF MAN. SPIRITUAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY.
+
+
+To the discovery of the outward world the Renaissance added a still
+greater achievement, by first discerning and bringing to light the full,
+whole nature of man.[705]
+
+This period, as we have seen, first gave the highest development to
+individuality, and then led the individual to the most zealous and
+thorough study of himself in all forms and under all conditions. Indeed,
+the development of personality is essentially involved in the
+recognition of it in oneself and in others. Between these two great
+processes our narrative has placed the influence of ancient literature,
+because the mode of conceiving and representing both the individual and
+human nature in general was defined and coloured by that influence. But
+the power of conception and representation lay in the age and in the
+people.
+
+The facts which we shall quote in evidence of our thesis will be few in
+number. Here, if anywhere in the course of this discussion, the author
+is conscious that he is treading on the perilous ground of conjecture,
+and that what seems to him a clear, if delicate and gradual, transition
+in the intellectual movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
+may not be equally plain to others. The gradual awakening of the soul of
+a people is a phenomenon which may produce a different impression on
+each spectator. Time will judge which impression is the most faithful.
+
+Happily the study of the intellectual side of human nature began, not
+with the search after a theoretical psychology--for that, Aristotle
+still sufficed--but with the endeavour to observe and to describe. The
+indispensable ballast of theory was limited to the popular doctrine of
+the four temperaments, in its then habitual union with the belief in the
+influence of the planets. Such conceptions may remain ineradicable in
+the minds of individuals, without hindering the general progress of the
+age. It certainly makes on us a singular impression, when we meet them
+at a time when human nature in its deepest essence and in all its
+characteristic expressions was not only known by exact observation, but
+represented by an immortal poetry and art. It sounds almost ludicrous
+when an otherwise competent observer considers Clement VII. to be of a
+melancholy temperament, but defers his judgment to that of the
+physicians, who declare the pope of a sanguine-choleric nature;[706] or
+when we read that the same Gaston de Foix, the victor of Ravenna, whom
+Giorgione painted and Bambaja carved, and whom all the historians
+describe, had the saturnine temperament.[707] No doubt those who use
+these expressions mean something by them; but the terms in which they
+tell us their meaning are strangely out of date in the Italy of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+As examples of the free delineation of the human spirit, we shall first
+speak of the great poets of the fourteenth century.
+
+If we were to collect the pearls from the courtly and knightly poetry of
+all the countries of the West during the two preceding centuries, we
+should have a mass of wonderful divinations and single pictures of the
+inward life, which at first sight would seem to rival the poetry of the
+Italians. Leaving lyrical poetry out of account, Godfrey of Strasburg
+gives us, in 'Tristram and Isolt,' a representation of human passion,
+some features of which are immortal. But these pearls lie scattered in
+the ocean of artificial convention, and they are altogether something
+very different from a complete objective picture of the inward man and
+his spiritual wealth.
+
+Italy, too, in the thirteenth century had, through the 'Trovatori,' its
+share in the poetry of the courts and of chivalry. To them is mainly due
+the 'Canzone,' whose construction is as difficult and artificial as that
+of the songs of any northern minstrel. Their subject and mode of thought
+represents simply the conventional tone of the courts, be the poet a
+burgher or a scholar.
+
+But two new paths at length showed themselves, along which Italian
+poetry could advance to another and a characteristic future. They are
+not the less important for being concerned only with the formal and
+external side of the art.
+
+To the same Brunetto Latini--the teacher of Dante--who, in his
+'Canzoni,' adopts the customary manner of the 'Trovatori,' we owe the
+first-known 'Versi Sciolti,' or blank hendecasyllabic verses,[708] and
+in his apparent absence of form, a true and genuine passion suddenly
+showed itself. The same voluntary renunciation of outward effect,
+through confidence in the power of the inward conception, can be
+observed some years later in fresco-painting, and later still in
+painting of all kinds, which began to cease to rely on colour for its
+effect, using simply a lighter or darker shade. For an age which laid so
+much stress on artificial form in poetry, these verses of Brunetto mark
+the beginning of a new epoch.[709]
+
+About the same time, or even in the first half of the thirteenth
+century, one of the many strictly-balanced forms of metre, in which
+Europe was then so fruitful, became a normal and recognised form in
+Italy--the sonnet. The order of rhymes and even the number of the lines
+varied for a whole century,[710] till Petrarch fixed them permanently.
+In this form all higher lyrical or meditative subjects, and at a later
+time subjects of every possible description, were treated, and the
+madrigals, the sestine, and even the 'Canzoni' were reduced to a
+subordinate place. Later Italian writers complain, half jestingly, half
+resentfully, of this inevitable mould, this Procrustean bed, to which
+they were compelled to make their thoughts and feelings fit. Others
+were, and still are, quite satisfied with this particular form of verse,
+which they freely use to express any personal reminiscence or idle
+sing-song without necessity or serious purpose. For which reason there
+are many more bad or insignificant sonnets than good ones.
+
+Nevertheless, the sonnet must be held to have been an unspeakable
+blessing for Italian poetry. The clearness and beauty of its structure,
+the invitation it gave to elevate the thought in the second and more
+rapidly moving half, and the ease with which it could be learned by
+heart, made it valued even by the greatest masters. In fact, they would
+not have kept it in use down to our own century, had they not been
+penetrated with a sense of its singular worth. These masters could have
+given us the same thoughts in other and wholly different forms. But when
+once they had made the sonnet the normal type of lyrical poetry, many
+other writers of great, if not the highest, gifts, who otherwise would
+have lost themselves in a sea of diffusiveness, were forced to
+concentrate their feelings. The sonnet became for Italian literature a
+condenser of thoughts and emotions such as was possessed by the poetry
+of no other modern people.
+
+Thus the world of Italian sentiment comes before us in a series of
+pictures, clear, concise, and most effective in their brevity. Had other
+nations possessed a form of expression of the same kind, we should
+perhaps have known more of their inward life; we might have had a number
+of pictures of inward and outward situations--reflexions of the national
+character and temper--and should not be dependent for such knowledge on
+the so-called lyrical poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
+who can hardly ever be read with any serious enjoyment. In Italy we can
+trace an undoubted progress from the time when the sonnet came into
+existence. In the second half of the thirteenth century the 'Trovatori
+della transizione,' as they have been recently named,[711] mark the
+passage from the Troubadours to the poets--that is, to those who wrote
+under the influence of antiquity. The simplicity and strength of their
+feeling, the vigorous delineation of fact, the precise expression and
+rounding off of their sonnets and other poems, herald the coming of a
+Dante. Some political sonnets of the Guelphs and Ghibellines (1260-1270)
+have about them the ring of his passion, and others remind us of his
+sweetest lyrical notes.
+
+Of his own theoretical view of the sonnet, we are unfortunately
+ignorant, since the last books of his work, 'De vulgari eloquio,' in
+which he proposed to treat of ballads and sonnets, either remained
+unwritten or have been lost. But, as a matter of fact, he has left us in
+his Sonnets and 'Canzoni,' a treasure of inward experience. And in what
+a framework he has set them! The prose of the 'Vita Nuova,' in which he
+gives an account of the origin of each poem, is as wonderful as the
+verses themselves, and forms with them a uniform whole, inspired with
+the deepest glow of passion. With unflinching frankness and sincerity he
+lays bare every shade of his joy and his sorrow, and moulds it
+resolutely into the strictest forms of art. Reading attentively these
+Sonnets and 'Canzoni,' and the marvellous fragments of the diary of his
+youth which lie between them, we fancy that throughout the Middle Ages
+the poets have been purposely fleeing from themselves, and that he was
+the first to seek his own soul. Before his time we meet with many an
+artistic verse; but he is the first artist in the full sense of the
+word--the first who consciously cast immortal matter into an immortal
+form. Subjective feeling has here a full objective truth and greatness,
+and most of it is so set forth that all ages and peoples can make it
+their own.[712] Where he writes in a thoroughly objective spirit, and
+lets the force of his sentiment be guessed at only by some outward fact,
+as in the magnificent sonnets 'Tanto gentile,' etc., and 'Vedi
+perfettamente,' etc., he seems to feel the need of excusing
+himself.[713] The most beautiful of these poems really belongs to this
+class--the 'Deh peregrini che pensosi andate.'
+
+Even apart from the 'Divine Comedy,' Dante would have marked by these
+youthful poems the boundary between medi�valism and modern times. The
+human spirit had taken a mighty step towards the consciousness of its
+own secret life.
+
+The revelations in this matter which are contained in the 'Divine
+Comedy' itself are simply immeasurable; and it would be necessary to go
+through the whole poem, one canto after another, in order to do justice
+to its value from this point of view. Happily we have no need to do
+this, as it has long been a daily food of all the countries of the West.
+Its plan, and the ideas on which it is based, belong to the Middle Ages,
+and appeal to our interest only historically; but it is nevertheless the
+beginning of all modern poetry, through the power and richness shown in
+the description of human nature in every shape and attitude.[714]
+
+From this time forwards poetry may have experienced unequal fortunes,
+and may show, for half a century together, a so-called relapse. But its
+nobler and more vital principle was saved for ever; and whenever in the
+fourteenth, fifteenth, and in the beginning of the sixteenth centuries,
+an original mind devotes himself to it, he represents a more advanced
+stage than any poet out of Italy, given--what is certainly not always
+easy to settle satisfactorily--an equality of natural gifts to start
+with.
+
+Here, as in other things, in Italy, culture--to which poetry
+belongs--precedes the plastic arts and, in fact, gives them their chief
+impulse. More than a century elapsed before the spiritual element in
+painting and sculpture attained a power of expression in any way
+analogous to that of the 'Divine Comedy.' How far the same rule holds
+good for the artistic development of other nations,[715] and of what
+importance the whole question may be, does not concern us here. For
+Italian civilisation it is of decisive weight.
+
+The position to be assigned to Petrarch in this respect must be settled
+by the many readers of the poet. Those who come to him in the spirit of
+a cross-examiner, and busy themselves in detecting the contradictions
+between the poet and the man, his infidelities in love, and the other
+weak sides of his character, may perhaps, after sufficient effort, end
+by losing all taste for his poetry. In place, then, of artistic
+enjoyment, we may acquire a knowledge of the man in his 'totality.' What
+a pity that Petrarch's letters from Avignon contain so little gossip to
+take hold of, and that the letters of his acquaintances and of the
+friends of these acquaintances have either been lost or never existed!
+Instead of Heaven being thanked when we are not forced to enquire how
+and through what struggles a poet has rescued something immortal from
+his own poor life and lot, a biography has been stitched together for
+Petrarch out of these so-called 'remains,' which reads like an
+indictment. But the poet may take comfort. If the printing and editing
+of the correspondence of celebrated people goes on for another
+half-century as it has begun in England and Germany, he will have
+illustrious company enough sitting with him on the stool of repentance.
+
+Without shutting our eyes to much that is forced and artificial in his
+poetry, where the writer is merely imitating himself and singing on in
+the old strain, we cannot fail to admire the marvellous abundance of
+pictures of the inmost soul--descriptions of moments of joy and sorrow
+which must have been thoroughly his own, since no one before him gives
+us anything of the kind, and on which his significance rests for his
+country and for the world. His verse is not in all places equally
+transparent; by the side of his most beautiful thoughts, stand at times
+some allegorical conceit, or some sophistical trick of logic, altogether
+foreign to our present taste. But the balance is on the side of
+excellence.
+
+Boccaccio, too, in his imperfectly-known Sonnets,[716] succeeds
+sometimes in giving a most powerful and effective picture of his
+feeling. The return to a spot consecrated by love (Son. 22), the
+melancholy of spring (Son. 33), the sadness of the poet who feels
+himself growing old (Son. 65), are admirably treated by him. And in the
+'Ameto' he has described the ennobling and transfiguring power of love
+in a manner which would hardly be expected from the author of the
+'Decamerone.'[717] In the 'Fiammetta' we have another great and
+minutely-painted picture of the human soul, full of the keenest
+observation, though executed with anything but uniform power, and in
+parts marred by the passion for high-sounding language and by an unlucky
+mixture of mythological allusions and learned quotations. The
+'Fiammetta,' if we are not mistaken, is a sort of feminine counterpart
+to the 'Vita Nuova' of Dante, or at any rate owes its origin to it.
+
+That the ancient poets, particularly the elegists, and Virgil, in the
+fourth book of the �neid, were not without influence[718] on the
+Italians of this and the following generation is beyond a doubt; but the
+spring of sentiment within the latter was nevertheless powerful and
+original. If we compare them in this respect with their contemporaries
+in other countries, we shall find in them the earliest complete
+expression of modern European feeling. The question, be it remembered,
+is not to know whether eminent men of other nations did not feel as
+deeply and as nobly, but who first gave documentary proof of the widest
+knowledge of the movements of the human heart.
+
+Why did the Italians of the Renaissance do nothing above the second rank
+in tragedy? That was the field on which to display human character,
+intellect, and passion, in the thousand forms of their growth, their
+struggles, and their decline. In other words: why did Italy produce no
+Shakespeare? For with the stage of other northern countries besides
+England the Italians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had no
+reason to fear a comparison; and with the Spaniards they could not enter
+into competition, since Italy had long lost all traces of religious
+fanaticism, treated the chivalrous code of honour only as a form, and
+was both too proud and too intelligent to bow down before its tyrannical
+and illegitimate masters.[719] We have therefore only to consider the
+English stage in the period of its brief splendour.
+
+It is an obvious reply that all Europe produced but one Shakespeare, and
+that such a mind is the rarest of Heaven's gifts. It is further possible
+that the Italian stage was on the way to something great when the
+Counter-reformation broke in upon it, and, aided by the Spanish rule
+over Naples and Milan, and indirectly over the whole peninsula, withered
+the best flowers of the Italian spirit. It would be hard to conceive of
+Shakespeare himself under a Spanish viceroy, or in the neighbourhood of
+the Holy Inquisition at Rome, or even in his own country a few decades
+later, at the time of the English Revolution. The stage, which in its
+perfection is a late product of every civilisation, must wait for its
+own time and fortune.
+
+We must not, however, quit this subject without mentioning certain
+circumstances, which were of a character to hinder or retard a high
+development of the drama in Italy, till the time for it had gone by.
+
+As the most weighty of these causes we must mention without doubt that
+the scenic tastes of the people were occupied elsewhere, and chiefly in
+the mysteries and religious processions. Throughout all Europe dramatic
+representations of sacred history and legend form the origin of the
+secular drama; but Italy, as it will be shown more fully in the sequel,
+had spent on the mysteries such a wealth of decorative splendour as
+could not but be unfavourable to the dramatic element. Out of all the
+countless and costly representations, there sprang not even a branch of
+poetry like the 'Autos Sagramentales' of Calderon and other Spanish
+poets, much less any advantage or foundation for the legitimate
+drama.[720]
+
+And when the latter did at length appear, it at once gave itself up to
+magnificence of scenic effects, to which the mysteries had already
+accustomed the public taste to far too great an extent. We learn with
+astonishment how rich and splendid the scenes in Italy were, at a time
+when in the North the simplest indication of the place was thought
+sufficient. This alone might have had no such unfavourable effect on the
+drama, if the attention of the audience had not been drawn away from the
+poetical conception of the play partly by the splendour of the costumes,
+partly and chiefly by fantastic interludes (Intermezzi).
+
+That in many places, particularly in Rome and Ferrara, Plautus and
+Terence, as well as pieces by the old tragedians, were given in Latin or
+in Italian (pp. 242, 255), that the academies (p. 280) of which we have
+already spoken, made this one of their chief objects, and that the poets
+of the Renaissance followed these models too servilely, were all
+untoward conditions for the Italian stage at the period in
+question. Yet I hold them to be of secondary importance. Had not the
+Counter-reformation and the rule of foreigners intervened, these very
+disadvantages might have been turned into useful means of transition. At
+all events, by the year 1520 the victory of the mother-tongue in tragedy
+and comedy was, to the great disgust of the humanists, as good as
+won.[721] On this side, then, no obstacle stood in the way of the most
+developed people in Europe, to hinder them from raising the drama, in
+its noblest forms, to be a true reflexion of human life and destiny. It
+was the Inquisitors and Spaniards who cowed the Italian spirit, and
+rendered impossible the representation of the greatest and most sublime
+themes, most of all when they were associated with patriotic memories.
+At the same time, there is no doubt that the distracting 'Intermezzi'
+did serious harm to the drama. We must now consider them a little more
+closely.
+
+When the marriage of Alfonso of Ferrara with Lucrezia Borgia was
+celebrated, Duke Hercules in person showed his illustrious guests the
+110 costumes which were to serve at the representation of five comedies
+of Plautus, in order that all might see that not one of them was used
+twice.[722] But all this display of silk and camlet was nothing to the
+ballets and pantomimes which served as interludes between the acts of
+the Plautine dramas. That in comparison, Plautus himself seemed mortally
+dull to a lively young lady like Isabella Gonzaga, and that while the
+play was going on everybody was longing for the interludes, is quite
+intelligible, when we think of the picturesque brilliancy with which
+they were put on the stage. There were to be seen combats of Roman
+warriors, who brandished their weapons to the sound of music,
+torch-dances executed by Moors, a dance of savages with horns of plenty,
+out of which streamed waves of fire--all as the ballet of a pantomime in
+which a maiden was delivered from a dragon. Then came a dance of fools,
+got up as punches, beating one another with pigs' bladders, with more of
+the same kind. At the Court of Ferrara they never gave a comedy without
+'its' ballet (Moresca).[723] In what style the 'Amphitryo' of Plautus
+was there represented (1491, at the first marriage of Alfonso with Anna
+Sforza), is doubtful. Possibly it was given rather as a pantomime with
+music, than as a drama.[724] In any case, the accessories were more
+considerable than the play itself. There was a choral dance of ivy-clad
+youths, moving in intricate figures, done to the music of a ringing
+orchestra; then came Apollo, striking the lyre with the plectrum, and
+singing an ode to the praise of the House of Este; then followed, as an
+interlude within an interlude, a kind of rustic farce, after which the
+stage was again occupied by classical mythology--Venus, Bacchus and
+their followers--and by a pantomime representing the judgment of Paris.
+Not till then was the second half of the fable of Amphitryo performed,
+with unmistakable references to the future birth of a Hercules of the
+House of Este. At a former representation of the same piece in the
+courtyard of the palace (1487), 'a paradise with stars and other
+wheels,' was constantly burning, by which is probably meant an
+illumination with fireworks, that, no doubt, absorbed most of the
+attention of the spectators. It was certainly better when such
+performances were given separately, as was the case at other courts. We
+shall have to speak of the entertainments given by the Cardinal Pietro
+Riario, by the Bentivogli at Bologna, and by others, when we come to
+treat of the festivals in general.
+
+This scenic magnificence, now become universal, had a disastrous effect
+on Italian tragedy. 'In Venice formerly,' writes Francesco
+Sansovino,[725] 'besides comedies, tragedies by ancient and modern
+writers were put on the stage with great pomp. The fame of the scenic
+arrangements (_apparati_) brought spectators from far and near.
+Nowadays, performances are given by private individuals in their own
+houses, and the custom has long been fixed of passing the carnival in
+comedies and other cheerful entertainments.' In other words, scenic
+display had helped to kill tragedy.
+
+The various starts or attempts of these modern tragedians, among which
+the 'Sofonisba' of Trissino was the most celebrated, belong to the
+history of literature. The same may be said of genteel comedy, modelled
+on Plautus and Terence. Even Ariosto could do nothing of the first
+order in this style. On the other hand, popular prose-comedy, as treated
+by Macchiavelli, Bibiena, and Aretino, might have had a future, if its
+matter had not condemned it to destruction. This was, on the one hand,
+licentious to the last degree, and on the other, aimed at certain
+classes in society, which, after the middle of the sixteenth century,
+ceased to afford a ground for public attacks. If in the 'Sofonisba' the
+portrayal of character gave place to brilliant declamation, the latter,
+with its half-sister caricature, was used far too freely in comedy also.
+Nevertheless, these Italian comedies, if we are not mistaken, were the
+first written in prose and copied from real life, and for this reason
+deserve mention in the history of European literature.
+
+The writing of tragedies and comedies, and the practice of putting both
+ancient and modern plays on the stage, continued without intermission;
+but they served only as occasions for display. The national genius
+turned elsewhere for living interest. When the opera and the pastoral
+fable came up, these attempts were at length wholly abandoned.
+
+One form of comedy only was and remained national--the unwritten,
+improvised 'Commedia dell'Arte.' It was of no great service in the
+delineation of character, since the masks used were few in number and
+familiar to everybody. But the talent of the nation had such an affinity
+for this style, that often in the middle of written comedies the actors
+would throw themselves on their own inspiration,[726] so that a new
+mixed form of comedy came into existence in some places. The plays given
+in Venice by Burchiello, and afterwards by the company of Armonio, Val.
+Zuccato, Lod. Dolce, and others, were perhaps of this character.[727] Of
+Burchiello we know expressly that he used to heighten the comic effect
+by mixing Greek and Sclavonic words with the Venetian dialect. A
+complete 'Commedia dell'Arte,' or very nearly so, was represented by
+Angelo Beolco, known as 'Il Ruzzante' (1502-1542), who enjoyed the
+highest reputation as poet and actor, was compared as poet to Plautus,
+and as actor to Roscius, and who formed a company with several of his
+friends, who appeared in his pieces as Paduan peasants, with the names
+Menato, Vezzo, Billora, &c. He studied their dialect when spending the
+summer at the villa of his patron Luigi Cornaro (Aloysius Cornelius) at
+Codevico.[728] Gradually all the famous local masks made their
+appearance, whose remains still delight the Italian populace at our day:
+Pantalone, the Doctor, Brighella, Pulcinella, Arlecchino, and the rest.
+Most of them are of great antiquity, and possibly are historically
+connected with the masks in the old Roman farces; but it was not till
+the sixteenth century that several of them were combined in one piece.
+At the present time this is less often the case; but every great city
+still keeps to its local mask--Naples to the Pulcinella, Florence to the
+Stentorello, Milan to its often so admirable Meneghino.[729]
+
+This is indeed scanty compensation for a people which possessed the
+power, perhaps to a greater degree than any other, to reflect and
+contemplate its own highest qualities in the mirror of the drama. But
+this power was destined to be marred for centuries by hostile forces,
+for whose predominance the Italians were only in part responsible. The
+universal talent for dramatic representation could not indeed be
+uprooted, and in music Italy long made good its claim to supremacy in
+Europe. Those who can find in this world of sound a compensation for the
+drama, to which all future was denied, have, at all events, no meagre
+source of consolation.
+
+But perhaps we can find in epic poetry what the stage fails to offer us.
+Yet the chief reproach made against the heroic poetry of Italy is
+precisely on the score of the insignificance and imperfect
+representation of its characters.
+
+Other merits are allowed to belong to it, among the rest, that for three
+centuries it has been actually read and constantly reprinted, while
+nearly the whole of the epic poetry of other nations has become a mere
+matter of literary or historical curiosity. Does this perhaps lie in the
+taste of the readers, who demand something different from what would
+satisfy a northern public? Certainly, without the power of entering to
+some degree into Italian sentiment, it is impossible to appreciate the
+characteristic excellence of these poems, and many distinguished men
+declare that they can make nothing of them. And in truth, if we
+criticise Pulci, Bojardo, Ariosto, and Berni solely with an eye to their
+thought and matter, we shall fail to do them justice. They are artists
+of a peculiar kind, who write for a people which is distinctly and
+eminently artistic.
+
+The medi�val legends had lived on after the gradual extinction of the
+poetry of chivalry, partly in the form of rhyming adaptations and
+collections, and partly of novels in prose. The latter was the case in
+Italy during the fourteenth century; but the newly-awakened memories of
+antiquity were rapidly growing up to a gigantic size, and soon cast into
+the shade all the fantastic creations of the Middle Ages. Boccaccio, for
+example, in his 'Visione Amorosa,' names among the heroes in his
+enchanted palace Tristram, Arthur, Galeotto, and others, but briefly, as
+if he were ashamed to speak of them (p. 206); and following writers
+either do not name them at all, or name them only for purposes of
+ridicule. But the people kept them in its memory, and from the people
+they passed into the hands of the poets of the fifteenth century. These
+were now able to conceive and represent their subject in a wholly new
+manner. But they did more. They introduced into it a multitude of fresh
+elements, and in fact recast it from beginning to end. It must not be
+expected of them that they should treat such subjects with the respect
+once felt for them. All other countries must envy them the advantage of
+having a popular interest of this kind to appeal to; but they could not
+without hypocrisy treat these myths with any respect.[730]
+
+Instead of this, they moved with victorious freedom in the new field
+which poetry had won. What they chiefly aimed at seems to have been that
+their poems, when recited, should produce the most harmonious and
+exhilarating effect. These works indeed gain immensely when they are
+repeated, not as a whole, but piecemeal, and with a slight touch of
+comedy in voice and gesture. A deeper and more detailed portrayal of
+character would do little to enhance this effect; though the reader may
+desire it, the hearer, who sees the rhapsodist standing before him, and
+who hears only one piece at a time, does not think about it at all. With
+respect to the figures which the poet found ready made for him, his
+feeling was of a double kind; his humanistic culture protested against
+their medi�val character, and their combats as counterparts of the
+battles and tournaments of the poet's own age exercised all his
+knowledge and artistic power, while at the same time they called forth
+all the highest qualities in the reciter. Even in Pulci,[731]
+accordingly, we find no parody, strictly speaking, of chivalry, nearly
+as the rough humour of his paladins at times approaches it. By their
+side stands the ideal of pugnacity--the droll and jovial Morgante--who
+masters whole armies with his bell-clapper, and who is himself thrown
+into relief by contrast with the grotesque and most interesting monster
+Margutte. Yet Pulci lays no special stress on these two rough and
+vigorous characters, and his story, long after they had disappeared from
+it, maintains its singular course. Bojardo[732] treats his characters
+with the same mastery, using them for serious or comic purposes as he
+pleases; he has his fun even out of supernatural beings, whom he
+sometimes intentionally depicts as louts. But there is one artistic aim
+which he pursues as earnestly as Pulci, namely, the lively and exact
+description of all that goes forward. Pulci recited his poem, as one
+book after another was finished, before the society of Lorenzo
+Magnifico, and in the same way Bojardo recited his at the court of
+Hercules of Ferrara. It may be easily imagined what sort of excellence
+such an audience demanded, and how little thanks a profound exposition
+of character would have earned for the poet. Under these circumstances
+the poems naturally formed no complete whole, and might just as well be
+half or twice as long as they now are. Their composition is not that of
+a great historical picture, but rather that of a frieze, or of some rich
+festoon entwined among groups of picturesque figures. And precisely as
+in the figures or tendrils of a frieze we do not look for minuteness of
+execution in the individual forms, or for distant perspectives and
+different planes, so we must as little expect anything of the kind from
+these poems.
+
+The varied richness of invention which continually astonishes us, most
+of all in the case of Bojardo, turns to ridicule all our school
+definitions as to the essence of epic poetry. For that age, this form of
+literature was the most agreeable diversion from arch�ological studies,
+and, indeed, the only possible means of re-establishing an independent
+class of narrative poetry. For the versification of ancient history
+could only lead to the false tracks which were trodden by Petrarch in
+his 'Africa,' written in Latin hexameters, and a hundred and fifty years
+later by Trissino in his 'Italy delivered from the Goths,' composed in
+'versi sciolti'--a never-ending poem of faultless language and
+versification, which only makes us doubt whether an unlucky alliance has
+been most disastrous to history or to poetry.[733]
+
+And whither did the example of Dante beguile those who imitated him? The
+visionary 'Trionfi' of Petrarch were the last of the works written under
+this influence which satisfy our taste. The 'Amorosa Visione' of
+Boccaccio is at bottom no more than an enumeration of historical or
+fabulous characters, arranged under allegorical categories.[734] Others
+preface what they have to tell with a baroque imitation of Dante's
+first canto, and provide themselves with some allegorical comparison, to
+take the place of Virgil. Uberti, for example, chose Solinus for his
+geographical poem--the 'Dittamondo'--and Giovanni Santi, Plutarch for
+his encomium on Frederick of Urbino.[735] The only salvation of the time
+from these false tendencies lay in the new epic poetry which was
+represented by Pulci and Bojardo. The admiration and curiosity with
+which it was received, and the like of which will perhaps never fall
+again to the lot of epic poetry to the end of time, is a brilliant proof
+how great was the need of it. It is idle to ask whether that epic ideal
+which our own day has formed from Homer and the 'Nibelungenlied' is or
+is not realised in these works; an ideal of their own age certainly was.
+By their endless descriptions of combats, which to us are the most
+fatiguing part of these poems, they satisfied, as we have already said,
+a practical interest of which it is hard for us to form a just
+conception[736]--as hard, indeed, as of the esteem in which a lively and
+faithful reflection of the passing moment was then held.
+
+Nor can a more inappropriate test be applied to Ariosto than the degree
+in which his 'Orlando Furioso'[737] serves for the representation of
+character. Characters, indeed, there are, and drawn with an affectionate
+care; but the poem does not depend on these for its effect, and would
+lose, rather than gain, if more stress were laid upon them. But the
+demand for them is part of a wider and more general desire which Ariosto
+fails to satisfy as our day would wish it satisfied. From a poet of such
+fame and such mighty gifts we would gladly receive something better than
+the adventures of Orlando. From him we might have hoped for a work
+expressing the deepest conflicts of the human soul, the highest thoughts
+of his time on human and divine things--in a word, one of those supreme
+syntheses like the 'Divine Comedy' or 'Faust.' Instead of which he goes
+to work like the plastic artists of his own day, not caring for
+originality in our sense of the word, simply reproducing a familiar
+circle of figures, and even, when it suits his purpose, making use of
+the details left him by his predecessors. The excellence which, in spite
+of all this, can nevertheless be attained, will be the more
+incomprehensible to people born without the artistic sense, the more
+learned and intelligent in other respects they are. The artistic aim of
+Ariosto is brilliant, living action, which he distributes equally
+through the whole of his great poem. For this end he needs to be
+excused, not only from all deeper expression of character, but also from
+maintaining any strict connection in his narrative. He must be allowed
+to take up lost and forgotten threads when and where he pleases; his
+heroes must come and go, not because their character, but because the
+story requires it. Yet in this apparently irrational and arbitrary style
+of composition he displays a harmonious beauty, never losing himself in
+description, but giving only such a sketch of scenes and persons as does
+not hinder the flowing movement of the narrative. Still less does he
+lose himself in conversation and monologue,[738] but maintains the lofty
+privilege of the true epos, by transforming all into living narrative.
+His pathos does not lie in the words,[739] not even in the famous
+twenty-third and following cantos, where Roland's madness is described.
+That the love-stories in the heroic poem are without all lyrical
+tenderness, must be reckoned a merit, though from a moral point of view
+they cannot be always approved. Yet at times they are of such truth and
+reality, notwithstanding all the magic and romance which surrounds them,
+that we might think them personal affairs of the poet himself. In the
+full consciousness of his own genius, he does not scruple to interweave
+the events of his own day into the poem, and to celebrate the fame of
+the house of Este in visions and prophecies. The wonderful stream of his
+octaves bears it all forwards in even and dignified movement.
+
+With Teofilo Folengo, or, as he here calls himself, Limerno Pitocco, the
+parody of the whole system of chivalry attained the end it had so long
+desired.[740] But here comedy, with its realism, demanded of necessity a
+stricter delineation of character. Exposed to all the rough usage of
+the half-savage street-lads in a Roman country town, Sutri, the little
+Orlando grows up before our eyes into the hero, the priest-hater, and
+the disputant. The conventional world which had been recognised since
+the time of Pulci and had served as framework for the epos, falls here
+to pieces. The origin and position of the paladins is openly ridiculed,
+as in the tournament of donkeys in the second book, where the knights
+appear with the most ludicrous armament. The poet utters his ironical
+regrets over the inexplicable faithlessness which seems implanted in the
+house of Gano of Mainz, over the toilsome acquisition of the sword
+Durindana, and so forth. Tradition, in fact, serves him only as a
+substratum for episodes, ludicrous fancies, allusions to events of the
+time (among which some, like the close of cap. vi. are exceedingly
+fine), and indecent jokes. Mixed with all this, a certain derision of
+Ariosto is unmistakable, and it was fortunate for the 'Orlando Furioso'
+that the 'Orlandino,' with its Lutheran heresies, was soon put out of
+the way by the Inquisition. The parody is evident when (cap. v. str. 28)
+the house of Gonzaga is deduced from the paladin Guidone, since the
+Colonna claimed Orlando, the Orsini Rinaldo, and the house of
+Este--according to Ariosto--Ruggiero as their ancestors. Perhaps
+Ferrante Gonzaga, the patron of the poet, was a party to this sarcasm on
+the house of Este.
+
+That in the 'Jerusalem Delivered' of Torquato Tasso the delineation of
+character is one of the chief tasks of the poet, proves only how far his
+mode of thought differed from that prevalent half a century before. His
+admirable work is a true monument of the Counter-reformation which had
+been meanwhile accomplished, and of the spirit and tendency of that
+movement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+BIOGRAPHY.
+
+
+Outside the sphere of poetry also, the Italians were the first of all
+European nations who displayed any remarkable power and inclination
+accurately to describe man as shown in history, according to his inward
+and outward characteristics.
+
+It is true that in the Middle Ages considerable attempts were made in
+the same direction; and the legends of the Church, as a kind of standing
+biographical task, must, to some extent, have kept alive the interest
+and the gift for such descriptions. In the annals of the monasteries and
+cathedrals, many of the churchmen, such as Meinwerk of Paderborn,
+Godehard of Kildesheim, and others, are brought vividly before our eyes;
+and descriptions exist of several of the German emperors, modelled after
+old authors--particularly Suetonius--which contain admirable features.
+Indeed these and other profane 'vitae' came in time to form a continuous
+counterpart to the sacred legends. Yet neither Einhard nor
+Radevicus[741] can be named by the side of Joinville's picture of St.
+Louis, which certainly stands almost alone as the first complete
+spiritual portrait of a modern European nature. Characters like St.
+Louis are rare at all times, and his was favoured by the rare good
+fortune that a sincere and na�ve observer caught the spirit of all the
+events and actions of his life, and represented it admirably. From what
+scanty sources are we left to guess at the inward nature of Frederick
+II. or of Philip the Fair. Much of what, till the close of the Middle
+Ages, passed for biography, is properly speaking nothing but
+contemporary narrative, written without any sense of what is individual
+in the subject of the memoir.
+
+Among the Italians, on the contrary, the search for the characteristic
+features of remarkable men was a prevailing tendency; and this it is
+which separates them from the other western peoples, among whom the same
+thing happens but seldom, and in exceptional cases. This keen eye for
+individuality belongs only to those who have emerged from the
+half-conscious life of the race and become themselves individuals.
+
+Under the influence of the prevailing conception of fame (p. 139, sqq.),
+an art of comparative biography arose which no longer found it
+necessary, like Anastasius,[742] Agnellus,[743] and their successors, or
+like the biographers of the Venetian doges, to adhere to a dynastic or
+ecclesiastical succession. It felt itself free to describe a man if and
+because he was remarkable. It took as models Suetonius, Nepos (the 'viri
+illustres'), and Plutarch, so far as he was known and translated; for
+sketches of literary history, the lives of the grammarians,
+rhetoricians, and poets, known to us as the 'Appendices' to
+Suetonius,[744] seem to have served as patterns, as well as the
+widely-read life of Virgil by Donatus.
+
+It has been already mentioned that biographical collections--lives of
+famous men and famous women--began to appear in the fourteenth century
+(p. 146). Where they do not describe contemporaries, they are naturally
+dependent on earlier narratives. The first great original effort is the
+life of Dante by Boccaccio. Lightly and rhetorically written, and full,
+as it is, of arbitrary fancies, this work nevertheless gives us a lively
+sense of the extraordinary features in Dante's nature.[745] Then follow,
+at the end of the fourteenth century, the 'vite' of illustrious
+Florentines, by Filippo Villani. They are men of every calling: poets,
+jurists, physicians, scholars, artists, statesmen, and soldiers, some of
+them then still living. Florence is here treated like a gifted family,
+in which all the members are noticed in whom the spirit of the house
+expresses itself vigorously. The descriptions are brief, but show a
+remarkable eye for what is characteristic, and are noteworthy for
+including the inward and outward physiognomy in the same sketch.[746]
+From that time forward,[747] the Tuscans never ceased to consider the
+description of man as lying within their special competence, and to them
+we owe the most valuable portraits of the Italians of the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries. Giovanni Cavalcanti, in the appendices to his
+Florentine history, written before the year 1450,[748] collects
+instances of civil virtue and abnegation, of political discernment and
+of military valour, all shown by Florentines. Pius II. gives us in his
+'Commentaries' valuable portraits of famous contemporaries; and not long
+ago a separate work of his earlier years,[749] which seems preparatory
+to these portraits, but which has colours and features that are very
+singular, was reprinted. To Jacob of Volterra we owe piquant sketches of
+members of the Curia[750] in the time of Sixtus IV. Vespasiano
+Fiorentino has been often referred to already, and as a historical
+authority a high place must be assigned to him; but his gift as a
+painter of character is not to be compared with that of Macchiavelli,
+Niccol� Valori, Guicciardini, Varchi, Francesco Vettori, and others, by
+whom European history has been probably as much influenced in this
+direction as by the ancients. It must not be forgotten that some of
+these authors soon found their way into northern countries by means of
+Latin translations. And without Giorgio Vasari of Arezzo and his
+all-important work, we should perhaps to this day have no history of
+northern art, or of the art of modern Europe, at all.[751]
+
+Among the biographers of North Italy in the fifteenth century,
+Bartolommeo Facio of Spezzia holds a high rank (p. 147). Platina, born
+in the territory of Cremona, gives us, in his 'Life of Paul II.' (p.
+231), examples of biographical caricatures. The description of the last
+Visconti,[752] written by Piercandido Decembrio--an enlarged imitation
+of Suetonius--is of special importance. Sismondi regrets that so much
+trouble has been spent on so unworthy an object, but the author would
+hardly have been equal to deal with a greater man, while he was
+thoroughly competent to describe the mixed nature of Filippo Maria, and
+in and through it to represent with accuracy the conditions, the forms,
+and the consequences of this particular kind of despotism. The picture
+of the fifteenth century would be incomplete without this unique
+biography, which is characteristic down to its minutest details. Milan
+afterwards possessed, in the historian Corio, an excellent
+portrait-painter; and after him came Paolo Giovio of Como, whose larger
+biographies and shorter 'Elogia' have achieved a world-wide reputation,
+and become models for future writers in all countries. It is easy to
+prove by a hundred passages how superficial and even dishonest he was;
+nor from a man like him can any high and serious purpose be expected.
+But the breath of the age moves in his pages, and his Leo, his Alfonso,
+his Pompeo Colonna, live and act before us with such perfect truth and
+reality, that we seem admitted to the deepest recesses of their nature.
+
+Among Neapolitan writers, Tristano Caracciolo (p. 36), so far as we are
+able to judge, holds indisputably the first place in this respect,
+although his purpose was not strictly biographical. In the figures which
+he brings before us, guilt and destiny are wondrously mingled. He is a
+kind of unconscious tragedian. That genuine tragedy which then found no
+place on the stage, 'swept by' in the palace, the street, and the public
+square. The 'Words and Deeds of Alfonso the Great,' written by Antonio
+Panormita[753] during the lifetime of the king, and consequently showing
+more of the spirit of flattery than is consistent with historical truth,
+are remarkable as one of the first of such collections of anecdotes and
+of wise and witty sayings.
+
+The rest of Europe followed the example of Italy in this respect but
+slowly,[754] although great political and religious movements had broken
+so many bands, and had awakened so many thousands to new spiritual life.
+Italians, whether scholars or diplomatists, still remained, on the
+whole, the best source of information for the characters of the leading
+men all over Europe. It is well known how speedily and unanimously in
+recent times the reports of the Venetian embassies in the sixteenth and
+seventeenth centuries have been recognised as authorities of the first
+order for personal description.[755] Even autobiography takes here and
+there in Italy a bold and vigorous flight, and puts before us, together
+with the most varied incidents of external life, striking revelations of
+the inner man. Among other nations, even in Germany at the time of the
+Reformation, it deals only with outward experiences, and leaves us to
+guess at the spirit within from the style of the narrative.[756] It
+seems as though Dante's 'Vita Nuova,' with the inexorable truthfulness
+which runs through it, had shown his people the way.
+
+The beginnings of autobiography are to be traced in the family histories
+of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which are said to be not
+uncommon as manuscripts in the Florentine libraries--unaffected
+narratives written for the sake of the individual or of his family, like
+that of Buonaccorso Pitti.
+
+A profound self-analysis is not to be looked for in the 'Commentaries'
+of Pius II. What we here learn of him as a man seems at first sight to
+be chiefly confined to the account which he gives of the different steps
+in his career. But further reflexion will lead us to a different
+conclusion with regard to this remarkable book. There are men who are by
+nature mirrors of what surrounds them. It would be irrelevant to ask
+incessantly after their convictions, their spiritual struggles, their
+inmost victories and achievements. �neas Sylvius lived wholly in the
+interest which lay near, without troubling himself about the problems
+and contradictions of life. His Catholic orthodoxy gave him all the help
+of this kind which he needed. And at all events, after taking part in
+every intellectual movement which interested his age, and notably
+furthering some of them, he still at the close of his earthly course
+retained character enough to preach a crusade against the Turks, and to
+die of grief when it came to nothing.
+
+Nor is the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, any more than that of
+Pius II., founded on introspection. And yet it describes the whole
+man--not always willingly--with marvellous truth and completeness. It is
+no small matter that Benvenuto, whose most important works have perished
+half finished, and who, as an artist, is perfect only in his little
+decorative specialty, but in other respects, if judged by the works of
+him which remain, is surpassed by so many of his greater
+contemporaries--that Benvenuto as a man will interest mankind to the end
+of time. It does not spoil the impression when the reader often detects
+him bragging or lying; the stamp of a mighty, energetic, and thoroughly
+developed nature remains. By his side our northern autobiographers,
+though their tendency and moral character may stand much higher, appear
+incomplete beings. He is a man who can do all and dares do all, and who
+carries his measure in himself.[757] Whether we like him or not, he
+lives, such as he was, as a significant type of the modern spirit.
+
+Another man deserves a brief mention in connection with this subject--a
+man who, like Benvenuto, was not a model of veracity: Girolamo Cardano
+of Milan (b. 1500). His little book, 'De propria vita'[758] will outlive
+and eclipse his fame in philosophy and natural science, just as
+Benvenuto's life, though its value is of another kind, has thrown his
+works into the shade. Cardano is a physician who feels his own pulse,
+and describes his own physical, moral, and intellectual nature, together
+with all the conditions under which it had developed, and this, to the
+best of his ability, honestly and sincerely. The work which he avowedly
+took as his model--the 'Confessions' of Marcus Aurelius--he was able,
+hampered as he was by no stoical maxims, to surpass in this particular.
+He desires to spare neither himself nor others, and begins the narrative
+of his career with the statement that his mother tried, and failed, to
+procure abortion. It is worth remark that he attributes to the stars
+which presided over his birth only the events of his life and his
+intellectual gifts, but not his moral qualities; he confesses (cap. 10)
+that the astrological prediction that he would not live to the age of
+forty or fifty years did him much harm in his youth. But there is no
+need to quote from so well-known and accessible a book; whoever opens it
+will not lay it down till the last page. Cardano admits that he cheated
+at play, that he was vindictive, incapable of all compunction,
+purposely cruel in his speech. He confesses it without impudence and
+without feigned contrition, without even wishing to make himself an
+object of interest, but with the same simple and sincere love of fact
+which guided him in his scientific researches. And, what is to us the
+most repulsive of all, the old man, after the most shocking
+experiences[759] and with his confidence in his fellow-men gone, finds
+himself after all tolerably happy and comfortable. He has still left him
+a grandson, immense learning, the fame of his works, money, rank and
+credit, powerful friends, the knowledge of many secrets, and, best of
+all, belief in God. After this, he counts the teeth in his head, and
+finds that he has fifteen.
+
+Yet when Cardano wrote, Inquisitors and Spaniards were already busy in
+Italy, either hindering the production of such natures, or, where they
+existed, by some means or other putting them out of the way. There lies
+a gulf between this book and the memoirs of Alfieri.
+
+Yet it would be unjust to close this list of autobiographers without
+listening to a word from one man who was both worthy and happy. This is
+the well-known philosopher of practical life, Luigi Cornaro, whose
+dwelling at Padua, classical as an architectural work, was at the same
+time the home of all the muses. In his famous treatise 'On the Sober
+Life,'[760] he describes the strict regimen by which he succeeded, after
+a sickly youth, in reaching an advanced and healthy age, then of
+eighty-three years. He goes on to answer those who despise life after
+the age of sixty-five as a living death, showing them that his own life
+had nothing deadly about it. 'Let them come and see, and wonder at my
+good health, how I mount on horseback without help, how I run upstairs
+and up hills, how cheerful, amusing, and contented I am, how free from
+care and disagreeable thoughts. Peace and joy never quit me.... My
+friends are wise, learned, and distinguished people of good position,
+and when they are not with me I read and write, and try thereby, as by
+all other means, to be useful to others. Each of these things I do at
+the proper time, and at my ease, in my dwelling, which is beautiful and
+lies in the best part of Padua, and is arranged both for summer and
+winter with all the resources of architecture, and provided with a
+garden by the running water. In the spring and autumn, I go for a while
+to my hill in the most beautiful part of the Euganean mountains, where I
+have fountains and gardens, and a comfortable dwelling; and there I
+amuse myself with some easy and pleasant chase, which is suitable to my
+years. At other times I go to my villa on the plain;[761] there all the
+paths lead to an open space, in the middle of which stands a pretty
+church; an arm of the Brenta flows through the plantations--fruitful,
+well-cultivated fields, now fully peopled, which the marshes and the
+foul air once made fitter for snakes than for men. It was I who drained
+the country; then the air became good, and people settled there and
+multiplied, and the land became cultivated as it now is, so that I can
+truly say: "On this spot I gave to God an altar and a temple, and souls
+to worship Him." This is my consolation and my happiness whenever I come
+here. In the spring and autumn, I also visit the neighbouring towns, to
+see and converse with my friends, through whom I make the acquaintance
+of other distinguished men, architects, painters, sculptors, musicians,
+and cultivators of the soil. I see what new things they have done, I
+look again at what I know already, and learn much that is of use to me.
+I see palaces, gardens, antiquities, public grounds, churches, and
+fortifications. But what most of all delights me when I travel, is the
+beauty of the country and the cities, lying now on the plain, now on the
+slopes of the hills, or on the banks of rivers and streams, surrounded
+by gardens and villas. And these enjoyments are not diminished through
+weakness of the eyes or the ears; all my senses (thank God!) are in the
+best condition, including the sense of taste; for I enjoy more the
+simple food which I now take in moderation, than all the delicacies
+which I ate in my years of disorder.'
+
+After mentioning the works he had undertaken on behalf of the republic
+for draining the marshes, and the projects which he had constantly
+advocated for preserving the lagunes, he thus concludes:--
+
+'These are the true recreations of an old age which God has permitted to
+be healthy, and which is free from those mental and bodily sufferings to
+which so many young people and so many sickly older people succumb. And
+if it be allowable to add the little to the great, to add jest to
+earnest, it may be mentioned as a result of my moderate life, that in my
+eighty-third year I have written a most amusing comedy, full of
+blameless wit. Such works are generally the business of youth, as
+tragedy is the business of old age. If it is reckoned to the credit of
+the famous Greek that he wrote a tragedy in his seventy-third year, must
+I not, with my ten years more, be more cheerful and healthy than he ever
+was? And that no consolation may be wanting in the overflowing cup of my
+old age, I see before my eyes a sort of bodily immortality in the
+persons of my descendants. When I come home I see before me, not one or
+two, but eleven grandchildren, between the ages of two and eighteen, all
+from the same father and mother, all healthy, and, so far as can already
+be judged, all gifted with the talent and disposition for learning and a
+good life. One of the younger I have as my playmate (buffoncello), since
+children from the third to the fifth year are born to tricks; the elder
+ones I treat as my companions, and, as they have admirable voices, I
+take delight in hearing them sing and play on different instruments. And
+I sing myself, and find my voice better, clearer, and louder than ever.
+These are the pleasures of my last years. My life, therefore, is alive,
+and not dead; nor would I exchange my age for the youth of such as live
+in the service of their passions.
+
+In the 'Exhortation' which Cornaro added at a much later time, in his
+ninety-fifth year, he reckons it among the elements of his happiness
+that his 'Treatise' had made many converts. He died at Padua in 1565, at
+the age of over a hundred years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE DESCRIPTION OF NATIONS AND CITIES.
+
+
+This national gift did not, however, confine itself to the criticism and
+description of individuals, but felt itself competent to deal with the
+qualities and characteristics of whole peoples. Throughout the Middle
+Ages the cities, families, and nations of all Europe were in the habit
+of making insulting and derisive attacks on one another, which, with
+much caricature, contained commonly a kernel of truth. But from the
+first the Italians surpassed all others in their quick apprehension of
+the mental differences among cities and populations. Their local
+patriotism, stronger probably than in any other medi�val people, soon
+found expression in literature, and allied itself with the current
+conception of 'Fame.' Topography became the counterpart of biography (p.
+145); while all the more important cities began to celebrate their own
+praises in prose and verse,[762] writers appeared who made the chief
+towns and districts the subject partly of a serious comparative
+description, partly of satire, and sometimes of notices in which jest
+and earnest are not easy to be distinguished. Brunetto Latini must first
+be mentioned. Besides his own country, he knew France from a residence
+of seven years, and gives a long list of the characteristic differences
+in costume and modes of life between Frenchmen and Italians, noticing
+the distinction between the monarchical government of France and the
+republican constitution of the Italian cities.[763] After this, next to
+some famous passages in the 'Divine Comedy,' comes the 'Dittamondo' of
+Uberti (about 1360). As a rule, only single remarkable facts and
+characteristics are here mentioned: the Feast of the Crows at Sant'
+Apollinare in Ravenna, the springs at Treviso, the great cellar near
+Vicenza, the high duties at Mantua, the forest of towers at Lucca. Yet
+mixed up with all this, we find laudatory and satirical criticisms of
+every kind. Arezzo figures with the crafty disposition of its citizens,
+Genoa with the artificially blackened eyes and teeth (?) of its women,
+Bologna with its prodigality, Bergamo with its coarse dialect and
+hard-headed people.[764] In the fifteenth century the fashion was to
+belaud one's own city even at the expense of others. Michele Savonarola
+allows that, in comparison with his native Padua, only Rome and Venice
+are more splendid, and Florence perhaps more joyous[765]--by which our
+knowledge is naturally not much extended. At the end of the century,
+Jovianus Pontanus, in his 'Antonius,' writes an imaginary journey
+through Italy, simply as a vehicle for malicious observations. But in
+the sixteenth century we meet with a series of exact and profound
+studies of national characteristics, such as no other people of that
+time could rival.[766] Macchiavelli sets forth in some of his valuable
+essays the character and the political condition of the Germans and
+French in such a way, that the born northerner, familiar with the
+history of his own country, is grateful to the Florentine thinker for
+his flashes of insight. The Florentines (p. 71 sqq.) begin to take
+pleasure in describing themselves;[767] and basking in the well-earned
+sunshine of their intellectual glory, their pride seems to attain its
+height when they derive the artistic pre-eminence of Tuscany among
+Italians, not from any special gifts of nature, but from hard patient
+work.[768] The homage of famous men from other parts of Italy, of which
+the sixteenth Capitolo of Ariosto is a splendid example, they accepted
+as a merited tribute to their excellence.
+
+An admirable description of the Italians, with their various pursuits
+and characteristics, though in few words and with special stress laid on
+the Lucchese, to whom the work was dedicated, was given by Ortensio
+Landi, who, however, is so fond of playing hide-and-seek with his own
+name, and fast-and-loose with historical facts, that even when he seems
+to be most in earnest, he must be accepted with caution and only after
+close examination.[769] The same Landi published an anonymous
+'Commentario' some ten years later,[770] which contains among many
+follies not a few valuable hints on the unhappy ruined condition of
+Italy in the middle of the century.[771] Leandro Alberti[772] is not so
+fruitful as might be expected in his description of the character of the
+different cities.
+
+To what extent this comparative study of national and local
+characteristics may, by means of Italian humanism, have influenced the
+rest of Europe, we cannot say with precision. To Italy, at all events,
+belongs the priority in this respect, as in the description of the world
+in general.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTWARD MAN.
+
+
+But the discoveries made with regard to man were not confined to the
+spiritual characteristics of individuals and nations; his outward
+appearance was in Italy the subject of an entirely different interest
+from that shown in it by northern peoples.[773]
+
+Of the position held by the great Italian physicians with respect to the
+progress of physiology, we cannot venture to speak; and the artistic
+study of the human figure belongs, not to a work like the present, but
+to the history of art. But something must here be said of that universal
+education of the eye, which rendered the judgment of the Italians as to
+bodily beauty or ugliness perfect and final.
+
+On reading the Italian authors of that period attentively, we are
+astounded at the keenness and accuracy with which outward features are
+seized, and at the completeness with which personal appearance in
+general is described.[774] Even to-day the Italians, and especially the
+Romans, have the art of sketching a man's picture in a couple of words.
+This rapid apprehension of what is characteristic is an essential
+condition for detecting and representing the beautiful. In poetry, it is
+true, circumstantial description may be a fault, not a merit, since a
+single feature, suggested by deep passion or insight, will often awaken
+in the reader a far more powerful impression of the figure described.
+Dante gives us nowhere a more splendid idea of his Beatrice than where
+he only describes the influence which goes forth from her upon all
+around. But here we have not to treat particularly of poetry, which
+follows its own laws and pursues its own ends, but rather of the general
+capacity to paint in words real or imaginary forms.
+
+In this Boccaccio is a master--not in the 'Decameron,' where the
+character of the tales forbids lengthy description, but in the romances,
+where he is free to take his time. In his 'Ameto'[775] he describes a
+blonde and a brunette much as an artist a hundred years later would have
+painted them--for here, too, culture long precedes art. In the account
+of the brunette--or, strictly speaking, of the less blonde of the
+two--there are touches which deserve to be called classical. In the
+words 'la spaziosa testa e distesa' lies the feeling for grander forms,
+which go beyond a graceful prettiness; the eyebrows with him no longer
+resemble two bows, as in the Byzantine ideal, but a single wavy line;
+the nose seems to have been meant to be aquiline;[776] the broad, full
+breast, the arms of moderate length, the effect of the beautiful hand,
+as it lies on the purple mantle--all both foretells the sense of beauty
+of a coming time, and unconsciously approaches to that of classical
+antiquity. In other descriptions Boccaccio mentions a flat (not
+medi�vally rounded) brow, a long, earnest, brown eye, and round, not
+hollowed neck, as well as--in a very modern tone--the 'little feet' and
+the 'two roguish eyes' of a black-haired nymph.[777]
+
+Whether the fifteenth century has left any written account of its ideal
+of beauty, I am not able to say. The works of the painters and sculptors
+do not render such an account as unnecessary as might appear at first
+sight, since possibly, as opposed to their realism, a more ideal type
+might have been favoured and preserved by the writers.[778] In the
+sixteenth century Firenzuola came forward with his remarkable work on
+female beauty.[779] We must clearly distinguish in it what he had
+learned from old authors or from artists, such as the fixing of
+proportions according to the length of the head, and certain abstract
+conceptions. What remains, is his own genuine observation, illustrated
+with examples of women and girls from Prato. As his little work is a
+kind of lecture, delivered before the women of this city--that is to
+say, before very severe critics--he must have kept pretty closely to the
+truth. His principle is avowedly that of Zeuxis and of Lucian--to piece
+together an ideal beauty out of a number of beautiful parts. He defines
+the shades of colour which occur in the hair and skin, and gives to the
+'biondo' the preference, as the most beautiful colour for the hair,[780]
+understanding by it a soft yellow, inclining to brown. He requires that
+the hair should be thick, long, and locky; the forehead serene, and
+twice as broad as high; the skin bright and clear (candida), but not of
+a dead white (bianchezza); the eyebrows dark, silky, most strongly
+marked in the middle, and shading off towards the ears and the nose; the
+white of the eye faintly touched with blue, the iris not actually black,
+though all the poets praise 'occhi neri' as a gift of Venus, despite
+that even goddesses were known for their eyes of heavenly blue, and that
+soft, joyous, brown eyes were admired by everybody. The eye itself
+should be large and full, and brought well forward; the lids white, and
+marked with almost invisible tiny red veins; the lashes neither too
+long, nor too thick, nor too dark. The hollow round the eye should have
+the same colour as the cheek.[781] The ear, neither too large nor too
+small, firmly and neatly fitted on, should show a stronger colour in the
+winding than in the even parts, with an edge of the transparent
+ruddiness of the pomegranate. The temples must be white and even, and
+for the most perfect beauty ought not to be too narrow. The red should
+grow deeper as the cheek gets rounder. The nose, which chiefly
+determines the value of the profile, must recede gently and uniformly in
+the direction of the eyes; where the cartilage ceases, there may be a
+slight elevation, but not so marked as to make the nose aquiline, which
+is not pleasing in women; the lower part must be less strongly coloured
+than the ears, but not of a chilly whiteness, and the middle partition
+above the lips lightly tinted with red. The mouth, our author would have
+rather small, and neither projecting to a point, nor quite flat, with
+the lips not too thin, and fitting neatly together; an accidental
+opening, that is, when the woman is neither speaking nor laughing,
+should not display more than six upper teeth. As delicacies of detail,
+he mentions a dimple in the upper lip, a certain fulness of the under
+lip, and a tempting smile in the left corner of the mouth--and so on.
+The teeth should not be too small, regular, well marked off from one
+another, and of the colour of ivory; and the gums must not be too dark
+or even like red velvet. The chin is to be round, neither pointed nor
+curved outwards, and growing slightly red as it rises; its glory is the
+dimple. The neck should be white and round and rather long than short,
+with the hollow and the Adam's apple but faintly marked; and the skin at
+every movement must show pleasing lines. The shoulders he desires broad,
+and in the breadth of the bosom sees the first condition of its beauty.
+No bone may be visible upon it, its fall and swell must be gentle and
+gradual, its colour 'candidissimo.' The leg should be long and not too
+hard in the lower parts, but still not without flesh on the shin, which
+must be provided with white, full calves. He likes the foot small, but
+not bony, the instep (it seems) high, and the colour white as alabaster.
+The arms are to be white, and in the upper parts tinted with red; in
+their consistence fleshy and muscular, but still soft as those of
+Pallas, when she stood before the shepherd on Mount Ida--in a word,
+ripe, fresh, and firm. The hand should be white, especially towards the
+wrist, but large and plump, feeling soft as silk, the rosy palm marked
+with a few, but distinct and not intricate lines; the elevations in it
+should be not too great, the space between thumb and forefinger brightly
+coloured and without wrinkles, the fingers long, delicate, and scarcely
+at all thinner towards the tips, with nails clear, even, not too long
+nor too square, and cut so as to show a white margin about the breadth
+of a knife's back.
+
+�sthetic principles of a general character occupy a very subordinate
+place to these particulars. The ultimate principles of beauty, according
+to which the eye judges 'senza appello,' are for Firenzuola a secret, as
+he frankly confesses; and his definitions of 'Leggiadria,' 'Grazia,'
+'Vaghezza,' 'Venust�,' 'Aria,' 'Maest�,' are partly, as has been
+remarked, philological, and partly vain attempts to utter the
+unutterable. Laughter he prettily defines, probably following some old
+author, as a radiance of the soul.
+
+The literature of all countries can, at the close of the Middle Ages,
+show single attempts to lay down theoretic principles of beauty;[782]
+but no other work can be compared to that of Firenzuola. Brantome, who
+came a good half-century later, is a bungling critic by his side,
+because governed by lasciviousness and not by a sense of beauty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+DESCRIPTIONS OF LIFE IN MOVEMENT.
+
+
+Among the new discoveries made with regard to man, we must reckon, in
+conclusion, the interest taken in descriptions of the daily course of
+human life.
+
+The comical and satirical literature of the Middle Ages could not
+dispense with pictures of every-day events. But it is another thing,
+when the Italians of the Renaissance dwelt on this picture for its own
+sake--for its inherent interest--and because it forms part of that
+great, universal life of the world whose magic breath they felt
+everywhere around them. Instead of and together with the satirical
+comedy, which wanders through houses, villages, and streets, seeking
+food for its derision in parson, peasant, and burgher, we now see in
+literature the beginnings of a true _genre_, long before it found any
+expression in painting. That _genre_ and satire are often met with in
+union, does not prevent them from being wholly different things.
+
+How much of earthly business must Dante have watched with attentive
+interest, before he was able to make us see with our own eyes all that
+happened in his spiritual world.[783] The famous pictures of the busy
+movement in the arsenal at Venice, of the blind men laid side by side
+before the church door,[784] and the like, are by no means the only
+instances of this kind: for the art, in which he is a master, of
+expressing the inmost soul by the outward gesture, cannot exist without
+a close and incessant study of human life.
+
+The poets who followed rarely came near him in this respect, and the
+novelists were forbidden by the first laws of their literary style to
+linger over details. Their prefaces and narratives might be as long as
+they pleased, but what we understand by _genre_ was outside their
+province. The taste for this class of description was not fully awakened
+till the time of the revival of antiquity.
+
+And here we are again met by the man who had a heart for
+everything--�neas Sylvius. Not only natural beauty, not only that which
+has an antiquarian or a geographical interest, finds a place in his
+descriptions (p. 248; ii. p. 28), but any living scene of daily
+life.[785] Among the numerous passages in his memoirs in which scenes
+are described which hardly one of his contemporaries would have thought
+worth a line of notice, we will here only mention the boat-race on the
+Lake of Bolsena.[786] We are not able to detect from what old
+letter-writer or story-teller the impulse was derived to which we owe
+such life-like pictures. Indeed, the whole spiritual communion between
+antiquity and the Renaissance is full of delicacy and of mystery.
+
+To this class belong those descriptive Latin poems of which we have
+already spoken (p. 262)--hunting-scenes, journeys, ceremonies, and so
+forth. In Italian we also find something of the same kind, as, for
+example, the descriptions of the famous Medicean tournament by Politian
+and Luca Pulci.[787] The true epic poets, Luigi Pulci, Bojardo, and
+Ariosto, are carried on more rapidly by the stream of their narrative;
+yet in all of them we must recognise the lightness and precision of
+their descriptive touch, as one of the chief elements of their
+greatness. Franco Sacchetti amuses himself with repeating the short
+speeches of a troop of pretty women caught in the woods by a shower of
+rain.[788]
+
+Other scenes of moving life are to be looked for in the military
+historians (p. 99). In a lengthy poem,[789] dating from an earlier
+period, we find a faithful picture of a combat of mercenary soldiers in
+the fourteenth century, chiefly in the shape of the orders, cries of
+battle, and dialogue with which it is accompanied.
+
+But the most remarkable productions of this kind are the realistic
+descriptions of country life, which are found most abundantly in Lorenzo
+Magnifico and the poets of his circle.
+
+Since the time of Petrarch,[790] an unreal and conventional style of
+bucolic poetry had been in vogue, which, whether written in Latin or
+Italian, was essentially a copy of Virgil. Parallel to this, we find the
+pastoral novel of Boccaccio (p. 259) and other works of the same kind
+down to the 'Arcadia' of Sannazaro, and later still, the pastoral comedy
+of Tasso and Guarini. They are works whose style, whether poetry or
+prose, is admirably finished and perfect, but in which pastoral life is
+only an ideal dress for sentiments which belong to a wholly different
+sphere of culture.[791]
+
+But by the side of all this there appeared in Italian poetry, towards
+the close of the fifteenth century, signs of a more realistic treatment
+of rustic life. This was not possible out of Italy; for here only did
+the peasant, whether labourer or proprietor, possess human dignity,
+personal freedom, and the right of settlement, hard as his lot might
+sometimes be in other respects.[792] The difference between town and
+country is far from being so marked here as in northern countries. Many
+of the smaller towns are peopled almost exclusively by peasants who, on
+coming home at nightfall from their work, are transformed into
+townsfolk. The masons of Como wandered over nearly all Italy; the child
+Giotto was free to leave his sheep and join a guild at Florence;
+everywhere there was a human stream flowing from the country into the
+cities, and some mountain populations seemed born to supply this
+current.[793] It is true that the pride and local conceit supplied poets
+and novelists with abundant motives for making game of the
+'villano,'[794] and what they left undone was taken charge of by the
+comic improvisers (p. 320 sqq.). But nowhere do we find a trace of that
+brutal and contemptuous class-hatred against the 'vilains' which
+inspired the aristocratic poets of Provence, and often, too, the French
+chroniclers. On the contrary,[795] Italian authors of every sort gladly
+recognise and accentuate what is great or remarkable in the life of the
+peasant. Gioviano Pontano mentions with admiration instances of the
+fortitude of the savage inhabitants of the Abruzzi;[796] in the
+biographical collections and in the novelists we meet with the figure of
+the heroic peasant-maiden[797] who hazards her life to defend her family
+and her honour.[798]
+
+Such conditions made the poetical treatment of country-life possible.
+The first instance we shall mention is that of Battista Mantovano, whose
+eclogues, once much read and still worth reading, appeared among his
+earliest works about 1480. They are a mixture of real and conventional
+rusticity, but the former tends to prevail. They represent the mode of
+thought of a well-meaning village clergyman, not without a certain
+leaning to liberal ideas. As Carmelite monk, the writer may have had
+occasion to mix freely with the peasantry.[799]
+
+But it is with a power of a wholly different kind that Lorenzo
+Magnifico transports himself into the peasant's world His 'Nencia di
+Barberino'[800] reads like a crowd of genuine extracts from the popular
+songs of the Florentine country, fused into a great stream of octaves.
+The objectivity of the writer is such that we are in doubt whether the
+speaker--the young peasant Vallera, who declares his love to
+Nencia--awakens his sympathy or ridicule. The deliberate contrast to the
+conventional eclogue is unmistakable. Lorenzo surrenders himself
+purposely to the realism of simple, rough country-life, and yet his work
+makes upon us the impression of true poetry.
+
+The 'Beca da Dicomano' of Luigi Pulci[801] is an admitted counterpart to
+the 'Nencia' of Lorenzo. But the deeper purpose is wanting. The 'Beca'
+is written not so much from the inward need to give a picture of popular
+life, as from the desire to win the approbation of the educated
+Florentine world by a successful poem. Hence the greater and more
+deliberate coarseness of the scenes, and the indecent jokes.
+Nevertheless, the point of view of the rustic lover is admirably
+maintained.
+
+Third in this company of poets comes Angelo Poliziano, with his
+'Rusticus'[802] in Latin hexameters. Keeping clear of all imitation of
+Virgil's Georgics, he describes the year of the Tuscan peasant,
+beginning with the late autumn, when the countryman gets ready his new
+plough and prepares the seed for the winter. The picture of the meadows
+in spring is full and beautiful, and the 'Summer' has fine passages; but
+the vintage-feast in autumn is one of the gems of modern Latin poetry.
+Politian wrote poems in Italian as well as Latin, from which we may
+infer that in Lorenzo's circle it was possible to give a realistic
+picture of the passionate life of the lower classes. His gipsy's
+love-song[803] is one of the earliest products of that wholly modern
+tendency to put oneself with poetic consciousness into the position of
+another class. This had probably been attempted for ages with a view to
+satire,[804] and the opportunity for it was offered in Florence at every
+carnival by the songs of the maskers. But the sympathetic understanding
+of the feelings of another class was new; and with it the 'Nencia' and
+this 'Canzone zingaresca' mark a new starting-point in the history of
+poetry.
+
+Here, too, we must briefly indicate how culture prepared the way for
+artistic development. From the time of the 'Nencia,' a period of eighty
+years elapses to the rustic genre-painting of Jacopo Bassano and his
+school.
+
+In the next part of this work we shall show how differences of birth had
+lost their significance in Italy. Much of this was doubtless owing to
+the fact that men and man were here first thoroughly and profoundly
+understood. This one single result of the Renaissance is enough to fill
+us with everlasting thankfulness. The logical notion of humanity was old
+enough--but here the notion became a fact.
+
+The loftiest conceptions on this subject were uttered by Pico della
+Mirandola in his speech on the dignity of man,[805] which may justly be
+called one of the noblest bequests of that great age. God, he tells us,
+made man at the close of the creation, to know the laws of the universe,
+to love its beauty, to admire its greatness. He bound him to no fixed
+place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no iron necessity, but gave
+him freedom to will and to move. 'I have set thee,' says the Creator to
+Adam, 'in the midst of the world, that thou mayst the more easily behold
+and see all that is therein. I created thee a being neither heavenly nor
+earthly, neither mortal nor immortal only, that thou mightest be free to
+shape and to overcome thyself. Thou mayst sink into a beast, and be born
+anew to the divine likeness. The brutes bring from their mother's body
+what they will carry with them as long as they live; the higher spirits
+are from the beginning, or soon after,[806] what they will be for ever.
+To thee alone is given a growth and a development depending on thine own
+free will. Thou bearest in thee the germs of a universal life.'
+
+
+
+
+_PART V._
+
+SOCIETY AND FESTIVALS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE EQUALISATION OF CLASSES.
+
+
+Every period of civilisation, which forms a complete and consistent
+whole, manifests itself not only in political life, in religion, art,
+and science, but also sets its characteristic stamp on social life. Thus
+the Middle Ages had their courtly and aristocratic manners and
+etiquette, differing but little in the various countries of Europe, as
+well as their peculiar forms of middle-class life.
+
+Italian customs at the time of the Renaissance offer in these respects
+the sharpest contrast to medi�valism. The foundation on which they rest
+is wholly different. Social intercourse in its highest and most perfect
+form now ignored all distinctions of caste, and was based simply on the
+existence of an educated class as we now understand the word. Birth and
+origin were without influence, unless combined with leisure and
+inherited wealth. Yet this assertion must not be taken in an absolute
+and unqualified sense, since medi�val distinctions still sometimes made
+themselves felt to a greater or less degree, if only as a means of
+maintaining equality with the aristocratic pretensions of the less
+advanced countries of Europe. But the main current of the time went
+steadily towards the fusion of classes in the modern sense of the
+phrase.
+
+The fact was of vital importance that, from certainly the twelfth
+century onwards, the nobles and the burghers dwelt together within the
+walls of the cities.[807] The interests and pleasures of both classes
+were thus identified, and the feudal lord learned to look at society
+from another point of view than that of his mountain-castle. The
+Church, too, in Italy never suffered itself, as in northern countries,
+to be used as a means of providing for the younger sons of noble
+families. Bishoprics, abbacies, and canonries were often given from the
+most unworthy motives, but still not according to the pedigrees of the
+applicants; and if the bishops in Italy were more numerous, poorer, and,
+as a rule, destitute of all sovereign rights, they still lived in the
+cities where their cathedrals stood, and formed, together with their
+chapters, an important element in the cultivated society of the place.
+In the age of despots and absolute princes which followed, the nobility
+in most of the cities had the motives and the leisure to give themselves
+up to a private life (p. 131) free from political danger and adorned
+with all that was elegant and enjoyable, but at the same time hardly
+distinguishable from that of the wealthy burgher. And after the time of
+Dante, when the new poetry and literature were in the hands of all
+Italy,[808] when to this was added the revival of ancient culture and
+the new interest in man as such, when the successful Condottiere became
+a prince, and not only good birth, but legitimate birth, ceased to be
+indispensable for a throne (p. 21), it might well seem that the age of
+equality had dawned, and the belief in nobility vanished for ever.
+
+From a theoretical point of view, when the appeal was made to antiquity,
+the conception of nobility could be both justified and condemned from
+Aristotle alone. Dante, for example,[809] adapts from the Aristotelian
+definition, 'Nobility rests on excellence and inherited wealth,' his own
+saying, 'Nobility rests on personal excellence or on that of
+predecessors.' But elsewhere he is not satisfied with this conclusion.
+He blames himself,[810] because even in Paradise, while talking with his
+ancestor Cacciaguida, he made mention of his noble origin, which is but
+as a mantle from which time is ever cutting something away, unless we
+ourselves add daily fresh worth to it. And in the 'Convito'[811] he
+disconnects 'nobile' and 'nobilt�' from every condition of birth, and
+identifies the idea with the capacity for moral and intellectual
+eminence, laying a special stress on high culture by calling 'nobilt�'
+the sister of 'filosofia.'
+
+And as time went on, the greater the influence of humanism on the
+Italian mind, the firmer and more widespread became the conviction that
+birth decides nothing as to the goodness or badness of a man. In the
+fifteenth century this was the prevailing opinion. Poggio, in his
+dialogue 'On nobility,'[812] agrees with his interlocutors--Niccol�
+Niccoli, and Lorenzo Medici, brother of the great Cosimo--that there is
+no other nobility than that of personal merit. The keenest shafts of his
+ridicule are directed against much of what vulgar prejudice thinks
+indispensable to an aristocratic life. 'A man is all the farther removed
+from true nobility, the longer his forefathers have plied the trade of
+brigands. The taste for hawking and hunting savours no more of nobility
+than the nests and lairs of the hunted creatures of spikenard. The
+cultivation of the soil, as practised by the ancients, would be much
+nobler than this senseless wandering through the hills and woods, by
+which men make themselves liker to the brutes than to the reasonable
+creatures. It may serve well enough as a recreation, but not as the
+business of a lifetime.' The life of the English and French chivalry in
+the country or in the woody fastnesses seems to him thoroughly ignoble,
+and worst of all the doings of the robber-knights of Germany. Lorenzo
+here begins to take the part of the nobility, but not--which is
+characteristic--appealing to any natural sentiment in its favour, but
+because Aristotle in the fifth book of the 'Politics' recognises the
+nobility as existent, and defines it as resting on excellence and
+inherited wealth. To this Niccoli retorts that Aristotle gives this not
+as his own conviction, but as the popular impression; in his 'Ethics,'
+where he speaks as he thinks, he calls him noble who strives after that
+which is truly good. Lorenzo urges upon him vainly that the Greek word
+for nobility means good birth; Niccoli thinks the Roman word 'nobilis'
+(_i.e._ remarkable) a better one, since it makes nobility depend on a
+man's deeds.[813] Together with these discussions, we find a sketch of
+the condition of the nobles in various parts of Italy. In Naples they
+will not work, and busy themselves neither with their own estates nor
+with trade and commerce, which they hold to be discreditable; they
+either loiter at home or ride about on horseback.[814] The Roman
+nobility also despise trade, but farm their own property; the
+cultivation of the land even opens the way to a title;[815] 'it is a
+respectable but boorish nobility.' In Lombardy the nobles live upon the
+rent of their inherited estates; descent and the abstinence from any
+regular calling constitute nobility.[816] In Venice, the 'nobili,' the
+ruling caste, were all merchants. Similarly in Genoa the nobles and
+non-nobles were alike merchants and sailors, and only separated by their
+birth; some few of the former, it is true, still lurked as brigands in
+their mountain-castles. In Florence a part of the old nobility had
+devoted themselves to trade; another, and certainly by far the smaller
+part, enjoyed the satisfaction of their titles, and spent their time,
+either in nothing at all, or else in hunting and hawking.[817]
+
+The decisive fact was, that nearly everywhere in Italy, even those who
+might be disposed to pride themselves on their birth could not make good
+the claims against the power of culture and of wealth, and that their
+privileges in politics and at court were not sufficient to encourage any
+strong feeling of caste. Venice offers only an apparent exception to
+this rule, for there the 'nobili' led the same life as their
+fellow-citizens, and were distinguished by few honorary privileges. The
+case was certainly different at Naples, which the strict isolation and
+the ostentatious vanity of its nobility excluded, above all other
+causes, from the spiritual movement of the Renaissance. The traditions
+of medi�val Lombardy and Normandy, and the French aristocratic
+influences which followed, all tended in this direction; and the
+Aragonese government, which was established by the middle of the
+fifteenth century, completed the work, and accomplished in Naples what
+followed a hundred years later in the rest of Italy--a social
+transformation in obedience to Spanish ideas, of which the chief
+features were the contempt for work and the passion for titles. The
+effect of this new influence was evident, even in the smaller towns,
+before the year 1500. We hear complaints from La Cava that the place had
+been proverbially rich, as long at it was filled with masons and
+weavers; whilst now, since instead of looms and trowels nothing but
+spurs, stirrups and gilded belts was to be seen, since everybody was
+trying to become Doctor of Laws or of Medicine, Notary, Officer or
+Knight, the most intolerable poverty prevailed.[818] In Florence an
+analogous change appears to have taken place by the time of Cosimo, the
+first Grand Duke; he is thanked for adopting the young people, who now
+despise trade and commerce, as knights of his order of St. Stephen.[819]
+This goes straight in the teeth of the good old Florentine custom,[820]
+by which fathers left property to their children on the condition that
+they should have some occupation (p. 79). But a mania for title of a
+curious and ludicrous sort sometimes crossed and thwarted, especially
+among the Florentines, the levelling influence of art and culture. This
+was the passion for knighthood, which became one of the most striking
+follies of the day, at a time when the dignity itself had lost every
+shadow of significance.
+
+'A few years ago,' writes Franco Sacchetti,[821] towards the end of the
+fourteenth century, 'everybody saw how all the work-people down to the
+bakers, how all the wool-carders, usurers, money-changers and
+blackguards of all descriptions, became knights. Why should an official
+need knighthood when he goes to preside over some little provincial
+town? What has this title to do with any ordinary bread-winning pursuit?
+How art thou sunken, unhappy dignity! Of all the long list of knightly
+duties, what single one do these knights of ours discharge? I wished to
+speak of these things that the reader might see that knighthood is
+dead.[822] And as we have gone so far as to confer the honour upon dead
+men, why not upon figures of wood and stone, and why not upon an ox?'
+The stories which Sacchetti tells by way of illustration speak plainly
+enough. There we read how Bernab� Visconti knighted the victor in a
+drunken brawl, and then did the same derisively to the vanquished; how
+German knights with their decorated helmets and devices were
+ridiculed--and more of the same kind. At a later period Poggio[823]
+makes merry over the many knights of his day without a horse and
+without military training. Those who wished to assert the privilege of
+the order, and ride out with lance and colours, found in Florence that
+they might have to face the government as well as the jokers.[824]
+
+On considering the matter more closely, we shall find that this belated
+chivalry, independent of all nobility of birth, though partly the fruit
+of an insane passion for title, had nevertheless another and a better
+side. Tournaments had not yet ceased to be practised, and no one could
+take part in them who was not a knight. But the combat in the lists, and
+especially the difficult and perilous tilting with the lance, offered a
+favourable opportunity for the display of strength, skill, and courage,
+which no one, whatever might be his origin, would willingly neglect in
+an age which laid such stress on personal merit.[825]
+
+It was in vain that from the time of Petrarch downwards the tournament
+was denounced as a dangerous folly. No one was converted by the pathetic
+appeal of the poet: 'In what book do we read that Scipio and C�sar were
+skilled at the joust?'[826] The practice became more and more popular
+in Florence. Every honest citizen came to consider his tournament--now,
+no doubt, less dangerous than formerly--as a fashionable sport. Franco
+Sacchetti[827] has left us a ludicrous picture of one of these holiday
+cavaliers--a notary seventy years old. He rides out on horseback to
+Peretola, where the tournament was cheap, on a jade hired from a dyer. A
+thistle is stuck by some wag under the tail of the steed, who takes
+fright, runs away, and carries the helmeted rider, bruised and shaken,
+back into the city. The inevitable conclusion of the story is a severe
+curtain-lecture from the wife, who is not a little enraged at these
+break-neck follies of her husband.[828]
+
+It may be mentioned in conclusion that a passionate interest in this
+sport was displayed by the Medici, as if they wished to show--private
+citizens as they were, without noble blood in their veins--that the
+society which surrounded them was in no respects inferior to a
+Court.[829] Even under Cosimo (1459), and afterwards under the elder
+Pietro, brilliant tournaments were held at Florence. The younger Pietro
+neglected the duties of government for these amusements, and would never
+suffer himself to be painted except clad in armour. The same practice
+prevailed at the Court of Alexander VI., and when the Cardinal Ascanio
+Sforza asked the Turkish Prince Djem (pp. 109, 115) how he liked the
+spectacle, the barbarian replied with much discretion that such combats
+in his country only took place among slaves, since then, in the case of
+accident, nobody was the worse for it. The oriental was unconsciously in
+accord with the old Romans in condemning the manners of the Middle Ages.
+
+Apart, however, from this particular prop of knighthood, we find here
+and there in Italy, for example at Ferrara (p. 46 sqq.), orders of court
+service, whose members had a right to the title.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But, great as were individual ambitions and the vanities of nobles and
+knights, it remains a fact that the Italian nobility took its place in
+the centre of social life, and not at the extremity. We find it
+habitually mixing with other classes on a footing of perfect equality,
+and seeking its natural allies in culture and intelligence. It is true
+that for the courtier a certain rank of nobility was required,[830] but
+this exigence is expressly declared to be caused by a prejudice rooted
+in the public mind--'per l'oppenion universale'--and never was held to
+imply the belief that the personal worth of one who was not of noble
+blood was in any degree lessened thereby, nor did it follow from this
+rule that the prince was limited to the nobility for his society. It was
+meant simply that the perfect man--the true courtier--should not be
+wanting in any conceivable advantage, and therefore not in this. If in
+all the relations of life he was specially bound to maintain a
+dignified and reserved demeanour, the reason was not found in the blood
+which flowed in his veins, but in the perfection of manner which was
+demanded from him. We are here in the presence of a modern distinction,
+based on culture and on wealth, but on the latter solely because it
+enables men to devote their life to the former, and effectually to
+promote its interests and advancement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE OUTWARD REFINEMENT OF LIFE.
+
+
+But in proportion as distinctions of birth ceased to confer any special
+privilege, was the individual himself compelled to make the most of his
+personal qualities, and society to find its worth and charm in itself.
+The demeanour of individuals, and all the higher forms of social
+intercourse, became ends pursued with a deliberate and artistic purpose.
+
+Even the outward appearance of men and women and the habits of daily
+life were more perfect, more beautiful, and more polished than among the
+other nations of Europe. The dwellings of the upper classes fall rather
+within the province of the history of art; but we may note how far the
+castle and the city mansion in Italy surpassed in comfort, order, and
+harmony the dwellings of the northern noble. The style of dress varied
+so continually that it is impossible to make any complete comparison
+with the fashions of other countries, all the more because since the
+close of the fifteenth century imitations of the latter were frequent.
+The costumes of the time, as given us by the Italian painters, are the
+most convenient and the most pleasing to the eye which were then to be
+found in Europe; but we cannot be sure if they represent the prevalent
+fashion, or if they are faithfully reproduced by the artist. It is
+nevertheless beyond a doubt that nowhere was so much importance attached
+to dress as in Italy. The people was, and is, vain; and even serious men
+among it looked on a handsome and becoming costume as an element in the
+perfection of the individual. At Florence, indeed, there was a brief
+period, when dress was a purely personal matter, and every man set the
+fashion for himself (p. 130, note 1), and till far into the sixteenth
+century there were exceptional people who still had the courage to do
+so;[831] and the majority at all events showed themselves capable of
+varying the fashion according to their individual tastes. It is a
+symptom of decline when Giovanni della Casa warns his readers not to be
+singular or to depart from existing fashions.[832] Our own age, which,
+in men's dress at any rate, treats uniformity as the supreme law, gives
+up by so doing far more than it is itself aware of. But it saves itself
+much time, and this, according to our notions of business, outweighs all
+other disadvantages.
+
+In Venice[833] and Florence at the time of the Renaissance there were
+rules and regulations prescribing the dress of the men and restraining
+the luxury of the women. Where the fashions were less free, as in
+Naples, the moralists confess with regret that no difference can be
+observed between noble and burgher.[834] They further deplore the rapid
+changes of fashion, and--if we rightly understand their words--the
+senseless idolatry of whatever comes from France, though in many cases
+the fashions which were received back from the French were originally
+Italian. It does not further concern us, how far these frequent changes,
+and the adoption of French and Spanish ways,[835] contributed to the
+national passion for external display; but we find in them additional
+evidence of the rapid movement of life in Italy in the decades before
+and after the year 1500. The occupation of different parts of Italy by
+foreigners caused the inhabitants not only to adopt foreign fashions,
+but sometimes to abandon all luxury in matters of dress. Such a change
+in public feeling at Milan is recorded by Landi. But the differences, he
+tells us, in costume continued to exist, Naples distinguishing itself by
+splendour, and Florence, to the eye of the writer, by absurdity.[836]
+
+We may note in particular the efforts of the women to alter their
+appearance by all the means which the toilette could afford. In no
+country of Europe since the fall of the Roman empire was so much trouble
+taken to modify the face, the colour of skin and the growth of the
+hair, as in Italy at this time.[837] All tended to the formation of a
+conventional type, at the cost of the most striking and transparent
+deceptions. Leaving out of account costume in general, which in the
+fourteenth century[838] was in the highest degree varied in colour and
+loaded with ornament, and at a later period assumed a character of more
+harmonious richness, we here limit ourselves more particularly to the
+toilette in the narrower sense.
+
+No sort of ornament was more in use than false hair, often made of white
+or yellow silk.[839] The law denounced and forbade it in vain, till some
+preacher of repentance touched the worldly minds of the wearers. Then
+was seen, in the middle of the public square, a lofty pyre (talamo), on
+which, beside lutes, dice-boxes, masks, magical charms, song-books, and
+other vanities, lay masses of false hair,[840] which the purging fires
+soon turned into a heap of ashes. The ideal colour sought for both in
+natural and artificial hair, was blond. And as the sun was supposed to
+have the power of making the hair of this colour,[841] many ladies would
+pass their whole time in the open air on sunshiny days.[842] Dyes and
+other mixtures were also used freely for the same purpose. Besides all
+these, we meet with an endless list of beautifying waters, plasters, and
+paints for every single part of the face--even for the teeth and
+eyelids--of which in our day we can form no conception. The ridicule of
+the poets,[843] the invectives of the preachers, and the experience of
+the baneful effects of these cosmetics on the skin, were powerless to
+hinder women from giving their faces an unnatural form and colour. It is
+possible that the frequent and splendid representations of
+Mysteries,[844] at which hundreds of people appeared painted and masked,
+helped to further this practice in daily life. It is certain that it was
+widely spread, and that the countrywomen vied in this respect with their
+sisters in the towns.[845] It was vain to preach that such decorations
+were the mark of the courtesan; the most honourable matrons, who all the
+year round never touched paint, used it nevertheless on holidays when
+they showed themselves in public.[846] But whether we look on this bad
+habit as a remnant of barbarism, to which the painting of savages is a
+parallel, or as a consequence of the desire for perfect youthful beauty
+in features and in colour, as the art and complexity of the toilette
+would lead us to think--in either case there was no lack of good advice
+on the part of the men.
+
+The use of perfumes, too, went beyond all reasonable limits. They were
+applied to everything with which human beings came into contact. At
+festivals even the mules were treated with scents and ointments,[847]
+Pietro Aretino thanks Cosimo I. for a perfumed roll of money.[848]
+
+The Italians of that day lived in the belief that they were more cleanly
+than other nations. There are in fact general reasons which speak rather
+for than against this claim. Cleanliness is indispensable to our modern
+notion of social perfection, which was developed in Italy earlier than
+elsewhere. That the Italians were one of the richest of existing
+peoples, is another presumption in their favour. Proof, either for or
+against these pretensions, can of course never be forthcoming, and if
+the question were one of priority in establishing rules of cleanliness,
+the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages is perhaps in advance of
+anything that Italy can produce. It is nevertheless certain that the
+singular neatness and cleanliness of some distinguished representatives
+of the Renaissance, especially in their behaviour at meals, was noticed
+expressly,[849] and that 'German' was the synonym in Italy for all that
+is filthy.[850] The dirty habits which Massimiliano Sforza picked up in
+the course of his German education, and the notice they attracted on his
+return to Italy, are recorded by Giovio.[851] It is at the same time
+very curious that, at least in the fifteenth century, the inns and
+hotels were left chiefly in the hands of Germans,[852] who probably,
+however, made their profit mostly out of the pilgrims journeying to
+Rome. Yet the statements on this point may refer rather to the country
+districts, since it is notorious that in the great cities Italian hotels
+held the first place.[853] The want of decent inns in the country may
+also be explained by the general insecurity of life and property.
+
+To the first half of the sixteenth century belongs the manual of
+politeness which Giovanni della Casa, a Florentine by birth, published
+under the title 'Il Galateo.' Not only cleanliness in the strict sense
+of the word, but the dropping of all the tricks and habits which we
+consider unbecoming, is here prescribed with the same unfailing tact
+with which the moralist discerns the highest ethical truths. In the
+literature of other countries the same lessons are taught, though less
+systematically, by the indirect influence of repulsive descriptions.[854]
+
+In other respects also, the 'Galateo' is a graceful and intelligent
+guide to good manners--a school of tact and delicacy. Even now it may be
+read with no small profit by people of all classes, and the politeness
+of European nations is not likely to outgrow its precepts. So far as
+tact is an affair of the heart, it has been inborn in some men from the
+dawn of civilization, and acquired through force of will by others; but
+the Italian first recognised it as a universal social duty and a mark of
+culture and education. And Italy itself had altered much in the course
+of two centuries. We feel at their close that the time for practical
+jokes between friends and acquaintances--for 'burle' and 'beffe' (p. 155
+sqq.)--was over in good society,[855] that the people had emerged from
+the walls of the cities and had learned a cosmopolitan politeness and
+consideration. We shall speak later on of the intercourse of society in
+the narrower sense.
+
+Outward life, indeed, in the fifteenth and the early part of the
+sixteenth centuries was polished and ennobled as among no other people
+in the world. A countless number of those small things and great things
+which combine to make up what we mean by comfort, we know to have first
+appeared in Italy. In the well-paved streets of the Italian cities,[856]
+driving was universal, while elsewhere in Europe walking or riding was
+the customs, and at all events no one drove for amusement. We read in
+the novelists of soft, elastic beds, of costly carpets and bedroom
+furniture, of which we hear nothing in other countries.[857] We often
+hear especially of the abundance and beauty of the linen. Much of all
+this is drawn within the sphere of art. We note with admiration the
+thousand ways in which art ennobles luxury, not only adorning the
+massive sideboard or the light brackets with noble vases and clothing
+the walls with the moving splendour of tapestry, and covering the
+toilet-table with numberless graceful trifles, but absorbing whole
+branches of mechanical work--especially carpentering--into its province.
+All western Europe, as soon as its wealth enabled it to do so, set to
+work in the same way at the close of the Middle Ages. But its efforts
+produced either childish and fantastic toy-work, or were bound by the
+chains of a narrow and purely Gothic art, while the Renaissance moved
+freely, entering into the spirit of every task it undertook and working
+for a far larger circle of patrons and admirers than the northern
+artist. The rapid victory of Italian decorative art over northern in the
+course of the sixteenth century is due partly to this fact, though
+partly the result of wider and more general causes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+LANGUAGE AS THE BASIS OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.
+
+
+The higher forms of social intercourse, which here meet us as a work of
+art--as a conscious product and one of the highest products of national
+life--have no more important foundation and condition than language.
+
+In the most flourishing period of the Middle Ages, the nobility of
+Western Europe had sought to establish a 'courtly' speech for social
+intercourse as well as for poetry. In Italy, too, where the dialects
+differed so greatly from one another, we find in the thirteenth century
+a so-called 'Curiale,' which was common to the courts and to the poets.
+It is of decisive importance for Italy that the attempt was there
+seriously and deliberately made to turn this into the language of
+literature and society. The introduction to the 'Cento Novelle Antiche,'
+which were put into their present shape before 1300, avow this object
+openly. Language is here considered apart from its uses in poetry; its
+highest function is clear, simple, intelligent utterance in short
+speeches, epigrams, and answers. This faculty was admired in Italy, as
+nowhere else but among the Greeks and Arabians: 'how many in the course
+of a long life have scarcely produced a single "bel parlare."'
+
+But the matter was rendered more difficult by the diversity of the
+aspects under which it was considered. The writings of Dante transport
+us into the midst of the struggle. His work on 'the Italian
+language'[858] is not only of the utmost importance for the subject
+itself, but is also the first complete treatise on any modern language.
+His method and results belong to the history of linguistic science, in
+which they will always hold a high place. We must here content
+ourselves with the remark that long before the appearance of this book
+the subject must have been one of daily and pressing importance, that
+the various dialects of Italy had long been the objects of eager study
+and dispute, and that the birth of the one classical language was not
+accomplished without many throes.[859]
+
+Nothing certainly contributed so much to this end as the great poem of
+Dante. The Tuscan dialect became the basis of the new national
+speech.[860] If this assertion may seem to some to go too far, as
+foreigners we may be excused, in a matter on which much difference of
+opinion prevails, for following the general belief.
+
+Literature and poetry probably lost more than they gained by the
+contentious purism which was long prevalent in Italy, and which marred
+the freshness and vigour of many an able writer. Others, again, who felt
+themselves masters of this magnificent language, were tempted to rely
+upon its harmony and flow, apart from the thought which it expressed. A
+very insignificant melody, played upon such an instrument, can produce a
+very great effect. But however this may be, it is certain that socially
+the language had great value. It was, as it were, the crown of a noble
+and dignified behaviour, and compelled the gentleman, both in his
+ordinary bearing and in exceptional moments to observe external
+propriety. No doubt this classical garment, like the language of Attic
+society, served to drape much that was foul and malicious; but it was
+also the adequate expression of all that is noblest and most refined.
+But politically and nationally it was of supreme importance, serving as
+an ideal home for the educated classes in all the states of the divided
+peninsula.[861] Nor was it the special property of the nobles or of any
+one class, but the poorest and humblest might learn it if they would.
+Even now--and perhaps more than ever--in those parts of Italy where, as
+a rule, the most unintelligible dialect prevails, the stranger is often
+astonished at hearing pure and well-spoken Italian from the mouths of
+peasants or artisans, and looks in vain for anything analogous in France
+or in Germany, where even the educated classes retain traces of a
+provincial speech. There are certainly a larger number of people able to
+read in Italy than we should be led to expect from the condition of many
+parts of the country--as for instance, the States of the Church--in
+other respects; but what is of more importance is the general and
+undisputed respect for pure language and pronunciation as something
+precious and sacred. One part of the country after another came to adopt
+the classical dialect officially. Venice, Milan, and Naples did so at
+the noontime of Italian literature, and partly through its influences.
+It was not till the present century that Piedmont became of its own free
+will a genuine Italian province by sharing in this chief treasure of the
+people--pure speech.[862] The dialects were from the beginning of the
+sixteenth century purposely left to deal with a certain class of
+subjects, serious as well as comic,[863] and the style which was thus
+developed proved equal to all its tasks. Among other nations a conscious
+separation of this kind did not occur till a much later period.
+
+The opinion of educated people as to the social value of language, is
+fully set forth in the 'Cortigiano.'[864] There were then persons, at
+the beginning of the sixteenth century, who purposely kept to the
+antiquated expressions of Dante and the other Tuscan writers of his
+time, simply because they were old. Our author forbids the use of them
+altogether in speech, and is unwilling to permit them even in writing,
+which he considers a form of speech. Upon this follows the admission
+that the best style of speech is that which most resembles good writing.
+We can clearly recognise the author's feeling that people who have
+anything of importance to say must shape their own speech, and that
+language is something flexible and changing because it is something
+living. It is allowable to make use of any expression, however ornate,
+as long as it is used by the people; nor are non-Tuscan words, or even
+French and Spanish words forbidden, if custom has once applied them to
+definite purposes.[865] Thus care and intelligence will produce a
+language, which, if not the pure old Tuscan, is still Italian, rich in
+flowers and fruit like a well-kept garden. It belongs to the
+completeness of the 'Cortigiano' that his wit, his polished manners, and
+his poetry, must be clothed in this perfect dress.
+
+When style and language had once become the property of a living
+society, all the efforts of purists and archaists failed to secure their
+end. Tuscany itself was rich in writers and talkers of the first order,
+who ignored and ridiculed these endeavours. Ridicule in abundance
+awaited the foreign scholar who explained to the Tuscans how little they
+understood their own language.[866] The life and influence of a writer
+like Macchiavelli was enough to sweep away all these cobwebs. His
+vigorous thoughts, his clear and simple mode of expression wore a form
+which had any merit but that of the 'Trecentisti.' And on the other hand
+there were too many North Italians, Romans, and Neapolitans, who were
+thankful if the demand for purity of style in literature and
+conversation was not pressed too far. They repudiated, indeed, the forms
+and idioms of their dialect; and Bandello, with what a foreigner might
+suspect to be false modesty, is never tired of declaring: 'I have no
+style; I do not write like a Florentine, but like a barbarian; I am not
+ambitious of giving new graces to my language; I am a Lombard, and from
+the Ligurian border into the bargain.'[867] But the claims of the
+purists were most successfully met by the express renunciation of the
+higher qualities of style, and the adoption of a vigorous, popular
+language in their stead. Few could hope to rival Pietro Bembo who,
+though born in Venice, nevertheless wrote the purest Tuscan, which to
+him was a foreign language, or the Neapolitan Sannazaro, who did the
+same. But the essential point was that language, whether spoken or
+written, was held to be an object of respect. As long as this feeling
+was prevalent, the fanaticism of the purists--their linguistic
+congresses and the rest of it[868]--did little harm. Their bad influence
+was not felt till much later, when the original power of Italian
+literature relaxed, and yielded to other and far worse influences. At
+last it became possible for the Accademia della Crusca to treat Italian
+like a dead language. But this association proved so helpless that it
+could not even hinder the invasion of Gallicism in the eighteenth
+century.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This language--loved, tended, and trained to every use--now served as
+the basis of social intercourse. In northern countries, the nobles and
+the princes passed their leisure either in solitude, or in hunting,
+fighting, drinking, and the like; the burghers in games and bodily
+exercises, with a mixture of literary or festive amusement. In Italy
+there existed a neutral ground, where people of every origin, if they
+had the needful talent and culture, spent their time in conversation and
+the polished interchange of jest and earnest. As eating and drinking
+formed a small part of such entertainments,[869] it was not difficult to
+keep at a distance those who sought society for these objects. If we are
+to take the writers of dialogues literally, the loftiest problems of
+human existence were not excluded from the conversation of thinking men,
+and the production of noble thoughts was not, as was commonly the case
+in the North, the work of solitude, but of society. But we must here
+limit ourselves to the less serious side of social intercourse--to the
+side which existed only for the sake of amusement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE HIGHER FORMS OF SOCIETY.
+
+
+This society, at all events at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
+was a matter of art; and had, and rested on, tacit or avowed rules of
+good sense and propriety, which are the exact reverse of all mere
+etiquette. In less polished circles, where society took the form of a
+permanent corporation, we meet with a system of formal rules and a
+prescribed mode of entrance, as was the case with those wild sets of
+Florentine artists of whom Vasari tells us that they were capable of
+giving representations of the best comedies of the day.[870] In the
+easier intercourse of society it was not unusual to select some
+distinguished lady as president, whose word was law for the evening.
+Everybody knows the introduction to Boccaccio's 'Decameron,' and looks
+on the presidency of Pampinea as a graceful fiction. That it was so in
+this particular case is a matter of course; but the fiction was
+nevertheless based on a practice which often occurred in reality.
+Firenzuola, who nearly two centuries later (1523) prefaces his
+collection of tales in a similar manner, with express reference to
+Boccaccio, comes assuredly nearer to the truth when he puts into the
+mouth of the queen of the society a formal speech on the mode of
+spending the hours during the stay which the company proposed to make in
+the country. The day was to begin with a stroll among the hills passed
+in philosophical talk; then followed breakfast,[871] with music and
+singing, after which came the recitation, in some cool, shady spot, of
+a new poem, the subject of which had been given the night before; in the
+evening the whole party walked to a spring of water where they all sat
+down and each one told a tale; last of all came supper and lively
+conversation 'of such a kind that the women might listen to it without
+shame and the men might not seem to be speaking under the influence of
+wine.' Bandello, in the introductions and dedications to single novels,
+does not give us, it is true, such inaugural discourses as this, since
+the circles before which the stories are told are represented as already
+formed; but he gives us to understand in other ways how rich, how
+manifold, and how charming the conditions of society must have been.
+Some readers may be of opinion that no good was to be got from a world
+which was willing to be amused by such immoral literature. It would be
+juster to wonder at the secure foundations of a society which,
+notwithstanding these tales, still observed the rules of order and
+decency, and which knew how to vary such pastimes with serious and solid
+discussion. The need of noble forms of social intercourse was felt to be
+stronger than all others. To convince ourselves of it, we are not
+obliged to take as our standard the idealised society which Castiglione
+depicts as discussing the loftiest sentiments and aims of human life at
+the court of Guidobaldo of Urbino, and Pietro Bembo at the castle of
+Asolo. The society described by Bandello, with all the frivolities which
+may be laid to its charge, enables us to form the best notion of the
+easy and polished dignity, of the urbane kindliness, of the intellectual
+freedom, of the wit and the graceful dilettantism which distinguished
+these circles. A significant proof of the value of such circles lies in
+the fact that the women who were the centres of them could become famous
+and illustrious without in any way compromising their reputation. Among
+the patronesses of Bandello, for example, Isabella Gonzaga (born an
+Este, p. 44) was talked of unfavourably not through any fault of her
+own, but on account of the too free-lived young ladies who filled her
+court.[872] Giulia Gonzaga Colonna, Ippolita Sforza married to a
+Bentivoglio, Bianca Rangona, Cecilia Gallerana, Camilla Scarampa, and
+others were either altogether irreproachable, or their social fame threw
+into the shade whatever they may have done amiss. The most famous woman
+of Italia, Vittoria Colonna[873] (b. 1490, d. 1547), the friend of
+Castiglione and Michelangelo, enjoyed the reputation of a saint. It is
+hard to give such a picture of the unconstrained intercourse of these
+circles in the city, at the baths, or in the country, as will furnish
+literal proof of the superiority of Italy in this respect over the rest
+of Europe. But let us read Bandello,[874] and then ask ourselves if
+anything of the same kind would have been then possible, say, in France,
+before this kind of society was there introduced by people like himself.
+No doubt the supreme achievements of the human mind were then produced
+independently of the helps of the drawing-room. Yet it would be unjust
+to rate the influence of the latter on art and poetry too low, if only
+for the reason that society helped to shape that which existed in no
+other country--a widespread interest in artistic production and an
+intelligent and critical public opinion. And apart from this, society of
+the kind we have described was in itself a natural flower of that life
+and culture which then was purely Italian, and which since then has
+extended to the rest of Europe.
+
+In Florence society was powerfully affected by literature and politics.
+Lorenzo the Magnificent was supreme over his circle, not, as we might be
+led to believe, through the princely position which he occupied, but
+rather through the wonderful tact he displayed in giving perfect freedom
+of action to the many and varied natures which surrounded him.[875] We
+see how gently he dealt with his great tutor Politian, and how the
+sovereignty of the poet and scholar was reconciled, though not without
+difficulty, with the inevitable reserve prescribed by the approaching
+change in the position of the house of Medici and by consideration for
+the sensitiveness of the wife. In return for the treatment he received,
+Politian became the herald and the living symbol of Medicean glory.
+Lorenzo, after the fashion of a true Medici, delighted in giving an
+outward and artistic expression to his social amusements. In his
+brilliant improvisation--the Hawking Party--he gives us a humorous
+description of his comrades, and in the Symposium a burlesque of them,
+but in both cases in such a manner that we clearly feel his capacity for
+more serious companionship.[876] Of this intercourse his correspondence
+and the records of his literary and philosophical conversation give
+ample proof. Some of the social unions which were afterwards formed in
+Florence were in part political clubs, though not without a certain
+poetical and philosophical character also. Of this kind was the
+so-called Platonic Academy which met after Lorenzo's death in the
+gardens of the Ruccellai.[877]
+
+At the courts of the princes, society naturally depended on the
+character of the ruler. After the beginning of the sixteenth century
+they became few in number, and these few soon lost their importance.
+Rome, however, possessed in the unique court of Leo X. a society to
+which the history of the world offers no parallel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE PERFECT MAN OF SOCIETY.
+
+
+It was for this society--or rather for his own sake--that the
+'Cortigiano,' as described to us by Castiglione, educated himself. He
+was the ideal man of society, and was regarded by the civilisation of
+that age as its choicest flower; and the court existed for him far
+rather than he for the court. Indeed, such a man would have been out of
+place at any court, since he himself possessed all the gifts and the
+bearing of an accomplished ruler, and because his calm supremacy in all
+things, both outward and spiritual, implied a too independent nature.
+The inner impulse which inspired him was directed, though our author
+does not acknowledge the fact, not to the service of the prince, but to
+his own perfection. One instance will make this clear.[878] In time of
+war the courtier refuses even useful and perilous tasks, if they are not
+beautiful and dignified in themselves, such as for instance the capture
+of a herd of cattle; what urges him to take part in war is not duty, but
+'l'onore.' The moral relation to the prince, as prescribed in the fourth
+book, is singularly free and independent. The theory of well-bred
+love-making, set forth in the third book, is full of delicate
+psychological observation, which perhaps would be more in place in a
+treatise on human nature generally; and the magnificent praise of ideal
+love, which occurs at the end of the fourth book, and which rises to a
+lyrical elevation of feeling, has no connection whatever with the
+special object of the work. Yet here, as in the 'Asolani' of Bembo, the
+culture of the time shows itself in the delicacy with which this
+sentiment is represented and analysed. It is true that these writers are
+not in all cases to be taken literally; but that the discourses they
+give us were actually frequent in good society, cannot be doubted, and
+that it was no affectation, but genuine passion, which appeared in this
+dress, we shall see further on.
+
+Among outward accomplishments, the so-called knightly exercises were
+expected in thorough perfection from the courtier, and besides these
+much that could only exist at courts highly organised and based on
+personal emulation, such as were not to be found out of Italy. Other
+points obviously rest on an abstract notion of individual perfection.
+The courtier must be at home in all noble sports, among them running,
+leaping, swimming, and wrestling; he must, above all things, be a good
+dancer and, as a matter of course, an accomplished rider. He must be
+master of several languages; at all events of Latin and Italian; he must
+be familiar with literature and have some knowledge of the fine arts. In
+music a certain practical skill was expected of him, which he was bound,
+nevertheless, to keep as secret as possible. All this is not to be taken
+too seriously, except what relates to the use of arms. The mutual
+interaction of these gifts and accomplishments results in the perfect
+man, in whom no one quality usurps the place of the rest.
+
+So much is certain, that in the sixteenth century the Italians had all
+Europe for their pupils both theoretically and practically in every
+noble bodily exercise and in the habits and manners of good society.
+Their instructions and their illustrated books on riding, fencing, and
+dancing served as the model to other countries. Gymnastics as an art,
+apart both from military training and from mere amusement, was probably
+first taught by Vittorino da Feltre (p. 213) and after his time became
+essential to a complete education.[879] The important fact is that they
+were taught systematically, though what exercises were most in favour,
+and whether they resembled those now in use, we are unable to say. But
+we may infer, not only from the general character of the people, but
+from positive evidence which has been left for us, that not only
+strength and skill, but grace of movement was one of the main objects of
+physical training. It is enough to remind the reader of the great
+Frederick of Urbino (p. 44) directing the evening games of the young
+people committed to his care.
+
+The games and contests of the popular classes did not differ essentially
+from those which prevailed elsewhere in Europe. In the maritime cities
+boat-racing was among the number, and the Venetian regattas were famous
+at an early period.[880] The classical game of Italy was and is the
+ball; and this was probably played at the time of the Renaissance with
+more zeal and brilliancy than elsewhere. But on this point no distinct
+evidence is forthcoming.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few words on music will not be out of place in this part of our
+work.[881] Musical composition down to the year 1500 was chiefly in the
+hands of the Flemish school, whose originality and artistic dexterity
+were greatly admired. Side by side with this, there nevertheless existed
+an Italian school, which probably stood nearer to our present taste.
+Half a century later came Palestrina, whose genius still works
+powerfully among us. We learn among other facts that he was a great
+innovator; but whether he or others took the decisive part in shaping
+the musical language of the modern world lies beyond the judgment of the
+unprofessional critic. Leaving on one side the history of musical
+composition, we shall confine ourselves to the position which music held
+in the social life of the day.
+
+A fact most characteristic of the Renaissance and of Italy is the
+specialisation of the orchestra, the search for new instruments and
+modes of sound, and, in close connection with this tendency, the
+formation of a class of 'virtuosi,' who devoted their whole attention to
+particular instruments or particular branches of music.
+
+Of the more complex instruments, which were perfected and widely
+diffused at a very early period, we find not only the organ, but a
+corresponding string-instrument, the 'gravicembalo' or 'clavicembalo.'
+Fragments of these, dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century,
+have come down to our own days, adorned with paintings from the hands of
+the greatest masters. Among other instruments the first place was held
+by the violin, which even then conferred great celebrity on the
+successful player. At the court of Leo X., who, when cardinal, had
+filled his house with singers and musicians, and who enjoyed the
+reputation of a critic and performer, the Jew Giovan Maria and Jacopo
+Sansecondo were among the most famous. The former received from Leo the
+title of count and a small town;[882] the latter has been taken to be
+the Apollo in the Parnassus of Raphael. In the course of the sixteenth
+century, celebrities in every branch of music appeared in abundance, and
+Lomazzo (about the year 1580) names the then most distinguished masters
+of the art of singing, of the organ, the lute, the lyre, the 'viola da
+gamba,' the harp, the cithern, the horn, and the trumpet, and wishes
+that their portraits might be painted on the instruments
+themselves.[883] Such many-sided comparative criticism would have been
+impossible anywhere but in Italy, although the same instruments were to
+be found in other countries.
+
+The number and variety of these instruments is shown by the fact that
+collections of them were now made from curiosity. In Venice, which was
+one of the most musical cities of Italy,[884] there were several such
+collections, and when a sufficient number of performers happened to be
+on the spot, a concert was at once improvised. In one of these museums
+there were a large number of instruments, made after ancient pictures
+and descriptions, but we are not told if anybody could play them, or how
+they sounded. It must not be forgotten that such instruments were often
+beautifully decorated, and could be arranged in a manner pleasing to the
+eye. We thus meet with them in collections of other rarities and works
+of art.
+
+The players, apart from the professional performers, were either single
+amateurs, or whole orchestras of them, organised into a corporate
+Academy.[885] Many artists in other branches were at home in music, and
+often masters of the art. People of position were averse to
+wind-instruments, for the same reason[886] which made them distasteful
+to Alcibiades and Pallas Athene. In good society singing, either alone
+or accompanied with the violin, was usual; but quartettes of
+string-instruments were also common,[887] and the 'clavicembalo' was
+liked on account of its varied effects. In singing the solo only was
+permitted, 'for a single voice is heard, enjoyed, and judged far
+better.' In other words, as singing, notwithstanding all conventional
+modesty, is an exhibition of the individual man of society, it is better
+that each should be seen and heard separately. The tender feelings
+produced in the fair listeners are taken for granted, and elderly people
+are therefore recommended to abstain from such forms of art, even though
+they excel in them. It was held important that the effect of the song
+should be enhanced by the impression made on the sight. We hear nothing
+however of the treatment in these circles of musical composition as an
+independent branch of art. On the other hand it happened sometimes that
+the subject of the song was some terrible event which had befallen the
+singer himself.[888]
+
+This dilettantism, which pervaded the middle as well as the upper
+classes, was in Italy both more widely spread and more genuinely
+artistic than in any other country of Europe. Wherever we meet with a
+description of social intercourse, there music and singing are always
+and expressly mentioned. Hundreds of portraits show us men and women,
+often several together, playing or holding some musical instrument, and
+the angelic concerts represented in the ecclesiastical pictures prove
+how familiar the painters were with the living effects of music. We read
+of the lute-player Antonio Rota, at Padua (d. 1549), who became a rich
+man by his lessons, and published a handbook to the practice of the
+lute.[889]
+
+At a time when there was no opera to concentrate and monopolise musical
+talent, this general cultivation of the art must have been something
+wonderfully varied, intelligent, and original. It is another question
+how much we should find to satisfy us in these forms of music, could
+they now be reproduced for us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
+
+
+To understand the higher forms of social intercourse at this period, we
+must keep before our minds the fact that women stood on a footing of
+perfect equality with men.[890] We must not suffer ourselves to be
+misled by the sophistical and often malicious talk about the assumed
+inferiority of the female sex, which we meet with now and then in the
+dialogues of this time,[891] nor by such satires as the third of
+Ariosto,[892] who treats woman as a dangerous grown-up child, whom a man
+must learn how to manage, in spite of the great gulf between them.
+There is, indeed, a certain amount of truth in what he says. Just
+because the educated woman was on a level with the man, that communion
+of mind and heart which comes from the sense of mutual dependence and
+completion, could not be developed in marriage at this time, as it has
+been developed later in the cultivated society of the North.
+
+The education given to women in the upper classes was essentially the
+same as that given to men. The Italian, at the time of the Renaissance,
+felt no scruple in putting sons and daughters alike under the same
+course of literary and even philological instruction (p. 222). Indeed,
+looking at this ancient culture as the chief treasure of life, he was
+glad that his girls should have a share in it. We have seen what
+perfection was attained by the daughters of princely houses in writing
+and speaking Latin (p. 234).[893] Many others must at least have been
+able to read it, in order to follow the conversation of the day, which
+turned largely on classical subjects. An active interest was taken by
+many in Italian poetry, in which, whether prepared or improvised, a
+large number of Italian women, from the time of the Venetian Cassandra
+Fedele onwards (about the close of the fifteenth century), made
+themselves famous.[894] One, indeed, Vittoria Colonna, may be called
+immortal. If any proof were needed of the assertion made above, it would
+be found in the manly tone of this poetry. Even the love-sonnets and
+religious poems are so precise and definite in their character, and so
+far removed from the tender twilight of sentiment, and from all the
+dilettantism which we commonly find in the poetry of women, that we
+should not hesitate to attribute them to male authors, if we had not
+clear external evidence to prove the contrary.
+
+For, with education, the individuality of women in the upper classes
+was developed in the same way as that of men. Till the time of the
+Reformation, the personality of women out of Italy, even of the highest
+rank, comes forward but little. Exceptions like Isabella of Bavaria,
+Margaret of Anjou, and Isabella of Castille, are the forced result of
+very unusual circumstances. In Italy, throughout the whole of the
+fifteenth century, the wives of the rulers, and still more those of the
+Condottieri, have nearly all a distinct, recognisable personality, and
+take their share of notoriety and glory. To these came gradually to be
+added a crowd of famous women of the most varied kind (i. p. 147, note
+1); among them those whose distinction consisted in the fact that their
+beauty, disposition, education, virtue, and piety, combined to render
+them harmonious human beings.[895] There was no question of 'woman's
+rights' or female emancipation, simply because the thing itself was a
+matter of course. The educated woman, no less than the man, strove
+naturally after a characteristic and complete individuality. The same
+intellectual and emotional development which perfected the man, was
+demanded for the perfection of the woman. Active literary work,
+nevertheless, was not expected from her, and if she were a poet, some
+powerful utterance of feeling, rather than the confidences of the novel
+or the diary, was looked for. These women had no thought of the
+public;[896] their function was to influence distinguished men, and to
+moderate male impulse and caprice.
+
+The highest praise which could then be given to the great Italian women
+was that they had the mind and the courage of men. We have only to
+observe the thoroughly manly bearing of most of the women in the heroic
+poems, especially those of Bojardo and Ariosto, to convince ourselves
+that we have before us the ideal of the time. The title 'virago,' which
+is an equivocal compliment in the present day, then implied nothing but
+praise. It was borne in all its glory by Caterina Sforza, wife and
+afterwards widow of Giroloma Riario, whose hereditary possession, Forli,
+she gallantly defended first against his murderers, and then against
+C�sar Borgia. Though finally vanquished, she retained the admiration of
+her countrymen and the title 'prima donna d'Italia.'[897] This heroic
+vein can be detected in many of the women of the Renaissance, though
+none found the same opportunity of showing their heroism to the world.
+In Isabella Gonzaga this type is clearly recognisable, and not less in
+Clarice, of the House of Medici, the wife of Filippo Strozzi.[898]
+
+Women of this stamp could listen to novels like those of Bandello,
+without social intercourse suffering from it. The ruling genius of
+society was not, as now, womanhood, or the respect for certain
+presuppositions, mysteries, and susceptibilities, but the consciousness
+of energy, of beauty, and of a social state full of danger and
+opportunity. And for this reason we find, side by side with the most
+measured and polished social forms, something our age would call
+immodesty,[899] forgetting that by which it was corrected and
+counterbalanced--the powerful characters of the women who were exposed
+to it.
+
+That in all the dialogues and treatises together we can find no absolute
+evidence on these points is only natural, however freely the nature of
+love and the position and capacities of women were discussed.
+
+What seems to have been wanting in this society were the young
+girls,[900] who, even when not brought up in the monasteries, were still
+carefully kept away from it. It is not easy to say whether their absence
+was the cause of the greater freedom of conversation, or whether they
+were removed on account of it.
+
+Even the intercourse with courtesans seems to have assumed a more
+elevated character, reminding us of the position of the Hetairae in
+Classical Athens. The famous Roman courtesan Imperia was a woman of
+intelligence and culture, had learned from a certain Domenico
+Campana the art of making sonnets, and was not without musical
+accomplishments.[901] The beautiful Isabella de Luna, of Spanish
+extraction, who was reckoned amusing company, seems to have been an odd
+compound of a kind heart with a shockingly foul tongue, which latter
+sometimes brought her into trouble.[902] At Milan, Bandello knew the
+majestic Caterina di San Celso,[903] who played and sang and recited
+superbly. It is clear from all we read on the subject that the
+distinguished people who visited these women, and from time to time
+lived with them, demanded from them a considerable degree of
+intelligence and instruction, and that the famous courtesans were
+treated with no slight respect and consideration. Even when relations
+with them were broken off, their good opinion was still desired,[904]
+which shows that departed passion had left permanent traces behind. But
+on the whole this intellectual intercourse is not worth mentioning by
+the side of that sanctioned by the recognised forms of social life, and
+the traces which it has left in poetry and literature are for the most
+part of a scandalous nature. We may well be astonished that among the
+6,800 persons of this class, who were to be found in Rome in
+1490[905]--that is, before the appearance of syphilis--scarcely a
+single woman seems to have been remarkable for any higher gifts. These
+whom we have mentioned all belong to the period which immediately
+followed. The mode of life, the morals and the philosophy of the public
+women, who with all their sensuality and greed were not always incapable
+of deeper passions, as well as the hypocrisy and devilish malice shown
+by some in their later years, are best set forth by Giraldi, in the
+novels which form the introduction to the 'Hecatommithi.' Pietro
+Aretino, in his 'Ragionamenti,' gives us rather a picture of his own
+depraved character than of this unhappy class of women as they really
+were.
+
+The mistresses of the princes, as has already been pointed out (p. 53),
+were sung by poets and painted by artists, and in consequence have been
+personally familiar to their contemporaries and to posterity. We hardly
+know more than the name of Alice Perrers and of Clara Dettin, the
+mistress of Frederick the Victorious, and of Agnes Sorel have only a
+half-legendary story. With the monarchs of the age of the
+Renaissance--Francis I. and Henry II.--the case is different.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+DOMESTIC ECONOMY.
+
+
+After treating of the intercourse of society, let us glance for a moment
+at the domestic life of this period. We are commonly disposed to look on
+the family life of the Italians at this time as hopelessly ruined by the
+national immorality, and this side of the question will be more fully
+discussed in the sequel. For the moment we must content ourselves with
+pointing out that conjugal infidelity has by no means so disastrous an
+influence on family life in Italy as in the North, so long at least as
+certain limits are not overstepped.
+
+The domestic life of the Middle Ages was a product of popular morals, or
+if we prefer to put it otherwise, a result of the inborn tendencies of
+national life, modified by the varied circumstances which affected them.
+Chivalry at the time of its splendour left domestic economy untouched.
+The knight wandered from court to court, and from one battle-field to
+another. His homage was given systematically to some other woman than
+his own wife, and things went how they might at home in the castle.[906]
+The spirit of the Renaissance first brought order into domestic life,
+treating it as a work of deliberate contrivance. Intelligent economical
+views (p. 77), and a rational style of domestic architecture served to
+promote this end. But the chief cause of the change was the thoughtful
+study of all questions relating to social intercourse, to education, to
+domestic service and organisation.
+
+The most precious document on this subject is the treatise on the
+management of the home by Agnolo Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti).[907] He
+represents a father speaking to his grown-up sons, and initiating them
+into his method of administration. We are introduced into a large and
+wealthy household, which if governed with moderation and reasonable
+economy, promises happiness and prosperity for generations to come. A
+considerable landed estate, whose produce furnishes the table of the
+house, and serves as the basis of the family fortune, is combined with
+some industrial pursuit, such as the weaving of wool or silk. The
+dwelling is solid and the food good. All that has to do with the plan
+and arrangement of the house is great, durable, and costly, but the
+daily life within it is as simple as possible. All other expenses, from
+the largest in which the family honour is at stake, down to the
+pocket-money of the younger sons, stand to one another in a rational,
+not a conventional relation. Nothing is considered of so much importance
+as education, which the head of the house gives not only to the
+children, but to the whole household. He first develops his wife from a
+shy girl, brought up in careful seclusion, to the true woman of the
+house, capable of commanding and guiding the servants. The sons are
+brought up without any undue severity,[908] carefully watched and
+counselled, and controlled 'rather by authority than by force.' And
+finally the servants are chosen and treated on such principles that
+they gladly and faithfully hold by the family.
+
+One feature of this book must be referred to, which is by no means
+peculiar to it, but which it treats with special warmth--the love of the
+educated Italian for country life.[909] In northern countries the nobles
+lived in the country in their castles, and the monks of the higher
+orders in their well-guarded monasteries, while the wealthiest burghers
+dwelt from one year's end to another in the cities. But in Italy, so far
+as the neighbourhood of certain towns at all events was concerned,[910]
+the security of life and property was so great, and the passion for a
+country residence was so strong, that men were willing to risk a loss in
+time of war. Thus arose the villa, the country-house of the well-to-do
+citizen. This precious inheritance of the old Roman world was thus
+revived, as soon as the wealth and culture of the people were
+sufficiently advanced.
+
+One author finds at his villa a peace and happiness, for an account of
+which the reader must hear him speak himself: 'While every other
+possession causes work and danger, fear and disappointment, the villa
+brings a great and honourable advantage; the villa is always true and
+kind; if you dwell in it at the right time and with love, it will not
+only satisfy you, but add reward to reward. In spring the green trees
+and the song of the birds will make you joyful and hopeful; in autumn a
+moderate exertion will bring forth fruit a hundredfold; all through the
+year melancholy will be banished from you. The villa is the spot where
+good and honest men love to congregate. Nothing secret, nothing
+treacherous, is done here; all see all; here is no need of judges or
+witnesses, for all are kindly and peaceably disposed one to another.
+Hasten hither, and fly away from the pride of the rich, and the
+dishonour of the bad. O blessed life in the villa, O unknown fortune!'
+The economical side of the matter is that one and the same property
+must, if possible, contain everything--corn, wine, oil, pasture-land and
+woods, and that in such cases the property was paid for well, since
+nothing needed then to be got from the market. But the higher enjoyment
+derived from the villa is shown by some words of the introduction:
+'Round about Florence lie many villas in a transparent atmosphere, amid
+cheerful scenery, and with a splendid view; there is little fog, and no
+injurious winds; all is good, and the water pure and healthy. Of the
+numerous buildings many are like palaces, many like castles, costly and
+beautiful to behold.' He is speaking of those unrivalled villas, of
+which the greater number were sacrificed, though vainly, by the
+Florentines themselves in the defence of their city in the year
+1529.[911]
+
+In these villas, as in those on the Brenta, on the Lombard hills, at
+Posilippo and on the Vomero, social life assumed a freer and more rural
+character than in the palaces within the city. We meet with charming
+descriptions of the intercourse of the guests, the hunting-parties, and
+all the open-air pursuits and amusements.[912] But the noblest
+achievements of poetry and thought are sometimes also dated from these
+scenes of rural peace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE FESTIVALS.
+
+
+It is by no arbitrary choice that in discussing the social life of this
+period, we are led to treat of the processions and shows which formed
+part of the popular festivals.[913] The artistic power of which the
+Italians of the Renaissance gave proof on such occasions,[914] was
+attained only by means of that free intercourse of all classes which
+formed the basis of Italian society. In Northern Europe the monasteries,
+the courts, and the burghers had their special feasts and shows as in
+Italy; but in the one case the form and substance of these displays
+differed according to the class which took part in them, in the other an
+art and culture common to the whole nation stamped them with both a
+higher and a more popular character. The decorative architecture, which
+served to aid in these festivals, deserves a chapter to itself in the
+history of art, although our imagination can only form a picture of it
+from the descriptions which have been left to us. We are here more
+especially concerned with the festival as a higher phase in the life of
+the people, in which its religious, moral, and poetical ideas took
+visible shape. The Italian festivals in their best form mark the point
+of transition from real life into the world of art.
+
+The two chief forms of festal display were originally here, as elsewhere
+in the West, the Mystery, or the dramatisation of sacred history and
+legend, and the Procession, the motive and character of which was also
+purely ecclesiastical.
+
+The performances of the Mysteries in Italy were from the first more
+frequent and splendid than elsewhere, and were most favourably affected
+by the progress of poetry and of the other arts. In the course of time
+not only did the farce and the secular drama branch off from the
+Mystery, as in other countries of Europe, but the pantomime also, with
+its accompaniments of singing and dancing, the effect of which depended
+on the richness and beauty of the spectacle.
+
+The Procession, in the broad, level, and well-paved streets of the
+Italian cities,[915] was soon developed into the 'Trionfo,' or train of
+masked figures on foot and in chariots, the ecclesiastical character of
+which gradually gave way to the secular. The processions at the Carnival
+and at the feast of Corpus Christi[916] were alike in the pomp and
+brilliancy with which they were conducted, and set the pattern
+afterwards followed by the royal or princely progresses. Other nations
+were willing to spend vast sums of money on these shows, but in Italy
+alone do we find an artistic method of treatment which arranged the
+procession as a harmonious and significative whole.
+
+What is left of these festivals is but a poor remnant of what once
+existed. Both religious and secular displays of this kind have abandoned
+the dramatic element--the costumes--partly from dread of ridicule, and
+partly because the cultivated classes, who formerly gave their whole
+energies to these things, have for several reasons lost their interest
+in them. Even at the Carnival, the great processions of masks are out of
+fashion. What still remains, such as the costumes adopted in imitation
+of certain religious confraternities, or even the brilliant festival of
+Santa Rosalia at Palermo, shows clearly how far the higher culture of
+the country has withdrawn from such interests.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The festivals did not reach their full development till after the
+decisive victory of the modern spirit in the fifteenth century,[917]
+unless perhaps Florence was here, as in other things, in advance of the
+rest of Italy. In Florence, the several quarters of the city were, in
+early times, organized with a view to such exhibitions, which demanded
+no small expenditure of artistic effort. Of this kind was the
+representation of Hell, with a scaffold and boats in the Arno, on the
+1st of May, 1304, when the Ponte alla Carraja broke down under the
+weight of the spectators.[918] That at a later time Florentines used to
+travel through Italy as directors of festivals (festaiuoli), shows that
+the art was early perfected at home.[919]
+
+In setting forth the chief points of superiority in the Italian
+festivals over those of other countries, the first that we shall have to
+remark is the developed sense of individual characteristics, in other
+words, the capacity to invent a given mask, and to act the part with
+dramatic propriety. Painters and sculptors not merely did their part
+towards the decoration of the place where the festival was held, but
+helped in getting up the characters themselves, and prescribed the
+dress, the paints (p. 373), and the other ornaments to be used. The
+second fact to be pointed out is the universal familiarity of the people
+with the poetical basis of the show. The Mysteries, indeed, were equally
+well understood all over Europe, since the biblical story and the
+legends of the saints were the common property of Christendom; but in
+all other respects the advantage was on the side of Italy. For the
+recitations, whether of religious or secular heroes, she possessed a
+lyrical poetry so rich and harmonious that none could resist its
+charm.[920] The majority, too, of the spectators--at least in the
+cities--understood the meaning of mythological figures, and could guess
+without much difficulty at the allegorical and historical, which were
+drawn from sources familiar to the mass of Italians.
+
+This point needs to be more fully discussed. The Middle Ages were
+essentially the ages of allegory. Theology and philosophy treated their
+categories as independent beings,[921] and poetry and art had but little
+to add, in order to give them personality. Here all the countries of the
+West were on the same level. Their world of ideas was rich enough in
+types and figures, but when these were put into concrete shape, the
+costume and attributes were likely to be unintelligible and unsuited to
+the popular taste. This, even in Italy, was often the case, and not only
+so during the whole period of the Renaissance, but down to a still later
+time. To produce the confusion, it was enough if a predicate of the
+allegorical figures was wrongly translated by an attribute. Even Dante
+is not wholly free from such errors,[922] and, indeed, he prides himself
+on the obscurity of his allegories in general.[923] Petrarch, in his
+'Trionfi,' attempts to give clear, if short, descriptions of at all
+events the figures of Love, of Chastity, of Death, and of Fame. Others
+again load their allegories with inappropriate attributes. In the
+Satires of Vinciguerra,[924] for example, Envy is depicted with rough,
+iron teeth, Gluttony as biting its own lips, and with a shock of tangled
+hair, the latter probably to show its indifference to all that is not
+meat and drink. We cannot here discuss the bad influence of these
+misunderstandings on the plastic arts. They, like poetry, might think
+themselves fortunate if allegory could be expressed by a mythological
+figure--by a figure which antiquity saved from absurdity--if Mars might
+stand for war, and Diana[925] for the love of the chase.
+
+Nevertheless art and poetry had better allegories than these to offer,
+and we may assume with regard to such figures of this kind as appeared
+in the Italian festivals, that the public required them to be clearly
+and vividly characteristic, since its previous training had fitted it to
+be a competent critic. Elsewhere, particularly at the Burgundian court,
+the most inexpressive figures, and even mere symbols, were allowed to
+pass, since to understand, or to seem to understand them, was a part of
+aristocratic breeding. On the occasion of the famous 'Oath of the
+Pheasant' in the year 1453,[926] the beautiful young horsewoman, who
+appears as 'Queen of Pleasure,' is the only pleasing allegory. The huge
+dishes, with automatic or even living figures within them, are either
+mere curiosities or are intended to convey some clumsy moral lesson. A
+naked female statue guarding a live lion was supposed to represent
+Constantinople and its future saviour, the Duke of Burgundy. The rest,
+with the exception of a Pantomime--Jason in Colchis--seems either too
+recondite to be understood or to have no sense at all. Olivier himself,
+to whom we owe the description of the scene, appeared costumed as 'The
+Church,' in a tower on the back of an elephant, and sang a long elegy on
+the victory of the unbelievers.[927]
+
+But although the allegorical element in the poetry, the art, and the
+festivals of Italy is superior both in good taste and in unity of
+conception to what we find in other countries, yet it is not in these
+qualities that it is most characteristic and unique. The decisive point
+of superiority[928] lay rather in the fact, that besides the
+personifications of abstract qualities, historical representatives of
+them were introduced in great number--that both poetry and plastic art
+were accustomed to represent famous men and women. The 'Divine Comedy,'
+the 'Trionfi' of Petrarch, the 'Amorosa Visione' of Boccaccio--all of
+them works constructed on this principle--and the great diffusion of
+culture which took place under the influence of antiquity, had made the
+nation familiar with this historical element. These figures now appeared
+at festivals, either individualised, as definite masks, or in groups, as
+characteristic attendants on some leading allegorical figure. The art of
+grouping and composition was thus learnt in Italy at a time when the
+most splendid exhibitions in other countries were made up of
+unintelligible symbolism or unmeaning puerilities.
+
+Let us begin with that kind of festival which is perhaps the oldest of
+all--the Mysteries.[929] They resembled in their main features those
+performed in the rest of Europe. In the public squares, in the churches,
+and in the cloisters extensive scaffolds were constructed, the upper
+story of which served as a Paradise to open and shut at will, and the
+ground-floor often as a Hell, while between the two lay the stage
+properly so called, representing the scene of all the earthly events of
+the drama. In Italy, as elsewhere, the biblical or legendary play often
+began with an introductory dialogue between Apostles, Prophets, Sibyls,
+Virtues, and Fathers of the Church, and sometimes ended with a dance. As
+a matter of course the half-comic 'Intermezzi' of secondary characters
+were not wanting in Italy, yet this feature was hardly so broadly marked
+as in northern countries.[930] The artificial means by which figures
+were made to rise and float in the air--one of the chief delights of
+these representations--were probably much better understood in Italy
+than elsewhere; and at Florence in the fourteenth century the hitches
+in these performances were a stock subject of ridicule.[931] Soon after
+Brunellesco invented for the Feast of the Annunciation in the Piazza San
+Felice a marvellous apparatus consisting of a heavenly globe surrounded
+by two circles of angels, out of which Gabriel flew down in a machine
+shaped like an almond. Cecca, too, devised the mechanism for such
+displays.[932] The spiritual corporations or the quarters of the city
+which undertook the charge and in part the performance of these plays
+spared, at all events in the larger towns, no trouble and expense to
+render them as perfect and artistic as possible. The same was no doubt
+the case at the great court festivals, when Mysteries were acted as well
+as pantomimes and secular dramas. The court of Pietro Riario (p. 106),
+and that of Ferrara were assuredly not wanting in all that human
+invention could produce.[933] When we picture to ourselves the
+theatrical talent and the splendid costumes of the actors, the scenes
+constructed in the style of the architecture of the period, and hung
+with garlands and tapestry, and in the background the noble buildings of
+an Italian piazza, or the slender columns of some great courtyard or
+cloister, the effect is one of great brilliance. But just as the secular
+drama suffered from this passion for display, so the higher poetical
+development of the Mystery was arrested by the same cause. In the texts
+which are left we find for the most part the poorest dramatic
+groundwork, relieved now and then by a fine lyrical or rhetorical
+passage, but no trace of the grand symbolic enthusiasm which
+distinguishes the 'Autos Sagramentales' of Calderon.
+
+In the smaller towns, where the scenic display was less, the effect of
+these spiritual plays on the character of the spectators may have been
+greater. We read[934] that one of the great preachers of repentance of
+whom more will be said later on, Roberto da Lecce, closed his Lenten
+sermons during the plague of 1448, at Perugia, with a representation of
+the Passion. The piece followed the New Testament closely. The actors
+were few, but the whole people wept aloud. It is true that on such
+occasions emotional stimulants were resorted to which were borrowed from
+the crudest realism. We are reminded of the pictures of Matteo da Siena,
+or of the groups of clay-figures by Guido Mazzoni, when we read that the
+actor who took the part of Christ appeared covered with wales and
+apparently sweating blood, and even bleeding from a wound in the
+side.[935]
+
+The special occasions on which these mysteries were performed, apart
+from the great festivals of the Church, from princely weddings, and the
+like, were of various kinds. When, for example, S. Bernardino of Siena
+was canonised by the Pope (1450), a sort of dramatic imitation of the
+ceremony took place (rappresentazione), probably on the great square of
+his native city, and for two days there was feasting with meat and drink
+for all comers.[936] We are told that a learned monk celebrated his
+promotion to the degree of Doctor of Theology, by giving a
+representation of the legend about the patron saint of the city.[937]
+Charles VIII. had scarcely entered Italy before he was welcomed at Turin
+by the widowed Duchess Bianca of Savoy with a sort of half-religious
+pantomime,[938] in which a pastoral scene first symbolised the Law of
+Nature, and then a procession of patriarchs the Law of Grace.
+Afterwards followed the story of Lancelot of the Lake, and that 'of
+Athens.' And no sooner had the King reached Chieri, than he was received
+with another pantomime, in which a woman in childbed was shown,
+surrounded by distinguished visitors.
+
+If any church festival was held by universal consent to call for
+exceptional efforts, it was the feast of Corpus Christi, which in Spain
+(p. 413) gave rise to a special class of poetry. We possess a splendid
+description of the manner in which that feast was celebrated at Viterbo
+by Pius II. in 1482.[939] The procession itself, which advanced from a
+vast and gorgeous tent in front of S. Francesco along the main street to
+the Cathedral, was the least part of the ceremony. The cardinals and
+wealthy prelates had divided the whole distance into parts, over which
+they severally presided, and which they decorated with curtains,
+tapestry, and garlands.[940] Each of them had also erected a stage of
+his own, on which, as the procession passed by, short historical and
+allegorical scenes were represented. It is not clear from the account
+whether all the characters were living beings or some merely draped
+figures;[941] the expense was certainly very great. There was a
+suffering Christ amid singing cherubs, the Last Supper with a figure of
+St. Thomas Aquinas, the combat between the Archangel Michael and the
+devils, fountains of wine and orchestras of angels, the grave of Christ
+with all the scene of the Resurrection, and finally, on the square
+before the Cathedral, the tomb of the Virgin. It opened after High Mass
+and the benediction, and the Mother of God ascended singing to Paradise,
+where she was crowned by her Son, and led into the presence of the
+Eternal Father.
+
+Among these representations in the public street, that given by the
+Cardinal Vice-Chancellor Roderigo Borgia, afterwards Pope Alexander VI.,
+was remarkable for its splendour and obscure symbolism.[942] It offers
+an early instance of the fondness for salvos of artillery[943] which was
+characteristic of the house of Borgia.
+
+The account is briefer which Pius II. gives us of the procession held
+the same year in Rome on the arrival of the skull of St. Andrew from
+Greece. There, too, Roderigo Borgia distinguished himself by his
+magnificence; but this festival had a more secular character than the
+other, as, besides the customary choirs of angels, other masks were
+exhibited, as well as 'strong men,' who seemed to have performed various
+feats of muscular prowess.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such representations as were wholly or chiefly secular in their
+character were arranged, especially at the more important princely
+courts, mainly with a view to splendid and striking scenic effects. The
+subjects were mythological or allegorical, and the interpretation
+commonly lay on the surface. Extravagancies, indeed, were not
+wanting--gigantic animals from which a crowd of masked figures suddenly
+emerged, as at Siena[944] in the year 1465, when at a public reception a
+ballet of twelve persons came out of a golden wolf; living table
+ornaments, not always, however, showing the tasteless exaggeration of
+the Burgundian Court (p. 182)--and the like. Most of them showed some
+artistic or poetical feeling. The mixture of pantomime and the drama at
+the Court of Ferrara has been already referred to in the treating of
+poetry (p. 318). The entertainments given in 1473 by the Cardinal Pietro
+Riario at Rome when Leonora of Aragon, the destined bride of Prince
+Hercules of Ferrara, was passing through the city, were famous far
+beyond the limits of Italy.[945] The plays acted were mysteries on some
+ecclesiastical subject, the pantomimes on the contrary, were
+mythological. There were represented Orpheus with the beasts, Perseus
+and Andromeda, Ceres drawn by dragons, Bacchus and Ariadne by panthers,
+and finally the education of Achilles. Then followed a ballet of the
+famous lovers of ancient times, with a troop of nymphs, which was
+interrupted by an attack of predatory centaurs, who in their turn were
+vanquished and put to flight by Hercules. The fact, in itself a trifle,
+may be mentioned, as characteristic of the taste of the time, that the
+human beings who at all the festivals appeared as statues in niches or
+on pillars and triumphal arches, and then showed themselves to be alive
+by singing or speaking, wore their natural complexion and a natural
+costume, and thus the sense of incongruity was removed; while in the
+house of Riario there was exhibited a living child, gilt from head to
+foot, who showered water round him from a spring.[946]
+
+Brilliant pantomimes of the same kind were given at Bologna, at the
+marriage of Annibale Bentivoglio with Lucrezia of Este.[947] Instead of
+the orchestra, choral songs were sung, while the fairest of Diana's
+nymphs flew over to the Juno Pronuba, and while Venus walked with a
+lion--which in this case was a disguised man--among a troop of savages.
+The decorations were a faithful representation of a forest. At Venice,
+in 1491, the princesses of the house of Este[948] were met and welcomed
+by the Bucentaur, and entertained by boat-races and a splendid
+pantomime, called 'Meleager,' in the court of the ducal palace. At Milan
+Lionardo da Vinci[949] directed the festivals of the Duke and of some
+leading citizens. One of his machines, which must have rivalled that of
+Brunellesco (p. 411), represented the heavenly bodies with all their
+movements on a colossal scale. Whenever a planet approached Isabella,
+the bride of the young Duke, the divinity whose name it bore stepped
+forth from the globe,[950] and sang some verses written by the
+court-poet Bellincioni (1489). At another festival (1493) the model of
+the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza appeared with other objects
+under a triumphal arch on the square before the castle. We read in
+Vasari of the ingenious automata which Lionardo invented to welcome the
+French kings as masters of Milan. Even in the smaller cities great
+efforts were sometimes made on these occasions. When Duke Borso came in
+1453 to Reggio[951] to receive the homage of the city, he was met at
+the door by a great machine, on which S. Prospero, the patron saint of
+the town, appeared to float, shaded by a baldachino held by angels,
+while below him was a revolving disc with eight singing cherubs, two of
+whom received from the saint the sceptre and keys of the city, which
+they then delivered to the Duke, while saints and angels held forth in
+his praise. A chariot drawn by concealed horses now advanced, bearing an
+empty throne, behind which stood a figure of Justice attended by a
+genius. At the corners of the chariot sat four grey-headed lawgivers,
+encircled by angels with banners; by its side rode standard-bearers in
+complete armour. It need hardly be added that the goddess and the genius
+did not suffer the Duke to pass by without an address. A second car,
+drawn by an unicorn, bore a Caritas with a burning torch; between the
+two came the classical spectacle of a car in the form of a ship, moved
+by men concealed within it. The whole procession now advanced before the
+Duke. In front of the Church of S. Pietro, a halt was again made. The
+saint, attended by two angels, descended in an aureole from the fa�ade,
+placed a wreath of laurel on the head of the Duke, and then floated back
+to his former position.[952] The clergy provided another allegory of a
+purely religious kind. Idolatry and Faith stood on two lofty pillars,
+and after Faith, represented by a beautiful girl, had uttered her
+welcome, the other column fell to pieces with the lay figure upon it.
+Further on, Borso was met by C�sar with seven beautiful women, who were
+presented to him as the seven Virtues which he was exhorted to pursue.
+At last the Cathedral was reached, but after the service the Duke again
+took his seat on a lofty golden throne, and a second time received the
+homage of some of the masks already mentioned. To conclude all, three
+angels flew down from an adjacent building, and, amid songs of joy,
+delivered to him branches of palm, as symbols of peace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us now give a glance at those festivals the chief feature of which
+was the procession itself.
+
+There is no doubt that from an early period of the Middle Ages the
+religious processions gave rise to the use of masks. Little angels
+accompanied the sacrament or the sacred pictures and reliques on their
+way through the streets; or characters in the Passion--such as Christ
+with the cross, the thieves and the soldiers, or the faithful
+women--were represented for public edification. But the great feasts of
+the Church were from an early time accompanied by a civic procession,
+and the na�vet� of the Middle Ages found nothing unfitting in the many
+secular elements which it contained. We may mention especially the naval
+car (_carrus navalis_), which had been inherited from pagan times,[953]
+and which, as an instance already quoted shows, was admissible at
+festivals of very various kinds, and has permanently left its name on
+one of them in particular--the Carnival. Such ships, decorated with all
+possible splendour, delighted the eyes of spectators long after the
+original meaning of them was forgotten. When Isabella of England met her
+bridegroom, the Emperor Frederick II., at Cologne, she was met by a
+number of such chariots, drawn by invisible horses, and filled with a
+crowd of priests who welcomed her with music and singing.
+
+But the religious processions were not only mingled with secular
+accessories of all kinds, but were often replaced by processions of
+clerical masks. Their origin is perhaps to be found in the parties of
+actors who wound their way through the streets of the city to the place
+where they were about to act the mystery; but it is possible that at an
+early period the clerical procession may have constituted itself as a
+distinct species. Dante[954] describes the 'Trionfo' of Beatrice, with
+the twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse, with the four mystical Beasts,
+with the three Christian and four Cardinal Virtues, and with Saint Luke,
+Saint Paul, and other Apostles, in a way which almost forces us to
+conclude that such processions actually occurred before his time. We
+are chiefly led to this conclusion by the chariot in which Beatrice
+drives, and which in the miraculous forest of the vision would have been
+unnecessary or rather out of place. It is possible, on the other hand,
+that Dante looked on the chariot as a symbol of victory and triumph, and
+that his poem rather served to give rise to these processions, the form
+of which was borrowed from the triumph of the Roman Emperors. However
+this may be, poetry and theology continued to make free use of the
+symbol. Savonarola[955] in his 'Triumph of the Cross' represents Christ
+on a Chariot of Victory, above his head the shining sphere of the
+Trinity, in his left hand the Cross, in his right the Old and New
+Testaments; below him the Virgin Mary; on both sides the Martyrs and
+Doctors of the Church with open books; behind him all the multitude of
+the saved; and in the distance the countless host of his
+enemies--emperors, princes, philosophers, heretics--all vanquished,
+their idols broken, and their books burned. A great picture of Titian,
+which is known only as a woodcut, has a good deal in common with this
+description. The ninth and tenth of Sabellico's (p. 62) thirteen Elegies
+on the Mother of God contain a minute account of her triumph, richly
+adorned with allegories, and especially interesting from that
+matter-of-fact air which also characterises the realistic painting of
+the fifteenth century.
+
+Nevertheless, the secular 'Trionfi' were far more frequent than the
+religious. They were modelled on the procession of the Roman Imperator,
+as it was known from the old reliefs and from the writings of ancient
+authors.[956] The historical conceptions then prevalent in Italy, with
+which these shows were closely connected, have been already discussed
+(p. 139).
+
+We now and then read of the actual triumphal entrance of a victorious
+general, which was organised as far as possible on the ancient pattern,
+even against the will of the hero himself. Francesco Sforza had the
+courage (1450) to refuse the triumphal chariot which had been prepared
+for his return to Milan, on the ground that such things were monarchical
+superstitions.[957] Alfonso the Great, on his entrance into Naples
+(1443), declined the wreath of laurel,[958] which Napoleon did not
+disdain to wear at his coronation in Notre-Dame. For the rest, Alfonso's
+procession, which passed by a breach in the wall through the city to the
+cathedral, was a strange mixture of antique, allegorical, and purely
+comic elements. The car, drawn by four white horses, on which he sat
+enthroned, was lofty and covered with gilding; twenty patricians carried
+the poles of the canopy of cloth of gold which shaded his head. The part
+of the procession which the Florentines then present in Naples had
+undertaken was composed of elegant young cavaliers, skilfully
+brandishing their lances, of a chariot with the figure of Fortune, and
+of seven Virtues on horseback. The goddess herself,[959] in accordance
+with the inexorable logic of allegory to which even the painters at that
+time conformed, wore hair only on the front part of her head, while the
+back part was bald, and the genius who sat on the lower steps of the
+car, and who symbolised the fugitive character of fortune, had his feet
+immersed (?) in a basin of water. Then followed, equipped by the same
+Florentines, a troop of horsemen in the costumes of various nations,
+dressed as foreign princes and nobles, and then, crowned with laurel and
+standing above a revolving globe, a Julius C�sar,[960] who explained to
+the king in Italian verse the meaning of the allegories, and then took
+his place in the procession. Sixty Florentines, all in purple and
+scarlet, closed this splendid display of what their home could achieve.
+Then a band of Catalans advanced on foot, with lay figures of horses
+fastened on to them before and behind, and engaged in a mock combat with
+a body of Turks, as though in derision of the Florentine sentimentalism.
+Last of all came a gigantic tower, the door of which was guarded by an
+angel with a drawn sword; on it stood four Virtues, who each addressed
+the king with a song. The rest of the show had nothing specially
+characteristic about it.
+
+At the entrance of Louis XII. into Milan in the year 1507[961] we find,
+besides the inevitable chariot with Virtues, a living group representing
+Jupiter, Mars, and a figure of Italy caught in a net. After which came a
+car laden with trophies, and so forth.
+
+And when there were in reality no triumphs to celebrate, the poets found
+a compensation for themselves and their patrons. Petrarch and Boccaccio
+had described the representation of every sort of fame as attendants
+each of an allegorical figure (p. 409); the celebrities of past ages
+were now made attendants of the prince. The poetess Cleofe Gabrielli of
+Gubbio paid this honour to Borso of Ferrara.[962] She gave him seven
+queens--the seven liberal arts--as his handmaids, with whom he mounted a
+chariot; further, a crowd of heroes, distinguished by names written on
+their foreheads; then followed all the famous poets; and after them the
+gods driving in their chariots. There is, in fact, at this time simply
+no end to the mythological and allegorical charioteering, and the most
+important work of art of Borso's time--the frescoes in the Palazzo
+Schifanoja--shows us a whole frieze filled with these motives.[963]
+Raphael, when he had to paint the Camera della Segnatura, found this
+mode of artistic thought completely vulgarised and worn out. The new and
+final consecration which he gave to it will remain a wonder to all ages.
+
+The triumphal processions, strictly speaking, of victorious generals,
+formed the exception. But all the festive processions, whether they
+celebrated any special event or were mainly held for their own sakes,
+assumed more or less the character and nearly always the name of a
+'Trionfo.' It is a wonder that funerals were not also treated in the
+same way.[964]
+
+It was the practice, both at the Carnival and on other occasions, to
+represent the triumphs of ancient Roman commanders, such as that of
+Paulus �milius under Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence, and that of
+Camillus on the visit of Leo X. Both were conducted by the painter
+Francesco Gronacci.[965] In Rome, the first complete exhibition of this
+kind was the triumph of Augustus after the victory over Cleopatra,[966]
+under Paul II., where, besides the comic and mythological masks, which,
+as a matter of fact, were not wanting in the ancient triumphs, all the
+other requisites were to be found--kings in chains, tablets with decrees
+of the senate and people, a senate clothed in the ancient costume,
+praetors, aediles, and quaestors, four chariots filled with singing
+masks, and, doubtless, cars laden with trophies. Other processions
+rather aimed at setting forth, in a general way, the universal empire of
+ancient Rome; and in answer to the very real danger which threatened
+Europe from the side of the Turks, a cavalcade of camels bearing masks
+representing Ottoman prisoners, appeared before the people. Later, at
+the Carnival of the year 1500, C�sar Borgia, with a bold allusion to
+himself, celebrated the triumph of Julius C�sar, with a procession of
+eleven magnificent chariots,[967] doubtless to the scandal of the
+pilgrims who had come for the Jubilee (vol. i. p. 116). Two 'Trionfi,'
+famous for their taste and beauty, were given by rival companies in
+Florence, on the election of Leo X. to the Papacy.[968] One of them
+represented the three Ages of Man, the other the four Ages of the World,
+ingeniously set forth in five scenes of Roman history, and in two
+allegories of the golden age of Saturn and of its final return. The
+imagination displayed in the adornment of the chariots, when the great
+Florentine artists undertook the work, made the scene so impressive that
+such representations became in time a permanent element in the popular
+life. Hitherto the subject cities had been satisfied merely to present
+their symbolical gifts--costly stuffs and wax-candles--on the day when
+they annually did homage. The guild of merchants now built ten chariots,
+to which others were afterwards to be added, not so much to carry as to
+symbolise the tribute, and Andrea del Sarto, who painted some of them,
+no doubt did his work to perfection.[969] These cars, whether used to
+hold tribute or trophies, now formed a part of all such celebrations,
+even when there was not much money to be laid out. The Sienese
+announced, in 1477, the alliance between Ferrante and Sixtus IV., with
+which they themselves were associated, by driving a chariot round the
+city, with 'one clad as the goddess of peace standing on a hauberk and
+other arms.'[970]
+
+At the Venetian festivals the processions, not on land but on water,
+were marvellous in their fantastic splendour. The sailing of the
+Bucentaur to meet the Princess of Ferrara in the year 1491 (p. 136)
+seems to have been something belonging to fairyland.[971] Countless
+vessels with garlands and hangings, filled with the richly-dressed youth
+of the city, moved in front; genii with attributes symbolising the
+various gods, floated on machines hung in the air; below stood others
+grouped as tritons and nymphs; the air was filled with music, sweet
+odours, and the fluttering of embroidered banners. The Bucentaur was
+followed by such a crowd of boats of every sort that for a mile all
+round (_octo stadia_) the water could not be seen. With regard to the
+rest of the festivities, besides the pantomime mentioned above, we may
+notice as something new, a boat-race of fifty powerful girls. In the
+sixteenth century,[972] the nobility were divided into corporations with
+a view to these festivals, whose most noteworthy feature was some
+extraordinary machine placed on a ship. So, for instance, in the year
+1541, at the festival of the 'Sempiterni,' a round 'universe' floated
+along the Grand Canal, and a splendid ball was given inside it. The
+Carnival, too, in this city was famous for its dances, processions, and
+exhibitions of every kind. The Square of St. Mark was found to give
+space enough not only for tournaments (p. 390), but for 'Trionfi,'
+similar to those common on the mainland. At a festival held on the
+conclusion of peace,[973] the pious brotherhoods ('scuole') took each
+its part in the procession. There, among golden chandeliers with red
+candles, among crowds of musicians and winged boys with golden bowls and
+horns of plenty, was seen a car on which Noah and David sat together
+enthroned; then came Abigail, leading a camel laden with treasures, and
+a second car with a group of political figures--Italy sitting between
+Venice and Liguria, the two last with their coats of arms, the former
+with a stork, the symbol of unity--and on a raised step three female
+symbolical figures with the arms of the allied princes. This was
+followed by a great globe with the constellations, as it seems, round
+it. The princes themselves, or rather their bodily representatives,
+appeared on other chariots with their servants and their coats of arms,
+if we have rightly interpreted our author.[974] There was also music at
+these and all other similar processions.
+
+The Carnival, properly so called, apart from these great triumphal
+marches, had nowhere, perhaps, in the fifteenth century, so varied a
+character as in Rome.[975] There were races of every kind--of horses,
+asses, buffalos, old men, young men, Jews, and so on. Paul II.
+entertained the people in crowds before the Palazzo di Venezia, in which
+he lived. The games in the Piazza Navona, which had probably never
+altogether ceased since the classical times, were remarkable for their
+warlike splendour. We read of a sham fight of cavalry, and a review of
+all the citizens in arms. The greatest freedom existed with regard to
+the use of masks, which were sometimes allowed for several months
+together.[976] Sixtus IV. ventured, in the most populous part of the
+city--at the Campofiore and near the Banchi--to make his way through
+crowds of masks, though he declined to receive them as visitors in the
+Vatican. Under Innocent VIII., a discreditable usage, which had already
+appeared among the Cardinals, attained its height. In the Carnival of
+1491, they sent one another chariots full of splendid masks, of singers,
+and of buffoons, chanting scandalous verses. They were accompanied by
+men on horseback.[977] Apart from the Carnival, the Romans seem to have
+been the first to discover the effect of a great procession by
+torchlight. When Pius II. came back from the Congress of Mantua in
+1459,[978] the people waited on him with a squadron of horsemen bearing
+torches, who rode in shining circles before his palace. Sixtus IV.,
+however, thought it better to decline a nocturnal visit of the people,
+who proposed to wait on him with torches and olive-branches.[979]
+
+But the Florentine Carnival surpassed the Roman in a certain class of
+processions, which have left their mark even in literature.[980] Among a
+crowd of masks on foot and on horseback appeared some huge, fantastic
+chariot, and upon it an allegorical figure or group of figures with the
+proper accompaniments, such as Jealousy with four spectacled faces on
+one head; the four temperaments (p. 309) with the planets belonging to
+them; the three Fates; Prudence enthroned above Hope and Fear, which lay
+bound before her; the four Elements, Ages, Winds, Seasons, and so on; as
+well as the famous chariot of Death with the coffins, which presently
+opened. Sometimes we meet with a splendid scene from classical
+mythology--Bacchus and Ariadne, Paris and Helen, and others. Or else a
+chorus of figures forming some single class or category, as the beggars,
+the hunters and nymphs, the lost souls, who in their lifetime were
+hard-hearted women, the hermits, the astrologers, the vagabonds, the
+devils, the sellers of various kinds of wares, and even on one occasion
+'il popolo,' the people as such, who all reviled one another in their
+songs. The songs, which still remain and have been collected, give the
+explanation of the masquerade sometimes in a pathetic, sometimes in a
+humorous, and sometimes in an excessively indecent tone. Some of the
+worst in this respect are attributed to Lorenzo the Magnificent,
+probably because the real author did not venture to declare himself.
+However this may be, we must certainly ascribe to him the beautiful song
+which accompanied the masque of Bacchus and Ariadne, whose refrain still
+echoes to us from the fifteenth century, like a regretful presentiment
+of the brief splendour of the Renaissance itself:--
+
+    'Quanto � bella giovinezza,
+     Che si fugge tuttavia!
+     Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:
+     Di doman non c'� certezza.'
+
+
+
+
+_PART VI._
+
+MORALITY AND RELIGION.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MORALITY.
+
+
+The relation of the various peoples of the earth to the supreme
+interests of life, to God, virtue, and immortality, may be investigated
+up to a certain point, but can never be compared to one another with
+absolute strictness and certainty. The more plainly in these matters our
+evidence seems to speak, the more carefully must we refrain from
+unqualified assumptions and rash generalisations.
+
+This remark is especially true with regard to our judgment on questions
+of morality. It may be possible to indicate many contrasts and shades of
+difference among different nations, but to strike the balance of the
+whole is not given to human insight. The ultimate truth with respect to
+the character, the conscience, and the guilt of a people remains for
+ever a secret; if only for the reason that its defects have another
+side, where they reappear as peculiarities or even as virtues. We must
+leave those who find a pleasure in passing sweeping censures on whole
+nations, to do so as they like. The peoples of Europe can maltreat, but
+happily not judge one another. A great nation, interwoven by its
+civilisation, its achievements, and its fortunes with the whole life of
+the modern world, can afford to ignore both its advocates and its
+accusers. It lives on with or without the approval of theorists.
+
+Accordingly, what here follows is no judgment, but rather a string of
+marginal notes, suggested by a study of the Italian Renaissance
+extending over some years. The value to be attached to them is all the
+more qualified as they mostly touch on the life of the upper classes,
+with respect to which we are far better informed in Italy than in any
+other country in Europe at that period. But though both fame and infamy
+sound louder here than elsewhere, we are not helped thereby in forming
+an adequate moral estimate of the people.
+
+What eye can pierce the depths in which the character and fate of
+nations are determined?--in which that which is inborn and that which
+has been experienced combine to form a new whole and a fresh nature?--in
+which even those intellectual capacities, which at first sight we should
+take to be most original, are in fact evolved late and slowly? Who can
+tell if the Italian before the thirteenth century possessed that
+flexible activity and certainty in his whole being--that play of power
+in shaping whatever subject he dealt with in word or in form, which was
+peculiar to him later? And if no answer can be found to these questions,
+how can we possibly judge of the infinite and infinitely intricate
+channels through which character and intellect are incessantly pouring
+their influence one upon the other. A tribunal there is for each one of
+us, whose voice is our conscience; but let us have done with these
+generalities about nations. For the people that seems to be most sick
+the cure may be at hand; and one that appears to be healthy may bear
+within it the ripening germs of death, which the hour of danger will
+bring forth from their hiding-place.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the civilisation of the
+Renaissance had reached its highest pitch, and at the same time the
+political ruin of the nation seemed inevitable, there were not wanting
+serious thinkers who saw a connexion between this ruin and the prevalent
+immorality. It was not one of those methodistical moralists who in every
+age think themselves called to declaim against the wickedness of the
+time, but it was Macchiavelli, who, in one of his most well-considered
+works,[981] said openly: 'We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above
+others.' Another man had perhaps said, 'We are individually highly
+developed; we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion which
+were natural to us in our undeveloped state, and we despise outward law,
+because our rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and officers
+wicked men.' Macchiavelli adds, 'because the Church and her
+representatives set us the worst example.'
+
+Shall we add also, 'because the influence exercised by antiquity was in
+this respect unfavourable'? The statement can only be received with many
+qualifications. It may possibly be true of the humanists (p. 272 sqq.),
+especially as regards the profligacy of their lives. Of the rest it may
+perhaps be said with some approach to accuracy, that, after they became
+familiar with antiquity, they substituted for holiness--the Christian
+ideal of life--the cultus of historical greatness (see Part II. chap.
+iii.). We can understand, therefore, how easily they would be tempted to
+consider those faults and vices to be matters of indifference, in spite
+of which their heroes were great. They were probably scarcely conscious
+of this themselves, for if we are summoned to quote any statement of
+doctrine on this subject, we are again forced to appeal to humanists
+like Paolo Giovio, who excuses the perjury of Giangaleazzo Visconti,
+through which he was enabled to found an empire, by the example of
+Julius C�sar.[982] The great Florentine historians and statesmen never
+stoop to these slavish quotations, and what seems antique in their deeds
+and their judgments is so because the nature of their political life
+necessarily fostered in them a mode of thought which has some analogy
+with that of antiquity.
+
+Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Italy at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century found itself in the midst of a grave moral crisis, out
+of which the best men saw hardly any escape.
+
+Let us begin by saying a few words about that moral force which was then
+the strongest bulwark against evil. The highly gifted men of that day
+thought to find it in the sentiment of honour. This is that enigmatic
+mixture of conscience and egoism which often survives in the modern man
+after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and
+hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness and great
+vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions; yet,
+nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left in the wreck of a
+character may gather around it, and from this fountain may draw new
+strength. It has become, in a far wider sense than is commonly believed,
+a decisive test of conduct in the minds of the cultivated Europeans of
+our own day, and many of those who yet hold faithfully by religion and
+morality are unconsciously guided by this feeling in the gravest
+decisions of their lives.[983]
+
+It lies without the limits of our task to show how the men of antiquity
+also experienced this feeling in a peculiar form, and how, afterwards,
+in the Middle Ages, a special sense of honour became the mark of a
+particular class. Nor can we here dispute with those who hold that
+conscience, rather than honour, is the motive power. It would indeed be
+better and nobler if it were so; but since it must be granted that even
+our worthier resolutions result from 'a conscience more or less dimmed
+by selfishness,' it is better to call the mixture by its right
+name.[984] It is certainly not always easy, in treating of the Italian
+of this period, to distinguish this sense of honour from the passion for
+fame, into which, indeed, it easily passes. Yet the two sentiments are
+essentially different.
+
+There is no lack of witnesses on this subject. One who speaks plainly
+may here be quoted as a representative of the rest. We read in the
+recently-published 'Aphorisms' of Guicciardini:[985] 'He who esteems
+honour highly, succeeds in all that he undertakes, since he fears
+neither trouble, danger, nor expense; I have found it so in my own case,
+and may say it and write it; vain and dead are the deeds of men which
+have not this as their motive.' It is necessary to add that, from what
+is known of the life of the writer, he can here be only speaking of
+honour, and not of fame. Rabelais has put the matter more clearly than
+perhaps any Italian. We quote him, indeed, unwillingly in these pages.
+What the great, baroque Frenchman gives us, is a picture of what the
+Renaissance would be without form and without beauty.[986] But his
+description of an ideal state of things in the Thelemite monastery is
+decisive as historical evidence. In speaking of his gentlemen and ladies
+of the Order of Free Will,[987] he tells us as follows:--
+
+'En leur reigle n'estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras. Parce
+que gens liberes, bien nayz,[988] bien instruictz, conversans en
+compaignies honnestes, ont par nature ung instinct et aguillon qui
+toujours les poulse � faitz vertueux, et retire de vice; lequel ilz
+nommoyent honneur.'
+
+This is that same faith in the goodness of human nature which inspired
+the men of the second half of the eighteenth century, and helped to
+prepare the way for the French Revolution. Among the Italians, too, each
+man appeals to this noble instinct within him, and though with regard to
+the people as a whole--chiefly in consequence of the national
+disasters--judgments of a more pessimistic sort became prevalent, the
+importance of this sense of honour must still be rated highly. If the
+boundless development of individuality, stronger than the will of the
+individual, be the work of a historical providence, not less so is the
+opposing force which then manifested itself in Italy. How often, and
+against what passionate attacks of selfishness it won the day, we cannot
+tell, and therefore no human judgment can estimate with certainty the
+absolute moral value of the nation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A force which we must constantly take into account in judging of the
+morality of the more highly-developed Italian of this period, is that
+of the imagination. It gives to his virtues and vices a peculiar colour,
+and under its influence his unbridled egoism shows itself in its most
+terrible shape.
+
+The force of his imagination explains, for example, the fact that he was
+the first gambler on a large scale in modern times. Pictures of future
+wealth and enjoyment rose in such life-like colours before his eyes,
+that he was ready to hazard everything to reach them. The Mohammedan
+nations would doubtless have anticipated him in this respect, had not
+the Koran, from the beginning, set up the prohibition against gambling
+as a chief safeguard of public morals, and directed the imagination of
+its followers to the search after buried treasures. In Italy, the
+passion for play reached an intensity which often threatened or
+altogether broke up the existence of the gambler. Florence had already,
+at the end of the fourteenth century, its Casanova--a certain
+Buonaccorso Pitti,[989] who, in the course of his incessant journeys as
+merchant, political agent, diplomatist and professional gambler, won and
+lost sums so enormous that none but princes like the Dukes of Brabant,
+Bavaria, and Savoy, were able to compete with him. That great
+lottery-bank, which was called the Court of Rome, accustomed people to a
+need of excitement, which found its satisfaction in games of hazard
+during the intervals between one intrigue and another. We read, for
+example, how Franceschetto Cyb�, in two games with the Cardinal
+Raffaello Riario, lost no less than 14,000 ducats, and afterwards
+complained to the Pope that his opponent had cheated him.[990] Italy has
+since that time been the home of the lottery.
+
+It was to the imagination of the Italians that the peculiar character of
+their vengeance was due. The sense of justice was, indeed, one and the
+same throughout Europe, and any violation of it, so long as no
+punishment was inflicted, must have been felt in the same manner. But
+other nations, though they found it no easier to forgive, nevertheless
+forgot more easily, while the Italian imagination kept the picture of
+the wrong alive with frightful vividness.[991] The fact that, according
+to the popular morality, the avenging of blood is a duty--a duty often
+performed in a way to make us shudder--gives to this passion a peculiar
+and still firmer basis. The government and the tribunals recognise its
+existence and justification, and only attempt to keep it within certain
+limits. Even among the peasantry, we read of Thyestean banquets and
+mutual assassination on the widest scale. Let us look at an
+instance.[992]
+
+In the district of Aquapendente three boys were watching cattle, and one
+of them said: 'Let us find out the way how people are hung.' While one
+was sitting on the shoulders of the other, and the third, after
+fastening the rope round the neck of the first, was tying it to an oak,
+a wolf came, and the two who were free ran away and left the other
+hanging. Afterwards they found him dead, and buried him. On the Sunday
+his father came to bring him bread, and one of the two confessed what
+had happened, and showed him the grave. The old man then killed him with
+a knife, cut him up, brought away the liver, and entertained the boy's
+father with it at home. After dinner, he told him whose liver it was.
+Hereupon began a series of reciprocal murders between the two families,
+and within a month thirty-six persons were killed, women as well as men.
+
+And such 'vendette,' handed down from father to son, and extending to
+friends and distant relations, were not limited to the lower classes,
+but reached to the highest. The chronicles and novels of the period are
+full of such instances, especially of vengeance taken for the violation
+of women. The classic land for these feuds was Romagna, where the
+'vendetta' was interwoven with intrigues and party divisions of every
+conceivable sort. The popular legends present an awful picture of the
+savagery into which this brave and energetic people had relapsed. We are
+told, for instance, of a nobleman at Ravenna, who had got all his
+enemies together in a tower, and might have burned them; instead of
+which he let them out, embraced them, and entertained them sumptuously;
+whereupon shame drove them mad, and they conspired against him.[993]
+Pious and saintly monks exhorted unceasingly to reconciliation, but they
+can scarcely have done more than restrain to a certain extent the feuds
+already established; their influence hardly prevented the growth of new
+ones. The novelists sometimes describe to us this effect of
+religion--how sentiments of generosity and forgiveness were suddenly
+awakened, and then again paralysed by the force of what had once been
+done and could never be undone. The Pope himself was not always lucky as
+a peacemaker. 'Pope Paul II. desired that the quarrel between Antonio
+Caffarello and the family of Alberino should cease, and ordered Giovanni
+Alberino and Antonio Caffarello to come before him, and bade them kiss
+one another, and promised them a fine of 2,000 ducats in case they
+renewed this strife, and two days after Antonio was stabbed by the same
+Giacomo Alberino, son of Giovanni, who had wounded him once before; and
+the Pope was full of anger, and confiscated the goods of Alberino, and
+destroyed his houses, and banished father and son from Rome.'[994] The
+oaths and ceremonies by which reconciled enemies attempted to guard
+themselves against a relapse, are sometimes utterly horrible. When the
+parties of the 'Nove' and the 'Popolari' met and kissed one another by
+twos in the cathedral at Siena on Christmas Eve, 1494,[995] an oath was
+read by which all salvation in time and eternity was denied to the
+future violator of the treaty--'an oath more astonishing and dreadful
+than had ever yet been heard.' The last consolations of religion in the
+hour of death were to turn to the damnation of the man who should break
+it. It is clear, however, that such a ceremony rather represents the
+despairing mood of the mediators than offers any real guarantee of
+peace, inasmuch as the truest reconciliation is just that one which has
+least need of it.
+
+This personal need of vengeance felt by the cultivated and highly placed
+Italian, resting on the solid basis of an analogous popular custom,
+naturally displays itself under a thousand different aspects, and
+receives the unqualified approval of public opinion, as reflected in the
+works of the novelists.[996] All are at one on the point, that, in the
+case of those injuries and insults for which Italian justice offered no
+redress, and all the more in the case of those against which no human
+law can ever adequately provide, each man is free to take the law into
+his own hands. Only there must be art in the vengeance, and the
+satisfaction must be compounded of the material injury and moral
+humiliation of the offender. A mere brutal, clumsy triumph of force was
+held by public opinion to be no satisfaction. The whole man with his
+sense of fame and of scorn, not only his fist, must be victorious.
+
+The Italian of that time shrank, it is true, from no dissimulation in
+order to attain his ends, but was wholly free from hypocrisy in matters
+of principle. In these he attempted to deceive neither himself nor
+others. Accordingly, revenge was declared with perfect frankness to be a
+necessity of human nature. Cool-headed people declared that it was then
+most worthy of praise, when it was disengaged from passion, and worked
+simply from motives of expedience, 'in order that other men may learn to
+leave us unharmed.'[997] Yet such instances must have formed only a
+small minority in comparison with those in which passion sought an
+outlet. This sort of revenge differs clearly from the avenging of blood,
+which has been already spoken of; while the latter keeps more or less
+within the limits of retaliation--the 'jus talionis'--the former
+necessarily goes much farther, not only requiring the sanction of the
+sense of justice, but craving admiration, and even striving to get the
+laugh on its own side.
+
+Here lies the reason why men were willing to wait so long for their
+revenge. A 'bella vendetta' demanded as a rule a combination of
+circumstances for which it was necessary to wait patiently. The gradual
+ripening of such opportunities is described by the novelists with
+heartfelt delight.
+
+There is no need to discuss the morality of actions in which plaintiff
+and judge are one and the same person. If this Italian thirst for
+vengeance is to be palliated at all, it must be by proving the existence
+of a corresponding national virtue, namely gratitude. The same force of
+imagination which retains and magnifies wrong once suffered, might be
+expected also to keep alive the memory of kindness received.[998] It is
+not possible, however, to prove this with regard to the nation as a
+whole, though traces of it may be seen in the Italian character of
+to-day. The gratitude shown by the inferior classes for kind treatment,
+and the good memory of the upper for politeness in social life, are
+instances of this.
+
+This connexion between the imagination and the moral qualities of the
+Italian repeats itself continually. If, nevertheless, we find more cold
+calculation in cases where the Northerner rather follows his impulses,
+the reason is that individual development in Italy was not only more
+marked and earlier in point of time, but also far more frequent. Where
+this is the case in other countries, the results are also analogous. We
+find, for example, that the early emancipation of the young from
+domestic and paternal authority is common to North America with Italy.
+Later on, in the more generous natures, a tie of freer affection grows
+up between parents and children.
+
+It is in fact a matter of extreme difficulty to judge fairly of other
+nations in the sphere of character and feeling. In these respects a
+people may be developed highly, and yet in a manner so strange that a
+foreigner is utterly unable to understand it. Perhaps all the nations of
+the West are in this point equally favoured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But where the imagination has exercised the most powerful and despotic
+influence on morals is in the illicit intercourse of the two sexes. It
+is well known that prostitution was freely practised in the Middle Ages,
+before the appearance of syphilis. A discussion, however, on these
+questions does not belong to our present work. What seems characteristic
+of Italy at this time, is that here marriage and its rights were more
+often and more deliberately trampled under foot than anywhere else. The
+girls of the higher classes were carefully secluded, and of them we do
+not speak. All passion was directed to the married women.
+
+Under these circumstances it is remarkable that, so far as we know,
+there was no diminution in the number of marriages, and that family life
+by no means underwent that disorganisation which a similar state of
+things would have produced in the North. Men wished to live as they
+pleased, but by no means to renounce the family, even when they were not
+sure that it was all their own. Nor did the race sink, either physically
+or mentally, on this account; for that apparent intellectual decline
+which showed itself towards the middle of the sixteenth century may be
+certainly accounted for by political and ecclesiastical causes, even if
+we are not to assume that the circle of achievements possible to the
+Renaissance had been completed. Notwithstanding their profligacy, the
+Italians continued to be, physically and mentally, one of the healthiest
+and best-born populations in Europe,[999] and have retained this
+position, with improved morals, down to our own time.
+
+When we come to look more closely at the ethics of love at the time of
+the Renaissance, we are struck by a remarkable contrast. The novelists
+and comic poets give us to understand that love consists only in sensual
+enjoyment, and that to win this, all means, tragic or comic, are not
+only permitted, but are interesting in proportion to their audacity and
+unscrupulousness. But if we turn to the best of the lyric poets and
+writers of dialogues, we find in them a deep and spiritual passion of
+the noblest kind, whose last and highest expression is a revival of the
+ancient belief in an original unity of souls in the Divine Being. And
+both modes of feeling were then genuine, and could co-exist in the same
+individual. It is not exactly a matter of glory, but it is a fact, that
+in the cultivated man of modern times, this sentiment can be not merely
+unconsciously present in both its highest and lowest stages, but may
+thus manifest itself openly, and even artistically. The modern man,
+like the man of antiquity, is in this respect too a microcosm, which the
+medi�val man was not and could not be.
+
+To begin with the morality of the novelists. They treat chiefly, as we
+have said, of married women, and consequently of adultery.
+
+The opinion mentioned above (p. 395) of the equality of the two sexes is
+of great importance in relation to this subject. The highly developed
+and cultivated woman disposes of herself with a freedom unknown in
+Northern countries; and her unfaithfulness does not break up her life in
+the same terrible manner, so long as no outward consequence follow from
+it. The husband's claim on her fidelity has not that firm foundation
+which it acquires in the North through the poetry and passion of
+courtship and betrothal. After the briefest acquaintance with her future
+husband, the young wife quits the convent or the paternal roof to enter
+upon a world in which her character begins rapidly to develop. The
+rights of the husband are for this reason conditional, and even the man
+who regards them in the light of a 'jus quaesitum' thinks only of the
+outward conditions of the contract, not of the affections. The beautiful
+young wife of an old man sends back the presents and letters of a
+youthful lover, in the firm resolve to keep her honour (honesta). 'But
+she rejoices in the love of the youth for the sake of his great
+excellence; and she perceives that a noble woman may love a man of merit
+without loss to her honour.'[1000] But the way is short from such a
+distinction to a complete surrender.
+
+The latter seems indeed as good as justified, when there is
+unfaithfulness on the part of the husband. The woman, conscious of her
+own dignity, feels this not only as a pain, but also as a humiliation
+and deceit, and sets to work, often with the calmest consciousness of
+what she is about, to devise the vengeance which the husband deserves.
+Her tact must decide as to the measure of punishment which is suited to
+the particular case. The deepest wound, for example, may prepare the way
+for a reconciliation and a peaceful life in the future, if only it
+remain secret. The novelists, who themselves undergo such experiences or
+invent them according to the spirit of the age, are full of admiration
+when the vengeance is skilfully adapted to the particular case, in fact,
+when it is a work of art. As a matter of course, the husband never at
+bottom recognises this right of retaliation, and only submits to it from
+fear or prudence. Where these motives are absent, where his wife's
+unfaithfulness exposes him or may expose him to the derision of
+outsiders, the affair becomes tragical, and not seldom ends in murder or
+other vengeance of a violent sort. It is characteristic of the real
+motive from which these deeds arise, that not only the husbands, but the
+brothers[1001] and the father of the woman feel themselves not only
+justified in taking vengeance, but bound to take it. Jealousy,
+therefore, has nothing to do with the matter, moral reprobation but
+little; the real reason is the wish to spoil the triumph of others.
+'Nowadays,' says Bandello,[1002] 'we see a woman poison her husband to
+gratify her lusts, thinking that a widow may do whatever she desires.
+Another, fearing the discovery of an illicit amour, has her husband
+murdered by her lover. And though fathers, brothers, and husbands arise
+to extirpate the shame with poison, with the sword, and by every other
+means, women still continue to follow their passions, careless of their
+honour and their lives.' Another time, in a milder strain, he exclaims:
+'Would that we were not daily forced to hear that one man has murdered
+his wife because he suspected her of infidelity; that another has killed
+his daughter, on account of a secret marriage; that a third has caused
+his sister to be murdered, because she would not marry as he wished! It
+is great cruelty that we claim the right to do whatever we list, and
+will not suffer women to do the same. If they do anything which does not
+please us, there we are at once with cords and daggers and poison. What
+folly it is of men to suppose their own and their house's honour depends
+on the appetite of a woman!' The tragedy in which such affairs commonly
+ended was so well known that the novelist looked on the threatened
+gallant as a dead man, even while he went about alive and merry. The
+physician and lute-player Antonio Bologna[1003] had made a secret
+marriage with the widowed Duchess of Amalfi, of the house of Aragon.
+Soon afterwards her brother succeeded in securing both her and her
+children, and murdered them in a castle. Antonio, ignorant of their
+fate, and still cherishing the hope of seeing them again, was staying at
+Milan, closely watched by hired assassins, and one day in the society of
+Ippolita Sforza sang to the lute the story of his misfortunes. A friend
+of the house, Delio, 'told the story up to this point to Scipione
+Attelano, and added that he would make it the subject of a novel, as he
+was sure that Antonio would be murdered.' The manner in which this took
+place, almost under the eyes of Delio and Attelano, is thrillingly
+described by Bandello (i. 26).
+
+Nevertheless, the novelists habitually show a sympathy for all the
+ingenious, comic, and cunning features which may happen to attend
+adultery. They describe with delight how the lover manages to hide
+himself in the house, all the means and devices by which he communicates
+with his mistress, the boxes with cushions and sweetmeats in which he
+can be hidden and carried out of danger. The deceived husband is
+described sometimes as a fool to be laughed at, sometimes as a
+blood-thirsty avenger of his honour; there is no third situation except
+when the woman is painted as wicked and cruel, and the husband or lover
+is the innocent victim. It may be remarked, however, that narratives of
+the latter kind are not strictly speaking novels, but rather warning
+examples taken from real life.[1004]
+
+When in the course of the sixteenth century Italian life fell more and
+more under Spanish influence, the violence of the means to which
+jealousy had recourse perhaps increased. But this new phase must be
+distinguished from the punishment of infidelity which existed before,
+and which was founded in the spirit of the Renaissance itself. As the
+influence of Spain declined, these excesses of jealousy declined also,
+till towards the close of the seventeenth century they had wholly
+disappeared, and their place was taken by that indifference which
+regarded the 'Cicisbeo' as an indispensable figure in every household,
+and took no offence at one or two supernumerary lovers ('Patiti').
+
+But who can undertake to compare the vast sum of wickedness which all
+these facts imply, with what happened in other countries? Was the
+marriage-tie, for instance, really more sacred in France during the
+fifteenth century than in Italy? The 'fabliaux' and farces would lead us
+to doubt it, and rather incline us to think that unfaithfulness was
+equally common, though its tragic consequences were less frequent,
+because the individual was less developed and his claims were less
+consciously felt than in Italy. More evidence, however, in favour of the
+Germanic peoples lies in the fact of the social freedom enjoyed among
+them by girls and women, which impressed Italian travellers so
+pleasantly in England and in the Netherlands (p. 399, note 2). And yet
+we must not attach too much importance to this fact. Unfaithfulness was
+doubtless very frequent, and in certain cases led to a sanguinary
+vengeance. We have only to remember how the northern princes of that
+time dealt with their wives on the first suspicion of infidelity.
+
+But it was not merely the sensual desire, not merely the vulgar appetite
+of the ordinary man, which trespassed upon forbidden ground among the
+Italians of that day, but also the passion of the best and noblest; and
+this, not only because the unmarried girl did not appear in society, but
+also because the man, in proportion to the completeness of his own
+nature, felt himself most strongly attracted by the woman whom marriage
+had developed. These are the men who struck the loftiest notes of
+lyrical poetry, and who have attempted in their treatises and dialogues
+to give us an idealised image of the devouring passion--'l'amor divino.'
+When they complain of the cruelty of the winged god, they are not only
+thinking of the coyness or hard-heartedness of the beloved one, but also
+of the unlawfulness of the passion itself. They seek to raise
+themselves above this painful consciousness by that spiritualisation of
+love which found a support in the Platonic doctrine of the soul, and of
+which Pietro Bembo is the most famous representative. His thoughts on
+this subject are set forth by himself in the third book of the
+'Asolani,' and indirectly by Castiglione, who puts in his mouth the
+splendid speech with which the fourth book of the 'Cortigiano'
+concludes; neither of these writers was a stoic in his conduct, but at
+that time it meant something to be at once a famous and a good man, and
+this praise must be accorded to both of them; their contemporaries took
+what these men said to be a true expression of their feeling, and we
+have not the right to despise it as affectation. Those who take the
+trouble to study the speech in the 'Cortigiano' will see how poor an
+idea of it can be given by an extract. There were then living in Italy
+several distinguished women, who owed their celebrity chiefly to
+relations of this kind, such as Giulia Gonzaga, Veronica da Coreggio,
+and, above all, Vittoria Colonna. The land of profligates and scoffers
+respected these women and this sort of love--and what more can be said
+in their favour? We cannot tell how far vanity had to do with the
+matter, how far Vittoria was flattered to hear around her the sublimated
+utterances of hopeless love from the most famous men in Italy. If the
+thing was here and there a fashion, it was still no trifling praise for
+Vittoria that she, at least, never went out of fashion, and in her
+latest years produced the most profound impressions. It was long before
+other countries had anything similar to show.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the imagination then, which governed this people more than any other,
+lies one general reason why the course of every passion was violent, and
+why the means used for the gratification of passion were often criminal.
+There is a violence which cannot control itself because it is born of
+weakness; but in Italy what we find is the corruption of powerful
+natures. Sometimes this corruption assumes a colossal shape, and crime
+seems to acquire almost a personal existence of its own.
+
+The restraints of which men were conscious were but few. Each
+individual, even among the lowest of the people, felt himself inwardly
+emancipated from the control of the State and its police, whose title to
+respect was illegitimate, and itself founded on violence; and no man
+believed any longer in the justice of the law. When a murder was
+committed, the sympathies of the people, before the circumstances of the
+case were known, ranged themselves instinctively on the side of the
+murderer.[1005] A proud, manly bearing before and at the execution
+excited such admiration that the narrator often forgets to tell us for
+what offence the criminal was put to death.[1006] But when we add to
+this inward contempt of law and to the countless grudges and enmities
+which called for satisfaction, the impunity which crime enjoyed during
+times of political disturbance, we can only wonder that the state and
+society were not utterly dissolved. Crises of this kind occurred at
+Naples during the transition from the Aragonese to the French and
+Spanish rule, and at Milan, on the repeated expulsions and returns of
+the Sforzas; at such times those men who have never in their hearts
+recognised the bonds of law and society, come forward and give free play
+to their instincts of murder and rapine. Let us take, by way of example,
+a picture drawn from a humbler sphere.
+
+When the Duchy of Milan was suffering from the disorders which followed
+the death of Giangaleazzo Sforza, about the year 1480 (pp. 40, 126), all
+safety came to an end in the provincial cities. This was the case in
+Parma,[1007] where the Milanese Governor, terrified by threats of
+murder, and after vainly offering rewards for the discovery of the
+offenders, consented to throw open the gaols and let loose the most
+abandoned criminals. Burglary, the demolition of houses, shameless
+offences against decency, public assassination and murders, especially
+of Jews, were events of everyday occurrence. At first the authors of
+these deeds prowled about singly, and masked; soon large gangs of armed
+men went to work every night without disguise. Threatening letters,
+satires, and scandalous jests circulated freely; and a sonnet in
+ridicule of the Government seems to have roused its indignation far more
+than the frightful condition of the city. In many churches the sacred
+vessels with the host were stolen, and this fact is characteristic of
+the temper which prompted these outrages. It is impossible to say what
+would happen now in any country of the world, if the government and
+police ceased to act, and yet hindered by their presence the
+establishment of a provisional authority; but what then occurred in
+Italy wears a character of its own, through the great share which
+personal hatred and revenge had in it. The impression, indeed, which
+Italy at this period makes on us is, that even in quiet times great
+crimes were commoner than in other countries. We may, it is true, be
+misled by the fact that we have far fuller details on such matters here
+than elsewhere, and that the same force of imagination, which gives a
+special character to crimes actually committed, causes much to be
+invented which never really happened. The amount of violence was perhaps
+as great elsewhere. It is hard to say for certain, whether in the year
+1500 men were any safer, whether human life was after all better
+protected, in powerful, wealthy Germany, with its robber knights,
+extortionate beggars, and daring highwaymen. But one thing is certain,
+that premeditated crimes, committed professionally and for hire by third
+parties, occurred in Italy with great and appalling frequency.
+
+So far as regards brigandage, Italy, especially in the more fortunate
+provinces, such as Tuscany, was certainly not more, and probably less,
+troubled than the countries of the North. But the figures which do meet
+us are characteristic of the country. It would be hard, for instance, to
+find elsewhere the case of a priest, gradually driven by passion from
+one excess to another, till at last he came to head a band of robbers.
+That age offers us this example among others.[1008] On August 12, 1495,
+the priest Don Niccol� de' Pelegati of Figarolo was shut up in an iron
+cage outside the tower of San Giuliano at Ferrara. He had twice
+celebrated his first mass; the first time he had the same day committed
+murder, but afterwards received absolution at Rome; he then killed four
+people and married two wives, with whom he travelled about. He
+afterwards took part in many assassinations, violated women, carried
+others away by force, plundered far and wide, and infested the territory
+of Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform, extorting food and
+shelter by every sort of violence. When we think of what all this
+implies, the mass of guilt on the head of this one man is something
+tremendous. The clergy and monks had many privileges and little
+supervision, and among them were doubtless plenty of murderers and other
+malefactors--but hardly a second Pelegati. It is another matter, though
+by no means creditable, when ruined characters sheltered themselves in
+the cowl in order to escape the arm of the law, like the corsair whom
+Massuccio knew in a convent at Naples.[1009] What the real truth was
+with regard to Pope John XXIII. in this respect, is not known with
+certainty.[1010]
+
+The age of the famous brigand chief did not begin till later, in the
+seventeenth century, when the political strife of Guelph and Ghibelline,
+of Frenchman and Spaniard, no longer agitated the country. The robber
+then took the place of the partisan.
+
+In certain districts of Italy, where civilization had made little
+progress, the country people were disposed to murder any stranger who
+fell into their hands. This was especially the case in the more remote
+parts of the Kingdom of Naples, where the barbarism dated probably from
+the days of the Roman 'latifundia,' and when the stranger and the enemy
+('hospes' and 'hostis') were in all good faith held to be one and the
+same. These people were far from being irreligious. A herdsman once
+appeared in great trouble at the confessional, avowing that, while
+making cheese during Lent, a few drops of milk had found their way into
+his mouth. The confessor, skilled in the customs of the country,
+discovered in the course of his examination that the penitent and his
+friends were in the practice of robbing and murdering travellers, but
+that, through the force of habit, this usage gave rise to no twinges of
+conscience within them.[1011] We have already mentioned (p. 352, note 3)
+to what a degree of barbarism the peasants elsewhere could sink in times
+of political confusion.
+
+A worse symptom than brigandage of the morality of that time was the
+frequency of paid assassination. In that respect Naples was admitted to
+stand at the head of all the cities of Italy. 'Nothing,' says
+Pontano,[1012] 'is cheaper here than human life.' But other districts
+could also show a terrible list of these crimes. It is hard, of course,
+to classify them according to the motives by which they were prompted,
+since political expediency, personal hatred, party hostility, fear, and
+revenge, all play into one another. It is no small honour to the
+Florentines, the most highly-developed people of Italy, that offences of
+this kind occurred more rarely among them than anywhere else,[1013]
+perhaps because there was a justice at hand for legitimate grievances
+which was recognised by all, or because the higher culture of the
+individual gave him different views as to the right of men to interfere
+with the decrees of fate. In Florence, if anywhere, men were able to
+feel the incalculable consequences of a deed of blood, and to
+understand how insecure the author of a so-called profitable crime is of
+any true and lasting gain. After the fall of Florentine liberty,
+assassination, especially by hired agents, seems to have rapidly
+increased, and continued till the government of Cosimo I. had attained
+such strength that the police[1014] was at last able to repress it.
+
+Elsewhere in Italy paid crimes were probably more or less frequent in
+proportion to the number of powerful and solvent buyers. Impossible as
+it is to make any statistical estimate of their amount, yet if only a
+fraction of the deaths which public report attributed to violence were
+really murders, the crime must have been terribly frequent. The worst
+example of all was set by princes and governments, who without the
+faintest scruple reckoned murder as one of the instruments of their
+power. And this, without being in the same category with C�sar Borgia.
+The Sforzas, the Aragonese monarchs, the Republic of Venice,[1015] and
+later on, the agents of Charles V. resorted to it whenever it suited
+their purpose. The imagination of the people at last became so
+accustomed to facts of this kind, that the death of any powerful man was
+seldom or never attributed to natural causes.[1016] There were certainly
+absurd notions current with regard to the effect of various poisons.
+There may be some truth in the story of that terrible white powder used
+by the Borgias, which did its work at the end of a definite period (p.
+116), and it is possible that it was really a 'velenum atterminatum'
+which the Prince of Salerno handed to the Cardinal of Aragon, with the
+words: 'In a few days you will die, because your father, King Ferrante,
+wished to trample upon us all.'[1017] But the poisoned letter which
+Caterina Riario sent to Pope Alexander VI.[1018] would hardly have
+caused his death even if he had read it; and when Alfonso the Great was
+warned by his physicians not to read in the 'Livy' which Cosimo de'
+Medici had presented to him, he told them with justice not to talk like
+fools.[1019] Nor can that poison, with which the secretary of Piccinino
+wished to anoint the sedan-chair of Pius II.,[1020] have affected any
+other organ than the imagination. The proportion which mineral and
+vegetable poisons bore to one another cannot be ascertained precisely.
+The poison with which the painter Rosso Fiorentino destroyed himself
+(1541) was evidently a powerful acid,[1021] which it would have been
+impossible to administer to another person without his knowledge. The
+secret use of weapons, especially of the dagger, in the service of
+powerful individuals, was habitual in Milan, Naples, and other cities.
+Indeed, among the crowds of armed retainers who were necessary for the
+personal safety of the great, and who lived in idleness, it was natural
+that outbreaks of this mania for blood should from time to time occur.
+Many a deed of horror would never have been committed, had not the
+master known that he needed but to give a sign to one or other of his
+followers.
+
+Among the means used for the secret destruction of others--so far, that
+is, as the intention goes--we find magic,[1022] practised, however,
+sparingly. Where 'maleficii,' 'malie,' and so forth, are mentioned, they
+appear rather as a means of heaping up additional terror on the head of
+some hated enemy. At the courts of France and England in the fourteenth
+and fifteenth centuries, magic, practised with a view to the death of an
+opponent, plays a far more important part in Italy.
+
+In this country, finally, where individuality of every sort attained its
+highest development, we find instances of that ideal and absolute
+wickedness which delights in crimes for their own sake, and not as means
+to an end, or at any rate as means to ends for which our psychology has
+no measure.
+
+Among these appalling figures we may first notice certain of the
+'Condottieri,'[1023] such as Braccio di Montone, Tiberto Brandolino, and
+that Werner von Urslingen whose silver hauberk bore the inscription:
+'The enemy of God, of pity and of mercy.' This class of men offers us
+some of the earliest instances of criminals deliberately repudiating
+every moral restraint. Yet we shall be more reserved in our judgment of
+them when we remember that the worst part of their guilt--in the
+estimate of those who record it--lay in their defiance of spiritual
+threats and penalties, and that to this fact is due that air of horror
+with which they are represented as surrounded. In the case of Braccio,
+the hatred of the Church went so far that he was infuriated at the sight
+of monks at their psalms, and had thrown them down from the top of a
+tower;[1024] but at the same time 'he was loyal to his soldiers and a
+great general.' As a rule, the crimes of the 'Condottieri' were
+committed for the sake of some definite advantage, and must be
+attributed to a position in which men could not fail to be demoralised.
+Even their apparently gratuitous cruelty had commonly a purpose, if it
+were only to strike terror. The barbarities of the House of Aragon, as
+we have seen, were mainly due to fear and to the desire for vengeance.
+The thirst for blood on its own account, the devilish delight in
+destruction, is most clearly exemplified in the case of the Spaniard
+C�sar Borgia, whose cruelties were certainly out of all proportion to
+the end which he had in view (p. 114 sqq.). In Sigismondo Malatesta,
+tyrant of Rimini (pp. 32, 228), the same disinterested love of evil may
+also be detected. It is not only the Court of Rome,[1025] but the
+verdict of history, which convicts him of murder, rape, adultery,
+incest, sacrilege, perjury and treason, committed not once but often.
+The most shocking crime of all--the unnatural attempt on his own son
+Roberto, who frustrated it with his drawn dagger,[1026]--may have been
+the result, not merely of moral corruption, but perhaps of some magical
+or astrological superstition. The same conjecture has been made to
+account for the rape of the Bishop of Fano[1027] by Pierluigi Farnese of
+Parma, son of Paul III.
+
+If we now attempt to sum up the principal features in the Italian
+character of that time, as we know it from a study of the life of the
+upper classes, we shall obtain something like the following result. The
+fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of
+its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. The individual first
+inwardly casts off the authority of a state which, as a fact, is in
+most cases tyrannical and illegitimate, and what he thinks and does is,
+rightly or wrongly, now called treason. The sight of victorious egoism
+in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm. And, while
+thinking to restore his inward equilibrium, he falls, through the
+vengeance which he executes, into the hands of the powers of darkness.
+His love, too, turns mostly for satisfaction to another individuality
+equally developed, namely, to his neighbour's wife. In face of all
+objective facts, of laws and restraints of whatever kind, he retains the
+feeling of his own sovereignty, and in each single instance forms his
+decision independently, according as honour or interest, passion or
+calculation, revenge or renunciation, gain the upper hand in his own
+mind.
+
+If therefore egoism in its wider as well as narrower sense is the root
+and fountain of all evil, the more highly developed Italian was for this
+reason more inclined to wickedness than the member of other nations of
+that time.
+
+But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault
+of his own, but rather through an historical necessity. It did not come
+upon him alone, but also, and chiefly by means of Italian culture, upon
+the other nations of Europe, and has constituted since then the higher
+atmosphere which they breathe. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but
+necessary; within it has grown up a modern standard of good and evil--a
+sense of moral responsibility--which is essentially different from that
+which was familiar to the Middle Ages.
+
+But the Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging
+of a new age. Through his gifts and his passions, he has become the most
+characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of
+his time. By the side of profound corruption appeared human
+personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which
+shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor
+medi�valism either could or would bestow upon it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.
+
+
+The morality of a people stands in the closest connection with its
+consciousness of God, that is to say, with its firmer or weaker faith in
+the divine government of the world, whether this faith looks on
+the world as destined to happiness or to misery and speedy
+destruction.[1028] The infidelity then prevalent in Italy is notorious,
+and whoever takes the trouble to look about for proofs, will find them
+by the hundred. Our present task, here as elsewhere, is to separate and
+discriminate; refraining from an absolute and final verdict.
+
+The belief in God at earlier times had its source and chief support in
+Christianity and the outward symbol of Christianity, the Church. When
+the Church became corrupt, men ought to have drawn a distinction, and
+kept their religion in spite of all. But this is more easily said than
+done. It is not every people which is calm enough, or dull enough, to
+tolerate a lasting contradiction between a principle and its outward
+expression. But history does not record a heavier responsibility than
+that which rests upon the decaying Church. She set up as absolute truth
+and by the most violent means, a doctrine which she had distorted to
+serve her own aggrandisement. Safe in the sense of her inviolability,
+she abandoned herself to the most scandalous profligacy, and, in order
+to maintain herself in this state, she levelled mortal blows against the
+conscience and the intellect of nations, and drove multitudes of the
+noblest spirits, whom she had inwardly estranged, into the arms of
+unbelief and despair.
+
+Here we are met by the question: Why did not Italy, intellectually so
+great, react more energetically against the hierarchy; why did she not
+accomplish a reformation like that which occurred in Germany, and
+accomplish it at an earlier date?
+
+A plausible answer has been given to this question. The Italian mind, we
+are told, never went further than the denial of the hierarchy, while the
+origin and the vigour of the German Reformation was due to its positive
+religious doctrines, most of all to the doctrines of justification by
+faith and of the inefficacy of good works.
+
+It is certain that these doctrines only worked upon Italy through
+Germany, and this not till the power of Spain was sufficiently great to
+root them out without difficulty, partly by itself and partly by means
+of the Papacy, and its instruments.[1029] Nevertheless, in the earlier
+religious movements of Italy, from the Mystics of the thirteenth century
+down to Savonarola, there was a large amount of positive religious
+doctrine which, like the very definite Christianity of the Huguenots,
+failed to achieve success only because circumstances were against it.
+Mighty events like the Reformation elude, as respects their details,
+their outbreak and their development, the deductions of the
+philosophers, however clearly the necessity of them as a whole may be
+demonstrated. The movements of the human spirit, its sudden flashes, its
+expansions and its pauses, must for ever remain a mystery to our eyes,
+since we can but know this or that of the forces at work in it, never
+all of them together.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The feeling of the upper and middle classes in Italy with regard to the
+Church at the time when the Renaissance culminated, was compounded of
+deep and contemptuous aversion, of acquiescence in the outward
+ecclesiastical customs which entered into daily life, and of a sense of
+dependence on sacraments and ceremonies. The great personal influence of
+religious preachers may be added as a fact characteristic of Italy.
+
+That hostility to the hierarchy, which displays itself more especially
+from the time of Dante onwards in Italian literature and history, has
+been fully treated by several writers. We have already (p. 223) said
+something of the attitude of public opinion with regard to the Papacy.
+Those who wish for the strongest evidence which the best authorities
+offer us, can find it in the famous passages of Macchiavelli's
+'Discorsi,' and in the unmutilated edition of Guicciardini. Outside the
+Roman Curia, some respect seems to have been felt for the best men among
+the bishops,[1030] and for many of the parochial clergy. On the other
+hand, the mere holders of benefices, the canons, and the monks were held
+in almost universal suspicion, and were often the objects of the most
+scandalous aspersions, extending to the whole of their order.
+
+It has been said that the monks were made the scapegoats for the whole
+clergy, for the reason that none but they could be ridiculed without
+danger.[1031] But this is certainly incorrect. They are introduced so
+frequently in the novels and comedies, because these forms of literature
+need fixed and well-known types where the imagination of the reader can
+easily fill up an outline. Besides which, the novelists do not as a fact
+spare the secular clergy.[1032] In the third place, we have abundant
+proof in the rest of Italian literature that men could speak boldly
+enough about the Papacy and the Court of Rome. In works of imagination
+we cannot expect to find criticism of this kind. Fourthly, the monks,
+when attacked, were sometimes able to take a terrible vengeance.
+
+It is nevertheless true that the monks were the most unpopular class of
+all, and that they were reckoned a living proof of the worthlessness of
+conventual life, of the whole ecclesiastical organisation, of the system
+of dogma, and of religion altogether, according as men pleased, rightly
+or wrongly, to draw their conclusions. We may also assume that Italy
+retained a clearer recollection of the origin of the two great mendicant
+orders than other countries, and had not forgotten that they were the
+chief agents in the reaction[1033] against what is called the heresy of
+the thirteenth century, that is to say, against an early and vigorous
+movement of the modern Italian spirit. And that spiritual police which
+was permanently entrusted to the Dominicans certainly never excited any
+other feeling than secret hatred and contempt.
+
+After reading the 'Decameron' and the novels of Franco Sacchetti, we
+might imagine that the vocabulary of abuse directed at the monks and
+nuns was exhausted. But towards the time of the Reformation this abuse
+became still fiercer. To say nothing of Aretino, who in the
+'Ragionamenti' uses conventual life merely as a pretext for giving free
+play to his own poisonous nature, we may quote one author as typical of
+the rest--Massuccio, in the first ten of his fifty novels. They are
+written in a tone of the deepest indignation, and with this purpose to
+make the indignation general; and are dedicated to men in the highest
+position, such as King Ferrante and Prince Alfonso of Naples. The
+stories are many of them old, and some of them familiar to readers of
+Boccaccio. But others reflect, with a frightful realism, the actual
+state of things at Naples. The way in which the priests befool and
+plunder the people by means of spurious miracles, added to their own
+scandalous lives, is enough to drive any thoughtful observer to despair.
+We read of the Minorite friars who travelled to collect alms: 'They
+cheat, steal, and fornicate, and when they are at the end of their
+resources, they set up as saints and work miracles, one displaying the
+cloak of St. Vincent, another the handwriting[1034] of St. Bernadino, a
+third the bridle of Capistrano's donkey.' Others 'bring with them
+confederates who pretend to be blind or afflicted with some mortal
+disease, and after touching the hem of the monk's cowl, or the reliques
+which he carried, are healed before the eyes of the multitude. All then
+shout "Misericordia," the bells are rung, and the miracle is recorded in
+a solemn protocol.' Or else a monk in the pulpit is denounced as a liar
+by another who stands below among the audience; the accuser is
+immediately possessed by the devil, and then healed by the preacher. The
+whole thing was a pre-arranged comedy, in which, however, the principal
+with his assistant made so much money that he was able to buy a
+bishopric from a Cardinal, on which the two confederates lived
+comfortably to the end of their days. Massuccio makes no great
+distinction between Franciscans and Dominicans, finding the one worth as
+much as the other. 'And yet the foolish people lets itself be drawn into
+their hatreds and divisions, and quarrels about them in public
+places,[1035] and calls itself "franceschino" or "domenichino."' The
+nuns are the exclusive property of the monks. Those of the former who
+have anything to do with the laity, are prosecuted and put in prison,
+while others are wedded in due form to the monks, with the
+accompaniments of mass, a marriage-contract, and a liberal indulgence in
+food and wine. 'I myself,' says the author, 'have been there not once,
+but several times, and seen it all with my own eyes. The nuns afterwards
+bring forth pretty little monks or else use means to hinder that result.
+And if any one charges me with falsehood, let him search the nunneries
+well, and he will find there as many little bones as in Bethlehem at
+Herod's time.'[1036] These things, and the like, are among the secrets
+of monastic life. The monks are by no means too strict with one another
+in the confessional, and impose a Paternoster in cases where they would
+refuse all absolution to a layman as if he were a heretic. 'Therefore
+may the earth open and swallow up the wretches alive, with those who
+protect them!' In another place Massuccio, speaking of the fact that the
+influence of the monks depends chiefly on the dread of another world,
+utters the following remarkable wish: 'The best punishment for them
+would be for God to abolish Purgatory; they would then receive no more
+alms, and would be forced to go back to their spades.'
+
+If men were free to write, in the time of Ferrante, and to him, in this
+strain, the reason is perhaps to be found in the fact that the king
+himself had been incensed by a false miracle which had been palmed off
+on him.[1037] An attempt had been made to urge him to a persecution of
+the Jews, like that carried out in Spain and imitated by the
+Popes,[1038] by producing a tablet with an inscription bearing the name
+of St. Cataldus, said to have been buried at Tarentum, and afterwards
+dug up again. When he discovered the fraud, the monks defied him. He had
+also managed to detect and expose a pretended instance of fasting, as
+his father Alfonso had done before him.[1039] The Court, certainly, was
+no accomplice in maintaining these blind superstitions.[1040]
+
+We have been quoting from an author who wrote in earnest, and who by no
+means stands alone in his judgment. All the Italian literature of that
+time is full of ridicule and invective aimed at the begging
+friars.[1041] It can hardly have been doubted that the Renaissance would
+soon have destroyed these two Orders, had it not been for the German
+Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation which that provoked. Their
+saints and popular preachers could hardly have saved them. It would only
+have been necessary to come to an understanding at a favourable moment
+with a Pope like Leo X., who despised the Mendicant Orders. If the
+spirit of the age found them ridiculous or repulsive, they could no
+longer be anything but an embarrassment to the Church. And who can say
+what fate was in store for the Papacy itself, if the Reformation had not
+saved it?
+
+The influence which the Father Inquisitor of a Dominican monastery was
+able habitually to exercise in the city where it was situated, was in
+the latter part of the fifteenth century just considerable enough to
+hamper and irritate cultivated people, but not strong enough to extort
+any lasting fear or obedience.[1042] It was no longer possible to punish
+men for their thoughts, as it once was (p. 290 sqq.), and those whose
+tongues wagged most impudently against the clergy could easily keep
+clear of heretical doctrine. Except when some powerful party had an end
+to serve, as in the case of Savonarola, or when there was a question of
+the use of magical arts, as was often the case in the cities of North
+Italy, we seldom read at this time of men being burnt at the stake. The
+Inquisitors were in some instances satisfied with the most superficial
+retractation, in others it even happened that the victim was saved out
+of their hands on the way to the place of execution. In Bologna (1452)
+the priest Niccol� da Verona had been publicly degraded on a wooden
+scaffold in front of San Domenico as a wizard and profaner of the
+sacraments, and was about to be led away to the stake, when he was set
+free by a gang of armed men, sent by Achille Malvezzi, a noted friend of
+heretics and violator of nuns. The legate, Cardinal Bessarion, was only
+able to catch and hang one of the party; Malvezzi lived on in
+peace.[1043]
+
+It deserves to be noticed that the higher monastic orders--the
+Benedictines, with their many branches--were, notwithstanding their
+great wealth and easy lives, far less disliked than the mendicant
+friars. For ten novels which treat of 'frati,' hardly one can be found
+in which a 'monaco' is the subject and the victim. It was no small
+advantage to this order that it was founded earlier, and not as an
+instrument of police, and that it did not interfere with private life.
+It contained men of learning, wit, and piety, but the average has been
+described by a member of it, Firenzuola,[1044] who says: 'These well-fed
+gentlemen with the capacious cowls do not pass their time in barefooted
+journeys and in sermons, but sit in elegant slippers with their hands
+crossed over their paunches, in charming cells wainscotted with
+cyprus-wood. And when they are obliged to quit the house, they ride
+comfortably, as if for their amusement, on mules and sleek, quiet
+horses. They do not overstrain their minds with the study of many books,
+for fear lest knowledge might put the pride of Lucifer in the place of
+monkish simplicity.'
+
+Those who are familiar with the literature of the time, will see that we
+have only brought forward what is absolutely necessary for the
+understanding of the subject.[1045] That the reputation attaching to the
+monks and the secular clergy must have shattered the faith of
+multitudes in all that is sacred is, of course obvious.
+
+And some of the judgments which we read are terrible; we will quote one
+of them in conclusion, which has been published only lately and is but
+little known. The historian Guicciardini, who was for many years in the
+service of the Medicean Popes says (1529) in his 'Aphorisms'[1046]: 'No
+man is more disgusted than I am with the ambition, the avarice, and the
+profligacy of the priests, not only because each of these vices is
+hateful in itself, but because each and all of them are most unbecoming
+in those who declare themselves to be men in special relations with God,
+and also because they are vices so opposed to one another, that they can
+only co-exist in very singular natures. Nevertheless, my position at the
+Court of several Popes forced me to desire their greatness for the sake
+of my own interest. But, had it been for this, I should have loved
+Martin Luther as myself, not in order to free myself from the laws which
+Christianity, as generally understood and explained, lays upon us, but
+in order to see this swarm of scoundrels ('questa caterva di
+scellerati') put back into their proper place, so that they may be
+forced to live either without vices or without power.'[1047]
+
+The same Guicciardini is of opinion that we are in the dark as to all
+that is supernatural, that philosophers and theologians have nothing but
+nonsense to tell us about it, that miracles occur in every religion and
+prove the truth of none in particular, and that all of them may be
+explained as unknown phenomena of nature. The faith which moves
+mountains, then common among the followers of Savonarola, is mentioned
+by Guicciardini as a curious fact, but without any bitter remark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Notwithstanding this hostile public opinion, the clergy and the monks
+had the great advantage that the people was used to them, and that their
+existence was interwoven with the everyday existence of all. This is the
+advantage which every old and powerful institution possesses. Everybody
+had some cowled or frocked relative, some prospect of assistance or
+future gain from the treasure of the Church; and in the centre of Italy
+stood the Court of Rome, where men sometimes became rich in a moment.
+Yet it must never be forgotten that all this did not hinder people from
+writing and speaking freely. The authors of the most scandalous satires
+were themselves mostly monks or beneficed priests. Poggio, who wrote the
+'Facetiae,' was a clergyman; Francesco Berni, the satirist, held a
+canonry; Teofilo Folengo, the author of the 'Orlandino,' was a
+Benedictine, certainly by no means a faithful one; Matteo Bandello, who
+held up his own order to ridicule, was a Dominican, and nephew of a
+general of this order. Were they encouraged to write by the sense that
+they ran no risk? Or did they feel an inward need to clear themselves
+personally from the infamy which attached to their order? Or were they
+moved by that selfish pessimism which takes for its maxim, 'it will last
+our time'? Perhaps all of these motives were more or less at work. In
+the case of Folengo, the unmistakable influence of Lutheranism must be
+added.[1048]
+
+The sense of dependence on rites and sacraments, which we have already
+touched upon in speaking of the Papacy (p. 103), is not surprising among
+that part of the people which still believed in the Church. Among those
+who were more emancipated, it testifies to the strength of youthful
+impressions, and to the magical force of traditional symbols. The
+universal desire of dying men for priestly absolution shows that the
+last remnants of the dread of hell had not, even in the case of one like
+Vitellozzo, been altogether extinguished. It would hardly be possible to
+find a more instructive instance than this. The doctrine taught by the
+Church of the 'character indelibilis' of the priesthood, independently
+of the personality of the priest, had so far borne fruit that it was
+possible to loathe the individual and still desire his spiritual gifts.
+It is true, nevertheless, that there were defiant natures like Galeotto
+of Mirandola,[1049] who died unabsolved in 1499, after living for
+sixteen years under the ban of the Church. All this time the city lay
+under an interdict on his account, so that no mass was celebrated and
+no Christian burial took place.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A splendid contrast to all this is offered by the power exercised over
+the nation by its great Preachers of Repentance. Other countries of
+Europe were from time to time moved by the words of saintly monks, but
+only superficially, in comparison with the periodical upheaval of the
+Italian conscience. The only man, in fact, who produced a similar effect
+in Germany during the fifteenth century,[1050] was an Italian, born in
+the Abruzzi, named Giovanni Capistrano. Those natures which bear within
+them this religious vocation and this commanding earnestness, wore then
+in Northern countries an intuitive and mystical aspect. In the South
+they were practical and expansive, and shared in the national gift of
+language and oratorical skill. The North produced an 'Imitation of
+Christ,' which worked silently, at first only within the walls of the
+monastery, but worked for the ages; the South produced men who made on
+their fellows a mighty but passing impression.
+
+This impression consisted chiefly in the awakening of the conscience.
+The sermons were moral exhortations, free from abstract notions and full
+of practical application, rendered more impressive by the saintly and
+ascetic character of the preacher, and by the miracles which, even
+against his will, the inflamed imagination of the people attributed to
+him.[1051] The most powerful argument used was not the threat of Hell
+and Purgatory, but rather the living results of the 'maledizione,' the
+temporal ruin wrought on the individual by the curse which clings to
+wrong-doing. The grieving of Christ and the Saints has its consequences
+in this life. And only thus could men, sunk in passion and guilt, be
+brought to repentance and amendment--which was the chief object of these
+sermons.
+
+Among these preachers were Bernadino da Siena, and his two pupils,
+Alberto da Sarteano and Jacopo della Marca, Giovanni Capistrano, Roberto
+da Lecce (p. 413), and finally, Girolamo Savonarola. No prejudice of the
+day was stronger than that against the mendicant friar, and this they
+overcame. They were criticised and ridiculed by a scornful
+humanism;[1052] but when they raised their voices, no one gave heed to
+the humanists. The thing was no novelty, and the scoffing Florentines
+had already in the fourteenth century learned to caricature it whenever
+it appeared in the pulpit.[1053] But no sooner did Savonarola come
+forward than he carried the people so triumphantly with him, that soon
+all their beloved art and culture melted away in the furnace which he
+lighted. Even the grossest profanation done to the cause by hypocritical
+monks, who got up an effect in the audience by means of confederates (p.
+460), could not bring the thing itself into discredit. Men kept on
+laughing at the ordinary monkish sermons, with their spurious miracles
+and manufactured reliques;[1054] but did not cease to honour the great
+and genuine prophets. These are a true Italian specialty of the
+fifteenth century.
+
+The Order--generally that of St. Francis, and more particularly the
+so-called Observantines--sent them out according as they were wanted.
+This was commonly the case when there was some important public or
+private feud in a city, or some alarming outbreak of violence,
+immorality, or disease. When once the reputation of a preacher was
+made, the cities were all anxious to hear him even without any special
+occasion. He went wherever his superiors sent him. A special form of
+this work was the preaching of a Crusade against the Turks;[1055] but
+here we have to speak more particularly of the exhortations to
+repentance.
+
+The order of these, when they were treated methodically, seems to have
+followed the customary list of the deadly sins. The more pressing,
+however, the occasion is, the more directly does the preacher make for
+his main point. He begins perhaps in one of the great churches of the
+Order, or in the cathedral. Soon the largest piazza is too small for the
+crowds which throng from every side to hear him, and he himself can
+hardly move without risking his life.[1056] The sermon is commonly
+followed by a great procession; but the first magistrates of the city,
+who take him in their midst, can hardly save him from the multitude of
+women who throng to kiss his hands and feet, and cut off fragments from
+his cowl.[1057]
+
+The most immediate consequences which follow from the preacher's
+denunciations of usury, luxury, and scandalous fashions, are the opening
+of the gaols--which meant no more than the discharge of the poorer
+creditors--and the burning of various instruments of luxury and
+amusement, whether innocent or not. Among these are dice, cards, games
+of all kinds, written incantations,[1058] masks, musical instruments,
+song-books, false hair, and so forth. All these would then be
+gracefully arranged on a scaffold ('talamo'), a figure of the devil
+fastened to the top, and then the whole set on fire (comp. p. 372).
+
+Then came the turn of the more hardened consciences. Men who had long
+never been near the confessional, now acknowledged their sins.
+Ill-gotten gains were restored, and insults which might have borne fruit
+in blood retracted. Orators like Bernadino of Siena[1059] entered
+diligently into all the details of the daily life of men, and the moral
+laws which are involved in it. Few theologians nowadays would feel
+tempted to give a morning sermon 'on contracts, restitutions, the public
+debt ("monte"), and the portioning of daughters,' like that which he
+once delivered in the Cathedral at Florence. Imprudent speakers easily
+fell into the mistake of attacking particular classes, professions, or
+offices, with such energy that the enraged hearers proceeded to violence
+against those whom the preacher had denounced.[1060] A sermon which
+Bernadino once preached in Rome (1424) had another consequence besides a
+bonfire of vanities on the Capitol: 'after this,'[1061] we read, 'the
+witch Finicella was burnt, because by her diabolical arts she had killed
+many children and bewitched many other persons; and all Rome went to see
+the sight.'
+
+But the most important aim of the preacher was, as has been already
+said, to reconcile enemies and persuade them to give up thoughts of
+vengeance. Probably this end was seldom attained till towards the close
+of a course of sermons, when the tide of penitence flooded the city,
+and when the air resounded[1062] with the cry of the whole people:
+'Misericordia!' Then followed those solemn embracings and treaties of
+peace, which even previous bloodshed on both sides could not hinder.
+Banished men were recalled to the city to take part in these sacred
+transactions. It appears that these 'Paci' were on the whole faithfully
+observed, even after the mood which prompted them was over; and then the
+memory of the monk was blessed from generation to generation. But there
+were sometimes terrible crises like those in the families Della Valle
+and Croce in Rome (1482), where even the great Roberto da Lecce raised
+his voice in vain.[1063] Shortly before Holy Week he had preached to
+immense crowds in the square before the Minerva. But on the night before
+Maunday Thursday a terrible combat took place in front of the Palazzo
+della Valle, near the Ghetto. In the morning Pope Sixtus gave orders for
+its destruction, and then performed the customary ceremonies of the day.
+On Good Friday Roberto preached again with a crucifix in his hand; but
+he and his hearers could do nothing but weep.
+
+Violent natures, which had fallen into contradiction with themselves,
+often resolved to enter a convent, under the impression made by these
+men. Among such were not only brigands and criminals of every sort, but
+soldiers without employment.[1064] This resolve was stimulated by their
+admiration of the holy man, and by the desire to copy at least his
+outward position.
+
+The concluding sermon is a general benediction, summed up in the words:
+'la pace sia con voi!' Throngs of hearers accompany the preacher to the
+next city, and there listen for a second time to the whole course of
+sermons.
+
+The enormous influence exercised by these preachers made it important,
+both for the clergy and for the government, at least not to have them as
+opponents; one means to this end was to permit only monks[1065] or
+priests who had received at all events the lesser consecration, to enter
+the pulpit, so that the Order or Corporation to which they belonged was,
+to some extent, responsible for them. But it was not easy to make the
+rule absolute, since the Church and pulpit had long been used as a means
+of publicity in many ways, judicial, educational, and others, and since
+even sermons were sometimes delivered by humanists and other laymen (p.
+234 sqq.). There existed, too, in Italy a dubious class of
+persons,[1066] who were neither monks nor priests, and who yet had
+renounced the world--that is to say, the numerous class of hermits who
+appeared from time to time in the pulpit on their own authority, and
+often carried the people with them. A case of this kind occurred at
+Milan in 1516, after the second French conquest, certainly at a time
+when public order was much disturbed. A Tuscan hermit Hieronymus of
+Siena, possibly an adherent of Savonarola, maintained his place for
+months together in the pulpit of the Cathedral, denounced the hierarchy
+with great violence, caused a new chandelier and a new altar to be set
+up in the church, worked miracles, and only abandoned the field after a
+long and desperate struggle.[1067] During the decades in which the fate
+of Italy was decided, the spirit of prophecy was unusually active, and
+nowhere where it displayed itself was it confined to any one particular
+class. We know with what a tone of true prophetic defiance the hermits
+came forward before the sack of Rome (p. 122). In default of any
+eloquence of their own, these men made use of messengers with symbols of
+one kind or another, like the ascetic near Siena (1429), who sent a
+'little hermit,' that is a pupil, into the terrified city with a skull
+upon a pole, to which was attached a paper with a threatening text from
+the Bible.[1068]
+
+Nor did the monks themselves scruple to attack princes, governments, the
+clergy, or even their own order. A direct exhortation to overthrow a
+despotic house, like that uttered by Jacopo Bussolaro at Pavia in the
+fourteenth century,[1069] hardly occurs again in the following period;
+but there is no want of courageous reproofs, addressed even to the Pope
+in his own chapel (p. 239, note 1), and of na�ve political advice given
+in the presence of rulers who by no means held themselves in need of
+it.[1070] In the Piazza del Castello at Milan, a blind preacher from the
+Incoronata--consequently an Augustinian--ventured in 1494 to exhort
+Ludovico Moro from the pulpit: 'My lord, beware of showing the French
+the way, else you will repent it.'[1071] There were further prophetic
+monks, who, without exactly preaching political sermons, drew such
+appalling pictures of the future that the hearers almost lost their
+senses. After the election of Leo X. in the year 1513, a whole
+association of these men, twelve Franciscan monks in all, journeyed
+through the various districts of Italy, of which one or other was
+assigned to each preacher. The one who appeared in Florence,[1072] Fra
+Francesco di Montepulciano, struck terror into the whole people. The
+alarm was not diminished by the exaggerated reports of his prophecies
+which reached those who were too far off to hear him. After one of his
+sermons he suddenly died 'of pain in the chest.' The people thronged in
+such numbers to kiss the feet of the corpse that it had to be secretly
+buried in the night. But the newly awakened spirit of prophecy, which
+seized upon even women and peasants, could not be controlled without
+great difficulty. 'In order to restore to the people their cheerful
+humour, the Medici--Giuliano, Leo's brother, and Lorenzo--gave on St.
+John's Day, 1514, those splendid festivals, tournaments, processions,
+and hunting-parties, which were attended by many distinguished persons
+from Rome, and among them, though disguised, by no less than six
+cardinals.'
+
+But the greatest of the prophets and apostles had been already burnt in
+Florence in the year 1498--Fra Giorolamo Savonarola of Ferrara. We must
+content ourselves with saying a few words respecting him.[1073]
+
+The instrument by means of which he transformed and ruled the city of
+Florence (1494-8) was his eloquence. Of this the meagre reports that
+are left to us, which were taken down mostly on the spot, give us
+evidently a very imperfect notion. It was not that he possessed any
+striking outward advantages, for voice, accent, and rhetorical skill
+constituted precisely his weakest side; and those who required the
+preacher to be a stylist, went to his rival Fra Mariano da Genazzano.
+The eloquence of Savonarola was the expression of a lofty and commanding
+personality, the like of which was not seen again till the time of
+Luther. He himself held his own influence to be the result of a divine
+illumination, and could therefore, without presumption, assign a very
+high place to the office of the preacher, who, in the great hierarchy of
+spirits, occupies the next place below the angels.
+
+This man, whose nature seemed made of fire, worked another and greater
+miracle than any of his oratorical triumphs. His own Dominican monastery
+of San Marco, and then all the Dominican monasteries of Tuscany, became
+like-minded with himself, and undertook voluntarily the work of inward
+reform. When we reflect what the monasteries then were, and what
+measureless difficulty attends the least change where monks are
+concerned, we are doubly astonished at so complete a revolution. While
+the reform was still in progress large numbers of Savonarola's followers
+entered the Order, and thereby greatly facilitated his plans. Sons of
+the first houses in Florence entered San Marco as novices.
+
+This reform of the Order in a particular province was the first step to
+a national Church, in which, had the reformer himself lived longer, it
+must infallibly have ended. Savonarola, indeed, desired the regeneration
+of the whole Church, and near the end of his career sent pressing
+exhortations to the great powers urging them to call together a Council.
+But in Tuscany his Order and party were the only organs of his
+spirit--the salt of the earth--while the neighbouring provinces remained
+in their old condition. Fancy and asceticism tended more and more to
+produce in him a state of mind to which Florence appeared as the scene
+of the kingdom of God upon earth.
+
+The prophecies, whose partial fulfilment conferred on Savonarola a
+supernatural credit, were the means by which the ever-active Italian
+imagination seized control of the soundest and most cautious natures. At
+first the Franciscans of the Osservanza, trusting in the reputation
+which had been bequeathed to them by San Bernadino of Siena, fancied
+that they could compete with the great Dominican. They put one of their
+own men into the Cathedral pulpit, and outbid the Jeremiads of
+Savonarola by still more terrible warnings, till Pietro de'Medici, who
+then still ruled over Florence, forced them both to be silent. Soon
+after, when Charles VIII. came into Italy and the Medici were expelled,
+as Savonarola had clearly foretold, he alone was believed in.
+
+It must be frankly confessed that he never judged his own premonitions
+and visions critically, as he did those of others. In the funeral
+oration on Pico della Mirandola, he deals somewhat harshly with his dead
+friend. Since Pico, notwithstanding an inner voice which came from God,
+would not enter the Order, he had himself prayed to God to chasten him
+for his disobedience. He certainly had not desired his death, and alms
+and prayers had obtained the favour that Pico's soul was safe in
+Purgatory. With regard to a comforting vision which Pico had upon his
+sick-bed, in which the Virgin appeared and promised him that he should
+not die, Savonarola confessed that he had long regarded it as a deceit
+of the Devil, till it was revealed to him that the Madonna meant the
+second and eternal death.[1074] If these things and the like are proofs
+of presumption, it must be admitted that this great soul at all events
+paid a bitter penalty for his fault. In his last days Savonarola seems
+to have recognised the vanity of his visions and prophecies. And yet
+enough inward peace was left him to enable him to meet death like a
+Christian. His partisans held to his doctrine and predictions for thirty
+years longer.
+
+He only undertook the reorganisation of the state for the reason that
+otherwise his enemies would have got the government into their own
+hands. It is unfair to judge him by the semi-democratic constitution (p.
+83, note 1) of the beginning of the year 1495. Nor is it either better
+or worse than other Florentine constitutions.[1075]
+
+He was at bottom the most unsuitable man who could be found for such a
+work. His ideal was a theocracy, in which all men were to bow in blessed
+humility before the Unseen, and all conflicts of passion were not even
+to be able to arise. His whole mind is written in that inscription on
+the Palazzo della Signoria, the substance of which was his maxim[1076]
+as early as 1495, and which was solemnly renewed by his partisans in
+1527: 'Jesus Christus Rex populi Florentini S. P. Q. decreto creatus.'
+He stood in no more relation to mundane affairs and their actual
+conditions than any other inhabitant of a monastery. Man, according to
+him, has only to attend to those things which make directly for his
+salvation.
+
+This temper comes out clearly in his opinions on ancient literature:
+'The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle, is that they
+brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics.
+Yet they and other philosophers are now in Hell. An old woman knows more
+about the Faith than Plato. It would be good for religion if many books
+that seem useful were destroyed. When there were not so many books and
+not so many arguments ("ragioni naturali") and disputes, religion grew
+more quickly than it has done since.' He wished to limit the classical
+instruction of the schools to Homer, Virgil, and Cicero, and to supply
+the rest from Jerome and Augustine. Not only Ovid and Catullus, but
+Terence and Tibullus, were to be banished. This may be no more than the
+expression of a nervous morality, but elsewhere in a special work he
+admits that science as a whole is harmful. He holds that only a few
+people should have to do with it, in order that the tradition of human
+knowledge may not perish, and particularly that there may be no want of
+intellectual athletes to confute the sophisms of the heretics. For all
+others, grammar, morals, and religious teaching ('litterae sacrae')
+suffice. Culture and education would thus return wholly into the charge
+of the monks, and as, in his opinion, the 'most learned and the most
+pious' are to rule over the states and empires, these rulers would also
+be monks. Whether he really foresaw this conclusion, we need not
+inquire.
+
+A more childish method of reasoning cannot be imagined. The simple
+reflection that the new-born antiquity and the boundless enlargement of
+human thought and knowledge which was due to it, might give splendid
+confirmation to a religion able to adapt itself thereto, seems never
+even to have occurred to the good man. He wanted to forbid what he could
+not deal with by any other means. In fact, he was anything but liberal,
+and was ready, for example, to send the astrologers to the same stake at
+which he afterwards himself died.[1077]
+
+How mighty must have been the soul which dwelt side by side with this
+narrow intellect! And what a flame must have glowed within him before he
+could constrain the Florentines, possessed as they were by the passion
+for culture, to surrender themselves to a man who could thus reason!
+
+How much of their heart and their worldliness they were ready to
+sacrifice for his sake is shown by those famous bonfires by the side of
+which all the 'talami' of Bernadino da Siena and others were certainly
+of small account.
+
+All this could not, however, be effected without the agency of a
+tyrannical police. He did not shrink from the most vexatious
+interferences with the much-prized freedom of Italian private life,
+using the espionage of servants on their masters as a means of carrying
+out his moral reforms. That transformation of public and private life
+which the iron Calvin was but just able to effect at Geneva with the aid
+of a permanent state of siege necessarily proved impossible at Florence,
+and the attempt only served to drive the enemies of Savonarola to a more
+implacable hostility. Among his most unpopular measures may be mentioned
+those organised parties of boys, who forced their way into the houses
+and laid violent hands on any objects which seemed suitable for the
+bonfire. As it happened that they were sometimes sent away with a
+beating, they were afterwards attended, in order to keep up the figment
+of a pious 'rising generation,' by a body-guard of grown-up persons.
+
+On the last day of the Carnival in the year 1497, and on the same day
+the year after, the great 'Auto da F�' took place on the Piazza della
+Signoria. In the centre of it rose a great pyramidal flight of stairs
+like the 'rogus' on which the Roman Emperors were commonly burned. On
+the lowest tier were arranged false beards, masks, and carnival
+disguises; above came volumes of the Latin and Italian poets, among
+others Boccaccio, the 'Morgante' of Pulci, and Petrarch, partly in the
+form of valuable printed parchments and illuminated manuscripts; then
+women's ornaments and toilette articles, scents, mirrors, veils, and
+false hair; higher up, lutes, harps, chess-boards, playing-cards; and
+finally, on the two uppermost tiers, paintings only, especially of
+female beauties, partly fancy-pictures, bearing the classical names of
+Lucretia, Cleopatra, or Faustina, partly portraits of the beautiful
+Bencina, Lena Morella, Bina, and Maria de'Lenzi; all the pictures of
+Bartolommeo della Porta, who brought them of his own accord; and, as it
+seems, some female heads--masterpieces of ancient sculptors. On the
+first occasion a Venetian merchant who happened to be present offered
+the Signoria 22,000 gold florins for the objects on the pyramid; but the
+only answer he received was that his portrait, too, was taken, and
+burned along with the rest. When the pile was lighted, the Signoria
+appeared on the balcony, and the air echoed with song, the sound of
+trumpets, and the pealing of bells. The people then adjourned to the
+Piazza di San Marco, where they danced round in three concentric
+circles. The innermost was composed of monks of the monastery,
+alternating with boys, dressed as angels; then came young laymen and
+ecclesiastics; and on the outside old men, citizens, and priests, the
+latter crowned with wreaths of olive.[1078]
+
+All the ridicule of his victorious enemies, who in truth had no lack of
+justification or of talent for ridicule, was unable to discredit the
+memory of Savonarola. The more tragic the fortunes of Italy became, the
+brighter grew the halo which in the recollection of the survivors
+surrounded the figure of the great monk and prophet. Though his
+predictions may not have been confirmed in detail, the great and
+general calamity which he foretold was fulfilled with appalling truth.
+
+Great, however, as the influence of all these preachers may have been,
+and brilliantly as Savonarola justified the claim of the monks to this
+office,[1079] nevertheless the order as a whole could not escape the
+contempt and condemnation of the people. Italy showed that she could
+give her enthusiasm only to individuals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If, apart from all that concerns the priests and the monks, we attempt
+to measure the strength of the old faith, it will be found great or
+small according to the light in which it is considered. We have spoken
+already of the need felt for the Sacraments as something indispensable
+(pp. 103, 464). Let us now glance for a moment at the position of faith
+and worship in daily life. Both were determined partly by the habits of
+the people and partly by the policy and example of the rulers.
+
+All that has to do with penitence and the attainment of salvation by
+means of good works was in much the same stage of development or
+corruption as in the North of Europe, both among the peasantry and among
+the poorer inhabitants of the cities. The instructed classes were here
+and there influenced by the same motives. Those sides of popular
+Catholicism which had their origin in the old pagan ways of addressing,
+rewarding, and reconciling the gods have fixed themselves ineradicably
+in the consciousness of the people. The eighth eclogue of Battista
+Mantovano,[1080] which has been already quoted elsewhere, contains the
+prayer of a peasant to the Madonna, in which she is called upon as the
+special patroness of all rustic and agricultural interests. And what
+conceptions they were which the people formed of their protectress in
+heaven! What was in the mind of the Florentine woman[1081] who gave 'ex
+voto' a keg of wax to the Annunziata, because her lover, a monk, had
+gradually emptied a barrel of wine without her absent husband finding it
+out! Then, too, as still in our own days, different departments of human
+life were presided over by their respective patrons. The attempt has
+often been made to explain a number of the commonest rites of the
+Catholic Church as remnants of pagan ceremonies, and no one doubts that
+many local and popular usages, which are associated with religious
+festivals, are forgotten fragments of the old pre-christian faiths of
+Europe. In Italy, on the contrary, we find instances in which the
+affiliation of the new faith on the old seems consciously recognised.
+So, for example, the custom of setting out food for the dead four days
+before the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, that is to say, on February
+18, the date of the ancient Feralia.[1082] Many other practices of this
+kind may then have prevailed and have since then been extirpated.
+Perhaps the paradox is only apparent if we say that the popular faith in
+Italy had a solid foundation just in proportion as it was pagan.
+
+The extent to which this form of belief prevailed in the upper classes
+can to a certain point be shown in detail. It had, as we have said in
+speaking of the influence of the clergy, the power of custom and early
+impressions on its side. The love for ecclesiastical pomp and display
+helped to confirm it, and now and then there came one of those epidemics
+of revivalism, which few even among the scoffers and the sceptics were
+able to withstand.
+
+But in questions of this kind it is perilous to grasp too hastily at
+absolute results. We might fancy, for example, that the feeling of
+educated men towards the reliques of the saints would be a key by which
+some chambers of their religious consciousness might be opened. And in
+fact, some difference of degree may be demonstrable, though by no means
+as clearly as might be wished. The Government of Venice in the fifteenth
+century seems to have fully shared in the reverence felt throughout the
+rest of Europe for the remains of the bodies of the saints (p. 72). Even
+strangers who lived in Venice found it well to adapt themselves to this
+superstition.[1083] If we can judge of scholarly Padua from the
+testimony of its topographer Michele Savonarola (p. 145), things must
+have been much the same there. With a mixture of pride and pious awe,
+Michele tells us how in times of great danger the saints were heard to
+sigh at night along the streets of the city, how the hair and nails on
+the corpse of a holy nun in Santa Chiara kept on continually growing,
+and how the same corpse, when any disaster was impending, used to make a
+noise and lift up the arms.[1084] When he sets to work to describe the
+chapel of St. Anthony in the Santo, the writer loses himself in
+ejaculations and fantastic dreams. In Milan the people at least showed a
+fanatical devotion to relics; and when once, in the year 1517, the monks
+of San Simpliciano were careless enough to expose six holy corpses
+during certain alterations of the high altar, which event was followed
+by heavy floods of rain, the people[1085] attributed the visitation to
+this sacrilege, and gave the monks a sound beating whenever they met
+them in the street. In other parts of Italy, and even in the case of the
+Popes themselves, the sincerity of this feeling is much more dubious,
+though here, too, a positive conclusion is hardly attainable. It is
+well known amid what general enthusiasm Pius II. solemnly deposited the
+head of the Apostle Andrew, which had been brought from Greece, and then
+from Santa Maura, in the Church of St. Peter (1462); but we gather from
+his own narrative that he only did it from a kind of shame, as so many
+princes were competing for the relic. It was not till afterwards that
+the idea struck him of making Rome the common refuge for all the remains
+of the saints which had been driven from their own churches.[1086] Under
+Sixtus IV. the population of the city was still more zealous in this
+cause than the Pope himself, and the magistracy (1483) complained
+bitterly that Sixtus had sent to Louis XI., the dying king of France,
+some specimens of the Lateran relics.[1087] A courageous voice was
+raised about this time at Bologna, advising the sale of the skull of St.
+Dominic to the king of Spain, and the application of the money to some
+useful public object.[1088] But those who had the least reverence of all
+for the relics were the Florentines. Between the decision to honour
+their saint S. Zanobi with a new sarcophagus and the final execution of
+the project by Ghiberti nineteen years elapsed (1409-28), and then it
+only happened by chance, because the master had executed a smaller order
+of the same kind with great skill.[1089]
+
+Perhaps through being tricked by a cunning Neapolitan abbess (1352), who
+sent them a spurious arm of the patroness of the Cathedral, Santa
+Reparata, made of wood and plaster, they began to get tired of
+relics.[1090] Or perhaps it would be truer to say that their �sthetic
+sense turned them away in disgust from dismembered corpses and mouldy
+clothes. Or perhaps their feeling was rather due to that sense for
+glory which thought Dante and Petrarch worthier of a splendid grave than
+all the twelve apostles put together. It is probable that throughout
+Italy, apart from Venice and from Rome, the condition of which latter
+city was exceptional, the worship of relics had been long giving way to
+the adoration of the Madonna,[1091] at all events to a greater extent
+than elsewhere in Europe; and in this fact lies indirect evidence of an
+early development of the �sthetic sense.
+
+It may be questioned whether in the North, where the vastest cathedrals
+are nearly all dedicated to Our Lady, and where an extensive branch of
+Latin and indigenous poetry sang the praises of the Mother of God, a
+greater devotion to her was possible. In Italy, however, the number of
+miraculous pictures of the Virgin was far greater, and the part they
+played in the daily life of the people much more important. Every town
+of any size contained a quantity of them, from the ancient, or
+ostensibly ancient, paintings by St. Luke, down to the works of
+contemporaries, who not seldom lived to see the miracles wrought by
+their own handiwork. The work of art was in these cases by no means as
+harmless as Battista Mantovano[1092] thinks; sometimes it suddenly
+acquired a magical virtue. The popular craving for the miraculous,
+especially strong in women, may have been fully satisfied by these
+pictures, and for this reason the relics been less regarded. It cannot
+be said with certainty how far the respect for genuine relics suffered
+from the ridicule which the novelists aimed at the spurious.[1093]
+
+The attitude of the educated classes towards Mariolatry is more clearly
+recognisable than towards the worship of images. One cannot but be
+struck with the fact that in Italian literature Dante's 'Paradise'[1094]
+is the last poem in honour of the Virgin, while among the people hymns
+in her praise have been constantly produced down to our own day. The
+names of Sannazaro and Sabellico[1095] and other writers of Latin poems
+prove little on the other side, since the object with which they wrote
+was chiefly literary. The poems written in Italian in the
+fifteenth[1096] and at the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, in
+which we meet with genuine religious feeling, such as the hymns of
+Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the sonnets of Vittoria Colonna and of
+Michelangelo, might have been just as well composed by Protestants.
+Besides the lyrical expression of faith in God, we chiefly notice in
+them the sense of sin, the consciousness of deliverance through the
+death of Christ, the longing for a better world. The intercession of the
+Mother of God is only mentioned by the way.[1097] The same phenomenon is
+repeated in the classical literature of the French at the time of Louis
+XIV. Not till the time of the Counter-Reformation did Mariolatry
+reappear in the higher Italian poetry. Meanwhile the plastic arts had
+certainly done their utmost to glorify the Madonna. It may be added that
+the worship of the saints among the educated classes often took an
+essentially pagan form (p. 260).
+
+We might thus critically examine the various sides of Italian
+Catholicism at this period, and so establish with a certain degree of
+probability the attitude of the instructed classes toward popular faith.
+Yet an absolute and positive result cannot be reached. We meet with
+contrasts hard to explain. While architects, painters, and sculptors
+were working with restless activity in and for the churches, we hear at
+the beginning of the sixteenth century the bitterest complaints of the
+neglect of public worship and of these churches themselves.
+
+    Templa ruunt, passim sordent altaria, cultus
+    Paulatim divinus abit.[1098]
+
+It is well known how Luther was scandalised by the irreverence with
+which the priests in Rome said Mass. And at the same time the feasts of
+the Church were celebrated with a taste and magnificence of which
+Northern countries had no conception. It looks as if this most
+imaginative of nations was easily tempted to neglect every-day things,
+and as easily captivated by anything extraordinary.
+
+It is to this excess of imagination that we must attribute the epidemic
+religious revivals, upon which we shall again say a few words. They must
+be clearly distinguished from the excitement called forth by the great
+preachers. They were rather due to general public calamities, or to the
+dread of such.
+
+In the Middle Ages all Europe was from time to time flooded by these
+great tides, which carried away whole peoples in their waves. The
+Crusades and the Flagellant revival are instances. Italy took part in
+both of these movements. The first great companies of Flagellants
+appeared, immediately after the fall of Ezzelino and his house, in the
+neighbourhood of the same Perugia[1099] which has been already spoken
+of (p. 482, note 2), as the head-quarters of the revivalist preachers.
+Then followed the Flagellants of 1310 and 1334,[1100] and then the great
+pilgrimage without scourging in the year 1399, which Corio has
+recorded.[1101] It is not impossible that the Jubilees were founded
+partly in order to regulate and render harmless this sinister passion
+for vagabondage which seized on whole populations at times of religious
+excitement. The great sanctuaries of Italy, such as Loreto and others,
+had meantime become famous, and no doubt diverted a certain part of this
+enthusiasm.[1102]
+
+But terrible crises had still at a much later time the power to reawaken
+the glow of medi�val penitence, and the conscience-stricken people,
+often still further appalled by signs and wonders, sought to move the
+pity of Heaven by wailings and scourgings, by fasts, processions, and
+moral enactments. So it was at Bologna when the plague came in
+1457,[1103] so in 1496 at a time of internal discord at Siena,[1104] to
+mention two only out of countless instances. No more moving scene can be
+imagined than that we read of at Milan in 1529, when famine, plague, and
+war conspired with Spanish extortion to reduce the city to the lowest
+depths of despair.[1105] It chanced that the monk who had the ear of the
+people, Fra Tommaso Nieto, was himself a Spaniard. The Host was borne
+along in a novel fashion, amid barefooted crowds of old and young. It
+was placed on a decorated bier, which rested on the shoulders of four
+priests in linen garments--an imitation of the Ark of the Covenant[1106]
+which the children of Israel once carried round the walls of Jericho.
+Thus did the afflicted people of Milan remind their ancient God of His
+old covenant with man; and when the procession again entered the
+cathedral, and it seemed as if the vast building must fall in with the
+agonised cry of 'Misericordia!' many who stood there may have believed
+that the Almighty would indeed subvert the laws of nature and of
+history, and send down upon them a miraculous deliverance.
+
+There was one government in Italy, that of Duke Ercole I. of
+Ferrara,[1107] which assumed the direction of public feeling, and
+compelled the popular revivals to move in regular channels. At the time
+when Savonarola was powerful in Florence, and the movement which he
+began spread far and wide among the population of central Italy, the
+people of Ferrara voluntarily entered on a general fast (at the
+beginning of 1496). A Lazarist announced from the pulpit the approach of
+a season of war and famine such as the world had never seen; but the
+Madonna had assured some pious people[1108] that these evils might be
+avoided by fasting. Upon this, the court itself had no choice but to
+fast, but it took the conduct of the public devotions into its own
+hands. On Easter Day, the 3rd of April, a proclamation on morals and
+religion was published, forbidding blasphemy, prohibited games, sodomy,
+concubinage, the letting of houses to prostitutes or panders, and the
+opening of all shops on feast-days, excepting those of the bakers and
+greengrocers. The Jews and Moors, who had taken refuge from the
+Spaniards at Ferrara, were now compelled again to wear the yellow O upon
+the breast. Contraveners were threatened, not only with the punishments
+already provided by law, but also 'with such severer penalties as the
+Duke might think good to inflict,' of which one-fourth in case of a
+pecuniary fine was to be paid to the Duke, and the other three-fourths
+were to go to some public institution. After this, the Duke and the
+court went several days in succession to hear sermons in church, and on
+the 10th of April all the Jews in Ferrara were compelled to do the
+same.[1109] On the 3rd of May the director of police--that Zampante who
+has been already referred to (p. 50)--sent the crier to announce that
+whoever had given money to the police-officers in order not to be
+informed against as a blasphemer, might, if he came forward, have it
+back with a further indemnification. These wicked officers, he said, had
+extorted as much as two or three ducats from innocent persons by
+threatening to lodge an information against them. They had then mutually
+informed against one another, and so had all found their way into
+prison. But as the money had been paid precisely in order not to have to
+do with Zampante, it is probable that his proclamation induced few
+people to come forward. In the year 1500, after the fall of Ludovico
+Moro, when a similar outbreak of popular feeling took place,
+Ercole[1110] ordered a series of nine processions, in which there were
+4,000 children dressed in white, bearing the standard of Jesus. He
+himself rode on horseback, as he could not walk without difficulty. An
+edict was afterwards published of the same kind as that of 1496. It is
+well known how many churches and monasteries were built by this ruler.
+He even sent for a live saint, the Suor Colomba, shortly before he
+married his son Alfonso to Lucrezia Borgia (1502). A special
+messenger[1111] fetched the saint with fifteen other nuns from Viterbo,
+and the Duke himself conducted her on her arrival at Ferrara into a
+convent prepared for her reception. We shall probably do him no
+injustice if we attribute all these measures very largely to political
+calculation. To the conception of government formed by the House of
+Este, as indicated above (p. 46, sqq.), this employment of religion for
+the ends of statecraft belongs by a kind of logical necessity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+RELIGION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
+
+
+But in order to reach a definite conclusion with regard to the religious
+sense of the men of this period, we must adopt a different method. From
+their intellectual attitude in general, we can infer their relation both
+to the Divine idea and to the existing religion of their age.
+
+These modern men, the representatives of the culture of Italy, were born
+with the same religious instincts as other medi�val Europeans. But their
+powerful individuality made them in religion, as in other matters,
+altogether subjective, and the intense charm which the discovery of the
+inner and outer universe exercised upon them rendered them markedly
+worldly. In the rest of Europe religion remained, till a much later
+period, something given from without, and in practical life egoism and
+sensuality alternated with devotion and repentance. The latter had no
+spiritual competitors, as in Italy, or only to a far smaller extent.
+
+Further, the close and frequent relations of Italy with Byzantium and
+the Mohammedan peoples had produced a dispassionate tolerance which
+weakened the ethnographical conception of a privileged Christendom. And
+when classical antiquity with its men and institutions became an ideal
+of life, as well as the greatest of historical memories, ancient
+speculation and scepticism obtained in many cases a complete mastery
+over the minds of Italians.
+
+Since, again, the Italians were the first modern people of Europe who
+gave themselves boldly to speculations on freedom and necessity, and
+since they did so under violent and lawless political circumstances, in
+which evil seemed often to win a splendid and lasting victory, their
+belief in God began to waver, and their view of the government of the
+world became fatalistic. And when their passionate natures refused to
+rest in the sense of uncertainty, they made a shift to help themselves
+out with ancient, oriental, or medi�val superstition. They took to
+astrology and magic.
+
+Finally, these intellectual giants, these representatives of the
+Renaissance, show, in respect to religion, a quality which is common in
+youthful natures. Distinguishing keenly between good and evil, they yet
+are conscious of no sin. Every disturbance of their inward harmony they
+feel themselves able to make good out of the plastic resources of their
+own nature, and therefore they feel no repentance. The need of salvation
+thus becomes felt more and more dimly, while the ambitions and the
+intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether every
+thought of a world to come, or else cause it to assume a poetic instead
+of a dogmatic form.
+
+When we look on all this as pervaded and often perverted by the
+all-powerful Italian imagination, we obtain a picture of that time which
+is certainly more in accordance with truth than are vague declamations
+against modern paganism. And closer investigation often reveals to us
+that underneath this outward shell much genuine religion could still
+survive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fuller discussion of these points must be limited to a few of the
+most essential explanations.
+
+That religion should again become an affair of the individual and of his
+own personal feeling was inevitable when the Church became corrupt in
+doctrine and tyrannous in practice, and is a proof that the European
+mind was still alive. It is true that this showed itself in many
+different ways. While the mystical and ascetical sects of the North lost
+no time in creating new outward forms for their new modes of thought and
+feeling, each individual in Italy went his own way, and thousands
+wandered on the sea of life without any religious guidance whatever. All
+the more must we admire those who attained and held fast to a personal
+religion. They were not to blame for being unable to have any part or
+lot in the old Church, as she then was; nor would it be reasonable to
+expect that they should all of them go through that mighty spiritual
+labour which was appointed to the German reformers. The form and aim of
+this personal faith, as it showed itself in the better minds, will be
+set forth at the close of our work.
+
+The worldliness, through which the Renaissance seems to offer so
+striking a contrast to the Middle Ages, owed its first origin to the
+flood of new thoughts, purposes, and views, which transformed the
+medi�val conception of nature and man. This spirit is not in itself more
+hostile to religion than that 'culture' which now holds its place, but
+which can give us only a feeble notion of the universal ferment which
+the discovery of a new world of greatness then called forth. This
+worldliness was not frivolous, but earnest, and was ennobled by art and
+poetry. It is a lofty necessity of the modern spirit that this attitude,
+once gained, can never again be lost, that an irresistible impulse
+forces us to the investigation of men and things, and that we must hold
+this enquiry to be our proper end and work.[1112] How soon and by what
+paths this search will lead us back to God, and in what ways the
+religious temper of the individual will be affected by it, are questions
+which cannot be met by any general answer. The Middle Ages, which spared
+themselves the trouble of induction and free enquiry, can have no right
+to impose upon us their dogmatical verdict in a matter of such vast
+importance.
+
+To the study of man, among many other causes, was due the tolerance and
+indifference with which the Mohammedan religion was regarded. The
+knowledge and admiration of the remarkable civilisation which Islam,
+particularly before the Mongol inundation, had attained, was peculiar to
+Italy from the time of the Crusades. This sympathy was fostered by the
+half-Mohammedan government of some Italian princes, by dislike and even
+contempt for the existing Church, and by constant commercial intercourse
+with the harbours of the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean.[1113] It
+can be shown that in the thirteenth century the Italians recognised a
+Mohammedan ideal of nobleness, dignity, and pride, which they loved to
+connect with the person of a Sultan. A Mameluke Sultan is commonly
+meant; if any name is mentioned, it is the name of Saladin.[1114] Even
+the Osmanli Turks, whose destructive tendencies were no secret, gave the
+Italians, as we have shown above (p. 92, sqq.), only half a fright, and
+a peaceable accord with them was looked upon as no impossibility. Along
+with this tolerance, however, appeared the bitterest religious
+opposition to Mohammedanism; the clergy, says Filelfo, should come
+forward against it, since it prevailed over a great part of the world
+and was more dangerous to Christendom than Judaism was;[1115] along with
+the readiness to compromise with the Turks, appeared the passionate
+desire for a war against them which possessed Pius II. during the whole
+of his pontificate, and which many of the humanists expressed in
+high-flown declamations.
+
+The truest and most characteristic expression of this religious
+indifference is the famous story of the Three Rings, which Lessing has
+put into the mouth of his Nathan, after it had been already told
+centuries earlier, though with some reserve, in the 'Hundred Old Novels'
+(nov. 72 or 73), and more boldly in Boccaccio.[1116] In what language
+and in what corner of the Mediterranean it was first told, can never be
+known; most likely the original was much more plain-spoken than the two
+Italian adaptations. The religious postulate on which it rests, namely
+Deism, will be discussed later on in its wider significance for this
+period. The same idea is repeated, though in a clumsy caricature, in the
+famous proverb of the 'three who have deceived the world, that is,
+Moses, Christ, and Mohammed.'[1117] If the Emperor Frederick II., in
+whom this saying is said to have originated, really thought so, he
+probably expressed himself with more wit. Ideas of the same kind were
+also current in Islam.
+
+At the height of the Renaissance, towards the close of the fifteenth
+century, Luigi Pulci offers us an example of the same mode of thought in
+the 'Morgante Maggiore.' The imaginary world of which his story treats
+is divided, as in all heroic poems of romance, into a Christian and a
+Mohammedan camp. In accordance with the medi�val temper, the victory of
+the Christian and the final reconciliation among the combatants was
+attended by the baptism of the defeated Islamites, and the
+Improvisatori, who preceded Pulci in the treatment of these subjects,
+must have made free use of this stock incident. It was Pulci's object to
+parody his predecessors, particularly the worst among them, and this he
+does by those appeals to God, Christ, and the Madonna, with which each
+canto begins; and still more clearly by the sudden conversions and
+baptisms, the utter senselessness of which must have struck every reader
+or hearer. This ridicule leads him further to the confession of his
+faith in the relative goodness of all religions,[1118] which faith,
+notwithstanding his professions of orthodoxy,[1119] rests on an
+essentially theistic basis. In another point too he departs widely from
+medi�val conceptions. The alternatives in past centuries were:
+Christian, or else Pagan and Mohammedan; orthodox believer or heretic.
+Pulci draws a picture of the Giant Margutte[1120] who, disregarding each
+and every religion, jovially confesses to every form of vice and
+sensuality, and only reserves to himself the merit of having never
+broken faith. Perhaps the poet intended to make something of this--in
+his way--honest monster, possibly to have led him into virtuous paths by
+Morgante, but he soon got tired of his own creation, and in the next
+canto brought him to a comic end.[1121] Margutte has been brought
+forward as a proof of Pulci's frivolity; but he is needed to complete
+the picture of the poetry of the fifteenth century. It was natural that
+it should somewhere present in grotesque proportions the figure of an
+untamed egoism, insensible to all established rule, and yet with a
+remnant of honourable feeling left. In other poems sentiments are put
+into the mouths of giants, fiends, infidels, and Mohammedans which no
+Christian knight would venture to utter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Antiquity exercised an influence of another kind than that of Islam, and
+this not through its religion, which was but too much like the
+Catholicism of this period, but through its philosophy. Ancient
+literature, now worshipped as something incomparable, is full of the
+victory of philosophy over religious tradition. An endless number of
+systems and fragments of systems were suddenly presented to the Italian
+mind, not as curiosities or even as heresies, but almost with the
+authority of dogmas, which had now to be reconciled rather than
+discriminated. In nearly all these various opinions and doctrines a
+certain kind of belief in God was implied; but taken altogether they
+formed a marked contrast to the Christian faith in a Divine government
+of the world. And there was one central question, which medi�val
+theology had striven in vain to solve, and which now urgently demanded
+an answer from the wisdom of the ancients, namely, the relation of
+Providence to the freedom or necessity of the human will. To write the
+history of this question even superficially from the fourteenth century
+onwards, would require a whole volume. A few hints must here suffice.
+
+If we take Dante and his contemporaries as evidence, we shall find that
+ancient philosophy first came into contact with Italian life in the form
+which offered the most marked contrast to Christianity, that is to say,
+Epicureanism. The writings of Epicurus were no longer preserved, and
+even at the close of the classical age a more or less one-sided
+conception had been formed of his philosophy. Nevertheless, that phase
+of Epicureanism which can be studied in Lucretius, and especially in
+Cicero, is quite sufficient to make men familiar with a godless
+universe. To what extent his teaching was actually understood, and
+whether the name of the problematic Greek sage was not rather a
+catchword for the multitude, it is hard to say. It is probable that the
+Dominican Inquisition used it against men who could not be reached by a
+more definite accusation. In the case of sceptics born before the time
+was ripe, whom it was yet hard to convict of positive heretical
+utterances, a moderate degree of luxurious living may have sufficed to
+provoke the charge. The word is used in this conventional sense by
+Giovanni Villani,[1122] when he explains the Florentine fires of 1115
+and 1117 as a Divine judgment on heresies, among others, 'on the
+luxurious and gluttonous sect of Epicureans.' The same writer says of
+Manfred, 'His life was Epicurean, since he believed neither in God, nor
+in the Saints, but only in bodily pleasure.'
+
+Dante speaks still more clearly in the ninth and tenth cantos of the
+'Inferno.' That terrible fiery field covered with half-opened tombs,
+from which issued cries of hopeless agony, was peopled by the two great
+classes of those whom the Church had vanquished or expelled in the
+thirteenth century. The one were heretics who opposed the Church by
+deliberately spreading false doctrine; the other were Epicureans, and
+their sin against the Church lay in their general disposition, which was
+summed up in the belief that the soul dies with the body.[1123] The
+Church was well aware that this one doctrine, if it gained ground, must
+be more ruinous to her authority than all the teachings of the
+Manichaeans and Paterini, since it took away all reason for her
+interference in the affairs of men after death. That the means which she
+used in her struggles were precisely what had driven the most gifted
+natures to unbelief and despair was what she naturally would not herself
+admit.
+
+Dante's loathing of Epicurus, or of what he took to be his doctrine, was
+certainly sincere. The poet of the life to come could not but detest the
+denier of immortality; and a world neither made nor ruled by God, no
+less than the vulgar objects of earthly life which the system appeared
+to countenance, could not but be intensely repugnant to a nature like
+his. But if we look closer, we find that certain doctrines of the
+ancients made even on him an impression which forced the biblical
+doctrine of the Divine government into the background, unless, indeed,
+it was his own reflection, the influence of opinions then prevalent, or
+loathing for the injustice that seemed to rule this world, which made
+him give up the belief in a special Providence.[1124] His God leaves all
+the details of the world's government to a deputy, Fortune, whose sole
+work it is to change and change again all earthly things, and who can
+disregard the wailings of men in unalterable beatitude. Nevertheless,
+Dante does not for a moment loose his hold on the moral responsibility
+of man; he believes in free will.
+
+The belief in the freedom of the will, in the popular sense of the
+words, has always prevailed in Western countries. At all times men have
+been held responsible for their actions, as though this freedom were a
+matter of course. The case is otherwise with the religious and
+philosophical doctrine, which labours under the difficulty of
+harmonising the nature of the will with the laws of the universe at
+large. We have here to do with a question of more or less, which every
+moral estimate must take into account. Dante is not wholly free from
+those astrological superstitions which illumined the horizon of his time
+with deceptive light, but they do not hinder him from rising to a worthy
+conception of human nature. 'The stars,' he makes his Marco Lombardo
+say,[1125] 'the stars give the first impulse to your actions,' but
+
+    Light has been given you for good and evil
+    And free volition; which, if some fatigue
+    In the first battles with the heavens it suffers,
+    Afterwards conquers all, if well 'tis nurtured.
+
+Others might seek the necessity which annulled human freedom in another
+power than the stars, but the question was henceforth an open and
+inevitable one. So far as it was a question for the schools or the
+pursuit of isolated thinkers, its treatment belongs to the historian of
+philosophy. But inasmuch as it entered into the consciousness of a wider
+public, it is necessary for us to say a few words respecting it.
+
+The fourteenth century was chiefly stimulated by the writings of Cicero,
+who, though in fact an eclectic, yet, by his habit of setting forth the
+opinions of different schools, without coming to a decision between
+them, exercised the influence of a sceptic. Next in importance came
+Seneca, and the few works of Aristotle which had been translated into
+Latin. The immediate fruit of these studies was the capacity to reflect
+on great subjects, if not in direct opposition to the authority of the
+Church, at all events independently of it.
+
+In the course of the fifteenth century the works of antiquity were
+discovered and diffused with extraordinary rapidity. All the writings of
+the Greek philosophers which we ourselves possess were now, at least in
+the form of Latin translations, in everybody's hands. It is a curious
+fact that some of the most zealous apostles of this new culture were men
+of the strictest piety, or even ascetics (p. 273). Fra Ambrogio
+Camaldolese, as a spiritual dignitary chiefly occupied with
+ecclesiastical affairs, and as a literary man with the translation of
+the Greek Fathers of the Church, could not repress the humanistic
+impulse, and at the request of Cosimo de'Medici, undertook to translate
+Diogenes Laertius into Latin.[1126] His contemporaries, Niccol� Niccoli,
+Griannozzo Manetti, Donato Acciajuoli, and Pope Nicholas V.,[1127]
+united to a many-sided humanism profound biblical scholarship and deep
+piety. In Vittorino da Feltre the same temper has been already noticed
+(p. 213 sqq.). The same Matthew Vegio, who added a thirteenth book to
+the '�neid,' had an enthusiasm for the memory of St. Augustine and his
+mother Monica which cannot have been without a deeper influence upon
+him. The result of all these tendencies was that the Platonic Academy at
+Florence deliberately chose for its object the reconciliation of the
+spirit of antiquity with that of Christianity. It was a remarkable oasis
+in the humanism of the period.[1128]
+
+This humanism was in fact pagan, and became more and more so as its
+sphere widened in the fifteenth century. Its representatives, whom we
+have already described as the advanced guard of an unbridled
+individualism, display as a rule such a character that even their
+religion, which is sometimes professed very definitely, becomes a matter
+of indifference to us. They easily got the name of atheists, if they
+showed themselves indifferent to religion, and spoke freely against the
+Church; but not one of them ever professed, or dared to profess, a
+formal, philosophical atheism.[1129] If they sought for any leading
+principle, it must have been a kind of superficial rationalism--a
+careless inference from the many and contradictory opinions of antiquity
+with which they busied themselves, and from the discredit into which the
+Church and her doctrines had fallen. This was the sort of reasoning
+which was near bringing Galeottus Martius[1130] to the stake, had not
+his former pupil, Pope Sixtus IV., perhaps at the request of Lorenzo
+de'Medici, saved him from the hands of the Inquisition. Galeotto had
+ventured to write that the man who walked uprightly, and acted according
+to the natural law born within him, would go to heaven, whatever nation
+he belonged to.
+
+Let us take, by way of example, the religious attitude of one of the
+smaller men in the great army. Codrus Urceus[1131] was first the tutor
+of the last Ordelaffo, Prince of Forl�, and afterwards for many years
+professor at Bologna. Against the Church and the monks his language is
+as abusive as that of the rest. His tone in general is reckless to the
+last degree, and he constantly introduces himself in all his local
+history and gossip. But he knows how to speak to edification of the true
+God-Man, Jesus Christ, and to commend himself by letter to the prayers
+of a saintly priest.[1132] On one occasion, after enumerating the
+follies of the pagan religions, he thus goes on: 'Our theologians, too,
+fight and quarrel "de lana caprina," about the Immaculate Conception,
+Antichrist, Sacraments, Predestination, and other things, which were
+better let alone than talked of publicly.' Once, when he was not at
+home, his room and manuscripts were burnt. When he heard the news he
+stood opposite a figure of the Madonna in the street, and cried to it:
+'Listen to what I tell you; I am not mad, I am saying what I mean. If I
+ever call upon you in the hour of my death, you need not hear me or take
+me among your own, for I will go and spend eternity with the
+devil.'[1133] After which speech he found it desirable to spend six
+months in retirement at the house of a wood-cutter. With all this, he
+was so superstitious that prodigies and omens gave him incessant
+frights, leaving him no belief to spare for the immortality of the soul.
+When his hearers questioned him on the matter, he answered that no one
+knew what became of a man, of his soul or his body, after death, and the
+talk about another life was only fit to frighten old women. But when he
+came to die, he commended in his will his soul or his spirit[1134] to
+Almighty God, exhorted his weeping pupils to fear the Lord, and
+especially to believe in immortality and future retribution, and
+received the Sacrament with much fervour. We have no guarantee that more
+famous men in the same calling, however significant their opinions may
+be, were in practical life any more consistent. It is probable that most
+of them wavered inwardly between incredulity and a remnant of the faith
+in which they were brought up, and outwardly held for prudential reasons
+to the Church.
+
+Through the connexion of rationalism with the newly born science of
+historical investigation, some timid attempts at biblical criticism may
+here and there have been made. A saying of Pius II.[1135] has been
+recorded, which seems intended to prepare the way for such criticism:
+'Even if Christianity were not confirmed by miracles, it ought still to
+be accepted on account of its morality.' When Lorenzo Valla calls Moses
+and the Evangelists historians, he does not seek to diminish their
+dignity and reputation; but is nevertheless conscious that in these
+words lies as decided a contradiction to the traditional view taken by
+the Church, as in the denial that the Apostles' Creed was the work of
+all the Apostles, or that the letter of Abgarus to Christ was
+genuine.[1136] The legends of the Church, in so far as they contained
+arbitrary versions of the biblical miracles, were freely
+ridiculed,[1137] and this reacted on the religious sense of the people.
+Where Judaising heretics are mentioned, we must understand chiefly those
+who denied the Divinity of Christ, which was probably the offence for
+which Giorgio da Novara was burnt at Bologna about the year 1500.[1138]
+But again at Bologna in the year 1497 the Dominican Inquisitor was
+forced to let the physician Gabrielle da Sal�, who had powerful patrons,
+escape with a simple expression of penitence,[1139] although he was in
+the habit of maintaining that Christ was not God, but son of Joseph and
+Mary, and conceived in the usual way; that by his cunning he had
+deceived the world to its ruin; that he may have died on the cross on
+account of crimes which he had committed; that his religion would soon
+come to an end; that his body was not really contained in the sacrament,
+and that he performed his miracles, not through any divine power, but
+through the influence of the heavenly bodies. This latter statement is
+most characteristic of the time, Faith is gone, but magic still holds
+its ground.[1140]
+
+A worse fate befell a Canon of Bergamo, Zanino de Solcia, a few years
+earlier (1459), who had asserted that Christ did not suffer from love to
+man, but under the influence of the stars, and who advanced other
+curious scientific and moral ideas. He was forced to abjure his errors,
+and paid for them by perpetual imprisonment.[1141]
+
+With respect to the moral government of the world, the humanists seldom
+get beyond a cold and resigned consideration of the prevalent violence
+and misrule. In this mood the many works 'On Fate,' or whatever name
+they bear, are written. They tell of the turning of the wheel of
+Fortune, and of the instability of earthly, especially political,
+things. Providence is only brought in because the writers would still be
+ashamed of undisguised fatalism, of the avowal of their ignorance, or of
+useless complaints. Gioviano Pontano[1142] ingeniously illustrates the
+nature of that mysterious something which men call Fortune by a hundred
+incidents, most of which belonged to his own experience. The subject is
+treated more humorously by �neas Sylvius, in the form of a vision seen
+in a dream.[1143] The aim of Poggio, on the other hand, in a work
+written in his old age,[1144] is to represent the world as a vale of
+tears, and to fix the happiness of various classes as low as possible.
+This tone became in future the prevalent one. Distinguished men drew up
+a debit and credit of the happiness and unhappiness of their lives, and
+generally found that the latter outweighed the former. The fate of Italy
+and the Italians, so far as it could be told in the year 1510, has been
+described with dignity and an almost elegiac pathos by Tristano
+Caracciolo.[1145] Applying this general tone of feeling to the
+humanists themselves, Pierio Valeriano afterwards composed his famous
+treatise (pp. 276-279). Some of these themes, such as the fortunes of
+Leo, were most suggestive. All the good that can be said of him
+politically has been briefly and admirably summed up by Francesco
+Vettori; the picture of Leo's pleasures is given by Paolo Giovio and in
+the anonymous biography;[1146] and the shadows which attended his
+prosperity are drawn with inexorable truth by the same Pierio Valeriano.
+
+We cannot, on the other hand, read without a kind of awe how men
+sometimes boasted of their fortune in public inscriptions. Giovanni II.
+Bentivoglio, ruler of Bologna, ventured to carve in stone on the newly
+built tower by his palace, that his merit and his fortune had given him
+richly of all that could be desired[1147]--and this a few years before
+his expulsion. The ancients, when they spoke in this tone, had
+nevertheless a sense of the envy of the gods. In Italy it was probably
+the Condottieri (p. 22) who first ventured to boast so loudly of their
+fortune.
+
+But the way in which resuscitated antiquity affected religion most
+powerfully, was not through any doctrines or philosophical system, but
+through a general tendency which it fostered. The men, and in some
+respects the institutions of antiquity were preferred to those of the
+Middle Ages, and in the eager attempt to imitate and reproduce them,
+religion was left to take care of itself. All was absorbed in the
+admiration for historical greatness (part ii. chap. iii., and above,
+_passim_). To this the philologians added many special follies of their
+own, by which they became the mark for general attention. How far Paul
+II. was justified in calling his Abbreviators and their friends to
+account for their paganism, is certainly a matter of great doubt, as his
+biographer and chief victim, Platina, (pp. 231, 331) has shown a
+masterly skill in explaining his vindictiveness on other grounds, and
+especially in making him play a ludicrous figure. The charges of
+infidelity, paganism,[1148] denial of immortality, and so forth, were
+not made against the accused till the charge of high treason had broken
+down. Paul, indeed, if we are correctly informed about him, was by no
+means the man to judge of intellectual things. He knew little Latin, and
+spoke Italian at Consistories and in diplomatic negotiations. It was he
+who exhorted the Romans to teach their children nothing beyond reading
+and writing. His priestly narrowness of view reminds us of Savonarola
+(p. 476), with the difference that Paul might fairly have been told that
+he and his like were in great part to blame if culture made men hostile
+to religion. It cannot, nevertheless, be doubted that he felt a real
+anxiety about the pagan tendencies which surrounded him. And what, in
+truth, may not the humanists have allowed themselves at the court of the
+profligate pagan, Sigismondo Malatesta? How far these men, destitute for
+the most part of fixed principle, ventured to go, depended assuredly on
+the sort of influences they were exposed to. Nor could they treat of
+Christianity without paganising it (part iii. chap. x.). It is curious,
+for instance, to notice how far Gioviano Pontano carried this confusion.
+He speaks of a saint not only as 'divus,' but as 'deus;' the angels he
+holds to be identical with the genii of antiquity;[1149] and his notion
+of immortality reminds us of the old kingdom of the shades. This spirit
+occasionally appears in the most extravagant shapes. In 1526, when Siena
+was attacked by the exiled party,[1150] the worthy canon Tizio, who
+tells us the story himself, rose from his bed on the 22nd July, called
+to mind what is written in the third book of Macrobius,'[1151]
+celebrated mass, and then pronounced against the enemy the curse with
+which his author had supplied him, only altering 'Tellus mater teque
+Juppiter obtestor' into 'Tellus teque Christe Deus obtestor.' After he
+had done this for three days, the enemy retreated. On the one side,
+these things strike us an affair of mere style and fashion; on the
+other, as a symptom of religious decadence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITION.
+
+
+But in another way, and that dogmatically, antiquity exercised a
+perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of
+superstition. Some fragments of this had survived in Italy all through
+the Middle Ages, and the resuscitation of the whole was thereby made so
+much the more easy. The part played by the imagination in the process
+need not be dwelt upon. This only could have silenced the critical
+intellect of the Italians.
+
+The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds
+destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery. Others, like
+Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance,
+and if they nevertheless retained a sturdy faith, it was because they
+held that the higher destiny of man would be accomplished in the life to
+come. But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism
+got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the
+former as its consequence.
+
+The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of
+antiquity, or even of the Arabians. From the relations of the planets
+among themselves and to the signs of the zodiac, future events and the
+course of whole lives were inferred, and the most weighty decisions were
+taken in consequence. In many cases the line of action thus adopted at
+the suggestion of the stars may not have been more immoral than that
+which would otherwise have been followed. But too often the decision
+must have been made at the cost of honour and conscience. It is
+profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and
+enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its
+support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish
+to penetrate and determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side
+of astrology.
+
+At the beginning of the thirteenth century this superstition suddenly
+appeared in the foreground of Italian life. The Emperor Frederick II.
+always travelled with his astrologer Theodorus; and Ezzelino da
+Romano[1152] with a large, well-paid court of such people, among them
+the famous Guido Bonatto and the long-bearded Saracen, Paul of Bagdad.
+In all important undertakings they fixed for him the day and the hour,
+and the gigantic atrocities of which he was guilty may have been in part
+practical inferences from their prophecies. Soon all scruples about
+consulting the stars ceased. Not only princes, but free cities[1153] had
+their regular astrologers, and at the universities,[1154] from the
+fourteenth to the sixteenth century, professors of this pseudo-science
+were appointed, and lectured side by side with the astronomers. It was
+well known that Augustine and other Fathers of the Church had combated
+astrology, but their old-fashioned notions were dismissed with easy
+contempt.[1155] The Popes[1156] commonly made no secret of their
+star-gazing, though Pius II., who also despised magic, omens, and the
+interpretation of dreams, is an honourable exception.[1157] Julius II.,
+on the other hand, had the day for his coronation and the day for his
+return from Bologna calculated by the astrologers.[1158] Even Leo X.
+seems to have thought the flourishing condition of astrology a credit to
+his pontificate,[1159] and Paul III. never held a Consistory till the
+star-gazers had fixed the hour.[1160]
+
+It may fairly be assumed that the better natures did not allow their
+actions to be determined by the stars beyond a certain point, and that
+there was a limit where conscience and religion made them pause. In
+fact, not only did pious and excellent people share the delusion, but
+they actually came forward to profess it publicly. One of these was
+Maestro Pagolo of Florence,[1161] in whom we can detect the same desire
+to turn astrology to moral account which meets us in the late Roman
+Firmicus Maternus.[1162] His life was that of a saintly ascetic. He ate
+almost nothing, despised all temporal goods, and only collected books. A
+skilled physician, he only practised among his friends, and made it a
+condition of his treatment that they should confess their sins. He
+frequented the small but famous circle which assembled in the Monastery
+of the Angeli around Fra Ambrogio Camaldolese (p. 463). He also saw much
+of Cosimo the Elder, especially in his last years; for Cosimo accepted
+and used astrology, though probably only for objects of lesser
+importance. As a rule, however, Pagolo only interpreted the stars to his
+most confidential friends. But even without this severity of morals, the
+astrologers might be highly respected and show themselves everywhere.
+There were also far more of them in Italy than in other European
+countries, where they only appeared at the great courts, and there not
+always. All the great householders in Italy, when the fashion was once
+established, kept an astrologer, who, it must be added, was not always
+sure of his dinner.[1163] Through the literature of this science, which
+was widely diffused even before the invention of printing, a
+dilettantism also grew up which as far as possible followed in the steps
+of the masters. The worst class of astrologers were those who used the
+stars either as an aid or a cloak to magical arts.
+
+Yet apart from the latter, astrology is a miserable feature in the life
+of that time. What a figure do all these highly gifted, many-sided,
+original characters play, when the blind passion for knowing and
+determining the future dethrones their powerful will and resolution! Now
+and then, when the stars send them too cruel a message, they manage to
+brace themselves up, act for themselves, and say boldly: 'Vir sapiens
+dominabitur astris'--the wise man is master of the stars,[1164] and then
+again relapse into the old delusion.
+
+In all the better families the horoscope of the children was drawn as a
+matter of course, and it sometimes happened that for half a lifetime men
+were haunted by the idle expectation of events which never occurred. The
+stars[1165] were questioned whenever a great man had to come to any
+important decision, and even consulted as to the hour at which any
+undertaking was to be begun. The journeys of princes, the reception of
+foreign ambassadors,[1166] the laying of the foundation-stone of public
+buildings, depended on the answer. A striking instance of the latter
+occurs in the life of the aforenamed Guido Bonatto, who by his personal
+activity and by his great systematic work on the subject[1167] deserves
+to be called the restorer of astrology in the thirteenth century. In
+order to put an end to the struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines at
+Forli, he persuaded the inhabitants to rebuild the city walls and to
+begin the works under a constellation indicated by himself. If then two
+men, one from each party, at the same moment put a stone into the
+foundation, there would henceforth and for ever be no more party
+divisions in Forli. A Guelph and a Ghibelline were selected for this
+office; the solemn moment arrived, each held the stone in his hands, the
+workmen stood ready with their implements, Bonatto gave the signal and
+the Ghibelline threw down his stone on to the foundation. But the Guelph
+hesitated, and at last refused to do anything at all, on the ground that
+Bonatto himself had the reputation of a Ghibelline and might be
+devising some mysterious mischief against the Guelphs. Upon which the
+astrologer addressed him: 'God damn thee and the Guelph party, with your
+distrustful malice! This constellation will not appear above our city
+for 500 years to come.' In fact God soon afterwards did destroy the
+Guelphs of Forli, but now, writes the chronicler about 1480, the two
+parties are thoroughly reconciled, and their very names are heard no
+longer.[1168]
+
+Nothing that depended upon the stars was more important than decisions
+in time of war. The same Bonatto procured for the great Ghibelline
+leader Guido da Montefeltro a series of victories, by telling him the
+propitious hour for marching.[1169] When Montefeltro was no longer
+accompanied by him[1170] he lost the courage to maintain his despotism,
+and entered a Minorite monastery, where he lived as a monk for many
+years till his death. In the war with Pisa in 1362, the Florentines
+commissioned their astrologer to fix the hour for the march,[1171] and
+almost came too late through suddenly receiving orders to take a
+circuitous route through the city. On former occasions they had marched
+out by the Via di Borgo S. Apostolo, and the campaign had been
+unsuccessful. It was clear that there was some bad omen connected with
+the exit through this street against Pisa, and consequently the army was
+now led out by the Porta Rossa. But as the tents stretched out there to
+dry had not been taken away, the flags--another bad omen--had to be
+lowered. The influence of astrology in war was confirmed by the fact
+that nearly all the Condottieri believed in it. Jacopo Caldora was
+cheerful in the most serious illness, knowing that he was fated to fall
+in battle, which in fact happened.[1172] Bartolommeo Alviano was
+convinced that his wounds in the head were as much a gift of the stars
+as his military command.[1173] Niccol� Orsini Pitigliano asked the
+physicist and astrologer Alessandro Benedetto[1174] to fix a favourable
+hour for the conclusion of his bargain with Venice (1495). When the
+Florentines on June 1, 1498, solemnly invested their new Condottiere
+Paolo Vitelli with his office, the Marshal's staff which they handed
+him was, at his own wish, decorated with pictures of the
+constellations.[1175] There were nevertheless generals like Alphonso the
+Great of Naples who did not allow their march to be settled by the
+prophets.[1176]
+
+Sometimes it is not easy to make out whether in important political
+events the stars were questioned beforehand, or whether the astrologers
+were simply impelled afterwards by curiosity to find out the
+constellation which decided the result. When Giangaleazzo Visconti (p.
+12) by a master-stroke of policy took prisoners his uncle Bernab�, with
+the latter's family (1385), we are told by a contemporary, that Jupiter,
+Saturn, and Mars stood in the house of the Twins,[1177] but we cannot
+say if the deed was resolved on in consequence. It is also probable that
+the advice of the astrologers was often determined by political
+calculation not less than by the course of the planets.[1178]
+
+All Europe, through the latter part of the Middle Ages, had allowed
+itself to be terrified by predictions of plagues, wars, floods, and
+earthquakes, and in this respect Italy was by no means behind other
+countries. The unlucky year 1494, which for ever opened the gates of
+Italy to the stranger, was undeniably ushered in by many prophecies of
+misfortune[1179]--only we cannot say whether such prophecies were not
+ready for each and every year.
+
+This mode of thought was extended with thorough consistency into regions
+where we should hardly expect to meet with it. If the whole outward and
+spiritual life of the individual is determined by the facts of his
+birth, the same law also governs groups of individuals and historical
+products--that is to say, nations and religions; and as the
+constellation of these things changes, so do the things themselves. The
+idea that each religion has its day, first came into Italian culture in
+connexion with these astrological beliefs, chiefly from Jewish and
+Arabian sources.[1180] The conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn brought
+forth, we are told,[1181] the faith of Israel; that of Jupiter and Mars,
+the Chaldean; with the Sun, the Egyptian; with Venus, the Mohammedan;
+with Mercury, the Christian; and the conjunction of Jupiter with the
+Moon will one day bring forth the religion of Antichrist. Checco
+d'Ascoli had already blasphemously calculated the nativity of Christ,
+and deduced from it his death upon the cross. For this he was burnt at
+the stake in 1327, at Florence.[1182] Doctrines of this sort ended by
+simply darkening men's whole perceptions of spiritual things.
+
+So much more worthy then of recognition is the warfare which the clear
+Italian spirit waged against this army of delusions. Notwithstanding the
+great monumental glorification of astrology, as in the frescos in the
+Salone at Padua,[1183] and those in Borso's summer palace (Schifanoja),
+at Ferrara, notwithstanding the shameless praises of even such a man as
+the elder Beroaldus,[1184] there was no want of thoughtful and
+independent minds to protest against it. Here, too, the way had been
+prepared by antiquity, but it was their own common sense and observation
+which taught them what to say. Petrarch's attitude towards the
+astrologers, whom he knew by personal intercourse, is one of bitter
+contempt;[1185] and no one saw through their system of lies more clearly
+than he. The novels, from the time when they first began to appear--from
+the time of the 'Cento novelle antiche,' are almost always hostile to
+the astrologers.[1186] The Florentine chroniclers bravely keep
+themselves free from the delusions which, as part of historical
+tradition, they are compelled to record. Giovanni Villani says more than
+once,[1187] 'No constellation can subjugate either the free will of man,
+or the counsels of God.' Matteo Villani[1188] declares astrology to be a
+vice which the Florentines had inherited, along with other
+superstitions, from their pagan ancestors, the Romans. The question,
+however, did not remain one for mere literary discussion, but the
+parties for and against disputed publicly. After the terrible floods of
+1333, and again in 1345, astrologers and theologians discussed with
+great minuteness the influence of the stars, the will of God, and the
+justice of his punishments.[1189] These struggles never ceased
+throughout the whole time of the Renaissance,[1190] and we may conclude
+that the protestors were in earnest, since it was easier for them to
+recommend themselves to the great by defending, than by opposing
+astrology.
+
+In the circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent, among his most distinguished
+Platonists, opinions were divided on this question. That Marsilio Ficino
+defended astrology, and drew the horoscope of the children of the house,
+promising the little Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., that he would one day
+be Pope,[1191] as Giovio would have us believe, is an invention--but
+other academicians accepted astrology. Pico della Mirandola,[1192] on
+the other hand, made an epoch in the subject by his famous refutation.
+He detects in this belief the root of all impiety and immorality. If the
+astrologer, he maintains, believes in anything at all, he must worship
+not God, but the planets, from which all good and evil are derived. All
+other superstitions find a ready instrument in astrology, which serves
+as handmaid to geomancy, chiromancy, and magic of every kind. As to
+morality, he maintains that nothing can more foster evil than the
+opinion that heaven itself is the cause of it, in which case the faith
+in eternal happiness and punishment must also disappear. Pico even took
+the trouble to check off the astrologers inductively, and found that in
+the course of a month three-fourths of their weather prophecies turned
+out false. But his main achievement was to set forth, in the Fourth
+Book--a positive Christian doctrine of the freedom of the will and the
+government of the universe, which seems to have made a greater
+impression on the educated classes throughout Italy than all the
+revivalist preachers put together. The latter, in fact, often failed to
+reach these classes.
+
+The first result of his book was that the astrologers ceased to publish
+their doctrines,[1193] and those who had already printed them were more
+or less ashamed of what they had done. Gioviano Pontano, for example, in
+his book on Fate (p. 503), had recognised the science, and in a great
+work of his own,[1194] the several parts of which were dedicated to his
+highly-placed friends and fellow-believers, Aldo Manucci, P. Bembo, and
+Sandazaro, had expounded the whole theory of it in the style of the old
+Firmicus, ascribing to the stars the growth of every bodily and
+spiritual quality. He now in his dialogue '�gidius,' surrendered, if not
+astrology, at least certain astrologers, and sounded the praises of free
+will, by which man is enabled to know God.[1195] Astrology remained more
+or less in fashion, but seems not to have governed human life in the way
+it formerly had done. The art of painting, which in the fifteenth
+century had done its best to foster the delusion, now expressed the
+altered tone of thought. Raphael, in the cupola of the Cappella
+Chigi,[1196] represents the gods of the different planets and the starry
+firmament, watched, however, and guided by beautiful angel-figures, and
+receiving from above the blessing of the Eternal Father. There was also
+another cause which now began to tell against astrology in Italy. The
+Spaniards took no interest in it, not even the generals, and those who
+wished to gain their favour[1197] declared open war against the
+half-heretical, half-Mohammedan science. It is true that
+Guicciardini[1198] writes in the year 1529: 'How happy are the
+astrologers, who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred lies,
+while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred
+truths.' But the contempt for astrology did not necessarily lead to a
+return to the belief in Providence. It could as easily lead to an
+indefinite Fatalism.
+
+In this respect, as in others, Italy was unable to make its own way
+healthily through the ferment of the Renaissance, because the foreign
+invasion and the Counter-Reformation came upon it in the middle. Without
+such interfering causes its own strength would have enabled it
+thoroughly to get rid of these fantastic illusions. Those who hold that
+the onslaught of the strangers and the Catholic reactions were
+necessities for which the Italian people was itself solely responsible,
+will look on the spiritual bankruptcy which they produced as a just
+retribution. But it is a pity that the rest of Europe had indirectly to
+pay so large a part of the penalty.
+
+The beliefs in omens seems a much more innocent matter than astrology.
+The Middle Ages had everywhere inherited them in abundance from the
+various pagan religions; and Italy did not differ in this respect from
+other countries. What is characteristic of Italy is the support lent by
+humanism to the popular superstition. The pagan inheritance was here
+backed up by a pagan literary development.
+
+The popular superstition of the Italians rested largely on premonitions
+and inferences drawn from ominous occurrences,[1199] with which a good
+deal of magic, mostly of an innocent sort, was connected. There was,
+however, no lack of learned humanists who boldly ridiculed these
+delusions, and to whose attacks we partly owe the knowledge of them.
+Gioviano Pontano; the author of the great astrological work already
+mentioned (p. 280), enumerates with pity in his 'Charon,' a long string
+of Neapolitan superstitions--the grief of the women when a fowl or a
+goose caught the pip; the deep anxiety of the nobility if a hunting
+falcon did not come home, or if a horse sprained his foot; the magical
+formul� of the Apulian peasants, recited on three Saturday evenings,
+when mad dogs were at large. The animal kingdom, as in antiquity, was
+regarded as specially significant in this respect, and the behaviour of
+the lions, leopards, and other beasts kept by the State (p. 293 sqq.)
+gave the people all the more food for reflection, because they had come
+to be considered as living symbols of the State. During the siege of
+Florence, in 1529, an eagle which had been shot at fled into the city,
+and the Signoria gave the bearer four ducats, because the omen was
+good.[1200] Certain times and places were favourable or unfavourable, or
+even decisive one way or the other, for certain actions. The
+Florentines, so Varchi tells us, held Saturday to be the fateful day on
+which all important events, good as well as bad, commonly happened.
+Their prejudice against marching out to war through a particular street
+has been already mentioned (p. 512). At Perugia one of the gates, the
+'Porta eburnea,' was thought lucky, and the Baglioni always went out to
+fight through it.[1201] Meteors and the appearance of the heavens were
+as significant in Italy as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, and the popular
+imagination saw warring armies in an unusual formation of clouds, and
+heard the clash of their collision high in the air.[1202] The
+superstition became a more serious matter when it attached itself to
+sacred things, when figures of the Virgin wept or moved the eyes,[1203]
+or when public calamities were associated with some alleged act of
+impiety, for which the people demanded expiation. In 1478, when
+Piacenza was visited with a violent and prolonged rainfall, it was said
+that there would be no dry weather till a certain usurer, who had been
+lately buried at San Francesco, had ceased to rest in consecrated earth.
+As the bishop was not obliging enough to have the corpse dug up, the
+young fellows of the town took it by force, dragged it round the streets
+amid frightful confusion, offered it to be insulted and maltreated by
+former creditors, and at last threw it into the Po.[1204] Even Politian
+accepted this point of view in speaking of Giacomo Pazzi, one of the
+chief of the conspiracy of 1478, in Florence, which is called after his
+name. When he was put to death, he devoted his soul to Satan with
+fearful words. Here, too, rain followed and threatened to ruin the
+harvest; here, too, a party of men, mostly peasants, dug up the body in
+the church, and immediately the clouds departed and the sun shone--'so
+gracious was fortune to the opinion of the people,' adds the great
+scholar.[1205] The corpse was first cast into unhallowed ground, the
+next day again dug up, and after a horrible procession through the city,
+thrown into the Arno.
+
+These facts and the like bear a popular character, and might have
+occurred in the tenth, just as well as in the sixteenth century. But now
+comes the literary influence of antiquity. We know positively that the
+humanists were peculiarly accessible to prodigies and auguries, and
+instances of this have been already quoted. If further evidence were
+needed, it would be found in Poggio. The same radical thinker who denied
+the rights of noble birth and the inequality of men (p. 361 sqq.), not
+only believed in all the medi�val stories of ghosts and devils (fol.
+167, 179), but also in prodigies after the ancient pattern, like those
+said to have occurred on the last visit of Eugenius IV. to
+Florence.[1206] 'Near Como there was seen one evening 4,000 dogs, who
+took the road to Germany; these were followed by a great herd of cattle,
+and these by an army on foot and horseback, some with no heads and some
+with almost invisible heads, and then a gigantic horseman with another
+herd of cattle behind him.' Poggio also believes in a battle of magpies
+and jackdaws (fol. 180). He even relates, perhaps without being aware of
+it, a well-preserved piece of ancient mythology. On the Dalmatian coast
+a Triton had appeared, bearded and horned, a genuine sea-satyr, ending
+in fins and a tail; he carried away women and children from the shore,
+till five stout-hearted washer-women killed him with sticks and
+stones.[1207] A wooden model of the monster, which was exhibited at
+Ferrara, makes the whole story credible to Poggio. Though there were no
+more oracles, and it was no longer possible to take counsel of the gods,
+yet it became again the fashion to open Virgil at hazard, and take the
+passage hit upon as an omen[1208] ('Sortes Virgilianae'). Nor can the
+belief in d�mons current in the later period of antiquity have been
+without influence on the Renaissance. The work of Jamblichus or Abammon
+on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, which may have contributed to this
+result, was printed in a Latin translation at the end of the fifteenth
+century. The Platonic Academy at Florence was not free from these and
+other neo-platonic dreams of the Roman decadence. A few words must here
+be given to the belief in d�mons and to the magic which was connected
+with this belief.
+
+The popular faith in what is called the spirit-world was nearly the
+same in Italy as elsewhere in Europe.[1209] In Italy as elsewhere there
+were ghosts, that is, reappearances of deceased persons; and if the view
+taken of them differed in any respect from that which prevailed in the
+North, the difference betrayed itself only in the ancient name 'ombra.'
+Nowadays if such a shade presents itself, a couple of masses are said
+for its repose. That the spirits of bad men appear in a dreadful shape,
+is a matter of course, but along with this we find the notion that the
+ghosts of the departed are universally malicious. The dead, says the
+priest in Bandello,[1210] kill the little children. It seems as if a
+certain shade was here thought of as separate from the soul, since the
+latter suffers in Purgatory, and when it appears, does nothing but wail
+and pray. To lay the ghost, the tomb was opened, the corpse pulled to
+pieces, the heart burned and the ashes scattered to the four
+winds.[1211] At other times what appears is not the ghost of a man, but
+of an event--of a past condition of things. So the neighbours explained
+the diabolical appearances in the old palace of the Visconti near San
+Giovanni in Conca, at Milan, since here it was that Bernab� Visconti had
+caused countless victims of his tyranny to be tortured and strangled,
+and no wonder if there were strange things to be seen.[1212] One evening
+a swarm of poor people with candles in their hands appeared to a
+dishonest guardian of the poor at Perugia, and danced round about him; a
+great figure spoke in threatening tones on their behalf--it was St.
+Al�, the patron saint of the poor-house.[1213] These modes of belief
+were so much a matter of course that the poets could make use of them as
+something which every reader would understand. The appearance of the
+slain Ludovico Pico under the walls of the besieged Mirandola is finely
+represented by Castiglione.[1214] It is true that poetry made the freest
+use of these conceptions when the poet himself had outgrown them.
+
+Italy, too, shared the belief in d�mons with the other nations of the
+Middle Ages. Men were convinced that God sometimes allowed bad spirits
+of every class to exercise a destructive influence on parts of the world
+and of human life. The only reservation made was that the man to whom
+the Evil One came as tempter, could use his free will to resist.[1215]
+In Italy the d�monic influence, especially as shown in natural events,
+easily assumed a character of poetical greatness. In the night before
+the great inundation of the Val d'Arno in 1333, a pious hermit above
+Vallombrosa heard a diabolical tumult in his cell, crossed himself,
+stepped to the door, and saw a crowd of black and terrible knights
+gallop by in armour. When conjured to stand, one of them said: 'We go to
+drown the city of Florence on account of its sins, if God will let
+us.'[1216] With this, the nearly contemporary vision at Venice (1340)
+may be compared, out of which a great master of the Venetian school,
+probably Giorgione, made the marvellous picture of a galley full of
+d�mons, which speeds with the swiftness of a bird over the stormy lagune
+to destroy the sinful island-city, till the three saints, who have
+stepped unobserved into a poor boatman's skiff, exorcised the fiends and
+sent them and their vessel to the bottom of the waters.[1217]
+
+To this belief the illusion was now added that by means of magical arts
+it was possible to enter into relations with the evil ones, and use
+their help to further the purposes of greed, ambition, and sensuality.
+Many persons were probably accused of doing so before the time when it
+was actually attempted by many; but when the so-called magicians and
+witches began to be burned, the deliberate practice of the black art
+became more frequent. With the smoke of the fires in which the suspected
+victims were sacrificed, were spread the narcotic fumes by which numbers
+of ruined characters were drugged into magic; and with them many
+calculating impostors became associated.
+
+The primitive and popular form in which the superstition had probably
+lived on uninterruptedly from the time of the Romans,[1218] was the art
+of the witch (Strega). The witch, so long as she limited herself to mere
+divination,[1219] might be innocent enough, were it not that the
+transition from prophecy to active help could easily, though often
+imperceptibly, be a fatal downward step. She was credited in such a case
+not only with the power of exciting love or hatred between man and
+woman, but also with purely destructive and malignant arts, and was
+especially charged with the sickness of little children, even when the
+malady obviously came from the neglect and stupidity of the parents. It
+is still questionable how far she was supposed to act by mere magical
+ceremonies and formul�, or by a conscious alliance with the fiends,
+apart from the poisons and drugs which she administered with a full
+knowledge of their effect.
+
+The more innocent form of the superstition, in which the mendicant friar
+could venture to appear as the competitor of the witch, is shown in the
+case of the witch of Gaeta whom we read of in Pontano.[1220] His
+traveller Suppatius reaches her dwelling while she is giving audience to
+a girl and a servant-maid, who come to her with a black hen, nine eggs
+laid on a Friday, a duck, and some white thread--for it is the third day
+since the new moon. They are then sent away, and bidden to come again at
+twilight. It is to be hoped that nothing worse than divination is
+intended. The mistress of the servant-maid is pregnant by a monk; the
+girl's lover has proved untrue and has gone into a monastery. The witch
+complains: 'Since my husband's death I support myself in this way, and
+should make a good thing of it, since the Gaetan women have plenty of
+faith, were it not that the monks baulk me of my gains by explaining
+dreams, appeasing the anger of the saints for money, promising husbands
+to the girls, men-children to the pregnant women, offspring to the
+barren, and besides all this visiting the women at night when their
+husbands are away fishing, in accordance with the assignations made in
+day-time at church.' Suppatius warns her against the envy of the
+monastery, but she has no fear, since the guardian of it is an old
+acquaintance of hers.[1221]
+
+But the superstition further gave rise to a worse sort of witches,
+namely those who deprived men of their health and life. In these cases
+the mischief, when not sufficiently accounted for by the evil eye and
+the like, was naturally attributed to the aid of powerful spirits. The
+punishment, as we have seen in the case of Finicella (p. 469), was the
+stake; and yet a compromise with fanaticism was sometimes practicable.
+According to the laws of Perugia, for example, a witch could settle the
+affair by paying down 400 pounds.[1222] The matter was not then treated
+with the seriousness and consistency of later times. In the territories
+of the Church, at Norcia (Nursia), the home of St. Benedict, in the
+upper Apennines, there was a perfect nest of witches and sorcerers, and
+no secret was made of it. It is spoken of in one of the most remarkable
+letters of �neas Sylvius,[1223] belonging to his earlier period. He
+writes to his brother: 'The bearer of this came to me to ask if I knew
+of a Mount of Venus in Italy, for in such a place magical arts were
+taught, and his master, a Saxon and a great astronomer,[1224] was
+anxious to learn them. I told him that I knew of a Porto Venere not far
+from Carrara, on the rocky coast of Liguria, where I spent three nights
+on the way to Basel; I also found that there was a mountain called Eryx
+in Sicily, which was dedicated to Venus, but I did not know whether
+magic was taught there. But it came into my mind while talking that in
+Umbria, in the old Duchy (Spoleto), near the town of Nursia, there is a
+cave beneath a steep rock, in which water flows. There, as I remember to
+have heard, are witches (striges), d�mons, and nightly shades, and he
+that has the courage can see and speak to ghosts (spiritus), and learn
+magical arts.[1225] I have not seen it, nor taken any trouble about it,
+for that which is learned with sin is better not learned at all.' He
+nevertheless names his informant, and begs his brother to take the
+bearer of the letter to him, should he be still alive. �neas goes far
+enough here in his politeness to a man of position, but personally he
+was not only freer from superstition than his contemporaries (pp. 481,
+508), but he also stood a test on the subject which not every educated
+man of our own day could endure. At the time of the Council of Basel,
+when he lay sick of the fever for seventy-five days at Milan, he could
+never be persuaded to listen to the magic doctors, though a man was
+brought to his bedside who a short time before had marvellously cured
+2,000 soldiers of fever in the camp of Piccinino. While still an
+invalid, �neas rode over the mountains to Basel, and got well on the
+journey.[1226]
+
+We learn something more about the neighbourhood of Norcia through the
+necromancer who tried to get Benvenuto Cellini into his power. A new
+book of magic was to be consecrated,[1227] and the best place for the
+ceremony was among the mountains in that district. The master of the
+magician had once, it is true, done the same thing near the Abbey of
+Farfa, but had there found difficulties which did not present themselves
+at Norcia; further, the peasants in the latter neighbourhood were
+trustworthy people who had practice in the matter, and who could afford
+considerable help in case of need. The expedition did not take place,
+else Benvenuto would probably have been able to tell us something of the
+impostor's assistants. The whole neighbourhood was then proverbial.
+Aretino says somewhere of an enchanted well, 'there dwell the sisters of
+the sibyl of Norcia and the aunt of the Fata Morgana.' And about the
+same time Trissino could still celebrate the place in his great
+epic[1228] with all the resources of poetry and allegory as the home of
+authentic prophecy.
+
+After the famous Bull of Innocent VIII. (1484),[1229] witchcraft and the
+persecution of witches grew into a great and revolting system. The chief
+representatives of this system of persecution were German Dominicans;
+and Germany and, curiously enough, those parts of Italy nearest Germany
+were the countries most afflicted by this plague. The bulls and
+injunctions of the Popes themselves[1230] refer, for example, to the
+Dominican Province of Lombardy, to Cremona, to the dioceses of Brescia
+and Bergamo. We learn from Sprenger's famous theoretico-practical guide,
+the 'Malleus Maleficarum,' that forty-one witches were burnt at Como in
+the first year after the publication of the bull; crowds of Italian
+women took refuge in the territory of the Archduke Sigismund, where they
+believed themselves to be still safe. Witchcraft ended by taking firm
+root in a few unlucky Alpine valleys, especially in the Val
+Camonica;[1231] the system of persecution had succeeded in permanently
+infecting with the delusion those populations which were in any way
+predisposed for it. This essentially German form of witchcraft is what
+we should think of when reading the stories and novels of Milan or
+Bologna.[1232] That it did not make further progress in Italy is
+probably due to the fact that elsewhere a highly developed 'Stregheria'
+was already in existence, resting on a different set of ideas. The
+Italian witch practised a trade, and needed for it money and, above all,
+sense. We find nothing about her of the hysterical dreams of the
+Northern witch, of marvellous journeys through the air, of Incubus and
+Succubus; the business of the 'Strega' was to provide for other people's
+pleasure. If she was credited with the power of assuming different
+shapes, or of transporting herself suddenly to distant places, she was
+so far content to accept this reputation, as her influence was thereby
+increased; on the other hand, it was perilous for her when the fear of
+her malice and vengeance, and especially of her power for enchanting
+children, cattle, and crops, became general. Inquisitors and magistrates
+were then thoroughly in accord with popular wishes if they burnt her.
+
+By far the most important field for the activity of the 'Strega' lay, as
+has been said, in love-affairs, and included the stirring up of love and
+of hatred, the producing of abortion, the pretended murder of the
+unfaithful man or woman by magical arts, and even the manufacture of
+poisons.[1233] Owing to the unwillingness of many persons to have to do
+with these women, a class of occasional practitioners arose who secretly
+learned from them some one or other of their arts, and then used this
+knowledge on their own account. The Roman prostitutes, for example,
+tried to enhance their personal attractions by charms of another
+description in the style of Horatian Canidia. Aretino[1234] may not only
+have known, but have also told the truth about them in this particular.
+He gives a list of the loathsome messes which were to be found in their
+boxes--hair, skulls, ribs, teeth, dead men's eyes, human skin, the
+navels of little children, the soles of shoes and pieces of clothing
+from tombs. They even went themselves to the graveyard and fetched bits
+of rotten flesh, which they slily gave their lovers to eat--with more
+that is still worse. Pieces of the hair and nails of the lover were
+boiled in oil stolen from the ever-burning lamps in the church. The most
+innocuous of their charms was to make a heart of glowing ashes, and then
+to pierce it while singing--
+
+    Prima che'l fuoco spenghi,
+    Fa ch'a mia porta venghi;
+    Tal ti punga mio amore
+    Quale io fo questo cuore.
+
+There were other charms practised by moonshine, with drawings on the
+ground, and figures of wax or bronze, which doubtless represented the
+lover, and were treated according to circumstances.
+
+These things were so customary that a woman who, without youth and
+beauty, nevertheless exercised a powerful charm on men, naturally became
+suspected of witchcraft. The mother of Sanga,[1235] secretary to Clement
+VII., poisoned her son's mistress, who was a woman of this kind.
+Unfortunately the son died too, as well as a party of friends who had
+eaten of the poisoned salad.
+
+Next come, not as helper, but as competitor to the witch, the magician
+or enchanter--'incantatore'--who was still more familiar with the most
+perilous business of the craft. Sometimes he was as much or more of an
+astrologer than of a magician; he probably often gave himself out as an
+astrologer in order not to be prosecuted as a magician, and a certain
+astrology was essential in order to find out the favourable hour for a
+magical process.[1236] But since many spirits are good[1237] or
+indifferent, the magician could sometimes maintain a very tolerable
+reputation, and Sixtus IV. in the year 1474, had to proceed expressly
+against some Bolognese Carmelites,[1238] who asserted in the pulpit that
+there was no harm in seeking information from the d�mons. Very many
+people believed in the possibility of the thing itself; an indirect
+proof of this lies in the fact that the most pious men believed that by
+prayer they could obtain visions of good spirits. Savonarola's mind was
+filled with these things; the Florentine Platonists speak of a mystic
+union with God; and Marcellus Palingenius (p. 264), gives us to
+understand clearly enough that he had to do with consecrated
+spirits.[1239] The same writer is convinced of the existence of a whole
+hierarchy of bad d�mons, who have their seat from the moon downwards,
+and are ever on the watch to do some mischief to nature and human
+life.[1240] He even tells of his own personal acquaintance with some of
+them, and as the scope of the present work does not allow of a
+systematic exposition of the then prevalent belief in spirits, the
+narrative of Palingenius may be given as one instance out of many.[1241]
+
+At S. Silvestro, on Soracte, he had been receiving instruction from a
+pious hermit on the nothingness of earthly things and the worthlessness
+of human life; and when the night drew near he set out on his way back
+to Rome. On the road, in the full light of the moon, he was joined by
+three men, one of whom called him by name, and asked him whence he came.
+Palingenius made answer: 'From the wise man on the mountain.' 'O fool,'
+replied the stranger, 'dost thou in truth believe that anyone on earth
+is wise? Only higher beings (Divi) have wisdom, and such are we three,
+although we wear the shapes of men. I am named Saracil, and these two
+Sathiel and Jana. Our kingdom lies near the moon, where dwell that
+multitude of intermediate beings who have sway over earth and sea.'
+Palingenius then asked, not without an inward tremor, what they were
+going to do at Rome. The answer was: 'One of our comrades, Ammon, is
+kept in servitude by the magic arts of a youth from Narni, one of the
+attendants of Cardinal Orsini; for mark it, O men, there is proof of
+your own immortality therein, that you can control one of us; I myself,
+shut up in crystal, was once forced to serve a German, till a bearded
+monk set me free. This is the service which we wish to render at Rome to
+our friend, and we shall also take the opportunity of sending one or two
+distinguished Romans to the nether world.' At these words a light breeze
+arose, and Sathiel said: 'Listen, our messenger is coming back from
+Rome, and this wind announces him.' And then another being appeared,
+whom they greeted joyfully and then asked about Rome. His utterances are
+strongly anti-papal: Clement VII. was again allied with the Spaniards
+and hoped to root out Luther's doctrines, not with arguments, but by the
+Spanish sword. This is wholly in the interest of the d�mons, whom the
+impending bloodshed would enable to carry away the souls of thousands
+into hell. At the close of this conversation, in which Rome with all its
+guilt is represented as wholly given over to the Evil One, the
+apparitions vanish, and leave the poet sorrowfully to pursue his way
+alone.[1242]
+
+Those who would form a conception of the extent of the belief in those
+relations to the d�mons which could be openly avowed in spite of the
+penalties attaching to witchcraft, may be referred to the much read work
+of Agrippa of Nettesheim on 'Secret Philosophy.' He seems originally to
+have written it before he was in Italy,[1243] but in the dedication to
+Trithemius he mentions Italian authorities among others, if only by way
+of disparagement. In the case of equivocal persons like Agrippa, or of
+the knaves and fools into whom the majority of the rest may be divided,
+there is little that is interesting in the system they profess, with its
+formul�, fumigations, ointments, and the rest of it.[1244] But this
+system was filled with quotations from the superstitions of antiquity,
+the influence of which on the life and the passions of Italians is at
+times most remarkable and fruitful. We might think that a great mind
+must be thoroughly ruined, before it surrendered itself to such
+influences; but the violence of hope and desire led even vigorous and
+original men of all classes to have recourse to the magician, and the
+belief that the thing was feasible at all weakened to some extent the
+faith, even of those who kept at a distance, in the moral order of the
+world. At the cost of a little money and danger it seemed possible to
+defy with impunity the universal reason and morality of mankind, and to
+spare oneself the intermediate steps which otherwise lie between a man
+and his lawful or unlawful ends.
+
+Let us here glance for a moment at an older and now decaying form of
+superstition. From the darkest period of the Middle Ages, or even from
+the days of antiquity, many cities of Italy had kept the remembrance of
+the connexion of their fate with certain buildings, statues, or other
+material objects. The ancients had left records of consecrating priests
+or Telest�, who were present at the solemn foundation of cities, and
+magically guaranteed their prosperity by erecting certain monuments or
+by burying certain objects (Telesmata). Traditions of this sort were
+more likely than anything else to live on in the form of popular,
+unwritten legend; but in the course of centuries the priest naturally
+became transformed into the magician, since the religious side of his
+function was no longer understood. In some of his Virgilian miracles at
+Naples,[1245] the ancient remembrance of one of these Telest� is clearly
+preserved, his name being in course of time supplanted by that of
+Virgil. The enclosing of the mysterious picture of the city in a vessel
+is neither more nor less than a genuine, ancient Telesma; and Virgil the
+founder of Naples is only the officiating priest, who took part in the
+ceremony, presented in another dress. The popular imagination went on
+working at these themes, till Virgil became also responsible for the
+brazen horse, for the heads at the Nolan gate, for the brazen fly over
+another gate, and even for the Grotto of Posilippo--all of them things
+which in one respect or other served to put a magical constraint upon
+fate, and the first two of which seemed to determine the whole fortune
+of the city. Medi�val Rome also preserved confused recollections of the
+same kind. At the church of S. Ambrogio at Milan, there was an ancient
+marble Hercules; so long, it was said, as this stood in its place, so
+long would the Empire last. That of the Germans is probably meant, as
+the coronation of their Emperors at Milan took place in this
+church.[1246] The Florentines[1247] were convinced that the temple of
+Mars, afterwards transformed into the Baptistry, would stand to the end
+of time, according to the constellation under which it had been built;
+they had, as Christians, removed from it the marble equestrian statue;
+but since the destruction of the latter would have brought some great
+calamity on the city--also according to a constellation--they set it
+upon a tower by the Arno. When Totila conquered Florence, the statue
+fell into the river, and was not fished out again till Charles the Great
+refounded the city. It was then placed on a pillar at the entrance to
+the Ponte Vecchio, and on this spot Buondelmente was slain in 1215. The
+origin of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline was thus
+associated with the dreaded idol. During the inundation of 1333 the
+statue vanished forever.[1248]
+
+But the same Telesma reappears elsewhere. Guido Bonatto, already
+mentioned, was not satisfied, at the refounding of the walls of Forli,
+with requiring certain symbolic acts of reconciliation from the two
+parties (p. 511). By burying a bronze or stone equestrian statue,[1249]
+which he had produced by astro logical or magical arts, he believed
+that he had defended the city from ruin, and even from capture and
+plunder. When Cardinal Albornoz (p. 102) was governor of Romagna some
+sixty years later, the statue was accidentally dug up and then shown to
+the people, probably by the order of the Cardinal, that it might be
+known by what means the cruel Montefeltro had defended himself against
+the Roman Church. And again, half a century later, when an attempt to
+surprise Forli had failed, men began to talk afresh of the virtue of the
+statue, which had perhaps been saved and reburied. It was the last time
+that they could do so; for a year later Forli was really taken. The
+foundation of buildings all through the fifteenth century was associated
+not only with astrology (p. 511) but also with magic. The large number
+of gold and silver medals which Paul II. buried in the foundations of
+his buildings[1250] was noticed, and Platina was by no means displeased
+to recognise an old pagan Telesma in the fact. Neither Paul nor his
+biographer were in any way conscious of the medi�val religious
+significance of such an offering.[1251]
+
+But this official magic, which in many cases only rests on hearsay, was
+comparatively unimportant by the side of the secret arts practised for
+personal ends.
+
+The form which these most often took in daily life is shown by Ariosto
+in his comedy of the necromancers.[1252] His hero is one of the many
+Jewish exiles from Spain, although he also gives himself out for a
+Greek, an Egyptian, and an African, and is constantly changing his name
+and costume. He pretends that his incantations can darken the day and
+lighten the darkness, that he can move the earth, make himself
+invisible, and change men into beasts; but these vaunts are only an
+advertisement. His true object is to make his account out of unhappy and
+troubled marriages, and the traces which he leaves behind him in his
+course are like the slime of a snail, or often like the ruin wrought by
+a hail-storm. To attain his ends he can persuade people that the box in
+which a lover is hidden is full of ghosts, or that he can make a corpse
+talk. It is at all events a good sign that poets and novelists could
+reckon on popular applause in holding up this class of men to ridicule.
+Bandello not only treats the sorcery of a Lombard monk as a miserable,
+and in its consequences terrible, piece of knavery,[1253] but he also
+describes with unaffected indignation[1254] the disasters which never
+cease to pursue the credulous fool. 'A man hopes with "Solomon's Key"
+and other magical books to find the treasures hidden in the bosom of the
+earth, to force his lady to do his will, to find out the secrets of
+princes, and to transport himself in the twinkling of an eye from Milan
+to Rome. The more often he is deceived, the more steadfastly he
+believes.... Do you remember the time, Signor Carlo, when a friend of
+ours, in order to win the favour of his beloved, filled his room with
+skulls and bones like a churchyard?' The most loathsome tasks were
+prescribed--to draw three teeth from a corpse or a nail from its finger,
+and the like; and while the hocus-pocus of the incantation was going on,
+the unhappy participants sometimes died of terror.
+
+Benvenuto Cellini did not die during the well-known incantation (1532)
+in the Coliseum at Rome,[1255] although both he and his companions
+witnessed no ordinary horrors; the Sicilian priest, who probably
+expected to find him a useful coadjutor in the future, paid him the
+compliment as they went home of saying that he had never met a man of so
+sturdy a courage. Every reader will make his own reflections on the
+proceedings themselves. The narcotic fumes and the fact that the
+imaginations of the spectators were predisposed for all possible
+terrors, are the chief points to be noticed, and explain why the lad who
+formed one of the party, and on whom they made most impression, saw
+much more than the others. But it may be inferred that Benvenuto himself
+was the one whom it was wished to impress, since the dangerous beginning
+of the incantation can have had no other aim than to arouse curiosity.
+For Benvenuto had to think before the fair Angelica occurred to him; and
+the magician told him afterwards that love-making was folly compared
+with the finding of treasures. Further, it must not be forgotten that it
+flattered his vanity to be able to say, 'The d�mons have kept their
+word, and Angelica came into my hands, as they promised, just a month
+later' (cap. 68). Even on the supposition that Benvenuto gradually lied
+himself into believing the whole story, it would still be permanently
+valuable as evidence of the mode of thought then prevalent.
+
+As a rule, however, the Italian artists, even 'the odd, capricious, and
+eccentric' among them, had little to do with magic. One of them, in his
+anatomical studies, may have cut himself a jacket out of the skin of a
+corpse, but at the advice of his confessor he put it again into the
+grave.[1256] Indeed the frequent study of anatomy probably did more than
+anything else to destroy the belief in the magical influence of various
+parts of the body, while at the same time the incessant observation and
+representation of the human form made the artist familiar with a magic
+of a wholly different sort.
+
+In general, notwithstanding the instances which have been quoted, magic
+seems to have been markedly on the decline at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century,--that is to say, at a time when it first began to
+flourish vigorously out of Italy; and thus the tours of Italian
+sorcerers and astrologers in the North seem not to have begun till their
+credit at home was thoroughly impaired. In the fourteenth century it was
+thought necessary carefully to watch the lake on Mount Pilatus, near
+Scariotto, to hinder the magicians from there consecrating their
+books.[1257] In the fifteenth century we find, for example, that the
+offer was made to produce a storm of rain, in order to frighten away a
+besieged army; and even then the commander of the besieged town--Nicol�
+Vitelli in Citt� di Castello--had the good sense to dismiss the
+sorcerers as godless persons.[1258] In the sixteenth century no more
+instances of this official kind appear, although in private life the
+magicians were still active. To this time belongs the classic figure of
+German sorcery, Dr. Johann Faust; the Italian ideal, on the other hand,
+Guido Bonatto, dates back to the thirteenth century.
+
+It must nevertheless be added that the decrease of the belief in magic
+was not necessarily accompanied by an increase of the belief in a moral
+order, but that in many cases, like the decaying faith in astrology, the
+delusion left behind it nothing but a stupid fatalism.
+
+One or two minor forms of this superstition, pyromancy, chiromancy[1259]
+and others, which obtained some credit as the belief in sorcery and
+astrology were declining, may be here passed over, and even the
+pseudo-science of physiognomy has by no means the interest which the
+name might lead us to expect. For it did not appear as the sister and
+ally of art and psychology, but as a new form of fatalistic
+superstition, and, what it may have been among the Arabians, as the
+rival of astrology. The author of a physiognomical treatise, Bartolommeo
+Cocle, who styled himself a 'metoposcopist,'[1260] and whose science,
+according to Giovio, seemed like one of the most respectable of the free
+arts, was not content with the prophecies which he made to the many
+clever people who daily consulted him, but wrote also a most serious
+'catalogue of such whom great dangers to life were awaiting.' Giovio,
+although grown old in the free thought of Rome--'in hac luce romana'--is
+of opinion that the predictions contained therein had only too much
+truth in them.[1261] We learn from the same source how the people aimed
+at in these and similar prophecies took vengeance on the seer. Giovanni
+Bentivoglio caused Lucas Gauricus to be five times swung to and fro
+against the wall, on a rope hanging from a lofty winding staircase,
+because Lucas had foretold to him the loss of his authority.[1262] Ermes
+Bentivoglio sent an assassin after Cocle, because the unlucky
+metoposcopist had unwillingly prophesied to him that he would die an
+exile in battle. The murderer seems to have derided the dying man in his
+last moments, saying that the prophet had foretold to him that he would
+shortly commit an infamous murder. The reviver of chiromancy, Antioco
+Tiberto of Cesena,[1263] came by an equally miserable end at the hands
+of Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, to whom he had prophesied the worst
+that a tyrant can imagine, namely, death in exile and in the most
+grievous poverty. Tiberto was a man of intelligence, who was supposed to
+give his answers less according to any methodical chiromancy than by
+means of his shrewd knowledge of mankind; and his high culture won for
+him the respect of those scholars who thought little of his
+divination.[1264]
+
+Alchemy, in conclusion, which is not mentioned in antiquity till quite
+late under Diocletian, played only a very subordinate part at the best
+period of the Renaissance.[1265] Italy went through the disease earlier,
+when Petrarch in the fourteenth century confessed, in his polemic
+against it, that gold-making was a general practice.[1266] Since then
+that particular kind of faith, devotion, and isolation which the
+practice of alchemy required became more and more rare in Italy, just
+when Italian and other adepts began to make their full profit out of the
+great lords in the North.[1267] Under Leo X. the few Italians who busied
+themselves with it were called 'ingenia curiosa,'[1268] and Aurelio
+Augurelli, who dedicated to Leo X., the great despiser of gold, his
+didactic poem on the making of the metal, is said to have received in
+return a beautiful but empty purse. The mystic science which besides
+gold sought for the omnipotent philosopher's stone, is a late northern
+growth, which had its rise in the theories of Paracelsus and others.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+GENERAL DISINTEGRATION OF BELIEF.
+
+
+With these superstitions, as with ancient modes of thought generally,
+the decline in the belief of immortality stands in the closest
+connection.[1269] This question has the widest and deepest relations
+with the whole development of the modern spirit.
+
+One great source of doubt in immortality was the inward wish to be under
+no obligations to the hated Church. We have seen that the Church branded
+those who thus felt as Epicureans (p. 496 sqq.). In the hour of death
+many doubtless called for the sacraments, but multitudes during their
+whole lives, and especially during their most vigorous years, lived and
+acted on the negative supposition. That unbelief on this particular
+point must often have led to a general scepticism, is evident of itself,
+and is attested by abundant historical proof. These are the men of whom
+Ariosto says: 'Their faith goes no higher than the roof.'[1270] In
+Italy, and especially in Florence, it was possible to live as an open
+and notorious unbeliever, if a man only refrained from direct acts of
+hostility against the Church.[1271] The confessor, for instance, who was
+sent to prepare a political offender for death, began by inquiring
+whether the prisoner was a believer, 'for there was a false report that
+he had no belief at all.'[1272]
+
+The unhappy transgressor here referred to--the same Pierpaolo Boscoli
+who has been already mentioned (p. 59)--who in 1513 took part in an
+attempt against the newly restored family of the Medici, is a faithful
+mirror of the religious confusion then prevalent. Beginning as a
+partisan of Savonarola, he became afterwards possessed with an
+enthusiasm for the ancient ideals of liberty, and for paganism in
+general; but when he was in prison his early friends regained the
+control of his mind, and secured for him what they considered a pious
+ending. The tender witness and narrator of his last hours is one of the
+artistic family of the Delia Robbia, the learned philologist Luca. 'Ah,'
+sighs Boscoli, 'get Brutus out of my head for me, that I may go my way
+as a Christian.' 'If you will,' answers Luca, 'the thing is not
+difficult; for you know that these deeds of the Romans are not handed
+down to us as they were, but idealised (con arte accresciute).' The
+penitent now forces his understanding to believe, and bewails his
+inability to believe voluntarily. If he could only live for a month with
+pious monks, he would truly become spiritually minded. It comes out that
+these partisans of Savonarola knew their Bible very imperfectly; Boscoli
+can only say the Paternoster and Avemaria, and earnestly begs Luca to
+exhort his friends to study the sacred writings, for only what a man has
+learned in life does he possess in death. Luca then reads and explains
+to him the story of the Passion according to the Gospel of St. Matthew;
+the poor listener, strange to say, can perceive clearly the Godhead of
+Christ, but is perplexed at his manhood; he wishes to get as firm a hold
+of it 'as if Christ came to meet him out of a wood.' His friend
+thereupon exhorts him to be humble, since this was only a doubt sent him
+by the Devil. Soon after it occurs to the penitent that he has not
+fulfilled a vow made in his youth to go on pilgrimage to the Impruneta;
+his friend promises to do it in his stead. Meantime the confessor--a
+monk, as was desired, from Savonarola's monastery--arrives, and after
+giving him the explanation quoted above of the opinion of St. Thomas
+Aquinas on tyrannicide, exhorts him to bear death manfully. Boscoli
+makes answer: 'Father, waste no time on this; the philosophers have
+taught it me already; help me to bear death out of love to Christ.' What
+follows--the communion, the leave-taking and the execution--is very
+touchingly described, one point deserves special mention. When Boscoli
+laid his head on the block, he begged the executioner to delay the
+stroke for a moment: 'During the whole time since the announcement of
+the sentence he had been striving after a close union with God, without
+attaining it as he wished, and now in this supreme moment he thought
+that by a strong effort he could give himself wholly to God.' It is
+clearly some half-understood expression of Savonarola which was
+troubling him.
+
+If we had more confessions of this character the spiritual picture of
+the time would be the richer by many important features which no poem or
+treatise has preserved for us. We should see more clearly how strong the
+inborn religious instinct was, how subjective and how variable the
+relation of the individual to religion, and what powerful enemies and
+competitors religion had. That men whose inward condition is of this
+nature, are not the men to found a new church, is evident; but the
+history of the Western spirit would be imperfect without a view of that
+fermenting period among the Italians, while other nations, who have had
+no share in the evolution of thought, may be passed over without loss.
+But we must return to the question of immortality.
+
+If unbelief in this respect made such progress among the more highly
+cultivated natures, the reason lay partly in the fact that the great
+earthly task of discovering the world and representing it in word and
+form, absorbed most of the higher spiritual faculties. We have already
+spoken (p. 490) of the inevitable worldliness of the Renaissance. But
+this investigation and this art were necessarily accompanied by a
+general spirit of doubt and inquiry. If this spirit shows itself but
+little in literature, if we find, for example, only isolated instances
+of the beginnings of biblical criticism (p. 465), we are not therefore
+to infer that it had no existence. The sound of it was only
+over-powered by the need of representation and creation in all
+departments--that is, by the artistic instinct; and it was further
+checked, whenever it tried to express itself theoretically, by the
+already existing despotism of the Church. This spirit of doubt must, for
+reasons too obvious to need discussion, have inevitably and chiefly
+busied itself with the question of the state of man after death.
+
+And here came in the influence of antiquity, and worked in a twofold
+fashion on the argument. In the first place men set themselves to master
+the psychology of the ancients, and tortured the letter of Aristotle for
+a decisive answer. In one of the Lucianic dialogues of the time[1273]
+Charon tells Mercury how he questioned Aristotle on his belief in
+immortality, when the philosopher crossed in the Stygian boat; but the
+prudent sage, although dead in the body and nevertheless living on,
+declined to compromise himself by a definite answer--and centuries later
+how was it likely to fare with the interpretation of his writings? All
+the more eagerly did men dispute about his opinion and that of others on
+the true nature of the soul, its origin, its pre-existence, its unity in
+all men, its absolute eternity, even its transformations; and there were
+men who treated of these things in the pulpit.[1274] The dispute was
+warmly carried on even in the fifteenth century; some proved that
+Aristotle taught the doctrine of an immortal soul;[1275] others
+complained of the hardness of men's hearts, who would not believe that
+there was a soul at all, till they saw it sitting down on a chair before
+them;[1276] Filelfo in his funeral oration on Francesco Sforza brings
+forward a long list of opinions of ancient and even of Arabian
+philosophers in favour of immortality, and closes the mixture, which
+covers a folio page and a half of print,[1277] with the words, 'Besides
+all this we have the Old and New Testaments, which are above all truth.'
+Then came the Florentine Platonists with their master's doctrine of the
+soul, supplemented at times, as in the case of Pico, by Christian
+teaching. But the opposite opinion prevailed in the instructed world. At
+the beginning of the sixteenth century the stumbling-block which it put
+in the way of the Church was so serious that Leo X. set forth a
+Constitution[1278] at the Lateran Council in 1513, in defence of the
+immortality and individuality of the soul, the latter against those who
+asserted that there was but one soul in all men. A few years later
+appeared the work of Pomponazzo, in which the impossibility of a
+philosophical proof of immortality is maintained; and the contest was
+now waged incessantly with replies and apologies, till it was silenced
+by the Catholic reaction. The pre-existence of the soul in God,
+conceived more or less in accordance with Plato's theory of ideas, long
+remained a common belief, and proved of service even to the poets.[1279]
+The consequences which followed from it as to the mode of the soul's
+continued existence after death, were not more closely considered.
+
+There was a second way in which the influence of antiquity made itself
+felt, chiefly by means of that remarkable fragment of the sixth book of
+Cicero's 'Republic' known by the name of Scipio's Dream. Without the
+commentary of Macrobius it would probably have perished like the rest of
+the second part of the work; it was now diffused in countless manuscript
+copies,[1280] and, after the discovery of typography, in a printed form,
+and edited afresh by various commentators. It is the description of a
+transfigured hereafter for great men, pervaded by the harmony of the
+spheres. This pagan heaven, for which many other testimonies were
+gradually extracted from the writings of the ancients, came step by step
+to supplant the Christian heaven in proportion as the ideal of fame and
+historical greatness threw into the shade the ideal of the Christian
+life, without, nevertheless, the public feeling being thereby offended
+as it was by the doctrine of personal annihilation after death. Even
+Petrarch founds his hope chiefly on this Dream of Scipio, on the
+declarations found in other Ciceronian works, and on Plato's 'Ph�do,'
+without making any mention of the Bible.[1281] 'Why,' he asks elsewhere,
+'should not I as a Catholic share a hope which was demonstrably
+cherished by the heathen?' Soon afterwards Coluccio Salutati wrote his
+'Labours of Hercules' (still existing in manuscript), in which it is
+proved at the end that the valorous man, who has well endured the great
+labours of earthly life, is justly entitled to a dwelling among the
+stars.[1282] If Dante still firmly maintained that the great pagans,
+whom he would have gladly welcomed in Paradise, nevertheless must not
+come beyond the Limbo at the entrance to Hell,[1283] the poetry of a
+later time accepted joyfully the new liberal ideas of a future life.
+Cosimo the Elder, according to Bernardo Pulci's poem on his death, was
+received in heaven by Cicero, who had also been called the 'Father of
+his country,' by the Fabii, by Curius, Fabricius and many others; with
+them he would adorn the choir where only blameless spirits sing.[1284]
+
+But in the old writers there was another and less pleasing picture of
+the world to come--the shadowy realms of Homer and of those poets who
+had not sweetened and humanised the conception. This made an impression
+on certain temperaments. Gioviano Pontano somewhere attributes to
+Sannazaro the story of a vision, which he beheld one morning early while
+half awake.[1285] He seemed to see a departed friend, Ferrandus
+Januarius, with whom he had often discoursed on the immortality of the
+soul, and whom he now asked whether it was true that the pains of Hell
+were really dreadful and eternal. The shadow gave an answer like that of
+Achilles when Odysseus questioned him. 'So much I tell and aver to thee,
+that we who are parted from earthly life have the strongest desire to
+return to it again.' He then saluted his friend and disappeared.
+
+It cannot but be recognised that such views of the state of man after
+death partly presuppose and partly promote the dissolution of the most
+essential dogmas of Christianity. The notion of sin and of salvation
+must have almost entirely evaporated. We must not be misled by the
+effects of the great preachers of repentance or by the epidemic revivals
+which have been described above (part vi. cap. 2). For even granting
+that the individually developed classes had shared in them like the
+rest, the cause of their participation was rather the need of emotional
+excitement, the rebound of passionate natures, the horror felt at great
+national calamities, the cry to heaven for help. The awakening of the
+conscience had by no means necessarily the sense of sin and the felt
+need of salvation as its consequence, and even a very severe outward
+penance did not perforce involve any repentance in the Christian meaning
+of the word. When the powerful natures of the Renaissance tell us that
+their principle is to repent of nothing,[1286] they may have in their
+minds only matters that are morally indifferent, faults of unreason or
+imprudence; but in the nature of the case this contempt for repentance
+must extend to the sphere of morals, because its origin, namely the
+consciousness of individual force, is common to both sides of human
+nature. The passive and contemplative form of Christianity, with its
+constant reference to a higher world beyond the grave, could no longer
+control these men. Macchiavelli ventured still farther, and maintained
+that it could not be serviceable to the state and to the maintenance of
+public freedom.[1287]
+
+The form assumed by the strong religious instinct which, notwithstanding
+all, survived in many natures, was Theism or Deism, as we may please to
+call it. The latter name may be applied to that mode of thought which
+simply wiped away the Christian element out of religion, without either
+seeking or finding any other substitute for the feelings to rest upon.
+Theism may be considered that definite heightened devotion to the one
+Supreme Being which the Middle Ages were not acquainted with. This mode
+of faith does not exclude Christianity, and can either ally itself with
+the Christian doctrines of sin, redemption, and immortality, or else
+exist and flourish without them.
+
+Sometimes this belief presents itself with childish na�vet� and even
+with a half-pagan air, God appearing as the almighty fulfiller of human
+wishes. Agnolo Pandolfini[1288] tells us how, after his wedding, he shut
+himself in with his wife, and knelt down before the family altar with
+the picture of the Madonna, and prayed, not to her, but to God that he
+would vouchsafe to them the right use of their property, a long life in
+joy and unity with one another, and many male descendants: 'for myself I
+prayed for wealth, honour, and friends, for her blamelessness, honesty,
+and that she might be a good housekeeper.' When the language used has a
+strong antique flavour, it is not always easy to keep apart the pagan
+style and the theistic belief.[1289]
+
+This temper sometimes manifests itself in times of misfortune with a
+striking sincerity. Some addresses to God are left us from the latter
+period of Firenzuola, when for years he lay ill of fever, in which,
+though he expressly declares himself a believing Christian, he shows
+that his religious consciousness is essentially theistic.[1290] His
+sufferings seem to him neither as the punishment of sin, nor as
+preparation for a higher world; they are an affair between him and God
+only, who has put the strong love of life between man and his despair.
+'I curse, but only curse Nature, since thy greatness forbids me to utter
+thy name.... Give me death, Lord, I beseech thee, give it me now!'
+
+In these utterances and the like, it would be vain to look for a
+conscious and consistent Theism; the speakers partly believed themselves
+to be still Christians, and for various other reasons respected the
+existing doctrines of the Church. But at the time of the Reformation,
+when men were driven to come to a distinct conclusion on such points,
+this mode of thought was accepted with a fuller consciousness; a number
+of the Italian Protestants came forward as Anti-Trinitarians and
+Socinians, and even as exiles in distant countries made the memorable
+attempt to found a church on these principles. From the foregoing
+exposition it will be clear that, apart from humanistic rationalism,
+other spirits were at work in this field.
+
+One chief centre of theistic modes of thought lay in the Platonic
+Academy at Florence, and especially in Lorenzo Magnifico himself. The
+theoretical works and even the letters of these men show us only half
+their nature. It is true that Lorenzo, from his youth till he died,
+expressed himself dogmatically as a Christian,[1291] and that Pico was
+drawn by Savonarola's influence to accept the point of view of a monkish
+ascetic.[1292] But in the hymns of Lorenzo,[1293] which we are tempted
+to regard as the highest product of the spirit of this school, an
+unreserved Theism is set forth--a Theism which strives to treat the
+world as a great moral and physical Cosmos. While the men of the Middle
+Ages look on the world as a vale of tears, which Pope and Emperor are
+set to guard against the coming of Antichrist; while the fatalists of
+the Renaissance oscillate between seasons of overflowing energy and
+seasons of superstition or of stupid resignation, here, in this circle
+of chosen spirits,[1294] the doctrine is upheld that the visible world
+was created by God in love, that it is the copy of a pattern
+pre-existing in Him, and that He will ever remain its eternal mover and
+restorer. The soul of man can by recognising God draw Him into its
+narrow boundaries, but also by love to Him itself expand into the
+Infinite--and this is blessedness on earth.
+
+Echoes of medi�val mysticism here flow into one current with Platonic
+doctrines, and with a characteristically modern spirit. One of the most
+precious fruits of the knowledge of the world and of man here comes to
+maturity, on whose account alone the Italian Renaissance must be called
+the leader of modern ages.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+A.
+
+Academies, educational, 281.
+
+Adrian VI., Pope, 121;
+  satires against, 162-164.
+
+'_Africa_,' the, of Petrarch, 258.
+
+Aguello of Pisa, 11.
+
+Alberto da Sarteano, 467.
+
+Alberti, Leon Battista, 136-138.
+
+Albertinus, Musattus, fame of, 140-141.
+
+Alboronoz, 102.
+
+Alchemy, 539, 540.
+
+Alexander VI., Pope, 109-117;
+  death of, 117.
+
+Alfonso I., 49.
+
+Alfonso of Ferrara, 99.
+
+Alfonso the Great of Naples, 35, 95, 459-461;
+  contempt for astrology, 513;
+  enthusiasm for antiquity, 225-227, 228.
+
+Alighieri Dante.--_See Dante._
+
+Allegorical representations, 415.
+
+Allegory, age of, 408-410;
+  superiority of Italian, 410-411.
+
+Amiens, treaty of, 123.
+
+'_Amoros� Visione_,' the, of Boccaccio, 324.
+
+Antiquity, importance of, Dante on, 204-205;
+  reproduction of, 230-242.
+
+Anti-Trinitarians, 549.
+
+Apollo Belvedere, discovery of the, 184.
+
+Aquinas, St. Thomas, 6, 7, 60.
+
+Arabic, study of, 200-202.
+
+Aragonese Dynasty, 16, 35.
+
+Aretino, Pietro, the railer, 164-168;
+  father of modern journalism, 165.
+
+Ariosto, 134;
+  and the Humanists, 273;
+  his artistic aim in epic, 326;
+  his picture of Roman society, 185;
+  '_Orlando Furioso_,' the, of, 325, 326, 327;
+  position as a Dramatist, 320;
+  style, 306;
+  satire on sorcery, 535-536.
+
+Arlotto (jester), 156.
+
+Army list, Venetian, 67.
+
+'_Asolani_,' the, of Bembo, 243.
+
+Assassination, paid, 450, 457.
+
+Assassins in Rome, 109.
+
+Astrology, belief in, 507-518;
+  protest against, 515.
+
+Auguries, belief in, 520, 521.
+
+Authors, the old, 187-202.
+
+Autobiography in Italy, 332, 333.
+
+
+B.
+
+Bacchus and Ariadne, song of, by Lorenzo de Medici, 427-428.
+
+Baglioni of Perugia, the, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32;
+  and the Oddi, disputes between, 29.
+
+Bandello, as novelist, 306;
+  on infidelity, 443-444;
+  style of writing, 382.
+
+Baraballe, comic procession of, 158.
+
+Bassano, Jacopo, rustic paintings of, 354.
+
+Belief, general disintegration of, 541-550.
+
+Bembo, Pietro, 231;
+  epigrams of, 267;
+  his '_Historia rerum Venetarum_,' 248;
+  letters of, 233;
+  the '_Sacra_' of, 259.
+
+Benedictines, the, 463.
+
+Bernab�, boar hounds of, 13.
+
+Bernadino da Siena, 235, 467, 469.
+
+Bessarion, Cardinal, his collection of Greek MSS., 189.
+
+Biblical criticism, 501.
+
+Biographies, Collective, 330 sqq.
+
+Biography, 328-337;
+  comparative, art of, 329.
+
+Blondus of Forli, historical writings of, 245, 246.
+
+Boar-hounds of Bernab�, 13.
+
+Boccaccio, 151;
+  life of Dante, 329;
+  master of personal description, 344;
+  on 'tyranny,' 56;
+  representative of antiquity, 205;
+  sonnets of, 314.
+
+Bojardo, as epic poet, 325;
+  inventiveness of, 324;
+  style of, 306.
+
+Borgias, the crimes of the, 109-117.
+
+Borgia, C�sar, 109-117;
+  death of, 117.
+
+Borso of Este, 49, 50, 51;
+  created duke of Modena and Reggio, 19;
+  welcome of, to Reggio, 417, 418.
+
+Boscoli, Pierpaolo, death of, 542-543.
+
+Botanical Gardens, 292.
+
+Brigandage, 449-450.
+
+Burchiello as Comedian, 320.
+
+
+C.
+
+Calumny at Papal Court, 161.
+
+Calvi Fabio, of Ravenna, 278-279.
+
+Cambray, League of, 68, 89.
+
+Can Grande della Scala, Court of, 9.
+
+Canzone, the, 310.
+
+'_Canzone Zingaresca_,' of Politian, 354.
+
+Capistrano, Giovanni, 467.
+
+'_Capitolo_,' the, 162-163.
+
+Cardano, Girolamo, of Milan, autobiography of, 334.
+
+Caricaturists, 159.
+
+'_Carmina Burana_,' the, 173.
+
+Carnival, the, 407, 425-427.
+
+Castiglione, 388.
+
+Catalogues of Libraries, 190, 191.
+
+Cathedral, Milan, founding of, 14.
+
+Catilinarians, the, 105.
+
+Catullus, as model, 264-265.
+
+Cellini, Benvenuto, autobiography of, 333-334.
+
+Celso, Caterina di San, 400.
+
+Certosa, Convent of, founding of, 13.
+
+Charles V., Emperor, action of, 123, 124.
+
+Charles IV., Emperor, 17, 18.
+
+Charles VIII. in Italy, 89, 90;
+  entry into Italy, 413.
+
+Children, naming of, 250-251.
+
+Chroniclers, Italian, 245;
+  Florentine, condemn astrology, 515.
+
+Church dignities, not bestowed according to pedigree, 360;
+  the corruption of, 456;
+  held in contempt, 457-458;
+  regeneration of, 125;
+  secularization of, proposed by Emperor Charles V., 123;
+  spirit of reform in, 123.
+
+Cicero, taken as model for style, 253-54.
+
+Ciceronianism and revival of Vitruvius, analogy between, 256.
+
+Ciriaco of Ancona, an antiquarian, 181.
+
+Class distinction ignored, 359-368.
+
+Clement VII., Pope, detested, 122;
+  flight of, 123;
+  temperament of, 309.
+
+Cleopatra, the discovery of, 184.
+
+Clubs, political, 387.
+
+Colonna, Giovanne, 177-178;
+  Giulia Gonzaga, 385;
+  Vittoria, 386, 446.
+
+'_Commedia dell'Arte_,' 320, 321.
+
+_Commentaries_, the, of Pius II., 333.
+
+Composition, Latin, history of, 252-253.
+
+Condottieri, the, despotisms founded by, 22, 23, 24.
+
+Convent of Certosa of Pavia, founding of, 13.
+
+Cornaro, Luigi, Autobiography of, 335-337;
+  _Vita Sobria_ of, 244.
+
+Corpse of girl, discovery of, 183.
+
+Corpus Christi, feast of, celebration of, 414.
+
+Corruption in Papacy, 106, 107.
+
+'_Cortigiano_,' the, by Castiglione, 381, 388, 446.
+
+Cosmetics, use of, 373-374.
+
+Council of Ten, 66.
+
+Country life, descriptions of, 306;
+  love of, 404-405.
+
+Crime, for its own sake, 453-454;
+  prevalence of, among priests, 448-449.
+
+Criticism, Biblical, 501.
+
+Crusades, the, 485-486;
+  influence of, 285.
+
+Culture, general Latinization of, 249-256.
+
+'_Curiale_,' the, 378.
+
+Cyb�, Franceschetto, 108-109;
+  as gambler, 436.
+
+
+D.
+
+Daemons, belief in, 521-524, 531.
+
+Dagger, use of the, 452.
+
+Dante, Alighieri, 75, 76, 83, 130, 133, 135;
+  as advocate of antiquity, 204-205;
+  satirist, 155;
+  belief in freedom of the will, 498;
+  burial place of, 143;
+  desire for fame, his, 139;
+  influence of, 324;
+  influence of nature shown in works, 299;
+  life of, by Boccaccio, 329;
+  on Epicureanism, 496-497;
+  the Italian language, 378-379;
+  nobility, 360-361;
+  view of the sonnet, 312;
+  '_Vita Nuova_' of, 333.
+
+Decadence of oratory, 241, 242.
+
+'_Decades_,' the, of Sabellico, 248.
+
+'_Decameron_,' the, 459.
+
+'_De Genealogia Deorum_,' 205-207.
+
+Demeanour of individuals, 369.
+
+Descriptions of life in movement, 348-355.
+
+Description of nations and cities, 338-342;
+  outward man, 343-347.
+
+Difference of birth, loss of significance of, 354.
+
+Dignities, Church, not bestowed according to pedigree, 360.
+
+'_Discorsi_,' the, of Macchiavelli, 458.
+
+Domestic comfort, 376-377;
+  economy, 132, 402-405.
+
+Dress, importance attached to, 369-370;
+  regulations relating to, 370-371.
+
+
+E.
+
+Ecloques of Battista Mantovano, 352, 479.
+
+Economy, domestic, 132, 402-405.
+
+Education, equal, of sexes, 396;
+  private, 135.
+
+Emperor Charles IV., 17;
+  submission to the Pope, 18;
+  Frederick II., 5-7, 69;
+  III., 19;
+  Sigismund, 18, 19.
+
+Epicureanism, 496.
+
+Epigram, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270.
+
+Epigraph, the, 268, 269.
+
+Equalization of classes, 359-368.
+
+Erasmus, 254.
+
+Ercole I., Duke of Ferrara, 487-489.
+
+Este, House of, government of the, 46, 48;
+  Isabella of, 43, 44;
+  novels relating to, 51, 52, 53;
+  popular feeling towards, 49, 50.
+
+Van Eyck, Hubert, 302, 303;
+  Johann, 302, 303.
+
+Ezzelino da Romano, 6, 7.
+
+
+F.
+
+Fame, modern idea of, 139-153;
+  thirst for, evils of, 152-153.
+
+Federigo of Urbino, 99.
+
+Feltre, Vittorino da, 213-214.
+
+Female beauty, Firenzuola on, 345-347.
+
+Ferrante of Naples, 36, 37, 459-461.
+
+Ferrara, flourishing state of, 47;
+  sale of public offices at, 47, 48.
+
+Festivals, 406-428;
+  full development of, 407;
+  higher phase in life of people, 406.
+
+Fire-arms, adoption of, 98-99.
+
+Firenzuola on female beauty, 345-347.
+
+Flagellants, the, 485-486.
+
+Flogging, 403.
+
+Florence, 61-87;
+  general statistics of, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80;
+  home of scandal-mongers, 161;
+  life more secure in, 440-451;
+  and Venice, birthplaces of science of statistics, 69-72.
+
+Florentines, the, as perfectors of festivals, 408.
+
+Foscari, Francesco, torture of, 66.
+
+France, changed attitude of, 91, 92.
+
+Frederick II., Emperor, 5-7, 69;
+  III., 19.
+
+Frederick of Urbino, learning of, 227;
+  oratory of, 237.
+
+Freedom of will, belief in, 497.
+
+Friars, mendicant, 462.
+
+
+G.
+
+Gallerana, Cecilia, 386.
+
+Gamblers, professional, 436.
+
+Gambling on large scale, 436.
+
+Gaston de Foix, 309.
+
+Genoa, 86-87.
+
+Germano-Spanish army, advance of, 122.
+
+Ghibellines and Guelphs, political sonnets of, 312.
+
+Ghosts, 521-523.
+
+Giangaleazzo, 13-14.
+
+Girls, in society, absence of, 399.
+
+Girolamo Savonarola (see Savonarola).
+
+Godfrey of Strasburg, 309.
+
+Golden Spur, order of the, 53.
+
+Gonnella (jester), 157.
+
+Gonzaga, House of, of Mantua, 43;
+  Francesco, 43, 44;
+  Giovan Francesco, 213-214;
+  Isabella, 385.
+
+Government, divine, belief in, destroyed, 507.
+
+'_Gran Consilio_,' the, 66.
+
+Gratitude as an Italian virtue, 440.
+
+Greater dynasties, 35-54.
+
+Greek, the study of, 195-197.
+
+Guarino of Verono, 215.
+
+Guelphs and Ghibellines, political sonnets of, 312.
+
+Guicciardini, his opinion of the priesthood, 464.
+
+Gymnastics first taught as an art, 389.
+
+Gyraldus, historian of the humanists, 276.
+
+
+H.
+
+Hair, false, 372.
+
+Hermits, 471.
+
+Hierarchy, hostility to the, 458.
+
+Hieronymus of Siena, 471-472.
+
+'_Historia rerum Venetarum_,' the, of Bembo, 248.
+
+History, treated of in poetry, 261.
+
+Honour, the sentiment of, 433-435.
+
+Horses, breeding of, 295-296.
+
+Humanism in the Fourteenth Century, 203;
+  furtherers of, 217-229.
+
+Humanists, fall of, in 16th century, 272-281;
+  faults of, 276;
+  historian of, 276;
+  temptations of, 275-276.
+
+Human Nature, study of intellectual side of, 308-309.
+
+Husband, rights of, 442.
+
+Hypocrisy, freedom of Italians from, 439.
+
+
+I.
+
+'_Il Galateo_' of G. della Casa, 375-376.
+
+Illegitimacy, indifference to, 21, 22.
+
+Immorality, prevalent at beginning of 16th century, 432.
+
+Immortality, decline of belief in, 541.
+
+Individual, the, assertion of, 129, 130, 131;
+  the, and the Italian State, 129-138;
+  the perfecting of, 134-138.
+
+Individuality, keen perception of Italians for, 329.
+
+Infidelity in marriage, 440-441, 456.
+
+Inn-keepers, German, 375.
+
+Innocent VIII., Pope, election of, 107.
+
+Inquisitors and Science, 291;
+  detrimental to development of drama, 317.
+
+Instruments, musical, collections of 393.
+
+Intolerance, religious, 6.
+
+Isabella of Este, 43, 44.
+
+Italians, cleanliness of, 374;
+  discoverers of the Middle Ages, 286;
+  journeys of, 285-288;
+  judges as to personal beauty, 342;
+  supremacy of, in literary world, 151;
+  writing of, 193.
+
+Italy, a school for scandal, 160;
+  subject to Spain, 94.
+
+
+J.
+
+Jacopo della Marca, 467.
+
+'_Jerusalem delivered_' of Tasso, delineation of character in, 327.
+
+Jesting, a profession, 156.
+
+Jews, literary activity of the, 199-201.
+
+Journeys of the Italians, 285-288.
+
+Julius II., Pope, character of, 118;
+  election of, 117.
+
+
+K.
+
+Knighthood, passion for, 364.
+
+
+L.
+
+Laetus Pomponus, life of, 279-281.
+
+'_L'amor, diveno_,' 445, 446.
+
+Language as basis of social intercourse, 378-383.
+
+La�coon, the, discovery of, 148.
+
+Latin composition, history of, 252-253;
+  treatises, and History, 243-248.
+
+Latini, Brunetto, originator of new epoch in poetry, 310.
+
+Laurel wreath, the, coronation of poets with, 207-209.
+
+Law, absence of belief in, 447.
+
+League of Cambray, 68, 89.
+
+Leo X., Pope, buffoonery of, 157-158;
+  influence on humanism, 224-225;
+  love of jesters, 157;
+  policy of, 119, 120, 121.
+
+Letter-writing, object of, 232.
+
+Library Catalogues, 190, 191.
+
+Life, outward refinement of, 369-377.
+
+Lionardo da Vinci, 114.
+
+Lorenzo the Magnificent, 90, 95, 108;
+  as describer of country life, 350, 353;
+  parody of '_Inferno_' by, 159;
+  song of Bacchus and Ariadne, 427-428;
+  tact of, 386-387;
+  theistic belief of, 549-550.
+
+Ludovico Casella, death of, 57.
+
+Ludovico il Moro, 41, 42, 64, 93.
+
+Lutherans, danger from the, 121.
+
+Luther, Martin, 121.
+
+
+M.
+
+Macchiavelli, 81, 82, 84-86, 96;
+  as comedian, 320;
+  '_Discorsi il_' of, 458;
+  metrical history by, 263;
+  on Italian immorality, 432.
+
+Madonna, the worship of, 483-485.
+
+Magicians, 530-533;
+  burning of, 524.
+
+Magic, decline of, 537;
+  official, 533-535, 538;
+  practice of, 453.
+
+Malatesta, Pandolfo, 27;
+  Robert, 23, 26;
+  Sigismondo, 33, 228-229.
+
+Man, the discovery of, 308-327.
+
+Manetti, Giannozzo, 197, 225;
+  high character of, 218-220;
+  eloquence of, 240.
+
+Mantovano, Battista, eclogues of, 352, 479.
+
+Manucci, Aldo, 197.
+
+Mayia, Galeazzo, of Milan, 40, 41, 106;
+  Filippo, of Milan, 38-39.
+
+Mariolatry, 484-485.
+
+Massuccio, novels of, 459-460.
+
+Maximilian I., commencement of new Imperial policy under, 20.
+
+Medici, House of, charm over Florence, 220-221;
+  passion for tournaments, 366-367.
+
+Medici Giovanni, 119-121;
+  Lorenzo, on 'nobility,' 361, 362;
+  the younger, 85.
+
+Menageries, 296;
+  human, 293-295.
+
+'_Meneghino_,' the, Mask of Milan, 321.
+
+Mercenary troops, introduction of, 98.
+
+Middle Ages, works on, by humanists, 246, 247.
+
+Milano-Venetian War, 99.
+
+Mirandola, Pico della, 198-199, 202;
+  death of, 465;
+  on dignity of man, 354-355;
+  free will, 516;
+  refutation of astrology, 516.
+
+Mohammedanism, opposition to, 493.
+
+Monks, abuse of, in '_Decameron_,' 459;
+  as satirists, 465;
+  scandalous lives of, 460-461;
+  unpopularity of, 459.
+
+Montefeltro, House of, of Urbino, 43;
+  Federigo, 44-46;
+  Guido, in relation to astrology, 512.
+
+Montepulciano, Fra Francesco di, 473.
+
+Morality, 431-455.
+
+'_Morgante Maggiore_,' the, of Luigi Pulci, 323-324, 494-495.
+
+Murder, public sympathy on side of, 447.
+
+Music, 390-394.
+
+Mystery plays, 406-407, 411-413, 416.
+
+Mythological representations, 415, 416.
+
+Myths, new, 259.
+
+
+N.
+
+Naming of children, 250-251.
+
+Natural Science in Italy, 289-297.
+
+Nature, beauty in, discovery of, 298-307.
+
+Navagero, style of, 265.
+
+'_Nencia_,' the, of Politian, 354.
+
+'_Nipoti_,' the, 106, 107.
+
+Niccoli, Niccolo, 188-189, 217;
+  on 'nobility,' 361-362.
+
+Nicholas V., Pope, faith in higher learning of, 223.
+
+Novels of Bandello, 306;
+  of Massuccio, 459, 460.
+
+
+O.
+
+Oddi, the, and the Baglioni of Perugia, disputes between, 29.
+
+Old writers, influence of, on Italian mind, 187.
+
+Omens, belief in, 518-521.
+
+'_On the infelicity of the Scholar_,' by Piero Valeriano, 276-277.
+
+Orator, the, important position of, 233, 234-238.
+
+Oratory, Pulpit, 238.
+
+Oriental Studies, revival of, 197.
+
+'_Orlando Furioso_,' the, of Ariosto, 325, 326, 327.
+
+Outward refinement of life, 369-377.
+
+
+P.
+
+Palingenius, Marcellus, '_Zodiac of Life_,' of, 264.
+
+Painting, rustic, of Jacopo Bassano, 354.
+
+Pandolfini, Agnolo, 132;
+  on home management, 402-404.
+
+Pantomime, the, 407, 416, 417.
+
+Papacy, the, and its dangers, 102-125;
+  corruption in, 106, 107, 109.
+
+Papal Court, calumny rife at, 161;
+  State, spirit of reform in, 123;
+  subjection of, 110.
+
+Pardons, sale of, 108.
+
+Parody, beginnings of, 263.
+
+Peasant life, poetical treatment of, 351-352.
+
+Perfect man of society, the, 388-394.
+
+Personal faith, 491-492.
+
+Petrarch and Laura, 151;
+  ascent of Mount Ventoux by, 301-302;
+  as geographer, 300;
+  contempt of astrologers, his, 515;
+  fixer of form of sonnet, 310;
+  ideal prince of, 9-10;
+  influence of nature on, 300, 301;
+  in Rome, 177-178;
+  life of, 313-314;
+  objection to fame, his, 141-142;
+  on tournaments, 365;
+  representative of antiquity, the, 205.
+
+Petty tyrannies, 28-34.
+
+Piacenza, devastation of, 101.
+
+Piccinino, Giacomo, 25, 26;
+  Jacopo, 99.
+
+Plautus, plays of, representations of, 255, 317-319.
+
+Poems, didactic, 264.
+
+Poetry, elegiac, 264, 266, 267;
+  epic, 321-323, 325;
+  Italian, second great age of, 305-306;
+  Latin modern, 257-271;
+  lyric, 306;
+  Maccaronic, 270, 271;
+  precursor of plastic arts, the, 312.
+
+Poggio, on '_Knighthood_,' 365;
+  on '_Nobility_,' 361-362.
+
+Policy, Foreign, of Italian states, 88-97.
+
+Politeness, Manual of, by G. della Casa, 375-376.
+
+Politics, Florentine, 73-74.
+
+Politian, as letter writer, 233;
+  '_Canzone Zingaresca_' of, 354.
+
+Pope Adrian VI., satires against, 162-164.
+
+Pope Alexander VI., 109-117;
+  death of, 117.
+
+Pope Clement VII., deliverance of, 123.
+
+Pope Innocent VIII., election of, 107.
+
+Pope Nicholas V., 188.
+
+Pope Paul II., 105;
+  attempts as peacemaker, 438;
+  personal head of republic of letters, 223;
+  priestly narrowness of, 505.
+
+Pope Paul III., 123.
+
+Pope Pius II., 105;
+  as antiquarian, 180-181;
+  as descriptive writer, 349;
+  believer in witches, 526-527;
+  celebration of feast of Corpus Christi by, 414;
+  contempt for astrology and magic, 508;
+  eloquence of, 235, 240;
+  love of nature, 303-305;
+  views on miracles, 501.
+
+Pope Sixtus IV., 105, 106, 107.
+
+Porcaro, Stefano, conspiracy of, 104.
+
+Porcello, Gian, Antonio dei Pandori, 99, 100.
+
+Poggio, walks through Rome of, 176.
+
+Preachers of repentance, 466-479;
+  personal influence of, 458.
+
+Printing, discovery of, reception of, 194.
+
+Processions, 406-407, 418-425.
+
+Prodigies, belief in, 520-521.
+
+Prophets, honour accorded to genuine, 467.
+
+Public worship, neglect of, 485.
+
+Pulci, epic poet, 323-325.
+
+'_Pulcinell_,' the mask of Naples, 321.
+
+
+R.
+
+Rambaldoni, Vittore dai, 213-214.
+
+Rangona, Bianca, 336.
+
+Raphael, 30;
+  appeal of, for restoration of ancient Rome, 184;
+  original subject of his picture, '_Deposition_,' 32.
+
+Rationalism, 500, 501.
+
+Reformation, German, 122;
+  effects on Papacy, 124.
+
+Regattas, Venetian, 390.
+
+Relics, pride taken in, 142-145.
+
+Religion in daily life, 456-489;
+  spirit of the Renaissance, and, 491-506.
+
+Religious tolerance, 490, 492, 493;
+  revivals, epidemics of, 485.
+
+Renaissance, the, a new birth, 175;
+  and the spirit of religion, 491-506.
+
+Repentance, preachers of, 466-479.
+
+Reproduction of antiquity: Latin correspondence and orations, 230-242.
+
+Republics, the, 61-87.
+
+Revivals, epidemics of religious, 485.
+
+Riario, Girolamo, 107;
+  Pietro, Cardinal, 106.
+
+Rienzi, Cola di, 15, 176.
+
+Rimini, House of, the, 29;
+  fall of, 33.
+
+Rites, Church, sense of dependence on, 465.
+
+Roberto da Lecce, 467, 470.
+
+Rome, assassins in, 109;
+  city of ruins, 177-186;
+  first topographical study of, 179;
+  Poggio's walks through, 176.
+
+Ruins in landscape gardening result of Christian legend, 186.
+
+
+S.
+
+'_Sacra_,' the, of Pietro Bembo, 259.
+
+Sadoleto, Jacopo, 231.
+
+Saints, reverence for relics of, 481-482;
+  worship of, 485.
+
+Sal�, Gabriella da, belief of, 502.
+
+Sannazaro, 151, 260, 265-267;
+  fame of, 261, 268.
+
+Sanctuaries of Italy, 486.
+
+Sansecondo, Giovan Maria, 392;
+  Jacopo, 392.
+
+Satires, Monks the authors of, 465.
+
+Savonarola, Girolamo, 467, 473-479;
+  belief in d�mons, 531;
+  eloquence of, 474;
+  funeral oration on, 475;
+  reform of Dominican monasteries due to, 474.
+
+Scaliger, 254.
+
+Scarampa, Camilla, 386.
+
+Science, national sympathy with, 289-292;
+  natural, in Italy, 289-297.
+
+'_Scrittori_' (copyists), 192-193.
+
+Secretaries, papal, important position of, 231.
+
+Sforza, house of, 24;
+  Alessandro, 28;
+  Francesco, 24, 25, 26, 39, 40, 99;
+  Galeazzo Maria, assassination of, 57-58.
+
+Sforza, Ippolita, 385;
+  Jacopo, 24, 25.
+
+Shakespeare, William, 316.
+
+Siena, 86.
+
+Sigismund, Emperor, 18, 19.
+
+Sixtus IV., Pope, 105, 106, 107.
+
+Slavery in Italy, 296.
+
+Society, higher forms of, 384-387;
+  ideal man of, 388-394;
+  in, Italian models to other countries, 389.
+
+Sociniaris, 549.
+
+Sonnet, the, 310-311, 312.
+
+Sonnets of Boccaccio, 314;
+  of Dante, 312.
+
+Spain, changed attitude of, 91, 92.
+
+Spaniards, detrimental to development of drama, 317.
+
+Spanish-Germano Army, advance of, 122.
+
+Spanish influence, jealousy under, 445.
+
+Speeches, subject of public, 239-241.
+
+Spur, golden, order of, 53.
+
+Spiritual description in poetry, 308-327.
+
+Statistics, science of, birthplace of, 69-72.
+
+St. Peter's at Rome, reconstruction of., 119.
+
+Stentorello, the mask of Florence, 321.
+
+Superstition, mixture of ancient and modern, 507-540.
+
+Sylvius �neas, see Pope Pius II.
+
+
+T.
+
+Taxation, 5, 8, 13, 35, 36, 47.
+
+Teano, Cardinal, 255.
+
+'_Telesma_,' the, 533-535.
+
+'_Telestae_,' the, 533-535.
+
+Terence, plays of, representation of, 255.
+
+'_Teseide_,' the, of Boccaccio, 259.
+
+Tiburzio, 105.
+
+Tolerance, religious, 490, 492, 493.
+
+Torso, the, discovery of, 184.
+
+Tragedy in time of Renaissance, 315-316, 317.
+
+Treatise, the, 243.
+
+'_Trionfo_,' the, 407, 419, 420, 423;
+  of Beatrice, 419-420.
+
+'_Trionfi_,' the, of Petrarch, 324.
+
+'_Trovatori_,' the, 310.
+
+_Trovatori della transizione_, the, 311.
+
+Turks, conspiracies with the, 92, 93.
+
+Tuscan dialect basis of new national speech, 379.
+
+Tyranny, opponents of, 55-60.
+
+Tyrannies, petty, 28-34.
+
+
+U.
+
+Uberti, Fazio degli, vision of, 178.
+
+Universities and Schools, 210-216.
+
+
+V.
+
+Valeriano, P., on the infelicity of the scholar, 276-277.
+
+Vatican, Library of, founding of, 188.
+
+'_Vendetta_,' the, 437-440.
+
+Vengeance, Italian, 436-400.
+
+Venetian-Milano war, 99.
+
+Venice, 61-87;
+  and Florence, birthplace of science of statistics, 69-72.
+
+Venice, processions in, 73;
+  public institutions in, 63;
+  relation of, to literature, 70;
+  stability of, cause of, 65-66;
+  statistics, general of, 69, 70, 71, 78.
+
+Villani, Giovanni, 73;
+  Matteo, 76.
+
+Vinci, Lionardo da, 138.
+
+Violin, the, 392.
+
+Visconti, the, 10, 15, 18, 22, 38, 40;
+  Giangaleazzo, 513;
+  Giovan Maria, assassination of, 57, 58.
+
+'_Vita Nuova_,' the, of Dante, 333.
+
+'_Vita Sobria_,' the, of Luigi Cornaro, 244.
+
+Vitelli, Paolo, 99.
+
+Vitruvius, revival of, and Ciceronianism, analogy between, 156.
+
+Venus of the Vatican, discovery of, 184.
+
+'_Versi Sciolti_,' the, origin of, 310.
+
+
+W.
+
+War as a work of art, 98-101.
+
+Wit, analysis of, 159-160;
+  first appearance of, in literature, 154;
+  modern, and satire, 154-168.
+
+Witch of Gaeta, the, 525.
+
+Witchcraft, 524-530.
+
+Witches, 524, 525, 526;
+  burning of, 524, 526, 528.
+
+Women, Ariosto on, 395;
+  equality of, with men, 395;
+  function of, 398;
+  heroism of, 398;
+  ideal for, 398;
+  position of, 395-401.
+
+Worship, public, neglect of, 485.
+
+
+Z.
+
+Zampante of Lucca, director of police, 50.
+
+'_Zodiac of Life_,' of Marcellus Palingenius, 264.
+
+
+                       GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
+                   LONDON: 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
+                   CAPE TOWN: 73 ST. GEORGE'S STREET
+                SYDNEY, N.S.W.: 218-222 CLARENCE STREET
+                WELLINGTON, N.Z.: 110-112 LAMBTON QUAY
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _History of Architecture_, by Franz Kugler. (The first half of the
+fourth volume, containing the 'Architecture and Decoration of the
+Italian Renaissance,' is by the Author.)
+
+[2] Macchiavelli, _Discorsi_, 1. i. c. 12. 'E la cagione, che la Italia
+non sia in quel medesimo termine, ne habbia anch' ella � una republica �
+un prencipe che la governi, � solamente la Chiesa; perch� havendovi
+habitato e tenuto imperio temporale non � stata si potente ne di tal
+virt�, che l'habbia potuto occupare il restante d'Italia e farsene
+prencipe.'
+
+[3] The rulers and their dependents were together called 'lo stato,' and
+this name afterwards acquired the meaning of the collective existence of
+a territory.
+
+[4] C. Winckelmann, _De Regni Siculi Administratione qualis fuerit
+regnante Friderico II._, Berlin. 1859. A. del Vecchio, _La legislazione
+di Federico II. imperatore_. Turin, 1874. Frederick II. has been fully
+and thoroughly discussed by Winckelmann and Schirrmacher.
+
+[5] Baumann, _Staatslehre des Thomas von Aquino_. Leipzig, 1873, esp.
+pp. 136 sqq.
+
+[6] _Cento Novelle Antiche_, ed. 1525. For Frederick, Nov. 2, 21, 22,
+23, 24, 30, 53, 59, 90, 100; for Ezzelino, Nov. 31, and esp. 84.
+
+[7] Scardeonius, _De Urbis Patav. Antiqu. in Gr�vius_, Thesaurus, vi.
+iii. p. 259.
+
+[8] Sismondi, _Hist. de R�p. Italiennes_, iv. p. 420; viii. pp. 1 sqq.
+
+[9] Franco Sacchetti, _Novelle_ (61, 62).
+
+[10] Dante, it is true, is said to have lost the favour of this prince,
+which impostors knew how to keep. See the important account in Petrarch,
+_De Rerum Memorandarum_, lib. ii. 3, 46.
+
+[11] Petrarca, _Epistol� Seniles_, lib. xiv. 1, to Francesco di Carrara
+(Nov. 28, 1373). The letter is sometimes printed separately with the
+title, 'De Republica optime administranda,' e.g. Bern, 1602.
+
+[12] It is not till a hundred years later that the princess is spoken of
+as the mother of the people. Comp. Hieron. Crivelli's funeral oration on
+Bianca Maria Visconti, in Muratori, _Scriptores Rerum Italicarum_, xxv.
+col. 429. It was by way of parody of this phrase that a sister of Sixtus
+IV. is called in Jac Volateranus (Murat., xxiii. col. 109) 'mater
+ecclesi�.'
+
+[13] With the parenthetical request, in reference to a previous
+conversation, that the prince would again forbid the keeping of pigs in
+the streets of Padua, as the sight of them was unpleasing, especially
+for strangers, and apt to frighten the horses.
+
+[14] Petrarca, _Rerum Memorandar._, lib. iii. 2, 66.--Matteo I. Visconti
+and Guido della Torre, then ruling in Milan, are the persons referred
+to.
+
+[15] Matteo Villani, v. 81: the secret murder of Matteo II. (Maffiolo)
+Visconti by his brother.
+
+[16] Filippo Villani, _Istorie_, xi. 101. Petrarch speaks in the same
+tone of the tyrants dressed out 'like altars at a festival.'--The
+triumphal procession of Castracane at Lucca is described minutely in his
+life by Tegrimo, in Murat., xi., col, 1340.
+
+[17] _De Vulgari Eloqui_, i. c. 12: ... 'qui non heroico more, sed
+plebeo sequuntur superbiam.'
+
+[18] This we find first in the fifteenth century, but their
+representations are certainly based on the beliefs of earlier times: L.
+B. Alberti, _De re �dif._, v. 3.--Franc. di Giorgio, 'Trattato,' in
+Della Valle, Lettere Sanesi, iii. 121.
+
+[19] Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 61.
+
+[20] Matteo Villani, vi. 1.
+
+[21] The Paduan passport office about the middle of the fourteenth
+century is referred to by Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 117, in the words,
+'quelli delle bullete.' In the last ten years of the reign of Frederick
+II., when the strictest control was exercised on the personal conduct of
+his subjects, this system must have been very highly developed.
+
+[22] Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 247 sqq. Recent Italian writers
+have observed that the Visconti have still to find a historian who,
+keeping the just mean between the exaggerated praises of contemporaries
+(_e.g._ Petrarch) and the violent denunciations of later political
+(Guelph) opponents, will pronounce a final judgment upon them.
+
+[23] E.g. of Paolo Giovio: _Elogia Virorum bellic� virtute illustrium_,
+Basel, 1575, p. 85, in the life of Bernab�. Giangal. (_Vita_, pp. 86
+sqq.) is for Giovio 'post Theodoricum omnium pr�stantissimus.' Comp.
+also Jovius, _Vit� xii. Vicecomitum Mediolani principum_, Paris, 1549.
+pp. 165 sqq.
+
+[24] Corio, fol. 272, 285.
+
+[25] Cagnola, in the _Archiv. Stor._, iii. p. 23.
+
+[26] So Corio, fol. 286, and Poggio, _Hist. Florent._ iv. in Murat. xx.
+col 290.--Cagnola (loc. cit.) speaks of his designs on the imperial
+crown. See too the sonnet in Trucchi, _Poesie Ital. ined._, ii. p. 118:
+
+    "Stan le citt� lombarde con le chiave
+     In man per darle a voi ... etc.
+     Roma vi chiamo: Cesar mio novello
+     Io sono ignuda, e l'anima pur vive:
+     Or mi coprite col vostro mantello," etc.
+
+
+[27] Corio, fol. 301 and sqq. Comp. Ammian. Marcellin., xxix. 3.
+
+[28] So Paul. Jovius, _Elogia_, pp. 88-92, Jo. Maria Philippus.
+
+[29] De Gingins, _D�p�ches des Ambassadeurs Milanais_, Paris and Geneva
+1858, ii. pp. 200 sqq. (N. 213). Comp. ii. 3 (N. 144) and ii. 212 sqq.
+(N. 218).
+
+[30] Paul. Jovius, _Elogia_, pp. 156 sqq. Carolus, Burg. dux.
+
+[31] This compound of force and intellect is called by Macchiavelli
+_Virt�_, and is quite compatible with _scelleratezza_. E.g. _Discorsi_,
+i. 10. in speaking of Sep. Severus.
+
+[32] On this point Franc. Vettori, _Arch. Stor._ vi. p. 29. 3 sqq.: 'The
+investiture at the hands of a man who lives in Germany, and has nothing
+of the Roman Emperor about him but the empty name, cannot turn a
+scoundrel into the real lord of a city.'
+
+[33] M. Villani, iv. 38, 39, 44, 56, 74, 76, 92; v. 1, 2, 14-16, 21, 22,
+36, 51, 54. It is only fair to consider that dislike of the Visconti may
+have led to worse representations than the facts justified. Charles IV.
+is once (iv. 74) highly praised by Villani.
+
+[34] It was an Italian, Fazio degli Uberti (_Dittamondo_, l. vi. cap.
+5--about 1360) who recommended to Charles IV. a crusade to the Holy
+Land. The passage is one of the best in this poem, and in other respects
+characteristic. The poet is dismissed from the Holy Sepulchre by an
+insolent Turk:
+
+    'Con passi lunghi e con la testa bassa
+     Oltre passai e dissi: ecco vergogna
+     Del cristian che'l saracin qui lassa!
+     Poscia al Pastor (the Pope) mi volsi far rampogna
+     E tu ti stai, che sei vicar di Cristo,
+     Co' frati tuoi a ingrassar la carogna?
+
+     Similimente dissi a quel sofisto (Charles IV.)
+     Che sta in Buemme (Bohemia) a piantar vigne e fichi
+     E che non cura di si caro acquisto:
+     Che fai? Perch� non segui i primi antichi
+     Cesari de' Romani, e che non segui,
+     Dico, gli Otti, i Corradi, i Federichi?
+     E che pur tieni questo imperio in tregui?
+     E se non hai lo cuor d'esser Augusto,
+     Che non rifiuti? o che non ti dilegui?' etc.
+
+Some eight years earlier, about 1352, Petrarch had written (to Charles
+IV., _Epist. Fam._, lib. xii. ep. 1, ed. Fracassetti, vol. ii. p. 160):
+'Simpliciter igitur et aperte ... pro maturando negotio terr� sanct� ...
+oro tuo egentem auxilio quam primum invisere velis Ausoniam.'
+
+[35] See for details Vespasiano Fiorent. ed. Mai, _Specilegium Romanum_,
+vol. i. p. 54. Comp. 150 and Panormita, _De Dictis et Factis Alfonsi_,
+lib. iv. nro. 4.
+
+[36] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 217 sqq.
+
+[37] 'Haveria voluto scortigare la brigata.' Giov. Maria Filelfo, then
+staying at Bergamo, wrote a violent satire 'in vulgus equitum auro
+notatorum.' See his biography in Favre, _M�langes d'Histoire
+litt�raire_, 1856, i. p. 10.
+
+[38] _Annales Estenses_, in Murat. xx. col. 41.
+
+[39] Poggii, _Hist. Florent. pop._ l. vii. in Murat. col. 381. This view
+is in accordance with the anti-monarchical sentiments of many of the
+humanists of that day. Comp. the evidence given by Bezold, 'Lehre von
+der Volkssouverainit�t w�hrend des Mittelalters,' _Hist. Ztschr._ bd.
+36, s. 365.
+
+[40] Some years later the Venetian Lionardo Giustiniani blames the word
+'imperator' as unclassical and therefore unbecoming the German emperor,
+and calls the Germans barbarians, on account of their ignorance of the
+language and manners of antiquity. The cause of the Germans was defended
+by the humanist H. Bebel. See L. Geiger, in the _Allgem. Deutsche
+Biogr._ ii. 196.
+
+[41] Senarega, _De reb. Genuens_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 575.
+
+[42] Enumerated in the _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 203.
+Comp. Pic. ii. _Comment._ ii. p. 102, ed. Rome, 1584.
+
+[43] Marin Sanudo, _Vita de' Duchi di Venezia_, in Murat. xxii. col.
+1113.
+
+[44] Varchi, _Stor. Fiorent._ i. p. 8.
+
+[45] Soriano, _Relazione di Roma_, 1533, in Tommaso Gar. _Relaz. della
+Corte di Roma_, (in Alberi, _Relaz. degli ambasc. Veneti_, ii. ser.
+iii.).
+
+[46] For what follows, see Canestrini, in the Introduction to vol. xv.
+of the _Archiv. Stor._
+
+[47] For him, see Shepherd-Tonelli, _Vita di Piggio_, App. pp.
+viii.-xvi.
+
+[48] Cagnola, _Archiv. Stor._ iii. p. 28: 'Et (Filippo Maria) da lei
+(Beatr.) ebbe molto tesoro e dinari, e tutte le giente d'arme del dicto
+Facino, che obedivano a lei.'
+
+[49] Inpressura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1911. For the
+alternatives which Macchiavelli puts before the victorious Condottiere,
+see _Discorsi_, i. 30. After the victory he is either to hand over the
+army to his employer and wait quietly for his reward, or else to win the
+soldiers to his own side to occupy the fortresses and to punish the
+prince 'di quella ingratitudine che esso gli userebbe.'
+
+[50] Comp. Barth. Facius, _De Viv. Ill._ p. 64, who tells us that C.
+commanded an army of 60,000 men. It is uncertain whether the Venetians
+did not poison Alviano in 1516, because he, as Prato says in _Arch.
+Stor._ iii. p. 348, aided the French too zealously in the battle of S.
+Donato. The Republic made itself Colleoni's heir, and after his death in
+1475 formally confiscated his property. Comp. Malipiero, _Annali
+Veneti_, in _Arch. Stor._ vii. i. 244. It was liked when the Condottieri
+invested their money in Venice, ibid. p. 351.
+
+[51] Cagnola, in _Arch. Stor._ iii. pp. 121 sqq.
+
+[52] At all events in Paul Jovius, _Vita Magni Sforti�_, Rom. 1539,
+(dedicated to the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza), one of the most attractive
+of his biographies.
+
+[53] �n. Sylv. _Comment. de Dictis et Factis Alfonsi_, Opera, ed. 1538,
+p. 251: Novitate gaudens Italia nihil habet stabile, nullum in e� vetus
+regnum, facile hic ex servis reges videmus.'
+
+[54] Pii, ii. _Comment._ i. 46; comp. 69.
+
+[55] Sismondi, x. 258; Corio. fol. 412, where Sforza is accused of
+complicity, as he feared danger to his own son from P.'s popularity.
+_Storia Bresciana_, in Murat. xxi. col. 209. How the Venetian
+Condottiere Colleoni was tempted in 1466, is told by Malipiero _Annali
+Veneti, Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p. 210. The Florentine exiles offered to
+make him Duke of Milan if he would expel from Florence their enemy,
+Piero de' Medici.
+
+[56] Allegretti, _Diari Sanesi_, in Murat. xxiii. p. 811.
+
+[57] _Orationes Philelphi_, ed. Venet. 1492, fol. 9, in the funeral
+oration on Francesco.
+
+[58] Marin Sanudo, _Vita del Duchi di Venezia_, in Murat. xxii. col.
+1241. See Reumont, _Lorenzo von Medici_ (Lpz. 1874), ii. pp. 324-7, and
+the authorities there quoted.
+
+[59] Malipiero, _Ann. Venet., Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p. 407.
+
+[60] _Chron. Eugubinum_, in Murat. xxi. col. 972.
+
+[61] _Vespas. Fiorent._ p. 148.
+
+[62] _Archiv. Stor._ xvi., parte i. et ii., ed. Bonaini, Fabretti,
+Polidori.
+
+[63] Julius II. conquered Perugia with ease in 1506, and compelled
+Gianpaolo Baglione to submit. The latter, as Macchiavelli (_Discorsi_,
+i. c. 27) tells us, missed the chance of immortality by not murdering
+the Pope.
+
+[64] Varelin _Stor. Fiorent._ i. pp. 242 sqq.
+
+[65] Comp. (inter. al.) Jovian. Pontan. _De Immanitate_, cap. 17.
+
+[66] Malipiero, _Ann. Venet., Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. pp. 498 sqq. After
+vainly searching for his beloved, whose father had shut her up in a
+monastery he threatened the father, burnt the monastery and other
+buildings, and committed many acts of violence.
+
+[67] Lil. Greg. Giraldus, _De Sepulchris ac vario Sepeliendi Ritu_.
+_Opera_ ed. Bas. 1580, i. pp. 640 sqq. Later edition by J. Faes,
+Helmst�dt, 1676 Dedication and postscript of Gir. 'ad Carolum Miltz
+Germanum,' in these editions without date; neither contains the passage
+given in the text.--In 1470 a catastrophe in miniature had already
+occurred in the same family (Galeotto had had his brother Antonio Maria
+thrown into prison). Comp. _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 225.
+
+[68] Jovian. Pontan. Opp. ed. Basile�, 1538, t. i. _De Liberalitate_,
+cap. 19, 29, and _De Obedientia_, l. 4. Comp. Sismondi, x. p. 78, and
+Panormita, _De Dictis et Factis Alphonsi_, lib. i. nro. 61, iv. nro. 42.
+
+[69] Tristano Caracciolo. 'De Fernando qui postea rex Aragonum fuit,
+ejusque posteris,' in Muratori XXII.; Jovian Pontanus, _De Prudentia_,
+l. iv.; _De Magnanimitate_, l. i.; _De Liberalitate_, cap. 29, 36; _De
+Immanitate_, cap. 8. Cam. Porzio, _Congiura dei Baroni del Regno de
+Napoli contro il re Ferdinando I._, Pisa, 1818, cap. 29, 36, new
+edition, Naples, 1859, _passim_; Comines, Charles VIII., with the
+general characteristics of the Arragonese. See for further information
+as to Ferrante's works for his people, the _Regis Ferdinandi primi
+Instructionum liber_, 1486-87, edited by Scipione Vopicella, which would
+dispose us to moderate to some extent the harsh judgment which has been
+passed upon him.
+
+[70] Paul. Jovius. _Histor._ i. p. 14. in the speech of a Milanese
+ambassador; _Diario Ferrarese_, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 294.
+
+[71] He lived in the closest intimacy with Jews, e.g. Isaac Abranavel,
+who fled with him to Messina. Comp. Zunz, _Zur. Gesch. und Lit._
+(Berlin, 1845) s. 529.
+
+[72] Petri Candidi Decembrii Vita Phil. Mari� Vicecomitis, in Murat.
+xx., of which however Jovius (_Vit� xii. Vicecomitum_ p. 186) says not
+without reason: 'Quum omissis laudibus qu� in Philippo celebrand�
+fuerant, vitia, notaret.' Guarino praises this prince highly. Rosmino
+Guarini, ii. p. 75. Jovius, in the above-mentioned work (p. 186), and
+Jov. Pontanus, _De Liberalitate_, ii. cap. 28 and 31, take special
+notice of his generous conduct to the captive Alfonso.
+
+[73] Were the fourteen marble statues of the saints in the Citadel of
+Milan executed by him? See _History of the Frundsbergs_, fol. 27.
+
+[74] It troubled him: _quod aliquando 'non esse' necesse esset_.
+
+[75] Corio, fol. 400; Cagnola, in _Archiv. Stor._ iii. p. 125.
+
+[76] _Pii II. Comment._ iii. p. 130. Comp. ii. 87. 106. Another and
+rather darker estimate of Sforza's fortune is given by Caracciolo, _De
+Varietate Fortun�_, in Murat. xxii. col. 74. See for the opposite view
+the praises of Sforza's luck in the _Oratio parentalis de divi Francesci
+Sphorti� felicitate_, by Filelfo (the ready eulogist of any master who
+paid him), who sung, without publishing, the exploits of Francesco in
+the Sforziad. Even Decembrio, the moral and literary opponent of
+Filelfo, celebrates Sforza's fortune in his biography (_Vita Franc.
+Sphorti�_, in Murat. xx.). The astrologers said: 'Francesco Sforza's
+star brings good luck to a man, but ruin to his descendants.' Arluni,
+_De Bello Veneto_, libri vi. in Gr�vius, _Thes. Antiqu. et Hist.
+Italic�_, v. pars iii. Comp. also Barth. Facius, _De Vir. III._ p. 67.
+
+[77] Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. pp. 216 sqq. 221-4.
+
+[78] Important documents as to the murder of Galeazzo Maria Sforza are
+published by G. D'Adda in the _Archivio Storico Lombardo Giornale della
+Societ� Lombarda_, vol. ii. (1875), pp. 284-94. 1. A Latin epitaph on
+the murderer Lampugnano, who lost his life in the attempt, and whom the
+writer represents as saying: 'Hic lubens quiesco, �ternum inquam facinus
+monumentumque ducibus, principibus, regibus, qui modo sunt quique mox
+futura trahantur ne quid adversus justitiam faciant dicantve; 2. A Latin
+letter of Domenico de' Belli, who, when eleven years old, was present at
+the murder; 3. The 'lamento' of Galeazzo Maria, in which, after calling
+upon the Virgin Mary and relating the outrage committed upon him, he
+summons his wife and children, his servants and the Italian cities which
+obeyed him, to bewail his fate, and sends forth his entreaty to all the
+nations of the earth, to the nine muses and the gods of antiquity, to
+set up a universal cry of grief.
+
+[79] _Chron. Venetum_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 65.
+
+[80] Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. p. 492. Comp. 482,
+562.
+
+[81] His last words to the same man, Bernardino da Corte, are to be
+found, certainty with oratorical decorations, but perhaps agreeing in
+the main with the thoughts of the Moor, in Senarega, Murat. xxiv. col.
+567.
+
+[82] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 336, 367, 369. The people
+believed he was forming a treasure.
+
+[83] Corio, fol. 448. The after effects of this state of things are
+clearly recognisable in those of the novels and introductions of
+Bandello which relate to Milan.
+
+[84] Amoretti, _Memorie Storiche sulla Vita Ecc. di Lionardo da Vinci_,
+pp. 35 sqq., pp. 83 sqq. Here we may also mention the Moor's efforts for
+the improvement of the university of Pavia.
+
+[85] See his sonnets in Trucchi, _Poesie inedite_.
+
+[86] Prato, in the _Arch. Stor._ iii. 298. Comp. 302.
+
+[87] Born 1466, betrothed to Isabella, herself six years of age, in
+1480, suc. 1484; m. 1490, d. 1519. Isabella's death, 1539. Her sons,
+Federigo (1519-1540), made Duke in 1530, and the famous Ferrante
+Gonzaga. What follows is taken from the correspondence of Isabella, with
+Appendices, _Archiv. Stor._, append., tom. ii. communicated by d'Arco.
+See the same writer, _Delle Arti e degli Artifici di Mantova_, Mant.
+1857-59, 2 vols. The catalogue of the collection has been repeatedly
+printed. Portrait and biography of Isabella in Didot, _Alde Manuce_,
+Paris, 1875, pp. lxi-lxviii. See also below, part ii. chapter 2.
+
+[88] Franc. Vettori, in the _Arch. Stor._ Append., tom. vi. p. 321. For
+Federigo, see _Vespas. Fiorent._ pp. 132 sqq. and Prendilacqua, _Vita di
+Vittorino da Feltre_, pp. 48-52. V. endeavoured to calm the ambitious
+youth Federigo, then his scholar, with the words: 'Tu quoque C�sar
+eris.' There is much literary information respecting him in, e.g.,
+Favre, _M�langes d'Hist. Lit._ i. p. 125, note 1.
+
+[89] See below, part iii. chapter 3.
+
+[90] Castiglione, _Cortigiano_, l. i.
+
+[91] Petr. Bembus, _De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio deque Elizabetha Gonzaga
+Urbini ducibus_, Venetis, 1530. Also in Bembo's Works, Basel, 1566, i.
+pp. 529-624. In the form of a dialogue; contains among other things, the
+letter of Frid. Fregosus and the speech of Odaxius on Guido's life and
+death.
+
+[92] What follows is chiefly taken from the _Annales Estenses_, in
+Murat. xx. and the _Diario Ferrarese_, Murat. xxiv
+
+[93] See Bandello, i. nov. 32.
+
+[94] _Diario Ferrar._ l. c. col. 347.
+
+[95] Paul. Jov. _Vita Alfonsi ducis_, ed. Flor. 1550, also an Italian by
+Giovanbattista Gelli, Flor. 1553.
+
+[96] Paulus Jovius, l. c.
+
+[97] The journey of Leo X. when Cardinal, may be also mentioned here.
+Comp. Paul. Jov. _Vita Leonis X._ lib. i. His purpose was less serious,
+and directed rather to amusement and knowledge of the world; but the
+spirit is wholly modern. No Northerner then travelled with such objects.
+
+[98] _Diar. Ferr._ in Murat. xxiv. col. 232 and 240.
+
+[99] Jovian. Pontan. _De Liberalitate_, cap. 28.
+
+[100] Giraldi, _Hecatomithi_, vi. nov. 1 (ed. 1565, fol. 223 _a_).
+
+[101] Vasari, xii. 166, _Vita di Michelangelo_.
+
+[102] As early as 1446 the members of the House of Gonzaga followed the
+corpse of Vittorino da Feltre.
+
+[103] Capitolo 19, and in the _Opere Minore_, ed. Lemonnier, vol. i. p.
+425, entitled Elegia 17. Doubtless the cause of this death (above, p.
+46) was unknown to the young poet, then 19 years old.
+
+[104] The novels in the _Hecatomithi_ of Giraldi relating to the House
+of Este are to be found, with one exception (i. nov. 8), in the 6th
+book, dedicated to Francesco of Este, Marchese della Massa, at the
+beginning of the second part of the whole work, which is inscribed to
+Alfonso II. 'the fifth Duke of Ferrara.' The 10th book, too, is
+specially dedicated to him, but none of the novels refer to him
+personally, and only one to his predecessor Hercules I.; the rest to
+Hercules I. 'the second Duke,' and Alfonso I. 'the third Duke of
+Ferrara.' But the stories told of these princes are for the most part
+not love tales. One of them (i. nov. 8) tells of the failure of an
+attempt made by the King of Naples to induce Hercules of Este to deprive
+Borso of the government of Ferrara; another (vi. nov. 10) describes
+Ercole's high-spirited treatment of conspirators. The two novels that
+treat of Alfonso I. (vi. nov. 2, 4), in the latter of which he only
+plays a subordinate part, are also, as the title of the book shows and
+as the dedication to the above-named Francesco explains more fully,
+accounts of 'atti di cortes�a' towards knights and prisoners, but not
+towards women, and only the two remaining tales are love-stories. They
+are of such a kind as can be told during the lifetime of the prince;
+they set forth his nobleness and generosity, his virtue and
+self-restraint. Only one of them (vi. nov. 1) refers to Hercules I., who
+was dead long before the novels were compiled, and only one to the
+Hercules II. then alive (b. 1508, d. 1568) son of Lucrezia Borgia,
+husband of Renata, of whom the poet says: 'Il giovane, che non meno ha
+benigno l'animo, che cortese l'aspetto, come gi� il vedemmo in Roma, nel
+tempo, ch'egli, in vece del padre, venne � Papa Hadriano.' The tale
+about him is briefly as follows:--Lucilla, the beautiful daughter of a
+poor but noble widow, loves Nicandro, but cannot marry him, as the
+lover's father forbids him to wed a portionless maiden. Hercules, who
+sees the girl and is captivated by her beauty, finds his way, through
+the connivance of her mother, into her bedchamber, but is so touched by
+her beseeching appeal that he respects her innocence, and, giving her a
+dowry, enables her to marry Nicandro.
+
+In Bandello, ii. nov. 8 and 9 refer to Alessandro Medici, 26 to Mary of
+Aragon, iii. 26, iv. 13 to Galeazzo Sforza, iii. 36, 37 to Henry VIII.
+of England, ii. 27 to the German Emperor Maximilian. The emperor, 'whose
+natural goodness and more than imperial generosity are praised by all
+writers,' while chasing a stag is separated from his followers, loses
+his way, and at last emerging from the wood, enquires the way from a
+countryman. The latter, busied with lading wood, begs the emperor, whom
+he does not know, to help him, and receives willing assistance. While
+still at work, Maximilian is rejoined, and, in spite of his signs to the
+contrary, respectfully saluted by his followers, and thus recognised by
+the peasant, who implores forgiveness for the freedom he has unwittingly
+taken. The emperor raises the kneeling suppliant, gives him presents,
+appoints him as his attendant, and confers upon him distinguished
+privileges. The narrator concludes: 'Dimostr� Cesare nello smontar da
+cavallo e con allegra ciera aiutar il bisognoso contadino, una
+indicibile e degna d'ogni lode humanit�, e in sollevarlo con danari e
+privilegii dalla sua faticosa vita, aperse il suo veramente animo
+Cesareo' (ii. 415). A story in the _Hecatomithi_ (viii. nov. 5) also
+treats of Maximilian. It is the same tale which has acquired a
+world-wide celebrity through Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_ (for
+its diffusion see Kirchhof's _Wendunmuth_, ed. Oesterley, bd. v. s. 152
+sqq.), and the scene of which is transferred by Giraldi to Innsbruck.
+Maximilian is the hero, and here too receives the highest eulogies.
+After being first called 'Massimiliano il Grande,' he is designated as
+one 'che fu raro esempio di cortesia, di magnanimit�, e di singolare
+giustizia.'
+
+[105] In the _Delici� Poet. Italorum_ (1608), ii. pp. 455 sqq.: ad
+Alfonsum ducem Calabri�. (Yet I do not believe that the above remark
+fairly applies to this poem, which clearly expresses the joys which
+Alfonso has with Drusula, and describes the sensations of the happy
+lover, who in his transports thinks that the gods themselves must envy
+him.--L.G.).
+
+[106] Mentioned as early as 1367, in the _Polistore_, in Murat. xxiv.
+col. 848, in reference to Niccol� the Elder, who makes twelve persons
+knights in honour of the twelve Apostles.
+
+[107] Burigozzo, in the _Archiv. Stor._ iii. p. 432.
+
+[108] _Discorsi_, i. 17, on Milan after the death of Filippo Visconti.
+
+[109] _De Incert. et Vanitate Scientiar._ cap. 55.
+
+[110] Prato, _Archiv. Stor._ iii. p. 241.
+
+[111] _De Casibus Virorum Illustrium_, l. ii. cap. 15.
+
+[112] _Discorsi_, iii. 6; comp. _Storie Fiorent._ l. viii. The
+description of conspiracies has been a favourite theme of Italian
+writers from a very remote period. Luitprand (of Cremona, _Mon. Germ._,
+ss. iii. 264-363) gives us a few, which are more circumstantial than
+those of any other contemporary writer of the tenth century; in the
+eleventh the deliverance of Messina from the Saracens, accomplished by
+calling in Norman Roger (Baluz. _Miscell._ i. p. 184), gives occasion to
+a characteristic narrative of this kind (1060); we need hardly speak of
+the dramatic colouring given to the stories of the Sicilian Vespers
+(1282). The same tendency is well known in the Greek writers.
+
+[113] Corio, fol. 333. For what follows, ibid. fol. 305, 422 sqq. 440.
+
+[114] So in the quotations from Gallus, in Sismondi, xi. 93. For the
+whole subject see Reumont, _Lorenzo dei Medici_, pp. 387-97, especially
+396.
+
+[115] Corio, fol. 422. Allegretto, _Diari Sanesi_, in Murat. xxiii. col.
+777. See above, p. 41.
+
+[116] The enthusiasm with which the Florentine Alamanno Rinuccini (b.
+1419) speaks in his _Ricordi_ (ed. by G. Aiazzi, Florence, 1840) of
+murderers and their deeds is very remarkable. For a contemporary, though
+not Italian, apology for tyrannicide, see Kervyn de Lettenhove, _Jean
+sans Peur et l'Apologie du Tyrannicide_, in the _Bulletin de l'Acad�mie
+de Bruxelles_, xi. (1861), pp. 558-71. A century later opinion in Italy
+had changed altogether. See the condemnation of Lampugnani's deed in
+Egnatius, _De Exemplis Ill. Vir._, Ven. fol. 99 _b_; comp. also 318 _b_.
+
+Petr. Crinitus, also (_De honest� disciplin�_, Paris, 1510, fol. 134
+_b_), writes a poem _De virtute Jo. Andr. Lamponiani tyrannicid�_, in
+which Lampugnani's deed is highly praised, and he himself is represented
+as a worthy companion of Brutus.
+
+Comp. also the Latin poem: _Bonini Mombritii poet� Mediol. trenodi� in
+funere illustrissimi D. Gal. Marie Sfor_ (2 Books--Milan, 1504), edited
+by Ascalon Vallis (_sic_), who in his dedication to the jurist Jac.
+Balsamus praises the poet and names other poems equally worthy to be
+printed. In this work, in which Meg�ra and Mars, Calliope and the poet,
+appear as interlocutors, the assassin--not Lampugnano, but a man from a
+humble family of artisans--is severely blamed, and he with his fellow
+conspirators are treated as ordinary criminals; they are charged with
+high treason on account of a projected alliance with Charles of
+Burgundy. No less than ten prognostics of the death of Duke Galeazzo are
+enumerated. The murder of the Prince, and the punishment of the assassin
+are vividly described; the close consists of pious consolations
+addressed to the widowed Princess, and of religious meditations.
+
+[117] 'Con studiare el Catalinario,' says Allegretto. Comp. (in Corio) a
+sentence like the following in the desposition of Olgiati: 'Quisque
+nostrum magis socios potissime et infinitos alios sollicitare,
+infestare, alter alteri benevolos se facere coepit. Aliquid aliquibus
+parum donare: simul magis noctu edere, bibere, vigilare, nostra omnia
+bona polliceri,' etc.
+
+[118] Vasari, iii. 251, note to _V. di Donatello_.
+
+[119] It now has been removed to a newly constructed building.
+
+[120] _Inferno_, xxxiv. 64.
+
+[121] Related by a hearer, Luca della Robbia, _Archiv. Stor._ i. 273.
+Comp. Paul. Jovius, _Vita Leonis X._ iii. in the _Viri Illustres_.
+
+[122] First printed in 1723, as appendix to Varchi's History, then in
+Roscoe, _Vita di Lorenzo de' Medici_, vol. iv. app. 12, and often
+besides. Comp. Reumont, _Gesch. Toscana's seit dem Ende des Florent.
+Freistaates_, Gotha, 1876, i. p. 67, note. See also the report in the
+_Lettere de' Principi_ (ed. Venez. 1577), iii. fol. 162 sqq.
+
+[123] On the latter point see Jac. Nardi, _Vita di Ant. Giacomini_,
+Lucca (1818), p. 18.
+
+[124] 'Genethliacum Venet� urbis,' in the _Carmina_ of Ant. Sabellicus.
+The 25th of March was chosen 'essendo il cielo in singolar disposizione,
+si come da gli astronomi � stato calcolato pi� volte.' Comp. Sansovino,
+_Venezia citt� nobilissima e singolare, descritta in 14 libri_, Venezia,
+1581, fol. 203. For the whole chapter see _Johannis Baptist� Egnatii
+viri doctissimi de exemplis Illustrium Virorum Venet� civitatis atque
+aliarum gentium_, Paris, 1554. The eldest Venetian chronicler, Joh.
+Diaconi, _Chron. Venetum_ in Pertz, _Monum._ S.S. vii. pp. 5, 6, places
+the occupation of the islands in the time of the Lombards and the
+foundation of the Rialto later.
+
+[125] 'De Venet� urbis apparatu panagiricum carmen quod oraculum
+inscribitur.'
+
+[126] The whole quarter was altered in the reconstructions of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+[127] Benedictus _Carol. VIII._ in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1597,
+1601, 1621. In the _Chron. Venetum_, Murat. xxiv. col. 26, the political
+virtues of the Venetians are enumerated: 'bont�, innocenza, zelo di
+carit�, piet�, misericordia.'
+
+[128] Many of the nobles cropped their hair. See _Erasmi Colloquia_, ed.
+Tiguri, a. 1553: miles et carthusianus.
+
+[129] _Epistol�_, lib. v. fol. 28.
+
+[130] Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. pp. 377, 431, 481,
+493, 530; ii. pp. 661, 668, 679. _Chron. Venetum_, in Muratori, xxiv.
+col. 57. _Diario Ferrarese_, ib. col. 240. See also _Dispacci di Antonio
+Giustiniani_ (Flor. 1876), i. p. 392.
+
+[131] Malipiero, in the _Archiv. Stor._ vii. ii. p. 691. Comp. 694, 713,
+and i. 535.
+
+[132] Marin Sanudo, _Vite dei Duchi_, Murat. xxii. col. 1194.
+
+[133] _Chron. Venetum_, Murat. xxiv. col. 105.
+
+[134] _Chron. Venetum_, Murat. xxiv. col. 123 sqq. and Malipiero, l. c.
+vii. i. pp. 175, 187 sqq. relate the significant fall of the Admiral
+Antonio Grimani, who, when accused on account of his refusal to
+surrender the command in chief to another, himself put irons on his feet
+before his arrival at Venice, and presented himself in this condition to
+the Senate. For him and his future lot, see Egnatius, fol. 183 _a_ sqq.,
+198 _b_ sqq.
+
+[135] _Chron. Ven._ l. c. col. 166.
+
+[136] Malipiero, l. c. vii. i. 349. For other lists of the same kind see
+Marin Sanudo, _Vite dei Duchi_, Murat. xxii. col. 990 (year 1426), col.
+1088 (year 1440), in Corio, fol. 435-438 (1483), in Guazzo _Historie_,
+fol. 151 sqq.
+
+[137] Guicciardini (_Ricordi_, n. 150) is one of the first to remark
+that the passion for vengeance can drown the clearest voice of
+self-interest.
+
+[138] Malipiero, l. c. vii. i., p. 328.
+
+[139] The statistical view of Milan, in the 'Manipulus Florum' (in
+Murat. xi. 711 sqq.) for the year 1288, is important, though not
+extensive. It includes house-doors, population, men of military age,
+'loggie' of the nobles, wells, bakeries, wine-shops, butchers'-shops,
+fishmongers, the consumption of corn, dogs, birds of chase, the price of
+salt, wood, hay, and wines; also the judges, notaries, doctors,
+schoolmasters, copying clerks, armourers, smiths, hospitals,
+monasteries, endowments, and religious corporations. A list perhaps
+still older is found in the 'Liber de magnalibus Mediolani,' in _Heinr.
+de Hervordia_, ed. Potthast, p. 165. See also the statistical account of
+Asti about the year 1250 in Ogerius Alpherius (Alfieri), _De Gestis
+Astensium, Histor. patr. Monumenta, Scriptorum_, tom. iii. col. 684.
+sqq.
+
+[140] Especially Marin Sanudo, in the _Vite dei Duchi di Venezia_,
+Murat. xxii. _passim_.
+
+[141] See for the marked difference between Venice and Florence, an
+important pamphlet addressed 1472 to Lorenzo de' Medici by certain
+Venetians, and the answer to it by Benedetto Dei, in Paganini, _Della
+Decima_, Florence, 1763, iii. pp. 135 sqq.
+
+[142] In Sanudo, l. c. col. 958. What relates to trade is extracted in
+Scherer, _Allgem. Gesch. des Welthandels_, i. 326, note.
+
+[143] Here all the houses, not merely those owned by the state, are
+meant. The latter, however, sometimes yielded enormous rents. See
+Vasari, xiii. 83. V. d. Jac. Sansovino.
+
+[144] See Sanudo, col. 963. In the same place a list of the incomes of
+the other Italian and European powers is given. An estimate for 1490 is
+to be found, col. 1245 sqq.
+
+[145] This dislike seems to have amounted to positive hatred in Paul II.
+who called the humanists one and all heretics. Platina, _Vita Pauli_,
+ii. p. 323. See also for the subject in general, Voigt, _Wiederbelebung
+des classischen Alterthums_, Berlin, 1859, pp. 207-213. The neglect of
+the sciences is given as a reason for the flourishing condition of
+Venice by Lil. Greg. Giraldus, _Opera_, ii. p. 439.
+
+[146] Sanudo, l. c. col. 1167.
+
+[147] Sansovina, _Venezia_, lib. xiii. It contains the biographies of
+the Doges in chronological order, and, following these lives one by one
+(regularly from the year 1312, under the heading _Scrittori Veneti_),
+short notices of contemporary writers.
+
+[148] Venice was then one of the chief seats of the Petrarchists. See G.
+Crespan, _Del Petrarchismo_, in _Petrarca e Venezia_, 1874, pp. 187-253.
+
+[149] See Heinric. de Hervordia ad a. 1293, p. 213, ed. Potthast, who
+says: 'The Venetians wished to obtain the body of Jacob of Forli from
+the inhabitants of that place, as many miracles were wrought by it. They
+promised many things in return, among others to bear all the expense of
+canonising the defunct, but without obtaining their request.'
+
+[150] Sanudo, l. c. col. 1158, 1171, 1177. When the body of St. Luke was
+brought from Bosnia, a dispute arose with the Benedictines of S.
+Giustina at Padua, who claimed to possess it already, and the Pope had
+to decide between the two parties. Comp. Guicciardini, _Ricordi_, n.
+401.
+
+[151] Sansovino, _Venezia_, lib. xii. 'dell'andate publiche del
+principe.' Egnatius, fol. 50_a_. For the dread felt at the papal
+interdict see Egnatius, fol. 12 _a_ sqq.
+
+[152] G. Villani, viii. 36. The year 1300 is also a fixed date in the
+_Divine Comedy_.
+
+[153] Stated about 1470 in _Vespas. Fiorent._ p. 554.
+
+[154] The passage which followed in former editions referring to the
+_Chronicle of Dino Compagni_ is here omitted, since the genuineness of
+the _Chronicle_ has been disproved by Paul Scheffer-Boichhorst
+(_Florentiner Studien_, Leipzig, 1874, pp. 45-210), and the disproof
+maintained (_Die Chronik des D. C._, Leipzig, 1875) against a
+distinguished authority (C. Hegel, _Die Chronik des D. C., Versuch einer
+Rettung_, Leipzig, 1875). Scheffer's view is generally received in
+Germany (see W. Bernhardi, _Der Stand der Dino-Frage, Hist. Zeitschr.
+N.F._, 1877, bd. i.), and even Hegel assumes that the text as we have it
+is a later manipulation of an unfinished work of Dino. Even in Italy,
+though the majority of scholars have wished to ignore this critical
+onslaught, as they have done other earlier ones of the same kind, some
+voices have been raised to recognise the spuriousness of the document.
+(See especially P. Fanfani in his periodical _Il Borghini_, and in the
+book _Dino Campagni Vendicato_, Milano, 1875). On the earliest
+Florentine histories in general see Hartwig, _Forschungen_, Marburg,
+1876, and C. Hegel in H. von Sybel's _Historischer Zeitschrift_, b.
+xxxv. Since then Isidore del Lungo, who with remarkable decision asserts
+its genuineness, has completed his great edition of Dino, and furnished
+it with a detailed introduction: _Dino Campagni e la sua cronaca_, 2
+vols. Firenze, 1879-80. A manuscript of the history, dating back to the
+beginning of the fifteenth century, and consequently earlier than all
+the hitherto known references and editions, has been lately found. In
+consequence of the discovery of this MS. and of the researches
+undertaken by C. Hegel, and especially of the evidence that the style of
+the work does not differ from that of the fourteenth century, the
+prevailing view of the subject is essentially this, that the Chronicle
+contains an important kernel, which is genuine, which, however, perhaps
+even in the fourteenth century, was remodelled on the ground-plan of
+Villani's Chronicle. Comp. Gaspary, _Geschichte der italienischen
+Literatur_. Berlin, 1885, i. pp. 361-9, 531 sqq.
+
+[155] _Purgatorio_, vi. at the end.
+
+[156] _De Monarchia_, i. 1. (New critical edition by Witte, Halle, 1863,
+71; German translation by O. Hubatsch, Berlin, 1872).
+
+[157] _Dantis Alligherii Epistol�_, cum notis C. Witte, Padua, 1827. He
+wished to keep the Pope as well as the Emperor always in Italy. See his
+letter, p. 35, during the conclave of Carpentras, 1314. On the first
+letter see _Vit� Nuova_, cap. 31, and _Epist._ p. 9.
+
+[158] Giov. Villani, xi. 20. Comp. Matt. Villani, ix. 93, who says that
+John XXII. 'astuto in tutte sue cose e massime in fare il danaio,' left
+behind him 18 million florins in cash and 6 millions in jewels.
+
+[159] See for this and similar facts Giov. Villani, xi. 87, xii. 54. He
+lost his own money in the crash and was imprisoned for debt. See also
+Kervyn de Lettenhove, _L'Europe au Si�cle de Philippe le Bel, Les
+Argentiers Florentins_ in _Bulletin de l'Acad�mie de Bruxelles_ (1861),
+vol. xii. pp. 123 sqq.
+
+[160] Giov. Villani, xi. 92, 93. In Macchiavelli, _Stor. Fiorent._ lib.
+ii. cap. 42, we read that 96,000 persons died of the plague in 1348.
+
+[161] The priest put aside a black bean for every boy and a white one
+for every girl. This was the only means of registration.
+
+[162] There was already a permanent fire brigade in Florence.
+
+[163] Matteo Villani, iii. 106.
+
+[164] Matteo Villani, i. 2-7, comp. 58. The best authority for the
+plague itself is the famous description by Boccaccio at the beginning of
+the _Decameron_.
+
+[165] Giov. Villani, x. 164.
+
+[166] _Ex Annalibus Ceretani_, in Fabroni, _Magni Cormi Vita_, Adnot.
+34. vol. ii. p. 63.
+
+[167] _Ricordi_ of Lorenzo, in Fabroni. _Laur. Med. Magnifici Vita_,
+Adnot. 2 and 25. Paul. Jovius, _Elogia_, pp. 131 sqq. Cosmus.
+
+[168] Given by Benedetto Dei, in the passage quoted above (p. 70, note
+1). It must be remembered that the account was intended to serve as a
+warning to assailants. For the whole subject see Reumont, _Lor. dei
+Medici_, ii. p. 419. The financial project of a certain Ludovico Ghetti,
+with important facts, is given in Roscoe, _Vita di Lor. Med._ ii.
+Append, i.
+
+[169] E. g. in the _Arch. Stor._ iv.(?) See as a contrast the very
+simple ledger of Ott. Nuland, 1455-1462 (Stuttg. 1843), and for a rather
+later period the day-book of Lukas Rem, 1494-1541, ed. by B. Greiff,
+Augsb., 1861.
+
+[170] Libri, _Histoire des Sciences Math�matiques_, ii. 163 sqq.
+
+[171] Varchi, _Stor. Fiorent._ iii. p. 56 and sqq. up to the end of the
+9th book. Some obviously erroneous figures are probably no more than
+clerical or typographical blunders.
+
+[172] In respect of prices and of wealth in Italy, I am only able, in
+default of further means of investigation, to bring together some
+scattered facts, which I have picked up here and there. Obvious
+exaggerations must be put aside. The gold coins which are worth
+referring to are the ducat, the sequin, the 'fiorino d'oro,' and the
+'scudo d'oro.' The value of all is nearly the same, 11 to 12 francs of
+our money.
+
+In Venice, for example, the Doge Andrea Vendramin (1476) with 170,000
+ducats passed for an exceedingly rich man (Malipiero, l. c. vii. ii. p.
+666. The confiscated fortune of Colleoni amounted to 216,000 florins, l.
+c. p. 244.
+
+About 1460 the Patriarch of Aquileia, Ludovico Patavino, with 200,000
+ducats, was called 'perhaps the richest of all Italians.' (Gasp.
+Veroneus _Vita Pauli II._, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1027.) Elsewhere
+fabulous statements.
+
+Antonio Grimani paid 30,000 ducats for his son's election as Cardinal.
+His ready money alone was put at 100,000 ducats. (_Chron. Venetum_,
+Murat. xxiv. col. 125.)
+
+For notices as to the grain in commerce and on the market at Venice, see
+in particular Malipiero, l. c. vii. ii. p. 709 sqq. Date 1498.
+
+In 1522 it is no longer Venice, but Genoa, next to Rome, which ranks as
+the richest city in Italy (only credible on the authority of Francesco.
+Vettori. See his history in the _Archiv. Stor._ Append. tom. vi. p.
+343). Bandello, _parte_ ii. _novello_ 34 and 42, names as the richest
+Genoese merchant of his time Ansaldo Grimaldi.
+
+Between 1400 and 1580 Franc. Sansovino assumes a depreciation of 50 per
+cent. in the value of money. (_Venezia_, fol. 151 bis.)
+
+In Lombardy it is believed that the relation between the price of corn
+about the middle of the fifteenth and that at the middle of the present
+century is as 3 to 8. (Sacco di Piacenza, in _Archiv. Stor._ Append.
+tom. v. Note of editor Scarabelli.)
+
+At Ferrara there were people at the time of Duke Borso with 50,000 to
+60,000 ducats (_Diario Ferrarese_, Murat. xxiv. col. 207, 214, 218; an
+extravagant statement, col. 187). In Florence the data are exceptional
+and do not justify a conclusion as to averages. Of this kind are the
+loans to foreign princes, in which the names of one or two houses only
+appear, but which were in fact the work of great companies. So too the
+enormous fines levied on defeated parties; we read, e.g. that from 1430
+to 1453 seventy-seven families paid 4,875,000 gold florins (Varchi, iii.
+p. 115 sqq.), and that Giannozzo Mannetti alone, of whom we shall have
+occasion to speak hereafter, was forced to pay a sum of 135,000 gold
+florins, and was reduced thereby to beggary (Reumont, i. 157).
+
+The fortune of Giovanni Medici amounted at his death (1428) to 179,221
+gold florins, but the latter alone of his two sons Cosimo and Lorenzo
+left at his death (1440) as much as 235,137 (Fabroni, _Laur. Med._
+Adnot. 2). Cosimo's son Piero left (1469) 237,982 scudi (Reumont,
+_Lorenzo de' Medici_, i. 286).
+
+It is a proof of the general activity of trade that the forty-four
+goldsmiths on the Ponte Vecchio paid in the fourteenth century a rent of
+800 florins to the Government (Vasari, ii. 114, _Vita di Taddeo Gaddi_).
+The diary of Buonaccorso Pitti (in Del�cluze, _Florence et ses
+Vicissitudes_, vol. ii.) is full of figures, which, however, only prove
+in general the high price of commodities and the low value of money.
+
+For Rome, the income of the Curia, which was derived from all Europe,
+gives us no criterion; nor are statements about papal treasures and the
+fortunes of cardinals very trustworthy. The well-known banker Agostino
+Chigi left (1520) a fortune of in all 800,000 ducats (_Lettere
+Pittoriche_, i. Append. 48).
+
+During the high prices of the year 1505 the value of the _staro
+ferrarrese del grano_, which commonly weighed from 68 to 70 pounds
+(German), rose to 1-1/3 ducats. The _semola_ or _remolo_ was sold at
+_venti soldi lo staro_; in the following fruitful years the _staro_
+fetched six _soldi_. Bonaventura Pistofilo, p. 494. At Ferrara the rent
+of a house yearly in 1455 was 25 _Lire_; comp. _Atti e memorie_, Parma,
+vi. 250; see 265 sqq. for a documentary statement of the prices which
+were paid to artists and amanuenses.
+
+From the inventory of the Medici (extracts in Muntz, _Pr�curseurs_, 158
+sqq.) it appears that the jewels were valued at 12,205 ducats; the rings
+at 1,792; the pearls (apparently distinguished from other jewels,
+S.G.C.M.) at 3,512; the medallions, cameos and mosaics at 2,579; the
+vases at 4,850; the reliquaries and the like at 3,600; the library at
+2,700; the silver at 7,000. Giov. Rucellai reckons that in 1473(?) he
+has paid 60,000 gold florins in taxes, 10,000 for the dowries of his
+five daughters, 2,000 for the improvement of the church of Santa Maria
+Novella. In 1474 he lost 20,000 gold florins through the intrigues of an
+enemy. (_Autografo dallo Tibaldone di G.R._, Florence, 1872). The
+marriage of Barnardo Rucellai with Nannina, the sister of Lorenzo de'
+Medici, cost 3,686 florins (Muntz, _Pr�curseurs_, 244, i).
+
+[173] So far as Cosimo (1433-1465) and his grandson Lorenzo Magnifico
+(d. 1492) are concerned, the author refrains from any criticism on their
+internal policy. The exaltation of both, particularly of Lorenzo, by
+William Roscoe (_Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, called the Magnificent_,
+1st ed. Liverpool, 1795; 10th ed. London, 1851), seems to have been a
+principal cause of the reaction of feeling against them. This reaction
+appeared first in Sismondi (_Hist. des R�p. Italiennes_, xi.), in reply
+to whose strictures, sometimes unreasonably severe, Roscoe again came
+forward (_Illustrations, Historical and Critical, of the Life of Lor. d.
+Med._, London, 1822); later in Gino Capponi (_Archiv. Stor. Ital._ i.
+(1842), pp. 315 sqq.), who afterwards (_Storia della Rep. di Firenze_, 2
+vols. Florence, 1875) gave further proofs and explanations of his
+judgment. See also the work of Von Reumont (_Lor. d. Med. il Magn._), 2
+vols. Leipzig, 1874, distinguished no less by the judicial calmness of
+its views than by the mastery it displays of the extensive materials
+used. See also A. Castelman: _Les Medicis_, 2 vols. Paris, 1879. The
+subject here is only casually touched upon. Comp. two works of B. Buser
+(Leipzig, 1879) devoted to the home and foreign policy of the Medici.
+(1) _Die Beziehungen der Medicus zu Frankreich._ 1434-1494, &c. (2)
+_Lorenzo de' Medici als italienischen Staatsman_, &c., 2nd ed., 1883.
+
+[174] Franc. Burlamacchi, father of the head of the Lucchese
+Protestants, Michele B. See _Arch. Stor. Ital._ ser. i. tom. x., pp.
+435-599; Documenti, pp. 146 sqq.; further Carlo Minutoli, _Storia di Fr.
+B._, Lucca, 1844, and the important additions of Leone del Prete in the
+_Giornale Storico degli Archiv. Toscani_, iv. (1860), pp. 309 sqq. It is
+well known how Milan, by its hard treatment of the neighbouring cities
+from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, prepared the way for the
+foundation of a great despotic state. Even at the time of the extinction
+of the Visconti in 1447, Milan frustrated the deliverance of Upper
+Italy, principally through not accepting the plan of a confederation of
+equal cities. Comp. Corio, fol. 358 sqq.
+
+[175] On the third Sunday in Advent, 1494, Savonarola preached as
+follows on the method of bringing about a new constitution: The sixteen
+companies of the city were each to work out a plan, the Gonfalonieri to
+choose the four best of these, and the Signory to name the best of all
+on the reduced list. Things, however, took a different turn, under the
+influence indeed of the preacher himself. See P. Villari, _Savonarola_.
+Besides this sermon, S. had written a remarkable _Trattato circa il
+regimento di Ferenze_ (reprinted at Lucca, 1817).
+
+[176] The latter first in 1527, after the expulsion of the Medici. See
+Varchi, i. 121, &c.
+
+[177] Macchiavelli, _Storie Fior._ l. iii. cap. 1: 'Un Savio dator di
+leggi,' could save Florence.
+
+[178] Varchi, _Stor. Fior._ i. p. 210.
+
+[179] 'Discorso sopra il riformar lo Stato di Firenze,' in the _Opere
+Minori_, p. 207.
+
+[180] The same view, doubtless borrowed from here, occurs in
+Montesquieu.
+
+[181] Belonging to a rather later period (1532?). Compare the opinion of
+Guicciardini, terrible in its frankness, on the condition and inevitable
+organisation of the Medicean party. _Lettere di Principi_, iii. fol.
+124, (ediz. Venez. 1577).
+
+[182] �n. Sylvii, _Apologia ad Martinum Mayer_, p. 701. To the same
+effect Macchiavelli, _Discorsi_, i. 55, and elsewhere.
+
+[183] How strangely modern half-culture affected political life is shown
+by the party struggles of 1535. Della Valle, _Lettere Sanesi_, iii. p.
+317. A number of small shopkeepers, excited by the study of Livy and of
+Macchiavelli's _Discorsi_, call in all seriousness for tribunes of the
+people and other Roman magistrates against the misgovernment of the
+nobles and the official classes.
+
+[184] Piero Valeriano, _De Infelicitate Literator._, speaking of
+Bartolommeo della Rovere. (The work of P. V. written 1527 is quoted
+according to the edition by Menken, _Analecta de Calamitate
+Literatorum_, Leipz. 1707.) The passage here meant can only be that at
+p. 384, from which we cannot infer what is stated in the text, but in
+which we read that B. d. R. wished to make his son abandon a taste for
+study which he had conceived and put him into business.
+
+[185] Senarega, _De reb. Genuens_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 548. For the
+insecurity of the time see esp. col. 519, 525, 528, &c. For the frank
+language of the envoy on the occasion of the surrender of the state to
+Francesco Sforza (1464), when the envoy told him that Genoa surrendered
+in the hope of now living safely and comfortably, see Cagnola, _Archiv.
+Stor._ iii. p. 165 sqq. The figures of the Archbishop, Doge, Corsair,
+and (later) Cardinal Paolo Fregoso form a notable contrast to the
+general picture of the condition of Italy.
+
+[186] So Varchi, at a much later time. _Stor. Fiorent._ i. 57.
+
+[187] Galeazzo Maria Sforza, indeed, declared the contrary (1467) to the
+Venetian agent, namely, that Venetian subjects had offered to join him
+in making war on Venice; but this is only vapouring. Comp. Malipiero,
+_Annali Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. p. 216 sqq. On every occasion
+cities and villages voluntarily surrendered to Venice, chiefly, it is
+true, those that escaped from the hands of some despot, while Florence
+had to keep down the neighbouring republics, which were used to
+independence, by force of arms, as Guicciardini (_Ricordi_, n. 29)
+observes.
+
+[188] Most strongly, perhaps, in an instruction to the ambassadors going
+to Charles VII. in the year 1452. (See Fabroni, _Cosmus_, Adnot. 107,
+fol. ii. pp. 200 sqq.) The Florentine envoys were instructed to remind
+the king of the centuries of friendly relations which had subsisted
+between France and their native city, and to recall to him that Charles
+the Great had delivered Florence and Italy from the barbarians
+(Lombards), and that Charles I. and the Romish Church were 'fondatori
+della parte Guelfa. Il qual fundamento fa cagione della ruina della
+contraria parte e introdusse lo stato di felicit�, in che noi siamo.'
+When the young Lorenzo visited the Duke of Anjou, then staying at
+Florence, he put on a French dress. Fabroni, ii. p. 9.
+
+[189] Comines, _Charles VIII._ chap. x. The French were considered
+'comme saints.' Comp. chap. 17; _Chron. Venetum_, in Murat. xxiv. col.
+5, 10, 14, 15; Matarazzo, _Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p.
+23, not to speak of countless other proofs. See especially the documents
+in Desjardins, op. cit. p. 127, note 1.
+
+[190] _Pii II. Commentarii_, x. p. 492.
+
+[191] Gingins, _D�p�ches des Ambassadeurs Milanais_, _etc._ i. pp. 26,
+153, 279, 283, 285, 327, 331, 345, 359; ii. pp. 29, 37, 101, 217, 306.
+Charles once spoke of giving Milan to the young Duke of Orleans.
+
+[192] Niccol� Valori, _Vita di Lorenzo_, Flor. 1568. Italian translation
+of the Latin original, first printed in 1749 (later in Galletti, _Phil.
+Villani, Liber de Civit. Flor. famosis Civibus_, Florence, 1847, pp.
+161-183; passage here referred to p. 171). It must not, however, be
+forgotten that this earliest biography, written soon after the death of
+Lorenzo, is a flattering rather than a faithful portrait, and that the
+words here attributed to Lorenzo are not mentioned by the French
+reporter, and can, in fact, hardly have been uttered. Comines, who was
+commissioned by Louis XI. to go to Rome and Florence, says (_M�moires_,
+l. vi. chap. 5): 'I could not offer him an army, and had nothing with me
+but my suite.' (Comp. Reumont, _Lorenzo_, i. p. 197, 429; ii. 598). In a
+letter from Florence to Louis XI. we read (Aug. 23, 1478: 'Omnis spes
+nostra reposita est in favoribus su� majestatis.' A. Desjardins,
+_N�gociations Diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane_ (Paris, 1859),
+i. p. 173. Similarly Lorenzo himself in Kervyn de Lettenhove, _Lettres
+et N�gotiations de Philippe de Comines_, i. p. 190. Lorenzo, we see, is
+in fact the one who humbly begs for help, not who proudly declines it.
+
+Dr. Geiger in his appendix maintains that Dr. Burchhardt's view as to
+Lorenzo's national Italian policy is not borne out by evidence. Into
+this discussion the translator cannot enter. It would need strong proof
+to convince him that the masterly historical perception of Dr.
+Burchhardt was in error as to a subject which he has studied with minute
+care. In an age when diplomatic lying and political treachery were
+matters of course, documentary evidence loses much of its weight, and
+cannot be taken without qualification as representing the real feelings
+of the persons concerned, who fenced, turned about, and lied, first on
+one side and then on another, with an agility surprising to those
+accustomed to live among truth-telling people (S.G.C.M.)
+
+Authorities quoted by Dr. Geiger are: Reumont, _Lorenzo_, 2nd ed., i.
+310; ii. 450. Desjardins: _N�gociations Diplomatiques de la France avec
+la Toscane_ (Paris, 1859), i. 173. Kervyn de Lettenhove, _Lettres et
+N�gociations de Philippe de Comines_, i. 180.
+
+[193] Fabroni, _Laurentius Magnificus_, Adnot. 205 sqq. In one of his
+Briefs it was said literally, 'Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta
+movebo;' but it is to be hoped that he did not allude to the Turks.
+(Villari, _Storia di Savonarola_, ii. p. 48 of the 'Documenti.')
+
+[194] E.g. Jovian. Pontan. in his _Charon_. In the dialogue between
+�cus, Minos, and Mercurius (_Op._ ed. Bas. ii. p. 1167) the first says:
+'Vel quod haud multis post s�culis futurum auguror, ut Italia, cujus
+intestina te odia male habent Minos, in unius redacta ditionem resumat
+imperii majestatem.' And in reply to Mercury's warning against the
+Turks, �cus answers: 'Quamquam timenda h�c sunt, tamen si vetera
+respicimus, non ab Asia aut Gr�cia, verum a Gallis Germanisque timendum
+Itali� semper fuit.'
+
+[195] Comines, _Charles VIII._, chap. 7. How Alfonso once tried in time
+of war to seize his opponents at a conference, is told by Nantiporto, in
+Murat. iii. ii. col. 1073. He was a genuine predecessor of C�sar Borgia.
+
+[196] _Pii II. Commentarii_, x. p. 492. See a letter of Malatesta in
+which he recommends to Mohammed II. a portrait-painter, Matteo Passo of
+Verona, and announces the despatch of a book on the art of war, probably
+in the year 1463, in Baluz. _Miscell._ iii. 113. What Galeazzo Maria of
+Milan told in 1467 to a Venetian envoy, namely, that he and his allies
+would join with the Turks to destroy Venice, was said merely by way of
+threat. Comp. Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. p. 222.
+For Boccalino, see page 36.
+
+[197] Porzio, _Congiura dei Baroni_, l. i. p. 5. That Lorenzo, as Porzio
+hints, really had a hand in it, is not credible. On the other hand, it
+seems only too certain that Venice prompted the Sultan to the deed. See
+Romanin, _Storia Documentata di Venezia_, lib. xi. cap. 3. After Otranto
+was taken, Vespasiano Bisticci uttered his 'Lamento d'Italia, _Archiv.
+Stor. Ital._ iv. pp. 452 sqq.
+
+[198] _Chron. Venet._ in Murat. xxiv. col. 14 and 76.
+
+[199] Malipiero, l. c. p. 565, 568.
+
+[200] Trithem. _Annales Hirsaug_, ad. a. 1490, tom. ii. pp. 535 sqq.
+
+[201] Malipiero, l. c. 161; comp. p. 152. For the surrender of Djem to
+Charles VIII. see p. 145, from which it is clear that a connection of
+the most shameful kind existed between Alexander and Bajazet, even if
+the documents in Burcardus be spurious. See on the subject Ranke, _Zur
+Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber_, 2 Auflage, Leipzig, 1874, p. 99, and
+Gregorovius, bd. vii. 353, note 1. _Ibid._ p. 353, note 2, a declaration
+of the Pope that he was not allied with the Turks.
+
+[202] Bapt. Mantuanus, _De Calamitatibus Temporum_, at the end of the
+second book, in the song of the Nereid Doris to the Turkish fleet.
+
+[203] Tommaso Gar, _Relaz. della Corte di Roma_, i. p. 55.
+
+[204] Ranke, _Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen V�lker_. The
+opinion of Michelet (_Reforme_, p. 467), that the Turks would have
+adopted Western civilisation in Italy, does not satisfy me. This mission
+of Spain is hinted at, perhaps for the first time, in the speech
+delivered by Fedra Inghirami in 1510 before Julius II., at the
+celebration of the capture of Bugia by the fleet of Ferdinand the
+Catholic. See _Anecdota Litteraria_, ii. p. 419.
+
+[205] Among others Corio, fol. 333. Jov. Pontanus, in his treatise, _De
+Liberalitate_, cap. 28, considers the free dismissal of Alfonso as a
+proof of the 'liberalitas' of Filippo Maria. (See above, p. 38, note 1.)
+Compare the line of conduct adopted with regard to Sforza, fol. 329.
+
+[206] Nic. Valori, _Vita di Lorenzo_; Paul Jovius, _Vita Leonis X._ l.
+i. The latter certainly upon good authority, though not without
+rhetorical embellishment. Comp. Reumont, i. 487, and the passage there
+quoted.
+
+[207] If Comines on this and many other occasions observes and judges as
+objectively as any Italian, his intercourse with Italians, particularly
+with Angelo Catto, must be taken into account.
+
+[208] Comp. e.g. Malipiero, pp. 216, 221, 236, 237, 468, &c., and above
+pp. 88, note 2, and 93, note 1. Comp. Egnatius, fol. 321 _a_. The Pope
+curses an ambassador; a Venetian envoy insults the Pope; another, to win
+over his hearers, tells a fable.
+
+[209] In Villari, _Storia di Savonarola_, vol. ii. p. xliii. of the
+'Documenti,' among which are to be found other important political
+letters. Other documents, particularly of the end of the fifteenth
+century in Baluzius, _Miscellanea_, ed. Mansi, vol. i. See especially
+the collected despatches of Florentine and Venetian ambassadors at the
+end of the fifteenth and beginning of sixteenth centuries in Desjardins,
+_N�gotiations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane_. vols. i. ii.
+Paris. 1859, 1861.
+
+[210] The subject has been lately treated more fully by Max J�hns, _Die
+Kriegskunst als Kunst_, Leipzig, 1874.
+
+[211] _Pii II. Comment._ iv. p. 190, ad. a. 1459.
+
+[212] The Cremonese prided themselves on their skill in this department.
+See _Cronaca di Cremona_ in the _Bibliotheca Historica Italica_, vol. i.
+Milan, 1876, p. 214, and note. The Venetians did the same, Egnatius,
+fol. 300 sqq.
+
+[213] To this effect Paul Jovius (_Elogia_, p. 184) who adds: 'Nondum
+enim invecto externarum gentium cruento more, Italia milites sanguinarii
+et mult� c�dis avidi esse didicerant.' We are reminded of Frederick of
+Urbino, who would have been 'ashamed' to tolerate a printed book in his
+library. See _Vespas. Fiorent._
+
+[214] _Porcellii Commentaria Jac. Picinini_, in Murat. xx. A
+continuation for the war of 1453, _ibid._ xxv. Paul Cortesius (_De
+Hominibus Doctis_, p. 33, Florence, 1734) criticises the book severely
+on account of the wretched hexameters.
+
+[215] Porcello calls Scipio �milianus by mistake, meaning Africanus
+Major.
+
+[216] Simonetta, _Hist. Fr. Sforti�_, in Murat. xxi. col. 630.
+
+[217] So he was considered. Comp. Bandello, parte i. nov. 40.
+
+[218] Comp. e.g. _De Obsidione Tiphernatium_, in vol. 2, of the _Rer.
+Italic. Scriptores excodd. Florent._ col. 690. The duel of Marshal
+Boucicault with Galeazzo Gonzaga (1406) in Cagnola, _Arch. Stor._ iii.
+p. 25. Infessura tells us of the honour paid by Sixtus IV. to the
+duellists among his guards. His successors issued bulls against
+duelling.
+
+[219] We may here notice parenthetically (see J�hns, pp. 26, sqq.) the
+less favourable side of the tactics of the Condottieri. The combat was
+often a mere sham-fight, in which the enemy was forced to withdraw by
+harmless manoeuvres. The object of the combatants was to avoid bloodshed,
+at the worst to make prisoners with a view to the ransom. According to
+Macchiavelli, the Florentines lost in a great battle in the year 1440
+one man only.
+
+[220] For details, see _Arch. Stor._ Append. tom. v.
+
+[221] Here once for all we refer our readers to Ranke's _Popes_, vol.
+i., and to Sugenheim, _Geschichte der Entstehung und Ausbildung des
+Kirchenstaates_. The still later works of Gregorovius and Reumont have
+also been made use of, and when they offer new facts or views, are
+quoted. See also _Geschichte der r�mischen Papstthums_, W. Wattenbach,
+Berlin, 1876.
+
+[222] For the impression made by the blessing of Eugenius IV. in
+Florence, see _Vespasiano Fiorent_, p. 18. See also the passage quoted
+in Reumont, _Lorenzo_, i. 171. For the impressive offices of Nicholas
+V., see Infessura (Eccard, ii. col. 1883 sqq.) and J. Manetti, _Vita
+Nicolai V._ (Murat. iii. ii. col. 923). For the homage given to Pius
+II., see _Diario Ferrarese_ (Murat. xxiv. col. 205), and _Pii II.
+Commentarii_, _passim_, esp. iv. 201, 204, and xi. 562. For Florence,
+see _Delizie degli Eruditi_, xx. 368. Even professional murderers
+respect the person of the Pope.
+
+The great offices in church were treated as matters of much importance
+by the pomp-loving Paul II. (Platina, l. c. 321) and by Sixtus IV., who,
+in spite of the gout, conducted mass at Easter in a sitting posture.
+(_Jac. Volaterran. Diarium_, Murat. xxiii. col. 131.) It is curious to
+notice how the people distinguished between the magical efficacy of the
+blessing and the unworthiness of the man who gave it; when he was unable
+to give the benediction on Ascension Day, 1481, the populace murmured
+and cursed him. (_Ibid._ col. 133.)
+
+[223] Macchiavelli, _Scritti Minori_, p. 142, in the well-known essay on
+the catastrophe of Sinigaglia. It is true that the French and Spanish
+soldiers were still more zealous than the Italians. Comp. in Paul. Jov.
+_Vita Leonis X._ (l. ii.) the scene before the battle of Ravenna, in
+which the Legate, weeping for joy, was surrounded by the Spanish troops,
+and besought for absolution. See further (_ibid._) the statements
+respecting the French in Milan.
+
+[224] In the case of the heretics of Poli, in the Campagna, who held the
+doctrine that a genuine Pope must show the poverty of Christ as the mark
+of his calling, we have simply a kind of Waldensian doctrine. Their
+imprisonment under Paul II. is related by Infessura (Eccard, ii. col.
+1893), Platina, p. 317, &c.
+
+[225] As an illustration of this feeling see the poem addressed to the
+Pope, quoted in Gregorovius, vii. 136.
+
+[226] _Dialogus de Conjuratione Stephani de Porcariis_, by his
+contemporary Petrus Godes de Vicenza, quoted and used by Gregorovius,
+viii. 130. L. B. Alberti, _De Porcaria Conjuratione_, in Murat. xxv.
+col. 309. Porcari was desirous 'omnem pontificiam turbam funditus
+exstinguere.' The author concludes: 'Video sane, quo stent loco res
+Itali�; intelligo qui sint, quibus hic perturbata esse omnia
+conducat....' He names them 'Extrinsecus impulsores,' and is of opinion
+that Porcari will find successors in his misdeeds. The dreams of Porcari
+certainly bore some resemblance to those of Cola Rienzi. He also
+referred to himself the poem 'Spirto Gentil,' addressed by Petrarch to
+Rienzi.
+
+[227] 'Ut Papa tantum vicarius Christi sit et non etiam C�saris.... Tunc
+Papa et dicetur et erit pater sanctus, pater omnium, pater ecclesi�,'
+&c. Valla's work was written rather earlier, and was aimed at Eugenius
+IV. See Vahlen, _Lor. Valla_ (Berlin, 1870), pp. 25 sqq., esp. 32.
+Nicholas V., on the other hand, is praised by Valla, Gregorovius, vii.
+136.
+
+[228] _Pii II. Comment._ iv. pp. 208 sqq. Voigt, _Enea Silvio_, iii. pp.
+151 sqq.
+
+[229] Platina, _Vita Pauli II._
+
+[230] Battista Mantovano, _De Calamitatibus Temporum_, l. iii. The
+Arabian sells incense, the Tyrian purple, the Indian ivory: 'Venalia
+nobis templa, sacerdotes, altaria sacra, coron�, ignes, thura, preces,
+c�lum est venale Deusque.' _Opera_, ed. Paris, 1507, fol. 302 _b_. Then
+follows an exhortation to Pope Sixtus, whose previous efforts are
+praised, to put an end to these evils.
+
+[231] See e.g. the _Annales Placentini_, in Murat. xx. col. 943.
+
+[232] Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 416-420. Pietro had already helped
+at the election of Sixtus. See Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii.
+col. 1895. It is curious that in 1469 it had been prophesied that
+deliverance would come from Savona (home of Sixtus, elected in 1471)
+within three years. See the letter and date in Baluz. _Miscell._ iii. p.
+181. According to Macchiavelli, _Storie Fiorent._ l. vii. the Venetians
+poisoned the cardinal. Certainly they were not without motives to do so.
+
+[233] Honorius II. wished, after the death of William I. (1127), to
+annex Apulia, as a feof reverted to St. Peter.
+
+[234] Fabroni, _Laurentius Mag._ Adnot. 130. An informer, Vespucci,
+sends word of both, 'Hanno in ogni elezione a mettere a sacco questa
+corte, e sono i maggior ribaldi del mondo.'
+
+[235] Corio, fol. 450. Details, partly from unpublished documents, of
+these acts of bribery in Gregorovius, vii. 310 sqq.
+
+[236] A most characteristic letter of exhortation by Lorenzo in Fabroni,
+_Laurentius Magn._ Adnot. 217, and extracts in Ranke, _Popes_, i. p. 45,
+and in Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. pp. 482 sqq.
+
+[237] And perhaps of certain Neapolitan feofs, for the sake of which
+Innocent called in the Angevins afresh against the immovable Ferrante.
+The conduct of the Pope in this affair and his participation in the
+second conspiracy of the barons, were equally foolish and dishonest. For
+his method of treating with foreign powers, see above p. 127, note 2.
+
+[238] Comp. in particular Infessura, in Eccard. _Scriptores_, ii.
+_passim_.
+
+[239] According to the _Dispacci di Antonio Giustiniani_, i. p. 60, and
+iii. p. 309, Seb. Pinzon was a native of Cremona.
+
+[240] Recently by Gregorovius, _Lucrezia Borgia_, 2 B�nde 3 Aufl.,
+Stuttgart, 1875.
+
+[241] Except the Bentivoglio at Bologna, and the House of Este at
+Ferrara. The latter was compelled to form a family relationship,
+Lucrezia marrying Prince Alfonso.
+
+[242] According to Corio (fol. 479) Charles had thoughts of a Council,
+of deposing the Pope, and even of carrying him away to France, this upon
+his return from Naples. According to Benedictus, _Carolus VIII._ (in
+Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1584), Charles, while in Naples, when
+Pope and cardinals refused to recognise his new crown, had certainly
+entertained the thought 'de Itali� imperio deque pontificis statu
+mutando,' but soon after made up his mind to be satisfied with the
+personal humiliation of Alexander. The Pope, nevertheless, escaped him.
+Particulars in Pilorgerie, _Campagne et Bulletins de la Grande Arm�e
+d'Italie_, 1494, 1495 (Paris, 1866, 8vo.), where the degree of
+Alexander's danger at different moments is discussed (pp. 111, 117,
+&c.). In a letter, there printed, of the Archbishop of St. Malo to Queen
+Anne, it is expressly stated: 'Si nostre roy eust voulu obtemperer � la
+plupart des Messeigneurs les Cardinaulx, ilz eussent fait ung autre
+pappe en intention de refformer l'�glise ainsi qu'ilz disaient. Le roy
+d�sire bien la reformacion, mais il ne veult point entreprandre de sa
+depposicion.'
+
+[243] Corio, fol. 450. Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p.
+318. The rapacity of the whole family can be seen in Malipiero, among
+other authorities, l. c. p. 565. A 'nipote' was splendidly entertained
+in Venice as papal legate, and made an enormous sum of money by selling
+dispensations; his servants, when they went away, stole whatever they
+could lay their hands on, including a piece of embroidered cloth from
+the high altar of a church at Murano.
+
+[244] This in Panvinio alone among contemporary historians (Contin.
+Platin�, p. 339), 'insidiis C�saris fratris interfectus ... connivente
+... ad scelus patre,' and to the same effect Jovius, _Elog. Vir. Ill._
+p. 302. The profound emotion of Alexander looks like a sign of
+complicity. After the corpse was drawn out of the Tiber, Sannazaro wrote
+(_Opera Omnia Latine Scripta_ 1535, fol. 41 _a_):
+
+    'Piscatorem hominum ne te non, Sixte, putemus
+      Piscaris natum retibus, ecce, tuum.'
+
+Besides the epigram quoted there are others (fol. 36 _b_, 42 _b_, 47
+_b_, 51 _a_, _b_--in the last passage 5) in Sannazaro on, i.e. against,
+Alexander. Among them is a famous one, referred to in Gregorovius i.
+314, on Lucrezia Borgia:
+
+    Ergo te semper cupiet Lucretia Sextus?
+    O fatum diri nominis: hic pater est?
+
+Others execrate his cruelty and celebrate his death as the beginning of
+an era of peace. On the Jubilee (see below, p. 108, note 1), there is
+another epigram, fol. 43 _b_. There are others no less severe (fol. 34
+_b_, 35 _a_, _b_, 42 _b_, 43 _a_) against C�sar Borgia, among which we
+find in one of the strongest:
+
+    Aut nihil aut C�sar vult dici Borgia; quidni?
+      Cum simul et C�sar possit, et esse nihil.
+
+(made use of by Bandello, iv. nov. 11). On the murder of the Duke of
+Gandia, see especially the admirable collection of the most original
+sources of evidence in Gregorovius, vii. 399-407, according to which
+C�sar's guilt is clear, but it seems very doubtful whether Alexander
+knew, or approved, of the intended assassination.
+
+[245] Macchiavelli, _Opere_, ed. Milan, vol. v. pp. 387, 393, 395, in
+the _Legazione al Duca Valentino_.
+
+[246] Tommaso Gar, _Relazioni della Corte di Roma_, i. p. 12, in the
+_Rel. of P. Capello_. Literally: 'The Pope has more respect for Venice
+than for any other power in the world.' 'E per� desidera, che ella
+(Signoria di Venezia) protegga il figliuolo, e dice voler fare tale
+ordine, che il papato o sia suo, ovvero della signoria nostra.' The word
+'suo' can only refer to C�sar. An instance of the uncertainty caused by
+this usage is found in the still lively controversy respecting the words
+used by Vasari in the _Vita di Raffaello_: 'A Bindo Altoviti fece il
+ritratto suo, &c.'
+
+[247] _Strozzii Poetae_, p. 19, in the 'Venatio' of Ercole Strozza: '
+... cui triplicem fata invidere coronam.' And in the Elegy on C�sar's
+death, p. 31 sqq.: 'Speraretque olim solii decora alta paterni.'
+
+[248] _Ibid._ Jupiter had once promised
+
+    'Affore Alexandri sobolem, qu� poneret olim
+     Itali� leges, atque aurea s�cla referret,' etc.
+
+
+[249] _Ibid._
+
+    'Sacrumque decus majora parantem deposuisse.'
+
+
+[250] He was married, as is well known, to a French princess of the
+family of Albret, and had a daughter by her; in some way or other he
+would have attempted to found a dynasty. It is not known that he took
+steps to regain the cardinal's hat, although (acc. to Macchiavelli, l.
+c. p. 285) he must have counted on the speedy death of his father.
+
+[251] Macchiavelli, l. c. p. 334. Designs on Siena and eventually on all
+Tuscany certainly existed, but were not yet ripe; the consent of France
+was indispensable.
+
+[252] Macchiavelli, l. c. pp. 326, 351, 414; Matarazzo, _Cronaca di
+Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. pp. 157 and 221. He wished his soldiers
+to quarter themselves where they pleased, so that they gained more in
+time of peace than of war. Petrus Alcyonius, _De Exilio_ (1522), ed.
+Mencken, p. 19, says of the style of conducting war: 'Ea scelera et
+flagitia a nostris militibus patrata sunt qu� ne Scyth� quidem aut
+Turc�, aut Poeni in Italia commisissent.' The same writer (p. 65) blames
+Alexander as a Spaniard: 'Hispani generis hominem, cujus proprium est,
+rationibus et commodis Hispanorum consultum velle, non Italorum.' See
+above, p. 109.
+
+[253] To this effect Pierio Valeriano, _De Infelicitate Literat._ ed.
+Mencken, p. 282, in speaking of Giovanni Regio: 'In arcano proscriptorum
+albo positus.'
+
+[254] Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 11. From May 22, 1502, onwards the
+_Despatches of Giustiniani_, 3 vols. Florence, 1876, edited by Pasquale
+Villari, offer valuable information.
+
+[255] Paulus Jovius, _Elogia_, C�sar Borgia. In the _Commentarii Urbani_
+of Ralph. Volaterianus, lib. xxii. there is a description of Alexander
+VI., composed under Julius II., and still written very guardedly. We
+here read: 'Roma ... nobilis jam carneficina facta erat.'
+
+[256] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 362.
+
+[257] Paul. Jovius, _Histor._ ii. fol. 47.
+
+[258] See the passages in Ranke, _R�m. P�pste_; S�mmtl. Werke, Bd.
+xxxvii. 35, and xxxix. Anh. Abschn. 1, Nro. 4, and Gregorovius, vii.
+497, sqq. Giustiniani does not believe in the Pope's being poisoned. See
+his _Dispacci_, vol. ii. pp. 107 sqq.; Villari's Note, pp. 120 sqq., and
+App. pp. 458 sqq.
+
+[259] Panvinius, _Epitome Pontificum_, p. 359. For the attempt to poison
+Alexander's successor, Julius II., see p. 363. According to Sismondi,
+xiii. p. 246, it was in this way that Lopez, Cardinal of Capua, for
+years the partner of all the Pope's secrets, came by his end; according
+to Sanuto (in Ranke, _Popes_, i. p. 52, note), the Cardinal of Verona
+also. When Cardinal Orsini died, the Pope obtained a certificate of
+natural death from a college of physicians.
+
+[260] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 254; comp. Attilio Alessio, in Baluz.
+_Miscell._, iv. p. 518 sqq.
+
+[261] And turned to the most profitable account by the Pope. Comp.
+_Chron. Venetum_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 133, given only as a report: 'E
+si giudiceva, che il Pontefice dovesse cavare assai danari di questo
+Giubileo, che gli torner� molto a proposito.
+
+[262] Anshelm, _Berner Chronik_, iii. pp. 146-156. Trithem. _Annales
+Hirsaug._ tom. ii. pp. 579, 584, 586.
+
+[263] Panvin. _Contin. Platinae_, p. 341.
+
+[264] Hence the splendour of the tombs of the prelates erected during
+their lifetime. A part of the plunder was in this way saved from the
+hands of the Popes.
+
+[265] Whether Julius really hoped that Ferdinand the Catholic would be
+induced to restore to the throne of Naples the expelled Aragonese
+dynasty, remains, in spite of Giovio's declaration (_Vita Alfonsi
+Ducis_), very doubtful.
+
+[266] Both poems in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, iv. 257 and 297. Of
+his death the _Cronaca di Cremona_ says: 'quale fu grande danno per la
+Italia, perch� era homo che non voleva tramontani in Italia, ed haveva
+cazato Francesi, e l'animo era de cazar le altri.' _Bibl. Hist. Ital._
+(1876) i. 217. It is true that when Julius, in August, 1511, lay one day
+for hours in a fainting fit, and was thought to be dead, the more
+restless members of the noblest families--Pompeo Colonna and Antimo
+Savelli--ventured to call 'the people' to the Capitol, and to urge them
+to throw off the Papal yoke--'a vendicarsi in libert� ... a publica
+ribellione,' as Guicciardini tells us in his tenth book. See, too, Paul.
+Jov. in the _Vita Pompeji Columnae_, and Gregorovius, viii. 71-75.
+
+[267] _Septimo decretal._ l. i. tit. 3, cap. 1-3.
+
+[268] Franc. Vettori, in the _Arch. Stor._ vi. 297.
+
+[269] Besides which it is said (Paul. Lang. _Chronicon Cilicense_) to
+have produced not less than 500,000 gold florins; the order of the
+Franciscans alone, whose general was made a cardinal, paid 30,000. For a
+notice of the various sums paid, see Sanuto, xxiv. fol. 227; for the
+whole subject see Gregorovius, viii. 214 sqq.
+
+[270] Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 301. _Arch. Stor._ Append. i. p. 293 sqq.
+Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, vi. p. 232 sqq. Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 42.
+
+[271] Ariosto, Sat. vi. v. 106. 'Tutti morrete, ed � fatal che muoja
+Leone appresso.' Sat. 3 and 7 ridicule the hangers on at Leo's Court.
+
+[272] One of several instances of such combinations is given in the
+_Lettere dei Principi_, i. 65, in a despatch of the Cardinal Bibbiena
+from Paris of the year 1518.
+
+[273] Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 333.
+
+[274] At the time of the Lateran Council, in 1512, Pico wrote an
+address: _J. E. P. Oratio ad Leonem X. et Concilium Lateranense de
+Reformandis Ecclesi� Moribus_ (ed. Hagenau, 1512, frequently printed in
+editions of his works). The address was dedicated to Pirckheimer and was
+again sent to him in 1517. Comp. _Vir. Doct. Epist. ad Pirck._, ed.
+Freytag, Leipz. 1838, p. 8. Pico fears that under Leo evil may
+definitely triumph over good, 'et in te bellum a nostr� religionis
+hostibus ante audias geri quam pariri.'
+
+[275] _Lettere dei Principi_, i. (Rome. 17th March, 1523): 'This city
+stands on a needle's point, and God grant that we are not soon driven to
+Avignon or to the end of the Ocean. I foresee the early fall of this
+spiritual monarchy.... Unless God helps us we are lost.' Whether Adrian
+were really poisoned or not, cannot be gathered with certainty from Blas
+Ortiz, _Itinerar. Hadriani_ (Baluz. _Miscell._ ed. Mansi, i. p. 386
+sqq.); the worst of it was that everybody believed it.
+
+[276] Negro, l.c. on Oct. 24 (should be Sept.) and Nov. 9, 1526, April
+11, 1527. It is true that he found admirers and flatterers. The dialogue
+of Petrus Alcyonus 'De Exilio' was written in his praise, shortly before
+he became Pope.
+
+[277] Varchi, _Stor. Fiorent._ i. 43, 46 sqq.
+
+[278] Paul. Jov., _Vita Pomp. Columnae_.
+
+[279] Ranke, _Deutsche Geschichte_ (4 Aufl.) ii. 262 sqq.
+
+[280] Varchi, _Stor. Fiorent._ ii. 43 sqq.
+
+[281] _Ibid._ and Ranke, _Deutsche Gesch._ ii. 278, note, and iii. 6
+sqq. It was thought that Charles would transfer his seat of government
+to Rome.
+
+[282] See his letter to the Pope, dated Carpentras, Sept. 1, 1527, in
+the _Anecdota litt._ iv. p. 335.
+
+[283] _Lettere dei Principi_, i. 72. Castiglione to the Pope, Burgos,
+Dec. 10, 1527.
+
+[284] Tommaso Gar, _Relaz. della Corte di Roma_, i. 299.
+
+[285] The Farnese succeeded in something of the kind, the Caraffa were
+ruined.
+
+[286] Petrarca, _Epist. Fam._ i. 3. p. 574, when he thanks God that he
+was born an Italian. And again in the _Apologia contra cujusdam anonymi
+Galli Calumnias_ of the year 1367 (_Opp._ ed. Bas. 1581) p. 1068 sqq.
+See L. Geiger, _Petrarca_, 129-145.
+
+[287] Particularly those in vol. i. of Schardius, _Scriptores rerum
+Germanicarum_, Basel, 1574. For an earlier period, Felix Faber,
+_Historia Suevorum_, libri duo (in Goldast, _Script. rer. Suev._ 1605);
+for a later, Irenicus, _Exegesis Germani�_, Hagenau, 1518. On the latter
+work and the patriotic histories of that time, see various studies of A.
+Horawitz, _Hist. Zeitschrift_, bd. xxxiii. 118, anm. 1.
+
+[288] One instance out of many: _The Answers of the Doge of Venice to a
+Florentine Agent respecting Pisa_, 1496, in Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti.
+Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p. 427.
+
+[289] Observe the expressions 'uomo singolare' and 'uomo unico' for the
+higher and highest stages of individual development.
+
+[290] By the year 1390 there was no longer any prevailing fashion of
+dress for men at Florence, each preferring to clothe himself in his own
+way. See the _Canzone_ of Franco Sacchetti: 'Contro alle nuove foggie'
+in the _Rime_, publ. dal Poggiali, p. 52.
+
+[291] At the close of the sixteenth century Montaigne draws the
+following parallel (_Essais_, l. iii. chap. 5, vol. iii. p. 367 of the
+Paris ed. 1816): 'Ils (les Italiens) ont plus communement des belles
+femmes et moins de laides que nous; mais des rares et excellentes
+beaut�s j'estime que nous allons � pair. Et j'en juge autant des
+esprits; de ceux de la commune fa�on, ils en ont beaucoup plus et
+evidemment; la brutalit� y est sans comparaison plus rare; d'ames
+singuli�res et du plus hault estage, nous ne leur en debvons rien.'
+
+[292] And also of their wives, as is seen in the family of Sforza and
+among other North Italian rulers. Comp. in the work of Jacobus Phil.
+Bergomensis, _De Plurimis Claris Selectisque Mulieribus_, Ferrara, 1497,
+the lives of Battista Malatesta, Paola Gonzaga, Bona Lombarda, Riccarda
+of Este, and the chief women of the House of Sforza, Beatrice and
+others. Among them are more than one genuine virago, and in several
+cases natural gifts are supplemented by great humanistic culture. (See
+below, chap. 3 and part v.)
+
+[293] Franco Sacchetti, in his 'Capitolo' (_Rime_, publ. dal Poggiali,
+p. 56), enumerates about 1390 the names of over a hundred distinguished
+people in the ruling parties who had died within his memory. However
+many mediocrities there may have been among them, the list is still
+remarkable as evidence of the awakening of individuality. On the 'Vite'
+of Filippo Villani, see below.
+
+[294] _Trattato del Governo della Famiglia_ forms a part of the work:
+_La Cura della Famiglia_ (_Opere Volg. di Leon Batt. Alberti_, publ. da
+Anicio Bonucci, Flor. 1844, vol. ii.). See there vol. i. pp. xxx.-xl.,
+vol. ii. pp. xxxv. sqq. and vol. v. pp. 1-127. Formerly the work was
+generally, as in the text, attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446; see
+on him _Vesp. Fiorent._, pp. 291 and 379); the recent investigations of
+Fr. Palermo (Florence 1871), have shown Alberti to be the author. The
+work is quoted from the ed. Torino, Pomba, 1828.
+
+[295] Trattato, p. 65 sqq.
+
+[296] Jov. Pontanus, _De Fortitudine_, l. ii. cap. 4, 'De tolerando
+Exilio,' Seventy years later, Cardanus (_De Vit� Propri�_, cap. 32)
+could ask bitterly: 'Quid est patria nisi consensus tyrannorum minutorum
+ad opprimendos imbelles timidos et qui plerumque sunt innoxii?'
+
+[297] _De Vulgari Eloquio_, lib. i. cap. 6. On the ideal Italian
+language, cap. 17. The spiritual unity of cultivated men, cap. 18. On
+home-sickness, comp. the famous passages, _Purg._ viii. 1 sqq., and
+_Parad._ xxv. 1 sqq.
+
+[298] _Dantis Alligherii Epistolae_, ed. Carolus Witte, p. 65.
+
+[299] Ghiberti, _Secondo Commentario_, cap. xv. (Vasari ed Lemonnier, i.
+p. xxix.).
+
+[300] _Codri Urcei Vita_, at the end of his works, first pub. Bologna
+1502. This certainly comes near the old saying: 'ubi bene, ibi patria.'
+C. U. was not called after the place of his birth, but after Forli,
+where he lived long; see Malagola, _Codro Urceo_, Bologna, 1877, cap. v.
+and app. xi. The abundance of neutral intellectual pleasure, which is
+independent of local circumstances, and of which the educated Italians
+became more and more capable, rendered exile more tolerable to them.
+Cosmopolitanism is further a sign of an epoch in which new worlds are
+discovered, and men feel no longer at home in the old. We see it among
+the Greeks after the Peloponnesian war; Plato, as Niebuhr says, was not
+a good citizen, and Xenophon was a bad one; Diogenes went so far as to
+proclaim homelessness a pleasure, and calls himself, Laertius tells us,
+[Greek: apolis]. Here another remarkable work may be mentioned.
+Petrus Alcyonius in his book: _Medices Legatus de Exilio lib. duo_, Ven.
+1522 (printed in Mencken, _Analecta de Calam. Literatorum_, Leipzig,
+1707, pp. 1-250) devotes to the subject of exile a long and prolix
+discussion. He tries logically and historically to refute the three
+reasons for which banishment is held to be an evil, viz. 1. Because the
+exile must live away from his fatherland. 2. Because he loses the
+honours given him at home. 3. Because he must do without his friends and
+relatives; and comes finally to the conclusion that banishment is not an
+evil. His dissertation culminates in the words, 'Sapientissimus quisque
+omnem orbem terrarum unam urbem esse ducit. Atque etiam illam veram sibi
+esse patriam arbitratur qu� se perigrinantem exciperit, qu� pudorem,
+probitatem, virtutem colit, qu� optima studia, liberales disciplinas
+amplectitur, qu� etiam facit ut peregrini omnes honesto otio teneant
+statum et famam dignitatis su�.'
+
+[301] This awakening of personality is also shown in the great stress
+laid on the independent growth of character, in the claim to shape the
+spiritual life for oneself, apart from parents and ancestors. Boccaccio
+(_De Cas. Vir. Ill._ Paris, s. a. fol. xxix. _b_) points out that
+Socrates came of uneducated, Euripides and Demosthenes of unknown,
+parents, and exclaims: 'Quasi animos a gignentibus habeamus!'
+
+[302] Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 16.
+
+[303] The angels which he drew on tablets at the anniversary of the
+death of Beatrice (_Vita Nuova_, p. 61) may have been more than the work
+of a dilettante. Lion. Aretino says he drew 'egregiamente,' and was a
+great lover of music.
+
+[304] For this and what follows, see esp. _Vespasiano Fiorentino_, an
+authority of the first order for Florentine culture in the fifteenth
+century Comp. pp. 359, 379, 401, etc. See, also, the charming and
+instructive _Vita Jannoctii Manetti_ (b. 1396), by Naldus Naldius, in
+Murat. xx. pp. 529-608.
+
+[305] What follows is taken, e.g., from Perticari's account of Pandolfo
+Collenuccio, in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi iii. pp. 197 sqq., and from
+the _Opere del Conte Perticari_, Mil. 1823, vol. ii.
+
+[306] For what follows compare Burckhardt, _Geschichte der Renaissance
+in Italien_, Stuttg. 1868, esp. p. 41 sqq., and A. Springer,
+_Abhandlungen zur neueren Kunstgeschichte_, Bonn, 1867, pp. 69-102. A
+new biography of Alberti is in course of preparation by Hub. Janitschek.
+
+[307] In Murat. xxv. col. 295 sqq., with the Italian translation in the
+_Opere Volgari di L. B. Alberti_, vol. i. pp. lxxxix-cix, where the
+conjecture is made and shown to be probable that this 'Vita' is by
+Alberti himself. See, further, Vasari, iv. 52 sqq. Mariano Socini, if we
+can believe what we read of him in �n. Sylvius (_Opera_, p. 622,
+_Epist._ 112) was a universal dilettante, and at the same time a master
+in several subjects.
+
+[308] Similar attempts, especially an attempt at a flying-machine, had
+been made about 880 by the Andalusian Abul Abbas Kasim ibn Firnas. Comp.
+Gyangos, _The History of the Muhammedan Dynasties in Spain_ (London,
+1840), i. 148 sqq. and 425-7; extracts in Hammer, _Literaturgesch. der
+Araber_, i. Introd. p. li.
+
+[309] Quidquid ingenio esset hominum cum quadam effectum elegantia, id
+prope divinum ducebat.
+
+[310] This is the book (comp. p. 185, note 2) of which one part, often
+printed alone, long passed for a work of Pandolfini.
+
+[311] In his work, _De Re �dificatoria_, l. viii. cap. i., there is a
+definition of a beautiful road: 'Si modo mare, modo montes, modo lacum
+fluentem fontesve, modo aridam rupem aut planitiem, modo nemus vallemque
+exhibebit.'
+
+[312] One writer among many: Blondus, _Roma Triumphans_, l. v. pp. 117
+sqq., where the definitions of glory are collected from the ancients,
+and the desire of it is expressly allowed to the Christian. Cicero's
+work, _De Gloria_, which Petrarch claimed to own, was stolen from him by
+his teacher Convenevole, and has never since been seen. Alberti, in a
+youthful composition when he was only twenty years of age, praises the
+desire of fame. _Opere_, vol. i. pp. cxxvii-clxvi.
+
+[313] _Paradiso_, xxv. at the beginning: 'Se mai continga,' &c. See
+above, p. 133, note 2. Comp. Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 49.
+'Vaghissimo fu e d'onore e di pompa, e per avventura pi� che alla sua
+inclita virt� non si sarebbe richiesto.'
+
+[314] _De Vulgari Eloquio_, l. i. cap. i. and esp. _De Monarchia_, l. i.
+cap. i., where he wishes to set forth the idea of monarchy not only in
+order to be useful to the world but also 'ut palmam tanti bravii primus
+in meam gloriam adipiscar.'
+
+[315] _Convito_, ed. Venezia, 1529, fol. 5 and 6.
+
+[316] _Paradiso_, vi. 112 sqq.
+
+[317] E.g. _Inferno_, vi. 89; xiii. 53; xvi. 85; xxxi. 127.
+
+[318] _Purgatorio_, v. 70, 87, 133; vi. 26; viii. 71; xi. 31; xiii. 147.
+
+[319] _Purgatorio_, xi. 85-117. Besides 'gloria' we here find close
+together 'grido, fama, rumore, nominanza, onore' all different names for
+the same thing. Boccaccio wrote, as he admits in his letter to Joh.
+Pizinga (_Op. Volg._ xvi. 30 sqq.) 'perpetuandi nominis desiderio'.
+
+[320] Scardeonius, _De Urb. Patav. Antiqu._ (Gr�v. _Thesaur._ vi. iii.
+col. 260). Whether 'cereis' or 'certis muneribus' should be the reading,
+cannot be said. The somewhat solemn nature of Mussatus can be recognised
+in the tone of his history of Henry VII.
+
+[321] Franc. Petrarca, _Posteritati_, or _Ad Posteros_, at the beginning
+of the editions of his works, or the only letter of Book xviii. of the
+_Epp. Seniles_; also in Fracassetti, _Petr. Epistol� Familiares_, 1859,
+i. 1-11. Some modern critics of Petrarch's vanity would hardly have
+shown as much kindness and frankness had they been in his place.
+
+[322] _Opera_, ed. 1581, p. 177: 'De celebritate nominis importuna.'
+Fame among the mass of people was specially offensive to him. _Epp.
+Fam._ i. 337, 340. In Petrarch, as in many humanists of the older
+generation, we can observe the conflict between the desire for glory and
+the claims of Christian humility.
+
+[323] 'De Remediis Utriusque Fortun�' in the editions of the works.
+Often printed separately, e.g. Bern, 1600. Compare Petrarch's famous
+dialogue, 'De Contemptu Mundi' or 'De Conflictu Curarum Suarum,' in
+which the interlocutor Augustinus blames the love of fame as a damnable
+fault.
+
+[324] _Epp. Fam._ lib. xviii. (ed. Fracassetti) 2. A measure of
+Petrarch's fame is given a hundred years later by the assertion of
+Blondus (_Italia Illustrata_, p. 416) that hardly even a learned man
+would know anything of Robert the Good if Petrarch had not spoken of him
+so often and so kindly.
+
+[325] It is to be noted that even Charles IV., perhaps influenced by
+Petrarch, speaks in a letter to the historian Marignola of fame as the
+object of every striving man. H. Friedjung, _Kaiser Karl IV. und sein
+Antheil am geistigen Leben seiner Zeit_, Vienna, 1876, p. 221.
+
+[326] _Epist. Seniles_, xiii. 3, to Giovanni Aretino, Sept. 9, 1370.
+
+[327] Filippo Villani, _Vite_, p. 19
+
+[328] Both together in the epitaph on Boccaccio: 'Nacqui in Firenze al
+Pozzo Toscanelli; Di fuor sepolto a Certaldo giaccio,' &c. Comp. _Op.
+Volg. di Boccaccio_, xvi. 44.
+
+[329] Mich. Savonarola, _De Laudibus Patavii_, in Murat. xxiv. col.
+1157. Arqu� remained from thenceforth the object of special veneration
+(comp. Ettore Conte Macola, _I Codici di Arqu�_, Padua, 1874), and was
+the scene of great solemnities at the fifth centenary of Petrarch's
+death. His dwelling is said to have been lately given to the city of
+Padua by the last owner, Cardinal Silvestri.
+
+[330] The decree of 1396 and its grounds in Gaye, _Carteggio_, i. 123.
+
+[331] Reumont, _Lorenzo de' Medici_, ii. 180.
+
+[332] Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 39.
+
+[333] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 121.
+
+[334] The former in the well-known sarcophagus near San Lorenzo, the
+latter over a door in the Palazzo della Ragione. For details as to their
+discovery in 1413, see Misson, _Voyage en Italie_, vol. i., and Michele
+Savonarola, col. 1157.
+
+[335] _Vita di Dante_, l. c. How came the body of Cassius from Philippi
+back to Parma?
+
+[336] 'Nobilitatis fastu' and 'sub obtentu religionis,' says Pius II.
+(_Comment._ x. p. 473). The new sort of fame must have been inconvenient
+to those who were accustomed to the old.
+
+That Carlo Malatesta caused the statue of Virgil to be pulled down and
+thrown into the Mincio, and this, as he alleged, from anger at the
+veneration paid to it by the people of Mantua, is a well-authenticated
+fact, specially attested by an invective written in 1397 by P. P.
+Vergerio against C. M., _De dirut� Statu� Virgilii P. P. V.
+eloquentissimi Oratoris Epistola ex Tugurio Blondi sub Apolline_, ed. by
+Marco Mantova Benavides (publ. certainly before 1560 at Padua). From
+this work it is clear that till then the statue had not been set up
+again. Did this happen in consequence of the invective? Bartholom�us
+Facius (_De Vir. Ill._ p. 9 sqq. in the Life of P. P. V. 1456) says it
+did, 'Carolum Malatestam invectus Virgilii statua, quam ille Mantu� in
+foro everterat, quoniam gentilis fuerat, ut ibidem restitueretur,
+effecit;' but his evidence stands alone. It is true that, so far as we
+know, there are no contemporary chronicles for the history of Mantua at
+that period (Platina, _Hist. Mant._ in Murat. xx. contains nothing about
+the matter), but later historians are agreed that the statue was not
+restored. See for evidence, Prendilacqua, _Vita di Vitt. da Feltre_,
+written soon after 1446 (ed. 1871, p. 78), where the destruction but not
+the restoration of the statue is spoken of, and the work of Ant.
+Possevini, jun. (_Gonzaga_, Mantua, 1628), where, p. 486, the pulling
+down of the statue, the murmurings and violent opposition of the people,
+and the promise given in consequence by the prince that he _would_
+restore it, are all mentioned, with the addition: 'Nec tamen restitutus
+est Virgilius.' Further, on March 17, 1499, Jacopo d'Hatry writes to
+Isabella of Este, that he has spoken with Pontano about a plan of the
+princess to raise a statue to Virgil at Mantua, and that Pontano cried
+out with delight that Vergerio, if he were alive, would be even more
+pleased 'che non se attrist� quando el Conte Carola Malatesta persuase
+abuttare la statua di Virgilio nel flume.' The writer then goes on to
+speak of the manner of setting it up, of the inscription 'P. Virgilius
+Mantuanus' and 'Isabella Marchionissa Mantu� restituit,' and suggests
+that Andrea Mantegna would be the right man to be charged with the work.
+Mantegna did in fact make the drawings for it. (The drawing and the
+letter in question are given in Baschet, _Recherches de documents d'art
+et d'histoire dans les Archives de Mantoue; documents in�dits concernant
+la personne et les oeuvres d'Andrea Mantegna_, in the _Gazette des
+Beaux-Arts_, xx. (1866) 478-492, esp. 486 sqq.) It is clear from this
+letter that Carlo Malatesta did not have the statue restored. In
+Comparetti's work on Virgil in the Middle Ages, the story is told after
+Burckhardt, but without authorities. Dr. Geiger, on the authority of
+Professor Paul of Berlin, distinguishes between C. Cassius Longinus and
+Cassius Parmensis, the poet, both among the assassins of C�sar.
+
+[337] Comp. Keyssler's _Neueste Reisen_, p. 1016.
+
+[338] The elder was notoriously a native of Verona.
+
+[339] This is the tone of the remarkable work, _De Laudibus Papi�_, in
+Murat. xx., dating from the fourteenth century--much municipal pride,
+but no idea of personal fame.
+
+[340] _De Laudibus Patavii_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1138 sqq. Only three
+cities, in his opinion--could be compared with Padua--Florence, Venice
+and Rome.
+
+[341] 'Nam et veteres nostri tales aut divos aut �tern� memori� dignos
+non immerito pr�dicabant, quum virtus summa sanctitatis sit consocia et
+pari ematur pretio.' What follows is most characteristic: 'Hos itaque
+meo facili judicio �ternos facio.'
+
+[342] Similar ideas occur in many contemporary writers. Codrus Urceus,
+_Sermo_ xiii. (_Opp._ 1506, fol. xxxviii. _b_), speaking of Galeazzo
+Bentivoglio, who was both a scholar and a warrior, 'Cognoscens artem
+militarem esse quidem excellentem, sed literas multo certe
+excellentiores.'
+
+[343] What follows immediately is not, as the editor remarks (Murat.
+xxiv col. 1059, note), from the pen of Mich. Savonarola.
+
+[344] Petrarch, in the 'Triumph' here quoted, only dwells on characters
+of antiquity, and in his collection, _De Rebus Memorandis_, has little
+to say of contemporaries. In the _Casus Virorum Illustrium_ of Boccaccio
+(among the men a number of women, besides Philippa Catinensis treated of
+at the end, are included, and even the goddess Juno is described), only
+the close of the eighth book and the last book--the ninth--deal with
+non-classical times. Boccaccio's remarkable work, _De Claris
+Mulieribus_, treats also almost exclusively of antiquity. It begins with
+Eve, speaks then of ninety-seven women of antiquity, and seven of the
+Middle ages, beginning with Pope Joan and ending with Queen Johanna of
+Naples. And so at a much later time in the _Commentarii Urbani_ of
+Ralph. Volaterranus. In the work _De Claris Mulieribus_ of the
+Augustinian Jacobus Bergomensis (printed 1497, but probably published
+earlier) antiquity and legend hold the chief place, but there are still
+some valuable biographies of Italian women. There are one or two lives
+of contemporary women by Vespasiano da Bisticci (_Arch. Stor. Ital._ iv.
+i. pp. 430 sqq.). In Scardeonius (_De Urb. Patav. Antiqu. Gr�v.
+Thesaur._ vi. iii. col. 405 sqq.,) only famous Paduan women are
+mentioned. First comes a legend or tradition from the time of the fall
+of the empire, then tragical stories of the party struggles of the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; then notices of several heroic
+women; then the foundress of nunneries, the political woman, the female
+doctor, the mother of many and distinguished sons, the learned woman,
+the peasant girl who dies defending her chastity; then the cultivated
+beauty of the sixteenth century, on whom everybody writes sonnets; and
+lastly, the female novelist and poet at Padua. A century later the
+woman-professor would have been added to these. For the famous woman of
+the House of Este, see Ariosto, _Orl._ xiii.
+
+[345] Bartolommeo Facio and Paolo Cortese. B. F. _De Viris Illustribus
+Liber_, was first published by L. Mehus (Florence, 1745). The book was
+begun by the author (known by other historical works, and resident at
+the court of Alfonso of Naples) after he had finished the history of
+that king (1455), and ended, as references to the struggles of Hungary
+and the writer's ignorance of the elevation of �neas Silvius to the
+cardinalate show, in 1456. (See, nevertheless, Wahlen, _Laurentii Vall�
+Opuscula Tria_, Vienna, 1869, p. 67, note 1.) It is never quoted by
+contemporaries, and seldom by later writers. The author wishes in this
+book to describe the famous men, '�tatis memori�que nostr�,' and
+consequently only mentions such as were born in the last quarter of the
+fourteenth century, and were still living in, or had died shortly
+before, the middle of the fifteenth. He chiefly limits himself to
+Italians, except in the case of artists or princes, among the latter of
+whom he includes the Emperor Sigismund and Albrecht Achilles of
+Brandenburg; and in arranging the various biographies he neither follows
+chronological order nor the distinction which the subject of each
+attained, but puts them down 'ut quisque mihi occurrerit,' intending to
+treat in a second part of those whom he might have left out in the
+first. He divides the famous men into nine classes, nearly all of them
+prefaced by remarks on their distinctive qualities: 1. Poets; 2.
+Orators; 3. Jurists; 4. Physicians (with a few philosophers and
+theologians, as an appendix); 5. Painters; 6. Sculptors; 7. Eminent
+citizens; 8. Generals; 9. Princes and kings. Among the latter he treats
+with special fulness and care of Pope Nicholas V. and King Alfonso of
+Naples. In general he gives only short and mostly eulogistic
+biographies, confined in the case of princes and soldiers to the list of
+their deeds, and of artists and writers to the enumeration of their
+works. No attempt is made at a detailed description or criticism of
+these; only with regard to a few works of art which he had himself seen
+he writes more fully. Nor is any attempt made at an estimate of
+individuals; his heroes either receive a few general words of praise, or
+must be satisfied with the mere mention of their names. Of himself the
+author says next to nothing. He states only that Guarino was his
+teacher, that Manetti wrote a book on a subject which he himself had
+treated, that Bracellius was his countryman, and that the painter Pisano
+of Verona was known to him (pp. 17, 18, 19, 48; but says nothing in
+speaking of Laurentius Valla of his own violent quarrels with this
+scholar. On the other hand, he does not fail to express his piety and
+his hatred to the Turks (p. 64), to relieve his Italian patriotism by
+calling the Swiss barbarians (p. 60), and to say of P. P. Vergerius,
+'dignus qui totam in Italia vitam scribens exegisset' (p. 9).
+
+Of all celebrities he evidently sets most store by the scholars, and
+among these by the 'oratores,' to whom he devotes nearly a third of his
+book. He nevertheless has great respect for the jurists, and shows a
+special fondness for the physicians, among whom he well distinguishes
+the theoretical from the practical, relating the successful diagnoses
+and operations of the latter. That he treats of theologians and
+philosophers in connection with the physicians, is as curious as that he
+should put the painters immediately after the physicians, although, as
+he says, they are most allied to the poets. In spite of his reverence
+for learning, which shows itself in the praise given to the princes who
+patronised it, he is too much of a courtier not to register the tokens
+of princely favour received by the scholars he speaks of, and to
+characterise the princes in the introduction to the chapters devoted to
+them as those who 'veluti corpus membra, ita omnia genera qu� supra
+memoravimus, regunt ac tuentur.'
+
+The style of the book is simple and unadorned, and the matter of it full
+of instruction, notwithstanding its brevity. It is a pity that Facius
+did not enter more fully into the personal relations and circumstances
+of the men whom he described, and did not add to the list of their
+writings some notice of the contents and the value of them.
+
+The work of Paolo Cortese (b. 1645, d. 1510), _De Hominibus Doctis
+Dialogus_ (first ed. Florence, 1734), is much more limited in its
+character. This work, written about 1490, since it mentions Antonius
+Geraldinus as dead, who died in 1488, and was dedicated to Lorenzo de'
+Medici, who died in 1492, is distinguished from that of Facius, written
+a generation earlier, not only by the exclusion of all who are not
+learned men, but by various inward and outward characteristics. First by
+the form, which is that of a dialogue between the author and his two
+companions, Alexander Farnese and Antonius, and by the digressions and
+unequal treatment of the various characters caused thereby; and secondly
+by the manner of the treatment itself. While Facius only speaks of the
+men of his own time, Cortese treats only of the dead, and in part of
+those long dead, by which he enlarges his circle more than he narrows it
+by exclusion of the living; while Facius merely chronicles works and
+deeds, as if they were unknown, Cortese criticises the literary activity
+of his heroes as if the reader were already familiar with it. This
+criticism is shaped by the humanistic estimate of eloquence, according
+to which no man could be considered of importance unless he had achieved
+something remarkable in eloquence, _i.e._ in the classical, Ciceronian
+treatment of the Latin language. On this principle Dante and Petrarch
+are only moderately praised, and are blamed for having diverted so much
+of their powers from Latin to Italian; Guarino is described as one who
+had beheld perfect eloquence at least through a cloud; Lionardo Aretino
+as one who had offered his contemporaries 'aliquid splendidius;' and
+Enea Silvio as he 'in quo primum apparuit mutati s�culi signum.' This
+point of view prevailed over all others; never perhaps was it held so
+one-sidedly as by Cortese. To get a notion of his way of thinking we
+have only to hear his remarks on a predecessor, also the compiler of a
+great biographical collection, Sicco Polentone: 'Ejus sunt viginti ad
+filium libri scripti de claris scriptoribus, utiles admodum qui jam fere
+ab omnibus legi sent desiti. Est enim in judicando parum acer, nec
+servit aurium voluptati quum tractat res ab aliis ante tractatas; sed
+hoc ferendum. Illud certe molestum est, dum alienis verbis sententiisque
+scripta infarcit et explet sua; ex quo nascitur maxime vitiosum
+scribendi genus, quum modo lenis et candidus, modo durus et asper
+apparcat, et sic in toto genere tanquam in unum agrum plura inter se
+inimicissima sparsa semina.'
+
+All are not treated with so much detail; most are disposed of in a few
+brief sentences; some are merely named without a word being added. Much
+is nevertheless to be learned from his judgments, though we may not be
+able always to agree with them. We cannot here discuss him more fully,
+especially as many of his most characteristic remarks have been already
+made use of; on the whole, they give us a clear picture of the way in
+which a later time, outwardly more developed, looked down with critical
+scorn upon an earlier age, inwardly perhaps richer, but externally less
+perfect.
+
+Facius, the author of the first-mentioned biographical work, is spoken
+of, but not his book. Like Facius, Cortese is the humble courtier,
+looking on Lorenzo de' Medici as Facius looked on Alfonso of Naples;
+like him, he is a patriot who only praises foreign excellence
+unwillingly and because he must; adding the assurance that he does not
+wish to oppose his own country (p. 48, speaking of Janus Pannonius).
+
+Information as to Cortese has been collected by Bernardus Paperinius,
+the editor of his work; we may add that his Latin translation of the
+novel of L. B. Alberti, _Hippolytus and Dejanira_, is printed for the
+first time in the _Opere di L. B. A._ vol. iii. pp. 439-463.
+
+[346] How great the fame of the humanists was is shown by the fact that
+impostors attempted to make capital out of the use of their names. There
+thus appeared at Verona a man strangely clad and using strange gestures,
+who, when brought before the mayor, recited with great energy passages
+of Latin verse and prose, taken from the works of Panormita, answered in
+reply to the questions put to him that he was himself Panormita, and was
+able to give so many small and commonly unknown details about the life
+of this scholar, that his statement obtained general credit. He was then
+treated with great honour by the authorities and the learned men of the
+city, and played his assumed part successfully for a considerable time,
+until Guarino and others who knew Panormita personally discovered the
+fraud. Comp. Rosmini, _Vita di Guarino_, ii. 44 sqq., 171 sqq. Few of
+the humanists were free from the habit of boasting. Codrus Urceus
+(_Vita_, at the end of the _Opera_, 1506, fol. lxx.), when asked for his
+opinion about this or that famous man, used to answer: 'Sibi scire
+videntur.' Barth. Facius, _De Vir. Ill._ p. 31, tells of the jurist
+Antonius Butriensis: 'Id unum in eo viro notandum est, quod neminem
+unquam, adeo excellere homines in eo studio volebat, ut doctoratu dignum
+in examine comprobavit.'
+
+[347] A Latin poet of the twelfth century, one of the wandering scholars
+who barters his song for a coat, uses this as a threat. _Carmina
+Burana_, p. 76.
+
+[348] Sonnet cli: Lasso ch'i ardo.
+
+[349] Boccaccio, _Opere Volgari_, vol. xvi. in Sonnet 13: Pallido,
+vinto, etc.
+
+[350] Elsewhere, and in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, iv. 203.
+
+[351] _Angeli Politiani Epp._ lib. x.
+
+[352] Quatuor navigationes, etc. Deodatum (_St. Di�_), 1507. Comp. O.
+Peschel, _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_, 1859, ed. 2,
+1876.
+
+[353] Paul. Jov. _De Romanis Piscibus_, Pr�fatio (1825). The first
+decade of his histories would soon be published, 'non sine aliqua spe
+immortalitatis.'
+
+[354] Comp. _Discorsi_, i. 27. 'Tristizia' (crime) can have 'grandezza'
+and be 'in alcuna parte generosa'; 'grandezza' can take away 'infamia'
+from a deed; a man can be 'onorevolmente tristo' in contrast to one who
+is 'perfettamente buono.'
+
+[355] _Storie Fiorentine_, l. vi.
+
+[356] Paul. Jov. _Elog. Vir. Lit. Ill._ p. 192, speaking of Marius
+Molsa.
+
+[357] Mere railing is found very early, in Benzo of Alba, in the
+eleventh century (_Mon. Germ._ ss. xi. 591-681).
+
+[358] The Middle Ages are further rich in so-called satirical poems; but
+the satire is not individual, but aimed at classes, categories, and
+whole populations, and easily passes into the didactic tone. The whole
+spirit of this literature is best represented by _Reineke Fuchs_, in all
+its forms among the different nations of the West. For this branch of
+French literature see a new and admirable work by Lenient, _La Satire en
+France au Moyen-�ge_, Paris, 1860, and the equally excellent
+continuation, _La Satire en France, ou la litt�rature militante, au
+XVIe Si�cle_, Paris, 1866.
+
+[359] See above, p. 7 note 2. Occasionally we find an insolent joke,
+nov. 37.
+
+[360] _Inferno_, xxi. xxii. The only possible parallel is with
+Aristophanes.
+
+[361] A modest beginning _Opera_, p. 421, sqq., in _Rerum Memorandarum
+Libri IV._ Again, in _Epp. Seniles_, x. 2. Comp. _Epp. Fam._ ed.
+Fracass. i. 68 sqq., 70, 240, 245. The puns have a flavour of their
+medi�val home, the monasteries. Petrarch's invectives 'contra Gallum,'
+'contra medicum objurgantem,' and his work, _De Sui Ipsius et Multorum
+Ignorantia_; perhaps also his _Epistol� sine Titulo_,' may be quoted as
+early examples of satirical writing.
+
+[362] Nov. 40, 41; Ridolfo da Camerino is the man.
+
+[363] The well-known jest of Brunellesco and the fat wood-carver,
+Manetto Ammanatini, who is said to have fled into Hungary before the
+ridicule he encountered, is clever but cruel.
+
+[364] The 'Araldo' of the Florentine Signoria. One instance among many,
+_Commissioni di Rinaldo degli Albizzi_, iii. 651, 669. The fool as
+necessary to enliven the company after dinner; Alcyonius, _De Exilio_,
+ed. Mencken, p. 129.
+
+[365] Sacchetti, nov. 48. And yet, according to nov. 67, there was an
+impression that a Romagnole was superior to the worst Florentine.
+
+[366] L. B. Alberti, _Del Governo della Famiglia, Opere_, ed. Bonucci,
+v. 171. Comp. above, p. 132, note 1.
+
+[367] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 156; comp. 24 for Dolcibene and the Jews.
+(For Charles IV. and the fools, _Friedjung_, o.c. p. 109.) The _Faceti�_
+of Poggio resemble Sacchetti's in substance--practical jokes,
+impertinences, refined indecency misunderstood by simple folk; the
+philologist is betrayed by the large number of verbal jokes. On L. A.
+Alberti, see pp. 136, sqq.
+
+[368] And consequently in those novels of the Italians whose subject is
+taken from them.
+
+[369] According to Bandello, iv. nov. 2, Gonnella could twist his
+features into the likeness of other people, and mimic all the dialects
+of Italy.
+
+[370] Paul. Jov. _Vita Leonis X._
+
+[371] 'Erat enim Bibiena mirus artifex hominibus �tate vel professione
+gravibus ad insaniam impellendis.' We are here reminded of the jests of
+Christine of Sweden with her philologists. Comp. the remarkable passage
+of Jovian. Pontanus, _De Sermone_, lib. ii. cap. 9: 'Ferdinandus Alfonsi
+filius, Neapolitanorum rex magnus et ipse fuit artifex et vultus
+componendi et orationes in quem ipse usus vellet. Nam �tatis nostri
+Pontifices maximi fingendis vultibus ac verbis vel histriones ipsos
+anteveniunt.
+
+[372] The eye-glass I not only infer from Rafael's portrait, where it
+can be explained as a magnifier for looking at the miniatures in the
+prayer-book, but from a statement of Pellicanus, according to which Leo
+views an advancing procession of monks through a 'specillum' (comp.
+_Z�richer Taschenbuch_ for 1858, p. 177), and from the 'cristallus
+concava,' which, according to Giovio, he used when hunting. (Comp.
+'Leonis X. vita auctore anon, conscripta' in the Appendix to Roscoe.) In
+Attilius Alessius (Baluz. _Miscell._ iv. 518) we read, 'Oculari ex
+gemina (gemma?) utebatur quam manu gestans, signando aliquid videndum
+esset, oculis admovebat.' The shortsightedness in the family of the
+Medici was hereditary. Lorenzo was shortsighted, and replied to the
+Sienese Bartolommeo Soccini, who said that the air of Florence was bad
+for the eyes: 'E quella di Siena al cervello.' The bad sight of Leo X.
+was proverbial. After his election, the Roman wits explained the number
+MCCCCXL. engraved in the Vatican as follows: 'Multi c�ci Cardinales
+creaverunt c�cum decimum Leonem.' Comp. Shepherd-Tonelli, _Vita del
+Poggio_, ii. 23, sqq., and the passages there quoted.
+
+[373] We find it also in plastic art, e.g., in the famous plate
+parodying the group of the La�coon as three monkeys. But here parody
+seldom went beyond sketches and the like, though much, it is true, may
+have been destroyed. Caricature, again, is something different.
+Lionardo, in the grotesque faces in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana,
+represents what is hideous when and because it is comical, and
+exaggerates the ludicrous element at pleasure.
+
+[374] Jovian. Pontan. _De Sermone_, libri v. He attributes a special
+gift of wit to the Sienese and Peruginese, as well as to the
+Florentines, adding the Spanish court as a matter of politeness.
+
+[375] _Il Cortigiano_, lib. ii. cap. 4 sqq., ed. Baude di Vesme,
+Florence, 1854, pp. 124 sqq. For the explanation of wit as the effect of
+contrast, though not clearly put, see _ibid._ cap. lxxiii. p. 136.
+
+[376] Pontanus, _De Sermone_, lib. iv. cap. 3, also advises people to
+abstain from using 'ridicula' either against the miserable or the
+strong.
+
+[377] _Galateo del Casa_, ed. Venez. 1789, p. 26 sqq. 48.
+
+[378] _Lettere Pittoriche_, i. p. 71, in a letter of Vinc. Borghini,
+1577. Macchiavelli (_Stor. Fior._ vii. cap. 28) says of the young
+gentlemen in Florence soon after the middle of the fifteenth century:
+'Gli stud� loro erano apparire col vestire splendidi, e col parlare
+sagaci ed astuti, e quello che pi� destramente mordeva gli altri, era
+pi� savio e da pi� stimato.'
+
+[379] Comp. Fedra Inghirami's funeral oration on Ludovico Podocataro (d.
+Aug. 25, 1504) in the _Anecd. Litt._ i. p. 319. The scandal-monger
+Massaino is mentioned in Paul. Jov. _Dialogues de Viris Litt. Illustr._
+(Tiraboschi, tom. vii. parte iv. p. 1631).
+
+[380] This was the plan followed by Leo X., and his calculations were
+not disappointed. Fearfully as his reputation was mangled after his
+death by the satirists, they were unable to modify the general estimate
+formed of him.
+
+[381] This was probably the case with Cardinal Ardicino della Porta, who
+in 1491 wished to resign his dignity and take refuge in a monastery. See
+Infessura, in Eccard. ii. col. 2000.
+
+[382] See his funeral oration in the _Anecd. Litt._ iv. p. 315. He
+assembled an army of peasants in the March of Aneona, which was only
+hindered from acting by the treason of the Duke of Urbino. For his
+graceful and hopeless love-poems, see Trucchi, _Poesie Inedite_, iii.
+123.
+
+[383] How he used his tongue at the table of Clement VII. is told in
+Giraldi, _Hecatomithi_, vii. nov. 5.
+
+[384] The charge of taking into consideration the proposal to drown
+Pasquino (in Paul. Jov. _Vita Hadriani_), is transferred from Sixtus IV.
+to Hadrian. Comp. _Lettere dei Principi_, i. 114 sqq., letter of Negro,
+dated April 7, 1523. On St. Mark's Day Pasquino had a special
+celebration, which the Pope forbade.
+
+[385] In the passages collected in Gregorovius, viii. 380 note, 381 sqq.
+393 sqq.
+
+[386] Comp. Pier. Valer. _De Infel. Lit._ ed. Mencken, p. 178.
+'Pestilentia qu� cum Adriano VI. invecta Romam invasit.'
+
+[387] E.g. Firenzuola, _Opera_ (Milano 1802), vol. i. p. 116, in the
+_Discorsi degli Animali_.
+
+[388] Comp. the names in H�fler, _Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Academie_
+(1876), vol. 82, p. 435.
+
+[389] The words of Pier. Valerian, _De Infel. Lit._ ed. Mencken, p. 382,
+are most characteristic of the public feeling at Rome: 'Ecce adest
+Musarum et eloquenti� totiusque nitoris hostis acerrimis, qui literatis
+omnibus inimicitias minitaretur, quoniam, ut ipse dictitabat, Terentiani
+essent, quos quum odisse atque etiam persequi coepisset voluntarium alii
+exilium, alias atque alias alii latebras qu�rentes tam diu latuere quoad
+Deo beneficio altero imperii anno decessit, qui si aliquanto diutius
+vixisset, Gothica illa tempora adversus bonas literas videbatur
+suscitaturus.' The general hatred of Adrian was also due partly to the
+fact that in the great pecuniary difficulties in which he found himself
+he adopted the expedient of a direct tax. Ranke, _P�pste_, i. 411. It
+may here be mentioned that there were, nevertheless, poets to be found
+who praised Adrian. Comp. various passages in the _Coryciana_ (ed. Rome,
+1524), esp. J. J. 2_b_ sqq.
+
+[390] To the Duke of Ferrara, January 1, 1536 (_Lettere_, ed. 1539, fol.
+39): 'You will now journey from Rome to Naples,' 'ricreando la vista
+avvilita nel mirar le miserie pontificali con la contemplazione delle
+eccellenze imperiali.'
+
+[391] The fear which he caused to men of mark, especially artists, by
+these means, cannot be here described. The publicistic weapon of the
+German Reformation was chiefly the pamphlet dealing with events as they
+occurred; Aretino is a journalist in the sense that he has within
+himself a perpetual occasion for writing.
+
+[392] E.g. in the _Capitolo_ on Albicante, a bad poet; unfortunately the
+passages are unfit for quotation.
+
+[393] _Lettere_, ed. Venez. 1539, fol. 12, dated May 31, 1527.
+
+[394] In the first _Capitolo_ to Cosimo.
+
+[395] Gaye, _Carteggio_, ii. 332.
+
+[396] See the insolent letter of 1536 in the _Lettere Pittor._ i.
+Append. 34. See above, p. 142, for the house where Petrarch was born in
+Arezzo.
+
+[397]
+
+    L'Aretin, per Deo grazia, � vivo e sano,
+    Ma'l mostaccio ha fregiato nobilmente,
+    E pi� colpi ha, che dita in una mano.'
+     (Mauro, '_Capitolo in lode delle bugie._')
+
+
+[398] See e.g. the letter to the Cardinal of Lorraine, _Lettere_, ed.
+Venez. fol. 29, dated Nov. 21, 1534, and the letters to Charles V., in
+which he says that no man stands nearer to God than Charles.
+
+[399] For what follows, see Gaye, _Carteggio_, ii. 336, 337, 345.
+
+[400] _Lettere_, ed. Venez. 1539, fol. 15, dated June 16, 1529. Comp.
+another remarkable letter to M. A., dated April 15, 1528, fol. 212.
+
+[401] He may have done so either in the hope of obtaining the red hat or
+from fear of the new activity of the Inquisition, which he had ventured
+to attack bitterly in 1535 (l. c. fol. 37), but which, after the
+reorganisation of the institution in 1542, suddenly took a fresh start,
+and soon silenced every opposing voice.
+
+[402] [Carmina Burana, in the _Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins in
+Stuttgart_, vol. xvi. (Stuttg. 1847). The stay in Pavia (p. 68 _bis_),
+the Italian local references in general, the scene with the 'pastorella'
+under the olive-tree (p. 146), the mention of the 'pinus' as a shady
+field tree (p. 156), the frequent use of the word 'bravium' (pp. 137,
+144), and particularly the form Madii for Maji (p. 141), all speak in
+favour of our assumption.]
+
+The conjecture of Dr. Burckhardt that the best pieces of the _Carmina
+Burana_ were written by an Italian, is not tenable. The grounds brought
+forward in its support have little weight (e.g. the mention of Pavia:
+'Quis Pavi� demorans castus habeatur?' which can be explained as a
+proverbial expression, or referred to a short stay of the writer at
+Pavia), cannot, further, hold their own against the reasons on the other
+side, and finally lose all their force in view of the probable
+identification of the author. The arguments of O. Hubatsch _Die
+lateinischen Vagantenlieder des Mittelalters_, G�rlitz, 1870, p. 87)
+against the Italian origin of these poems are, among others, the attacks
+on the Italian and praise of the German clergy, the rebukes of the
+southerners as a 'gens proterva,' and the reference to the poet as
+'transmontanus.' Who he actually was, however, is not clearly made out.
+That he bore the name of Walther throws no light upon his origin. He was
+formerly identified with Gualterus de Mapes, a canon of Salisbury and
+chaplain to the English kings at the end of the twelfth century; since,
+by Giesebrecht (_Die Vaganten oder Goliarden und ihre Lieder, Allgemeine
+Monatschrift_, 1855), with Walther of Lille or Chatillon, who passed
+from France into England and Germany, and thence possibly with the
+Archbishop Reinhold of K�ln (1164 and 75) to Italy (Pavia, &c.). If this
+hypothesis, against which Hubatsch (l. c.) has brought forward certain
+objections, must be abandoned, it remains beyond a doubt that the origin
+of nearly all these songs is to be looked for in France, from whence
+they were diffused through the regular school which here existed for
+them over Germany, and there expanded and mixed with German phrases;
+while Italy, as Giesebrecht has shown, remained almost unaffected by
+this class of poetry. The Italian translator of Dr. Burckhardt's work,
+Prof. D. Valbusa, in a note to this passage (i. 235), also contests the
+Italian origin of the poem. [L. G.]
+
+[403] _Carm. Bur._ p. 155, only a fragment: the whole in Wright, _Walter
+Mapes_ (1841), p. 258. Comp. Hubatsch, p. 27 sqq., who points to the
+fact that a story often treated of in France is at the foundation. �st.
+Inter. _Carm. Bur._ p. 67; Dum Dian�, _Carm. Bur._ p. 124. Additional
+instances: 'Cor patet Jovi;' classical names for the loved one; once,
+when he calls her Blanciflor, he adds, as if to make up for it, the name
+of Helena.
+
+[404] In what way antiquity could serve as guide and teacher in all the
+higher regions of life, is briefly sketched by �neas Sylvius (_Opera_,
+p. 603, in the _Epist._ 105, to the Archduke Sigismund).
+
+[405] For particulars we must refer the reader to Roscoe, _Lorenzo Mag._
+and _Leo X._, as well as to Voigt, _Enea Silvio_ (Berlin, 1856-63); to
+the works of Reumont and to Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom im
+Mittelalter_.
+
+To form a conception of the extent which studies at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century had reached, we cannot do better than turn to the
+_Commentarii Urbani_ of Raphael Volatterranus (ed. Basil, 1544, fol. 16,
+&c.). Here we see how antiquity formed the introduction and the chief
+matter of study in every branch of knowledge, from geography and local
+history, the lives of great and famous men, popular philosophy, morals
+and the special sciences, down to the analysis of the whole of Aristotle
+with which the work closes. To understand its significance as an
+authority for the history of culture, we must compare it with all the
+earlier encyclop�dias. A complete and circumstantial account of the
+matter is given in Voigt's admirable work, _Die Wiederbelebung des
+classischen Alterthums_ oder _Das erste Jahrhundert der Humanismus_,
+Berlin, 1859.
+
+[406] In William of Malmesbury, _Gesta Regum Anglor_. l. ii. � 169, 170,
+205, 206 (ed. Lond. 1840, vol. i. p. 277 sqq. and p. 354 sqq.), we meet
+with the dreams of treasure-hunters, Venus as ghostly love, and the
+discovery of the gigantic body of Pallas, son of Evander, about the
+middle of the eleventh century. Comp. Jac. ab Aquis _Imago Mundi_
+(_Hist. Patr. Monum. Script._ t. iii. col. 1603), on the origin of the
+House of Colonna, with reference to the discovery of hidden treasure.
+Besides the tales of the treasure-seekers, William of Malmesbury
+mentions the elegy of Hildebert of Mans, Bishop of Tours, one of the
+most singular examples of humanistic enthusiasm in the first half of the
+twelfth century.
+
+[407] Dante, _Convito_, tratt. iv. cap. v.
+
+[408] _Epp. Familiares_, vi. 2; references to Rome before he had seen
+it, and expressions of his longing for the city, _Epp. Fam._ ed.
+Fracass. vol. i. pp. 125, 213; vol. ii. pp. 336 sqq. See also the
+collected references in L. Geiger, _Petrarca_, p. 272, note 3. In
+Petrarch we already find complaints of the many ruined and neglected
+buildings, which he enumerates one by one (_De Rem. Utriusque Fort._
+lib. i. dial. 118), adding the remark that many statues were left from
+antiquity, but no paintings (l. c. 41).
+
+[409] _Dittamondo_, ii. cap. 3. The procession reminds one at times of
+the three kings and their suite in the old pictures. The description of
+the city (ii. cap. 31) is not without arch�ological value (Gregorovius,
+vi. 697, note 1). According to Polistoro (Murat. xxiv. col. 845),
+Niccol� and Ugo of Este journeyed in 1366 to Rome, 'per vedere quelle
+magnificenze antiche, che al presente sipossono vedere in Roma.'
+
+[410] Gregorovius, v. 316 sqq. Parenthetically we may quote foreign
+evidence that Rome in the Middle Ages was looked upon as a quarry. The
+famous Abbot Sugerius, who about 1140 was in search of lofty pillars for
+the rebuilding of St. Denis, thought at first of nothing less then
+getting hold of the granite monoliths of the Baths of Diocletian, but
+afterwards changed his mind. See 'Sugerii Libellus Alter,' in Duchesne,
+_Hist. Franc. Scriptores_, iv. p. 352.
+
+[411] _Poggii Opera_, fol. 50 sqq. 'Ruinarum Urbis Rom� Descriptio,'
+written about 1430, shortly before the death of Martin V. The Baths of
+Caracalla and Diocletian had then their pillars and coating of marble.
+See Gregorovius, vi. 700-705.
+
+[412] Poggio appears as one of the earliest collectors of inscriptions,
+in his letter in the _Vita Poggii_, Muratori, xx. col. 177, and as
+collector of busts, (col. 183, and letter in Shepherd-Tonelli, i. 258).
+See also _Ambros. Traversarii Epistol�_, xxv. 42. A little book which
+Poggio wrote on inscriptions seems to have been lost. Shepherd, _Life of
+Poggio_, trad. Tonelli, i. 154 sqq.
+
+[413] Fabroni, _Cosmus_, Adnot. 86. From a letter of Alberto degli
+Alberti to Giovanni Medici. See also Gregorovius, vii. 557. For the
+condition of Rome under Martin V., see Platina, p. 227; and during the
+absence of Eugenius IV., see Vespasiano Fiorent., p. 21.
+
+[414] _Roma Instaurata_, written in 1447, and dedicated to the Pope;
+first printed, Rome, 1474.
+
+[415] See, nevertheless, his distichs in Voigt, _Wiederbelebung des
+Alterthums_, p. 275, note 2. He was the first Pope who published a Bull
+for the protection of old monuments (4 Kal. Maj. 1462), with penalties
+in case of disobedience. But these measures were ineffective. Comp.
+Gregorovius, vii. pp. 558 sqq.
+
+[416] What follows is from Jo. Ant. Campanus, _Vita Pii II._, in
+Muratori, iii. ii. col. 980 sqq. _Pii II. Commentarii_, pp. 48, 72 sqq.,
+206, 248 sqq., 501, and elsewhere.
+
+[417] First dated edition, Brixen, 1482.
+
+[418] Boccaccio, _Fiammetta_, cap. 5. _Opere_, ed. Montier, vi. 91.
+
+[419] His work, _Cyriaci Anconitani Itinerarium_, ed. Mehus, Florence,
+1742. Comp. Leandro Alberti, _Descriz. di tutta l'Italia_, fol. 285.
+
+[420] Two instances out of many: the fabulous origin of Milan in
+Manipulus (Murat. xl. col. 552), and that of Florence in Gio. Villani
+(who here, as elsewhere, enlarges on the forged chronicle of Ricardo
+Malespini), according to which Florence, being loyally Roman in its
+sentiments, is always in the right against the anti-Roman rebellious
+Fiesole (i. 9, 38, 41; ii. 2). Dante, _Inf._ xv. 76.
+
+[421] _Commentarii_, p. 206, in the fourth book.
+
+[421A] Mich. Cannesius, _Vita Pauli II._, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 993.
+Towards even Nero, son of Domitius Ahenobarbus, the author will not be
+impolite, on account of his connection with the Pope. He only says of
+him, 'De quo verum Scriptores multa ac diversa commemorant.' The family
+of Plato in Milan went still farther, and nattered itself on its descent
+from the great Athenian. Filelfo in a wedding speech, and in an encomium
+on the jurist Teodoro Plato, ventured to make this assertion; and a
+Giovanantonio Plato put the inscription on a portrait in relief carved
+by him in 1478 (in the court of the Pal. Magenta at Milan): 'Platonem
+suum, a quo originem et ingenium refert.'
+
+[422] See on this point, Nangiporto, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1094;
+Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1951; Matarazzo, in the
+_Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 180. Nangiporto, however, admits that it was
+no longer possible to decide whether the corpse was male or female.
+
+[423] As early as Julius II. excavations were made in the hope of
+finding statues. Vasari, xi. p. 302, _V. di Gio. da Udine_. Comp.
+Gregorovius, viii. 186.
+
+[424] The letter was first attributed to Castiglione, _Lettere di Negozi
+del Conte Bald. Castiglione_, Padua, 1736 and 1769, but proved to be
+from the hand of Raphael by Daniele Francesconi in 1799. It is printed
+from a Munich MS. in Passavant, _Leben Raphael's_, iii. p. 44. Comp.
+Gruyer _Raphael et l'Antiquit�_, 1864, i. 435-457.
+
+[425] _Lettere Pittoriche_, ii. 1, Tolomei to Landi, 14 Nov., 1542.
+
+[426] He tried 'curis animique doloribus quacunque ratione aditum
+intercludere;' music and lively conversation charmed him, and he hoped
+by their means to live longer. _Leonis X. Vita Anonyma_, in Roscoe, ed.
+Bossi, xii. p. 169.
+
+[427] This point is referred to in the _Satires_ of Ariosto. See the
+first ('Perc' ho molto,' &c.), and the fourth 'Poiche, Annibale').
+
+[428] Ranke, _P�pste_, i. 408 sqq. '_Lettere dei Principi_, p. 107.
+Letter of Negri, September 1, 1522 ... 'tutti questi cortigiani esausti
+da Papa Leone e falliti.' They avenged themselves after the death of Leo
+by satirical verses and inscriptions.
+
+[429] _Pii II. Commentarii_, p. 251 in the 5th book. Comp. Sannazaro's
+elegy, 'Ad Ruinas Cumarum urbis vetustissim�' (_Opera_, fol. 236 sqq.).
+
+[430] Polifilo (i.e. Franciscus Columna) 'Hypnerotomachia, ubi humana
+omnia non nisi somnum esse docet atque obiter plurima scita sane quam
+digna commemorat,' Venice, Aldus Manutius, 1499. Comp. on this
+remarkable book and others, A. Didot, _Alde Manuce_, Paris, 1875, pp.
+132-142; and Gruyer, _Raphael et l'Antiquit�_, i. pp. 191 sqq.; J.
+Burckhardt, _Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien_, pp. 43 sqq., and
+the work of A. Ilg, Vienna, 1872.
+
+[431] While all the Fathers of the Church and all the pilgrims speak
+only of a cave. The poets, too, do without the palace. Comp. Sannazaro,
+_De Partu Virginis_, l. ii.
+
+[432] Chiefly from Vespasiano Fiorentine, in the first vol. of the
+_Spicileg. Romanum_, by Mai, from which edition the quotations in this
+book are made. New edition by Bartoli, Florence, 1859. The author was a
+Florentine bookseller and copying agent, about and after the middle of
+the fifteenth century.
+
+[433] Comp. Petr. _Epist. Fam._ ed. Fracass. l. xviii. 2, xxiv. 12, var.
+25, with the notes of Fracassetti in the Italian translation, vol. iv.
+92-101, v. 196 sqq., where the fragment of a translation of Homer before
+the time of Pilato is also given.
+
+[434] Forgeries, by which the passion for antiquity was turned to the
+profit or amusement of rogues, are well known to have been not uncommon.
+See the articles in the literary histories on Annius of Viterbo.
+
+[435] Vespas. Fiorent. p. 31. 'Tommaso da Serezana usava dire, che dua
+cosa farebbe, se egli potesse mai spendere, ch'era in libri e murare. E
+l'una e l'altra fece nel suo pontificato.' With respect to his
+translation, see �en. Sylvius, _De Europa_, cap. 58, p. 459, and
+Papencordt, _Ges. der Stadt Rom._ p. 502. See esp. Voigt, op. cit. book
+v.
+
+[436] Vespas. Fior. pp. 48 and 658, 665. Comp. J. Manetti, _Vita Nicolai
+V._, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 925 sqq. On the question whether and how
+Calixtus III. partly dispersed the library again, see Vespas. Fiorent.
+p. 284, with Mai's note.
+
+[437] Vespas. Fior. pp. 617 sqq.
+
+[438] Vespas. Fior. pp. 457 sqq.
+
+[439] Vespas. Fiorent, p. 193. Comp. Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col.
+1185 sqq.
+
+[440] How the matter was provisionally treated is related in Malipiero,
+_Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor._ vii. ii. pp. 653, 655.
+
+[441] Vespas. Fior. pp. 124 sqq., and 'Inventario della Libreria
+Urbinata compilata nel Secolo XV. da Federigo Veterano, bibliotecario di
+Federigo I. da Montefeltro Duca d'Urbino,' given by C. Guasti in tbe
+_Giornale Storico degli Archivi Toscani_, vi. (1862), 127-147 and vii.
+(1863) 46-55, 130-154. For contemporary opinions on the library, see
+Favre, _M�langes d'Hist. Lit._ i. 127, note 6. The following is the
+substance of Dr. Geiger's remarks on the subject of the old authors:--
+
+For the Medicean Library comp. _Delle condicioni e delle vicende della
+libreria medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508 ricerche di Enea Piccolomini_,
+Arch. stor. ital., 265 sqq., 3 serie, vol. xix. pp. 101-129,254-281, xx.
+51-94, xxi. 102-112, 282-296. Dr. Geiger does not undertake an estimate
+of the relative values of the various rare and almost unknown works
+contained in the library, nor is he able to state where they are now to
+be found. He remarks that information as to Greece is much fuller than
+as to Italy, which is a characteristic mark of the time. The catalogue
+contains editions of the Bible, of single books of it, with text and
+annotations, also Greek and Roman works in their then most complete
+forms, together with some Hebrew books--_tractatus quidam rabbinorum
+hebr._--with much modern work, chiefly in Latin, and with not a little
+in Italian.
+
+Dr. Geiger doubts the absolute accuracy of Vespasiano Fiorentino's
+catalogue of the library at Urbino. See the German edition, i. 313, 314.
+[S.G.C.M.]
+
+[442] Perhaps at the capture of Urbino by the troops of C�sar Borgia.
+The existence of the manuscript has been doubted; but I cannot believe
+that Vespasiano would have spoken of the gnomic extracts from Menander,
+which do not amount to more than a couple of hundred verses, as 'tutte
+le opere,' nor have mentioned them in the list of comprehensive
+manuscripts, even though he had before him only our present Pindar and
+Sophocles. It is not inconceivable that this Menander may some day come
+to light.
+
+[The catalogue of the library at Urbino (see foregoing note), which
+dates back to the fifteenth century, is not perfectly in accordance with
+Vespasiano's report, and with the remarks of Dr. Burckhardt upon it. As
+an official document, it deserves greater credit than Vespasiano's
+description, which, like most of his descriptions, cannot be acquitted
+of a certain inaccuracy in detail and tendency to over-colouring. In
+this catalogue no mention is made of the manuscript of Menander. Mai's
+doubt as to its existence is therefore justified. Instead of 'all the
+works of Pindar,' we here find: 'Pindaris Olimpia et Pithia.' The
+catalogue makes no distinction between ancient and modern books,
+contains the works of Dante (among others, _Comoedi� Thusco Carmine_),
+and Boccaccio, in a very imperfect form; those of Petrarch, however, in
+all completeness. It may be added that this catalogue mentions many
+humanistic writings which have hitherto remained unknown and unprinted,
+that it contains collections of the privileges of the princes of
+Montefeltro, and carefully enumerates the dedications offered by
+translators or original writers to Federigo of Urbino.--L. G.]
+
+[443] For what follows and in part for what has gone before,
+see W. Wattenbach, _Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter_, 2nd. ed. Leipzig,
+1875, pp. 392 sqq., 405 sqq., 505. Comp. also the poem, _De Officio
+Scrib�_, of Phil. Beroaldus, who, however, is rather speaking of the
+public scrivener.]
+
+[444] When Piero de' Medici, at the death of Matthias Corvinus,
+the book-loving King of Hungary, declared that the 'scrittori' must now
+lower their charges, since they would otherwise find no further
+employment (Scil. except in Italy), he can only have meant the Greek
+copyists, as the caligraphists, to whom one might be tempted to refer
+his words, continued to be numerous throughout all Italy. Fabroni,
+_Laurent. Magn._ Adnot. 156 Comp. Adnot. 154.]
+
+[445] Gaye, _Carteggio_, i. p. 164. A letter of the year 1455
+under Calixtus III. The famous miniature Bible of Urbino is written by a
+Frenchman, a workman of Vespasiano's. See D'Agincourt, _La Peinture_,
+tab. 78. On German copyists in Italy, see further G. Campori, _Artisti
+Italiani e Stranieri negli Stati Estensi_, Modena, 1855, p. 277, and
+_Giornale di Erudizione Artistica_, vol. ii. pp. 360 sqq. Wattenbach,
+_Schriftwesen_, 411, note 5. For German printers, see below.]
+
+[446] Vespas. Fior. p. 335.]
+
+[447] Ambr. Trav. _Epist._ i. p. 63. The Pope was equally
+serviceable to the libraries of Urbino and Pesaro (that of Aless.
+Sforza, p. 38). Comp. Arch. Stor. ital. xxi. 103-106. The Bible and
+Commentaries on it; the Fathers of the Church; Aristotle, with his
+commentators, including Averroes and Avicenna; Moses Maimonides; Latin
+translations of Greek philosophers; the Latin prose writers; of the
+poets only Virgil, Statius, Ovid, and Lucan are mentioned.]
+
+[448] Vespas. Fior. p. 129.]
+
+[449] 'Artes--Quis Labor est fessis demptus ab Articulis' in a
+poem by Robertus Ursus about 1470, _Rerum Ital. Script, ex Codd.
+Fiorent._ tom, ii. col. 693. He rejoices rather too hastily over the
+rapid spread of classical literature which was hoped for. Comp. Libri,
+_Hist. des Sciences Math�matiques_, ii. 278 sqq. (See also the eulogy of
+Lor. Valla, _Hist. Zeitschr._ xxxii. 62.) For the printers at Rome (the
+first were Germans: Hahn, Pannartz, Schweinheim), see Gaspar. Veron.
+_Vita Pauli II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1046; and Laire, _Spec. Hist.
+Typographi� Romanae, xv. sec._ Rom�, 1778; Gregorovius, vii. 525-33. For
+the first Privilegium in Venice, see Marin Sanudo, in Muratori, xxii.
+col. 1189.]
+
+[450] Something of the sort had already existed in the age of
+manuscripts. See Vespas. Fior. p. 656, on the _Cronaco del Mondo_ of
+Zembino of Pistoia.]
+
+[451] Fabroni, _Laurent. Magn._ Adnot. 212. It happened in the
+case of the libel. _De Exilio_.]
+
+[452] Even in Petrarch the consciousness of this superiority of
+Italians over Greeks is often to be noticed: _Epp. Fam._ lib. i. ep. 3;
+_Epp. Sen._ lib. xii. ep. 2; he praises the Greeks reluctantly:
+_Carmina_, lib. iii. 30 (ed. Rossetti, vol. ii. p. 342). A century
+later, �neas Sylvius writes (Comm. to Panormita, 'De Dictis et Factis
+Alfonsi,' Append.): 'Alfonsus tanto est Socrate major quanto gravior
+Romanus homo quam Gr�cus putatur.' In accordance with this feeling the
+study of Greek was thought little of. From a document made use of below,
+written about 1460, it appears that Porcellio and Tomaso Seneca tried to
+resist the rising influence of Greek. Similarly, Paolo Cortese (1490)
+was averse to Greek, lest the hitherto exclusive authority of Latin
+should be impaired, _De Hominibus Doctis_, p. 20. For Greek studies in
+Italy, see esp. the learned work of Favre, _M�langes d'Hist. Liter._ i.
+_passim_.]
+
+[453] See above p. 187, and comp. C. Voigt, _Wiederbelebung_,
+323 sqq.]
+
+[454] The dying out of these Greeks is mentioned by Pierius
+Valerian, _De Infelicitate Literat._ in speaking of Lascaris. And Paulus
+Jovius, at the end of his _Elogia Literaria_, says of the Germans, 'Quum
+liter� non latin� modo cum pudore nostro, sed gr�c� et hebraic� in eorum
+terras fatali commigratione transierint' (about 1450). Similarly, sixty
+years before (1482), Joh. Argyropulos had exclaimed, when he heard young
+Reuchlin translate Thucydides in his lecture-room at Rome, 'Gr�cia
+nostra exilio transvolavit Alpes.' Geiger, _Reuchlin_ (Lpzg. 1871), pp.
+26 sqq. Burchhardt, 273. A remarkable passage is to be found in Jov.
+Pontanus, _Antonius_, opp. iv. p. 203: 'In Gr�cia magis nunc Turcaicum
+discas quam Gr�cum. Quicquid enim doctorum habent Gr�c� disciplin�, in
+Italia nobiscum victitat.]
+
+[455] Ranke, _P�pste_, i. 486 sqq. Comp. the end of this part
+of our work.]
+
+[456] Tommaso Gar, _Relazioni della Corte di Roma_, i. pp. 338,
+379.]
+
+[457] George of Trebizond, teacher of rhetoric at Venice, with
+a salary of 150 ducats a year (see Malipiero, _Arch. Stor._ vii. ii. p.
+653). For the Greek chair at Perugia, see _Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 19
+of the Introduction. In the case of Rimini, there is some doubt whether
+Greek was taught or not. Comp. _Anecd. Litt._ ii. p. 300. At Bologna,
+the centre of juristic studies, Aurispa had but little success. Details
+on the subject in Malagola.]
+
+[458] Exhaustive information on the subject in the admirable
+work of A. F. Didot, _Alde Manuce et l'H�llenisme � Venise_, Paris,
+1875.]
+
+[459] For what follows see A. de Gubernatis, _Mat�riaux pour
+servir � l'Histoire des �tudes Orientales en Italie_, Paris, Florence,
+&c., 1876. Additions by Soave in the _Bolletino Italiano degli Studi
+Orientali_, i. 178 sqq. More precise details below.]
+
+[460] See below.]
+
+[461] See _Commentario della Vita di Messer Gianozzo Manetti,
+scritto da Vespasiano Bisticci_, Torino, 1862, esp. pp. 11, 44, 91 sqq.]
+
+[462] Vesp. Fior. p. 320. A. Trav. _Epist._ lib. xi. 16.]
+
+[463] Platina, _Vita Sixti IV._ p. 332.]
+
+[464] Benedictus Faleus, _De Origine Hebraicarum Gr�carum
+Latinarumque Literarum_, Naples, 1520.]
+
+[465] For Dante, see Wegele, _Dante_, 2nd ed. p. 268, and
+Lasinio, _Dante e le Lingue semitiche_ in the _Rivista Orientale_ (Flor.
+1867-8). On Poggio, _Opera_, p. 297; Lion. Bruni, _Epist._ lib. ix. 12,
+comp. Gregorovius, vii. 555, and Shepherd-Tonelli, _Vita di Poggio_, i.
+65. The letter of Poggio to Niccoli, in which he treats of Hebrew, has
+been lately published in French and Latin under the title, _Les Bains de
+Bade par Pogge_, by Antony M�ray, Paris, 1876. Poggio desired to know on
+what principles Jerome translated the Bible, while Bruni maintained
+that, now that Jerome's translation was in existence, distrust was shown
+to it by learning Hebrew. For Manetti as a collector of Hebrew MSS. see
+Steinschneider, in the work quoted below. In the library at Urbino there
+were in all sixty-one Hebrew manuscripts. Among them a Bible 'opus
+mirabile et integrum, cum glossis mirabiliter scriptus in modo avium,
+arborum et animalium in maximo volumine, ut vix a tribus hominibus
+feratur.' These, as appears from Assemanni's list, are now mostly in the
+Vatican. On the first printing in Hebrew, see Steinschneider and Cassel,
+_Jud. Typographic in Esch. u. Gruber, Realencyclop._ sect. ii. bd. 28,
+p. 34, and _Catal. Bodl._ by Steinschneider, 1852-60, pp. 2821-2866. It
+is characteristic that of the two first printers one belonged to Mantua,
+the other to Reggio in Calabria, so that the printing of Hebrew books
+began almost contemporaneously at the two extremities of Italy. In
+Mantua the printer was a Jewish physician, who was helped by his wife.
+It may be mentioned as a curiosity that in the _Hypnerotomachia_ of
+Polifilo, written 1467, printed 1499, fol. 68 _a_, there is a short
+passage in Hebrew; otherwise no Hebrew occurs in the Aldine editions
+before 1501. The Hebrew scholars in Italy are given by De Gubernatis (p.
+80), but authorities are not quoted for them singly. (Marco Lippomanno
+is omitted; comp. Steinschneider in the book given below.) Paolo de
+Canale is mentioned as a learned Hebraist by Pier. Valerian. _De Infel.
+Literat._ ed. Mencken, p. 296; in 1488 Professor in Bologna, _Mag.
+Vicentius_; comp. _Costituzione, discipline e riforme dell'antico studio
+Bolognese. Memoria del Prof. Luciano Scarabelli_, Piacenza, 1876; in
+1514 Professor in Rome, Agarius Guidacerius, acc. to Gregorovius, viii.
+292, and the passages there quoted. On Guid. see Steinschneider,
+_Bibliogr. Handbuch_, Leipzig, 1859, pp. 56, 157-161.]
+
+[466] The literary activity of the Jews in Italy is too great
+and of too wide an influence to be passed over altogether in silence.
+The following paragraphs, which, not to overload the text, I have
+relegated to the notes, are wholly the substance of communications made
+me by Dr. M. Steinschneider, of Berlin, to whom I [Dr. Ludwig Geiger]
+here take the opportunity of expressing my thanks for his constant and
+friendly help. He has given exhaustive evidence on the subject in his
+profound and instructive treatise, 'Letteratura Italiana dei Giudei,' in
+the review _Il Buonarotti_, vols. vi. viii. xi. xii.; Rome, 1871-77
+(also printed separately); to which, once for all, I refer the reader.
+
+There were many Jews living in Rome at the time of the Second Temple.
+They had so thoroughly adopted the language and civilisation prevailing
+in Italy, that even on their tombs they used not Hebrew, but Latin and
+Greek inscriptions (communicated by Garucci, see Steinschneider, _Hebr.
+Bibliogr._ vi. p. 102, 1863). In Lower Italy, especially, Greek learning
+survived during the Middle Ages among the inhabitants generally, and
+particularly among the Jews, of whom some are said to have taught at the
+University of Salerno, and to have rivalled the Christians in literary
+productiveness (comp. Steinschneider, 'Donnolo,' in Virchow's _Archiv_,
+bd. 39, 40). This supremacy of Greek culture lasted till the Saracens
+conquered Lower Italy. But before this conquest the Jews of Middle Italy
+had been striving to equal or surpass their bretheren of the South.
+Jewish learning centred in Rome, and from there spread, as early as the
+sixteenth century, to Cordova, Kairowan, and South Germany. By means of
+these emigrants, Italian Judaism became the teacher of the whole race.
+Through its works, especially through the work _Aruch_ of Nathan ben
+Jechiel (1101), a great dictionary to the Talmud, the Midraschim, and
+the Thargum, 'which, though not informed by a genuine scientific spirit,
+offers so rich a store of matter and rests on such early authorities,
+that its treasures have even now not been wholly exhausted,' it
+exercised indirectly a great influence (Abraham Geiger, _Das Judenthum
+und seine Geschichte_, Breslau, bd. ii. 1865, p. 170; and the same
+author's _Nachgelassene Schriften_, bd. ii. Berlin, 1875, pp. 129 and
+154). A little later, in the thirteenth century, the Jewish literature
+in Italy brought Jews and Christians into contact, and received through
+Frederick II., and still more perhaps through his son Manfred, a kind of
+official sanction. Of this contact we have evidence in the fact that an
+Italian, Niccol� di Giovinazzo, studied with a Jew, Moses ben Salomo,
+the Latin translation of the famous work of Maimonides, _More Nebuchim_;
+of this sanction, in the fact that the Emperor, who was distinguished
+for his freethinking as much as for his fondness for Oriental studies,
+probably was the cause of this Latin translation being made, and
+summoned the famous Anatoli from Provence into Italy, to translate works
+of Averroes into Hebrew (comp. Steinschneider, _Hebr. Bibliogr._ xv. 86,
+and Renan, _L'Averroes et l'Averroisme_, third edition, Paris, 1866, p.
+290). These measures prove the acquaintance of early Jews with Latin,
+which rendered intercourse possible between them and Christians--an
+intercourse which bore sometimes a friendly and sometimes a polemical
+character. Still more than Anatoli, Hillel b. Samuel, in the latter half
+of the thirteenth century, devoted himself to Latin literature; he
+studied in Spain, returned to Italy, and here made many translations
+from Latin into Hebrew; among them of writings of Hippocrates in a Latin
+version. (This was printed 1647 by Gaiotius, and passed for his own.) In
+this translation he introduced a few Italian words by way of
+explanation, and thus perhaps, or by his whole literary procedure, laid
+himself open to the reproach of despising Jewish doctrines.
+
+But the Jews went further than this. At the end of the thirteenth and in
+the fourteenth centuries, they drew so near to Christian science and to
+the representatives of the culture of the Renaissance, that one of them,
+Giuda Romano, in a series of hitherto unprinted writings, laboured
+zealously at the scholastic philosophy, and in one treatise used Italian
+words to explain Hebrew expressions. He is one of the first to do so
+(Steinschneider, _Giuda Romano_, Rome, 1870). Another, Giuda's cousin
+Manoello, a friend of Dante, wrote in imitation of him a sort of Divine
+Comedy in Hebrew, in which he extols Dante, whose death he also bewailed
+in an Italian sonnet (Abraham Geiger, _J�d. Zeitsch._ v. 286-331,
+Breslau, 1867). A third, Mose Riete, born towards the end of the
+century, wrote works in Italian (a specimen in the Catalogue of Hebrew
+MSS., Leyden, 1858). In the fifteenth century we can clearly recognise
+the influence of the Renaissance in Messer Leon, a Jewish writer, who,
+in his _Rhetoric_, uses Quintilian and Cicero, as well as Jewish
+authorities. One of the most famous Jewish writers in Italy in the
+fifteenth century was Eliah del Medigo, a philosopher who taught
+publicly as a Jew in Padua and Florence, and was once chosen by the
+Venetian Senate as arbitrator in a philosophical dispute (Abr. Geiger,
+_Nachgelassene Schriften_, Berlin, 1876, bd. iii. 3). Eliah del Medigo
+was the teacher of Pico della Mirandola; besides him, Jochanan Alemanno
+(comp. Steinschneider, _Polem. u. Apolog. Lit._ Lpzg. 1877, anh. 7, �
+25). The list of learned Jews in Italy may be closed by Kalonymos ben
+David and Abraham de Balmes (d. 1523), to whom the greater part of the
+translations of Averroes from Hebrew into Latin is due, which were still
+publicly read at Padua in the seventeenth century. To this scholar may
+be added the Jewish Aldus, Gerson Soncino, who not only made his press
+the centre of Jewish printing, but, by publishing Greek works,
+trespassed on the ground of the great Aldus himself (Steinschneider,
+_Gerson Soncino und Aldus Manutius_, Berlin, 1858).
+
+[467] Pierius Valerian. _De Infelic. Lit._ ed. Mencken, 301, speaking of
+Mongajo. Gubernatis, p. 184, identifies him with Andrea Alpago, of
+Bellemo, said to have also studied Arabian literature, and to have
+travelled in the East. On Arabic studies generally, Gubernatis, pp. 173
+sqq. For a translation made 1341 from Arabic into Italian, comp.
+Narducci, _Intorno ad una tradizione italiana di una composizione
+astronomica di Alfonso X. r� di Castiglia_, Roma 1865. On Ramusio, see
+Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 250.
+
+[468] Gubernatis, p. 188. The first book contains Christian prayers in
+Arabic; the first Italian translations of the Koran appeared in 1547. In
+1499 we meet with a few not very successful Arabic types in the work of
+Polifilo, b. 7 _a_. For the beginnings of Egyptian studies, see
+Gregorovius, viii. p. 304.
+
+[469] Especially in the important letter of the year 1485 to Ermolao
+Barbaro, in _Ang. Politian. Epistol�_, l. ix. Comp. Jo. Pici, _Oratio de
+Hominis Dignitate_. For this discourse, see the end of part iv.; on Pico
+himself more will be given in part vi. chap. 4.
+
+[470] Their estimate of themselves is indicated by Poggio (_De
+Avaritia_, fol. 2), according to whom only such persons could say that
+they had lived (_se vixisse_) who had written learned and eloquent books
+in Latin or translated Greek into Latin.
+
+[471] Esp. Libri, _Histoires des Sciences Math�m._ ii. 159 sqq., 258
+sqq.
+
+[472] _Purgatorio_, xviii. contains striking instances. Mary hastens
+over the mountains, C�sar to Spain; Mary is poor and Fabricius
+disinterested. We may here remark on the chronological introduction of
+the Sibyls into the profane history of antiquity as attempted by Uberti
+in his _Dittamondo_ (i. cap. 14, 15), about 1360.
+
+[473] The first German translation of the _Decameron_, by H. Steinhovel,
+was printed in 1472, and soon became popular. The translations of the
+whole _Decameron_ were almost everywhere preceded by those of the story
+of Griselda, written in Latin by Petrarch.
+
+[474] These Latin writings of Boccaccio have been admirably discussed
+recently by Sch�ck, _Zur Characteristik des ital. Hum. im 14 und 15
+Jahrh._ Breslau, 1865; and in an article in Fleckeisen and Masius,
+_Jahrb�cher fur Phil. und P�dag._ bd. xx. (1874).
+
+[475] 'Poeta,' even in Dante (_Vita Nuova_, p. 47), means only the
+writer of Latin verses, while for Italian the expressions 'Rimatore,
+Dicitore per rima,' are used. It is true that the names and ideas became
+mixed in course of time.
+
+[476] Petrarch, too, at the height of his fame complained in moments of
+melancholy that his evil star decreed him to pass his last years among
+scoundrels (_extremi fures_). In the imaginary letter to Livy, _Epp.
+Fam._ ed. Fracass. lib. xxiv. ep. 8. That Petrarch defended poetry, and
+how, is well known (comp. Geiger, _Petr._ 113-117). Besides the enemies
+who beset him in common with Boccaccio, he had to face the doctors
+(comp. _Invectiv� in Medicum Objurgantem_, lib. i. and ii.).
+
+[477] Boccaccio, in a later letter to Jacobus Pizinga (_Opere Volgari_,
+vol. xvi.), confines himself more strictly to poetry properly so called.
+And yet he only recognises as poetry that which treated of antiquity,
+and ignores the Troubadours.
+
+[478] Petr. _Epp. Senil._ lib. i. ep. 5.
+
+[479] Boccaccio (_Vita di Dante_, p. 50): 'La quale (laurea) non scienza
+accresce ma � dell'acquistata certissimo testimonio e ornamento.'
+
+[480] _Paradiso_, xxv. 1 sqq. Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 50. 'Sopra
+le fonti di San Giovanni si era disporto di coronare.' Comp. _Paradiso_,
+i. 25.
+
+[481] See Boccaccio's letter to him in the _Opere Volgari_, vol. xvi. p.
+36: 'Si pr�stet Deus, concedente senatu Romuleo.' ...
+
+[482] Matt. Villani, v. 26. There was a solemn procession on horseback
+round the city, when the followers of the Emperor, his 'baroni,'
+accompanied the poet. Boccaccio, l. c. Petrarch: _Invectiv� contra Med.
+Pr�f._ See also _Epp. Fam. Volgarizzate da Fracassetti_, iii. 128. For
+the speech of Zanobi at the coronation, Friedjung, l. c. 308 sqq. Fazio
+degli Uberti was also crowned, but it is not known where or by whom.
+
+[483] Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 185.
+
+[484] Vespas. Fiorent. pp. 575, 589. _Vita Jan. Manetti_, in Murat. xx.
+col. 543. The celebrity of Lionardo Aretino was in his lifetime so great
+that people came from all parts merely to see him; a Spaniard fell on
+his knees before him.--Vesp. p. 568. For the monument of Guarino, the
+magistrate of Ferrara allowed, in 1461, the then considerable sum of 100
+ducats. On the coronation of poets in Italy there is a good summary of
+notices in Favre, _M�langes d'Hist. Lit._ (1856) i. 65 sqq.
+
+[485] Comp. Libri, _Histoire des Sciences Math�m._ ii. p. 92 sqq.
+Bologna, as is well known, was older. Pisa flourished in the fourteenth
+century, fell through the wars with Florence, and was afterwards
+restored by Lorenzo Magnifico, 'ad solatium veteris amiss� libertatis,'
+as Giovio says, _Vita Leonis X._ l. i. The university of Florence (comp.
+Gaye, _Carteggio_, i. p. 461 to 560 _passim_; _Matteo Villani_, i. 8;
+vii. 90), which existed as early as 1321, with compulsory attendance for
+the natives of the city, was founded afresh after the Black Death in
+1848, and endowed with an income of 2,500 gold florins, fell again into
+decay, and was refounded in 1357. The chair for the explanation of
+Dante, established in 1373 at the request of many citizens, was
+afterwards commonly united with the professorship of philology and
+rhetoric, as when Filelfo held it.
+
+[486] This should be noticed in the lists of professors, as in that of
+the University of Pavia in 1400 (Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 290),
+where (among others) no less than twenty jurists appear.
+
+[487] Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col. 990.
+
+[488] Fabroni, _Laurent. Magn._ Adnot. 52, in the year 1491.
+
+[489] Allegretto, _Diari Sanesi_, in Murat. xiii. col. 824.
+
+[490] Filelfo, when called to the newly founded University of Pisa,
+demanded at least 500 gold florins. Comp. Fabroni, _Laur. Magn._ ii. 75
+sqq. The negotiations were broken off, not only on account of the high
+salary asked for.
+
+[491] Comp. Vespasian. Fiorent. pp. 271, 572, 582, 625. _Vita. Jan.
+Manetti_, in Murat. xx. col. 531 sqq.
+
+[492] Vespas. Fiorent. p. 1460. Prendilacqua (a pupil of Vitt.),
+_Intorno alla Vita di V. da F._, first ed. by Natale dalle Laste, 1774,
+translated by Giuseppe Brambilla, Como, 1871. C. Rosmini, _Idea
+dell'ottimo Precettore nella Vita e Disciplina di Vittorino da Feltre e
+de' suoi Discepoli_, Bassano, 1801. Later works by Racheli (Milan,
+1832), and Venoit (Paris, 1853).
+
+[493] Vespas. Fior. p. 646, of which, however, C. Rosmini, _Vita e
+Disciplina di Guarino Veronese e de' suoi Discepoli_, Brescia, 1856 (3
+vols.), says that it is (ii. 56), 'formicolante di errori di fatto.'
+
+[494] For these and for Guarino generally, see Facius, _De Vir.
+Illustribus_, p. 17 sqq.; and Cortesius, _De Hom. Doctis_, p. 13. Both
+agree that the scholars of the following generation prided themselves on
+having been pupils of Guarino; but while Fazio praises his works,
+Cortese thinks that he would have cared better for his fame if he had
+written nothing. Guarino and Vittorino were friends and helped one
+another in their studies. Their contemporaries were fond of comparing
+them, and in this comparison Guarino commonly held the first place
+(Sabellico, _Dial. de Lingu. Lat. Reparata_, in Rosmini, ii. 112).
+Guarino's attitude with regard to the 'Ermafrodito' is remarkable; see
+Rosmini, ii. 46 sqq. In both these teachers an unusual moderation in
+food and drink was observed; they never drank undiluted wine: in both
+the principles of education were alike; they neither used corporal
+punishment; the hardest penalty which Vittorino inflicted was to make
+the boy kneel and lie upon the ground in the presence of his
+fellow-pupils.
+
+[495] To the Archduke Sigismond, _Epist._ 105, p. 600, and to King
+Ladislaus Postumus, p. 695; the latter as _Tractatus de Liberorum
+Educatione_ (1450).
+
+[496] P. 625. On Niccoli, see further a speech of Poggio, _Opera_, ed.
+1513, fol. 102 sqq.; and a life by Manetti in his book, _De Illustribus
+Longaevis_.
+
+[497] The following words of Vespasiano are untranslatable: 'A vederlo
+in tavola cosi antico come era, era una gentilezza.'
+
+[498] _Ibid._ p. 495.
+
+[499] According to Vespas. p. 271, learned men were in the habit of
+meeting here for discussion.
+
+[500] Of Niccoli it may be further remarked that, like Vittorino, he
+wrote nothing, being convinced that he could not treat of anything in as
+perfect a form as he desired; that his senses were so delicately poised
+that he 'neque rudentem asinum, neque secantem serram, neque muscipulam
+vagientem sentire audireve poterat.' But the less favourable sides of
+Niccoli's character must not be forgotten. He robbed his brother of his
+sweetheart Benvenuta, roused the indignation of Lionardo Aretino by this
+act, and was embittered by the girl against many of his friends. He took
+ill the refusal to lend him books, and had a violent quarrel with
+Guarino on this account. He was not free from a petty jealousy, under
+the influence of which he tried to drive Chrysoloras, Poggio, and
+Filelfo away from Florence.
+
+[501] See his _Vita_, by Naldus Naldi, in Murat. xx. col. 532 sqq. See
+further Vespasiano Bisticci, _Commentario della Vita di Messer Giannozzo
+Manetti_, first published by P. Fanfani in _Collezione di Opere inedite
+o rare_, vol. ii. Torino, 1862. This 'Commentario' must be distinguished
+from the short 'Vita' of Manetti by the same author, in which frequent
+reference is made to the former. Vespasiano was on intimate terms with
+Giannozzo Manetti, and in the biography tried to draw an ideal picture
+of a statesman for the degenerate Florence. Vesp. is Naldi's authority.
+Comp. also the fragment in Galetti, _Phil. Vill. Liber Flor._ 1847, pp.
+129-138. Half a century after his death Manetti was nearly forgotten.
+Comp. Paolo Cortese, p. 21.
+
+[502] The title of the work, in Latin and Italian, is given in Bisticci,
+_Commentario_, pp. 109, 112.
+
+[503] What was known of Plato before can only have been fragmentary. A
+strange discussion on the antagonism of Plato and Aristotle took place
+at Ferrara in 1438, between Ugo of Siena and the Greeks who came to the
+Council. Comp. �neas Sylvius, _De Europa_, cap. 52 (_Opera_, p. 450).
+
+[504] In Niccol� Valori, _Life of Lorenzo the Magnificent_. Comp.
+Vespas. Fiorent. p. 426. The first supporters of Argyropulos were the
+Acciajuoli. _Ib._ 192: Cardinal Bessarion and his parallels between
+Plato and Aristotle. _Ib._ 223: Cusanus as Platonist. _Ib._ 308: The
+Catalonian Narciso and his disputes with Argyropulos. _Ib._ 571: Single
+Dialogues of Plato, translated by Lionardo Aretino. _Ib._ 298: The
+rising influence of Neoplatonism. On Marsilio Ficino, see Reumont,
+_Lorenzo de' Medici_, ii. 27 sqq.
+
+[505] Varchi, _Stor. Fior._ p. 321. An admirable sketch of character.
+
+[506] The lives of Guarino and Vittorino by Rosmini mentioned above (p.
+213, note 1; and 215, note 1), as well as the life of Poggio by
+Shepherd, especially in the enlarged Italian translation of Tonelli (2
+vols. Florence, 1825); the Correspondence of Poggio, edited by the same
+writer (2 vols. Flor. 1832); and the letters of Poggio in Mai's
+_Spicilegium_, tom. x. Rome, 1844, pp. 221-272, all contain much on this
+subject.
+
+[507] _Epist. 39_; _Opera_, p. 526, to Mariano Socino.
+
+[508] We must not be misled by the fact that along with all this
+complaints were frequently heard of the inadequacy of princely patronage
+and of the indifference of many princes to their fame. See e.g. Bapt.
+Mantan, Eclog. v. as early as the fifteenth century; and Ambrogio
+Traversari, _De Infelicitate Principum_. It was impossible to satisfy
+all.
+
+[509] For the literary and scientific patronage of the popes down to the
+end of the fifteenth century, see Gregorovius, vols. vii. and viii. For
+Pius II., see Voigt, _En. Silvio als Papst Pius II._ bd. iii. (Berlin,
+1863), pp. 406-440.
+
+[510] Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De Poetis Nostri Temporis_, speaking of the
+_Sphaerulus_ of Camerino. The worthy man did not finish it in time, and
+his work lay for forty years in his desk. For the scanty payments made
+by Sixtus IV., comp. Pierio Valer. _De Infelic. Lit._ on Theodoras Gaza.
+He received for a translation and commentary of a work of Aristotle
+fifty gold florins, 'ab eo a quo se totum inauratum iri speraverat.' On
+the deliberate exclusion of the humanists from the cardinalate by the
+popes before Leo, comp. Lor. Grana's funeral oration on Cardinal Egidio,
+_Anecdot. Litt._ iv. p. 307.
+
+[511] The best are to be found in the _Deliciae Poetarum Italorum_, and
+in the Appendices to the various editions of Roscoe, _Leo X._ Several
+poets and writers, like Alcyonius, _De Exilio_, ed. Menken, p. 10, say
+frankly that they praise Leo in order themselves to become immortal.
+
+[512] Paul. Jov. _Elogia_ speaking of Guido Posthumus.
+
+[513] Pierio Valeriano in his _Simia_.
+
+[514] See the elegy of Joh. Aurelius Mutius in the _Deliciae Poetarum
+Italorum_.
+
+[515] The well-known story of the purple velvet purse filled with
+packets of gold of various sizes, in which Leo used to thrust his hand
+blindly, is in Giraldi _Hecatommithi_, vi. nov. 8. On the other hand,
+the Latin 'improvisatori,' when their verses were too faulty, were
+whipped. Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De Poetis Nostri Temp. Opp._ ii. 398
+(Basil, 1580).
+
+[516] Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi. iv. 181.
+
+[517] Vespas. Fior. p. 68 sqq. For the translations from Greek made by
+Alfonso's orders, see p. 93; _Vita Jan. Manetti_, in Murat. xx. col. 541
+sqq., 450 sqq., 495. Panormita, _Dicta et Facta Alfonsi_, with the notes
+by �neas Sylvius, ed. by Jacob Spiegel, Basel, 1538.
+
+[518] Even Alfonso was not able to please everybody--Poggio, for
+example. See Shepherd-Tonelli, _Poggio_ ii. 108 sqq. and Poggio's letter
+to Facius in _Fac. de Vir. Ill._ ed. Mehus, p. 88, where he writes of
+Alfonso: 'Ad ostentationem qu�dam facit quibus videatur doctis viris
+favere;' and Poggio's letter in Mai, _Spicil._ tom. x. p. 241.
+
+[519] Ovid. _Amores_, iii. 11, vs. ii.; Jovian. Pontan. _De Principe_.
+
+[520] _Giorn. Napolet._ in Murat. xxi. col. 1127.
+
+[521] Vespas. Fior. pp. 3, 119 sqq. 'Volle aver piena notizia d'ogni
+cosa, cosi sacra come gentile.'
+
+[522] The last Visconti divided his interest between Livy, the French
+chivalrous romances, Dante, and Petrarch. The humanists who presented
+themselves to him with the promise 'to make him famous,' were generally
+sent away after a few days. Comp. _Decembrio_, in Murat. xx. col. 1114.
+
+[523] Paul. Jov. _Vita Alfonsi Ducis_.
+
+[524] On Collenuccio at the court of Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro (son of
+Alessandro, p. 28), who finally, in 1508, put him to death, see p. 135,
+note 4. At the time of the last Ordelaffi at Forli, the place was
+occupied by Codrus Urceus (1477-80); death-bed complaint of C. U. _Opp._
+Ven. 1506, fol. liv.; for his stay in Forli, _Sermo_, vi. Comp. Carlo
+Malagola, _Della Vita di C. U._ Bologna, 1877, Ap. iv. Among the
+instructed despots, we may mention Galeotto Manfreddi of Faenza,
+murdered in 1488 by his wife, and some of the Bentivoglio family at
+Bologna.
+
+[525] _Anecdota Literar._ ii. pp. 305 sqq., 405. Basinius of Parma
+ridicules Porcellio and Tommaso Seneca; they are needy parasites, and
+must play the soldier in their old age, while he himself was enjoying an
+'ager' and a 'villa.'
+
+[526] For details respecting these graves, see Keyssler, _Neueste
+Reisen_, s. 924.
+
+[527] _Pii II. Comment._ l. ii. p. 92. By history he means all that has
+to do with antiquity. Cortesius also praises him highly, p. 34 sqq.
+
+[528] Fabroni, _Costnus_, Adnot. 118. Vespasian. Fior. _passim_. An
+important passage respecting the demands made by the Florentines on
+their secretaries ('quod honor apud Florentinos magnus habetur,' says B.
+Facius, speaking of Poggio's appointment to the secretaryship, _De Vir.
+Ill._ p. 17), is to be found in �neas Sylvius, _De Europ�_, cap. 54
+(_Opera_, p. 454).
+
+[529] See Voigt, _En. Silvio als Papst Pius II._ bd. iii. 488 sqq., for
+the often-discussed and often-misunderstood change which Pius II. made
+with respect to the Abbreviators.
+
+[530] Comp. the statement of Jacob Spiegel (1521) given in the reports
+of the Vienna Academy, lxxviii. 333.
+
+[531] _Anecdota Lit._ i. p. 119 sqq. A plea ('Actio ad Cardinales
+Deputatos') of Jacobus Volaterranus in the name of the Secretaries, no
+doubt of the time of Sixtus IV. (Voigt, l. c. 552, note). The humanistic
+claims of the 'advocati consistoriales' rested on their oratory, as that
+of the Secretaries on their correspondence.
+
+[532] The Imperial chancery under Frederick III. was best known to �neas
+Sylvius. Comp. _Epp._ 23 and 105; _Opera_, pp. 516 and 607.
+
+[533] The letters of Bembo and Sadoleto have been often printed; those
+of the former, e.g. in the _Opera_, Basel, 1556, vol. ii., where the
+letters written in the name of Leo X. are distinguished from private
+letters; those of the latter most fully, 5 vols. Rome, 1760. Some
+additions to both have been given by Carlo Malagola in the review _Il
+Baretti_, Turin, 1875. Bembo's _Asolani_ will be spoken of below;
+Sadoleto's significance for Latin style has been judged as follows by a
+contemporary, Petrus Alcyonius, _De Exilio_, ed. Menken, p. 119: 'Solus
+autem nostrorum temporum aut certe cum paucis animadvertit elocutionem
+emendatam et latinam esse fundamentum oratoris; ad eamque obtinendam
+necesse esse latinam linguam expurgare quam inquinarunt nonnulli
+exquisitarum literarum omnino rudes et nullius judicii homines, qui
+partim a circumpadanis municipiis, partim ex transalpinis provinciis, in
+hanc urbem confluxerunt. Emendavit igitur 'eruditissimus hic vir
+corruptam et vitiosam lingu� latin� consuetudinem, pura ac integra
+loquendi ratione.'
+
+[534] Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 449, for the letter of Isabella of
+Aragon to her father, Alfonso of Naples; fols. 451, 464, two letters of
+the Moor to Charles VIII. Compare the story in the _Lettere Pittoriche_,
+iii. 86 (Sebastiano del Piombo to Aretino), how Clement VII., during the
+sack of Rome, called his learned men round him, and made each of them
+separately write a letter to Charles V.
+
+[535] For the correspondence of the period in general, see Voigt,
+_Wiederbelebung_, 414-427.
+
+[536] Bembo thought it necessary to excuse himself for writing in
+Italian: 'Ad Sempronium,' _Bembi Opera_, Bas. 1556, vol. iii. 156 sqq.
+
+[537] On the collection of the letters of Aretino, see above, pp. 164
+sqq., and the note. Collections of Latin letters had been printed even
+in the fifteenth century.
+
+[538] Comp. the speeches in the _Opera_ of Philelphus, Sabellicus,
+Beroaldus, &c.; and the writings and lives of Giann. Manetti, �neas
+Sylvius, and others.
+
+[539] B. F. _De Viris Illustribus_, ed. Mehus, p. 7. Manetti, as Vesp.
+Bisticci, _Commentario_, p. 51, states, delivered many speeches in
+Italian, and then afterwards wrote them out in Latin. The scholars of
+the fifteenth century, e.g. Paolo Cortese, judge the achievements of the
+past solely from the point of view of 'Eloquentia.'
+
+[540] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 198, 205.
+
+[541] _Pii II. Comment._ l. i. p. 10.
+
+[542] The success of the fortunate orator was great, and the humiliation
+of the speaker who broke down before distinguished audiences no less
+great. Examples of the latter in Petrus Crinitus, _De Honest�
+Disciplin�_, v. cap. 3. Comp. Vespas. Fior. pp. 319, 430.
+
+[543] _Pii II. Comment._ l. iv. p. 205. There were some Romans, too, who
+awaited him at Viterbo. 'Singuli per se verba facere, ne alius alio
+melior videretur, cum essent eloquenti� ferme pares.' The fact that the
+Bishop of Arezzo was not allowed to speak in the name of the general
+embassy of the Italian states to the newly chosen Alexander VI., is
+seriously placed by Guicciardini (at the beginning of book i.) among the
+causes which helped to produce the disaster of 1494.
+
+[544] Told by Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col. 1160.
+
+[545] _Pii II. Comment._ l. ii. p. 107. Comp. p. 87. Another oratorical
+princess, Madonna Battista Montefeltro, married to a Malatesta,
+harangued Sigismund and Martin. Comp. _Arch. Stor._ iv. i. p. 442, note.
+
+[546] _De Expeditione in Turcas_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 68. 'Nihil enim
+Pii concionantis majestate sublimius.' Not to speak of the na�ve
+pleasure with which Pius describes his own triumphs, see Campanus, _Vita
+Pii II._, in Murat. iii. ii. _passim_. At a later period these speeches
+were judged less admiringly. Comp. Voigt, _Enea Silvio_, ii. 275 sqq.
+
+[547] Charles V., when unable on one occasion to follow the flourishes
+of a Latin orator at Genoa, replied in the ear of Giovio: 'Ah, my tutor
+Adrian was right, when he told me I should be chastened for my childish
+idleness in learning Latin.' Paul. Jov. _Vita Hadriani VI._ Princes
+replied to these speeches through their official orators; Frederick III.
+through Enea Silvio, in answer to Giannozzo Manetti. Vesp. Bist.
+_Comment._ p. 64.
+
+[548] Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis Nostri Temp._ speaking of
+Collenuccio. Filelfo, a married layman, delivered an introductory speech
+in the Cathedral at Como for the Bishop Scarampi, in 1460. Rosmini,
+_Filelfo_, ii. 122, iii. 147.
+
+[549] Fabroni, _Cosmus_, Adnot. 52.
+
+[550] Which, nevertheless, gave some offence to Jac. Volaterranus (in
+Murat. xxiii. col. 171) at the service in memory of Platina.
+
+[551] _Anecdota Lit._ i. p. 299, in Fedra's funeral oration on Lod.
+Podacataro, whom Guarino commonly employed on these occasions. Guarino
+himself delivered over fifty speeches at festivals and funerals, which
+are enumerated in Rosmini, _Guarino_, ii. 139-146. Burckhardt, 332. Dr.
+Geiger here remarks that Venice also had its professional orators. Comp.
+G. Voigt, ii. 425.
+
+[552] Many of these opening lectures have been preserved in the works of
+Sabellicus, Beroaldus Major, Codrus Urceus, &c. In the works of the
+latter there are also some poems which he recited 'in principio studii.'
+
+[553] The fame of Pomponazzo's delivery is preserved in Paul. Jov.
+_Elogia Vir. Doct._ p. 134. In general, it seems that the speeches, the
+form of which was required to be perfect, were learnt by heart. In the
+case of Giannozzo Manetti we know positively that it was so on one
+occasion (_Commentario_, 39). See, however, the account p. 64, with the
+concluding statement that Manetti spoke better _impromptu_ than Aretino
+with preparation. We are told of Codrus Urceus, whose memory was weak,
+that he read his orations (_Vita_, at the end of his works. Ven. 1506,
+fol. lxx.). The following passage will illustrate the exaggerated value
+set on oratory: 'Ausim affirmare perfectum oratorem (si quisquam modo
+sit perfectus orator) ita facile posse nitorem, l�titiam, lumina et
+umbras rebus dare quas oratione exponendas suscipit, ut pictorem suis
+coloribus et pigmentis facere videmus.' (Petr. Alcyonius, _De Exilio_,
+ed. Menken, p. 136.)
+
+[554] Vespas. Fior. p. 103. Comp. p. 598, where he describes how
+Giannozzo Manetti came to him in the camp.
+
+[555] _Archiv. Stor._ xv. pp. 113, 121. Canestrini's Introduction, p. 32
+sqq. Reports of two such speeches to soldiers; the first, by Alamanni,
+is wonderfully fine and worthy of the occasion (1528).
+
+[556] On this point see Faustinus Terdoceus, in his satire _De Triumpho
+Stultitiae_, lib. ii.
+
+[557] Both of these extraordinary cases occur in Sabellicus, _Opera_,
+fol. 61-82. _De Origine et Auctu Religionis_, delivered at Verona from
+the pulpit before the barefoot friars; and _De Sacerdotii Laudibus_,
+delivered at Venice.
+
+[558] Jac. Volaterrani. _Diar. Roman._ in Murat. xxiii. _passim_. In
+col. 173 a remarkable sermon before the court, though in the absence of
+Sixtus IV., is mentioned. Pater Paolo Toscanella thundered against the
+Pope, his family, and the cardinals. When Sixtus heard of it, he smiled.
+
+[559] Fil. Villani, _Vitae_, ed. Galetti, p. 30.
+
+[560] See above, p. 237, note 3.
+
+[561] Georg. Trapezunt, _Rhetorica_, the first complete system of
+instruction. �n. Sylvius, _Artis Rhetoricae Praecepta_, in the _Opera_,
+p. 992. treats purposely only of the construction of sentences and the
+position of words. It is characteristic as an instance of the routine
+which was followed. He names several other theoretical writers who are
+some of them no longer known. Comp. C. Voigt, ii. 262 sqq.
+
+[562] His life in Murat. xx. is full of the triumphs of his eloquence.
+Comp. Vespas. Fior. 592 sqq., and _Commentario_, p. 30. On us these
+speeches make no great impression, e.g. that at the coronation of
+Frederick III. in Freher-Struve, _Script. Rer. Germ._ iii. 4-19. Of
+Manetti's oration at the burial of Lion. Aretino, Shepherd-Tonelli says
+(_Poggio_, ii. 67 sqq.): 'L'orazione ch'ei compose, � ben la cosa la pi�
+meschina che potesse udirsi, piena di puerilit� volgare nello stile,
+irrelevante negli argomenti e d'una prolissit� insopportabile.'
+
+[563] _Annales Placentini_, in Murat. xx. col. 918.
+
+[564] _E.g._ Manetti. Comp. Vesp. _Commentario_, p. 30; so, too,
+Savonarola Comp. Perrens, _Vie de Savonarole_, i. p. 163. The shorthand
+writers, however, could not always follow him, or, indeed, any rapid
+'Improvisatori.' Savonarola preached in Italian. See Pasq. Villari:
+_Vita di Savonarola_.
+
+[565] It was by no means one of the best (_Opuscula Beroaldi_, Basel,
+1509, fol. xviii.-xxi). The most remarkable thing in it is the flourish
+at the end: 'Esto tibi ipsi archetypon et exemplar, teipsum imitare,'
+etc.
+
+[566] Letters and speeches of this kind were written by Alberto di
+Ripalta; comp. the _Annales Placentini_, written by his father Antonius
+and continued by himself, in Murat. xx. col. 914 sqq., where the pedant
+gives an instructive account of his own literary career.
+
+[567] _Pauli Jovii Dialogus de Viris Litteris Illustribus_, in
+Tiraboschi, tom. vii. parte iv. Yet he says some ten years later, at the
+close of the _Elogia Litteraria_: 'Tenemus adhuc (after the leadership
+in philology had passed to the Germans) sincerae et constantis
+eloquentiae munitam arcem,' etc. The whole passage, given in German in
+Gregorovius, viii. 217 sqq. is important, as showing the view taken of
+Germany by an Italian, and is again quoted below in this connection.
+
+[568] A special class is formed by the semi-satirical dialogues, which
+Collenuccio, and still more Pontano, copied from Lucian. Their example
+stimulated Erasmus and Hutten. For the treatises properly so-called
+parts of the ethical writings of Plutarch may have served as models.
+
+[569] See below, part iv. chap. 5.
+
+[570] Comp. the epigram of Sannazaro:
+
+    'Dum patriam laudat, damnat dum Poggius hostem,
+      Nec malus est civis, nec bonus historicus.'
+
+
+[571] Benedictus: _Caroli VIII. Hist._ in Eccard, Scriptt. vi. col.
+1577.
+
+[572] Petrus Crinitus deplores this contempt, _De honesta disciplina_,
+l. xviii. cap. 9. The humanists here resemble the writers in the decline
+of antiquity, who also severed themselves from their own age. Comp.
+Burckhardt, _Die Zeit Constantin's des Grossen_. See for the other side
+several declarations of Poggio in Voigt, _Wiederbelebung_, p. 443 sqq.
+
+[573] Lorenzo Valla, in the preface to the _Historia Ferdinandi Regis
+Arag._; in opposition to him, Giacomo Zeno in the _Vita Caroli Zeni_,
+Murat. xix. p. 204. See, too, Guarino, in Rosmini, ii. 62 sqq., 177 sqq.
+
+[574] In the letter to Pizinga, _Opere Volgari_, vol. xvi. p. 38. With
+Raph. Volaterranus, l. xxi. the intellectual world begins in the
+fourteenth century. He is the same writer whose early books contain so
+many notices--excellent for his time--of the history of all countries.
+
+[575] Here, too, Petrarch cleared the way. See especially his critical
+investigation of the Austrian Charter, claiming to descend from C�sar.
+_Epp. Sen._ xvi. 1.
+
+[576] Like that of Giannozzo Manetti in the presence of Nicholas V., of
+the whole Papal court, and of a great concourse of strangers from all
+parts. Comp. Vespas. Fior. p. 591, and more fully in the _Commentario_,
+pp. 37-40.
+
+[577] In fact, it was already said that Homer alone contained the whole
+of the arts and sciences--that he was an encyclop�dia. Comp. _Codri
+Urcei Opera_, Sermo xiii. at the end. It is true that we met with a
+similar opinion in several ancient writers. The words of C. U. (Sermo
+xiii., habitus in laudem liberalium artium; _Opera_, ed. Ven. 1506, fol.
+xxxviii. _b_) are as follows: 'Eia ergo bono animo esto; ego graecas
+litteras tibi exponam; et praecipue divinum Homerum, a quo ceu fonte
+perenni, ut scribit Naso, vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis. Ab Homero
+grammaticum dicere poteris, ab Homero rhetoricam, ab Homero medicinam,
+ab Homero astrologiam, ab Homero fabulas, ab Homero historias, ab Homero
+mores, ab Homero philosophorum dogmata, ab Homero artem militarem, ab
+Homero coquinariam, ab Homero architecturam, ab Homero regendarum urbium
+modum percipies; et in summa, quidquid boni quidquid honesti animus
+hominis discendi cupidus optare potest, in Homero facile poteris
+invenire.' To the same effect 'Sermo' vii. and viii. _Opera_, fol. xxvi.
+sqq., which treat of Homer only.
+
+[578] A cardinal under Paul II. had his cooks instructed in the Ethics
+of Aristotle. Comp. Gaspar. Veron. _Vita Pauli II._ in Muratori, iii.
+ii. col. 1034.
+
+[579] For the study of Aristotle in general, a speech of Hermolaus
+Barbarus is specially instructive.
+
+[580] Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 898.
+
+[581] Vasari, xi. pp. 189, 257. _Vite di Sodoma e di Garofalo._ It is
+not surprising that the profligate women at Rome took the most
+harmonious ancient names--Julia, Lucretia, Cassandra, Portia, Virginia,
+Penthesilea, under which they appear in Aretino. It was, perhaps, then
+that the Jews took the names of the great Semitic enemies of the
+Romans--Hannibal, Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, which even now they commonly bear
+in Rome. [This last assertion cannot be maintained. Neither Zunz, _Namen
+der Juden_, Leipzig, 1837, reprinted in Zunz _Gesammelte Schriften_,
+Berlin, 1876, nor Steinschneider in his collection in _Il Buonarotti_,
+ser. ii. vol. vi. 1871, pp. 196-199, speaks of any Jew of that period
+who bore these names, and even now, according to the enquiries of Prince
+Buoncompagni from Signer Tagliacapo, in charge of the Jewish archives in
+Rome, there are only a few who are named Asdrubale, and none Amilcare or
+Annibale. L. G.] Burckhardt, 352. A careful choice of names is
+recommended by L. B. Alberti, _Della familia_, opp. ii. p. 171. Maffeo
+Vegio (_De educatione liberorum._ lib. i. c. x.) warns his readers
+against the use of _nomina indecora barbara aut nova, aut quae gentilium
+deorum sunt_. Names like 'Nero' disgrace the bearer; while others such
+as Cicero, Brutus, Naso, Maro, can be used _qualiter per se parum
+venusta propter tamen eximiam illorum virtutem_.
+
+[582]
+
+    'Quasi che 'l nome i buon giudici inganni,
+     E che quel meglio t' abbia a far poeta,
+     Che non far� lo studio di molt' anni!'
+
+So jests Ariosto, to whom fortune had certainly given a harmonious name,
+in the _Seventh Satire_, vs. 64.
+
+[583] Or after those of Bojardo, which are in part the same as his.
+
+[584] The soldiers of the French army in 1512 were 'omnibus diris ad
+inferos devocati!' The honest canon, Tizio, who, in all seriousness,
+pronounced a curse from Macrobius against foreign troops, will be spoken
+of further on.
+
+[585] _De infelicitate principum_, in Poggii _Opera_, fol. 152: 'Cujus
+(Dantis) exstat poema praeclarum, neque, si literis Latinis constaret,
+ull� ex parte poetis superioribus (the ancients) postponendum.'
+According to Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 74, 'Many wise men' even
+then discussed the question why Dante had not written in Latin.
+Cortesius (_De hominibus doctis_, p. 7) complains: 'Utinam tam bene
+cogitationes suas Latinus litteris mandare potuisset, quam bene patrium
+sermonem illustravit!' He makes the same complaint in speaking of
+Petrarch and Boccaccio.
+
+[586] His work _De vulgari eloquio_ was for long almost unknown, and,
+valuable as it is to us, could never have exercised the influence of the
+_Divina Commedia_.
+
+[587] To know how far this fanaticism went, we have only to refer to
+Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis nostri temporis_, _passim_. Vespasiano
+Bisticci is one of the few Latin writers of that time who openly
+confessed that they knew little of Latin (_Commentario della vita di G.
+Manetti_, p. 2), but he knew enough to introduce Latin sentences here
+and there in his writings, and to read Latin letters (_ibid._ 96, 165).
+In reference to this exclusive regard for Latin, the following passage
+may be quoted from Petr. Alcyonius, _De exilio_, ed. Menken, p. 213. He
+says that if Cicero could rise up and behold Rome, 'Omnium maxime illum
+credo perturbarent ineptiae quorumdam qui, amisso studio veteris linguae
+quae eadem hujus urbis et universae Italiae propria erat, dies noctesque
+incumbunt in linguam Geticam aut Dacicam discendam eandemque omni
+ratione ampliendam, cum Goti, Visigothi et Vandali (qui erant olim Getae
+et Daci) eam in Italos invexerant, ut artes et linguam et nomen Romanum
+delerent.'
+
+[588] There were regular stylistic exercises, as in the _Orationes_ of
+the elder Beroaldus, where there are two tales of Boccaccio, and even a
+'Canzone' of Petrarch translated into Latin.
+
+[589] Comp. Petrarch's letter from the earth to illustrious shades
+below. _Opera_, p. 704 sqq. See also p. 372 in the work _De rep. optime
+administranda_: 'Sic esse doleo, sed sic est.'
+
+[590] A burlesque picture of the fanatical purism prevalent in Rome is
+given by Jovian. Pontanus in his _Antonius_.
+
+[591] _Hadriani (Cornetani) Card. S. Chrysogoni de sermone latino
+liber_, especially the introduction. He finds in Cicero and his
+contemporaries Latinity in its absolute form (_an sich_). The same
+Codrus Urceus, who found in Homer the sum of all science (see above, p.
+249, note 1) says (_Opp._ ed. 1506, fol. lxv.): 'Quidquid temporibus
+meis aut vidi aut studui libens omne illud Cicero mihi felici dedit
+omine,' and goes so far as to say in another poem (_ibid._): 'Non habet
+huic similem doctrinae Graecia mater.'
+
+[592] Paul. Jov. _Elogia doct. vir._ p. 187 sqq., speaking of Bapt.
+Pius.
+
+[593] Paul Jov. _Elogia_, on Naugerius. Their ideal, he says, was:
+'Aliquid in stylo proprium, quod peculiarem ex cert� not� mentis
+effigiem referret, ex naturae genio effinxisse.' Politian, when in a
+hurry, objected to write his letters in Latin. Comp. Raph. Volat.
+_Comment. urban._ l. xxi. Politian to Cortesius (_Epist._ lib. viii. ep.
+16): 'Mihi vero longe honestior tauri facies, aut item leonis, quam
+simiae videtur;' to which Cortesius replied: 'Ego malo esse assecla et
+simia Ciceronis quam alumnus.' For Pico's opinion on the Latin language,
+see the letter quoted above, p. 202.
+
+[594] Paul. Jov. _Dialogus de viris literis illustribus_, in Tiraboschi,
+ed. Venez. 1766, tom. vii. p. iv. It is well known that Giovio was long
+anxious to undertake the great work which Vasari accomplished. In the
+dialogue mentioned above it is foreseen and deplored that Latin would
+now altogether lose its supremacy.
+
+[595] In the 'Breve' of 1517 to Franc. de' Rosi, composed by Sadoleto,
+in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, vi. p. 172.
+
+[596] Gasp. Veronens. _Vita Pauli II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1031. The
+plays of Seneca and Latin translations of Greek dramas were also
+performed.
+
+[597] At Ferrara, Plautus was played chiefly in the Italian adaptations
+of Collenuccio, the younger Guarino, and others, and principally for the
+sake of the plots. Isabella Gonzaga took the liberty of finding him
+dull. For Latin comedy in general, see R. Peiper in Fleckeisen and
+Masius, _Neue Jahrb. f�r Phil. u. P�dag._, Lpzg. 1874, xx. 131-138, and
+_Archiv f�r Literaturgesch_. v. 541 sqq. On Pomp. Laetus, see _Sabellici
+Opera_, Epist. l. xi. fol. 56 sqq., and below, at the close of Part III.
+
+[598] Comp. Burckhardt. _Gesch. der Renaissance in Italien_, 38-41.
+
+[599] For what follows see _Deliciae poetarum Italorum_; Paul. Jov.
+_Elogia_; Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis nostri temporis_; and the
+Appendices to Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi.
+
+[600] There are two new editions of the poem, that of Pingaud (Paris,
+1872), and that of Corradini (Padua, 1874). In 1874 two Italian
+translations also appeared by G. B. Gaudo and A. Palesa. On the
+_Africa_, compare L. Geiger: _Petrarca_, pp. 122 sqq., and p. 270, note
+7.
+
+[601] Filippo Villani, _Vite_, ed. Galetti, p. 16.
+
+[602] _Franc. Aleardi Oratio in laudem Franc. Sfortiae_, in Marat. xxv.
+col. 384. In comparing Scipio with Caesar, Guarino and Cyriacus
+Anconitanus held the latter, Poggio (_Opera_, epp. fol. 125, 134 sqq.)
+the former, to be the greater. For Scipio and Hannibal in the miniatures
+of Attavante, see Vasari, iv. 41. _Vita di Fiesole_. The names of both
+used for Picinino and Sforza. See p. 99. There were great disputes as to
+the relative greatness of the two. Shepherd-Tonelli, i. 262 sqq. and
+Rosmini: Guarino, ii. 97-111.
+
+[603] The brilliant exceptions, where rural life is treated
+realistically, will also be mentioned below.
+
+[604] Printed in Mai, _Spicilegium Romanum_, vol. viii. pp. 488-504;
+about 500 hexameter verses. Pierio Valeriano followed out the myth in
+his poetry. See his _Carpio_, in the _Deliciae poetarum Italorum_. The
+frescoes of Brusasorci in the Pal. Murari at Verona represent the
+subject of the _Sarca_.
+
+[605] Newly edited and translated by Th. A. Fassnacht in _Drei Perlen
+der neulateinischen Poesie_. Leutkirch and Leipzig, 1875. See further,
+Goethe's _Werke_ (Hempel'sche Ausgabe), vol. xxxii. pp. 157 and 411.
+
+[606] _De sacris diebus._
+
+[607] E.g. in his eighth eclogue.
+
+[608] There are two unfinished and unprinted Sforziads, one by the
+elder, the other by the younger Filelfo. On the latter, see Favre,
+_M�langes d'Hist. Lit._ i. 156; on the former, see Rosmini, _Filelfo_,
+ii. 157-175. It is said to be 12,800 lines long, and contains the
+passage: 'The sun falls in love with Bianca.'
+
+[609] Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, viii. 184. A poem in a similar
+style, xii. 130. The poem of Angilbert on the Court of Charles the Great
+curiously reminds us of the Renaissance. Comp. Pertz. _Monum._ ii.
+
+[610] Strozzi, _Poetae_, p. 31 sqq. 'Caesaris Borgiae ducis epicedium.'
+
+[611]
+
+    'Pontificem addiderat, flammis lustralibus omneis
+     Corporis ablutum labes, Dis Juppiter ipsis,' etc.
+
+
+[612] This was Ercole II. of Ferrara, b. April 4, 1508, probably either
+shortly before or shortly after the composition of this poem. 'Nascere,
+magne puer, matri expectate patrique,' is said near the end.
+
+[613] Comp. the collections of the _Scriptores_ by Schardius, Freher,
+&c., and see above p. 126, note 1.
+
+[614] Uzzano, see _Archiv._ iv. i. 296. Macchiavelli, _i Decennali_. The
+life of Savonarola, under the title _Cedrus Libani_, by Fra Benedetto.
+_Assedio di Piombino_, Murat. xxv. We may quote as a parallel the
+_Teuerdank_ and other northern works in rhyme (new ed. of that by
+Haltaus, Quedlinb. and Leipzig, 1836). The popular historical songs of
+the Germans, which were produced in great abundance in the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries, may be compared with these Italian poems.
+
+[615] We may remark of the _Coltivazione_ of L. Alamanni, written in
+Italian 'versi sciolti,' that all the really poetical and enjoyable
+passages are directly or indirectly borrowed from the ancients (an old
+ed., Paris, 1540; new ed. of the works of A., 2 vols., Florence, 1867).
+
+[616] E.g. by C. G. Weise, Leipzig, 1832. The work, divided into twelve
+books, named after the twelve constellations, is dedicated to Hercules
+II. of Ferrara. In the dedication occur the remarkable words: 'Nam quem
+alium patronum in tot� Itali� invenire possum, cui musae cordisunt, qui
+carmen sibi oblatum aut intelligat, aut examine recto expendere sciat?'
+Palingenius uses 'Juppiter' and 'Deus' indiscriminately.
+
+[617] L. B. Alberti's first comic poem, which purported to be by an
+author Lepidus, was long considered as a work of antiquity.
+
+[618] In this case (see below, p. 266, note 2) of the introduction to
+Lucretius, and of Horace, _Od._ iv. 1.
+
+[619] The invocation of a patron saint is an essentially pagan
+undertaking, as has been noticed at p. 57. On a more serious occasion,
+comp. Sannazaro's Elegy: 'In festo die divi Nazarii martyris.' Sann.
+_Elegiae_, 1535, fol. 166 sqq.
+
+[620]
+
+    Si satis ventos tolerasse et imbres
+    Ac minas fatorum hominumque fraudes
+    Da Pater tecto salientem avito
+        Cernere fumum!
+
+
+[621] _Andr. Naugerii, Orationes duae carminaque aliquot_, Venet. 1530,
+4^o. The few 'Carmina' are to be found partly or wholly in the
+_Deliciae_. On N. and his death, see Pier. Val. _De inf. lit._ ed.
+Menken, 326 sqq.
+
+[622] Compare Petrarch's greeting to Italy, written more than a century
+earlier (1353) in _Petr. Carmina Minora_, ed. Rossetti, ii. pp. 266 sqq.
+
+[623] To form a notion of what Leo X. could swallow, see the prayer of
+Guido Postumo Silvestri to Christ, the Virgin, and all the Saints, that
+they would long spare this 'numen' to earth, since heaven had enough of
+such already. Printed in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, v. 337.
+
+[624] Molza's _Poesie volgari e Latine_, ed. by Pierantonio Serassi,
+Bergamo 1747.
+
+[625] Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 36.
+
+[626] Sannazaro ridicules a man who importuned him with such forgeries:
+'Sint vetera haec aliis, m� nova semper erunt.' (Ad Rufum, _Opera_,
+1535, fol. 41 _a_.)
+
+[627] 'De mirabili urbe Venetiis' (_Opera_, fol. 38 b):
+
+    Viderat Adriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis
+      Stare urbem et toto ponere jura mari:
+    Nunc mihi Tarpejas quantum vis Juppiter arceis
+      Objice et illa tui moenia Martis ait,
+    Si pelago Tybrim praefers, urbem aspice utramque
+      Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse deos.
+
+
+[628] _Lettere de'principi_, i. 88, 98.
+
+[629] Malipiero, _Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor._ vii. i. p. 508. At the end
+we read, in reference to the bull as the arms of the Borgia:
+
+    'Merge, Tyber, vitulos animosas ultor in undas;
+      Bos cadat inferno victima magna Jovi!'
+
+
+[630] On the whole affair, see Roscoe, _Leone X._, ed. Bossi, vii. 211,
+viii. 214 sqq. The printed collection, now rare, of these _Coryciana_ of
+the year 1524 contains only the Latin poems; Vasari saw another book in
+the possession of the Augustinians in which were sonnets. So contagious
+was the habit of affixing poems, that the group had to be protected by a
+railing, and even hidden altogether. The change of Goritz into 'Corycius
+senex' is suggested by Virgil, _Georg._ iv. 127. For the miserable end
+of the man at the sack of Rome, see Pierio Valeriano, _De infelic.
+literat._ ed. Menken, p. 369.
+
+[631] The work appeared first in the _Coryciana_, with introductions by
+Silvanus and Corycius himself; also reprinted in the Appendices to
+Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, and in the _Deliciae_. Comp. Paul. Jov.
+_Elogia_, speaking of Arsillus. Further, for the great number of the
+epigrammatists, see Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, l. c. One of the most biting
+pens was Marcantonio Casanova. Among the less known, Jo. Thomas
+Muscanius (see _Deliciae_) deserves mention. On Casanova, see Pier.
+Valer. _De infel. lit._ ed. Menken, p. 376 sqq.; and Paul. Jov.
+_Elogia_, p. 142 sqq., who says of him: 'Nemo autem eo simplicitate ac
+innocenti� vitae melior;' Arsillus (l. c.) speaks of his 'placidos
+sales.' Some few of his poems in the _Coryciana_, J. 3 _a_ sqq. L. 1
+_a_, L. 4 _b_.
+
+[632] Marin Sanudo, in the _Vite de'duchi di Venezia_, Murat. xii.
+quotes them regularly.
+
+[633] Scardeonius, _De urb. Patav. antiq._ (Graev. thes. vi. 11, col.
+270), names as the inventor a certain Odaxius of Padua, living about the
+middle of the fifteenth century. Mixed verses of Latin and the language
+of the country are found much earlier in many parts of Europe.
+
+[634] It must not be forgotten that they were very soon printed with
+both the old Scholia and modern commentaries.
+
+[635] Ariosto, _Satira_, vii. Date 1531.
+
+[636] Of such children we meet with several, yet I cannot give an
+instance in which they were demonstrably so treated. The youthful
+prodigy Giulio Campagnola was not one of those who were forced with an
+ambitious object. Comp. Scardeonius, _De urb. Patav. antiq._ in Graev.
+thes. vi. 3, col. 276. For the similar case of Cecchino Bracci, d. 1445
+in his fifteenth year, comp. Trucchi, _Poesie Ital. inedite_, iii. p.
+229. The father of Cardano tried 'memoriam artificialem instillare,' and
+taught him, when still a child, the astrology of the Arabians. See
+Cardanus, _De propria vita_ cap. 34. Manoello may be added to the list,
+unless we are to take his expression, 'At the age of six years I am as
+good as at eighty,' as a meaningless phrase. Comp. _Litbl. des Orients_,
+1843, p. 21.
+
+[637] Bapt. Mantuan. _De calamitatibus temporum_, l. i.
+
+[638] Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _Progymnasma adversus literas et literatos_.
+_Opp._ ed. Basil. 1580, ii. 422-445. Dedications 1540-1541; the work
+itself addressed to Giov. Franc. Pico, and therefore finished before
+1533.
+
+[639] Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _Hercules_. The dedication is a striking
+evidence of the first threatening movements of the Inquisition.
+
+[640] He passed, as we have seen, for the last protector of the
+scholars.
+
+[641] _De infelicitate literatorum._ On the editions, see above, p. 86,
+note 4. Pier. Val., after leaving Rome, lived long in a good position as
+professor at Padua. At the end of his work he expresses the hope that
+Charles V. and Clement VII. would bring about a better time for the
+scholars.
+
+[642] Comp. Dante, _Inferno_, xiii. 58 sqq., especially 93 sqq., where
+Petrus de Vineis speaks of his own suicide.
+
+[643] Pier. Valer. pp. 397 sqq., 402. He was the uncle of the writer.
+
+[644] Coelii Calcagnini, _Opera_, ed. Basil. 1544, p. 101, in the Seventh
+Book of the Epistles, No. 27, letter to Jacob Ziegler. Comp. Pierio Val.
+_De inf. lit._ ed. Menken, p. 369 sqq.
+
+[645] _M. Ant. Sabellici Opera_, Epist. l. xi. fol. 56. See, too, the
+biography in the _Elogia_ of Paolo Giovio, p. 76 sqq. The former
+appeared separately at Strasburg in 1510, under the title Sabellicus:
+_Vita Pomponii Laeti_.
+
+[646] Jac. Volaterran. _Diar. Rom._ in Muratori. xxiii. col. 161, 171,
+185. _Anecdota literaria_, ii. pp. 168 sqq.
+
+[647] Paul. Jov. _De Romanis piscibus_, cap. 17 and 34.
+
+[648] Sadoleti, Epist. 106, of the year 1529.
+
+[649] Anton. Galatei, Epist. 10 and 12, in Mai, _Spicileg. Rom._ vol.
+viii.
+
+[650] This was the case even before the middle of the century. Comp.
+Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis nostri temp._ ii.
+
+[651] Luigi Bossi, _Vita di Cristoforo Colombo_, in which there is a
+sketch of earlier Italian journeys and discoveries, p. 91 sqq.
+
+[652] See on this subject a treatise by Pertz. An inadequate account is
+to be found in �neas Sylvius, _Europae status sub Frederico III. Imp._
+cap. 44 (in Freher's _Scriptores_, ed. 1624, vol. ii. p. 87). On �n. S.
+see Peschel o.c. 217 sqq.
+
+[653] Comp. O. Peschel, _Geschichte der Erdkunde_, 2nd edit., by Sophus
+Ruge, Munich, 1877, p. 209 sqq. _et passim_.
+
+[654] _Pii II. Comment._ l. i. p. 14. That he did not always observe
+correctly, and sometimes filled up the picture from his fancy, is
+clearly shown, e.g., by his description of Basel. Yet his merit on the
+whole is nevertheless great. On the description of Basel see G. Voigt;
+Enea Silvio, i. 228; on E. S. as Geographer, ii. 302-309. Comp. i. 91
+sqq.
+
+[655] In the sixteenth century, Italy continued to be the home of
+geographical literature, at a time when the discoverers themselves
+belonged almost exclusively to the countries on the shores of the
+Atlantic. Native geography produced in the middle of the century the
+great and remarkable work of Leandro Alberti, _Descrizione di tutta
+l'Italia_, 1582. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the maps in
+Italy were in advance of those of other countries. See Wieser: _Der
+Portulan des Infanten Philipp II. von Spanien_ in _Sitzungsberichte der
+Wien. Acad. Phil. Hist. Kl._ Bd. 82 (1876), pp. 541 sqq. For the
+different Italian maps and voyages of discovery, see the excellent work
+of Oscar Peschel: _Abhandl. zur Erd-und V�lkerkunde_ (Leipzig, 1878).
+Comp. also, _inter alia_: Berchet, _Il planisfero di Giovanni Leandro
+del'anno 1452 fa-simil nella grandezza del' original Nota illustrativa_,
+16 S. 4^o. Venezia, 1879. Comp. Voigt, ii. 516; and G. B. de Rossi,
+_Piante iconogrofiche di Roma anteriori al secolo XVI._ Rome, 1879. For
+Petrarch's attempt to draw out a map of Italy, comp. Flavio Biondo:
+_Italia illustrata_ (ed. Basil.), p. 352 sqq.; also _Petr. Epist. var.
+LXI._ ed. Fracass. iii. 476. A remarkable attempt at a map of Europe,
+Asia and Africa is to be found on the obverse of a medal of Charles IV.
+of Anjou, executed by Francesco da Laurana in 1462.
+
+[656] Libri, _Histoire des Sciences Math�matiques en Italie_. 4 vols.
+Paris, 1838.
+
+[657] To pronounce a conclusive judgment on this point, the growth of
+the habit of collecting observations, in other than the mathematical
+sciences, would need to be illustrated in detail. But this lies outside
+the limits of our task.
+
+[658] Libri, op. cit. ii. p. 174 sqq. See also Dante's treatise, _De
+aqua et terra_; and W. Schmidt, _Dante's Stellung in der Geschichte der
+Cosmographie_, Graz, 1876. The passages bearing on geography and natural
+science from the _Tesoro_ of Brunetto Latini are published separately:
+_Il trattato della Sfera di S. Br. L._, by Bart. Sorio (Milan, 1858),
+who has added B. L.'s system of historical chronology.
+
+[659] Scardeonius, _De urb. Patav. antiq._ in _Graevii Thesaur. ant.
+Ital._ tom. vi. pars iii. col. 227. A. died in 1312 during the
+investigation; his statue was burnt. On Giov. Sang. see op. cit. col.
+228 sqq. Comp. on him, Fabricius, _Bibl. Lat._ s. v. Petrus de Apono.
+Sprenger in _Esch. u. Gruber_, i. 33. He translated (a. 1292-1293)
+astrological works of Abraham ibn Esra, printed 1506.
+
+[660] See below, part vi. chapter 2.
+
+[661] See the exaggerated complaints of Libri, op. cit. ii. p. 258 sqq.
+Regrettable as it may be that a people so highly gifted did not devote
+more of its strength to the natural sciences, we nevertheless believe
+that it pursued, and in part attained, still more important ends.
+
+[662] On the studies of the latter in Italy, comp. the thorough
+investigation by C. Malagola in his work on Codro Urceo (Bologna, 1878,
+cap. vii. 360-366).
+
+[663] Italians also laid out botanical gardens in foreign countries,
+e.g. Angelo, of Florence, a contemporary of Petrarch, in Prag.
+Friedjung: _Carl IV._ p. 311, note 4.
+
+[664] _Alexandri Braccii descriptio horti Laurentii Med._, printed as
+Appendix No. 58 to Roscoe's _Life of Lorenzo_. Also to be found in the
+Appendices to Fabroni's _Laurentius_.
+
+[665] _Mondanarii Villa_, printed in the _Poemata aliquot insignia
+illustr. poetar. recent._
+
+[666] On the zoological garden at Palermo under Henry VI., see Otto de
+S. Blasio ad a. 1194. That of Henry I. of England in the park of
+Woodstock (Guliel. Malmes. p. 638) contained lions, leopards, camels,
+and a porcupine, all gifts of foreign princes.
+
+[667] As such he was called, whether painted or carved in stone,
+'Marzocco.' At Pisa eagles were kept. See the commentators on Dante,
+_Inf._ xxxiii. 22. The falcon in Boccaccio, _Decam._ v. 9. See for the
+whole subject: _Due trattati del governo e delle infermit� degli
+uccelli, testi di lingua inediti_. Rome, 1864. They are works of the
+fourteenth century, possibly translated from the Persian.
+
+[668] See the extract from �gid. Viterb. in Papencordt, _Gesch. der
+Stadt Rom im Mittelalter_, p. 367, note, with an incident of the year
+1328. Combats of wild animals among themselves and with dogs served to
+amuse the people on great occasions. At the reception of Pius II. and of
+Galeazzo Maria Sforza at Florence, in 1459, in an enclosed space on the
+Piazza della Signoria, bulls, horses, boars, dogs, lions, and a giraffe
+were turned out together, but the lions lay down and refused to attack
+the other animals. Comp. _Ricordi di Firenze, Rer. Ital. script. ex
+Florent. codd._ tom. ii. col. 741. A different account in _Vita Pii II._
+Murat. iii. ii. col. 976. A second giraffe was presented to Lorenzo the
+Magnificent by the Mameluke Sultan Kaytbey. Comp. Paul. Jov. _Vita
+Leonis X._ l. i. In Lorenzo's menagerie one magnificent lion was
+especially famous, and his destruction by the other lions was reckoned a
+presage of the death of his owner.
+
+[669] Gio. Villani, x. 185, xi. 66. Matteo Villani, iii. 90, v. 68. It
+was a bad omen if the lions fought, and worse still if they killed one
+another. Com. Varchi, _Stor. fiorent._ iii. p. 143. Matt. V. devotes the
+first of the two chapters quoted to prove (1) that lions were born in
+Italy, and (2) that they came into the world alive.
+
+[670] _Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 77, year 1497. A pair
+of lions once escaped from Perugia; _ibid._ xvi. i. p. 382, year 1434.
+Florence, for example, sent to King Wladislaw of Poland (May, 1406), a
+pair of lions _ut utriusque sexus animalia ad procreandos catulos
+haberetis_. The accompanying statement is amusing in a diplomatic
+document: 'Sunt equidem hi leones Florentini, et satis quantum natura
+promittere potuit mansueti, deposit� feritate, quam insitam habent,
+hique in G�tulorum regionibus nascuntur et Indorum, in quibus multitudo
+dictorum animalium evalescit, sicuti prohibent naturales. Et cum leonum
+complexio sit frigoribus inimica, quod natura sagax ostendit, natura in
+regionibus aestu ferventibus generantur, necessarium est, quod vostra
+serenitas, si dictorum animalium vitam et sobolis propagationem, ut
+remur, desiderat, faciat provideri, quod in locis calidis educentur et
+maneant. Conveniunt nempe cum regia majestate leones quoniam leo gr�ce
+latine rex dicitur. Sicut enim rex dignitate potentia, magnanimitate
+ceteros homines antecellit, sic leonis generositas et vigor
+imperterritus animalia cuncta praesit. Et sicut rex, sic leo adversus
+imbecilles et timidos clementissimum se ostendit, et adversus inquietos
+et tumidos terribilem se offert animadversione justissima.' (_Cod.
+epistolaris s�culi. Mon. med. �vi hist. res gestas Poloni� illustr._
+Krakau, 1876, p. 25.)
+
+[671] Gage, _Carteggio_, i. p. 422, year 1291. The Visconti used trained
+leopards for hunting hares, which were started by little dogs. See v.
+Kobel, _Wildanger_, p. 247, where later instances of hunting with
+leopards are mentioned.
+
+[672] _Strozzii poetae_, p. 146: _De leone Borsii Ducis_. The lion
+spares the hare and the small dog, imitating (so says the poet) his
+master. Comp. the words fol. 188, 'et inclusis condita septa feris,' and
+fol. 193, an epigram of fourteen lines, 'in leporarii ingressu quam
+maximi;' see _ibid._ for the hunting-park.
+
+[673] _Cron. di Perugia_, l. c. xvi. ii. p. 199. Something of the same
+kind is to be found in Petrarch, _De remed. utriusque fortunae_, but
+less clearly expressed. Here Gaudium, in the conversation with Ratio,
+boasts of owning monkeys and 'ludicra animalia.'
+
+[674] Jovian. Pontan. _De magnificentia._ In the zoological garden of
+the Cardinal of Aquileja, at Albano, there were, in 1463, peacocks and
+Indian fowls and Syrian goats with long ears. _Pii II. Comment._ l. xi.
+p. 562 sqq.
+
+[675] _Decembrio_, ap. Muratori, xx. col. 1012.
+
+[676] Brunetti Latini, _Tesor._ (ed. Chabaille, Paris, 1863), lib. i. In
+Petrarch's time there were no elephants in Italy. 'Itaque et in Italia
+avorum memoria unum Frederico Romanorum principi fuisse et nunc Egyptio
+tyranno nonnisi unicum esse fama est.' _De rem. utr. fort._ i. 60.
+
+[677] The details which are most amusing, in Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, on
+Tristanus Acunius. On the porcupines and ostriches in the Pal. Strozzi,
+see Rabelais, _Pantagruel_, iv. chap. 11. Lorenzo the Magnificent
+received a giraffe from Egypt through some merchants, Baluz. _Miscell._
+iv. 416. The elephant sent to Leo was greatly bewailed by the people
+when it died, its portrait was painted, and verses on it were written by
+the younger Beroaldus.
+
+[678] Comp. Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, p. 234, speaking of Francesco Gonzaga.
+For the luxury at Milan in this respect, see Bandello, Parte II. Nov. 3
+and 8. In the narrative poems we also sometimes hear the opinion of a
+judge of horses. Comp. Pulci, _Morgante_, xv. 105 sqq.
+
+[679] Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, speaking of Hipp. Medices.
+
+[680] At this point a few notices on slavery in Italy at the time of the
+Renaissance will not be out of place. A short, but important, passage in
+Jovian. Pontan. _De obedientia_, l. iii. cap. i.: 'An homo, cum liber
+natura sit, domino parere debeat?' In North Italy there were no slaves.
+Elsewhere, even Christians, as well as Circassians and Bulgarians, were
+bought from the Turks, and made to serve till they had earned their
+ransom. The negroes, on the contrary, remained slaves; but it was not
+permitted, at least in the kingdom of Naples, to emasculate them. The
+word 'moro' signifies any dark-skinned man; the negro was called 'moro
+nero.'--Fabroni, _Cosmos_, Adn. 110: Document on the sale of a female
+Circassian slave (1427); Adn. 141: List of the female slaves of
+Cosimo.--Nantiporto, Murat. iii. ii. col. 1106: Innocent VIII. received
+100 Moors as a present from Ferdinand the Catholic, and gave them to
+cardinals and other great men (1488).--Marsuccio, _Novelle_, 14: sale of
+slaves; do. 24 and 25: negro slaves who also (for the benefit of their
+owner?) work as 'facchini,' and gain the love of the women; do. 48 Moors
+from Tunis caught by Catalans and sold at Pisa.--Gaye, _Carteggio_, i.
+360: manumission and reward of a negro slave in a Florentine will
+(1490).--Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, sub Franc. Sfortia; Porzio, _Congiura_,
+iii. 195; and Comines, _Charles VIII._ chap. 18: negroes as gaolers and
+executioners of the House of Aragon in Naples.--Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, sub
+Galeatio: negroes as followers of the prince on his excursions.--�ne�
+Sylvii, _Opera_, p. 456: a negro slave as a musician.--Paul. Jov. _De
+piscibus_, cap 3: a (free?) negro as diver and swimming-master at
+Genoa.--Alex. Benedictus, _De Carolo VIII._ in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii.
+col. 1608: a negro (�thiops) as superior officer at Venice, according to
+which we are justified in thinking of Othello as a negro.--Bandello,
+Parte III. Nov. 21: when a slave at Genoa deserved punishment he was
+sold away to Iviza, one of the Balearic isles, to carry salt.
+
+The foregoing remarks, although they make no claim to completeness, may
+be allowed to stand as they are in the new edition, on account of the
+excellent selection of instances they contain, and because they have not
+met with sufficient notice in the works upon the subject. Latterly a
+good deal has been written on the slave-trade in Italy. The very curious
+book of Filippo Zamboni: _Gli Ezzelini, Dante e gli Schiavi, ossia Roma
+e la Schiavit� personale domestica. Con documenti inediti. Seconda
+edizione aumentata_ (Vienna, 1870), does not contain what the title
+promises, but gives, p. 241 sqq., valuable information on the
+slave-trade; p. 270, a remarkable document on the buying and selling of
+a female slave; p. 282, a list of various slaves (with the place were
+they were bought and sold, their home, age, and price) in the thirteenth
+and three following centuries. A treatise by Wattenbach: _Sklavenhandel
+im Mittelalter_ (_Anzeiger f�r Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit_, 1874, pp.
+37-40) refers only in part to Italy: Clement V. decides in 1309 that the
+Venetian prisoners should be made slaves of; in 1501, after the capture
+of Capua, many Capuan women were sold at Rome for a low price. In the
+_Monum. historica Slavorum meridionalium_, ed. Vinc. Macusceo, tom. i.
+Warsaw, 1874, we read at p. 199 a decision (Ancona, 1458) that the
+'Greci, Turci, Tartari, Sarraceni, Bossinenses, Burgari vel Albanenses,'
+should be and always remain slaves, unless their masters freed them by a
+legal document. Egnatius, _Exempl. ill. vir._ Ven. fol. 246 _a_, praises
+Venice on the ground that 'servorum Venetis ipsis nullum unquam usum
+extitisse;' but, on the other hand, comp. Zamboni, p. 223, and
+especially Vincenzo Lazari: 'Del traffico e delle condizioni degli
+schiavi, in Venezia nel tempo di mezzo,' in _Miscellanea di Stor. Ital._
+Torino, 1862, vol. i. 463-501.
+
+[681] It is hardly necessary to refer the reader to the famous chapters
+on this subject in Humboldt's _Kosmos_.
+
+[682] See on this subject the observations of Wilhelm Grimm, quoted by
+Humboldt in the work referred to.
+
+[683] Carmina Burana, p. 162, _De Phyllide et Flora_, str. 66.
+
+[684] It would be hard to say what else he had to do at the top of the
+Bismantova in the province of Reggio, _Purgat._ iv. 26. The precision
+with which he brings before us all the parts of his supernatural world
+shows a remarkable sense of form and space. That there was a belief in
+the existence of hidden treasures on the tops of mountains, and that
+such spots were regarded with superstitious terror, may be clearly
+inferred from the _Chron. Novaliciense_, ii. 5, in Pertz, _Script._
+vii., and _Monum. hist. patriae, Script._ iii.
+
+[685] Besides the description of Bai� in the _Fiammetta_, of the grove
+in the Ameto, etc., a passage in the _De genealogia deorum_, xiv. 11, is
+of importance, where he enumerates a number of rural beauties--trees,
+meadows, brooks, flocks and herds, cottages, etc.--and adds that these
+things 'animum mulcent;' their effect is 'mentem in se colligere.'
+
+[686] Flavio Biondo, _Italia Illustrata_ (ed. Basil), p. 352 sqq. Comp.
+_Epist. Var._ ed. Fracass. (lat.) iii. 476. On Petrarch's plan of
+writing a great geographical work, see the proofs given by Attilio
+Hortis, _Accenni alle Scienze Naturali nelle Opere di G. Boccacci_,
+Trieste, 1877, p. 45 sqq.
+
+[687] Although he is fond of referring to them: e.g. _De vita solitaria_
+(_Opera_, ed. Basil, 1581), esp. p. 241, where he quotes the description
+of a vine-arbour from St. Augustine.
+
+[688] _Epist. famil._ vii. 4. 'Interea utinam scire posses, quanta, cum
+voluptate solivagus et liber, inter montes et nemora, inter fontes et
+flumina, inter libros et maximorum hominum ingenia respiro, quamque me
+in ea, quae ante sunt, cum Apostolo extendens et praeterita oblivisci
+nitor et praesentia non videre.' Comp. vi. 3, o. c. 316 sqq. esp. 334
+sqq. Comp. L. Geiger: _Petrarca_, p. 75, note 5, and p. 269.
+
+[689] 'Jacuit sine carmine sacro.' Comp. _Itinerar. Syriacum, Opp._ p.
+558.
+
+[690] He distinguishes in the _Itinerar. Syr._ p. 357, on the Riviera di
+Levante: 'colles asperitate gratissima et mira fertilitate conspicuos.'
+On the port of Gaeta, see his _De remediis utriusque fortunae_, i. 54.
+
+[691] _Letter to Posterity_: 'Subito loco specie percussus.'
+Descriptions of great natural events: A Storm at Naples, 1343: _Epp.
+fam._ i. 263 sqq.; An Earthquake at Basel, 1355, _Epp. seniles_, lib. x.
+2, and _De rem. utr. fort._ ii. 91.
+
+[692] _Epist. fam._ ed. Fracassetti, i. 193 sqq.
+
+[693] _Il Dittamondo_, iii. cap. 9.
+
+[694] _Dittamondo_, iii. cap. 21, iv. cap. 4. Papencordt, _Gesch. der
+Stadt Rom_, says that the Emperor Charles IV. had a strong taste for
+beautiful scenery, and quotes on this point Pelzel, _Carl IV._ p. 456.
+(The two other passages, which he quotes, do not say the same.) It is
+possible that the Emperor took this fancy from intercourse with the
+humanists (see above, pp. 141-2). For the interest taken by Charles in
+natural science see H. Friedjung, op. cit. p. 224, note 1.
+
+[695] We may also compare Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 310: 'Homo fuit
+(Pius II.) verus, integer, apertus; nil habuit ficti, nil simulati'--an
+enemy of hypocrisy and superstition, courageous and consistent. See
+Voigt, ii. 261 sqq. and iii. 724. He does not, however, give an analysis
+of the character of Pius.
+
+[696] The most important passages are the following: _Pii II. P. M.
+Commentarii_, l. iv. p. 183; spring in his native country; l. v. p. 251;
+summer residence at Tivoli; l. vi. p. 306: the meal at the spring of
+Vicovaro; l. viii. p. 378: the neighbourhood of Viterbo; p. 387: the
+mountain monastery of St. Martin; p. 388: the Lake of Bolsena; l. ix. p.
+396: a splendid description of Monte Amiata; l. x. p. 483: the situation
+of Monte Oliveto; p. 497: the view from Todi; l. xi. p. 554: Ostia and
+Porto; p. 562: description of the Alban Hills; l. xii. p. 609: Frascati
+and Grottaferrata; comp. 568-571.
+
+[697] So we must suppose it to have been written, not Sicily.
+
+[698] He calls himself, with an allusion to his name: 'Silvarum amator
+et varia videndi cupidus.'
+
+[699] On Leonbattista Alberti's feeling for landscapes see above, p. 136
+sqq. Alberti, a younger contemporary of �neas Silvius (_Trattato del
+Governo della Famiglia_, p. 90; see above, p. 132, note 1), is delighted
+when in the country with 'the bushy hills,' 'the fair plains and rushing
+waters.' Mention may here be made of a little work _�tna_, by P. Bembus,
+first published at Venice, 1495, and often printed since, in which,
+among much that is rambling and prolix, there are remarkable
+geographical descriptions and notices of landscapes.
+
+[700] A most elaborate picture of this kind in Ariosto; his sixth canto
+is all foreground.
+
+[701] He deals differently with his architectural framework, and in this
+modern decorative art can learn something from him even now.
+
+[702] _Lettere Pittoriche_, iii. 36, to Titian, May, 1544.
+
+[703] _Strozzii Poetae_, in the _Erotica_, l. vi. fol. 183; in the poem:
+'Hortatur se ipse, ut ad amicam properet.'
+
+[704] Comp. Thausing: _D�rer_, Leipzig, 1876, p. 166.
+
+[705] These striking expressions are taken from the seventh volume of
+Michelet's _Histoire de France_ (Introd.).
+
+[706] Tomm. Gar, _Relaz. della Corte di Roma_, i. pp. 278 and 279. In
+the Rel. of Soriano, year 1533.
+
+[707] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 295 sqq. The word 'saturnico' means
+'unhappy' as well as 'bringing misfortune.' For the influence of the
+planets on human character in general, see Corn. Agrippa, _De occulta
+philosophia_, c. 52.
+
+[708] See Trucchi, _Poesie Italiane inedite_, i. p 165 sqq.
+
+[709] Blank verse became at a later time the usual form for dramatic
+compositions. Trissino, in the dedication of his _Sofonisba_ to Leo X.,
+expressed the hope that the Pope would recognise this style for what it
+was--as better, nobler, and _less easy_ than it looked. Roscoe, _Leone_
+X., ed. Bossi, viii. 174.
+
+[710] Comp. e.g. the striking forms adopted by Dante, _Vita Nuova_, ed.
+Witte, p. 13 sqq., 16 sqq. Each has twenty irregular lines; in the
+first, one rhyme occurs eight times.
+
+[711] Trucchi, op. cit. i. 181 sqq.
+
+[712] These were the 'Canzoni' and Sonnets which every blacksmith and
+donkey-driver sang and parodied--which made Dante not a little angry.
+(Comp. Franco Sachetti, Nov. 114, 115.) So quickly did these poems find
+their way among the people.
+
+[713] _Vita Nuova_, ed. Witte, pp. 81, 82 sqq. 'Deh peregrini,' _ibid._
+116.
+
+[714] For Dante's psychology, the beginning of _Purg._ iv. is one of the
+most important passages. See also the parts of the _Convito_ bearing on
+the subject.
+
+[715] The portraits of the school of Van Eyck would prove the contrary
+for the North. They remained for a long period far in advance of all
+descriptions in words.
+
+[716] Printed in the sixteenth volume of his _Opere Volgari_. See M.
+Landau, _Giov. Boccaccio_ (Stuttg. 1877), pp. 36-40; he lays special
+stress on B.'s dependence on Dante and Petrarch.
+
+[717] In the song of the shepherd Teogape, after the feast of Venus,
+_Opp._ ed. Montier, vol. xv. 2. p. 67 sqq. Comp. Landau, 58-64; on the
+_Fiammetta_, see Landau, 96-105.
+
+[718] The famous Lionardo Aretino, the leader of the humanists at the
+beginning of the fifteenth century, admits, 'Che gli antichi Greci
+d'umanita e di gentilezza di cuore abbino avanzanto di gran lunga i
+nostri Italiani;' but he says it at the beginning of a novel which
+contains the sentimental story of the invalid Prince Antiochus and his
+step-mother Stratonice--a document of an ambiguous and half-Asiatic
+character. (Printed as an Appendix to the _Cento Novelle Antiche_.)
+
+[719] No doubt the court and prince received flattery enough from their
+occasional poets and dramatists.
+
+[720] Comp. the contrary view taken by Gregorovius, _Gesch. Roms_, vii.
+619.
+
+[721] Paul. Jovius, _Dialog. de viris lit. illustr._, in Tiraboschi,
+tom. vii. iv. Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, _De poetis nostri temp._
+
+[722] Isabella Gonzaga to her husband, Feb. 3, 1502, _Arch. Stor._
+Append. ii. p. 306 sqq. Comp. Gregorovius, _Lucrezia Borgia_, i.
+256-266, ed. 3. In the French _Myst�res_ the actors themselves first
+marched before the audience in procession, which was called the
+'montre.'
+
+[723] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 404. Other passages
+referring to the stage in that city, cols. 278, 279, 282 to 285, 361,
+380, 381, 393, 397, from which it appears that Plautus was the dramatist
+most popular on these occasions, that the performances sometimes lasted
+till three o'clock in the morning, and were even given in the open air.
+The ballets were without any meaning or reference to the persons present
+and the occasion solemnized. Isabella Gonzaga, who was certainly at the
+time longing for her husband and child, and was dissatisfied with the
+union of her brother with Lucrezia, spoke of the 'coldness and
+frostiness' of the marriage and the festivities which attended it.
+
+[724] _Strozzii Poet�_, fol. 232, in the fourth book of the _�olosticha_
+of Tito Strozza. The lines run:
+
+    'Ecce superveniens rerum argumenta retexit
+      Mimus, et ad populum verba diserta refert.
+     Tum similes habitu formaque et voce Men�chmi
+      Dulcibus oblectant lumina nostra modis.'
+
+The _Men�chmi_ was also given at Ferrara in 1486, at the cost of more
+than 1,000 ducats. Murat. xxiv. 278.
+
+[725] Franc. Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 169. The passage in the original
+is as follows: 'Si sono anco spesso recitate delle tragedie con grandi
+apparecchi, comporte da poeti antichi o da moderni. Alle quali per la
+fama degli apparati concorrevano le genti estere e circonvicine per
+vederle e udirle. Ma hoggi le feste da particolari si fanno fra i
+parenti et essendosi la citt� regolata per se medesima da certi anni in
+qu�, si passano i tempi del Carnovale in comedie e in altri pi� lieti e
+honorati diletti.' The passage is not thoroughly clear.
+
+[726] This must be the meaning of Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 168, when
+he complains that the 'recitanti' ruined the comedies 'con invenzioni o
+personaggi troppo ridicoli.'
+
+[727] Sansovino, l. c.
+
+[728] Scardeonius, _De urb. Patav. antiq._, in Graevius, Thes. vi. iii.
+col. 288 sqq. An important passage for the literature of the dialects
+generally. One of the passages is as follows: 'Hinc ad recitandas
+comoedias socii scenici et gregales et �muli fuere nobiles juvenes
+Patavini, Marcus Aurelius Alvarotus quem in comoediis suis Menatum
+appellitabat, et Hieronymus Zanetus quem Vezzam, et Castegnola quem
+Billoram vocitabat, et alii quidam qui sermonem agrestium imitando pr�
+ceteris callebant.'
+
+[729] That the latter existed as early as the fifteenth century may be
+inferred from the _Diario Ferrerese_, Feb. 2nd, 1501: 'Il duca Hercole
+fece una festa di Menechino secondo il suo uso.' Murat. xxiv. col. 393.
+There cannot be a confusion with the Men�chmi of Plautus, which is
+correctly written, l. c. col. 278. See above, p. 318, note 2.
+
+[730] Pulci mischievously invents a solemn old-world legend for his
+story of the giant Margutte (_Morgante_, canto xix. str. 153 sqq.). The
+critical introduction of Limerno Pitocco is still droller (_Orlandino_,
+cap. i. str. 12-22).
+
+[731] The _Morgante_ was written in 1460 and the following years, and
+first printed at Venice in 1481. Last ed. by P. Sermolli, Florence,
+1872. For the tournaments, see part v. chap. i. See, for what follows,
+Ranke: _Zur Geschichte der italienischen Poesie_, Berlin, 1837.
+
+[732] The _Orlando inamorato_ was first printed in 1496.
+
+[733] _L'Italia liberata da Goti_, Rome, 1547.
+
+[734] See above, p. 319, and Landau's _Boccaccio_, 64-69. It must,
+nevertheless, be observed that the work of Boccaccio here mentioned was
+written before 1344, while that of Petrarch was written after Laura's
+death, that is, after 1348.
+
+[735] Vasari, viii. 71, in the Commentary to the _Vita di Rafaelle_.
+
+[736] Much of this kind our present taste could dispense with in the
+_Iliad_.
+
+[737] First edition, 1516.
+
+[738] The speeches inserted are themselves narratives.
+
+[739] As was the case with Pulci, _Morgante_, canto xix. str. 20 sqq.
+
+[740] The _Orlandino_, first edition, 1526.
+
+[741] Radevicus, _De gestis Friderici imp._, especially ii. 76. The
+admirable _Vita Henrici IV._ contains very little personal description,
+as is also the case with the _Vita Chuonradi imp._ by Wipo.
+
+[742] The librarian Anastasius (middle of ninth century) is here meant.
+The whole collection of the lives of the Popes (_Liber Pontificalis_)
+was formerly ascribed to him, but erroneously. Comp. Wattenbach,
+_Deutschland's Geschichtsquellen_, i. 223 sqq. 3rd ed.
+
+[743] Lived about the same time as Anastasius; author of a history of
+the bishopric of Ravenna. Wattenbach, l. c. 227.
+
+[744] How early Philostratus was used in the same way, I am unable to
+say. Suetonius was no doubt taken as a model in times still earlier.
+Besides the life of Charles the Great, written by Eginhard, examples
+from the twelfth century are offered by William of Malmesbury in his
+descriptions of William the Conqueror (p. 446 sqq., 452 sqq.), of
+William II. (pp. 494, 504), and of Henry I. (p. 640).
+
+[745] See the admirable criticism in Landau, _Boccaccio_, 180-182.
+
+[746] See above, p. 131. The original (Latin) was first published in
+1847 at Florence, by Galletti, with the title, _Philippi Villani Liber
+de civitatis Florentiae famosis civibus_; an old Italian translation has
+been often printed since 1747, last at Trieste, 1858. The first book,
+which treats of the earliest history of Florence and Rome, has never
+been printed. The chapter in Villani, _De semipoetis_, i.e. those who
+wrote in prose as well as in verse, or those who wrote poems besides
+following some other profession, is specially interesting.
+
+[747] Here we refer the reader to the biography of L. B. Alberti, from
+which extracts are given above (p. 136), and to the numerous Florentine
+biographies in Muratori, in the _Archivio Storico_, and elsewhere. The
+life of Alberti is probably an autobiography, l. c. note 2.
+
+[748] _Storia Fiorentina_, ed. F. L. Polidori, Florence, 1838.
+
+[749] _De viris illustribus_, in the publications of the _Stuttgarter
+liter. Vereins_, No. i. Stuttg. 1839. Comp. C. Voigt, ii. 324. Of the
+sixty-five biographies, twenty-one are lost.
+
+[750] His _Diarium Romanum_ from 1472 to 1484, in Murat. xiii. 81-202.
+
+[751] _Ugolini Verini poetae Florentini_ (a contemporary of Lorenzo, a
+pupil of Landinus, fol. 13, and teacher of Petrus Crinitus, fol. 14),
+_De illustratione urbis Florentinae libri tres_, Paris, 1583, deserves
+mention, esp. lib. 2. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio are spoken of and
+characterised without a word of blame. For several women, see fol. 11.
+
+[752] _Petri Candidi Decembrii Vita Philippi Mariae Vicecomitis_, in
+Murat. xx. Comp above, p. 38.
+
+[753] See above, p. 225.
+
+[754] On Comines, see above, p. 96, note 1. While Comines, as is there
+indicated, partly owes his power of objective criticism to intercourse
+with Italians, the German humanists and statesmen, notwithstanding the
+prolonged residence of some of them in Italy, and their diligent and
+often most successful study of the classical world, acquired little or
+nothing of the gift of biographical representation or of the analysis of
+character. The travels, biographies, and historical sketches of the
+German humanists in the fifteenth, and often in the early part of the
+sixteenth centuries, are mostly either dry catalogues or empty,
+rhetorical declamations.
+
+[755] See above, p. 96.
+
+[756] Here and there we find exceptions. Letters of Hutten, containing
+autobiographical notices, bits of the chronicle of Barth. Sastrow, and
+the _Sabbata_ of Joh. Kessler, introduce us to the inward conflicts of
+the writers, mostly, however, bearing the specifically religious
+character of the Reformation.
+
+[757] Among northern autobiographies we might, perhaps, select for
+comparison that of Agrippa d'Aubign� (though belonging to a later
+period) as a living and speaking picture of human individuality.
+
+[758] Written in his old age, about 1576. On Cardano as an investigator
+and discoverer, see Libri, _Hist. des Sciences Math�m._ iii. p. 167 sqq.
+
+[759] E.g. the execution of his eldest son, who had taken vengeance for
+his wife's infidelity by poisoning her (cap. 27, 50).
+
+[760] _Discorsi della Vita Sobria_, consisting of the 'trattato,' of a
+'compendio,' of an 'esortazione,' and of a 'lettera' to Daniel Barbaro.
+The book has been often reprinted.
+
+[761] Was this the villa of Codevico mentioned above, p. 321?
+
+[762] In some cases very early; in the Lombard cities as early as the
+twelfth century. Comp. Landulfus senior, _Ricobaldus_, and (in Murat.
+x.) the remarkable anonymous work, _De laudibus Papiae_, of the
+fourteenth century. Also (in Murat. i.) _Liber de Situ urbis Mediol._
+Some notices on Italian local history in O. Lorenzo, _Deutschland's
+Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter seit dem 13ten Jahr_. Berlin, 1877; but
+the author expressly refrains from an original treatment of the subject.
+
+[763] _Li Tresors_, ed. Chabaille, Paris, 1863, pp. 179-180. Comp.
+_ibid._ p. 577 (lib. iii. p. ii. c. 1).
+
+[764] On Paris, which was a much more important place to the medi�val
+Italian than to his successor a hundred years later, see _Dittamondo_,
+iv. cap. 18. The contrast between France and Italy is accentuated by
+Petrarch in his _Invectivae contra Gallum_.
+
+[765] Savonarola, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1186 (above, p. 145). On Venice,
+see above, p. 62 sqq. The oldest description of Rome, by Signorili
+(MS.), was written in the pontificate of Martin V. (1417); see
+Gregorovius, vii. 569; the oldest by a German is that of H. Muffel
+(middle of fifteenth century), ed. by Voigt, T�bingen, 1876.
+
+[766] The character of the restless and energetic Bergamasque, full of
+curiosity and suspicion, is charmingly described in Bandello, parte i.
+nov. 34.
+
+[767] E.g. Varchi, in the ninth book of the _Storie Fiorentine_ (vol.
+iii. p. 56 sqq.).
+
+[768] Vasari, xii. p. 158. _V. di Michelangelo_, at the beginning. At
+other times mother nature is praised loudly enough, as in the sonnet of
+Alfons de' Pazzi to the non-Tuscan Annibal Caro (in Trucchi, l. c. iii.
+p. 187):
+
+    'Misero il Varchi! e pi� infelici noi,
+     Se a vostri virtudi accidentali
+     Aggiunto fosse 'l natural, ch'� in noi!'
+
+
+[769] _Forcianae Quaestiones, in quibus varia Italorum ingenia
+explicantur multaque alia scitu non indigna._ Autore Philalette
+Polytopiensi cive. Among them, _Mauritii Scaevae Carmen_.
+
+    'Quos hominum mores varios quas denique mentes
+        Diverso profert Itala terra solo,
+     Quisve vinis animus, mulierum et strenua virtus
+        Pulchre hoc exili codice lector habes.'
+
+Neapoli excudebat Martinus de Ragusia, Anno MDXXXVI. This little work,
+made use of by Ranke, _P�pste_, i. 385, passes as being from the hand of
+Ortensio Landi (comp. Tiraboschi, vii. 800 to 812), although in the work
+itself no hint is given of the author. The title is explained by the
+circumstance that conversations are reported which were held at Forcium,
+a bath near Lucca, by a large company of men and women, on the question
+whence it comes that there are such great differences among mankind. The
+question receives no answer, but many of the differences among the
+Italians of that day are noticed--in studies, trade, warlike skill (the
+point quoted by Ranke), the manufacture of warlike implements, modes of
+life, distinctions in costume, in language, in intellect, in loving and
+hating, in the way of winning affection, in the manner of receiving
+guests, and in eating. At the close, come some reflections on the
+differences among philosophical systems. A large part of the work is
+devoted to women--their differences in general, the power of their
+beauty, and especially the question whether women are equal or inferior
+to men. The work has been made use of in various passages below. The
+following extract may serve as an example (fol. 7 _b_ sqq.):--'Aperiam
+nunc qu� sint in consilio aut dando aut accipiendo dissimilitudo.
+Pr�stant consilio Mediolanenses, sed aliorum gratia potius quam sua.
+Sunt nullo consilio Genuenses. Rumor est Venetos abundare. Sunt perutili
+consilio Lucenses, idque aperte indicarunt, cum in tanto totius Itali�
+ardore, tot hostibus circumsepti suam libertatem, ad quam nati videntur
+semper tutati sint, nulla, quidem, aut capitis aut fortunarum ratione
+habita. Quis porro non vehementer admiretur? Quis callida consilia non
+stupeat? Equidem quotiescunque cogito, quanta prudentia ingruentes
+procellas evitarint, quanta solertia impendentia pericula effugerint,
+adducor in stuporem. Lucanis vero summum est studium, eos deludere qui
+consilii captandi gratia adeunt, ipsi vero omnia inconsulte ac temere
+faciunt. Brutii optimo sunt consilio, sed ut incommodent, aut perniciem
+afferant, in rebus qu� magn� deliberationis dictu mirum quam stupidi
+sint, eisdem plane dotibus instructi sunt Volsci quod ad c�des et furta
+paulo propensiores sint. Pisani bono quidem sunt consilio, sed parum
+constanti, si quis diversum ab eis senserit, mox acquiescunt, rursus si
+aliter suadeas, mutabunt consilium, illud in caussa fuit quod tam duram
+ac diutinam obsidionem ad extremum usque non pertulerint. Placentini
+utrisque abundant consiliis, scilicet salutaribus ac pernitiosis, non
+facile tamen ab iis impetres pestilens consilium, apud Regienses neque
+consilii copiam invenies. Si sequare Mutinensium consilia, raro cedet
+infeliciter, sunt enim peracutissimo consilio, et voluntate plane bona.
+Providi sunt Florentini (si unumquemque seorsum accipias) si vero simul
+conjuncti sint, non admodum mihi consilia eorum probabuntur; feliciter
+cedunt Senensium consilia, subita sunt Perusinorum; salutaria
+Ferrariensium, fideli sunt consilio Veronenses, semper ambigui sunt in
+consiliis aut dandis aut accipiendis Patavini. Sunt pertinaces in eo
+quod coeperint consilio Bergomates, respuunt omnium consilia Neapolitani,
+sunt consultissimi Bononienses.'
+
+[770] _Commentario delle pi� notabili e mostruose cose d'Italia et altri
+luoghi, di Lingua Aramea in Italiana tradotta. Con un breve Catalogo
+degli inventori delle cose che si mangiano et beveno, novamente
+ritrovato._ In Venetia 1553 (first printed 1548, based on a journey
+taken by Ortensio Landi through Italy in 1543 and 1544). That Landi was
+really the author of this _Commentario_ is clear from the concluding
+remarks of Nicolo Morra (fol. 46 _a_): 'Il presente commentario nato del
+constantissimo cervello di M. O. L.;' and from the signature of the
+whole (fol. 70 _a_): SVISNETROH SVDNAL, ROTUA TSE, 'Hortensius Landus
+autor est.' After a declaration as to Italy from the mouth of a
+mysterious grey-haired sage, a journey is described from Sicily through
+Italy to the East. All the cities of Italy are more or less fully
+discussed: that Lucca should receive special praise is intelligible from
+the writer's way of thinking. Venice, where he claims to have been much
+with Pietro Aretino (p. 166), and Milan are described in detail, and in
+connexion with the latter the maddest stories are told (fol. 25 sqq.).
+There is no want of such elsewhere--of roses which flower all the year
+round, stars which shine at midday, birds which are changed into men,
+and men with bulls' heads on their shoulders, mermen, and men who spit
+fire from their mouths. Among all these there are often authentic bits
+of information, some of which will be used in the proper place; short
+mention is made of the Lutherans (fol. 32 _a_, 38 _a_), and frequent
+complaints are heard of the wretched times and unhappy state of Italy.
+We there read (fol. 22 _a_): 'Son questi quelli Italiani li quali in un
+fatto d'armi uccisero ducento mila Francesi? sono finalmente quelli che
+di tutto il mondo s'impadronirono? Hai quanto (per quel che io vego)
+degenerati sono. Hai quanto dissimili mi paiono dalli antichi padri
+loro, liquali et singolar virtu di cuore e disciplina militare
+ugualmente monstrarno havere.' On the catalogue of eatables which is
+added, see below.
+
+[771] _Descrizione di tutta l'Italia._
+
+[772] Satirical lists of cities are frequently met with later, e.g.
+Macaroneide, _Phantas._ ii. For France, Rabelais, who knew the
+Macaroneide, is the chief source of all the jests and malicious
+allusions of this local sort.
+
+[773] It is true that many decaying literatures are full of painfully
+minute descriptions. See e.g. in Sidonius Apollinaris the descriptions
+of a Visigoth king (_Epist._ i. 2), of a personal enemy (_Epist._ iii.
+13), and in his poems the types of the different German tribes.
+
+[774] On Filippo Villani, see p. 330.
+
+[775] _Parnasso teatrale_, Lipsia, 1829. Introd. p. vii.
+
+[776] The reading is here evidently corrupt. The passage is as follows
+(_Ameto_, Venezia, 1856, p. 54): 'Del mezo de' quali non camuso naso in
+linea diretta discende, quanto ad aquilineo non essere dimanda il
+dovere.'
+
+[777] 'Due occhi ladri nel loro movimento.' The whole work is rich in
+such descriptions.
+
+[778] The charming book of songs by Giusto dei Conti, _La bella Mano_
+(best ed. Florence, 1715), does not tell us as many details of this
+famous hand of his beloved as Boccaccio in a dozen passages of the
+_Ameto_ of the hands of his nymphs.
+
+[779] 'Della bellezza delle donne,' in the first vol. of the _Opere di
+Firenzuola_, Milano, 1802. For his view of bodily beauty as a sign of
+beauty of soul, comp. vol. ii. pp. 48 to 52, in the 'ragionamenti'
+prefixed to his novels. Among the many who maintain this doctrine,
+partly in the style of the ancients, we may quote one, Castiglione, _Il
+Cortigiana_, l. iv. fol. 176.
+
+[780] This was a universal opinion, not only the professional opinion of
+painters. See below.
+
+[781] This may be an opportunity for a word on the eyes of Lucrezia
+Borgia, taken from the distichs of a Ferrarese court-poet, Ercole
+Strozza (_Strozzii Poetae_, fol. 85-88). The power of her glance is
+described in a manner only explicable in an artistic age, and which
+would not now be permitted. Sometimes it turns the beholder to fire,
+sometimes to stone. He who looks long at the sun, becomes blind; he who
+beheld Medusa, became a stone; but he who looks at the countenance of
+Lucrezia
+
+    'Fit primo intuitu c�cus et inde lapis.'
+
+Even the marble Cupid sleeping in her halls is said to have been
+petrified by her gaze:
+
+    'Lumine Borgiado saxificatur Amor.'
+
+Critics may dispute, if they please, whether the so-called Eros of
+Praxiteles or that of Michelangelo is meant, since she was the possessor
+of both.
+
+And the same glance appeared to another poet, Marcello Filosseno, only
+mild and lofty, 'mansueto e altero' (Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, vii.
+p. 306).
+
+Comparisons with ideal figures of antiquity occur (p. 30). Of a boy ten
+years old we read in the _Orlandino_ (ii. str. 47), 'ed ha capo romano.'
+Referring to the fact that the appearance of the temples can be
+altogether changed by the arrangement of the hair, Firenzuola makes a
+comical attack on the overcrowding of the hair with flowers, which
+causes the head to 'look like a pot of pinks or a quarter of goat on the
+spit.' He is, as a rule, thoroughly at home in caricature.
+
+[782] For the ideal of the 'Minnes�nger,' see Falke, _Die deutsche
+Trachten- und Modenwelt_, i. pp. 85 sqq.
+
+[783] On the accuracy of his sense of form, p. 290.
+
+[784] _Inferno_, xxi. 7; _Purgat._ xiii. 61.
+
+[785] We must not take it too seriously, if we read (in Platina, _Vitae
+Pontiff._ p. 310) that he kept at his court a sort of buffoon, the
+Florentine Greco, 'hominem certe cujusvis mores, naturam, linguam cum
+maximo omnium qui audiebant risu facile exprimentem.'
+
+[786] _Pii. II. Comment._ viii. p. 391.
+
+[787] Two tournaments must be distinguished, Lorenzo's in 1468 and
+Guiliano's in 1475 (a third in 1481?). See Reumont, _L. M._ i. 264 sqq.
+361, 267, note 1; ii. 55, 67, and the works there quoted, which settle
+the old dispute on these points. The first tournament is treated in the
+poem of Luca Pulci, ed. _Ciriffo Calvaneo di Luca Pulci Gentilhuomo
+Fiorentino, con la Giostra del Magnifico Lorenzo de' Medici_. Florence,
+1572, pp. 75, 91; the second in an unfinished poem of Ang. Poliziano,
+best ed. Carducci, _Le Stanze, l'Orfeo e le Rime di M. A. P._ Florence,
+1863. The description of Politian breaks off at the setting out of
+Guiliano for the tournament. Pulci gives a detailed account of the
+combatants and the manner of fighting. The description of Lorenzo is
+particularly good (p. 82).
+
+[788] This so-called 'Caccia' is printed in the Commentary to
+Castiglione's _Eclogue_ from a Roman MS. _Lettere del conte B.
+Castiglione_, ed. Pierantonio Lerassi (Padua, 1771), ii. p. 269.
+
+[789] See the _Serventese_ of Giannozzo of Florence, in Trucchi, _Poesie
+italiane inedite_, ii. p. 99. The words are many of them quite
+unintelligible, borrowed really or apparently from the languages of the
+foreign mercenaries. Macchiavelli's description of Florence during the
+plague of 1527 belongs, to certain extent, to this class of works. It is
+a series of living, speaking pictures of a frightful calamity.
+
+[790] According to Boccaccio (_Vita di Dante_, p. 77), Dante was the
+author of two eclogues, probably written in Latin. They are addressed to
+Joh. de Virgiliis. Comp. Fraticelli, _Opp. min. di Dante_, i. 417.
+Petrarch's bucolic poem in _P. Carmina minora_, ed. Bossetti, i. Comp.
+L. Geiger, _Petr._ 120-122 and 270, note 6, especially A. Hortis,
+_Scritti inediti di F. P._ Triest, 1874.
+
+[791] Boccaccio gives in his _Ameto_ (above, p. 344) a kind of mythical
+Decameron, and sometimes fails ludicrously to keep up the character. One
+of his nymphs is a good Catholic, and prelates shoot glances of unholy
+love at her in Rome. Another marries. In the _Ninfale fiesolano_ the
+nymph Mensola, who finds herself pregnant, takes counsel of an 'old and
+wise nymph.'
+
+[792] In general the prosperity of the Italian peasants was greater then
+than that of the peasantry anywhere else in Europe. Comp. Sacchetti,
+nov. 88 and 222; L. Pulci in the _Beca da Dicamano_ (Villari,
+_Macchiavelli_, i. 198, note 2).
+
+[793] 'Nullum est hominum genus aptius urbi,' says Battista Mantovano
+(_Ecl._ viii.) of the inhabitants of the Monte Baldo and the Val.
+Cassina, who could turn their hands to anything. Some country
+populations, as is well known, have even now privileges with regard to
+certain occupations in the great cities.
+
+[794] Perhaps one of the strongest passages, _Orlandino_, cap. v. str.
+54-58. The tranquil and unlearned Vesp. Bisticci says (_Comm. sulla vita
+di Giov. Manetti_, p. 96): 'Sono due ispezie di uomini difficili a
+supportare per la loro ignoranza; l'una sono i servi, la seconda i
+contadini.'
+
+[795] In Lombardy, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the nobles
+did not shrink from dancing, wrestling, leaping, and racing with the
+peasants. _Il Cortigiano_, l. ii. fol. 54. A. Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti)
+in the _Trattato del governo della famiglia_, p. 86, is an instance of a
+land-owner who consoles himself for the greed and fraud of his peasant
+tenantry with the reflection that he is thereby taught to bear and deal
+with his fellow-creatures.
+
+[796] Jovian. Pontan. _De fortitudine_, lib. ii.
+
+[797] The famous peasant-woman of the Valtellina--Bona Lombarda, wife of
+the Condottiere Pietro Brunoro--is known to us from Jacobus Bergomensis
+and from Porcellius, in Murat. xxv. col. 43.
+
+[798] On the condition of the Italian peasantry in general, and
+especially of the details of that condition in several provinces, we are
+unable to particularise more fully. The proportions between freehold and
+leasehold property, and the burdens laid on each in comparison with
+those borne at the present time, must be gathered from special works
+which we have not had the opportunity of consulting. In stormy times the
+country people were apt to have appalling relapses into savagery (_Arch.
+Stor._ xvi. i. pp. 451 sqq., ad. a. 1440; Corio, fol. 259; _Annales
+Foroliv._ in Murat. xxii. col. 227, though nothing in the shape of a
+general peasants' war occurred. The rising near Piacenza in 1462 was of
+some importance and interest. Comp. Corio, _Storia di Milano_, fol. 409;
+_Annales Placent._ in Murat. xx. col. 907; Sismondi, x. p. 138. See
+below, part vi. cap. 1.
+
+[799] _F. Bapt. Mantuani Bucolica seu Adolescentia in decem Eclogas
+divisa_; often printed, e.g. Strasburg, 1504. The date of composition is
+indicated by the preface, written in 1498, from which it also appears
+that the ninth and tenth eclogues were added later. In the heading to
+the tenth are the words, 'post religionis ingressum;' in that of the
+seventh, 'cum jam autor ad religionem aspiraret.' The eclogues by no
+means deal exclusively with peasant life; in fact, only two of them do
+so--the sixth, 'disceptatione rusticorum et civium,' in which the writer
+sides with the rustics; and the eighth, 'de rusticorum religione.' The
+others speak of love, of the relations between poets and wealthy men, of
+conversion to religion, and of the manners of the Roman court.
+
+[800] _Poesie di Lorenzo Magnifico_, i. p. 37 sqq. The remarkable poems
+belonging to the period of the German 'Minnes�nger,' which bear the name
+of Neithard von Reuenthal, only depict peasant life in so far as the
+knight chooses to mix with it for his amusement. The peasants reply to
+the ridicule of Reuenthal in songs of their own. Comp. Karl Schroder,
+_Die h�fische Dorfpoesie des deutschen Mittelalters_ in Rich. Gosche,
+_Jahrb. f�r Literaturgesch._ 1 vol. Berlin, 1875, pp. 45-98, esp. 75
+sqq.
+
+[801] _Poesie di Lor. Magn._ ii. 149.
+
+[802] In the _Deliciae poetar. ital._, and in the works of Politian.
+First separate ed. Florence, 1493. The didactic poem of Rucellai, _Le
+Api_, first printed 1519, and _La coltivazione_, Paris, 1546, contain
+something of the same kind.
+
+[803] _Poesie di Lor. Magnifico_, ii. 75.
+
+[804] The imitation of different dialects and of the manners of
+different districts spring from the same tendency. Comp. p. 155.
+
+[805] _Jo. Pici oratio de hominis dignitate._ The passage is as follows:
+'Statuit tandem optimus opifex ut cui dari nihil proprium poterat
+commune esset quidquid privatum singulis fuerat. Igitur hominem accepit
+indiscretae opus imaginis atque in mundi posito meditullio sic est
+allocutus; Nec certam sedem, nec propriam faciem, nec munus ullum
+peculiare tibi dedimus, O Adam, ut quam sedem, quam faciem, quae munera
+tute optaveris, ea pro voto pro tua sententia habeas et possideas.
+Definita caeteris natura inter praescriptas a nobis leges coercetur, tu
+nullis augustiis coercitus pro tuo arbitrio, in cujus manus te posui,
+tibi illam praefinies. Medium te mundi posui ut circumspiceres inde
+commodius quidquid est in mundo. Nec te caelestem neque terrenum, neque
+mortalem neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius
+honorariusque plastes et fictor in quam malueris tute formam effingas.
+Poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare, poteris in superiora
+quae sunt divina ex tui animi sententia regenerari. O summam dei patris
+liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis felicitatem. Cui datum id
+habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta simulatque nascuntur id
+secum afferunt, ut ait Lucilius, e bulga matris quod possessura sunt;
+supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt quod sunt futuri
+in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae
+vit� germina indidit pater; qu� quisque excoluerit illa adolescent et
+fructus suos ferent in illo. Si vegetalia, planta fiet, si sensualia,
+obbrutescet, si rationalia, coeleste evadet animal, si intellectualia,
+angelus erit et dei filius, et si nulla creaturarum sorte contentus in
+unitatis centrum suae se receperit, unus cum deo spiritus factus in
+solitaria patris caligine qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus
+antestabit.'
+
+The speech first appears in the _commentationes_ of Jo. Picus without
+any special title; the heading 'de hominis dignitate' was added later.
+It is not altogether suitable, since a great part of the discourse is
+devoted to the defence of the peculiar philosophy of Pico, and the
+praise of, the Jewish Cabbalah. On Pico, see above, p. 202 sqq.; and
+below; part. vi. chap. 4. More than two hundred years before, Brunetto
+Latini (_Tesoro_, lib. i. cap. 13, ed. Chabaille, p. 20) had said:
+'Toutes choses dou ciel en aval sont faites pour l'ome; mais li hom at
+faiz pour lui meisme.' The words seemed to a contemporary to have too
+much human pride in them, and he added: 'e por Dieu amer et servir et
+por avoir la joie pardurable.'
+
+[806] An allusion to the fall of Lucifer and his followers.
+
+[807] The habit among the Piedmontese nobility of living in their
+castles in the country struck the other Italians as exceptional.
+Bandello, parte ii. nov. 7 (?).
+
+[808] This was the case long before printing. A large number of
+manuscripts, and among them the best, belonged to Florentine artisans.
+If it had not been for Savonarola's great bonfire, many more of them
+would be left.
+
+[809] Dante, _De monarchia_, l. ii. cap. 3.
+
+[810] _Paradiso_, xvi. at the beginning.
+
+[811] Dante, _Convito_, nearly the whole _Trattato_, iv., and elsewhere.
+Brunetto Latini says (_Il tesoro_, lib. i. p. ii. cap. 50, ed.
+Chabaille, p. 343): 'De ce (la vertu) nasqui premierement la noblet� de
+gentil gent, non pas de ses anc�tres;' and he warns men (lib. ii. p. ii.
+cap. 196, p. 440) that they may lose true nobility by bad actions.
+Similarly Petrarch, _de rem. utr. fort._ lib. i. dial. xvii.: 'Verus
+nobilis non nascitur, sed fit.'
+
+[812] _Poggi Opera, Dial. de nobilitate._ Aristotle's view is expressly
+combatted by B. Platina, _De vera nobilitate_.
+
+[813] This contempt of noble birth is common among the humanists. See
+the severe passages in �n. Sylvius, _Opera_, pp. 84 (_Hist. bohem._ cap.
+2) and 640. (_Stories of Lucretia and Euryalus._)
+
+[814] This is the case in the capital itself. See Bandello, parte ii.
+nov. 7; _Joviani Pontani Antonius_, where the decline of energy in the
+nobility is dated from the coming of the Aragonese dynasty.
+
+[815] Throughout Italy it was universal that the owner of large landed
+property stood on an equality with the nobles. It is only flattery when
+J. A. Campanus adds to the statement of Pius II. (_Commentarii_, p. 1),
+that as a boy he had helped his poor parents in their rustic labours,
+the further assertion that he only did so for his amusement, and that
+this was the custom of the young nobles (Voigt, ii. 339).
+
+[816] For an estimate of the nobility in North Italy, Bandello, with his
+repeated rebukes of _m�salliances_, is of importance (parte i. nov. 4,
+26; parte iii. nov. 60). For the participation of the nobles in the
+games of the peasants, see above.
+
+[817] The severe judgment of Macchiavelli, _Discorsi_, i. 55, refers
+only to those of the nobility who still retained feudal rights, and who
+were thoroughly idle and politically mischievous. Agrippa of Nettesheim,
+who owes his most remarkable ideas chiefly to his life in Italy, has a
+chapter on the nobility and princes (_De Incert. et Vanit. Scient._ cap,
+80), the bitterness of which exceeds anything to be met with elsewhere,
+and is due to the social ferment then prevailing in the North. A passage
+at p. 213 is as follows: 'Si ... nobilitatis primordia requiramus,
+comperiemus hanc nefaria perfidia et crudelitate partam, si ingressum
+spectemus, reperiemus hanc mercenaria militia et latrociniis auctam.
+Nobilitas revera nihil aliud est quam robusta improbitas atque dignitas
+non nisi scelere quaesita benedictio et hereditas pessimorom
+quorumcunque filiorum.' In giving the history of the nobility he makes a
+passing reference to Italy (p. 227).
+
+[818] Massuccio, nov. 19 (ed. Settembrini, Nap. 1874, p. 220). The first
+ed. of the novels appeared in 1476.
+
+[819] Jacopo Pitti to Cosimo I., _Archiv. Stor._ iv. ii. p. 99. In North
+Italy the Spanish rule brought about the same results. Bandello, parte
+ii. nov. 40, dates from this period.
+
+[820] When, in the fifteenth century, Vespasiano Fiorentino (pp. 518,
+632) implies that the rich should not try to increase their inherited
+fortune, but should spend their whole annual income, this can only, in
+the mouth of a Florentine, refer to the great landowners.
+
+[821] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 153. Comp. nov. 82 and 150.
+
+[822] 'Che la cavalleria � morta.'
+
+[823] Poggius, _De Nobilitate_, fol. 27. See above, p. 19. �nea Silvio
+(_Hist. Fried. III._ ed. Kollar, p. 294) finds fault with the readiness
+with which Frederick conferred knighthood in Italy.
+
+[824] Vasari, iii. 49, and note. _Vita di Dello._ The city of Florence
+claimed the right of conferring knighthood. On the ceremonies of this
+kind in 1378 and 1389, see Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 444 sqq.
+
+[825] Senarega, _De Reb. Gen._ in Murat. xxiv. col. 525. At a wedding of
+Joh. Adurnus with Leonora di Sanseverino, 'certamina equestria in
+Sarzano edita sunt ... proposita et data victoribus praemia. Ludi
+multiformes in palatio celebrati a quibus tanquam a re nova pendebat
+plebs et integros dies illis spectantibus impendebat.' Politian writes
+to Joh. Picus of the cavalry exercise of his pupils (_Aug. Pol. Epist._
+lib. xii. ep. 6): 'Tu tamen a me solos fieri poetas aut oratores putas,
+at ego non minus facio bellatores.' Ortensio Landi in the _Commentario_,
+fol. 180, tells of a duel between two soldiers at Correggio with a fatal
+result, reminding one of the old gladiatorial combats. The writer, whose
+imagination is generally active, gives us here the impression of
+truthfulness. The passages quoted show that knighthood was not
+absolutely necessary for these public contests.
+
+[826] Petrarch, _Epist. Senil._ xi. 13, to Ugo of Este. Another passage
+in the _Epist. Famil._ lib. v. ep. 6, Dec. 1st, 1343, describes the
+disgust he felt at seeing a knight fall at a tournament in Naples. For
+legal prescriptions as to the tournament at Naples, see Fracassetti's
+Italian translation of Petrarch's letters, Florence, 1864, ii. p. 34. L.
+B. Alberti also points out the danger, uselessness, and expense of
+tournaments. _Della Famiglia, Op. Volg._ ii. 229.
+
+[827] Nov. 64. With reference to this practice, it is said expressly in
+the _Orlandino_ (ii. str. 7), of a tournament under Charlemagne: 'Here
+they were no cooks and scullions, but kings, dukes, and marquises, who
+fought.'
+
+[828] This is one of the oldest parodies of the tournament. Sixty years
+passed before Jacques Coeur, the burgher-minister of finance under
+Charles VII., gave a tournament of donkeys in the courtyard of his
+palace at Bourges (about 1450). The most brilliant of all these
+parodies--the second canto of the _Orlandino_ just quoted--was not
+published till 1526.
+
+[829] Comp. the poetry, already quoted, of Politian and Luca Pulci (p.
+349, note 3). Further, Paul. Jov., _Vita Leonis X._ l. i.; Macchiavelli,
+_Storie Fiorent._, l. vii.; Paul. Jov. _Elog._, speaking of Pietro de'
+Medici, who neglected his public duties for these amusements, and of
+Franc. Borbonius, who lost his life in them; Vasari, ix. 219, _Vita di
+Granacci_. In the _Morgante_ of Pulci, written under the eyes of
+Lorenzo, the knights are comical in their language and actions, but
+their blows are sturdy and scientific. Bojardo, too, writes for those
+who understand the tournament and the art of war. Comp. p. 323. In
+earlier Florentine history we read of a tournament in honour of the king
+of France, c. 1380, in Leon. Aret., _Hist. Flor._ lib. xi. ed. Argent,
+p. 222. The tournaments at Ferrara in 1464 are mentioned in the _Diario
+Ferrar._ in Murat. xxiv. col. 208; at Venice, see Sansovino, _Venezia_,
+fol. 153 sqq.; at Bologna in 1470 and after, see Bursellis, _Annal.
+Bonon._ Muratori xxiii. col. 898, 903, 906, 908, 911, where it is
+curious to note the odd mixture of sentimentalism attaching to the
+celebration of Roman triumphs; 'ut antiquitas Romana renovata
+videretur,' we read in one place. Frederick of Urbino (p. 44 sqq.) lost
+his right eye at a tournament 'ab ictu lanceae.' On the tournament as
+held at that time in northern countries, see Olivier de la Marche,
+_M�moires_, _passim_, and especially cap. 8, 9, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, &c.
+
+[830] Bald. Castiglione. _Il Cortigiano_, l. i. fol. 18.
+
+[831] Paul. Jovii, _Elogia_, sub tit. Petrus Gravina, Alex. Achillinus,
+Balth. Castellio, &c. pp. 138 sqq. 112 sqq. 143 sqq.
+
+[832] Casa, _Il Galateo_, p. 78.
+
+[833] See on this point the Venetian books of fashions, and Sansovino,
+_Venezia_, fol. 150 sqq. The bridal dress at the betrothal--white, with
+the hair falling freely on the shoulders--is that of Titian's Flora. The
+'Proveditori alle pompe' at Venice established 1514. Extracts from their
+decisions in Armand Baschet, _Souvenirs d'une Mission_, Paris, 1857.
+Prohibition of gold-embroidered garments in Venice, 1481, which had
+formerly been worn even by the bakers' wives; they were now to be
+decorated 'gemmis unionibus,' so that 'frugalissimus ornatus' cost 4,000
+gold florins. M. Ant. Sabellici, _Epist._ lib. iii. (to M. Anto.
+Barbavarus).
+
+[834] Jovian. Pontan. _De Principe_: 'Utinam autem non eo impudentiae
+perventum esset, ut inter mercatorem et patricium nullum sit in vestitu
+ceteroque ornatu discrimen. Sed haec tanta licentia reprehendi potest,
+coerceri non potest, quanquam mutari vestes sic quotidie videamus, ut
+quas quarto ante mense in deliciis habebamus, nunc repudiemus et tanquam
+veteramenta abjiciamus. Quodque tolerari vix potest, nullum fere
+vestimenti genus probatur, quod e Galliis non fuerit adductum, in quibus
+levia pleraque in pretio sunt, tametsi nostri persaepe homines modum
+illis et quasi formulam quandam praescribant.'
+
+[835] See e.g. the _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 297, 320,
+376, sqq., in which the last German fashions are spoken of; the
+chronicler says, 'Che pareno buffoni tali portatori.'
+
+[836] This interesting passage from a very rare work may be here quoted.
+See above, p. 83 note 1. The historical event referred to is the
+conquest of Milan by Antonio Leiva, the general of Charles V., in 1522.
+'Olim splendidissime vestiebant Mediolanenses. Sed postquam Carolus
+C�sar in eam urbem tetram et monstruosam Bestiam immisit, it a consumpti
+et exhausti sunt, ut vestimentorum splendorem omnium maxime oderint, et
+quemadmodum ante illa durissima Antoniana tempora nihil aliud fere
+cogitabant quam de mutandis vestibus, nunc alia cogitant ac in mente
+versant. Non potuit tamen illa Leviana rabies tantum perdere, neque illa
+in exhausta depraedandi libidine tantum expilare, quin a re familiari
+adhuc belle parati fiant atque ita vestiant quemadmodum decere
+existimant. Et certe nisi illa Antonii Levae studia egregios quosdam
+imitatores invenisset, meo quidem judicio, nulli cederent. Neapolitani
+nimium exercent in vestitu sumptus. Genuensium vestitum perelegantem
+judico neque sagati sunt neque togati. Ferme oblitus eram Venetorum. Ii
+togati omnes. Decet quidem ille habitus adulta aetate homines, juvenes
+vero (si quid ego judico) minime utuntur panno quem ipsi vulgo Venetum
+appellant, ita probe confecto ut perpetuo durare existimes, saepissime
+vero eas vestes gestant nepotes, quas olim tritavi gestarunt. Noctu
+autem dum scortantur ac potant, Hispanicis palliolis utuntur.
+Ferrarienses ac Mantuani nihil tam diligenter curant, quam ut pileos
+habeant aureis quibusdam frustillis adornatos, atque nutanti capite
+incedunt seque quovis honore dignos existimant, Lucenses neque superbo,
+neque abjecto vestitu. Florentinorum habitus mihi quidem ridiculus
+videtur. Reliquos omitto, ne nimius sim.' Ugolinus Verinus, 'de
+illustratione urbis Florentiae' says of the simplicity of the good old
+time:
+
+            'Non externis advecta Britannis
+    Lana erat in pretio, non concha aut coccus in usu.'
+
+
+[837] Comp. the passages on the same subject in Falke, _Die deutsche
+Trachten- und Modenwelt_, Leipzig, 1858.
+
+[838] On the Florentine women, see the chief references in Giov.
+Villani, x. 10 and 150 (Regulations as to dress and their repeal);
+Matteo Villani, i. 4 (Extravagant living in consequence of the plague).
+In the celebrated edict on fashions of the year 1330, embroidered
+figures only were allowed on the dresses of women, to the exclusion of
+those which were painted (dipinto). What was the nature of these
+decorations appears doubtful. There is a list of the arts of the
+toilette practised by women in Boccaccio, _De Cas. Vir. Ill._ lib. i.
+cap. 18, 'in mulieres.'
+
+[839] Those of real hair were called 'capelli morti.' Wigs were also
+worn by men, as by Giannozzo Manetti, _Vesp. Bist. Commentario_, p. 103;
+so at least we explain this somewhat obscure passage. For an instance of
+false teeth made of ivory, and worn, though only for the sake of clear
+articulation, by an Italian prelate, see Anshelm, _Berner Chronik_, iv.
+p. 30 (1508). Ivory teeth in Boccaccio, l. c.: 'Dentes casu sublatos
+reformare ebore fuscatos pigmentis gemmisque in albedinem revocare
+pristinam.'
+
+[840] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1874: Allegretto, in
+Murat. xxiii. col. 823. For the writers on Savonarola, see below.
+
+[841] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 152: 'Capelli biondissimi per forza di
+sole.' Comp. p. 89, and the rare works quoted by Yriarte, '_Vie d'un
+Patricien de Venise_' (1874), p. 56.
+
+[842] As was the case in Germany too. _Poesie satiriche_, p. 119. From
+the satire of Bern. Giambullari, 'Per prendere moglie' (pp. 107-126), we
+can form a conception of the chemistry of the toilette, which was
+founded largely on superstition and magic.
+
+[843] The poets spared no pains to show the ugliness, danger, and
+absurdity of these practices. Comp. Ariosto, _Sat._ iii. 202 sqq.;
+Aretino, _Il Marescalco_, atto ii. scena 5; and several passages in the
+_Ragionamenti_; Giambullari, l. c. Phil. Beroald. sen. _Garmina_. Also
+Filelfo in his Satires (Venice, 1502, iv. 2-5 sqq.).
+
+[844] Cennino Cennini, _Trattato della Pittura_, gives in cap. 161 a
+recipe for painting the face, evidently for the purpose of mysteries or
+masquerades, since, in cap. 162, he solemnly warns his readers against
+the general use of cosmetics and the like, which was peculiarly common,
+as he tells us (p. 146 sqq.), in Tuscany.
+
+[845] Comp. _La Nencia di Barberino_, str. 20 and 40. The lover promises
+to bring his beloved cosmetics from the town (see on this poem of
+Lorenzo dei Medici, above, p. 101).
+
+[846] Agnolo Pandolfini, _Trattato della Governo della Famiglia_, p.
+118. He condemns this practice most energetically.
+
+[847] Tristan. Caracciolo, in Murat. xxii. col. 87. Bandello, parte ii.
+nov. 47.
+
+[848] Cap. i. to Cosimo: "Quei cento scudi nuovi e profumati che l'altro
+di mi mandaste a donare." Some objects which date from that period have
+not yet lost their odour.
+
+[849] Vespasiano Fiorent. p. 453, in the life of Donato Acciajuoli, and
+p. 625, in the life of Niccoli. See above, vol. i. p. 303 sqq.
+
+[850] Giraldi, _Hecatommithi_, Introduz. nov. 6. A few notices on the
+Germans in Italy may not here be out of place. On the fear of German
+invasion, see p. 91, note 2; on Germans as copyists and printers, p. 193
+sqq. and the notes; on the ridicule of Hadrian VI. as a German, p. 227
+and notes. The Italians were in general ill-disposed to the Germans, and
+showed their ill-will by ridicule. Boccaccio (_Decam._ viii. 1) says:
+'Un Tedesco in soldo pr� della persona � assai leale a coloro ne' cui
+servigi si mattea; il che rade volte suole de' Tedeschi avenire.' The
+tale is given as an instance of German cunning. The Italian humanists
+are full of attacks on the German barbarians, and especially those who,
+like Poggio, had seen Germany. Comp. Voigt, _Wiederbelebung_, 374 sqq.;
+Geiger, _Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Italien Zeit des
+Humanismus_ in _Zeitschrift f�r deutsche Culturgeschichte_, 1875, pp.
+104-124; see also Janssen, _Gesch. der deutschen Volkes_, i. 262. One of
+the chief opponents of the Germans was Joh. Ant. Campanus. See his
+works, ed. Mencken, who delivered a discourse 'De Campani odio in
+Germanos.' The hatred of the Germans was strengthened by the conduct of
+Hadrian VI., and still more by the conduct of the troops at the sack of
+Rome (Gregorovius, viii. 548, note). Bandello III. nov. 30, chooses the
+German as the type of the dirty and foolish man (see iii. 51, for
+another German). When an Italian wishes to praise a German he says, as
+Petrus Alcyonius in the dedication to his dialogue _De Exilio_, to
+Nicolaus Schomberg, p. 9: 'Itaque etsi in Misnensi clarissima Germani�
+provincia illustribus natalibus ortus es, tamen in Italiae luce
+cognosceris.' Unqualified praise is rare, e.g. of German women at the
+time of Marius, _Cortigiano_, iii. cap. 33.
+
+It must be added that the Italians of the Renaissance, like the Greeks
+of antiquity, were filled with aversion for all barbarians. Boccaccio,
+_De claris Mulieribus_, in the article 'Carmenta,' speaks of 'German
+barbarism, French savagery, English craft, and Spanish coarseness.'
+
+[851] Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, p. 289, who, however, makes no mention of the
+German education. Maximilian could not be induced, even by celebrated
+women, to change his underclothing.
+
+[852] �neas Sylvius (_Vitae Paparum_, ap. Murat. iii. ii. col. 880)
+says, in speaking of Baccano: 'Pauca sunt mapalia, eaque hospitia
+faciunt Theutonici; hoc hominum genus totam fere Italiam hospitalem
+facit; ubi non repereris hos, neque diversorium quaeras.'
+
+[853] Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 21. Padua, about the year 1450, boasted of
+a great inn--the 'Ox'--like a palace, containing stabling for two
+hundred horses. Michele Savonarola, in Mur. xxiv. col. 1175. At
+Florence, outside the Porta San Gallo, there was one of the largest and
+most splendid inns then known, but which served, it seems, only as a
+place of amusement for the people of the city. Varchi, _Stor. Fior._
+iii. p. 86. At the time of Alexander VI. the best inn at Rome was kept
+by a German. See the remarkable notices taken from the MS. of Burcardus
+in Gregorovius, vii. 361, note 2. Comp. _ibid._ p. 93, notes 2 and 3.
+
+[854] Comp. e.g. the passages in Sebastian Brant's _Narrenschiff_, in
+the Colloquies of Erasmus, in the Latin poem of Grobianus, &c., and
+poems on behaviour at table, where, besides descriptions of bad habits,
+rules are given for good behaviour. For one of these, see C. Weller,
+_Deutsche Gedichte der Jahrhunderts_, T�bingen, 1875.
+
+[855] The diminution of the 'burla' is evident from the instances in the
+_Cortigiano_, l. ii. fol. 96. The Florence practical jokes kept their
+ground tenaciously. See, for evidence, the tales of Lasca (Ant. Franc.
+Grazini, b. 1503, d. 1582), which appeared at Florence in 1750.
+
+[856] For Milan, see Bandello, parte i. nov. 9. There were more than
+sixty carriages with four, and numberless others with two, horses, many
+of them carved and richly gilt and with silken tops. Comp. _ibid._ nov.
+4. Ariosto, _Sat._ iii. 127.
+
+[857] Bandello, parte i. nov. 3, iii. 42, iv. 25.
+
+[858] _De Vulgari Eloquio_, ed. Corbinelli, Parisiis, 1577. According to
+Boccaccio, _Vita di Dante_, p. 77, it was written shortly before his
+death. He mentions in the _Convito_ the rapid and striking changes which
+took place during his lifetime in the Italian language.
+
+[859] See on this subject the investigations of Lionardo Aretino
+(_Epist._ ed. Mehus. ii. 62 sqq. lib. vi. 10) and Poggio (_Historiae
+disceptativae convivales tres_, in the _Opp._ fol. 14 sqq.), whether in
+earlier times the language of the people and of scholars was the same.
+Lionardo maintains the negative; Poggio expressly maintains the
+affirmative against his predecessor. See also the detailed argument of
+L. B. Alberti in the introduction to _Della Famiglia_, book iii., on the
+necessity of Italian for social intercourse.
+
+[860] The gradual progress which this dialect made in literature and
+social intercourse could be tabulated without difficulty by a native
+scholar. It could be shown to what extent in the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries the various dialects kept their places, wholly or
+partly, in correspondence, in official documents, in historical works,
+and in literature generally. The relations between the dialects and a
+more or less impure Latin, which served as the official language, would
+also be discussed. The modes of speech and pronunciation in the
+different cities of Italy are noticed in Landi, _Forcianae Quaestiones_,
+fol. 7 _a._ Of the former he says: 'Hetrusci vero quanquam caeteris
+excellant, effugere tamen non possunt, quin et ipsi ridiculi sint, aut
+saltem quin se mutuo lacerent;' as regards pronunciation, the Sienese,
+Lucchese, and Florentines are specially praised; but of the Florentines
+it is said: 'Plus (jucunditatis) haberet si voces non ingurgitaret aut
+non ita palato lingua jungeretur.'
+
+[861] It is so felt to be by Dante, _De Vulgari Eloquio_.
+
+[862] Tuscan, it is true, was read and written long before this in
+Piedmont--but very little reading and writing was done at all.
+
+[863] The place, too, of the dialect in the usage of daily life was
+clearly understood. Gioviano Pontano ventured especially to warn the
+prince of Naples against the use of it (Jov. Pontan. _De Principe_). The
+last Bourbons were notoriously less scrupulous in this respect. For the
+way in which a Milanese Cardinal, who wished to retain his native
+dialect in Rome was ridiculed, see Bandello, parte ii. nov. 31.
+
+[864] Bald. Castiglione, _Il Cortigiano_, l. i. fol. 27 sqq. Throughout
+the dialogue we are able to gather the personal opinion of the writer.
+The opposition to Petrarch and Boccaccio is very curious (Dante is not
+once mentioned). We read that Politian, Lorenzo de' Medici, and others
+were also Tuscans, and as worthy of imitation as they, 'e forse di non
+minor dottrina e guidizio.'
+
+[865] There was a limit, however, to this. The satirists introduce bits
+of Spanish, and Folengo (under the pseudonym Limerno Pitocco, in his
+_Orlandino_) of French, but only by way of ridicule. It is an
+exceptional fact that a street in Milan, which at the time of the French
+(1500 to 1512, 1515 to 1522) was called Rue Belle, now bears the name
+Rugabella. The long Spanish rule has left almost no traces on the
+language, and but rarely the name of some governor in streets and public
+buildings. It was not till the eighteenth century that, together with
+French modes of thought, many French words and phrases found their way
+into Italian. The purism of our century is still busy in removing them.
+
+[866] Firenzuola, _Opera_, i. in the preface to the discourse on female
+beauty, and ii. in the _Ragionamenti_ which precede the novels.
+
+[867] Bandello, parte i. _Proemio_, and nov. 1 and 2. Another Lombard,
+the before-mentioned Teofilo Folengo in his _Orlandino_, treats the
+whole matter with ridicule.
+
+[868] Such a congress appears to have been held at Bologna at the end of
+1531 under the presidency of Bembo. See the letter of Claud. Tolomai, in
+Firenzuola, _Opere_, vol. ii. append. p. 231 sqq. But this was not so
+much a matter of purism, but rather the old quarrel between Lombards and
+Tuscans.
+
+[869] Luigi Cornaro complains about 1550 (at the beginning of his
+_Trattato della Vita Sobria_) that latterly Spanish ceremonies and
+compliments, Lutheranism and gluttony had been gaining ground in Italy.
+With moderation in respect to the entertainment offered to guests, the
+freedom and ease of social intercourse disappeared.
+
+[870] Vasari, xii. p. 9 and 11, _Vita di Rustici_. For the School for
+Scandal of needy artists, see xi. 216 sqq., _Vita d'Aristotile_.
+Macchiavelli's _Capitoli_ for a circle of pleasure-seekers (_Opere
+minori_, p. 407) are a ludicrous caricature of these social statutes.
+The well-known description of the evening meeting of artists in Rome in
+Benvenuto Cellini, i. cap. 30 is incomparable.
+
+[871] Which must have been taken about 10 or 11 o'clock. See Bandello,
+parte ii. nov. 10.
+
+[872] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 309, calls the ladies 'alquante
+ministre di Venere.'
+
+[873] Biographical information and some of her letters in A. v.
+Reumont's _Briefe heiliger und gottesf�rchtiger Italiener_. Freiburg
+(1877) p. 22 sqq.
+
+[874] Important passages: parte i. nov. 1, 3, 21, 30, 44; ii. 10, 34,
+55; iii. 17, &c.
+
+[875] Comp. _Lorenzo Magn. dei Med., Poesie_, i. 204 (the Symposium);
+291 (the Hawking-Party). Roscoe, _Vita di Lorenzo_, iii. p. 140, and
+append. 17 to 19.
+
+[876] The title 'Simposio' is inaccurate; it should be called, 'The
+return from the Vintage.' Lorenzo, in a parody of Dante's Hell, gives an
+amusing account of his meeting in the Via Faenza all his good friends
+coming back from the country more or less tipsy. There is a most comical
+picture in the eighth chapter of Piovanno Arlotto, who sets out in
+search of his lost thirst, armed with dry meat, a herring, a piece of
+cheese, a sausage, and four sardines, 'e tutte si cocevan nel sudore.'
+
+[877] On Cosimo Ruccellai as centre of this circle at the beginning of
+the sixteenth century, see Macchiavelli, _Arte della Guerra_, l. i.
+
+[878] _Il Cortigiano_, l. ii. fol. 53. See above pp. 121, 139.
+
+[879] Caelius Calcagninus (_Opere_, p. 514) describes the education of a
+young Italian of position about the year 1506, in the funeral speech on
+Antonio Costabili: first, 'artes liberales et ingenuae disciplinae; tum
+adolescentia in iis exercitationibus acta, qu� ad rem militarem corpus
+et animum praemuniunt. Nunc gymnastae (i.e. the teachers of gymnastics)
+operam dare, luctari, excurrere, natare, equitare, venari, aucupari, ad
+palum et apud lanistam ictus inferre aut declinare, caesim punctimve
+hostem ferire, hastam vibrare, sub armis hyemen juxta et aestatem
+traducere, lanceis occursare, veri ac communis Martis simulacra
+imitari.' Cardanus (_De prop. Vita_, c. 7) names among his gymnastic
+exercises the springing on to a wooden horse. Comp. Rabelais,
+_Gargantua_, i. 23, 24, for education in general, and 35 for gymnastic
+art. Even for the philologists, Marsilius Ficinus (_Epist._ iv. 171
+Galeotto) requires gymnastics, and Maffeo Vegio (_De Puerorum
+Educatione_, lib. iii. c. 5) for boys.
+
+[880] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 172 sqq. They are said to have arisen
+through the rowing out to the Lido, where the practice with the crossbow
+took place. The great regatta on the feast of St. Paul was prescribed by
+law from 1315 onwards. In early times there was much riding in Venice,
+before the streets were paved and the level wooden bridges turned into
+arched stone ones. Petrarch (_Epist. Seniles_, iv. 4) describes a
+brilliant tournament held in 1364 on the square of St. Mark, and the
+Doge Steno, about the year 1400, had as fine a stable as any prince in
+Italy. But riding in the neighbourhood of the square was prohibited as a
+rule after the year 1291. At a later time the Venetians naturally had
+the name of bad riders. See Ariosto, _Sat._ v. 208.
+
+[881] See on this subject: _Ueber den Einfluss der Renaissance auf die
+Entwickelung der Musik_, by Bernhard Loos, Basel, 1875, which, however,
+hardly offers for this period more than is given here. On Dante's
+position with regard to music, and on the music to Petrarch's and
+Boccaccio's poems, see Trucchi, _Poesie Ital. inedite_, ii. p. 139. See
+also _Poesie Musicali dei Secoli XIV., XV. e XVI. tratte da vari codici
+per cura di Antonio Cappelli_, Bologna, 1868. For the theorists of the
+fourteenth century, Filippo Villani, _Vite_, p. 46, and Scardeonius, _De
+urb. Pativ. antiq._ in Graev. Thesaur, vi. iii. col. 297. A full account
+of the music at the court of Frederick of Urbino, is to be found in
+_Vespes. Fior._ p. 122. For the children's chapel (ten children 6 to 8
+years old whom F. had educated in his house, and who were taught
+singing), at the court of Hercules I., see _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat.
+xxiv. col. 359. Out of Italy it was still hardly allowable for persons
+of consequence to be musicians; at the Flemish court of the young
+Charles V. a serious dispute took place on the subject. See Hubert.
+Leod. _De Vita Frid. II. Palat._ l. iii. Henry VIII. of England is an
+exception, and also the German Emperor Maximilian, who favoured music as
+well as all other arts. Joh. Cuspinian, in his life of the Emperor,
+calls him 'Musices singularis amator' and adds, 'Quod vel hinc maxime
+patet, quod nostra aetate musicorum principes omnes, in omni genere
+musices omnibusque instrumentis in ejus curia, veluti in fertilissimo
+agro succreverant. Scriberem catalogum musicorum quos novi, nisi
+magnitudinem operis vererer.' In consequence of this, music was much
+cultivated at the University of Vienna. The presence of the musical
+young Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan contributed to this result. See
+Aschbach, _Gesch. der Wiener Universit�t_ (1877), vol. ii. 79 sqq.
+
+A remarkable and comprehensive passage on music is to be found, where we
+should not expect it, in the Maccaroneide, Phant. xx. It is a comic
+description of a quartette, from which we see that Spanish and French
+songs were often sung, that music already had its enemies (1520), and
+that the chapel of Leo X. and the still earlier composer, Josquin des
+Pr�s, whose principal works are mentioned, were the chief subjects of
+enthusiasm in the musical world of that time. The same writer (Folengo)
+displays in his _Orlandino_ (iii. 23 &c.), published under the name
+Limerno Pitocco, a musical fanaticism of a thoroughly modern sort.
+
+Barth. Facius, _De Vir. Ill._ p. 12, praises Leonardus Justinianus as a
+composer, who produced love-songs in his youth, and religious pieces in
+his old age. J. A. Campanus (_Epist._ i. 4, ed. Mencken) extols the
+musician Zacarus at Teramo and says of him, 'Inventa pro oraculis
+habentur.' Thomas of Forli 'musicien du pape' in _Burchardi Diarium_,
+ed. Leibnitz, pp. 62 sqq.
+
+[882] _Leonis Vita anonyma_, in Roscoe, ed. Bossi, xii. p. 171. May he
+not be the violinist in the Palazzo Sciarra? A certain Giovan Maria da
+Corneto is praised in the _Orlandino_ (Milan, 1584, iii. 27).
+
+[883] Lomazzo, _Trattato dell'Arte della Pittura_, &c. p. 347. The text,
+however, does not bear out the last statement, which perhaps rests on a
+misunderstanding of the final sentence, 'Et insieme vi si possono
+gratiosamente rappresentar convitti et simili abbellimenti, che il
+pittore leggendo i poeti e gli historici pu� trovare copiosamente et
+anco essendo ingenioso et ricco d'invenzione pu� per se stesso
+imaginare?' Speaking of the lyre, he mentions Lionardo da Vinci and
+Alfonso (Duke?) of Ferrara. The author includes in his work all the
+celebrities of the age, among them several Jews. The most complete list
+of the famous musicians of the sixteenth century, divided into an
+earlier and a later generation, is to be found in Rabelais, in the 'New
+Prologue' to the fourth book. A virtuoso, the blind Francesco of
+Florence (d. 1390), was crowned at Venice with a wreath of laurel by the
+King of Cyprus.
+
+[884] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 138. The same people naturally
+collected books of music. Sansovino's words are, '� vera cosa che la
+musica ha la sua propria sede in questa citt�.'
+
+[885] The 'Academia de' Filarmonici' at Verona is mentioned by Vasari,
+xi. 133, in the life of Sanmichele. Lorenzo Magnifico was in 1480
+already the centre of a School of Harmony consisting of fifteen members,
+among them the famous organist and organ-builder Squarcialupi. See
+Delecluze, _Florence et ses Vicissitudes_, vol. ii. p. 256, and Reumont,
+_L. d. M._ i. 177 sqq., ii. 471-473. Marsilio Ficino took part in these
+exercises and gives in his letters (_Epist._ i. 73, iii. 52, v. 15)
+remarkable rules as to music. Lorenzo seems to have transmitted his
+passion for music to his son Leo X. His eldest son Pietro was also
+musical.
+
+[886] _Il Cortigiano_, fol. 56, comp. fol. 41.
+
+[887] Quatro viole da arco'--a high and, except in Italy, rare
+achievement for amateurs.
+
+[888] Bandello, parte i. nov. 26. The song of Antonio Bologna in the
+House of Ippolita Bentivoglio. Comp. iii. 26. In these delicate days,
+this would be called a profanation of the holiest feelings. (Comp. the
+last song of Britannicus, Tacit. _Annal._ xiii. 15.) Recitations
+accompanied by the lute or 'viola' are not easy to distinguish, in the
+accounts left us, from singing properly so-called.
+
+[889] Scardeonius, l. c.
+
+[890] For biographies of women, see above, p. 147 and note 1. Comp. the
+excellent work of Attilio Hortis: _Le Donne Famose, descritte da
+Giovanni Boccacci_. Trieste, 1877.
+
+[891] E.g. in Castiglione, _Il Cortigiano_. In the same strain Francesco
+Barbaro, _De Re Uxoria_; Poggio, _An Seni sit Uxor ducenda_, in which
+much evil is said of women; the ridicule of Codro Urceo, especially his
+remarkable discourse, _An Uxor sit ducenda_ (_Opera_, 1506, fol.
+xviii.-xxi.), and the sarcasms of many of the epigrammatists. Marcellus
+Palingenius, (vol. i. 304) recommends celibacy in various passages, lib.
+iv. 275 sqq., v. 466-585; as a means of subduing disobedient wives he
+recommends to married people,
+
+                  'Tu verbera misce
+    Tergaque nunc duro resonent pulsata bacillo.'
+
+Italian writers on the woman's side are Benedetto da Cesena, _De Honore
+Mulierum_, Venice, 1500, Dardano, _La defesa della Donna_, Ven. 1554,
+_Per Donne Romane_. ed. Manfredi, Bol. 1575. The defence of, or attack
+on, women, supported by instances of famous or infamous women down to
+the time of the writer, was also treated by the Jews, partly in Italian
+and partly in Hebrew; and in connection with an earlier Jewish
+literature dating from the thirteenth century, we may mention Abr.
+Sarteano and Eliah Gennazzano, the latter of whom defended the former
+against the attacks of Abigdor (for their MS. poems about year 1500,
+comp. Steinschneider, _Hebr. Bibliogr._ vi. 48).
+
+[892] Addressed to Annibale Maleguccio, sometimes numbered as the 5th or
+the 6th.
+
+[893] When the Hungarian Queen Beatrice, a Neapolitan princess, came to
+Vienna in 1485, she was addressed in Latin, and 'arrexit diligentissime
+aures domina regina saepe, cum placide audierat, subridendo.' Aschbach,
+o. c. vol. ii. 10 note.
+
+[894] The share taken by women in the plastic arts was insignificant.
+The learned Isotta Nogarola deserves a word of mention. On her
+intercourse with Guarino, see Rosmini, ii. 67 sqq.; with Pius II. see
+Voigt, iii. 515 sqq.
+
+[895] It is from this point of view that we must judge of the life of
+Allessandra de' Bardi in Vespasiano Fiorentino (Mai, _Spicileg._ rom. i.
+p. 593 sqq.) The author, by the way, is a great 'laudator temporis
+acti,' and it must not be forgotten that nearly a hundred years before
+what he calls the good old time, Boccaccio wrote the _Decameron_. On the
+culture and education of the Italian women of that day, comp. the
+numerous facts quoted in Gregorovius, _Lucrezia Borgia_. There is a
+catalogue of the books possessed by Lucrezia in 1502 and 3 (Gregorovius,
+ed. 3, i. 310, ii. 167), which may be considered characteristic of the
+Italian women of the period. We there find a Breviary; a little book
+with the seven psalms and some prayers; a parchment book with gold
+miniature, called _De Coppelle alla Spagnola_; the printed letters of
+Catherine of Siena; the printed epistles and gospels in Italian; a
+religious book in Spanish; a MS. collection of Spanish odes, with the
+proverbs of Domenico Lopez; a printed book, called _Aquila Volante_; the
+_Mirror of Faith_ printed in Italian; an Italian printed book called
+_The Supplement of Chronicles_; a printed Dante, with commentary; an
+Italian book on philosophy; the legends of the saints in Italian; an old
+book _De Ventura_; a Donatus; a Life of Christ in Spanish; a MS.
+Petrarch, on duodecimo parchment. A second catalogue of the year 1516
+contains no secular books whatever.
+
+[896] Ant. Galateo, _Epist. 3_, to the young Bona Sforza, the future
+wife of Sigismund of Poland: 'Incipe aliquid de viro sapere, quoniam ad
+imperandum viris nata es.... Ita fac, ut sapientibus viris placeas, ut
+te prudentes et graves viri admirentur, et vulgi et muliercularum studia
+et judicia despicias,' &c. A remarkable letter in other respects also
+(Mai. _Spicileg. Rom._ viii. p. 532).
+
+[897] She is so called in the _Chron. Venetum_, in Muratori, xxiv. col.
+121 sqq. (in the account of her heroic defence, _ibid._ col. 121 she is
+called a virago). Comp. Infessura in Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1981,
+and _Arch. Stor._ append. ii. p. 250, and Gregorovius, vii. 437 note 1.
+
+[898] Contemporary historians speak of her more than womanly intellect
+and eloquence. Comp. Ranke's _Filippo Strozzi_, in _Historisch-biographische
+Studien_, p. 371 note 2.
+
+[899] And rightly so, sometimes. How ladies should behave while such
+tales are telling, we learn from _Cortigiano_, l. iii. fol. 107. That
+the ladies who were present at his dialogues must have known how to
+conduct themselves in case of need, is shown by the strong passage, l.
+ii. fol. 100. What is said of the 'Donna di Palazzo'--the counterpart of
+the Cortigiano--that she should neither avoid frivolous company nor use
+unbecoming language, is not decisive, since she was far more the servant
+of the princess than the Cortigiano of the prince. See Bandello, i. nov.
+44. Bianca d'Este tells the terrible love-story of her ancestor, Niccol�
+of Ferrara, and Parisina. The tales put into the mouths of the women in
+the _Decameron_ may also serve as instances of this indelicacy. For
+Bandello, see above, p. 145; and Landau, _Beitr. z. Gesch. der Ital.
+Nov._ Vienna, 1875, p. 102. note 32.
+
+[900] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 152 sqq. How highly the travelled
+Italians valued the freer intercourse with girls in England and the
+Netherlands is shown by Bandello, ii. nov. 44, and iv. nov. 27. For the
+Venetian women and the Italian women generally, see the work of Yriarte,
+pp. 50 sqq.
+
+[901] Paul. Jov. _De Rom. Piscibus_, cap. 5; Bandello, parte iii. nov.
+42. Aretino, in the _Ragionamento del Zoppino_, p. 327, says of a
+courtesan: 'She knows by heart all Petrarch and Boccaccio, and many
+beautiful verses of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and a thousand other authors.'
+
+[902] Bandello, ii. 51, iv. 16.
+
+[903] Bandello, iv. 8.
+
+[904] For a characteristic instance of this, see Giraldi, _Hecatomithi_,
+vi nov. 7.
+
+[905] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1997. The public
+women only, not the kept women, are meant. The number, compared with the
+population of Rome, is certainly enormous, perhaps owing to some
+clerical error. According to Giraldi, vi. 7, Venice was exceptionally
+rich 'di quella sorte di donne che cortigiane son dette;' see also the
+epigram of Pasquinus (Gregor. viii. 279, note 2); but Rome did not stand
+behind Venice (Giraldi, _Introduz._ nov. 2). Comp. the notice of the
+'meretrices' in Rome (1480) who met in a church and were robbed of their
+jewels and ornaments, Murat. xxii. 342 sqq., and the account in
+_Burchardi, Diarium_, ed. Leibnitz, pp. 75-77, &c. Landi (_Commentario_,
+fol. 76) mentions Rome, Naples, and Venice as the chief seats of the
+'cortigiane;' _ibid._ 286, the fame of the women of Chiavenna is to be
+understood ironically. The _Quaestiones Forcianae_, fol. 9, of the same
+author give most interesting information on love and love's delights,
+and the style and position of women in the different cities of Italy. On
+the other hand, Egnatius (_De Exemp. III. Vir._ Ven. fol. 212 _b_ sqq.)
+praises the chastity of the Venetian women, and says that the
+prostitutes come every year from Germany. Corn. Agr. _de van.
+Scientiae_, cap. 63 (_Opp._ ed. Lugd. ii. 158) says: 'Vidi ego nuper
+atque legi sub titulo "Cortosan�" Italica lingua editum et Venetiis
+typis excusum de arte meretricia dialogum, utriusque Veneris omnium
+flagitiosissimum et dignissimum, qui ipse cum autore suo ardeat.' Ambr.
+Traversari (_Epist._ viii. 2 sqq.) calls the beloved of Niccol� Niccoli
+'foemina fidelissima.' In the _Lettere dei Principi_, i. 108 (report of
+Negro, Sept. 1, 1522) the 'donne Greche' are described as 'fonte di ogni
+cortesia et amorevolezza.' A great authority, esp. for Siena, is the
+_Hermaphroditus_ of Panormitanus. The enumeration of the 'lenae
+lupaeque' in Florence (ii. 37) is hardly fictitious; the line there
+occurs:
+
+    'Annaque _Theutonico_ tibi si dabit obvia cantu.'
+
+
+[906] Were these wandering knights really married?
+
+[907] _Trattato del Governo della Famiglia._ See above, p. 132, note 1.
+Pandolfini died in 1446, L. B. Alberti, by whom the work was really
+written, in 1472.
+
+[908] A thorough history of 'flogging' among the Germanic and Latin
+races treated with some psychological power, would be worth volumes of
+dispatches and negotiations. (A modest beginning has been made by
+Lichtenberg, _Vermischte Schriften_, v. 276-283.) When, and through what
+influence, did flogging become a daily practice in the German household?
+Not till after Walther sang: 'Nieman kan mit gerten kindes zuht
+beherten.'
+
+In Italy beating ceased early; Maffeo Vegio (d. 1458) recommends (_De
+Educ. Liber._ lib. i. c. 19) moderation in flogging, but adds:
+'Caedendos magis esse filios quam pestilentissmis blanditiis laetandos.'
+At a later time a child of seven was no longer beaten. The little Roland
+(_Orlandino_, cap. vii. str. 42) lays down the principle:
+
+    'Sol gli asini si ponno bastonare,
+     Se una tal bestia fussi, patirei.'
+
+The German humanists of the Renaissance, like Rudolf Agricola and
+Erasmus, speak decisively against flogging, which the elder
+schoolmasters regarded as an indispensable means of education. In the
+biographies of the _Fahrenden Sch�ler_ at the close of the fifteenth
+century (_Platter's Lebensbeschriebung_, ed. Fechter, Basel, 1840;
+_Butzbach's Wanderbuch_, ed. Becher, Regensburg, 1869) there are gross
+examples of the corporal punishment of the time.
+
+[909] But the taste was not universal. J. A. Campanus (_Epist._ iv. 4)
+writes vigorously against country life. He admits: 'Ego si rusticus
+natus non essem, facile tangerer voluptate;' but since he was born a
+peasant, 'quod tibi deliciae, mihi satietas est.'
+
+[910] Giovanni Villani, xi. 93, our principal authority for the building
+of villas before the middle of the fourteenth century. The villas were
+more beautiful than the town houses, and great exertions were made by
+the Florentines to have them so, 'onde erano tenuti matti.'
+
+[911] _Trattato del Governo della Famiglia_ (Torino, 1829), pp. 84, 88.
+
+[912] See above, part iv. chap. 2. Petrarch was called 'Silvanus,' on
+the ground of his dislike of the town and love of the country. _Epp.
+Fam._ ed. Fracass. ii. 87 sqq. Guarino's description of a villa to
+Gianbattista Candrata, in Rosmini, ii. 13 sqq., 157 sqq. Poggio, in a
+letter to Facius (_De Vir. Ill._ p. 106): 'Sum enim deditior senectutis
+gratia rei rustic� quam antea.' See also Poggio, _Opp._ (1513), p 112
+sqq.; and Shepherd-Tonelli, i. 255 and 261. Similarly Maffeo Vegio (_De
+Lib. Educ._ vi. 4), and B. Platina at the beginning of his dialogue, 'De
+Vera Nobilitate.' Politian's descriptions of the country-houses of the
+Medici in Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 73, 87. For the Farnesina, see
+Gregorovius, viii. 114.
+
+[913] Comp. J. Burckhardt, _Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien_
+(Stuttg. 1868), pp. 320-332.
+
+[914] Compare pp. 47 sqq., where the magnificence of the festivals is
+shown to have been a hindrance to the higher development of the drama.
+
+[915] In comparison with the cities of the North.
+
+[916] The procession at the feast of Corpus Christi was not established
+at Venice until 1407; Cecchetti, _Venezia e la Corte di Roma_, i. 108.
+
+[917] The festivities which took place when Visconti was made Duke of
+Milan, 1395 (Corio, fol. 274), had, with all their splendour, something
+of medi�val coarseness about them, and the dramatic element was wholly
+wanting. Notice, too, the relative insignificance of the processions in
+Pavia during the fourteenth century (_Anonymus de Laudibus Papiae_, in
+Murat. xi. col. 34 sqq.).
+
+[918] Gio. Villani, viii. 70.
+
+[919] See e.g. Infessura, in Eccard, _Scrippt._ ii. col. 1896; Corio,
+fols. 417, 421.
+
+[920] The dialogue in the Mysteries was chiefly in octaves, the
+monologue in 'terzine.' For the Mysteries, see J. L. Klein, _Geschichte
+der Ital. Dramas_, i. 153 sqq.
+
+[921] We have no need to refer to the realism of the schoolmen for proof
+of this. About the year 970 Bishop Wibold of Cambray recommended to his
+clergy, instead of dice, a sort of spiritual b�zique, with fifty-six
+abstract names represented by as many combinations of cards. 'Gesta
+Episcopori Cameracens.' in _Mon. Germ._ SS. vii. p. 433.
+
+[922] E.g. when he found pictures on metaphors. At the gate of Purgatory
+the central broken step signifies contrition of heart (_Purg._ ix. 97),
+though the slab through being broken loses its value as a step. And
+again (_Purg._ xviii. 94), the idle in this world have to show their
+penitence by running in the other, though running could be a symbol of
+flight.
+
+[923] _Inferno_, ix. 61; _Purgat._ viii. 19.
+
+[924] _Poesie Satiriche_, ed. Milan, p. 70 sqq. Dating from the end of
+the fourteenth century.
+
+[925] The latter e.g. in the _Venatio_ of the Cardinal Adriano da
+Corneto (Strasburg, 1512; often printed). Ascanio Sforza is there
+supposed to find consolation for the fall of his house in the pleasures
+of the chase. See above, p. 261.
+
+[926] More properly 1454. See Olivier de la Marche, _M�moires_, chap.
+29.
+
+[927] For other French festivals, see e.g. Juv�nal des Ursins (Paris,
+1614), ad. a. 1389 (entrance of Queen Isabella); John de Troyes, ad. a.
+1461) (often printed) (entrance of Louis XI.). Here, too, we meet with
+living statues, machines for raising bodies, and so forth; but the whole
+is confused and disconnected, and the allegories are mostly
+unintelligible. The festivals at Lisbon in 1452, held at the departure
+of the Infanta Eleonora, the bride of the Emperor Frederick III., lasted
+several days and were remarkable for their magnificence. See
+Freher-Struve, _Rer. German. Script._ ii. fol. 51--the report of Nic.
+Lauckmann.
+
+[928] A great advantage for those poets and artists who knew how to use
+it.
+
+[929] Comp. Bartol. Gambia, _Notizie intorno alle Opere di Feo Belcari_,
+Milano, 1808; and especially the introduction to the work, _Le
+Rappresentazioni di Feo Belcari ed altre di lui Poesie_, Firenze, 1833.
+As a parallel, see the introduction of the bibliophile Jacob to his
+edition of Pathelin (Paris, 1859).
+
+[930] It is true that a Mystery at Siena on the subject of the Massacre
+of the Innocents closed with a scene in which the disconsolate mothers
+seized one another by the hair. Della Valle, _Lettere Sanesi_, iii. p.
+53. It was one of the chief aims of Feo Belcari (d. 1484), of whom we
+have spoken, to free the Mysteries from these monstrosities.
+
+[931] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 72.
+
+[932] Vasari, iii. 232 sqq.: _Vita di Brunellesco_; v. 36 sqq.: _Vita
+del Cecca_. Comp. v. 32, _Vita di Don Bartolommeo_.
+
+[933] _Arch. Stor._ append. ii. p. 310. The Mystery of the Annunciation
+at Ferrara, on the occasion of the wedding of Alfonso, with fireworks
+and flying apparatus. For an account of the representation of Susanna,
+John the Baptist, and of a legend, at the house of the Cardinal Riario,
+see Corio, fol. 417. For the Mystery of Constantine the Great in the
+Papal Palace at the Carnival, 1484, see Jac. Volaterran. (Murat. xxiii.
+col. 194). The chief actor was a Genoese born and educated at
+Constantinople.
+
+[934] Graziani, _Cronaca di Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi. 1. p. 598. At the
+Crucifixion, a figure was kept ready and put in the place of the actor.
+
+[935] For this, see Graziani, l. c. and _Pii II. Comment._ l. viii. pp.
+383, 386. The poetry of the fifteenth century sometimes shows the same
+coarseness. A 'canzone' of Andrea da Basso traces in detail the
+corruption of the corpse of a hard-hearted fair one. In a monkish drama
+of the twelfth century King Herod was put on the stage with the worms
+eating him (_Carmina Burana_, pp. 80 sqq.). Many of the German dramas of
+the seventeenth century offer parallel instances.
+
+[936] Allegretto, _Diarii Sanesi_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 767.
+
+[937] Matarazzo, _Arch. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 36. The monk had previously
+undertaken a voyage to Rome to make the necessary studies for the
+festival.
+
+[938] Extracts from the 'Vergier d'honneur,' in Roscoe, _Leone X._, ed.
+Bossi, i. p. 220, and iii. p. 263.
+
+[939] _Pii II. Comment._ l. viii. pp. 382 sqq. Another gorgeous
+celebration of the 'Corpus Domini' is mentioned by Bursellis, _Annal.
+Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 911, for the year 1492. The
+representations were from the Old and New Testaments.
+
+[940] On such occasions we read, 'Nulla di muro si potea vedere.'
+
+[941] The same is true of many such descriptions.
+
+[942] Five kings with an armed retinue, and a savage who fought with a
+(tamed?) lion; the latter, perhaps, with an allusion to the name of the
+Pope--Sylvius.
+
+[943] Instances under Sixtus IV., Jac. Volaterr. in Murat. xxiii. col.
+135 (bombardorum et sclopulorum crepitus), 139. At the accession of
+Alexander VI. there were great salvos of artillery. Fireworks, a
+beautiful invention due to Italy, belong, like festive decorations
+generally, rather to the history of art than to our present work. So,
+too, the brilliant illuminations we read of in connexion with many
+festivals, and the hunting-trophies and table-ornaments. (See p. 319.
+The elevation of Julius II. to the Papal throne was celebrated at Venice
+by three days' illumination. Brosch, _Julius II._ p. 325, note 17.)
+
+[944] Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 772. See, besides, col. 770, for
+the reception of Pius II. in 1459. A paradise, or choir of angels, was
+represented, out of which came an angel and sang to the Pope, 'in modo
+che il Papa si commosse a lagrime per gran tenerezza da si dolci
+parole.'
+
+[945] See the authorities quoted in Favre, _M�langes d'Hist. Lit._ i.
+138; Corio, fol. 417 sqq. The _menu_ fills almost two closely printed
+pages. 'Among other dishes a mountain was brought in, out of which
+stepped a living man, with signs of astonishment to find himself amid
+this festive splendour; he repeated some verses and then disappeared'
+(Gregorovius, vii. 241). Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1896;
+_Strozzii Poetae_, fol. 193 sqq. A word or two may here be added on
+eating and drinking. Leon. Aretino (_Epist._ lib. iii. ep. 18) complains
+that he had to spend so much for his wedding feast, garments, and so
+forth, that on the same day he had concluded a 'matrimonium' and
+squandered a 'patrimonium.' Ermolao Barbaro describes, in a letter to
+Pietro Cara, the bill of fare at a wedding-feast at Trivulzio's (_Angeli
+Politiani Epist._ lib. iii.). The list of meats and drinks in the
+Appendix to Landi's _Commentario_ (above) is of special interest. Landi
+speaks of the great trouble he had taken over it, collecting it from
+five hundred writers. The passage is too long to be quoted (we there
+read: 'Li antropofagi furono i primi che mangiassero carne humana').
+Poggio (_Opera_, 1513, fol. 14 sqq.) discusses the question': 'Uter
+alteri gratias debeat pro convivio impenso, isne qui vocatus est ad
+convivium an qui vocavit?' Platina wrote a treatise 'De Arte
+Coquinaria,' said to have been printed several times, and quoted under
+various titles, but which, according to his own account (_Dissert.
+Vossiane_, i. 253 sqq.), contains more warnings against excess than
+instructions on the art in question.
+
+[946] Vasari, ix. p. 37, _Vita di Puntormo_, tells how a child, during
+such a festival at Florence in the year 1513, died from the effects of
+the exertion--or shall we say, of the gilding? The poor boy had to
+represent the 'golden age'!
+
+[947] Phil. Beroaldi, _Nuptiae Bentivolorum_, in the _Orationes Ph. B._
+Paris, 1492, c. 3 sqq. The description of the other festivities at this
+wedding is very remarkable.
+
+[948] M. Anton. Sabellici, _Epist._ l. iii. fol. 17.
+
+[949] Amoretti, _Memorie, &c. su. Lionardo da Vinci_, pp. 38 sqq.
+
+[950] To what extent astrology influenced even the festivals of this
+century is shown by the introduction of the planets (not described with
+sufficient clearness) at the reception of the ducal brides at Ferrara.
+_Diario Ferrarese_, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 248, ad. a. 1473; col. 282,
+ad. a. 1491. So, too, at Mantua, _Arch. Stor._ append. ii. p. 233.
+
+[951] _Annal. Estens._ in Murat. xx. col. 468 sqq. The description is
+unclear and printed from an incorrect transcript.
+
+[952] We read that the ropes of the machine used for this purpose were
+made to imitate garlands.
+
+[953] Strictly the ship of Isis, which entered the water on the 5th of
+March, as a symbol that navigation was reopened. For analogies in the
+German religion, see Jac. Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_.
+
+[954] _Purgatorio_, xxix. 43 to the end, and xxx. at the beginning.
+According to v. 115, the chariot is more splendid than the triumphal
+chariot of Scipio, of Augustus, and even of the Sun-God.
+
+[955] Ranke, _Gesch. der Roman. und German. V�lker_, ed. 2, p. 95. P.
+Villari, _Savonarola_.
+
+[956] Fazio degli Uberti, _Dittamondo_ (lib. ii. cap. 3), treats
+specially 'del modo del triumphare.'
+
+[957] Corio, fol. 401: 'dicendo tali cose essere superstitioni de' Re.'
+Comp. Cagnola, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 127, who says that the duke
+declined from modesty.
+
+[958] See above, vol. i. p. 315 sqq.; comp. i. p. 15, note 1. 'Triumphus
+Alfonsi,' as appendix to the _Dicta et Facta_ of Panormita, ed. 1538,
+pp. 129-139, 256 sqq. A dislike to excessive display on such occasions
+was shown by the gallant Comneni. Comp. Cinnamus, i. 5, vi. 1.
+
+[959] The position assigned to Fortune is characteristic of the na�vet�
+of the Renaissance. At the entrance of Massimiliano Sforza into Milan
+(1512), she stood as the chief figure of a triumphal arch _above_ Fama,
+Speranza, Audacia, and Penitenza, all represented by living persons.
+Comp. Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 305.
+
+[960] The entrance of Borso of Este into Reggio, described above (p.
+417), shows the impression which Alfonso's triumph had made in all
+Italy,. On the entrance of C�sar Borgia into Rome in 1500, see
+Gregorovius, vii. 439.
+
+[961] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. 260 sqq. The author says expressly, 'le
+quali cose da li triumfanti Romani se soliano anticamente usare.'
+
+[962] Her three 'capitoli' in terzines, _Anecd. Litt._ iv. 461 sqq.
+
+[963] Old paintings of similar scenes are by no means rare, and no doubt
+often represent masquerades actually performed. The wealthy classes soon
+became accustomed to drive in chariots at every public solemnity. We
+read that Annibale Bentivoglio, eldest son of the ruler of Bologna,
+returned to the palace after presiding as umpire at the regular military
+exercises, 'cum triumpho more romano.' Bursellis, l. c. col. 909. ad. a.
+1490.
+
+[964] The remarkable funeral of Malatesta Baglione, poisoned at Bologna
+in 1437 (Graziani, _Arch. Stor._ xvi. i. p. 413), reminds us of the
+splendour of an Etruscan funeral. The knights in mourning, however, and
+other features of the ceremony, were in accordance with the customs of
+the nobility throughout Europe. See e.g. the funeral of Bertrand
+Duguesclin, in Juv�nal des Ursins, ad. a. 1389. See also Graziani, l. c.
+p. 360.
+
+[965] Vasari, ix. p. 218, _Vita di Granacci_. On the triumphs and
+processions in Florence, see Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 433.
+
+[966] Mich. Cannesius, _Vita Pauli II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 118 sqq.
+
+[967] Tommasi, _Vita di Caesare Borgia_, p. 251.
+
+[968] Vasari ix. p. 34 sqq., _Vita di Puntormo_. A most important
+passage of its kind.
+
+[969] Vasari, viii. p. 264, _Vita di Andrea del Sarto_.
+
+[970] Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 783. It was reckoned a bad omen
+that one of the wheels broke.
+
+[971] _M. Anton. Sabellici Epist._ l. iii. letter to M. Anton.
+Barbavarus. He says: 'Vetus est mos civitatis in illustrium hospitum
+adventu eam navim auro et purpura insternere.'
+
+[972] Sansovino, _Venezia_, fol. 151 sqq. The names of these
+corporations were: Pavoni, Accessi, Eterni, Reali, Sempiterni. The
+academies probably had their origin in these guilds.
+
+[973] Probably in 1495. Comp. _M. Anton. Sabellici Epist._ l. v. fol.
+28; last letter to M. Ant. Barbavarus.
+
+[974] 'Terr� globum socialibus signis circunquaque figuratum,' and
+'quinis pegmatibus, quorum singula foederatorum regum, principumque suas
+habuere effigies et cum his ministros signaque in auro affabre caelata.'
+
+[975] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1093, 2000; Mich.
+Cannesius, _Vita Pauli II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1012; Platina.
+_Vitae Pontiff._ p. 318; Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xiii. col. 163, 194;
+Paul. Jov. _Elogia_, sub Juliano C�sarino. Elsewhere, too, there were
+races for women, _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 384: comp.
+Gregorovius, vi. 690 sqq., vii. 219, 616 sqq.
+
+[976] Once under Alexander VI. from October till Lent. See Tommasi, l.
+c. p. 322.
+
+[977] Baluz. _Miscell._ iv. 517 (comp. Gregorovius, vii. 288 sqq.).
+
+[978] _Pii II. Comment._ l. iv. p. 211.
+
+[979] Nantiporto, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1080. They wished to thank him
+for a peace which he had concluded, but found the gates of the palace
+closed and troops posted in all the open places.
+
+[980] 'Tutti i trionfi, carri, mascherate, o canti carnascialeschi.'
+Cosmopoli, 1750. Macchiavelli, _Opere Minori_, p. 505; Vasari, vii. p.
+115 sqq. _Vita di Piero di Cosimo_, to whom a chief part in the
+development of these festivities is ascribed. Comp. B. Loos (above, p.
+154, note 1) p. 12 sqq. and Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 443 sqq., where the
+authorities are collected which show that the Carnival was soon
+restrained. Comp. ibid ii. p. 24.
+
+[981] _Discorsi_, l. i. c. 12. Also c. 55: Italy is more corrupt than
+all other countries; then come the French and Spaniards.
+
+[982] Paul. Jov. _Viri Illustres_: Jo. Gal. Vicecomes. Comp. p. 12 sqq.
+and notes.
+
+[983] On the part filled by the sense of honour in the modern world, see
+Pr�vost-Paradol, _La France Nouvelle_, liv. iii. chap. 2.
+
+[984] Compare what Mr. Darwin says of blushing in the 'Expression of the
+Emotions,' and of the relations between shame and conscience.
+
+[985] Franc. Guicciardini, _Ricordi Politici e Civili_, n. 118 (_Opere
+inedite_, vol. i.).
+
+[986] His closest counterpart is Merlinus Coccajus (Teofilo Folengo),
+whose _Opus Maccaronicorum_ Rabelais certainly knew, and quotes more
+than once (_Pantagruel_, l. ii. ch. 1. and ch. 7, at the end). It is
+possible that Merlinus Coccajus may have given the impulse which
+resulted in Pantagruel and Gargantua.
+
+[987] _Gargantua_, l. i. cap. 57.
+
+[988] That is, well-born in the higher sense of the word, since
+Rabelais, son of the innkeeper of Chinon, has here no motive for
+assigning any special privilege to the nobility. The preaching of the
+Gospel, which is spoken of in the inscription at the entrance to the
+monastery, would fit in badly with the rest of the life of the inmates;
+it must be understood in a negative sense, as implying defiance of the
+Roman Church.
+
+[989] See extracts from his diary in Del�cluze, _Florence et ses
+Vicissitudes_, vol. 2.
+
+[990] Infessura, ap. Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1992. On F. C. see
+above, p. 108.
+
+[991] This opinion of Stendhal (_La Chartreuse de Parme_, ed. Delahays,
+p. 335) seems to me to rest on profound psychological observation.
+
+[992] Graziani, _Cronaca di Perugia_, for the year 1437 (_Arch. Stor._
+xvi. i. p. 415).
+
+[993] Giraldi, _Hecatommithi_, i. nov. 7.
+
+[994] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptt._ ii. col. 1892, for the year 1464.
+
+[995] Allegretto, _Diari Sanisi_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 837. Allegretto
+was himself present when the oath was taken, and had no doubt of its
+efficacy.
+
+[996] Those who leave vengeance to God are ridiculed by Pulci,
+_Morgante_, canto xxi. str. 83 sqq., 104 sqq.
+
+[997] Guicciardini, _Ricordi_, l. c. n. 74.
+
+[998] Thus Cardanus (_De Propria Vita_, cap. 13) describes himself as
+very revengeful, but also as 'verax, memor beneficiorum, amans
+justiti�.'
+
+[999] It is true that when the Spanish rule was fully established the
+population fell off to a certain extent. Had this fact been due to the
+demoralisation of the people, it would have appeared much earlier.
+
+[1000] Giraldi, _Hecatommithi_, iii. nov. 2. In the same strain,
+_Cortigiano_, l. iv. fol. 180.
+
+[1001] A shocking instance of vengeance taken by a brother at Perugia in
+the year 1455, is to be found in the chronicle of Graziani (_Arch.
+Stor._ xvi. p. 629). The brother forces the gallant to tear out the
+sister's eyes, and then beats him from the place. It is true that the
+family was a branch of the Oddi, and the lover only a cordwainer.
+
+[1002] Bandello, parte i. nov. 9 and 26. Sometimes the wife's confessor
+is bribed by the husband and betrays the adultery.
+
+[1003] See above p. 394, and note 1.
+
+[1004] As instance, Bandello, part i. nov. 4.
+
+[1005] 'Piaccia al Signore Iddio che non si ritrovi,' say the women in
+Giraldi (iii. nov. 10), when they are told that the deed may cost the
+murderer his head.
+
+[1006] This is the case, for example, with Gioviano Pontano (_De
+Fortitudine_, l. ii.). His heroic Ascolans, who spend their last night
+in singing and dancing, the Abruzzian mother, who cheers up her son on
+his way to the gallows, &c., belong probably to brigand families, but he
+forgets to say so.
+
+[1007] _Diarium Parmense_, in Murat. xxii. col. 330 to 349 _passim_. The
+sonnet, col. 340.
+
+[1008] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 312. We are reminded of
+the gang led by a priest, which for some time before the year 1837
+infested western Lombardy.
+
+[1009] Massuccio, nov. 29. As a matter of course, the man has luck in
+his amours.
+
+[1010] If he appeared as a corsair in the war between the two lines of
+Anjou for the possession of Naples, he may have done so as a political
+partisan, and this, according to the notions of the time, implied no
+dishonour. The Archbishop Paolo Fregoso of Genoa, in the second half of
+the fifteenth century probably allowed himself quite as much freedom, or
+more. Contemporaries and later writers, e.g. Aretino and Poggio, record
+much worse things of John. Gregorovius, vi. p. 600.
+
+[1011] Poggio, _Facetiae_, fol. 164. Anyone familiar with Naples at the
+present time, may have heard things as comical, though bearing on other
+sides of human life.
+
+[1012] _Jovian. Pontani Antonius_: 'Nec est quod Neapoli quam hominis
+vita minoris vendatur.' It is true he thinks it was not so under the
+House of Anjou, 'sicam ab iis (the Aragonese) accepimus.' The state of
+things about the year 1534 is described by Benvenuto Cellini, i. 70.
+
+[1013] Absolute proof of this cannot be given, but few murders are
+recorded, and the imagination of the Florentine writers at the best
+period is not filled with the suspicion of them.
+
+[1014] See on this point the report of Fedeli, in Alberi, _Relazioni
+Serie_, ii. vol. i. pp. 353 sqq.
+
+[1015] M. Brosch (_Hist. Zeitschr._ bd. 27, p. 295 sqq.) has collected
+from the Venetian archives five proposals, approved by the council, to
+poison the Sultan (1471-1504), as well as evidence of the plan to murder
+Charles VIII. (1495) and of the order given to the Proveditor at Faenza
+to have C�sar Borgia put to death (1504).
+
+[1016] Dr. Geiger adds several conjectural statements and references on
+this subject. It may be remarked that the suspicion of poisoning, which
+I believe to be now generally unfounded, is often expressed in certain
+parts of Italy with regard to any death not at once to be accounted
+for.--[The Translator.]
+
+[1017] Infessura, in Eccard, _Scriptor._ ii. col. 1956.
+
+[1018] _Chron. Venetum_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 131. In northern countries
+still more wonderful things were believed as to the art of poisoning in
+Italy. See _Juv�nal des Ursins_, ad. ann. 1382 (ed. Buchon, p. 336), for
+the lancet of the poisoner, whom Charles of Durazzo took into his
+service; whoever looked at it steadily, died.
+
+[1019] Petr. Crinitus, _De Honesta Disciplina_, l. xviii. cap. 9.
+
+[1020] _Pii II. Comment._ l. xi. p. 562. Joh. Ant. Campanus, _Vita Pii
+II._ in Murat. iii. ii. col. 988.
+
+[1021] Vasari, ix. 82, _Vita di Rosso_. In the case of unhappy marriages
+it is hard to say whether there were more real or imaginary instances of
+poisoning. Comp. Bandello, ii. nov. 5 and 54: ii. nov. 40 is more
+serious. In one and the same city of Western Lombardy, the name of which
+is not given, lived two poisoners. A husband, wishing to convince
+himself of the genuineness of his wife's despair, made her drink what
+she believed to be poison, but which was really coloured water,
+whereupon they were reconciled. In the family of Cardanus alone four
+cases of poisoning occurred (_De Propria Vita_, cap. 30, 50). Even at a
+banquet given at the coronation of a pope each cardinal brought his own
+cupbearer with him, and his own wine, 'probably because they knew from
+experience that otherwise they would run the risk of being poisoned.'
+And this usage was general at Rome, and practised 'sine injuria
+invitantis!' Blas Ortiz, _Itinerar. Hadriani VI._ ap. Baluz. Miscell.
+ed. Mansi, i. 380.
+
+[1022] For the magic arts used against Leonello of Ferrara, see _Diario
+Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 194, ad a. 1445. When the sentence was
+read in the public square to the author of them, a certain Benato, a man
+in other respects of bad character, a noise was heard in the air and the
+earth shook, so that many people fled away or fell to the ground; this
+happened because Benato 'havea chiamato e scongiurato il diavolo.' What
+Guicciardini (l. i.) says of the wicked arts practised by Ludovico Moro
+against his nephew Giangaleazzo, rests on his own responsibility. On
+magic, see below, cap. 4.
+
+[1023] Ezzelino da Romano might be put first, were it not that he rather
+acted under the influence of ambitious motives and astrological
+delusions.
+
+[1024] _Giornali Napoletani_, in Murat. xxi. col. 1092 ad a. 1425.
+According to the narrative this deed seems to have been committed out of
+mere pleasure in cruelty. Br., it is true, believed neither in God nor
+in the saints, and despised and neglected all the precepts and
+ceremonies of the Church.
+
+[1025] _Pii II. Comment._ l. vii. p. 338.
+
+[1026] Jovian. Pontan. _De Immanitate_, cap. 17, where he relates how
+Malatesta got his own daughter with child--and so forth.
+
+[1027] Varchi, _Storie Fiorentine_, at the end. (When the work is
+published without expurgations, as in the Milanese edition.)
+
+[1028] On which point feeling differs according to the place and the
+people. The Renaissance prevailed in times and cities where the tendency
+was to enjoy life heartily. The general darkening of the spirits of
+thoughtful men did not begin to show itself till the time of the foreign
+supremacy in the sixteenth century.
+
+[1029] What is termed the spirit of the Counter-Reformation was
+developed in Spain some time before the Reformation itself, chiefly
+through the sharp surveillance and partial reorganisation of the Church
+under Ferdinand and Isabella. The principal authority on this subject is
+Gomez, _Life of Cardinal Ximenes_, in Rob. Belus, _Rer. Hispan.
+Scriptores_, 3 vols. 1581.
+
+[1030] It is to be noticed that the novelists and satirists scarcely
+ever mention the bishops, although they might, under altered names, have
+attacked them like the rest. They do so, however, e.g. in Bandello, ii.
+nov. 45; yet in ii. 40, he describes a virtuous bishop. Gioviano Pontano
+in the _Charon_ introduces the ghost of a luxurious bishop with a
+'duck's walk.'
+
+[1031] Foscolo, _Discorso sul testo del Decamerone_, 'Ma dei preti in
+dignit� niuno poteva far motto senza pericolo; onde ogni frate fu l'irco
+delle iniquita d'Israele,' &c. Timotheus Maffeus dedicates a book
+against the monks to Pope Nicholas V.; Facius, _De Vir. Ill._ p. 24.
+There are specially strong passages against the monks and clergy in the
+work of Palingenius already mentioned iv. 289, v. 184 sqq., 586 sqq.
+
+[1032] Bandello prefaces ii. nov. i. with the statement that the vice of
+avarice was more discreditable to priests than to any other class of
+men, since they had no families to provide for. On this ground he
+justifies the disgraceful attack made on a parsonage by two soldiers or
+brigands at the orders of a young gentleman, on which occasion a sheep
+was stolen from the stingy and gouty old priest. A single story of this
+kind illustrates the ideas in which men lived and acted better than all
+the dissertations in the world.
+
+[1033] Giov. Villani, iii. 29, says this clearly a century later.
+
+[1034] _L'Ordine._ Probably the tablet with the inscription I. H. S. is
+meant.
+
+[1035] He adds, 'and in the _seggi_,' i.e. the clubs into which the
+Neapolitan nobility was divided. The rivalry of the two orders is often
+ridiculed, e.g. Bandello, iii. nov. 14.
+
+[1036] Nov. 6, ed. Settembrini, p. 83, where it is remarked that in the
+Index of 1564 a book is mentioned, _Matrimonio delli Preti e delle
+Monache_.
+
+[1037] For what follows, see Jovian. Pontan. _De Sermone_, l. ii. cap.
+17, and Bandello, parte i. nov. 32. The fury of brother Franciscus, who
+attempted to work upon the king by a vision of St. Cataldus, was so
+great at his failure, and the talk on the subject so universal, 'ut
+Italia ferme omnis ipse in primis Romanus pontifex de tabul� hujus
+fuerit inventione sollicitus atque anxius.'
+
+[1038] Alexander VI. and Julius II., whose cruel measures, however, did
+not appear to the Venetian ambassadors Giustiniani and Soderini as
+anything but a means of extorting money. Comp. M. Brosch, _Hist.
+Zeitscher._ bd. 37.
+
+[1039] Panormita, _De Dictis et Factis Alphonsi_, lib. ii. �neas Sylvius
+in his commentary to it (_Opp._ ed. 1651, p. 79) tells of the detection
+of a pretended faster, who was said to have eaten nothing for four
+years.
+
+[1040] For which reason they could be openly denounced in the
+neighbourhood of the court. See Jovian. Pontan. _Antonius_ and _Charon_.
+One of the stories is the same as in Massuccio, nov. ii.
+
+[1041] See for one example the eighth canto of the _Macaroneide_.
+
+[1042] The story in Vasari, v. p. 120, _Vita di Sandro Botticelli_ shows
+that the Inquisition was sometimes treated jocularly. It is true that
+the 'Vicario' here mentioned may have been the archbishop's deputy
+instead of the inquisitor's.
+
+[1043] Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ ap. Murat. xxiii. col. 886, cf. 896.
+Malv. died 1468; his 'beneficium' passed to his nephew.
+
+[1044] See p. 88 sqq. He was abbot at Vallombrosa. The passage, of which
+we give a free translation, is to be found _Opere_, vol. ii. p. 209, in
+the tenth novel. See an inviting description of the comfortable life of
+the Carthusians in the _Commentario d'Italia_, fol. 32 sqq. quoted at p.
+84.
+
+[1045] Pius II. was on principle in favour of the abolition of the
+celibacy of the clergy. One of his favourite sentences was,
+'Sacerdotibus magna ratione sublatus nuptias majori restituendas
+videri.' Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 311.
+
+[1046] Ricordi, n. 28, in the _Opere inedite_, vol. i.
+
+[1047] Ricordi, n. i. 123, 125.
+
+[1048] See the _Orlandino_, cap. vi. str. 40 sqq.; cap. vii. str. 57;
+cap. viii. str. 3 sqq., especially 75.
+
+[1049] _Diaria Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 362.
+
+[1050] He had with him a German and a Slavonian interpreter. St. Bernard
+had to use the same means when he preached in the Rhineland.
+
+[1051] Capistrano, for instance, contented himself with making the sign
+of the cross over the thousands of sick persons brought to him, and with
+blessing them in the name of the Trinity and of his master San
+Bernadino, after which some of them not unnaturally got well. The
+Brescian chronicle puts it in this way, 'He worked fine miracles, yet
+not so many as were told of him' (Murat. xxi.).
+
+[1052] So e.g. Poggio, _De Avaritia_, in the _Opera_, fol. 2. He says
+they had an easy matter of it, since they said the same thing in every
+city, and sent the people away more stupid than they came. Poggio
+elsewhere (_Epist._ ed. Tonelli i. 281) speaks of Albert of Sarteano as
+'doctus' and 'perhumanus.' Filelfo defended Bernadino of Siena and a
+certain Nicolaus, probably out of opposition to Poggio (_Sat._ ii. 3,
+vi. 5) rather than from liking for the preachers. Filelfo was a
+correspondent of A. of Sarteano. He also praises Roberto da Lecce in
+some respects, but blames him for not using suitable gestures and
+expressions, for looking miserable when he ought to look cheerful, and
+for weeping too much and thus offending the ears and tastes of his
+audience. Fil. _Epist._ Venet. 1502, fol. 96 _b_.
+
+[1053] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 72. Preachers who fail are a constant
+subject of ridicule in all the novels.
+
+[1054] Compare the well-known story in the _Decamerone_ vi. nov. 10.
+
+[1055] In which case the sermons took a special colour. See Malipiero,
+_Ann. Venet. Archiv. Stor._ vii. i. p. 18. _Chron. Venet._ in Murat.
+xxiv. col. 114. _Storia Bresciana_, in Murat. xxi. col. 898. Absolution
+was freely promised to those who took part in, or contributed money for
+the crusade.
+
+[1056] _Storia Bresciana_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 865 sqq. On the first
+day 10,000 persons were present, 2,000 of them strangers.
+
+[1057] Allegretto, _Diari Sanesi_, in Murat. xxiii. col. 819 sqq. (July
+13 to 18, 1486); the preacher was Pietro dell'Osservanza di S.
+Francesco.
+
+[1058] Infessura (in Eccard, _Scriptores_, ii. col. 1874) says: 'Canti,
+brevi, sorti.' The first may refer to song-books, which actually were
+burnt by Savonarola. But Graziani (_Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor._ xvi.
+i., p. 314) says on a similar occasion, 'brieve incanti,' when we must
+without doubt read 'brevi e incanti,' and perhaps the same emendation is
+desirable in Infessura, whose 'sorti' point to some instrument of
+superstition, perhaps a pack of cards for fortune-telling. Similarly
+after the introduction of printing, collections were made of all the
+attainable copies of Martial, which then were burnt. Bandello, iii. 10.
+
+[1059] See his remarkable biography in _Vespasiano Fiorent._ p. 244
+sqq., and that by �neas Sylvius, _De Viris Illustr._ p. 24. In the
+latter we read: 'Is quoque in tabella pictum nomen Jesus deferebat,
+hominibusque adorandum ostendebat multumque suadebat ante ostia domorum
+hoc nomen depingi.'
+
+[1060] Allegretto, l. c. col. 823. A preacher excited the people against
+the judges (if instead of 'giudici' we are not to read 'giudei'), upon
+which they narrowly escaped being burnt in their houses. The opposite
+party threatened the life of the preacher in return.
+
+[1061] Infessura, l. c. In the date of the witch's death there seems to
+be a clerical error. How the same saint caused an ill-famed wood near
+Arezzo to be cut down, is told in Vasari, iii. 148, _Vita di Parri
+Spinelli_. Often, no doubt, the penitential zeal of the hearers went no
+further than such outward sacrifices.
+
+[1062] 'Pareva che l'aria si fendesse,' we read somewhere.
+
+[1063] Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 166 sqq. It is not
+expressly said that he interfered with this feud, but it can hardly be
+doubted that he did so. Once (1445), when Jacopo della Marca had but
+just quitted Perugia after an extraordinary success, a frightful
+_vendetta_ broke out in the family of the Ranieri. Comp. Graziani, l. c.
+p. 565 sqq. We may here remark that Perugia was visited by these
+preachers remarkably often, comp. pp. 597, 626, 631, 637, 647.
+
+[1064] Capistrano admitted fifty soldiers after one sermon, _Stor.
+Bresciana_, l. c. Graziani, l. c. p. 565 sqq. �n. Sylvius (_De Viris
+Illustr._ p. 25), when a young man, was once so affected by a sermon of
+San Bernadino as to be on the point of joining his Order. We read in
+Graziani of a convert quitting the order; he married, 'e fu magiore
+ribaldo, che non era prima.'
+
+[1065] That there was no want of disputes between the famous
+Observantine preachers and their Dominican rivals is shown by the
+quarrel about the blood of Christ which was said to have fallen from the
+cross to the earth (1462). See Voigt. _Enea Silvio_ iii. 591 sqq. Fra
+Jacopo della Marca, who would not yield to the Dominican Inquisitor, is
+criticised by Pius II. in his detailed account (_Comment._ l. xi. p.
+511), with delicate irony: 'Pauperiem pati, et famam et sitim et
+corporis cruciatum et mortem pro Christi nomine nonnulli possunt;
+jacturam nominis vel minimam ferre recusant tanquam sua deficiente fama
+Dei quoque gloria pereat.'
+
+[1066] Their reputation oscillated even then between two extremes. They
+must be distinguished from the hermit-monks. The line was not always
+clearly drawn in this respect. The Spoletans, who travelled about
+working miracles, took St. Anthony and St. Paul as their patrons, the
+latter on account of the snakes which they carried with them. We read of
+the money they got from the peasantry even in the thirteenth century by
+a sort of clerical conjuring. Their horses were trained to kneel down at
+the name of St. Anthony. They pretended to collect for hospitals
+(Massuccio, nov. 18; Bandello iii., nov. 17). Firenzuola in his _Asino
+d'Oro_ makes them play the part of the begging priests in Apulejus.
+
+[1067] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 357. Burigozzo, _ibid._ p. 431 sqq.
+
+[1068] Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 856 sqq. The quotation was:
+'Ecce venio cito et velociter. Estote parati.'
+
+[1069] Matteo Villani, viii. cap. 2 sqq. He first preached against
+tyranny in general, and then, when the ruling house of the Beccaria
+tried to have him murdered, he began to preach a change of government
+and constitution, and forced the Beccaria to fly from Pavia (1357). See
+Petrarch, _Epp. Fam._ xix. 18, and A. _Hortis, Scritti Inediti di F. P._
+174-181.
+
+[1070] Sometimes at critical moments the ruling house itself used the
+services of monks to exhort the people to loyalty. For an instance of
+this kind at Ferrara, see Sanudo (Murat. xxii. col. 1218). A preacher
+from Bologna reminded the people of the benefits they had received from
+the House of Este, and of the fate that awaited them at the hands of the
+victorious Venetians.
+
+[1071] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. p. 251. Other fanatical anti-French
+preachers, who appeared after the expulsion of the French, are mentioned
+by Burigozzo, _ibid._ pp. 443, 449, 485; ad a. 1523, 1526, 1529.
+
+[1072] Jac. Pitti, _Storia Fior._ l. ii. p. 112.
+
+[1073] Perrens, _J�r�me Savonarole_, two vols. Perhaps the most
+systematic and sober of all the many works on the subject. P. Villari,
+_La Storia di Girol. Savonarola_ (two vols. 8vo. Firenze, Lemonnier).
+The view taken by the latter writer differs considerably from that
+maintained in the text. Comp. also Ranke in _Historisch-biographische
+Studien_, Lpzg. 1878, pp. 181-358. On Genaz. see Vill. i. 57 sqq. ii.
+343 sqq. Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 522-526, 533 sqq.
+
+[1074] Sermons on Haggai; close of sermon 6.
+
+[1075] Savonarola was perhaps the only man who could have made the
+subject cities free and yet kept Tuscany together. But he never seems to
+have thought of doing so. Pisa he hated like a genuine Florentine.
+
+[1076] A remarkable contrast to the Sienese who in 1483 solemnly
+dedicated their distracted city to the Madonna. Allegretto, in Murat.
+xxiii. col. 815.
+
+[1077] He says of the 'impii astrologi': 'non � dar disputar (con loro)
+altrimenti che col fuoco.'
+
+[1078] See Villari on this point.
+
+[1079] See the passage in the fourteenth sermon on Ezechiel, in Perrens,
+o. c. vol. i. 30 note.
+
+[1080] With the title, _De Rusticorum Religione_. See above p. 352.
+
+[1081] Franco Sacchetti, nov. 109, where there is more of the same kind.
+
+[1082] Bapt. Mantuan. _De Sacris Diebus_, l. ii. exclaims:--
+
+    Ista superstitio, ducens a Manibus ortum
+    Tartareis, sancta de religione facessat
+    Christigen�m! vivis epulas date, sacra sepultis.
+
+A century earlier, when the army of John XXII. entered the Marches to
+attack the Ghibellines, the pretext was avowedly 'eresia' and
+'idolatria.' Recanti, which surrendered voluntarily, was nevertheless
+burnt, 'because idols had been worshipped there,' in reality, as a
+revenge for those whom the citizens had killed. Giov. Villani, ix. 139,
+141. Under Pius II. we read of an obstinate sun-worshipper, born at
+Urbino. �n. Sylv. _Opera_, p. 289. _Hist. Rer. ubique Gestar._ c. 12.
+More wonderful still was what happened in the Forum in Rome under Leo X.
+(more properly in the interregnum between Hadrian and Leo. June 1522,
+Gregorovius, viii. 388). To stay the plague, a bull was solemnly offered
+up with pagan rites. Paul. Jov. _Hist._ xxi. 8.
+
+[1083] See Sabellico, _De Situ Venetae Urbis_. He mentions the names of
+the saints, after the manner of many philologists, without the addition
+of 'sanctus' or 'divus,' but speaks frequently of different relics, and
+in the most respectful tone, and even boasts that he kissed several of
+them.
+
+[1084] _De Laudibus Patavii_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1149 to 1151.
+
+[1085] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. pp. 408 sqq. Though he is by no means a
+freethinker, he still protests against the causal nexus.
+
+[1086] _Pii II. Comment._ l. viii. pp. 352 sqq. 'Verebatur Pontifex, ne
+in honore tanti apostoli diminute agere videretur,' &c.
+
+[1087] Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 187. The Pope excused
+himself on the ground of Louis' great services to the Church, and by the
+example of other Popes, e.g. St. Gregory, who had done the like. Louis
+was able to pay his devotion to the relic, but died after all. The
+Catacombs were at that time forgotten, yet even Savonarola (l. c. col.
+1150) says of Rome: 'Velut ager Aceldama Sanctorum habita est.'
+
+[1088] Bursellis, _Annal. Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 905. It was one
+of the sixteen patricians, Bartol. della Volta, d. 1485 or 1486.
+
+[1089] Vasari, iii. 111 sqq. note. _Vita di Ghiberti._
+
+[1090] Matteo Villani, iii. 15 and 16.
+
+[1091] We must make a further distinction between the Italian cultus of
+the bodies of historical saints of recent date, and the northern
+practice of collecting bones and relics of a sacred antiquity. Such
+remains were preserved in great abundance in the Lateran, which, for
+that reason, was of special importance for pilgrims. But on the tombs of
+St. Dominic and St. Anthony of Padua rested, not only the halo of
+sanctity, but the splendour of historical fame.
+
+[1092] The remarkable judgment in his _De Sacris Diebus_, the work of
+his later years, refers both to sacred and profane art (l. i.). Among
+the Jews, he says, there was a good reason for prohibiting all graven
+images, else they would have relapsed into the idolatry or devil-worship
+of the nations around them:
+
+    Nunc autem, postquam penitus natura Satanum
+    Cognita, et antiqua sine majestate relicta est,
+    Nulla ferunt nobis statuae discrimina, nullos
+    Fert pictura dolos; jam sunt innoxia signa;
+    Sunt modo virtutum testes monimentaque laudum
+    Marmora, et aeternae decora immortalia famae.
+
+
+[1093] Battista Mantovano complains of certain 'nebulones' (_De Sacris
+Diebus_, l. v.) who would not believe in the genuineness of the Sacred
+Blood at Mantua. The same criticism which called in question the
+Donation of Constantine was also, though indirectly, hostile to the
+belief in relics.
+
+[1094] Especially the famous prayer of St. Bernard, _Paradiso_, xxxiii.
+1, 'Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio.'
+
+[1095] Perhaps we may add Pius II., whose elegy on the Virgin is printed
+in the _Opera_, p. 964, and who from his youth believed himself to be
+under her special protection. Jac. Card. Papiens. 'De Morte Pii,' _Opp._
+p. 656.
+
+[1096] That is, at the time when Sixtus IV. was so zealous for the
+Immaculate Conception. _Extravag. Commun._ l. iii. tit. xii. He founded,
+too, the Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, and the
+Feasts of St. Anne and St. Joseph. See Trithem. _Ann. Hirsaug._ ii. p.
+518.
+
+[1097] The few frigid sonnets of Vittoria on the Madonna are most
+instructive in this respect (n. 85 sqq. ed. P. Visconti, Rome, 1840).
+
+[1098] Bapt. Mantuan. _De Sacris Diebus_, l. v., and especially the
+speech of the younger Pico, which was intended for the Lateran Council,
+in Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, viii. p. 115. Comp. p. 121, note 3.
+
+[1099] _Monach. Paduani Chron._ l. iii. at the beginning. We there read
+of this revival: 'Invasit primitus Perusinos, Romanes postmodum, deinde
+fere Itali� populos universos.' Guil. Ventura (_Fragmenta de Gestis
+Astensium_ in _Mon. Hist. Patr. SS._ tom. iii. col. 701) calls the
+Flagellant pilgrimage 'admirabilis Lombardorum commotio;' hermits came
+forth from their cells and summoned the cities to repent.
+
+[1100] G. Villani, viii. 122, xi. 23. The former were not received in
+Florence, the latter were welcomed all the more readily.
+
+[1101] Corio, fol. 281. Leon. Aretinus, _Hist. Flor._ lib. xii. (at the
+beginning) mentions a sudden revival called forth by the processions of
+the 'dealbati' from the Alps to Lucca, Florence, and still farther.
+
+[1102] Pilgrimages to distant places had already become very rare. Those
+of the princes of the House of Este to Jerusalem, St. Jago, and Vienne
+are enumerated in Murat. xxiv. col. 182, 187, 190, 279. For that of
+Rinaldo Albizzi to the Holy Land, see Macchiavelli, _Stor. Fior._ l. v.
+Here, too, the desire of fame is sometimes the motive. The chronicler
+Giov. Cavalcanti (_Ist. Fiorentine_, ed. Polidori, ii. 478) says of
+Lionardo Fescobaldi, who wanted to go with a companion (about the year
+1400) to the Holy Sepulchre: 'Stimarono di eternarsi nella mente degli
+uomini futuri.'
+
+[1103] Bursellis, _Annal. Bon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 890.
+
+[1104] Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 855 sqq. The report had got
+about that it had rained blood outside the gate. All rushed forth, yet
+'gli uomini di guidizio non lo credono.'
+
+[1105] Burigozzo, _Arch. Stor._ iii. 486. For the misery which then
+prevailed in Lombardy, Galeazzo Capello (_De Rebus nuper in Italia
+Gestis_) is the best authority. Milan suffered hardly less than Rome did
+in the sack of 1527.
+
+[1106] It was also called 'l'arca del testimonio,' and people told how
+it was 'conzado' (constructed) 'con gran misterio.'
+
+[1107] _Diario Ferrarese_, in Murat. xxiv. col. 317, 322, 323, 326, 386,
+401.
+
+[1108] 'Ad uno santo homo o santa donna,' says the chronicle. Married
+men were forbidden to keep concubines.
+
+[1109] The sermon was especially addressed to them; after it a Jew was
+baptised, 'ma non di quelli' adds the annalist, 'che erano stati a udire
+la predica.'
+
+[1110] 'Per buono rispetto a lui noto e perch� sempre � buono a star
+bene con Iddio,' says the annalist. After describing the arrangements,
+he adds resignedly: 'La cagione perch� sia fatto et si habbia a fare non
+s'intende, basta che ogni bene � bene.'
+
+[1111] He is called 'Messo del Cancellieri del Duca.' The whole thing
+was evidently intended to appear the work of the court only, and not of
+any ecclesiastical authority.
+
+[1112] See the quotations from Pico's _Discourse on the Dignity of Man_
+above, pp. 354-5.
+
+[1113] Not to speak of the fact that a similar tolerance or indifference
+was not uncommon among the Arabians themselves.
+
+[1114] So in the _Decameron_. Sultans without name in Massuccio nov. 46,
+48, 49; one called 'R� di Fes,' another 'R� di Tunisi.' In _Dittamondo_,
+ii. 25, we read, 'il buono Saladin.' For the Venetian alliance with the
+Sultan of Egypt in the year 1202, see G. Hanotaux in the _Revue
+Historique_ iv. (1877) pp. 74-102. There were naturally also many
+attacks on Mohammedanism. For the Turkish woman baptized first in Venice
+and again in Rome, see Cechetti i. 487.
+
+[1115] _Philelphi Epistolae_, Venet. 1502 fol. 90 _b._ sqq.
+
+[1116] _Decamerone_ i. nov. 3. Boccaccio is the first to name the
+Christian religion, which the others do not. For an old French authority
+of the thirteenth century, see Tobler, _Li di dou Vrai Aniel_, Leipzig,
+1871. For the Hebrew story of Abr. Abulafia (b. 1241 in Spain, came to
+Italy about 1290 in the hope of converting the Pope to Judaism), in
+which two servants claim each to hold the jewel buried for the son, see
+Steinschneider, _Polem. und Apol. Lit. der Arab. Sprache_, pp. 319 and
+360. From these and other sources we conclude that the story originally
+was less definite than as we now have it (in Abul. e.g. it is used
+polemically against the Christians), and that the doctrine of the
+equality of the three religions is a later addition. Comp. Reuter,
+_Gesch. der Relig. Aufkl�rung im M. A._ (Berlin, 1877), iii. 302 sqq.
+390.
+
+[1117] _De Tribus Impostoribus_, the name of a work attributed to
+Frederick II. among many other people, and which by no means answers the
+expectations raised by the title. Latest ed. by Weller, Heilbronn, 1876.
+The nationality of the author and the date of composition are both
+disputed. See Reuter, op. cit. ii. 273-302.
+
+[1118] In the mouth, nevertheless, of the fiend Astarotte, canto xxv.
+str. 231 sqq. Comp. str. 141 sqq.
+
+[1119] Canto xxviii. str. 38 sqq.
+
+[1120] Canto xviii. str. 112 to the end.
+
+[1121] Pulci touches, though hastily, on a similar conception in his
+Prince Chiaristante (canto xxi. str. 101 sqq., 121 sqq., 145 sqq., 163
+sqq.), who believes nothing and causes himself and his wife to be
+worshipped. We are reminded of Sigismondo Malatesta (p. 245).
+
+[1122] Giov. Villani, iv. 29, vi. 46. The name occurs as early as 1150
+in Northern countries. It is defined by William of Malmesbury (iii. 237,
+ed. Londin, 1840): 'Epicureorum ... qui opinantur animam corpore solutam
+in aerem evanescere, in auras effluere.'
+
+[1123] See the argument in the third book of Lucretius. The name of
+Epicurean was afterwards used as synonymous with freethinker. Lorenzo
+Valla (_Opp._ 795 sqq.) speaks as follows of Epicurus: 'Quis eo parcior,
+quis contentior, quis modestior, et quidem in nullo philosophorum omnium
+minus invenio fuisse vitiorum, plurimique honesti viri cum Graecorum,
+tum Romanorum, Epicurei fuerunt.' Valla was defending himself to
+Eugenius IV. against the attacks of Fra Antonio da Bitonto and others.
+
+[1124] _Inferno_, vii. 67-96.
+
+[1125] _Purgatorio_, xvi. 73. Compare the theory of the influence of the
+planets in the _Convito_. Even the fiend Astarotte in Pulci (_Morgante_,
+xxv. str. 150) attests the freedom of the human will and the justice of
+God.
+
+[1126] Comp. Voigt, _Wiederbelebung_, 165-170.
+
+[1127] _Vespasiano Fiorent._ pp. 26, 320, 435, 626, 651. Murat. xx. col.
+532.
+
+[1128] In Platina's introd. to his Life of Christ the religious
+influence of the Renaissance is curiously exemplified (_Vit� Paparum_,
+at the beginning): Christ, he says, fully attained the fourfold Platonic
+'nobilitas' according to his 'genus': 'quem enim ex gentilibus habemus
+qui gloria et nomine cum David et Salomone, quique sapientia et doctrina
+cum Christo ipso conferri merito debeat et possit?' Judaism, like
+classical antiquity, was also explained on a Christian hypothesis. Pico
+and Pietro Galatino endeavoured to show that Christian doctrine was
+foreshadowed in the Talmud and other Jewish writings.
+
+[1129] On Pomponazzo, see the special works; among others, Bitter,
+_Geschichte der Philosophie_, bd. ix.
+
+[1130] Paul. Jovii, _Elog. Lit._ p. 90. G. M. was, however, compelled to
+recant publicly. His letter to Lorenzo (May 17, 1478) begging him to
+intercede with the Pope, 'satis enim poenarum dedi,' is given by
+Malagola, Codro Urceo, p. 433.
+
+[1131] _Codri Urcei Opera_, with his life by Bart. Bianchini; and in his
+philological lectures, pp. 65, 151, 278, &c.
+
+[1132] On one occasion he says, 'In Laudem Christi:'
+
+    Phoebum alii vates musasque Jovemque sequuntur,
+        At mihi pro vero nomine Christus erit.
+
+He also (fol. x. _b_) attacks the Bohemians. Huss and Jerome of Prague
+are defended by Poggio in his famous letter to Lion. Aretino, and placed
+on a level with Mucius Scaevola and Socrates.
+
+[1133] 'Audi virgo ea quae tibi mentis compos et ex animo dicam. Si
+forte cum ad ultimum vitae finem pervenero supplex accedam ad te spem
+oratum, ne me audias neve inter tuos accipias oro; cum infernis diis in
+aeternum vitam degere decrevi.'
+
+[1134] 'Animum meum seu animam'--a distinction by which philology used
+then to perplex theology.
+
+[1135] Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 311: 'Christianam fidem si miraculis
+non esset confirmata, honestate sua recipi debuisse.' It may be
+questioned whether all that Platina attributes to the Pope is in fact
+authentic.
+
+[1136] Preface to the _Historia Ferdinandi I._ (_Hist. Ztschr._ xxxiii.
+61) and _Antid. in Pogg._ lib. iv. _Opp._ p. 256 sqq. Pontanus (_De
+Sermone_, i. 18) says that Valla did not hesitate 'dicere profiterique
+palam habere se quoque in Christum spicula.' Pontano, however, was a
+friend of Valla's enemies at Naples.
+
+[1137] Especially when the monks improvised them in the pulpit. But the
+old and recognised miracles did not remain unassailed. Firenzuola
+(_Opere_, vol. ii. p. 208, in the tenth novel) ridicules the Franciscans
+of Novara, who wanted to spend money which they had embezzled, in adding
+a chapel to their church, 'dove fusse dipinta quella bella storia,
+quando S. Francesco predicava agli uccelli nel deserto; e quando ei fece
+la santa zuppa, e che l'agnolo Gabriello gli port� i zoccoli.'
+
+[1138] Some facts about him are to be found in Bapt. Mantuan. _De
+Patientia_, l. iii. cap. 13.
+
+[1139] Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 915.
+
+[1140] How far these blasphemous utterances sometimes went, has been
+shown by Gieseler (_Kirchengeschichte_, ii. iv. � 154, anm.) who quotes
+several striking instances.
+
+[1141] Voigt, _Enea Silvio_, iii. 581. It is not known what happened to
+the Bishop Petro of Aranda who (1500) denied the Divinity of Christ and
+the existence of Hell and Purgatory, and denounced indulgences as a
+device of the popes invented for their private advantage. For him, see
+_Burchardi Diarium_, ed. Leibnitz, p. 63 sqq.
+
+[1142] Jov. Pontanus, _De Fortuna_, _Opp._ i. 792-921. Comp. _Opp._ ii.
+286.
+
+[1143] �n. Sylvii, _Opera_, p. 611.
+
+[1144] Poggius, _De Miseriis Humanae Conditionis_.
+
+[1145] Caracciolo, _De Varietate Fortunae_, in Murat. xxii., one of the
+most valuable writings of a period rich in such works. On Fortune in
+public processions, see p. 421.
+
+[1146] _Leonis X. Vita Anonyma_, in Roscoe, ed. Bossi, xii. p. 153.
+
+[1147] Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 909: 'Monimentum
+hoc conditum a Joanne Bentivolo secundo patriae rectore, cui virtus et
+fortuna cuncta qu� optari possunt affatim praestiterunt.' It is still
+not quite certain whether this inscription was outside, and visible to
+everybody, or, like another mentioned just before, hidden on one of the
+foundation stones. In the latter case, a fresh idea is involved. By this
+secret inscription, which perhaps only the chronicler knew of, Fortune
+is to be magically bound to the building.
+
+[According to the words of the chronicle, the inscription cannot have
+stood on the walls of the newly built tower. The exact spot is
+uncertain.--L.G.]
+
+[1148] 'Quod nimium gentilitatis amatores essemus.' Paganism, at least
+in externals, certainly went rather far. Inscriptions lately found in
+the Catacombs show that the members of the Academy described themselves
+as 'sacerdotes,' and called Pomponius L�tus 'pontifex maximus;' the
+latter once addressed Platina as 'pater sanctissimus.' Gregorovius, vii.
+578.
+
+[1149] While the plastic arts at all events distinguished between angels
+and 'putti,' and used the former for all serious purposes. In the
+_Annal. Estens._ Murat. xx. col. 468, the 'amorino' is naively called
+'instar Cupidinis angelus.' Comp. the speech made before Leo X. (1521),
+in which the passage occurs: 'Quare et te non jam Juppiter, sed Virgo
+Capitolina Dei parens qu� hujus urbis et collis reliquis pr�sides,
+Romamque et Capitolium tutaris.' Greg. viii. 294.
+
+[1150] Della Valle, _Lettere Sanesi_, iii. 18.
+
+[1151] Macrob. _Saturnal._ iii. 9. Doubtless the canon did not omit the
+gestures there prescribed. Comp. Gregorovius, viii. 294, for Bembo. For
+the paganism thus prevalent in Rome, see also Ranke, _P�pste_, i. 73
+sqq. Comp. also Gregorovius, viii. 268.
+
+[1152] _Monachus Paduan._ l. ii. ap. Urstisius, _Scriptt._ i. pp. 598,
+599, 602, 607. The last Visconti (p. 37) had also a number of these men
+in his service (Comp. Decembrio, in Murat. xx. col. 1017): he undertook
+nothing without their advice. Among them was a Jew named Helias.
+Gasparino da Barzizzi once addressed him: 'Magna vi astrorum fortuna
+tuas res reget.' G. B. _Opera_, ed. Furietto, p. 38.
+
+[1153] E.g. Florence, where Bonatto filled the office for a long period.
+See too Matteo Villani, xi. 3, where the city astrologer is evidently
+meant.
+
+[1154] Libri, _Hist. des Sciences Math�m._ ii. 52, 193. At Bologna this
+professorship is said to have existed in 1125. Comp. the list of
+professors at Pavia, in Corio, fol. 290. For the professorship at the
+Sapienza under Leo X., see Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, v. p. 283.
+
+[1155] J. A. Campanus lays stress on the value and importance of
+astrology, and concludes with the words: 'Quamquam Augustinus
+sanctissimus ille vir quidem ac doctissimus, sed fortassis ad fidem
+religionemque propensior negat quicquam vel boni vel mali astrorum
+necessitate contingere.' 'Oratio initio studii Perugi� habita,' compare
+_Opera_, Rome, 1495.
+
+[1156] About 1260 Pope Alexander IV. compelled a Cardinal (and
+shamefaced astrologer) Bianco to bring out a number of political
+prophecies. Giov. Villani, vi. 81.
+
+[1157] _De Dictis, &c. Alfonsi, Opera_, p. 493. He held it to be
+'pulchrius quam utile.' Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 310. For Sixtus IV.
+comp. Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 173, 186. He caused the
+hours for audiences, receptions, and the like, to be fixed by the
+'planetarii.' In the _Europa_, c. 49, Pius II. mentions that Baptista
+Blasius, an astronomer from Cremona, had prophesied the misfortunes of
+Fr. Foscaro 'tanquam pr�vidisset.'
+
+[1158] Brosch, _Julius II._ (Gotha, 1878), pp. 97 and 323.
+
+[1159] P. Valeriano, _De Infel. Lit._ (318-324) speaks of Fr. Friuli,
+who wrote on Leo's horoscope, and 'abditissima qu�que anteact� �tatis et
+uni ipsi cognita principi explicuerat qu�que incumberent qu�que futura
+essent ad unguem ut eventus postmodum comprobavit, in singulos fere dies
+pr�dixerat.'
+
+[1160] Ranke, _P�pste_, i. 247.
+
+[1161] _Vespas. Fiorent._ p. 660, comp. 341. _Ibid._ p. 121, another
+Pagolo is mentioned as court mathematician and astrologer of Federigo of
+Montefeltro. Curiously enough, he was a German.
+
+[1162] Firmicus Maternus, _Matheseos Libri_ viii. at the end of the
+second book.
+
+[1163] In Bandello, iii. nov. 60, the astrologer of Alessandro
+Bentivoglio, in Milan, confessed himself a poor devil before the whole
+company.
+
+[1164] It was in such a moment of resolution that Ludovico Moro had the
+cross with this inscription made, which is now in the Minster at Chur.
+Sixtus IV. too once said that he would try if the proverb was true. On
+this saying of the astrologer Ptolem�us, which B. Fazio took to be
+Virgilian, see Laur. Valla, _Opera_, p. 461.
+
+[1165] The father of Piero Capponi, himself an astrologer, put his son
+into trade lest he should get the dangerous wound in the head which
+threatened him. _Vita di P. Capponi, Arch. Stor._ iv. ii. 15. For an
+instance in the life of Cardanus, see p. 334. The physician and
+astrologer Pierleoni of Spoleto believed that he would be drowned,
+avoided in consequence all watery places, and refused brilliant
+positions offered him at Venice and Padua. Paul. Jov. _Elog. Liter._ pp.
+67 sqq. Finally he threw himself into the water, in despair at the
+charge brought against him of complicity in Lorenzo's death, and was
+actually drowned. Hier. Aliottus had been told to be careful in his
+sixty-second year, as his life would then be in danger. He lived with
+great circumspection, kept clear of the doctors, and the year passed
+safely. H. A. _Opuscula_ (Arezzo, 1769), ii. 72. Marsilio Ficino, who
+despised astrology (_Opp._ p. 772) was written to by a friend (_Epist._
+lib. 17): 'Praeterea me memini a duobus vestrorum astrologis audivisse,
+te ex quadam siderum positione antiquas revocaturum philosophorum
+sententias.'
+
+[1166] For instances in the life of Ludovico Moro, see Senarega, in
+Murat, xxiv. col. 518, 524. Benedictus, in Eccard, ii. col. 1623. And
+yet his father, the great Francesco Sforza, had despised astrology, and
+his grandfather Giacomo had not at any rate followed its warnings.
+Corio, fol. 321, 413.
+
+[1167] For the facts here quoted, see _Annal. Foroliviens_. in Murat.
+xxii. col. 233 sqq. (comp. col. 150). Leonbattista Alberti endeavoured
+to give a spiritual meaning to the ceremony of laying the foundation.
+_Opere Volgari_, tom. iv. p. 314 (or _De Re �dific_. 1. i.). For Bonatto
+see Filippo Villani, _Vite_ and _Delia Vita e delle Opere di Guido
+Bonati, Astrologo e Astronomo del Secolo Decimoterzo, raccolte da E.
+Boncompagni_, Rome 1851. B.'s great work, _De Astronomia_, lib. x. has
+been often printed.
+
+[1168] In the horoscopes of the second foundation of Florence (Giov.
+Villani, iii. 1. under Charles the Great) and of the first of Venice
+(see above, p. 62), an old tradition is perhaps mingled with the poetry
+of the Middle Ages.
+
+[1169] For one of these victories, see the remarkable passage quoted
+from Bonatto in Steinschneider, in the _Zeitschr. d. D. Morg. Ges._ xxv.
+p. 416. On B. comp. _ibid._ xviii. 120 sqq.
+
+[1170] _Ann. Foroliv._ 235-238. Filippo Villani, _Vite._ Macchiavelli,
+_Stor. Fior._ l. i. When constellations which augured victory appeared,
+Bonatto ascended with his book and astrolabe to the tower of San
+Mercuriale above the Piazza, and when the right moment came gave the
+signal for the great bell to be rung. Yet it was admitted that he was
+often wide of the mark, and foresaw neither his own death nor the fate
+of Montefeltro. Not far from Cesena he was killed by robbers, on his way
+back to Forli from Paris and from Italian universities where he had been
+lecturing. As a weather prophet he was once overmatched and made game of
+by a countryman.
+
+[1171] Matteo Villani, xi. 3; see above, p. 508.
+
+[1172] Jovian. Pontan. _De Fortitudine_, l. i. See p. 511 note 1, for
+the honourable exception made by the first Sforza.
+
+[1173] Paul. Jov. _Elog._ sub v. Livianus, p. 219.
+
+[1174] Who tells it us himself. Benedictus, in Eccard, ii. col. 1617.
+
+[1175] In this sense we must understand the words of Jac. Nardi, _Vita
+d'Ant. Giacomini_, p. 65. The same pictures were common on clothes and
+household utensils. At the reception of Lucrezia Borgia in Ferrara, the
+mule of the Duchess of Urbino wore trappings of black velvet with
+astrological figures in gold. _Arch. Stor. Append._ ii. p. 305.
+
+[1176] �n. Sylvius, in the passage quoted above p. 508; comp. _Opp._
+481.
+
+[1177] Azario, in Corio, fol. 258.
+
+[1178] Considerations of this kind probably influenced the Turkish
+astrologers who, after the battle of Nicopolis, advised the Sultan
+Bajazet I. to consent to the ransom of John of Burgundy, since 'for his
+sake much Christian blood would be shed.' It was not difficult to
+foresee the further course of the French civil war. _Magn. Chron.
+Belgicum_, p. 358. _Juv�nal des Ursins_, ad. a. 1396.
+
+[1179] Benedictus, in Eccard, ii. col. 1579. It was said of King
+Ferrante in 1493 that he would lose his throne 'sine cruore sed sola
+fama'--which actually happened.
+
+[1180] Comp. Steinschneider, _Apokalypsen mit polemischer Tendenz_, D.
+M. G. Z. xxviii. 627 sqq. xxix. 261.
+
+[1181] Bapt. Mantuan. _De Patientia_, l. iii. cap. 12.
+
+[1182] Giov. Villani, x. 39, 40. Other reasons also existed, e.g. the
+jealousy of his colleagues. Bonatto had taught the same, and had
+explained the miracle of Divine Love in St. Francis as the effect of the
+planet Mars. Comp. Jo. Picus, _Adv. Astrol._ ii. 5.
+
+[1183] They were painted by Miretto at the beginning of the fifteenth
+century. Acc. to Scardeonius they were destined 'ad indicandum
+nascentium naturas per gradus et numeros'--a more popular way of
+teaching than we can now well imagine. It was astrology '� la port�e de
+tout le monde.'
+
+[1184] He says (_Orationes_, fol. 35, 'In Nuptias') of astrology: 'haec
+efficit ut homines parum a Diis distare videantur'! Another enthusiast
+of the same time is Jo. Garzonius, _De Dignitate Urbis Bononiae_, in
+Murat. xxi. col. 1163.
+
+[1185] Petrarca, _Epp. Seniles_, iii. 1 (p. 765) and elsewhere. The
+letter in question was written to Boccaccio. On Petrarch's polemic
+against the astrologers, see Geiger. _Petr._ 87-91 and 267, note 11.
+
+[1186] Franco Sacchetti (nov. 151) ridicules their claims to wisdom.
+
+[1187] Gio. Villani, iii. x. 39. Elsewhere he appears as a devout
+believer in astrology, x. 120, xii. 40.
+
+[1188] In the passage xi. 3.
+
+[1189] Gio. Villani, xi. 2, xii. 58.
+
+[1190] The author of the _Annales Placentini_ (in Murat. xx. col. 931),
+the same Alberto di Ripalta mentioned at p. 241, took part in this
+controversy. The passage is in other respects remarkable, since it
+contains the popular opinion with regard to the nine known comets, their
+colour, origin, and significance. Comp. Gio. Villani, xi. 67. He speaks
+of a comet as the herald of great and generally disastrous events.
+
+[1191] Paul. Jov. _Vita Leonis_ xx. l. iii. where it appears that Leo
+himself was a believer at least in premonitions and the like, see above
+p. 509.
+
+[1192] Jo. Picus Mirand. _Adversus Astrologos_, libri xii.
+
+[1193] Acc. to Paul, Jov. _Elog. Lit._ sub tit. Jo. Picus, the result he
+achieved was 'ut subtilium disciplinarum professores a scribendo
+deterruisse videatur.'
+
+[1194] _De Rebus Caelestibus_, libri xiv. (_Opp._ iii. 1963-2591). In
+the twelfth book, dedicated to Paolo Cortese, he will not admit the
+latter's refutation of astrology. �gidius, _Opp._ ii. 1455-1514. Pontano
+had dedicated his little work _De Luna_ (_Opp._ iii. 2592) to the same
+hermit Egidio (of Viterbo?)
+
+[1195] For the latter passage, see p. 1486. The difference between
+Pontano and Pico is thus put by Franc. Pudericus, one of the
+interlocutors in the dialogue (p. 1496): 'Pontanus non ut Johannes Picus
+in disciplinam ipsam armis equisque, quod dicitur, irrumpit, cum illam
+tueatur, ut cognitu maxime dignam ac pene divinam, sed astrologos
+quosdam, ut parum cautos minimeque prudentes insectetur et rideat.'
+
+[1196] In S. Maria del Popolo at Rome. The angels remind us of Dante's
+theory at the beginning of the _Convito_.
+
+[1197] This was the case with Antonio Galateo who, in a letter to
+Ferdinand the Catholic (Mai, _Spicileg. Rom._ vol. viii. p. 226, ad a.
+1510), disclaims astrology with violence, and in another letter to the
+Count of Potenza (_ibid._ p. 539) infers from the stars that the Turks
+would attack Rhodes the same year.
+
+[1198] _Ricordi_, l. c. n. 57.
+
+[1199] Many instances of such superstitions in the case of the last
+Visconti are mentioned by Decembrio (Murat. xx. col. 1016 sqq.). Odaxius
+says in his speech at the burial of Guidobaldo (_Bembi Opera_, i. 598
+sqq.), that the gods had announced his approaching death by
+thunderbolts, earthquakes, and other signs and wonders.
+
+[1200] Varchi, _Stor. Fior._ l. iv. (p. 174); prophecies and
+premonitions were then as rife in Florence as at Jerusalem during the
+siege. Comp. _ibid._ iii. 143, 195; iv. 43, 177.
+
+[1201] Matarazzo, _Archiv. Stor._ xvi. ii. p. 208.
+
+[1202] Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. 324, for the year 1514.
+
+[1203] For the Madonna dell'Arbore in the Cathedral at Milan, and what
+she did in 1515, see Prato, l. c. p. 327. He also records the discovery
+of a dead dragon as thick as a horse in the excavations for a mortuary
+chapel near S. Nazaro. The head was taken to the Palace of the Triulzi
+for whom the chapel was built.
+
+[1204] 'Et fuit mirabile quod illico pluvia cessavit.' _Diar. Parmense_
+in Murat. xxii. col. 280. The author shares the popular hatred of the
+usurers. Comp. col. 371.
+
+[1205] _Conjurationis Pactianae Commentarius_, in the appendices to
+Roscoe's _Lorenzo_. Politian was in general an opponent of astrology.
+The saints were naturally able to cause the rain to cease. Comp. �neas
+Sylvius, in his life of Bernadino da Siena (_De Vir. Ill._ p. 25):
+'jussit in virtute Jesu nubem abire, quo facto solutis absque pluvia
+nubibus, prior serenitas rediit'.
+
+[1206] _Poggi Facetiae_, fol. 174. �n. Sylvius (_De Europa_, c. 53, 54,
+_Opera_, pp. 451, 455) mentions prodigies which may have really
+happened, such as combats between animals and strange appearances in the
+sky, and mentions them chiefly as curiosities, even when adding the
+results attributed to them. Similarly Antonio Ferrari (il Galateo), _De
+Situ Iapygiae_, p. 121, with the explanation: 'Et hae, ut puto, species
+erant earum rerum qu� longe aberant atque ab eo loco in quo species
+visae sunt minime poterant.'
+
+[1207] _Poggi Facetiae_, fol. 160. Comp. Pausanias, ix. 20.
+
+[1208] Varchi, iii 195. Two suspected persons decided on flight in 1529,
+because they opened the �neid at book iii. 44. Comp. Rabelais,
+_Pantagruel_, iii. 10.
+
+[1209] The imaginations of the scholars, such as the 'splendor' and the
+'spiritus' of Cardanus, and the 'd�mon familiaris' of his father, may be
+taken for what they are worth. Comp. Cardanus, _De Propria Vita_, cap.
+4, 38, 47. He was himself an opponent of magic; cap. 39. For the
+prodigies and ghosts he met with, see cap. 37, 41. For the terror of
+ghosts felt by the last Visconti, see Decembrio, in Murat. xx. col.
+1016.
+
+[1210] 'Molte fiate i morti guastano le creature.' Bandello, ii. nov. 1.
+We read (Galateo, p. 177) that the 'anim�' of wicked men rise from the
+grave, appear to their friends and acquaintances, 'animalibus vexi,
+pueros sugere ac necare, deinde in sepulcra reverti.'
+
+[1211] Galateo, l. c. We also read (p. 119) of the 'Fata Morgana' and
+other similar appearances.
+
+[1212] Bandello, iii. nov. 20. It is true that the ghost was only a
+lover wishing to frighten the occupier of the palace, who was also the
+husband of the beloved lady. The lover and his accomplices dressed
+themselves up as devils; one of them, who could imitate the cry of
+different animals, had been sent for from a distance.
+
+[1213] Graziani, _Arch. Stor._ xvi. i. p. 640, ad a. 1467. The guardian
+died of fright.
+
+[1214] _Balth. Castilionii Carmina_; Prosopopeja Lud. Pici.
+
+[1215] Alexandri ab Alexandro, _Dierum Genialium_, libri vi. (Colon.
+1539), is an authority of the first rank for these subjects, the more so
+as the author, a friend of Pontanus and a member of his academy, asserts
+that what he records either happened to himself, or was communicated to
+him by thoroughly trustworthy witnesses. Lib. vi. cap. 19: two evil men
+and a monk are attacked by devils, whom they recognise by the shape of
+their feet, and put to flight, partly by force and partly by the sign of
+the cross. Lib. vi. cap. 21: A servant, cast into prison by a cruel
+prince on account of a small offence, calls upon the devil, is
+miraculously brought out of the prison and back again, visits meanwhile
+the nether world, shows the prince his hand scorched by the flames of
+Hell, tells him on behalf of a departed spirit certain secrets which had
+been communicated to the latter, exhorts him to lay aside his cruelty,
+and dies soon after from the effects of the fright. Lib. ii. c. 19, iii.
+15, v. 23: Ghosts of departed friends, of St. Cataldus, and of unknown
+beings in Rome, Arezzo and Naples. Lib. ii. 22, iii. 8: Appearances of
+mermen and mermaids at Naples, in Spain, and in the Peloponnesus; in the
+latter case guaranteed by Theodore Gaza and George of Trebizond.
+
+[1216] Gio. Villani, xi. 2. He had it from the Abbot of Vallombrosa, to
+whom the hermit had communicated it.
+
+[1217] Another view of the D�mons was given by Gemisthos Pletho, whose
+great philosophical work [Greek: oi nomoi], of which only
+fragments are now left (ed. Alexander, Paris, 1858), was probably known
+more fully to the Italians of the fifteenth century, either by means of
+copies or of tradition, and exercised undoubtedly a great influence on
+the philosophical, political, and religious culture of the time.
+According to him the d�mons, who belong to the third order of the gods,
+are preserved from all error, and are capable of following in the steps
+of the gods who stand above them; they are spirits who bring to men the
+good things 'which come down from Zeus through the other gods in order;
+they purify and watch over man, they raise and strengthen his heart.'
+Comp. Fritz Schultze, _Gesch. der Philosophie der Renaissance_, Jena,
+1874.
+
+[1218] Yet but little remained of the wonders attributed to her. For
+probably the last metamorphosis of a man into an ass, in the eleventh
+century under Leo IX., see Giul. Malmesbur. ii. 171.
+
+[1219] This was probably the case with the possessed woman, who in 1513
+at Ferrara and elsewhere was consulted by distinguished Lombards as to
+future events. Her name was Rodogine. See Rabelais, _Pantagruel_, iv.
+58.
+
+[1220] Jovian. Pontan. Antonius.
+
+[1221] How widespread the belief in witches then was, is shown by the
+fact that in 1483 Politian gave a 'praelectio' 'in priora Aristotelis
+Analytica cui titulus Lamia' (Italian trans. by Isidore del Lungo, Flor.
+1864) Comp. Reumont, _Lorenzo_, ii. 75-77. Fiesole, according to this,
+was, in a certain sense, a witches' nest.
+
+[1222] Graziani, _Arch. Stor._ xvi. i. p. 565, ad a. 1445, speaking of a
+witch at Nocera, who only offered half the sum, and was accordingly
+burnt. The law was aimed at such persons as 'facciono le fature overo
+venefitie overo encantatione d'ommunde spirite a nuocere,' l. c. note 1,
+2.
+
+[1223] Lib. i. ep. 46, _Opera_, p. 531 sqq. For 'umbra' p. 552 read
+'Umbria,' and for 'lacum' read 'locum.'
+
+[1224] He calls him later on: 'Medicus Ducis Saxoni�, homo tum dives tum
+potens.'
+
+[1225] In the fourteenth century there existed a kind of hell-gate near
+Ansedonia in Tuscany. It was a cave, with footprints of men and animals
+in the sand, which whenever they were effaced, reappeared the next day.
+Uberti. _Il Dittamondo_, l. iii. cap. 9.
+
+[1226] _Pii II. Comment._ l. i. p. 10.
+
+[1227] Benv. Cellini, l. i. cap. 65.
+
+[1228] _L'Italia Liberata da' Goti_, canto xiv. It may be questioned
+whether Trissino himself believed in the possibility of his description,
+or whether he was not rather romancing. The same doubt is permissible in
+the case of his probable model, Lucan (book vi.), who represents the
+Thessalian witch conjuring up a corpse before Sextus Pompejus.
+
+[1229] _Septimo Decretal_, lib. v. tit. xii. It begins: 'Summis
+desiderantes affectibus' &c. I may here remark that a full consideration
+of the subject has convinced me that there are in this case no grounds
+for believing in a survival of pagan beliefs. To satisfy ourselves that
+the imagination of the mendicant friars is solely responsible for this
+delusion, we have only to study, in the Memoirs of Jacques du Clerc, the
+so-called trial of the Waldenses of Arras in the year 1459. A century's
+prosecutions and persecutions brought the popular imagination into such
+a state that witchcraft was accepted as a matter of course and
+reproduced itself naturally.
+
+[1230] Of Alexander VI., Leo X., Hadrian VI.
+
+[1231] Proverbial as the country of witches, e.g. _Orlandino_, i. 12.
+
+[1232] E.g. Bandello, iii. nov. 29, 52. Prato, _Arch. Stor._ iii. 409.
+Bursellis, _Ann. Bon._ in Murat. xxiii. col. 897, mentions the
+condemnation of a prior in 1468, who kept a ghostly brothel: 'cives
+Bononienses coire faciebat cum d�monibus in specie puellarum.' He
+offered sacrifices to the d�mons. See for a parallel case, Procop.
+_Hist. Arcana_, c. 12, where a real brothel is frequented by a d�mon,
+who turns the other visitors out of doors. The Galateo (p. 116) confirms
+the existence of the belief in witches: 'volare per longinquas regiones,
+choreas per paludes dicere et d�monibus cnogredi, ingredi et egredi per
+clausa ostia et foramina.'
+
+[1233] For the loathsome apparatus of the witches' kitchens, see
+_Maccaroneide_, Phant. xvi. xxi., where the whole procedure is
+described.
+
+[1234] In the _Ragionamento del Zoppino_. He is of opinion that the
+courtesans learn their arts from certain Jewish women, who are in
+possession of 'malie.' The following passage is very remarkable. Bembo
+says in the life of Guidobaldo (_Opera_, i. 614): 'Guid. constat sive
+corporis et naturae vitio, seu quod vulgo creditum est, actibus magicis
+ab Octaviano patruo propter regni cupiditatem impeditum, quarum omnino
+ille artium expeditissimus habebatur, nulla cum femina coire unquam in
+tota vita potuisse, nec unquam fuisse ad rem uxoriam idoneum.'
+
+[1235] Varchi, _Stor. Fior._ ii. p. 153.
+
+[1236] Curious information is given by Landi, in the _Commentario_, fol.
+36 a and 37 _a_, about two magicians, a Sicilian and a Jew; we read of
+magical mirrors, of a death's-head speaking, and of birds stopped short
+in their flight.
+
+[1237] Stress is laid on this reservation. Corn. Agrippa, _De Occulta
+Philosophia_, cap. 39.
+
+[1238] _Septimo Decretal_, l. c.
+
+[1239] _Zodiacus Vitae_, xv. 363-549, comp. x. 393 sqq.
+
+[1240] _Ibid._ ix. 291 sqq.
+
+[1241] _Ibid._ x. 770 sqq.
+
+[1242] The mythical type of the magician among the poets of the time was
+Malagigi. Speaking of him, Pulci (_Morgante_, canto xxiv. 106 sqq.)
+gives his theoretical view of the limits of d�monic and magic influence.
+It is hard to say how far he was in earnest. Comp. canto xxi.
+
+[1243] Polydorus Virgilius was an Italian by birth, but his work _De
+Prodigiis_ treats chiefly of superstition in England, where his life was
+passed. Speaking of the prescience of the d�mons, he makes a curious
+reference to the sack of Rome in 1527.
+
+[1244] Yet murder is hardly ever the end, and never, perhaps, the means.
+A monster like Gilles de Retz (about 1440) who sacrificed more than 100
+children to the d�mons has scarcely a distant counterpart in Italy.
+
+[1245] See the treatise of Roth 'Ueber den Zauberer Virgilius' in
+Pfeiffer's _Germania_, iv., and Comparetti's _Virgil in the Middle
+Ages_. That Virgil began to take the place of the older Telest� may be
+explained partly by the fact that the frequent visits made to his grave
+even in the time of the Empire struck the popular imagination.
+
+[1246] Uberti, _Dittamondo_, 1. iii. cap. 4.
+
+[1247] For what follows, see Gio. Villani, i. 42, 60, ii. 1, iii. v. 38,
+xi. He himself does not believe such godless superstitions. Comp. Dante,
+_Inferno_ xiii. 146.
+
+[1248] According to a fragment given in Baluz. Miscell ix. 119, the
+Perugians had a quarrel in ancient times with the Ravennates, 'et
+militem marmoreum qui juxta Ravennam se continue volvebat ad solem
+usurpaverunt et ad eorum civitatem virtuosissime transtulerunt.'
+
+[1249] The local belief on the matter is given in _Annal. Forolivens_.
+Murat. xxii. col. 207, 238; more fully in Fil. Villani, _Vite_, p 33.
+
+[1250] Platina, _Vitae Pontiff._ p. 320: 'Veteres potius hac in re quam
+Petrum, Anacletum, et Linum imitatus.'
+
+[1251] Which it is easy to recognise e.g. in Sugerius, _De Consecratione
+Ecclesiae_ (Duchesne, _Scriptores_, iv. 355) and in _Chron.
+Petershusanum_, i. 13 and 16.
+
+[1252] Comp. the _Calandra_ of Bibiena.
+
+[1253] Bandello, iii. nov. 52. Fr. Filelfo (_Epist. Venet._ lib. 34,
+fol. 240 sqq.) attacks nercromancy fiercely. He is tolerably free from
+superstition (_Sat._ iv. 4) but believes in the 'mali effectus,' of a
+comet (_Epist._ fol. 246 _b_).
+
+[1254] Bandello, iii. 29. The magician exacts a promise of secrecy
+strengthened by solemn oaths, in this case by an oath at the high altar
+of S. Petronio at Bologna, at a time when no one else was in the church.
+There is a good deal of magic in the _Maccaroneide_, Phant. xviii.
+
+[1255] Benv. Cellini, i. cap. 64.
+
+[1256] Vasari, viii. 143, _Vita di Andrea da Fiesole_. It was Silvio
+Cosini, who also 'went after magical formul� and other follies.'
+
+[1257] Uberti, _Dittamondo_, iii. cap. 1. In the March of Ancona he
+visits Scariotto, the supposed birthplace of Judas, and observes: 'I
+must not here pass over Mount Pilatus, with its lake, where throughout
+the summer the guards are changed regularly. For he who understands
+magic comes up hither to have his books consecrated, whereupon, as the
+people of the place say, a great storm arises.' (The consecration of
+books, as has been remarked, p. 527, is a special ceremony, distinct
+from the rest.) In the sixteenth century the ascent of Pilatus near
+Luzern was forbidden 'by lib und guot,' as Diebold Schilling records. It
+was believed that a ghost lay in the lake on the mountain, which was the
+spirit of Pilate. When people ascended the mountain or threw anything
+into the lake, fearful storms sprang up.
+
+[1258] _De Obsedione Tiphernatium_, 1474 (Rer. Ital. Scrippt. ex
+Florent. codicibus, tom. ii.).
+
+[1259] This superstition, which was widely spread among the soldiery
+(about 1520), is ridiculed by Limerno Pitocco, in the _Orlandino_, v.
+60.
+
+[1260] Paul. Jov. _Elog. Lit._ p. 106, sub voce 'Cocles.'
+
+[1261] It is the enthusiastic collector of portraits who is here
+speaking.
+
+[1262] From the stars, since Gauricus did not know physiognomy. For his
+own fate he had to refer to the prophecies of Cocle, since his father
+had omitted to draw his horoscope.
+
+[1263] Paul. Jov. l. c. p. 100 sqq. s. v. Tibertus.
+
+[1264] The most essential facts as to these side-branches of divination,
+are given by Corn. Agrippa, _De Occulta Philosophia_, cap. 57.
+
+[1265] Libri, _Hist. des Sciences Math�m._ ii. 122.
+
+[1266] 'Novi nihil narro, mos est publicus' (_Remed. Utr. Fort._ p. 93),
+one of the lively passages of this book, written 'ab irato.'
+
+[1267] Chief passage in Trithem. _Ann. Hirsaug._ ii. 286 sqq.
+
+[1268] 'Neque enim desunt,' Paul. Jov. _Elog. Lit._ p. 150, s. v. 'Pomp,
+Gauricus;' comp. ibid. p. 130, s. v. Aurel. Augurellus, _Maccaroneide_.
+Phant. xii.
+
+[1269] In writing a history of Italian unbelief it would be necessary to
+refer to the so-called Averrhoism, which was prevalent in Italy and
+especially in Venice, about the middle of the fourteenth century. It was
+opposed by Boccaccio and Petrarch in various letters, and by the latter
+in his work: _De Sui Ipsius et Aliorum Ignorantia_. Although Petrarch's
+opposition may have been increased by misunderstanding and exaggeration,
+he was nevertheless fully convinced that the Averrhoists ridiculed and
+rejected the Christian religion.
+
+[1270] Ariosto, _Sonetto_, 34: 'Non credere sopra il tetto.' The poet
+uses the words of an official who had decided against him in a matter of
+property.
+
+[1271] We may here again refer to Gemisthos Plethon, whose disregard of
+Christianity had an important influence on the Italians, and
+particularly on the Florentines of that period.
+
+[1272] _Narrazione del Caso del Boscoli, Arch. Stor._ i. 273 sqq. The
+standing phrase was 'non aver fede;' comp. Vasari, vii. 122, _Vita di
+Piero di Cosimo_.
+
+[1273] Jovian. Pontan. _Charon_, _Opp._ ii. 1128-1195.
+
+[1274] _Faustini Terdocei Triumphus Stultitiae_, l. ii.
+
+[1275] E.g. Borbone Morosini about 1460; comp. Sansovino, _Venezia_ l.
+xiii. p. 243. He wrote 'de immortalite anim� ad mentem Aristotelis.'
+Pomponius L�tus, as a means of effecting his release from prison,
+pointed to the fact that he had written an epistle on the immortality of
+the soul. See the remarkable defence in Gregorovius, vii. 580 sqq. See
+on the other hand Pulci's ridicule of this belief in a sonnet, quoted by
+Galeotti, _Arch. Stor. Ital._ n. s. ix. 49 sqq.
+
+[1276] _Vespas. Fiorent._ p. 260.
+
+[1277] _Orationes Philelphi_, fol. 8.
+
+[1278] _Septimo Decretal._ lib. v. tit. iii. cap. 8.
+
+[1279] Ariosto, _Orlando_, vii. 61. Ridiculed in _Orlandino_, iv. 67,
+68. Cariteo, a member of the Neapolitan Academy of Pontanus, uses the
+idea of the pre-existence of the soul in order to glorify the House of
+Aragon. Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi, ii. 288.
+
+[1280] Orelli, ad Cic. _De Republ._ l. vi. Comp. Lucan, _Pharsalia_, at
+the beginning.
+
+[1281] Petrarca, _Epp. Fam._ iv. 3, iv. 6.
+
+[1282] Fil. Villani, _Vite_, p. 15. This remarkable passage is as
+follows: 'Che agli uomini fortissimi poich� hanno vinto le mostruose
+fatiche della terra, debitamente sieno date le stelle.'
+
+[1283] _Inferno_, iv. 24 sqq. Comp. _Purgatorio_, vii. 28, xxii. 100.
+
+[1284] This pagan heaven is referred to in the epitaph on the artist
+Niccol� dell'Arca:
+
+    'Nunc te Praxiteles, Phidias, Polycletus adora
+        Miranturque tuas, o Nicolae, manus.'
+
+In Bursellis, _Ann. Bonon._ Murat. xxiii. col. 912.
+
+[1285] In his late work _Actius_.
+
+[1286] Cardanus, _De Propria Vita_, cap. 13: 'Non poenitere ullius rei
+quam voluntarie effecerim, etiam qu� male cessisset;' else I should be
+of all men the most miserable.
+
+[1287] _Discorsi_, ii. cap. 2.
+
+[1288] _Del Governo della Famiglia_, p. 114.
+
+[1289] Comp. the short ode of M. Antonio Flaminio in the _Coryciana_
+(see p. 269):
+
+    Dii quibus tam Corycius venusta
+    Signa, tam dives posuit sacellum,
+    Ulla si vestros animos piorum
+        Gratia tangit,
+
+    Vos jocos risusque senis faceti
+    Sospites servate diu; senectam
+    Vos date et semper viridem et Falerno
+        Usque madentem.
+
+    At simul longo satiatus �vo
+    Liquerit terras, dapibus Deorum
+    L�tus intersit, potiore mutans
+        Nectare Bacchum.
+
+
+[1290] Firenzuola, _Opere_, iv. p. 147 sqq.
+
+[1291] Nic. Valori, _Vita di Lorenzo_, _passim_. For the advice to his
+son Cardinal Giovanni, see Fabroni, _Laurentius_, adnot. 178, and the
+appendices to Roscoe's _Leo X._
+
+[1292] _Jo. Pici Vita_, auct. Jo. Franc. Pico. For his 'Deprecatio ad
+Deum,' see _Deliciae Poetarum Italorum_.
+
+[1293] _Orazione_, Roscoe, _Leone X._ ed. Bossi viii. 120 (Magno Dio per
+la cui costante legge); hymn (oda il sacro inno tutta la natura) in
+Fabroni,' _Laur._ adnot. 9; _L'Altercazione_, in the _Poesie di Lor.
+Magn._ i. 265. The other poems here named are quoted in the same
+collection.
+
+[1294] If Pulci in his _Morgante_ is anywhere in earnest with religion,
+he is so in canto xvi. str. 6. This deistic utterance of the fair pagan
+Antea is perhaps the plainest expression of the mode of thought
+prevalent in Lorenzo's circle, to which tone the words of the d�mon
+Astarotte (quoted above p. 494) form in a certain sense the complement.
+
+
+
+
+Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
+
+belonged orginally to Florentine=> belonged originally to Florentine {pg
+204}
+
+the Citadal of Milan=> the Citadel of Milan {pg 38}
+
+nature of Lndovico Moro=> nature of Ludovico Moro {pg 43}
+
+Die Kriegskunt als Kunst=> Die Kriegskunst als Kunst {pg 98 fn 210}
+
+to to take any interest=> to take any interest {pg 101}
+
+of its vasals, the legitimate=> of its vassals, the legitimate {pg 125}
+
+do so by imfamous deeds=> do so by infamous deeds {pg 152}
+
+forged chroncle of Ricardo Malespini=> forged chronicle of Ricardo
+Malespini {pg 182 fn 420}
+
+fight its way amongt he heathen=> fight its way among the heathen {pg
+206}
+
+to the annoyance of to Petrarch=> to the annoyance of Petrarch {pg 208}
+
+was familar with the writings=> was familiar with the writings {pg 227}
+
+now altogether lose it supremacy=> now altogether lose its supremacy {pg
+255 fn 594}
+
+The plays of Platus and Terence=> The plays of Plautus and Terence {pg
+242}
+
+and minged with the general mourning=> and mingled with the general
+mourning {pg 296}
+
+compelled them for awhile to see=> compelled them for a while to see {pg
+298}
+
+I go for awhile=> I go for a while {pg 336}
+
+Jo. Pici oratio de hominis dignatate=> Jo. Pici oratio de hominis
+dignitate {pg 354 fn 805}
+
+he gives us a humorout description=> he gives us a humorous description
+{pg 387}
+
+Cronaco di Perugia, Arch. Stor.=> Cronaca di Perugia, Arch. Stor. {pg
+413 fn 934}
+
+eyes of Delio and Atellano=> eyes of Delio and Attelano {pg 444}
+
+Guilia Gonzaga, 385;=> Giulia Gonzaga, 385; {pg 552}
+
+futherers of, 217-229.=> furtherers of, 217-229. {pg 554}
+
+Illigitimacy, indifference to, 21, 22.=> Illegitimacy, indifference to,
+21, 22. {pg 554}
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in
+Italy, by Jacob Burckhardt
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+
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+left:95%;font-size:55%;text-align:right;color:gray;
+background-color:#ffffff;font-variant:normal;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:none;text-indent:0em;}
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+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, by 
+Jacob Burckhardt
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
+
+Author: Jacob Burckhardt
+
+Translator: S. G. C. (Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore)
+
+Release Date: October 20, 2014 [EBook #2074]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CIVILISATION OF THE RENAISSANCE  ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary=""
+style="border: 2px black solid;margin:auto auto;max-width:50%;
+padding:1%;">
+<tr><td>
+<p class="nind">Some typographical errors have been corrected;
+<a href="#transcrib">a list follows the text</a>.</p>
+<p class="nind"><a href="#CONTENTS"><b>Contents</b></a><br />
+<a href="#INDEX"><b>Index</b>:</a><small>
+<a href="#A">A</a>,
+<a href="#B">B</a>,
+<a href="#C">C</a>,
+<a href="#D">D</a>,
+<a href="#E">E</a>,
+<a href="#F">F</a>,
+<a href="#G">G</a>,
+<a href="#H">H</a>,
+<a href="#I-i">I</a>,
+<a href="#J">J</a>,
+<a href="#K">K</a>,
+<a href="#L">L</a>,
+<a href="#M">M</a>,
+<a href="#N">N</a>,
+<a href="#O">O</a>,
+<a href="#P">P</a>,
+<a href="#R">R</a>,
+<a href="#S">S</a>,
+<a href="#T">T</a>,
+<a href="#U">U</a>,
+<a href="#V-i">V</a>,
+<a href="#W">W</a>,
+<a href="#Z">Z</a>.</small><br />
+<a href="#FOOTNOTES"><b>Footnotes</b></a></p>
+<p class="c">(etext transcriber's note)</p></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="292" height="500" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_i" id="page_i"></a>{i}</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>THE<br />
+CIVILISATION &nbsp; OF &nbsp; THE<br />
+RENAISSANCE<br />
+IN &nbsp; ITALY</h1>
+
+<p class="cb">&nbsp; <br />&nbsp; <br />By<br />
+JACOB BURCKHARDT<br />
+AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY<br />
+S. G. C. MIDDLEMORE<br /><br /><br />
+LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN &amp; UNWIN LTD.<br />
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ii" id="page_ii"></a>{ii}</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp; </p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iii" id="page_iii"></a>{iii}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE.</h2>
+
+<p class="nind">D<small>R</small>. <span class="smcap">Burckhardt’s</span> work on the Renaissance in Italy is
+too well known, not only to students of the period, but
+now to a wider circle of readers, for any introduction
+to be necessary. The increased interest which has of
+late years, in England, been taken in this and kindred
+subjects, and the welcome which has been given to the
+works of other writers upon them, encourage me to hope
+that in publishing this translation I am meeting a want
+felt by some who are either unable to read German at
+all, or to whom an English version will save a good
+deal of time and trouble.</p>
+
+<p>The translation is made from the third edition of the
+original, recently published in Germany, with slight
+additions to the text, and large additions to the notes,
+by Dr. <span class="smcap">Ludwig Geiger</span>, of Berlin. It also contains some
+fresh matter communicated by Dr. <span class="smcap">Burckhardt</span> to Professor
+<span class="smcap">Diego Valbusa</span> of Mantua, the Italian translator
+of the book. To all three gentlemen my thanks are due
+for courtesy shown, or help given to me in the course
+of my work.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iv" id="page_iv"></a>{iv}</span></p>
+
+<p>In a few cases, where Dr. <span class="smcap">Geiger’s</span> view differs from
+that taken by Dr. <span class="smcap">Burckhardt</span>, I have called attention
+to the fact by bracketing Dr. <span class="smcap">Geiger’s</span> opinion and
+adding his initials.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+THE TRANSLATOR.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_v" id="page_v"></a>{v}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_I">PART I.
+<br /><small><i>THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART</i></small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-1">CHAPTER I.<br />
+<small>INTRODUCTION.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Political condition of Italy in the thirteenth century</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_004">4</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Norman State under Frederick II.</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_005">5</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Ezzelino da Romano</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_007">7</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-1">CHAPTER II.<br />
+<small>THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Finance and its relation to culture</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_008">8</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The ideal of the absolute ruler</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_009">9</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Inward and outward dangers</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_010">10</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Florentine estimate of the tyrants</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_011">11</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Visconti</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_012">12</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-1">CHAPTER III.<br />
+<small>THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Intervention and visits of the emperors</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_018">18</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Want of a fixed law of succession. Illegitimacy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_020">20</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Founding of States by Condottieri</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_022">22</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Relations of Condottieri to their employers</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_023">23</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The family of Sforza</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_024">24</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Giacomo Piccinino</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_025">25</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Later attempts of the Condottieri</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_026">26</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-1">CHAPTER IV.<br />
+<small>THE PETTY TYRANNIES.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Baglioni of Perugia</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_028">28</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Massacre in the year 1500</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_031">31</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Malatesta, Pico, and Petrucci<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vi" id="page_vi"></a>{vi}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_033">33</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-1">CHAPTER V.<br />
+<small>THE GREATER DYNASTIES.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Aragonese at Naples</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_035">35</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The last Visconti at Milan</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_038">38</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Francesco Sforza and his luck</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_039">39</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Galeazzo Maria and Ludovic Moro</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_040">40</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Gonzaga at Mantua</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_043">43</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_044">44</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Este at Ferrara</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_046">46</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI-1">CHAPTER VI.<br />
+<small>THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The later Guelphs and Ghibellines</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_055">55</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The conspirators</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_056">56</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Murders in church</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_057">57</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Influence of ancient tyrannicide</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_057">57</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Catiline as an ideal</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_059">59</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Florentine view of tyrannicide</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_059">59</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The people and tyrannicide</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_060">60</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII-1">CHAPTER VII.<br />
+<small>THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Venice in the fifteenth century</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_062">62</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The inhabitants</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_063">63</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Dangers from the poor nobility</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_064">64</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Causes of the stability of Venice</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_065">65</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Council of Ten and political trials</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_066">66</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Relations with the Condottieri</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_067">67</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Optimism of Venetian foreign policy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_068">68</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Venice as the home of statistics</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_069">69</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Retardation of the Renaissance</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_071">71</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Mediæval devotion to reliques</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_072">72</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Florence from the fourteenth century</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_073">73</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Objectivity of political intelligence</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_074">74</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Dante as a politician</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_075">75</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Florence as the home of statistics: the two Villanis</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_076">76</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Higher form of statistics</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_077">77</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Florentine constitutions and the historians</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_082">82</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Fundamental vice of the State</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_082">82</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Political theorists</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_083">83</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Macchiavelli and his views</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_084">84</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Siena and Genoa</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_086">86</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII-1">CHAPTER VIII.<br />
+<small>FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Envy felt towards Venice</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_088">88</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Relations to other countries: sympathy with France</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_089">89</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Plan for a balance of power<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vii" id="page_vii"></a>{vii}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_090">90</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Foreign intervention and conquests</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_091">91</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Alliances with the Turks</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_092">92</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Counter-influence of Spain</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_094">94</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Objective treatment of politics</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_095">95</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Art of diplomacy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_096">96</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX-1">CHAPTER IX.<br />
+<small>WAR AS A WORK OF ART.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Firearms</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_098">98</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Professional warriors and dilettanti</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_099">99</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Horrors of war</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_101">101</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_X-1">CHAPTER X.<br />
+<small>THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Relation of the Papacy to Italy and foreign countries</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_103">103</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Disturbances in Rome from the time of Nicholas V.</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_104">104</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Sixtus IV. master of Rome</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_105">105</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>States of the Nipoti in Romagna</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Cardinals belonging to princely houses</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Innocent VIII. and his son</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_108">108</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Alexander VI. as a Spaniard</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_109">109</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Relations with foreign countries</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_110">110</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Simony</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Cæsar Borgia and his relations to his father</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Cæsar’s plans and acts</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_112">112</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Julius II. as Saviour of the Papacy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Leo X. His relations with other States</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Adrian VI.</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_121">121</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Clement VII. and the sack of Rome</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_122">122</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Reaction consequent on the latter</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_123">123</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Papacy of the Counter-Reformation</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_124">124</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Conclusion. The Italian patriots</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_125">125</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_II">PART II.<br />
+<small><i>THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL.</i></small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-2">CHAPTER I.<br />
+<small>THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The mediæval man</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_129">129</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The awakening of personality</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_129">129</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The despot and his subjects</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_130">130</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Individualism in the Republics</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_131">131</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Exile and cosmopolitanism<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_viii" id="page_viii"></a>{viii}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_132">132</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-2">CHAPTER II.<br />
+<small>THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The many-sided men</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_134">134</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The universal men</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-2">CHAPTER III.<br />
+<small>THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Dante’s feeling about fame</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_139">139</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The celebrity of the Humanists: Petrarch</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Cultus of birthplace and graves</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_142">142</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Cultus of the famous men of antiquity</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_143">143</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Literature of local fame: Padua</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_143">143</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Literature of universal fame</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_146">146</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Fame given or refused by the writers</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_150">150</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Morbid passion for fame</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_152">152</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-2">CHAPTER IV.<br />
+<small>MODERN WIT AND SATIRE.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Its connection with individualism</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_154">154</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Florentine wit: the novel</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_155">155</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Jesters and buffoons</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Leo X. and his witticisms</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_157">157</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Poetical parodies</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_158">158</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Theory of wit</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_159">159</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Railing and reviling</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_161">161</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Adrian VI. as scapegoat</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_162">162</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Pietro Aretino</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_164">164</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_III">PART III.<br />
+<small><i>THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY.</i></small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-3">CHAPTER I.<br />
+<small>INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Widened application of the word ‘Renaissance’</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_171">171</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Antiquity in the Middle Ages</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_172">172</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Latin poetry of the twelfth century in Italy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_173">173</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The spirit of the fourteenth century</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_175">175</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-3">CHAPTER II.<br />
+<small>ROME, THE CITY OF RUINS.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Dante, Petrarch, Uberti</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_177">177</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Rome at the time of Poggio</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_179">179</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Nicholas V., and Pius II. as an antiquarian</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_180">180</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Antiquity outside Rome<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ix" id="page_ix"></a>{ix}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_181">181</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Affiliation of families and cities on Rome</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_182">182</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Roman corpse</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_183">183</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Excavations and architectural plans</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_184">184</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Rome under Leo X.</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_184">184</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Sentimental effect of ruins</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_185">185</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-3">CHAPTER III.<br />
+<small>THE OLD AUTHORS.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Their diffusion in the fourteenth century</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_187">187</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Discoveries in the fifteenth century</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The libraries</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_189">189</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Copyists and ‘Scrittori’</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Printing</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_194">194</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Greek scholarship</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_195">195</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Oriental scholarship</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_197">197</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Pico’s view of antiquity</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_202">202</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-3">CHAPTER IV.<br />
+<small>HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Its inevitable victory</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_203">203</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_205">205</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Coronation of the poets</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_207">207</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-3">CHAPTER V.<br />
+<small>THE UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Position of the Humanists at the Universities</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_211">211</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Latin schools</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_213">213</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Freer education: Vittorino da Feltre</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_213">213</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Guarino of Verona</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_215">215</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The education of princes</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_216">216</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI-3">CHAPTER VI.<br />
+<small>THE FURTHERERS OF HUMANISM.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Florentine citizens: Niccoli and Manetti</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_217">217</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The earlier Medici</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_220">220</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Humanism at the Courts</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_222">222</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Popes from Nicholas V. onwards</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_223">223</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Alfonso of Naples</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_225">225</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Frederick of Urbino</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_227">227</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Houses of Sforza and Este</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_227">227</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Sigismodo Malatesta</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_228">228</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII-3">CHAPTER VII.<br />
+<small>THE REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUITY. LATIN CORRESPONDENCE AND ORATIONS.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Papal Chancery</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_230">230</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Letter-writing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_x" id="page_x"></a>{x}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_232">232</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The orators</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_233">233</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Political, diplomatic, and funeral orations</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_236">236</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Academic and military speeches</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_237">237</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Latin sermons</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_238">238</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Form and matter of the speeches</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_239">239</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Passion for quotation</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Imaginary speeches</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_241">241</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Decline of eloquence</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_242">242</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII-3">CHAPTER VIII.<br />
+<small>LATIN TREATISES AND HISTORY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Value of Latin</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Researches on the Middle Ages: Blondus</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_245">245</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Histories in Italian; their antique spirit</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_246">246</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX-3">CHAPTER IX.<br />
+<small>GENERAL LATINISATION OF CULTURE.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Ancient names</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_250">250</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Latinised social relations</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_251">251</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Claims of Latin to supremacy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Cicero and the Ciceronians</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_253">253</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Latin conversation</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_X-3">CHAPTER X.<br />
+<small>MODERN LATIN POETRY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Epic poems on ancient history: The ‘Africa’</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_258">258</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Mythic poetry</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_259">259</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Christian epics: Sannazaro</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_260">260</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Poetry on contemporary subjects</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_261">261</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Introduction of mythology</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_262">262</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Didactic poetry: Palingenius</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_263">263</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Lyric poetry and its limits</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_264">264</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Odes on the saints</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_265">265</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Elegies and the like</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_266">266</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The epigram</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_267">267</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI-3">CHAPTER XI.<br />
+<small>FALL OF THE HUMANISTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The accusations and the amount of truth they contained</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_272">272</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Misery of the scholars</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_277">277</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Type of the happy scholar</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_278">278</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Pomponius Laetus</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_279">279</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Academies<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xi" id="page_xi"></a>{xi}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_280">280</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_IV">PART IV.
+<br /><small><i>THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.</i></small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-4">CHAPTER I.<br />
+<small>JOURNEYS OF THE ITALIANS.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Columbus</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_286">286</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Cosmographical purpose in travel</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_287">287</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-4">CHAPTER II.<br />
+<small>NATURAL SCIENCE IN ITALY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Empirical tendency of the nation</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_289">289</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Dante and astronomy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_290">290</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Attitude of the Church towards natural science</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_290">290</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Influence of Humanism</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_291">291</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Botany and gardens</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_292">292</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Zoology and collections of foreign animals</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_293">293</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Human menagerie of Ippolito Medici</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_296">296</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-4">CHAPTER III.<br />
+<small>THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL BEAUTY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Landscapes in the Middle Ages</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_299">299</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Petrarch and his ascents of mountains</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_301">301</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Uberti’s ‘Dittamondo’</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_302">302</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Flemish school of painting</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_302">302</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Æneas Sylvius and his descriptions</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_303">303</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Nature in the poets and novelists</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_305">305</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-4">CHAPTER IV.<br />
+<small>THE DISCOVERY OF MAN.&mdash;SPIRITUAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Popular psychological ground-work. The temperaments</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_309">309</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Value of unrhymed poetry</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_310">310</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Value of the Sonnet</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_310">310</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Dante and the ‘Vita Nuova’</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_312">312</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The ‘Divine Comedy’</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_312">312</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Petrarch as a painter of the soul</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_314">314</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Boccaccio and the Fiammetta</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_315">315</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Feeble development of tragedy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_315">315</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Scenic splendour, the enemy of the drama</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_316">316</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The intermezzo and the ballet</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_317">317</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Comedies and masques</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_320">320</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Compensation afforded by music</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_321">321</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Epic romances</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_321">321</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Necessary subordination of the descriptions of character</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_323">323</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Pulci and Bojardo</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_323">323</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Inner law of their compositions</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_324">324</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Ariosto and his style<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xii" id="page_xii"></a>{xii}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_325">325</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Folengo and parody</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_326">326</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Contrast offered by Tasso</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_327">327</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-4">CHAPTER V.<br />
+<small>BIOGRAPHY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Advance of Italy on the Middle Ages</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_328">328</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Tuscan biographers</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_330">330</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Biography in other parts of Italy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_332">332</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Autobiography; Æneas Sylvius</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_333">333</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Benvenuto Cellini</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_333">333</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Girolamo Cardano</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_334">334</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Luigi Cornaro</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_335">335</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI-4">CHAPTER VI.<br />
+<small>THE DESCRIPTION OF NATIONS AND CITIES.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The ‘Dittamondo’</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_339">339</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Descriptions in the sixteenth century</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_339">339</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII-4">CHAPTER VII.<br />
+<small>DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTWARD MAN.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Boccaccio on Beauty</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_344">344</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Ideal of Firenzuola</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_345">345</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>His general definitions</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_345">345</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII-4">CHAPTER VIII.<br />
+<small>DESCRIPTIONS OF LIFE IN MOVEMENT.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Æneas Sylvius and others</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_349">349</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Conventional bucolic poetry from the time of Petrarch</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_350">350</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Genuine poetic treatment of country life</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_351">351</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Battista Mantovano, Lorenzo Magnifico, Pulci</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_352">352</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Angelo Poliziano</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_353">353</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Man, and the conception of humanity</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_354">354</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Pico della Mirandola on the dignity of man</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_354">354</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_V">PART V.<br />
+<small><i>SOCIETY AND FESTIVALS.</i></small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-5">CHAPTER I.<br />
+<small>THE EQUALISATION OF CLASSES.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Contrast to the Middle Ages</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_359">359</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Common life of nobles and burghers in the cities</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_359">359</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Theoretical criticism of noble birth</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_360">360</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The nobles in different parts of Italy<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiii" id="page_xiii"></a>{xiii}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_362">362</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The nobility and culture</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_363">363</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Bad influence of Spain</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_363">363</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Knighthood since the Middle Ages</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_364">364</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The tournaments and the caricature of them</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_365">365</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Noble birth as a requisite of the courtier</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_367">367</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-5">CHAPTER II.<br />
+<small>OUTWARD REFINEMENT OF LIFE.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Costume and fashions</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_369">369</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The toilette of women</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_371">371</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Cleanliness</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_374">374</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The ‘Galateo’ and good manners</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_375">375</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Comfort and elegance</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_376">376</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-5">CHAPTER III.<br />
+<small>LANGUAGE AS THE BASIS OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Development of an ideal language</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_378">378</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Its wide diffusion</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_379">379</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Purists</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_379">379</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Their want of success</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_382">382</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Conversation</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_383">383</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-5">CHAPTER IV.<br />
+<small>THE HIGHER FORMS OF SOCIETY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Rules and statutes</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_384">384</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The novelists and their society</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_384">384</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The great lady and the drawing-room</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_385">385</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Florentine society</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_386">386</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Lorenzo’s descriptions of his own circle</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_387">387</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-5">CHAPTER V.<br />
+<small>THE PERFECT MAN OF SOCIETY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>His love-making</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_388">388</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>His outward and spiritual accomplishments</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_389">389</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Bodily exercises</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_389">389</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Music</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_390">390</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The instruments and the Virtuosi</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_392">392</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Musical dilettantism in society</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_393">393</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI-5">CHAPTER VI.<br />
+<small>THE POSITION OF WOMEN.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Their masculine education and poetry</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_396">396</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Completion of their personality</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_397">397</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Virago</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_398">398</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Women in society<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiv" id="page_xiv"></a>{xiv}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_399">399</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The culture of the prostitutes</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_399">399</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII-5">CHAPTER VII.<br />
+<small>DOMESTIC ECONOMY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Contrast to the Middle Ages</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_402">402</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Agnolo Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti)</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_402">402</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The villa and country life</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_404">404</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII-5">CHAPTER VIII.<br />
+<small>THE FESTIVALS.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Their origin in the mystery and the procession</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_406">406</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Advantages over foreign countries</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_408">408</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Historical representatives of abstractions</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_409">409</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Mysteries</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_411">411</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Corpus Christi at Viterbo</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_414">414</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Secular representations</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_415">415</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Pantomimes and princely receptions</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_417">417</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Processions and religious Trionfi</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_419">419</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Secular Trionfi</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_420">420</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Regattas and processions on water</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_424">424</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Carnival at Rome and Florence</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_426">426</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#PART_VI">PART VI.
+<br /><small><i>MORALITY AND RELIGION.</i></small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-6">CHAPTER I.<br />
+<small>MORALITY.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Limits of criticism</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_431">431</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Italian consciousness of demoralization</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_432">432</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The modern sense of honour</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_433">433</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Power of the imagination</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_435">435</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The passion for gambling and for vengeance</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_436">436</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Breach of the marriage tie</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_441">441</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Position of the married woman</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_442">442</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Spiritualization of love</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_445">445</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>General emancipation from moral restraints</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_446">446</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Brigandage</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_448">448</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Paid assassination: poisoning</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_450">450</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Absolute wickedness</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_453">453</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Morality and individualism<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xv" id="page_xv"></a>{xv}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_454">454</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-6">CHAPTER II.<br />
+<small>RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Lack of a reformation</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_457">457</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Relations of the Italian to the Church</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_457">457</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Hatred of the hierarchy and the monks</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_458">458</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The mendicant orders</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_462">462</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Dominican Inquisition</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_462">462</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The higher monastic orders</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_463">463</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Sense of dependence on the Church</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_465">465</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The preachers of repentance</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_466">466</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Girolamo Savonarola</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_473">473</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Pagan elements in popular belief</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_479">479</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Faith in reliques</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_481">481</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Mariolatry</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_483">483</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Oscillations in public opinion</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_485">485</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Epidemic religious revivals</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_485">485</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Their regulation by the police at Ferrara</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_487">487</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-6">CHAPTER III.<br />
+<small>RELIGION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Inevitable subjectivity</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_490">490</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Worldliness</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_492">492</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Tolerance of Mohammedanism</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_492">492</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Equivalence of all religions</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_494">494</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Influence of antiquity</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_495">495</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The so-called Epicureans</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_496">496</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The doctrine of free will</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_497">497</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The pious Humanists</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_499">499</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The less pronounced Humanists</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_499">499</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Codrus Urceus</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_500">500</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The beginnings of religious criticism</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_501">501</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Fatalism of the Humanists</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_503">503</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Their pagan exterior</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_504">504</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-6">CHAPTER IV.<br />
+<small>MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITIONS.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Astrology</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_507">507</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Its extension and influence</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_508">508</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Its opponents in Italy</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_515">515</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Pico’s opposition and influence</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_516">516</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Various superstitions</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_518">518</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Superstition of the Humanists</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_519">519</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Ghosts of the departed</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_522">522</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Belief in dæmons</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_523">523</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Italian witch</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_524">524</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Witches’ nest at Norcia</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_526">526</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Influence and limits of Northern witchcraft</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_528">528</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Witchcraft of the prostitutes<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xvi" id="page_xvi"></a>{xvi}</span></td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_529">529</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The magicians and enchanters</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_530">530</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The dæmons on the way to Rome</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_531">531</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Special forms of magic: the Telesmata</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_533">533</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Magic at the laying of foundation-stones</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_534">534</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The necromancer in poetry</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_535">535</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Benvenuto Cellini’s tale</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_536">536</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Decline of magic</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_537">537</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Special branches of the superstition</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_538">538</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><th colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-6">CHAPTER V.<br />
+<small>GENERAL DISINTEGRATION OF BELIEF.</small></a></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Last confession of Boscoli</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_543">543</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Religious disorder and general scepticism</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_543">543</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Controversy as to immortality</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_545">545</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The pagan heaven</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_545">545</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Homeric life to come</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_546">546</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Evaporation of Christian doctrine</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_547">547</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Italian Thei</td><td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_548">548</a></td></tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_001" id="page_001"></a>{1}</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a>{2}</span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<i><a name="PART_I" id="PART_I"></a>PART I.</i><br />
+<br />
+THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART.<br />
+</h2>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a>{3}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-1" id="CHAPTER_I-1"></a>CHAPTER I.<br /><br />
+<small>INTRODUCTION.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HIS</small> work bears the title of an essay in the strictest sense
+of the word. No one is more conscious than the writer with
+what limited means and strength he has addressed himself
+to a task so arduous. And even if he could look with greater
+confidence upon his own researches, he would hardly thereby
+feel more assured of the approval of competent judges. To
+each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilisation present
+a different picture; and in treating of a civilisation which
+is the mother of our own, and whose influence is still at work
+among us, it is unavoidable that individual judgment and
+feeling should tell every moment both on the writer and on
+the reader. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the
+possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies
+which have served for this work might easily, in other hands,
+not only receive a wholly different treatment and application,
+but lead also to essentially different conclusions. Such indeed
+is the importance of the subject, that it still calls for fresh
+investigation, and may be studied with advantage from the
+most varied points of view. Meanwhile we are content if a
+patient hearing be granted us, and if this book be taken and
+judged as a whole. It is the most serious difficulty of the
+history of civilisation that a great intellectual process must be
+broken up into single, and often into what seem arbitrary
+categories, in order to be in any way intelligible. It was
+formerly our intention to fill up the gaps in this book by
+a special work on the ‘Art of the Renaissance,’&mdash;an intention,
+however, which we have been able only to fulfil<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> in part.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a>{4}</span></p>
+
+<p>The struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen
+left Italy in a political condition which differed essentially
+from that of other countries of the West. While in France,
+Spain and England the feudal system was so organised that,
+at the close of its existence, it was naturally transformed into
+a unified monarchy, and while in Germany it helped to
+maintain, at least outwardly, the unity of the empire, Italy
+had shaken it off almost entirely. The Emperors of the fourteenth
+century, even in the most favourable case, were no
+longer received and respected as feudal lords, but as possible
+leaders and supporters of powers already in existence; while
+the Papacy,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> with its creatures and allies, was strong enough
+to hinder national unity in the future, not strong enough itself
+to bring about that unity. Between the two lay a multitude
+of political units&mdash;republics and despots&mdash;in part of long standing,
+in part of recent origin, whose existence was founded
+simply on their power to maintain it.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> In them for the first
+time we detect the modern political spirit of Europe, surrendered
+freely to its own instincts, often displaying the worst
+features of an unbridled egoism, outraging every right, and
+killing every germ of a healthier culture. But, wherever this
+vicious tendency is overcome or in any way compensated,
+a new fact appears in history&mdash;the state as the outcome of
+reflection and calculation, the state as a work of art. This
+new life displays itself in a hundred forms, both in the
+republican and in the despotic states, and determines their
+inward constitution, no less than their foreign policy. We
+shall limit ourselves to the consideration of the completer and
+more clearly defined type, which is offered by the despotic
+states.</p>
+
+<p>The internal condition of the despotically governed states<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a>{5}</span>
+had a memorable counterpart in the Norman Empire of Lower
+Italy and Sicily, after its transformation by the Emperor
+Frederick II.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> Bred amid treason and peril in the neighbourhood
+of the Saracens, Frederick, the first ruler of the modern
+type who sat upon a throne, had early accustomed himself,
+both in criticism and action, to a thoroughly objective treatment
+of affairs. His acquaintance with the internal condition
+and administration of the Saracenic states was close and
+intimate; and the mortal struggle in which he was engaged
+with the Papacy compelled him, no less than his adversaries,
+to bring into the field all the resources at his command.
+Frederick’s measures (especially after the year 1231) are aimed
+at the complete destruction of the feudal state, at the transformation
+of the people into a multitude destitute of will and
+of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree
+to the exchequer. He centralised, in a manner hitherto unknown
+in the West, the whole judicial and political administration
+by establishing the right of appeal from the feudal courts,
+which he did not, however, abolish, to the imperial judges.
+No office was henceforth to be filled by popular election, under
+penalty of the devastation of the offending district and of the
+enslavement of its inhabitants. Excise duties were introduced;
+the taxes, based on a comprehensive assessment, and distributed
+in accordance with Mohammedan usages, were collected by
+those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true,
+it is impossible to obtain any money from Orientals. Here, in
+short, we find, not a people, but simply a disciplined multitude
+of subjects; who were forbidden, for example, to marry out
+of the country without special permission, and under no circumstances
+were allowed to study abroad. The University
+of Naples was the first we know of to restrict the freedom
+of study, while the East, in these respects at all events, left its
+youth unfettered. It was after the example of Mohammedan
+rulers that Frederick traded on his own account in all parts of
+the Mediterranean, reserving to himself the monopoly of many<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a>{6}</span>
+commodities, and restricting in various ways the commerce
+of his subjects. The Fatimite Caliphs, with all their esoteric
+unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of the
+differences in the religious faith of their people; Frederick,
+on the other hand, crowned his system of government by a
+religious inquisition, which will seem the more reprehensible
+when we remember that in the persons of the heretics he
+was persecuting the representatives of a free municipal life.
+Lastly, the internal police, and the kernel of the army for
+foreign service, was composed of Saracens who had been
+brought over from Sicily to Nocera and Luceria&mdash;men who
+were deaf to the cry of misery and careless of the ban of the
+Church. At a later period the subjects, by whom the use
+of weapons had long been forgotten, were passive witnesses
+of the fall of Manfred and of the seizure of the government by
+Charles of Anjou; the latter continued to use the system which
+he found already at work.</p>
+
+<p>At the side of the centralising Emperor appeared an usurper
+of the most peculiar kind: his vicar and son-in-law, Ezzelino
+da Romano. He stands as the representative of no system
+of government or administration, for all his activity was
+wasted in struggles for supremacy in the eastern part of Upper
+Italy; but as a political type he was a figure of no less importance
+for the future than his imperial protector Frederick.
+The conquests and usurpations which had hitherto taken place
+in the Middle Ages rested on real or pretended inheritance and
+other such claims, or else were effected against unbelievers and
+excommunicated persons. Here for the first time the attempt
+was openly made to found a throne by wholesale murder and
+endless barbarities, by the adoption, in short, of any means
+with a view to nothing but the end pursued. None of his
+successors, not even Cæsar Borgia, rivalled the colossal guilt
+of Ezzelino; but the example once set was not forgotten, and
+his fall led to no return of justice among the nations, and
+served as no warning to future transgressors.</p>
+
+<p>It was in vain at such a time that St. Thomas Aquinas,
+a born subject of Frederick, set up the theory of a constitutional
+monarchy, in which the prince was to be supported by
+an upper house named by himself, and a representative body<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a>{7}</span>
+elected by the people; in vain did he concede to the people the
+right of revolution.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> Such theories found no echo outside the
+lecture-room, and Frederick and Ezzelino were and remain for
+Italy the great political phenomena of the thirteenth century.
+Their personality, already half legendary, forms the most
+important subject of ‘The Hundred Old Tales,’ whose original
+composition falls certainly within this century.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> In them
+Frederick is already represented as possessing the right to do
+as he pleased with the property of his subjects, and exercises
+on all, even on criminals, a profound influence by the force
+of his personality; Ezzelino is spoken of with the awe which
+all mighty impressions leave behind them. His person became
+the centre of a whole literature from the chronicle of eyewitnesses
+to the half-mythical tragedy<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> of later poets.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately after the fall of Frederick and Ezzelino, a crowd
+of tyrants appeared upon the scene. The struggle between
+Guelph and Ghibelline was their opportunity. They came
+forward in general as Ghibelline leaders, but at times and
+under conditions so various that it is impossible not to recognise
+in the fact a law of supreme and universal necessity. The
+means which they used were those already familiar in the
+party struggles of the past&mdash;the banishment or destruction
+of their adversaries and of their adversaries’ households.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a>{8}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-1" id="CHAPTER_II-1"></a>CHAPTER II.<br /><br />
+<small>THE TYRANNY OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> tyrannies, great and small, of the fourteenth century
+afford constant proof that examples such as these were not
+thrown away. Their misdeeds cried forth loudly and have been
+circumstantially told by historians. As states depending for
+existence on themselves alone, and scientifically organised
+with a view to this object, they present to us a higher interest
+than that of mere narrative.</p>
+
+<p>The deliberate adaptation of means to ends, of which no
+prince out of Italy had at that time a conception, joined to almost
+absolute power within the limits of the state, produced among
+the despots both men and modes of life of a peculiar character.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>
+The chief secret of government in the hands of the prudent
+ruler lay in leaving the incidence of taxation so far as possible
+where he found it, or as he had first arranged it. The chief
+sources of income were: a land tax, based on a valuation;
+definite taxes on articles of consumption and duties on exported
+and imported goods; together with the private fortune of the
+ruling house. The only possible increase was derived from the
+growth of business and of general prosperity. Loans, such as
+we find in the free cities, were here unknown; a well-planned
+confiscation was held a preferable means of raising money,
+provided only that it left public credit unshaken&mdash;an end
+attained, for example, by the truly Oriental practice of deposing
+and plundering the director of the finances.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></p>
+
+<p>Out of this income the expenses of the little court, of the
+body-guard, of the mercenary troops, and of the public buildings
+were met, as well as of the buffoons and men of talent
+who belonged to the personal attendants of the prince. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a>{9}</span>
+illegitimacy of his rule isolated the tyrant and surrounded him
+with constant danger; the most honourable alliance which he
+could form was with intellectual merit, without regard to its
+origin. The liberality of the northern princes of the thirteenth
+century was confined to the knights, to the nobility which
+served and sang. It was otherwise with the Italian despot.
+With his thirst of fame and his passion for monumental works,
+it was talent, not birth, which he needed. In the company
+of the poet and the scholar he felt himself in a new position,
+almost, indeed, in possession of a new legitimacy.</p>
+
+<p>No prince was more famous in this respect than the ruler
+of Verona, Can Grande della Scala, who numbered among the
+illustrious exiles whom he entertained at his court representatives
+of the whole of Italy.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> The men of letters were not
+ungrateful. Petrarch, whose visits at the courts of such men
+have been so severely censured, sketched an ideal picture
+of a prince of the fourteenth century.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> He demands great
+things from his patron, the lord of Padua, but in a manner
+which shows that he holds him capable of them. ‘Thou must
+not be the master but the father of thy subjects, and must
+love them as thy children; yea, as members of thy body.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a>
+Weapons, guards, and soldiers thou mayest employ against the
+enemy&mdash;with thy subjects goodwill is sufficient. By citizens,
+of course, I mean those who love the existing order; for those
+who daily desire change are rebels and traitors, and against
+such a stern justice may take its course.’</p>
+
+<p>Here follows, worked out in detail, the purely modern fiction
+of the omnipotence of the state. The prince is to be inde<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a>{10}</span>pendent
+of his courtiers, but at the same time to govern with
+simplicity and modesty; he is to take everything into his
+charge, to maintain and restore churches and public buildings,
+to keep up the municipal police,<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> to drain the marshes, to look
+after the supply of wine and corn; he is to exercise a strict
+justice, so to distribute the taxes that the people can recognise
+their necessity and the regret of the ruler to be compelled to
+put his hands in the pockets of others; he is to support the
+sick and the helpless, and to give his protection and society to
+distinguished scholars, on whom his fame in after ages will
+depend.</p>
+
+<p>But whatever might be the brighter sides of the system,
+and the merits of individual rulers, yet the men of the fourteenth
+century were not without a more or less distinct consciousness
+of the brief and uncertain tenure of most of these
+despotisms. Inasmuch as political institutions like these are
+naturally secure in proportion to the size of the territory in
+which they exist, the larger principalities were constantly
+tempted to swallow up the smaller. Whole hecatombs of
+petty rulers were sacrificed at this time to the Visconti alone.
+As a result of this outward danger an inward ferment was in
+ceaseless activity; and the effect of the situation on the
+character of the ruler was generally of the most sinister kind.
+Absolute power, with its temptations to luxury and unbridled
+selfishness, and the perils to which he was exposed from
+enemies and conspirators, turned him almost inevitably into a
+tyrant in the worst sense of the word. Well for him if he
+could trust his nearest relations! But where all was illegitimate,
+there could be no regular law of inheritance, either
+with regard to the succession or to the division of the ruler’s
+property; and consequently the heir, if incompetent or a
+minor, was liable in the interest of the family itself to be supplanted
+by an uncle or cousin of more resolute character. The
+acknowledgment or exclusion of the bastards was a fruitful
+source of contest; and most of these families in consequence<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a>{11}</span>
+were plagued with a crowd of discontented and vindictive
+kinsmen. This circumstance gave rise to continual outbreaks
+of treason and to frightful scenes of domestic bloodshed.
+Sometimes the pretenders lived abroad in exile, and like the
+Visconti, who practised the fisherman’s craft on the Lake of
+Garda,<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> viewed the situation with patient indifference. When
+asked by a messenger of his rival when and how he thought
+of returning to Milan, he gave the reply, ‘By the same means
+as those by which I was expelled, but not till his crimes have
+outweighed my own.’ Sometimes, too, the despot was sacrificed
+by his relations, with the view of saving the family, to
+the public conscience which he had too grossly outraged.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> In
+a few cases the government was in the hands of the whole
+family, or at least the ruler was bound to take their advice;
+and here, too, the distribution of property and influence often
+led to bitter disputes.</p>
+
+<p>The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent
+hatred of the Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the
+pomp and display with which the despot was perhaps less
+anxious to gratify his own vanity than to impress the popular
+imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to an
+adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge
+Aguello of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden
+sceptre, and show himself at the window of his house, ‘as relics
+are shown.’ reclining on embroidered drapery and cushions,
+served like a pope or emperor, by kneeling attendants.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> More
+often, however, the old Florentines speak on this subject in a
+tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and characterised well
+the vulgarity and commonplace which mark the ambition of
+the new princes.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> ‘What mean their trumpets and their bells,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a>{12}</span>
+their horns and their flutes; but come, hangman&mdash;come,
+vultures?’ The castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the
+popular mind, is a lofty and solitary building, full of dungeons
+and listening-tubes,<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> the home of cruelty and misery. Misfortune
+is foretold to all who enter the service of the despot,<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a>
+who even becomes at last himself an object of pity: he must
+needs be the enemy of all good and honest men; he can trust
+no one, and can read in the faces of his subjects the expectation
+of his fall. ‘As despotisms rise, grow, and are consolidated,
+so grows in their midst the hidden element which must
+produce their dissolution and ruin.’<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> But the deepest ground
+of dislike has not been stated; Florence was then the scene of
+the richest development of human individuality, while for the
+despots no other individuality could be suffered to live and
+thrive but their own and that of their nearest dependents.
+The control of the individual was rigorously carried out, even
+down to the establishment of a system of passports.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<p>The astrological superstitions and the religious unbelief of
+many of the tyrants gave, in the minds of their contemporaries,
+a peculiar colour to this awful and God-forsaken existence.
+When the last Carrara could no longer defend the walls and
+gates of the plague-stricken Padua, hemmed in on all sides by
+the Venetians (1405), the soldiers of the guard heard him cry
+to the devil ‘to come and kill him.’</p>
+
+<p>The most complete and instructive type of the tyranny of
+the fourteenth century is to be found unquestionably among
+the Visconti of Milan, from the death of the Archbishop
+Giovanni onwards (1354). The family likeness which shows
+itself between Bernabò and the worst of the Roman Emperors<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a>{13}</span>
+is unmistakable;<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> the most important public object was the
+prince’s boar-hunting; whoever interfered with it was put to
+death with torture; the terrified people were forced to maintain
+5,000 boar-hounds, with strict responsibility for their
+health and safety. The taxes were extorted by every conceivable
+sort of compulsion; seven daughters of the prince
+received a dowry of 100,000 gold florins apiece; and an
+enormous treasure was collected. On the death of his wife
+(1384) an order was issued ‘to the subjects’ to share his grief,
+as once they had shared his joy, and to wear mourning for a
+year. The <i>coup de main</i> (1385) by which his nephew Giangaleazzo
+got him into his power&mdash;one of those brilliant plots
+which make the heart of even late historians beat more quickly<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a>&mdash;was
+strikingly characteristic of the man. Giangaleazzo,
+despised by his relations on account of his religion and his love
+of science, resolved on vengeance, and, leaving the city under
+pretext of a pilgrimage, fell upon his unsuspecting uncle, took
+him prisoner, forced his way back into the city at the head of
+an armed band, seized on the government, and gave up the
+palace of Bernabò to general plunder.</p>
+
+<p>In Giangaleazzo that passion for the colossal which was
+common to most of the despots shows itself on the largest scale.
+He undertook, at the cost of 300,000 golden florins, the construction
+of gigantic dykes, to divert in case of need the Mincio
+from Mantua and the Brenta from Padua, and thus to render
+these cities defenceless.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> It is not impossible, indeed, that he
+thought of draining away the lagoons of Venice. He founded
+that most wonderful of all convents, the Certosa of Pavia,<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a>{14}</span>
+the cathedral of Milan, ‘which exceeds in size and splendour
+all the churches of Christendom.’ The Palace in Pavia, which
+his father Galeazzo began and which he himself finished, was
+probably by far the most magnificent of the princely dwellings
+of Europe. There he transferred his famous library, and the
+great collection of relics of the saints, in which he placed a
+peculiar faith. King Winceslaus made him Duke (1395); he
+was hoping for nothing less than the Kingdom of Italy<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> or the
+Imperial crown, when (1402) he fell ill and died. His whole
+territories are said to have paid him in a single year, besides
+the regular contribution of 1,200,000 gold florins, no less than
+800,000 more in extraordinary subsidies. After his death the
+dominions which he had brought together by every sort of
+violence fell to pieces; and for a time even the original nucleus
+could with difficulty be maintained by his successors. What
+might have become of his sons Giovanni Maria (died 1412) and
+Filippo Maria (died 1417), had they lived in a different country
+and among other traditions, cannot be said. But, as heirs of
+their house, they inherited that monstrous capital of cruelty
+and cowardice which had been accumulated from generation
+to generation.</p>
+
+<p>Giovanni Maria, too, is famed for his dogs, which were no
+longer, however, used for hunting, but for tearing human
+bodies. Tradition has preserved their names, like those of the
+bears of the Emperor Valentinian I.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> In May, 1409, when war
+was going on, and the starving populace cried to him in the
+streets, <i>Pace! Pace!</i> he let loose his mercenaries upon them,
+and 200 lives were sacrificed; under penalty of the gallows it
+was forbidden to utter the words <i>pace</i> and <i>guerra</i>, and the
+priests were ordered, instead of <i>dona nobis pacem</i>, to say <i>tran<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a>{15}</span>quillitatem</i>!
+At last a band of conspirators took advantage of
+the moment when Facino Cane, the chief Condottiere of the
+insane ruler, lay ill at Pavia, and cut down Giovan Maria in
+the church of San Gottardo at Milan; the dying Facino on the
+same day made his officers swear to stand by the heir Filippo
+Maria, whom he himself urged his wife<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> to take for a second
+husband. His wife, Beatrice di Tenda, followed his advice.
+We shall have occasion to speak of Filippo Maria later on.</p>
+
+<p>And in times like these Cola di Rienzi was dreaming of
+founding on the rickety enthusiasm of the corrupt population
+of Rome a new state which was to comprise all Italy. By the
+side of rulers such as those whom we have described, he seems
+no better than a poor deluded fool.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a>{16}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-1" id="CHAPTER_III-1"></a>CHAPTER III.<br /><br />
+<small>THE TYRANNY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> despotisms of the fifteenth century show an altered
+character. Many of the less important tyrants, and some
+of the greater, like the Scala and the Carrara, had disappeared,
+while the more powerful ones, aggrandized by conquest, had
+given to their systems each its characteristic development.
+Naples for example received a fresh and stronger impulse from
+the new Arragonese dynasty. A striking feature of this epoch
+is the attempt of the Condottieri to found independent dynasties
+of their own. Facts and the actual relations of things,
+apart from traditional estimates, are alone regarded; talent
+and audacity win the great prizes. The petty despots, to
+secure a trustworthy support, begin to enter the service of the
+larger states, and become themselves Condottieri, receiving in
+return for their services money and impunity for their misdeeds,
+if not an increase of territory. All, whether small or
+great, must exert themselves more, must act with greater
+caution and calculation, and must learn to refrain from too
+wholesale barbarities; only so much wrong is permitted by
+public opinion as is necessary for the end in view, and this the
+impartial bystander certainly finds no fault with. No trace is
+here visible of that half-religious loyalty by which the legitimate
+princes of the West were supported; personal popularity
+is the nearest approach we can find to it. Talent and calculation
+are the only means of advancement. A character like
+that of Charles the Bold, which wore itself out in the passionate
+pursuit of impracticable ends, was a riddle to the Italian.
+‘The Swiss were only peasants, and if they were all killed,
+that would be no satisfaction for the Burgundian nobles who
+might fall in the war. If the Duke got possession of all
+Switzerland without a struggle, his income would not be 5,000<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a>{17}</span>
+ducats the greater.’<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> The mediæval features in the character
+of Charles, his chivalrous aspirations and ideals, had long
+become unintelligible to the Italian. The diplomatists of the
+South, when they saw him strike his officers and yet keep
+them in his service, when he maltreated his troops to punish
+them for a defeat, and then threw the blame on his counsellors
+in the presence of the same troops, gave him up for lost.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a>
+Louis XI., on the other hand, whose policy surpasses that of
+the Italian princes in their own style, and who was an avowed
+admirer of Francesco Sforza, must be placed in all that regards
+culture and refinement far below these rulers.</p>
+
+<p>Good and evil lie strangely mixed together in the Italian
+States of the fifteenth century. The personality of the ruler
+is so highly developed, often of such deep significance, and
+so characteristic of the conditions and needs of the time,
+that to form an adequate moral judgment on it is no easy
+task.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p>
+
+<p>The foundation of the system was and remained illegitimate,
+and nothing could remove the curse which rested upon it.
+The imperial approval or investiture made no change in the
+matter, since the people attached little weight to the fact, that
+the despot had bought a piece of parchment somewhere in
+foreign countries, or from some stranger passing through his
+territory.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> If the Emperor had been good for anything&mdash;so ran
+the logic of uncritical common sense&mdash;he would never have let
+the tyrant rise at all. Since the Roman expedition of Charles
+IV., the emperors had done nothing more in Italy than sanction
+a tyranny which had arisen without their help; they could
+give it no other practical authority than what might flow from
+an imperial charter. The whole conduct of Charles in Italy<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a>{18}</span>
+was a scandalous political comedy. Matteo Villani<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> relates
+how the Visconti escorted him round their territory, and at
+last out of it; how he went about like a hawker selling his
+wares (privileges, etc.) for money; what a mean appearance
+he made in Rome, and how at the end, without even drawing
+the sword, he returned with replenished coffers across the
+Alps. Nevertheless, patriotic enthusiasts and poets, full of the
+greatness of the past, conceived high hopes at his coming,
+which were afterwards dissipated by his pitiful conduct.
+Petrarch, who had written frequent letters exhorting the
+Emperor to cross the Alps, to give back to Rome its departed
+greatness, and to set up a new universal empire, now, when
+the Emperor, careless of these high-flying projects, had come
+at last, still hoped to see his dreams realized, strove unweariedly,
+by speech and writing, to impress the Emperor with
+them, but was at length driven away from him with disgust
+when he saw the imperial authority dishonoured by the
+submission of Charles to the Pope.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> Sigismund came, on the
+first occasion at least (1414), with the good intention of
+persuading John XXIII. to take part in his council; it was on
+that journey, when Pope and Emperor were gazing from the
+lofty tower of Cremona on the panorama of Lombardy, that
+their host, the tyrant Gabino Fondolo, was seized with the
+desire to throw them both over. On his second visit Sigismund
+came as a mere adventurer, giving no proof whatever
+of his imperial prerogative, except by crowning Beccadelli as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a>{19}</span>
+a poet; for more than half a year he remained shut up in
+Siena, like a debtor in gaol, and only with difficulty, and at
+a later period, succeeded in being crowned in Rome. And
+what can be thought of Frederick III.? His journeys to Italy
+have the air of holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the
+expense of those who wanted him to confirm their prerogatives,
+or whose vanity it flattered to entertain an emperor. The
+latter was the case with Alfonso of Naples, who paid 150,000
+florins for the honour of an imperial visit.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> At Ferrara,<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> on his
+second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a whole day
+without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty
+titles; he created knights, counts, doctors, notaries&mdash;counts,
+indeed, of different degrees, as, for instance, counts palatine,
+counts with the right to create doctors up to the number
+of five, counts with the right to legitimatise bastards, to
+appoint notaries, and so forth. The Chancellor, however,
+expected in return for the patents in question a gratuity which
+was thought excessive at Ferrara.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> The opinion of Borso,
+himself created Duke of Modena and Reggio in return for an
+annual payment of 4,000 gold florins, when his imperial patron
+was distributing titles and diplomas to all the little court, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a>{20}</span>
+not mentioned. The humanists, then the chief spokesmen
+of the age, were divided in opinion according to their personal
+interests, while the Emperor was greeted by some<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> of them
+with the conventional acclamations of the poets of imperial
+Rome. Poggio<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> confessed that he no longer knew what the
+coronation meant; in the old times only the victorious Inperator
+was crowned, and then he was crowned with laurel.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a></p>
+
+<p>With Maximilian I. begins not only the general intervention
+of foreign nations, but a new imperial policy with regard to
+Italy. The first step&mdash;the investiture of Ludovico Moro with
+the duchy of Milan and the exclusion of his unhappy nephew&mdash;was
+not of a kind to bear good fruits. According to the
+modern theory of intervention, when two parties are tearing
+a country to pieces, a third may step in and take its share,
+and on this principle the empire acted. But right and justice
+were appealed to no longer. When Louis XII. was expected
+in Genoa (1502), and the imperial eagle was removed from the
+hall of the ducal palace and replaced by painted lilies, the
+historian, Senarega<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> asked what after all, was the meaning of
+the eagle which so many revolutions had spared, and what
+claims the empire had upon Genoa. No one knew more about
+the matter than the old phrase that Genoa was a <i>camera
+imperii</i>. In fact, nobody in Italy could give a clear answer to
+any such questions. At length, when Charles V. held Spain
+and the empire together, he was able by means of Spanish
+forces to make good imperial claims; but it is notorious that
+what he thereby gained turned to the profit, not of the empire,
+but of the Spanish monarchy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a>{21}</span>Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the
+dynasties of the fifteenth century, was the public indifference
+to legitimate birth, which to foreigners&mdash;for example, to
+Comines&mdash;appeared so remarkable. The two things went
+naturally together. In northern countries, as in Burgundy,
+the illegitimate offspring were provided for by a distinct class
+of appanages, such as bishoprics and the like; in Portugal an
+illegitimate line maintained itself on the throne only by
+constant effort; in Italy, on the contrary, there no longer
+existed a princely house where, even in the direct line of
+descent, bastards were not patiently tolerated. The Aragonese
+monarchs of Naples belonged to the illegitimate line, Aragon
+itself falling to the lot of the brother of Alfonso I. The great
+Frederick of Urbino was, perhaps, no Montefeltro at all.
+When Pius II. was on his way to the Congress of Mantua
+(1459), eight bastards of the house of Este rode to meet him at
+Ferrara, among them the reigning duke Borso himself and two
+illegitimate sons of his illegitimate brother and predecessor
+Leonello.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> The latter had also had a lawful wife, herself an
+illegitimate daughter of Alfonso I. of Naples by an African
+woman.<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> The bastards were often admitted to the succession
+where the lawful children were minors and the dangers of the
+situation were pressing; and a rule of seniority became recognised,
+which took no account of pure or impure birth. The
+fitness of the individual, his worth and his capacity, were of
+more weight than all the laws and usages which prevailed
+elsewhere in the West. It was the age, indeed, in which the
+sons of the Popes were founding dynasties. In the sixteenth
+century, through the influence of foreign ideas and of the
+counter-reformation which then began, the whole question was
+judged more strictly: Varchi discovers that the succession of
+the legitimate children ‘is ordered by reason, and is the
+will of heaven from eternity.’<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici
+founded his claim to the lordship of Florence on the fact that
+he was perhaps the fruit of a lawful marriage, and at all events
+son of a gentlewoman, and not, like Duke Alessandro, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a>{22}</span>
+a servant girl.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> At this time began those morganatic marriages
+of affection which in the fifteenth century, on grounds
+either of policy or morality, would have had no meaning at all.</p>
+
+<p>But the highest and the most admired form of illegitimacy in
+the fifteenth century was presented by the Condottiere, who,
+whatever may have been his origin, raised himself to the
+position of an independent ruler. At bottom, the occupation
+of Lower Italy by the Normans in the eleventh century was
+of this character. Such attempts now began to keep the
+peninsula in a constant ferment.</p>
+
+<p>It was possible for a Condottiere to obtain the lordship of
+a district even without usurpation, in the case when his
+employer, through want of money or troops, provided for
+him in this way;<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> under any circumstances the Condottiere,
+even when he dismissed for the time the greater part of his
+forces, needed a safe place where he could establish his winter
+quarters, and lay up his stores and provisions. The first
+example of a captain thus portioned is John Hawkwood, who
+was invested by Gregory XI. with the lordship of Bagnacavallo
+and Cotignola.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> When with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian
+armies and leaders appeared upon the scene, the chances
+of founding a principality, or of increasing one already acquired,
+became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian
+outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan
+after the death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two
+sons was chiefly aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms
+founded by the Condottieri; and from the greatest of them,
+Facino Cane, the house of Visconti inherited, together with his
+widow, a long list of cities, and 400,000 golden florins, not to
+speak of the soldiers of her first husband whom Beatrice di
+Tenda brought with her.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> From henceforth that thoroughly
+immoral relation between the governments and their Condottieri,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a>{23}</span>
+which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became
+more and more common. An old story<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a>&mdash;one of those which
+are true and not true, everywhere and nowhere&mdash;describes it
+as follows: The citizens of a certain town (Siena seems to be
+meant) had once an officer in their service who had freed them
+from foreign aggression; daily they took counsel how to
+recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their power
+was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city.
+At last one of them rose and said, ‘Let us kill him and then
+worship him as our patron saint.’ And so they did, following
+the example set by the Roman senate with Romulus. In fact,
+the Condottieri had reason to fear none so much as their
+employers; if they were successful, they became dangerous,
+and were put out of the way like Robert Malatesta just after
+the victory he had won for Sixtus IV. (1482); if they failed,
+the vengeance of the Venetians on Carmagnola<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> showed to
+what risks they were exposed (1432). It is characteristic of
+the moral aspect of the situation, that the Condottieri had
+often to give their wives and children as hostages, and notwithstanding
+this, neither felt nor inspired confidence. They
+must have been heroes of abnegation, natures like Belisarius
+himself, not to be cankered by hatred and bitterness; only
+the most perfect goodness could save them from the most
+monstrous iniquity. No wonder then if we find them full
+of contempt for all sacred things, cruel and treacherous to
+their fellows&mdash;men who cared nothing whether or no they
+died under the ban of the Church. At the same time, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a>{24}</span>
+through the force of the same conditions, the genius and
+capacity of many among them attained the highest conceivable
+development, and won for them the admiring devotion of their
+followers; their armies are the first in modern history in which
+the personal credit of the leader is the one moving power. A
+brilliant example is shown in the life of Francesco Sforza;<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> no
+prejudice of birth could prevent him from winning and turning
+to account when he needed it a boundless devotion from each
+individual with whom he had to deal; it happened more than
+once that his enemies laid down their arms at the sight of him,
+greeting him reverently with uncovered heads, each honouring
+in him ‘the common father of the men-at-arms.’ The race of
+the Sforza has this special interest, that from the very beginning
+of its history we seem able to trace its endeavours
+after the crown.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> The foundation of its fortune lay in the
+remarkable fruitfulness of the family; Francesco’s father,
+Jacopo, himself a celebrated man, had twenty brothers and
+sisters, all brought up roughly at Cotignola, near Faenza, amid
+the perils of one of the endless Romagnole ‘vendette’ between
+their own house and that of the Pasolini. The family dwelling
+was a mere arsenal and fortress; the mother and daughters
+were as warlike as their kinsmen. In his thirteenth year
+Jacopo ran away and fled to Panicale to the Papal Condottiere
+Boldrino&mdash;the man who even in death continued to lead his
+troops, the word of order being given from the bannered tent
+in which the embalmed body lay, till at last a fit leader was
+found to succeed him. Jacopo, when he had at length made
+himself a name in the service of different Condottieri, sent for
+his relations, and obtained through them the same advantages
+that a prince derives from a numerous dynasty. It was these
+relations who kept the army together when he lay a captive in
+the Castel dell’Uovo at Naples; his sister took the royal
+envoys prisoners with her own hands, and saved him by this
+reprisal from death. It was an indication of the breadth and
+the range of his plans that in monetary affairs Jacopo was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a>{25}</span>
+thoroughly trustworthy; even in his defeats he consequently
+found credit with the bankers. He habitually protected the
+peasants against the licence of his troops, and reluctantly
+destroyed or injured a conquered city. He gave his well-known
+mistress, Lucia, the mother of Francesco, in marriage to another
+in order to be free from a princely alliance. Even the marriages
+of his relations were arranged on a definite plan. He
+kept clear of the impious and profligate life of his contemporaries,
+and brought up his son Francesco to the three rules:
+‘Let other men’s wives alone; strike none of your followers,
+or, if you do, send the injured man far away; don’t ride a hard-mouthed
+horse, or one that drops his shoe.’ But his chief
+source of influence lay in the qualities, if not of a great general,
+at least of a great soldier. His frame was powerful, and
+developed by every kind of exercise; his peasant’s face and
+frank manners won general popularity; his memory was
+marvellous, and after the lapse of years could recall the names
+of his followers, the number of their horses, and the amount of
+their pay. His education was purely Italian: he devoted his
+leisure to the study of history, and had Greek and Latin
+authors translated for his use. Francesco, his still more famous
+son, set his mind from the first on founding a powerful state,
+and through brilliant generalship and a faithlessness which
+hesitated at nothing, got possession of the great city of Milan
+(1447-1450).</p>
+
+<p>His example was contagious. Æneas Sylvius wrote about
+this time:<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> ‘In our change-loving Italy, where nothing stands
+firm, and where no ancient dynasty exists, a servant can
+easily become a king.’ One man in particular, who styled
+himself ‘the man of fortune,’ filled the imagination of the
+whole country: Giacomo Piccinino, the son of Niccolò. It was
+a burning question of the day if he, too, would succeed in
+founding a princely house. The greater states had an obvious
+interest in hindering it, and even Francesco Sforza thought it
+would be all the better if the list of self-made sovereigns were
+not enlarged. But the troops and captains sent against him,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a>{26}</span>
+at the time, for instance, when he was aiming at the lordship
+of Siena, recognised their interest in supporting him:<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> ‘If it
+were all over with him, we should have to go back and plough
+our fields.’ Even while besieging him at Orbetello, they
+supplied him with provisions; and he got out of his straits
+with honour. But at last fate overtook him. All Italy was
+betting on the result, when (1465), after a visit to Sforza at
+Milan, he went to King Ferrante at Naples. In spite of the
+pledges given, and of his high connections, he was murdered
+in the Castel dell’Uovo.<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> Even the Condottieri, who had
+obtained their dominions by inheritance, never felt themselves
+safe. When Roberto Malatesta and Frederick of Urbino died
+on the same day (1482), the one at Rome, the other at Bologna,
+it was found<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> that each had recommended his state to the
+care of the other. Against a class of men who themselves
+stuck at nothing, everything was held to be permissible.
+Francesco Sforza, when quite young, had married a rich
+Calabrian heiress, Polissena Russa, Countess of Montalto, who
+bore him a daughter; an aunt poisoned both mother and child,
+and seized the inheritance.<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a></p>
+
+<p>From the death of Piccinino onwards, the foundations of
+new States by the Condottieri became a scandal not to be
+tolerated. The four great Powers, Naples, Milan, the Papacy,
+and Venice, formed among themselves a political equilibrium
+which refused to allow of any disturbance. In the States of
+the Church, which swarmed with petty tyrants, who in part
+were, or had been, Condottieri, the nephews of the Popes, since
+the time of Sixtus IV., monopolised the right to all such
+undertakings. But at the first sign of a political crisis, the
+soldiers of fortune appeared again upon the scene. Under the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a>{27}</span>
+wretched administration of Innocent VIII. it was near happening
+that a certain Boccalino, who had formerly served in the
+Burgundian army, gave himself and the town of Osimo, of
+which he was master, up to the Turkish forces;<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> fortunately,
+through the intervention of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he proved
+willing to be paid off, and took himself away. In the year
+1495, when the wars of Charles VIII. had turned Italy upside
+down, the Condottiere Vidovero, of Brescia, made trial of his
+strength:<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> he had already seized the town of Cesena and
+murdered many of the nobles and the burghers; but the citadel
+held out, and he was forced to withdraw. He then, at the
+head of a band lent him by another scoundrel, Pandolfo Malatesta
+of Rimini, son of the Roberto already spoken of, and
+Venetian Condottiere, wrested the town of Castelnuovo from
+the Archbishop of Ravenna. The Venetians, fearing that
+worse would follow, and urged also by the Pope, ordered
+Pandolfo, ‘with the kindest intentions,’ to take an opportunity
+of arresting his good friend: the arrest was made, though ‘with
+great regret,’ whereupon the order came to bring the prisoner
+to the gallows. Pandolfo was considerate enough to strangle
+him in prison, and then show his corpse to the people. The
+last notable example of such usurpers is the famous Castellan
+of Musso, who during the confusion in the Milanese territory
+which followed the battle of Pavia (1525), improvised a sovereignty
+on the Lake of Como.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a>{28}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-1" id="CHAPTER_IV-1"></a>CHAPTER IV.<br /><br />
+<small>THE PETTY TYRANNIES.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">I<small>T</small> may be said in general of the despotisms of the fifteenth
+century that the greatest crimes are most frequent in the
+smallest states. In these, where the family was numerous
+and all the members wished to live in a manner befitting their
+rank, disputes respecting the inheritance were unavoidable.
+Bernardo Varano of Camerino put (1434) two of his brothers
+to death,<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> wishing to divide their property among his sons.
+Where the ruler of a single town was distinguished by a wise,
+moderate, and humane government, and by zeal for intellectual
+culture, he was generally a member of some great
+family, or politically dependent on it. This was the case, for
+example, with Alessandro Sforza,<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> Prince of Pesaro, brother
+of the great Francesco, and stepfather of Frederick of Urbino
+(d. 1473). Prudent in administration, just and affable in his
+rule, he enjoyed, after years of warfare, a tranquil reign,
+collected a noble library, and passed his leisure in learned or
+religious conversation. A man of the same class was Giovanni
+II., Bentivoglio of Bologna (1462-1506), whose policy was
+determined by that of the Este and the Sforza. What ferocity
+and bloodthirstiness is found, on the other hand, among the
+Varani of Camerino, the Malatesta of Rimini, the Manfreddi
+of Faenza, and above all among the Baglioni of Perugia. We
+find a striking picture of the events in the last-named family
+towards the close of the fifteenth century, in the admirable
+historical narratives of Graziani and Materazzo.<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a></p>
+
+<p>The Baglioni were one of those families whose rule never
+took the shape of an avowed despotism. It was rather a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a>{29}</span>
+leadership exercised by means of their vast wealth and of their
+practical influence in the choice of public officers. Within the
+family one man was recognised as head; but deep and secret
+jealousy prevailed among the members of the different branches.
+Opposed to the Baglioni stood another aristocratic party, led
+by the family of the Oddi. In 1487 the city was turned into
+a camp, and the houses of the leading citizens swarmed with
+bravos; scenes of violence were of daily occurrence. At the
+burial of a German student, who had been assassinated, two
+colleges took arms against one another; sometimes the bravos
+of the different houses even joined battle in the public square.
+The complaints of the merchants and artisans were vain; the
+Papal Governors and <i>Nipoti</i> held their tongues, or took themselves
+off on the first opportunity. At last the Oddi were
+forced to abandon Perugia, and the city became a beleaguered
+fortress under the absolute despotism of the Baglioni, who
+used even the cathedral as barracks. Plots and surprises were
+met with cruel vengeance; in the year 1491, after 130 conspirators,
+who had forced their way into the city, were killed
+and hung up at the Palazzo Comunale, thirty-five altars were
+erected in the square, and for three days mass was performed
+and processions held, to take away the curse which rested on
+the spot. A nephew of Innocent VIII. was in open day run
+through in the street. A nephew of Alexander VI., who was
+sent to smooth matters over, was dismissed with public contempt.
+All the while the two leaders of the ruling house,
+Guido and Ridolfo, were holding frequent interviews with
+Suor Colomba of Rieti, a Dominican nun of saintly reputation
+and miraculous powers, who under penalty of some great
+disaster ordered them to make peace&mdash;naturally in vain.
+Nevertheless the chronicle takes the opportunity to point out
+the devotion and piety of the better men in Perugia during
+this reign of terror. When in 1494 Charles VIII. approached,
+the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and
+near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity, that every
+house in the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields
+lay untilled, the peasants were turned into plundering and
+murdering savages, the fresh-grown bushes were filled with
+stags and wolves, and the beasts grew fat on the bodies of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a>{30}</span>
+slain, on so-called ‘Christian flesh.’ When Alexander VI.
+withdrew (1495) into Umbria before Charles VIII., then returning
+from Naples, it occurred to him, when at Perugia, that
+he might now rid himself of the Baglioni once for all; he
+proposed to Guido a festival or tournament, or something else
+of the same kind, which would bring the whole family together.
+Guido, however, was of opinion, ‘that the most impressive
+spectacle of all would be to see the whole military force of
+Perugia collected in a body,’ whereupon the Pope abandoned
+his project. Soon after, the exiles made another attack, in
+which nothing but the personal heroism of the Baglioni won
+them the victory. It was then that Simonetto Baglione, a lad
+of scarcely eighteen, fought in the square with a handful of
+followers against hundreds of the enemy: he fell at last with
+more than twenty wounds, but recovered himself when Astorre
+Baglione came to his help, and mounting on horseback in
+gilded armour with a falcon on his helmet, ‘like Mars in
+bearing and in deeds, plunged into the struggle.’</p>
+
+<p>At that time Raphael, a boy of twelve years of age, was at
+school under Pietro Perugino. The impressions of these days
+are perhaps immortalised in the small, early pictures of St.
+Michael and St. George: something of them, it may be, lives
+eternally in the great painting of St. Michael: and if Astorre
+Baglione has anywhere found his apotheosis, it is in the figure
+of the heavenly horseman in the Heliodorus.</p>
+
+<p>The opponents of the Baglioni were partly destroyed, partly
+scattered in terror, and were henceforth incapable of another
+enterprise of the kind. After a time a partial reconciliation
+took place, and some of the exiles were allowed to return.
+But Perugia became none the safer or more tranquil: the
+inward discord of the ruling family broke out in frightful
+excesses. An opposition was formed against Guido and Ridolfo
+and their sons Gianpaolo, Simonetto, Astorre, Gismondo,
+Gentile, Marcantonio and others, by two great-nephews,
+Grifone and Carlo Barciglia; the latter of the two was also
+nephew of Varano, Prince of Camerino, and brother of one
+of the former exiles, Ieronimo della Penna. In vain did
+Simonetto, warned by sinister presentiment, entreat his uncle
+on his knees to allow him to put Penna to death: Guido<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a>{31}</span>
+refused. The plot ripened suddenly on the occasion of the
+marriage of Astorre with Lavinia Colonna, at Midsummer 1500.
+The festival began and lasted several days amid gloomy forebodings,
+whose deepening effect is admirably described by
+Matarazzo. Varano fed and encouraged them with devilish
+ingenuity: he worked upon Grifone by the prospect of undivided
+authority, and by stories of an imaginary intrigue of
+his wife Zenobia with Gianpaolo. Finally each conspirator
+was provided with a victim. (The Baglioni lived all of them
+in separate houses, mostly on the site of the present castle.)
+Each received fifteen of the bravos at hand; the remainder
+were set on the watch. In the night of July 15 the doors
+were forced, and Guido, Astorre, Simonetto, and Gismondo
+were murdered; the others succeeded in escaping.</p>
+
+<p>As the corpse of Astorre lay by that of Simonetto in the
+street, the spectators, ‘and especially the foreign students,’
+compared him to an ancient Roman, so great and imposing
+did he seem. In the features of Simonetto could still be traced
+the audacity and defiance which death itself had not tamed.
+The victors went round among the friends of the family, and
+did their best to recommend themselves; they found all in
+tears and preparing to leave for the country. Meantime the
+escaped Baglioni collected forces without the city, and on the
+following day forced their way in, Gianpaolo at their head,
+and speedily found adherents among others whom Barciglia
+had been threatening with death. When Grifone fell into
+their hands near S. Ercolono. Gianpaolo handed him over
+for execution to his followers. Barciglia and Penna fled to
+Varano, the chief author of the tragedy, at Camerino; and in
+a moment, almost without loss, Gianpaolo became master of
+the city.</p>
+
+<p>Atalanta, the still young and beautiful mother of Grifone,
+who the day before had withdrawn to a country house with
+the latter’s wife Zenobia and two children of Gianpaolo, and
+more than once had repulsed her son with a mother’s curse,
+now returned with her step-daughter in search of the dying
+man. All stood aside as the two women approached, each
+man shrinking from being recognised as the slayer of Grifone,
+and dreading the malediction of the mother. But they were<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a>{32}</span>
+deceived: she herself besought her son to pardon him who
+had dealt the fatal blow, and he died with her blessing. The
+eyes of the crowd followed the two women reverently as they
+crossed the square with blood-stained garments. It was
+Atalanta for whom Raphael afterwards painted the world-famed
+‘Deposition,’ with which she laid her own maternal
+sorrows at the feet of a yet higher and holier suffering.</p>
+
+<p>The cathedral, in the immediate neighbourhood of which
+the greater part of this tragedy had been enacted, was washed
+with wine and consecrated afresh. The triumphal arch,
+erected for the wedding, still remained standing, painted with
+the deeds of Astorre and with the laudatory verses of the
+narrator of these events, the worthy Matarazzo.</p>
+
+<p>A legendary history, which is simply the reflection of these
+atrocities, arose out of the early days of the Baglioni. All
+the members of this family from the beginning were reported
+to have died an evil death&mdash;twenty-seven on one occasion
+together; their houses were said to have been once before
+levelled to the ground, and the streets of Perugia paved with
+the bricks&mdash;and more of the same kind. Under Paul III. the
+destruction of their palaces really took place.<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a></p>
+
+<p>For a time they seem to have formed good resolutions, to
+have brought their own party into order, and to have protected
+the public officials against the arbitrary acts of the
+nobility. But the old curse broke out again like a smouldering
+fire. Gianpaolo was enticed to Rome under Leo X., and there
+beheaded; one of his sons, Orazio, who ruled in Perugia for a
+short time only, and by the most violent means, as the partisan
+of the Duke of Urbino (himself threatened by the Pope), once
+more repeated in his own family the horrors of the past. His
+uncle and three cousins were murdered, whereupon the Duke
+sent him word that enough had been done.<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> His brother,
+Malatesta Baglione, the Florentine general, has made himself
+immortal by the treason of 1530; and Malatesta’s son Ridolfo,
+the last of the house, attained, by the murder of the legate<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a>{33}</span>
+and the public officers in the year 1534, a brief but sanguinary
+authority.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there we meet with the names of the rulers of
+Rimini. Unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high
+culture, have been seldom so combined in one individual as
+in Sigismondo Malatesta (d. 1467).<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> But the accumulated
+crimes of such a family must at last outweigh all talent, however
+great, and drag the tyrant into the abyss. Pandolfo,
+Sigismondo’s nephew, who has been mentioned already, succeeded
+in holding his ground, for the sole reason that the
+Venetians refused to abandon their Condottiere, whatever guilt
+he might be chargeable with; when his subjects (1497), after
+ample provocation,<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> bombarded him in his castle at Rimini,
+and afterwards allowed him to escape, a Venetian commissioner
+brought him back, stained as he was with fratricide
+and every other abomination. Thirty years later the Malatesta
+were penniless exiles. In the year 1527, as in the time of
+Cæsar Borgia, a sort of epidemic fell on the petty tyrants:
+few of them outlived this date, and none to their own good.
+At Mirandola, which was governed by insignificant princes of
+the house of Pico, lived in the year 1533 a poor scholar, Lilio
+Gregorio Giraldi, who had fled from the sack of Rome to the
+hospitable hearth of the aged Giovanni Francesco Pico, nephew
+of the famous Giovanni; the discussions as to the sepulchral
+monument which the prince was constructing for himself gave
+rise to a treatise, the dedication of which bears the date of
+April in this year. The postscript is a sad one.<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a>&mdash;‘In October
+of the same year the unhappy prince was attacked in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a>{34}</span>
+night and robbed of life and throne by his brother’s son; and
+I myself escaped narrowly, and am now in the deepest misery.’</p>
+
+<p>A pseudo-despotism without characteristic features, such as
+Pandolfo Petrucci exercised from the year 1490 in Siena, then
+torn by faction, is hardly worth a closer consideration. Insignificant
+and malicious, he governed with the help of a
+professor of jurisprudence and of an astrologer, and frightened
+his people by an occasional murder. His pastime in the
+summer months was to roll blocks of stone from the top of
+Monte Amiata, without caring what or whom they hit. After
+succeeding, where the most prudent failed, in escaping from
+the devices of Cæsar Borgia, he died at last forsaken and despised.
+His sons maintained a qualified supremacy for many
+years afterwards.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a>{35}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-1" id="CHAPTER_V-1"></a>CHAPTER V.<br /><br />
+<small>THE GREATER DYNASTIES.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">I<small>N</small> treating of the chief dynasties of Italy, it is convenient
+to discuss the Aragonese, on account of its special character,
+apart from the rest. The feudal system, which from the
+days of the Normans had survived in the form of a territorial
+supremacy of the Barons, gave a distinctive colour to the political
+constitution of Naples; while elsewhere in Italy, excepting
+only in the southern part of the ecclesiastical dominion,
+and in a few other districts, a direct tenure of land prevailed,
+and no hereditary powers were permitted by the law. The
+great Alfonso, who reigned in Naples from 1435 onwards
+(d. 1458), was a man of another kind than his real or alleged
+descendants. Brilliant in his whole existence, fearless in
+mixing with his people, mild and generous towards his enemies,
+dignified and affable in intercourse, modest notwithstanding
+his legitimate royal descent, admired rather than blamed even
+for his old man’s passion for Lucrezia d’Alagna, he had the
+one bad quality of extravagance,<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> from which, however, the
+natural consequence followed. Unscrupulous financiers were
+long omnipotent at Court, till the bankrupt king robbed them
+of their spoils; a crusade was preached, as a pretext for taxing
+the clergy; the Jews were forced to save themselves from
+conversion and other oppressive measures by presents and the
+payment of regular taxes; when a great earthquake happening
+in the Abruzzi, the survivors were compelled to make good the
+contributions of the dead. On the other hand, he abolished
+unreasonable taxes, like that on dice, and aimed at relieving
+his poorer subjects from the imposts which pressed most heavily<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a>{36}</span>
+upon them. By such means Alfonso was able to entertain
+distinguished guests with unrivalled splendour; he found
+pleasure in ceaseless expense, even for the benefit of his
+enemies, and in rewarding literary work knew absolutely no
+measure. Poggio received 500 pieces of gold for translating
+Xenophon’s ‘Cyropædeia.’</p>
+
+<p>Ferrante,<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> who succeeded him, passed as his illegitimate son
+by a Spanish lady, but was not improbably the son of a half-caste
+Moor of Valentia. Whether it was his blood or the plots
+formed against his life by the barons which embittered and
+darkened his nature, it is certain that he was equalled in
+ferocity by none among the princes of his time. Restlessly
+active, recognised as one of the most powerful political minds
+of the day, and free from the vices of the profligate, he
+concentrated all his powers, among which must be reckoned
+profound dissimulation and an irreconcileable spirit of vengeance,
+on the destruction of his opponents. He had been
+wounded in every point in which a ruler is open to offence;
+for the leaders of the barons, though related to him by marriage,
+were yet the allies of his foreign enemies. Extreme
+measures became part of his daily policy. The means for this
+struggle with his barons, and for his external wars, were
+exacted in the same Mohammedan fashion which Frederick
+II. had introduced: the Government alone dealt in oil and
+wine; the whole commerce of the country was put by Ferrante
+into the hands of a wealthy merchant, Francesco Coppola, who
+had entire control of the anchorage on the coast, and shared
+the profits with the King. Deficits were made up by forced
+loans, by executions and confiscations, by open simony, and by
+contributions levied on the ecclesiastical corporations. Besides<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a>{37}</span>
+hunting, which he practised regardless of all rights of property,
+his pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents
+near him, either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and
+embalmed, dressed in the costume which they wore in their
+lifetime.<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> He would chuckle in talking of the captives with
+his friends, and made no secret whatever of the museum of
+mummies. His victims were mostly men whom he had got
+into his power by treachery; some were even seized while
+guests at the royal table. His conduct to his first minister,
+Antonello Petrucci, who had grown sick and grey in his
+service, and from whose increasing fear of death he extorted
+present after present, was literally devilish. At length the
+suspicion of complicity with the last conspiracy of the barons
+gave the pretext for his arrest and execution. With him died
+Coppola. The way in which all this is narrated in Caracciolo
+and Porzio makes one’s hair stand on end. The elder of the
+King’s sons, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, enjoyed in later years
+a kind of co-regency with his father. He was a savage, brutal
+profligate&mdash;described by Comines as ‘the cruelest, worst, most
+vicious and basest man ever seen’&mdash;who in point of frankness
+alone had the advantage of Ferrante, and who openly avowed
+his contempt for religion and its usages.<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> The better and
+nobler features of the Italian despotisms are not to be found
+among the princes of this line; all that they possessed of the
+art and culture of their time served the purposes of luxury or
+display. Even the genuine Spaniards seem to have almost
+always degenerated in Italy; but the end of this cross-bred
+house (1494 and 1503) gives clear proof of a want of blood.
+Ferrante died of mental care and trouble; Alfonso accused his
+brother Federigo, the only honest member of the family, of
+treason, and insulted him in the vilest manner. At length,
+though he had hitherto passed for one of the ablest generals in
+Italy, he lost his head and fled to Sicily, leaving his son, the
+younger Ferrante, a prey to the French and to domestic treason.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a>{38}</span>
+A dynasty which had ruled as this had done must at least have
+sold its life dear, if its children were ever to hope for a restoration.
+But, as Comines one-sidedly, and yet on the whole
+rightly observes on this occasion, ‘<i>Jamais homme cruel ne fut
+hardi</i>.’</p>
+
+<p>The despotism of the Dukes of Milan, whose government
+from the time of Giangaleazzo onwards was an absolute
+monarchy of the most thorough-going sort, shows the genuine
+Italian character of the fifteenth century. The last of the
+Visconti, Filippo Maria (1412-1447), is a character of peculiar
+interest, and of which fortunately an admirable description<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a>
+has been left us. What a man of uncommon gifts and high
+position can be made by the passion of fear, is here shown with
+what may be called a mathematical completeness. All the
+resources of the State were devoted to the one end of securing
+his personal safety, though happily his cruel egoism did not
+degenerate into a purposeless thirst for blood. He lived in the
+Citadel of Milan, surrounded by magnificent gardens, arbours,
+and lawns. For years he never set foot in the city, making
+his excursions only in the country, where lay several of his
+splendid castles; the flotilla which, drawn by the swiftest
+horses, conducted him to them along canals constructed for the
+purpose, was so arranged as to allow of the application of the
+most rigorous etiquette. Whoever entered the citadel was
+watched by a hundred eyes; it was forbidden even to stand at
+the window, lest signs should be given to those without. All
+who were admitted among the personal followers of the Prince
+were subjected to a series of the strictest examinations; then,
+once accepted, were charged with the highest diplomatic
+commissions, as well as with the humblest personal services&mdash;both
+in this Court being alike honourable. And this was the
+man who conducted long and difficult wars, who dealt habitu<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a>{39}</span>ally
+with political affairs of the first importance, and every day
+sent his plenipotentiaries to all parts of Italy. His safety lay
+in the fact that none of his servants trusted the others, that his
+Condottieri were watched and misled by spies, and that the
+ambassadors and higher officials were baffled and kept apart
+by artificially nourished jealousies, and in particular by the
+device of coupling an honest man with a knave. His inward
+faith, too, rested upon opposed and contradictory systems; he
+believed in blind necessity, and in the influence of the stars,
+and offering prayers at one and the same time to helpers of
+every sort;<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> he was a student of the ancient authors, as well
+as of French tales of chivalry. And yet the same man, who
+would never suffer death to be mentioned in his presence,<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> and
+caused his dying favourites to be removed from the castle, that
+no shadow might fall on the abode of happiness, deliberately
+hastened his own death by closing up a wound, and, refusing
+to be bled, died at last with dignity and grace.</p>
+
+<p>His step-son and successor, the fortunate Condottiere Francesco
+Sforza (1450-1466, see p. 24), was perhaps of all the
+Italians of the fifteenth century the man most after the heart
+of his age. Never was the triumph of genius and individual
+power more brilliantly displayed than in him; and those who
+would not recognise his merit were at least forced to wonder
+at him as the spoilt child of fortune. The Milanese claimed
+it openly as an honour to be governed by so distinguished
+a master; when he entered the city the thronging populace
+bore him on horseback into the cathedral, without giving him
+the chance to dismount.<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> Let us listen to the balance-sheet
+of his life, in the estimate of Pope Pius II., a judge in such
+matters:<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a> ‘In the year 1459, when the Duke came to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a>{40}</span>
+congress at Mantua, he was 60 (really 58) years old; on horseback
+he looked like a young man; of a lofty and imposing
+figure, with serious features, calm and affable in conversation,
+princely in his whole bearing, with a combination of bodily
+and intellectual gifts unrivalled in our time, unconquered on
+the field of battle,&mdash;such was the man who raised himself from
+a humble position to the control of an empire. His wife was
+beautiful and virtuous, his children were like the angels of
+heaven; he was seldom ill, and all his chief wishes were
+fulfilled. And yet he was not without misfortune. His wife,
+out of jealousy, killed his mistress; his old comrades and
+friends, Troilo and Brunoro, abandoned him and went over to
+King Alfonso; another, Ciarpollone, he was forced to hang for
+treason; he had to suffer it that his brother Alessandro set the
+French upon him; one of his sons formed intrigues against
+him, and was imprisoned; the March of Ancona, which he had
+won in war, he lost again in the same way. No man enjoys so
+unclouded a fortune, that he has not somewhere to struggle
+with adversity. He is happy who has but few troubles.’ With
+this negative definition of happiness the learned Pope dismisses
+the reader. Had he been able to see into the future, or been
+willing to stop and discuss the consequences of an uncontrolled
+despotism, one prevading fact would not have escaped his
+notice&mdash;the absence of all guarantee for the future. Those
+children, beautiful as angels, carefully and thoroughly educated
+as they were, fell victims, when they grew up, to the corruption
+of a measureless egoism. Galeazzo Maria (1466-1476), solicitous
+only of outward effect, took pride in the beauty of his
+hands, in the high salaries he paid, in the financial credit he
+enjoyed, in his treasure of two million pieces of gold, in the
+distinguished people who surrounded him, and in the army and
+birds of chase which he maintained. He was fond of the sound
+of his own voice, and spoke well, most fluently, perhaps, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a>{41}</span>
+he had the chance of insulting a Venetian ambassador.<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> He
+was subject to caprices, such as having a room painted with
+figures in a single night; and, what was worse, to fits of senseless
+debauchery and of revolting cruelty to his nearest friends.
+To a handful of enthusiasts, at whose head stood Giov. Andrea
+di Lampugnano, he seemed a tyrant too bad to live; they
+murdered him,<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> and thereby delivered the State into the power
+of his brothers, one of whom, Ludovico il Moro, threw his
+nephew into prison, and took the government into his own
+hands. From this usurpation followed the French intervention,
+and the disasters which befell the whole of Italy.</p>
+
+<p>The Moor is the most perfect type of the despot of that age,
+and, as a kind of natural product, almost disarms our moral
+judgment. Notwithstanding the profound immorality of the
+means he employed, he used them with perfect ingenuousness;
+no one would probably have been more astonished than himself
+to learn, that for the choice of means as well as of ends a human
+being is morally responsible; he would rather have reckoned it
+as a singular virtue that, so far as possible, he had abstained
+from too free a use of the punishment of death. He accepted
+as no more than his due the almost fabulous respect of the
+Italians for his political genius.<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a> In 1496 he boasted that the
+Pope Alexander was his chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his
+Condottiere, Venice his chamberlain, and the King of France
+his courier, who must come and go at his bidding.<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> With<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a>{42}</span>
+marvellous presence of mind he weighed, even in his last
+extremity, all possible means of escape, and at length decided,
+to his honour, to trust to the goodness of human nature; he
+rejected the proposal of his brother, the Cardinal Ascanio, who
+wished to remain in the Citadel of Milan, on the ground of
+a former quarrel: ‘Monsignore, take it not ill, but I trust you
+not, brother though you be;’ and appointed to the command
+of the castle, ‘that pledge of his return,’ a man to whom he
+had always done good, but who nevertheless betrayed him.<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a>
+At home the Moor was a good and useful ruler, and to the last
+he reckoned on his popularity both in Milan and in Como. In
+former years (after 1496) he had overstrained the resources of
+his State, and at Cremona had ordered, out of pure expediency,
+a respectable citizen, who had spoken against the new taxes,
+to be quietly strangled. Since that time, in holding audiences,
+he kept his visitors away from his person by means of a bar, so
+that in conversing with him they were compelled to speak at
+the top of their voices.<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> At his court, the most brilliant in
+Europe, since that of Burgundy had ceased to exist, immorality
+of the worst kind was prevalent: the daughter was sold by the
+father, the wife by the husband, the sister by the brother.<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a>
+The Prince himself was incessantly active, and, as son of his
+own deeds, claimed relationship with all who, like himself,
+stood on their personal merits&mdash;with scholars, poets, artists,
+and musicians. The academy which he founded<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a> served rather
+for his own purposes than for the instruction of scholars; nor
+was it the fame of the distinguished men who surrounded him
+which he heeded, so much as their society and their services.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_043" id="page_043"></a>{43}</span>
+It is certain that Bramante was scantily paid at first;<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a>
+Lionardo, on the other hand, was up to 1496 suitably remunerated&mdash;and
+besides, what kept him at the court, if not his
+own free will? The world lay open to him, as perhaps to no
+other mortal man of that day; and if proof were wanting
+of the loftier element in the nature of Ludovico Moro, it is
+found in the long stay of the enigmatic master at his court.
+That afterwards Lionardo entered the service of Cæsar Borgia
+and Francis I. was probably due to the interest he felt in the
+unusual and striking character of the two men.</p>
+
+<p>After the fall of the Moor&mdash;he was captured in April 1500
+by the French, after his return from his flight to Germany&mdash;his
+sons were badly brought up among strangers, and showed
+no capacity for carrying out his political testament. The
+elder, Massimiliano, had no resemblance to him; the younger,
+Francesco, was at all events not without spirit. Milan, which
+in those years changed its rulers so often, and suffered so
+unspeakably in the change, endeavoured to secure itself against
+a reaction. In the year 1512 the French, retreating before the
+arms of Maximilian and the Spaniards, were induced to make
+a declaration that the Milanese had taken no part in their
+expulsion, and, without being guilty of rebellion, might yield
+themselves to a new conqueror.<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a> It is a fact of some political
+importance that in such moments of transition the unhappy
+city, like Naples at the flight of the Aragonese, was apt to fall
+a prey to gangs of (often highly aristocratic) scoundrels.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The house of Gonzaga at Mantua and that of Montefeltro
+of Urbino were among the best ordered and richest in men
+of ability during the second half of the fifteenth century. The
+Gonzaga were a tolerably harmonious family; for a long
+period no murder had been known among them, and their
+dead could be shown to the world without fear. The Marquis
+Francesco Gonzaga<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a> and his wife, Isabella of Este, in spite of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a>{44}</span>
+some few irregularities, were a united and respectable couple,
+and brought up their sons to be successful and remarkable
+men at a time when their small but most important State was
+exposed to incessant danger. That Francesco, either as statesman
+or as soldier, should adopt a policy of exceptional honesty,
+was what neither the Emperor, nor Venice, nor the King of
+France could have expected or desired; but certainly since the
+battle at Taro (1495), so far as military honour was concerned,
+he felt and acted as an Italian patriot, and imparted the same
+spirit to his wife. Every deed of loyalty and heroism, such as
+the defence of Faenza against Cæsar Borgia, she felt as a
+vindication of the honour of Italy. Our judgment of her does
+not need to rest on the praises of the artists and writers who
+made the fair princess a rich return for her patronage; her
+own letters show her to us as a woman of unshaken firmness,
+full of kindliness and humorous observation. Bembo, Bandello,
+Ariosto, and Bernardo Tasso sent their works to this court,
+small and powerless as it was, and empty as they found its
+treasury. A more polished and charming circle was not to be
+seen in Italy, since the dissolution (1508) of the old Court of
+Urbino; and in one respect, in freedom of movement, the
+society of Ferrara was inferior to that of Mantua. In artistic
+matters Isabella had an accurate knowledge, and the catalogue
+of her small but choice collection can be read by no lover of
+art without emotion.</p>
+
+<p>In the great Federigo (1444-1482), whether he were a
+genuine Montefeltro or not, Urbino possessed a brilliant representative
+of the princely order. As a Condottiere&mdash;and in this
+capacity he served kings and popes for thirty years after he
+became prince&mdash;he shared the political morality of soldiers of
+fortune, a morality of which the fault does not rest with them
+alone; as ruler of his little territory he adopted the plan of
+spending at home the money he had earned abroad, and tax<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a>{45}</span>ing
+his people as lightly as possible. Of him and his two
+successors, Guidobaldo and Francesco Maria, we read: ‘They
+erected buildings, furthered the cultivation of the land, lived
+at home, and gave employment to a large number of people:
+their subjects loved them.’<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> But not only the state, but the
+court too, was a work of art and organization, and this in
+every sense of the word. Federigo had 500 persons in his
+service; the arrangements of the court were as complete as in
+the capitals of the greatest monarchs, but nothing was wasted;
+all had its object, and all was carefully watched and controlled.
+The court was no scene of vice and dissipation: it served as a
+school of military education for the sons of other great houses,
+the thoroughness of whose culture and instruction was made a
+point of honour by the Duke. The palace which he built, if
+not one of the most splendid, was classical in the perfection of
+its plan; there was placed the greatest of his treasures, the
+celebrated library.<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a> Feeling secure in a land where all gained
+profit or employment from his rule, and where none were
+beggars, he habitually went unarmed and almost unaccompanied;
+alone among the princes of his time he ventured to
+walk in an open park, and to take his frugal meals in an open
+chamber, while Livy, or in time of fasting, some devotional
+work, was read to him. In the course of the same afternoon
+he would listen to a lecture on some classical subject, and
+thence would go to the monastery of the Clarisse and talk of
+sacred things through the grating with the abbess. In the
+evening he would overlook the martial exercises of the young
+people of his court on the meadow of St. Francesco, known for
+its magnificent view, and saw to it well that all the feats were
+done in the most perfect manner. He strove always to be
+affable and accessible to the utmost degree, visiting the artisans
+who worked for him in their shops, holding frequent audiences,
+and, if possible, attending to the requests of each individual on<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a>{46}</span>
+the same day that they were presented. No wonder that the
+people, as he walked along the street, knelt down and cried:
+‘Dio ti mantenga, signore!’ He was called by thinking
+people ‘the light of Italy.’<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a> His gifted son Guidobaldo,<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a>
+visited by sickness and misfortune of every kind, was able at
+the last (1508) to give his state into the safe hands of his
+nephew Francesco Maria (nephew also of Pope Julius II.),
+who, at least, succeeded in preserving the territory from any
+permanent foreign occupation. It is remarkable with what
+confidence Guidobaldo yielded and fled before Cæsar Borgia
+and Francesco before the troops of Leo X.; each knew that
+his restoration would be all the easier and the more popular
+the less the country suffered through a fruitless defence.
+When Ludovico made the same calculation at Milan, he forgot
+the many grounds of hatred which existed against him. The
+court of Guidobaldo has been made immortal as the high
+school of polished manners by Baldassar Castiglione, who
+represented his eclogue Thyrsis before, and in honour of that
+society (1506), and who afterwards (1518) laid the scena of the
+dialogue of his ‘Cortigiano’ in the circle of the accomplished
+Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga.</p>
+
+<p>The government of the family of Este at Ferrara, Modena,
+and Reggio displays curious contrasts of violence and popularity.<a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a>
+Within the palace frightful deeds were perpetrated;
+a princess was beheaded (1425) for alleged adultery with a
+step-son;<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a> legitimate and illegitimate children fled from the
+court, and even abroad their lives were threatened by assassins
+sent in pursuit of them (1471). Plots from without were
+incessant; the bastard of a bastard tried to wrest the crown
+from the lawful heir, Hercules I.: this latter is said afterwards
+(1493) to have poisoned his wife on discovering that she, at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a>{47}</span>
+instigation of her brother Ferrante of Naples, was going to
+poison him. This list of tragedies is closed by the plot of two
+bastards against their brothers, the ruling Duke Alfonso I. and
+the Cardinal Ippolito (1506), which was discovered in time,
+and punished with imprisonment for life. The financial
+system in this State was of the most perfect kind, and necessarily
+so, since none of the large or second-rate powers of Italy
+were exposed to such danger and stood in such constant need
+of armaments and fortifications. It was the hope of the rulers
+that the increasing prosperity of the people would keep pace
+with the increasing weight of taxation, and the Marquis
+Niccolò (d. 1441) used to express the wish that his subjects
+might be richer than the people of other countries. If the
+rapid increase of the population be a measure of the prosperity
+actually attained, it is certainly a fact of importance that in
+the year 1497, notwithstanding the wonderful extension of the
+capital, no houses were to be let.<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a> Ferrara is the first really
+modern city in Europe; large and well-built quarters sprang
+up at the bidding of the ruler: here, by the concentration of
+the official classes and the active promotion of trade, was
+formed for the first time a true capital; wealthy fugitives
+from all parts of Italy, Florentines especially, settled and built
+their palaces at Ferrara. But the indirect taxation, at all
+events, must have reached a point at which it could only just
+be borne. The Government, it is true, took measures of
+alleviation which were also adopted by other Italian despots,
+such as Galeazzo Maria Sforza: in time of famine corn was
+brought from a distance and seems to have been distributed
+gratuitously;<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a> but in ordinary times it compensated itself by
+the monopoly, if not of corn, of many other of the necessaries
+of life&mdash;fish, salt meat, fruit, and vegetables, which last were
+carefully planted on and near the walls of the city. The most
+considerable source of income, however, was the annual sale of
+public offices, a usage which was common throughout Italy,
+and about the working of which at Ferrara we have more
+precise information. We read, for example, that at the new<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_048" id="page_048"></a>{48}</span>
+year 1502 the majority of the officials bought their places at
+‘prezzi salati;’ public servants of the most various kinds,
+custom-house officers, bailiffs (massari), notaries, ‘podestà,’
+judges, and even captains, <i>i.e.</i>, lieutenant-governors of provincial
+towns, are quoted by name. As one of the ‘devourers
+of the people’ who paid dearly for their places, and who were
+‘hated worse than the devil,’ Tito Strozza&mdash;let us hope not the
+famous Latin poet&mdash;is mentioned. About the same time every
+year the dukes were accustomed to make a round of visits in
+Ferrara, the so called ‘andar per ventura,’ in which they took
+presents from, at any rate, the more wealthy citizens. The
+gifts, however, did not consist of money, but of natural
+products.</p>
+
+<p>It was the pride of the duke<a name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a> for all Italy to know that at
+Ferrara the soldiers received their pay and the professors of
+the University their salary not a day later than it was due;
+that the soldiers never dared lay arbitrary hands on citizen or
+peasant; that the town was impregnable to assault; and that
+vast sums of coined money were stored up in the citadel. To
+keep two sets of accounts seemed unnecessary; the Minister of
+Finance was at the same time manager of the ducal household.
+The buildings erected by Borso (1430-1471), by Hercules I.
+(till 1505), and by Alfonso I. (till 1534), were very numerous,
+but of small size: they are characteristic of a princely house
+which, with all its love of splendour&mdash;Borso never appeared
+but in embroidery and jewels&mdash;indulged in no ill-considered
+expense. Alfonso may perhaps have foreseen the fate which
+was in store for his charming little villas, the Belvedere with
+its shady gardens, and Montana with its fountains and beautiful
+frescoes.</p>
+
+<p>It is undeniable that the dangers to which these princes
+were constantly exposed developed in them capacities of a remarkable
+kind. In so artificial a world only a man of consummate
+address could hope to succeed; each candidate for
+distinction was forced to make good his claims by personal
+merit and show himself worthy of the crown he sought. Their
+characters are not without dark sides; but in all of them lives<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a>{49}</span>
+something of those qualities which Italy then pursued as its
+ideal. What European monarch of the time so laboured for
+his own culture as, for instance, Alfonso I.? His travels in
+France, England, and the Netherlands were undertaken for the
+purpose of study: by means of them he gained an accurate
+knowledge of the industry and commerce of these countries.<a name="FNanchor_97_97" id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a>
+It is ridiculous to reproach him with the turner’s work which
+he practised in his leisure hours, connected as it was with his
+skill in the casting of cannon, and with the unprejudiced freedom
+with which he surrounded himself by masters of every
+art. The Italian princes were not, like their contemporaries
+in the North, dependent on the society of an aristocracy which
+held itself to be the only class worth consideration, and which
+infected the monarch with the same conceit. In Italy the
+prince was permitted and compelled to know and to use men
+of every grade in society; and the nobility, though by birth a
+caste, were forced in social intercourse to stand upon their
+personal qualifications alone. But this is a point which we
+shall discuss more fully in the sequel.</p>
+
+<p>The feeling of the Ferrarese towards the ruling house was a
+strange compound of silent dread, of the truly Italian sense of
+well-calculated interest, and of the loyalty of the modern subject:
+personal admiration was transformed into a new sentiment
+of duty. The city of Ferrara raised in 1451 a bronze
+equestrian statue to their Prince Niccolò, who had died ten
+years earlier; Borso (1454) did not scruple to place his own
+statue, also of bronze, but in a sitting posture, hard by in the
+market; in addition to which the city, at the beginning of his
+reign, decreed to him a ‘marble triumphal pillar.’ And when
+he was buried the whole people felt as if God himself had died
+a second time.<a name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a> A citizen, who, when abroad from Venice,
+had spoken ill of Borso in public, was informed on his return
+home, and condemned to banishment and the confiscation of
+his goods; a loyal subject was with difficulty restrained from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a>{50}</span>
+cutting him down before the tribunal itself, and with a rope
+round his neck the offender went to the duke and begged
+for a full pardon. The government was well provided with
+spies, and the duke inspected personally the daily list of travellers
+which the innkeepers were strictly ordered to present.
+Under Borso,<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a> who was anxious to leave no distinguished
+stranger unhonoured, this regulation served a hospitable purpose;
+Hercules I.<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> used it simply as a measure of precaution.
+In Bologna, too, it was then the rule, under Giovanni II. Bentivoglio,
+that every passing traveller who entered at one gate
+must obtain a ticket in order to go out at another.<a name="FNanchor_101_101" id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a> An unfailing
+means of popularity was the sudden dismissal of oppressive
+officials. When Borso arrested in person his chief and
+confidential counsellors, when Hercules I. removed and disgraced
+a tax-gatherer, who for years had been sucking the
+blood of the people, bonfires were lighted and the bells were
+pealed in their honour. With one of his servants, however,
+Hercules let things go too far. The director of the police, or
+by whatever name we should choose to call him (Capitano di
+Giustizia), was Gregorio Zampante of Lucca&mdash;a native being
+unsuited for an office of this kind. Even the sons and brothers
+of the duke trembled before this man; the fines he inflicted
+amounted to hundreds and thousands of ducats, and torture
+was applied even before the hearing of a case: bribes were
+accepted from wealthy criminals, and their pardon obtained
+from the duke by false representations. Gladly would the
+people have paid any sum to this ruler for sending away the
+‘enemy of God and man.’ But Hercules had knighted him
+and made him godfather to his children; and year by year
+Zampante laid by 2,000 ducats. He dared only eat pigeons
+bred in his own house, and could not cross the street without a
+band of archers and bravos. It was time to get rid of him; in
+1490 two students and a converted Jew whom he had mortally
+offended, killed him in his house while taking his siesta, and
+then rode through the town on horses held in waiting, raising
+the cry, ‘Come out! come out! we have slain Zampante!’<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a>{51}</span>
+The pursuers came too late, and found them already safe across
+the frontier. Of course it now rained satires&mdash;some of them in
+the form of sonnets, others of odes.</p>
+
+<p>It was wholly in the spirit of this system that the sovereign
+imposed his own respect for useful servants on the court and
+on the people. When in 1469 Borso’s privy councillor Ludovico
+Casella died, no court of law or place of business in the
+city, and no lecture-room at the University, was allowed to
+be open: all had to follow the body to S. Domenico, since
+the duke intended to be present. And, in fact, ‘the first of
+the house of Este who attended the corpse of a subject’
+walked, clad in black, after the coffin, weeping, while behind
+him came the relatives of Casella, each conducted by one of
+the gentlemen of the Court: the body of the plain citizen was
+carried by nobles from the church into the cloister, where it
+was buried. Indeed this official sympathy with princely emotion
+first came up in the Italian States.<a name="FNanchor_102_102" id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a> At the root of the
+practice may be a beautiful, humane sentiment; the utterance
+of it, especially in the poets, is, as a rule, of equivocal sincerity.
+One of the youthful poems of Ariosto,<a name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a> on the Death of Lionora
+of Aragon, wife of Hercules I., contains besides the inevitable
+graveyard flowers, which are scattered in the elegies of all ages,
+some thoroughly modern features: ‘This death had given Ferrara
+a blow which it would not get over for years: its benefactress
+was now its advocate in heaven, since earth was not
+worthy of her; truly, the angel of Death did not come to her,
+as to us common mortals, with blood-stained scythe, but fair to
+behold (onesta), and with so kind a face that every fear was
+allayed.’ But we meet, also, with a sympathy of a different
+kind. Novelists, depending wholly on the favour of their
+patrons, tell us the love-stories of the prince, even before his
+death,<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a> in a way which, to later times, would seem the height<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a>{52}</span>
+of indiscretion, but which then passed simply as an innocent
+compliment. Lyrical poets even went so far as to sing the
+illicit flames of their lawfully married lords, <i>e.g.</i> Angelo Poliziano,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_053" id="page_053"></a>{53}</span>
+those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Gioviano Pontano,
+with a singular gusto, those of Alfonso of Calabria. The poem
+in question<a name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a> betrays unconsciously the odious disposition of the
+Aragonese ruler; in these things too, he must needs be the
+most fortunate, else woe be to those who are more successful!
+That the greatest artists, for example Lionardo, should paint
+the mistresses of their patrons was no more than a matter of
+course.</p>
+
+<p>But the house of Este was not satisfied with the praises
+of others; it undertook to celebrate them itself. In the Palazzo
+Schifanoja Borso caused himself to be painted in a series of
+historical representations, and Hercules kept the anniversary
+of his accession to the throne by a procession which was
+compared to the feast of Corpus Christi; shops were closed as
+on Sunday; in the centre of the line walked all the members
+of the princely house (bastards included) clad in embroidered
+robes. That the crown was the fountain of honour and
+authority, that all personal distinction flowed from it alone,
+had been long<a name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a> expressed at this court by the Order of the
+Golden Spur&mdash;an order which had nothing in common with
+mediæval chivalry. Hercules I. added to the spur a sword,
+a gold-laced mantle, and a grant of money, in return for which
+there is no doubt that regular service was required.</p>
+
+<p>The patronage of art and letters for which this court has<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a>{54}</span>
+obtained a world-wide reputation, was exercised through the
+University, which was one of the most perfect in Italy, and by
+the gift of places in the personal or official service of the prince;
+it involved consequently no additional expense. Bojardo, as
+a wealthy country gentleman and high official, belonged to
+this class. At the time when Ariosto began to distinguish
+himself, there existed no court, in the true sense of the word,
+either at Milan or Florence, and soon there was none either at
+Urbino or at Naples. He had to content himself with a place
+among the musicians and jugglers of Cardinal Ippolito till
+Alfonso took him into his service. It was otherwise at a
+later time with Torquato Tasso, whose presence at court was
+jealously sought after.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a>{55}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI-1" id="CHAPTER_VI-1"></a>CHAPTER VI.<br /><br />
+<small>THE OPPONENTS OF TYRANNY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">I<small>N</small> face of this centralised authority, all legal opposition within
+the borders of the state was futile. The elements needed for
+the restoration of a republic had been for ever destroyed, and
+the field prepared for violence and despotism. The nobles,
+destitute of political rights, even where they held feudal possessions,
+might call themselves Guelphs or Ghibellines at will,
+might dress up their bravos in padded hose and feathered caps<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a>
+or how else they pleased; thoughtful men like Macchiavelli<a name="FNanchor_108_108" id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a>
+knew well enough that Milan and Naples were too ‘corrupt’
+for a republic. Strange judgments fall on these two so-called
+parties, which now served only to give an official sanction
+to personal and family disputes. An Italian prince, whom
+Agrippa of Nettesheim<a name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a> advised to put them down, replied
+that their quarrels brought him in more than 12,000 ducats
+a year in fines. And when in the year 1500, during the brief
+return of Ludovico Moro to his States, the Guelphs of Tortona
+summoned a part of the neighbouring French army into the
+city, in order to make an end once for all of their opponents,
+the French certainly began by plundering and ruining the
+Ghibellines, but finished by doing the same to their hosts, till
+Tortona was utterly laid waste.<a name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> In Romagna, the hotbed
+of every ferocious passion, these two names had long lost all
+political meaning. It was a sign of the political delusion of the
+people that they not seldom believed the Guelphs to be the
+natural allies of the French and the Ghibellines of the Spaniards.
+It is hard to see that those who tried to profit by this error got<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a>{56}</span>
+much by doing so. France, after all her interventions, had to
+abandon the peninsula at last, and what became of Spain, after
+she had destroyed Italy, is known to every reader.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the despots of the Renaissance. A pure and
+simple mind, we might think, would perhaps have argued
+that, since all power is derived from God, these princes, if they
+were loyally and honestly supported by all their subjects, must
+in time themselves improve and lose all traces of their violent
+origin. But from characters and imaginations inflamed by
+passion and ambition, reasoning of this kind could not be
+expected. Like bad physicians, they thought to cure the
+disease by removing the symptoms, and fancied that if the
+tyrant were put to death, freedom would follow of itself. Or
+else, without reflecting even to this extent, they sought only
+to give a vent to the universal hatred, or to take vengeance for
+some family misfortune or personal affront. Since the governments
+were absolute, and free from all legal restraints, the
+opposition chose its weapons with equal freedom. Boccaccio
+declares openly<a name="FNanchor_111_111" id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a> ‘Shall I call the tyrant king or prince, and
+obey him loyally as my lord? No, for he is the enemy of the
+commonwealth. Against him I may use arms, conspiracies,
+spies, ambushes and fraud; to do so is a sacred and necessary
+work. There is no more acceptable sacrifice than the blood
+of a tyrant.’ We need not occupy ourselves with individual
+cases; Macchiavelli,<a name="FNanchor_112_112" id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a> in a famous chapter of his ‘Discorsi,’
+treats of the conspiracies of ancient and modern times from the
+days of the Greek tyrants downwards, and classifies them with
+cold-blooded indifference according to their various plans and
+results. We need make but two observations, first on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a>{57}</span>
+murders committed in church, and next on the influence
+of classical antiquity. So well was the tyrant guarded that it
+was almost impossible to lay hands upon him elsewhere than
+at solemn religious services; and on no other occasion was the
+whole family to be found assembled together. It was thus
+that the Fabrianese<a name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a> murdered (1435) the members of their
+ruling house, the Chiavistelli, during high mass, the signal
+being given by the words of the Creed, ‘Et incarnatus est.’
+At Milan the Duke Giovan Maria Visconti (1412) was assassinated
+at the entrance of the church of San Gottardo, Galeazzo
+Maria Sforza (1476) in the church of Santo Stefano, and
+Ludovico Moro only escaped (1484) the daggers of the adherents
+of the widowed Duchess Bona, through entering the church of
+Sant’ Ambrogio by another door than that by which he was
+expected. There was no intentional impiety in the act; the
+assassins of Galeazzo did not fail to pray before the murder to
+the patron saint of the church, and to listen devoutly to the
+first mass. It was, however, one cause of the partial failure
+of the conspiracy of the Pazzi against Lorenzo and Guiliano
+Medici (1478), that the brigand Montesecco, who had bargained
+to commit the murder at a banquet, declined to undertake it in
+the Cathedral of Florence. Certain of the clergy ‘who were
+familiar with the sacred place, and consequently had no fear’
+were induced to act in his stead.<a name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a></p>
+
+<p>As to the imitation of antiquity, the influence of which on
+moral, and more especially on political, questions we shall often
+refer to, the example was set by the rulers themselves, who,
+both in their conception of the state and in their personal conduct,
+took the old Roman empire avowedly as their model.
+In like manner their opponents, when they set to work with a
+deliberate theory, took pattern by the ancient tyrannicides.
+It may be hard to prove that in the main point&mdash;in forming
+the resolve itself&mdash;they consciously followed a classical example;
+but the appeal to antiquity was no mere phrase. The
+most striking disclosures have been left us with respect to
+the murderers of Galeazzo Sforza&mdash;Lampugnani, Olgiati, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a>{58}</span>
+Visconti.<a name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> Though all three had personal ends to serve, yet
+their enterprise may be partly ascribed to a more general
+reason. About this time Cola de’ Montani, a humanist and
+professor of eloquence, had awakened among many of the
+young Milanese nobility a vague passion for glory and patriotic
+achievements, and had mentioned to Lampugnani and Olgiati
+his hope of delivering Milan. Suspicion was soon aroused
+against him: he was banished from the city, and his pupils
+were abandoned to the fanaticism he had excited. Some ten
+days before the deed they met together and took a solemn oath
+in the monastery of Sant’ Ambrogio. ‘Then,’ says Olgiati,
+‘in a remote corner I raised my eyes before the picture of the
+patron saint, and implored his help for ourselves and for all <i>his</i>
+people.’ The heavenly protector of the city was called on to
+bless the undertaking, as was afterwards St. Stephen, in whose
+church it was fulfilled. Many of their comrades were now
+informed of the plot, nightly meetings were held in the house
+of Lampugnani, and the conspirators practised for the murder
+with the sheaths of their daggers. The attempt was successful,
+but Lampugnani was killed on the spot by the attendants of
+the duke; the others were captured: Visconti was penitent,
+but Olgiati through all his tortures maintained that the deed
+was an acceptable offering to God, and exclaimed while the
+executioner was breaking his ribs, ‘Courage, Girolamo! thou
+wilt long be remembered; death is bitter, but glory is eternal.’<a name="FNanchor_116_116" id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a>{59}</span></p>
+
+<p>But however idealistic the object and purpose of such conspiracies
+may appear, the manner in which they were conducted
+betrays the influence of that worst of all conspirators,
+Catiline&mdash;a man in whose thoughts freedom had no place
+whatever. The annals of Siena tells us expressly that the
+conspirators were students of Sallust, and the fact is indirectly
+confirmed by the confession of Olgiati.<a name="FNanchor_117_117" id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a> Elsewhere, too, we
+meet with the name of Catiline, and a more attractive pattern
+of the conspirator, apart from the end he followed, could hardly
+be discovered.</p>
+
+<p>Among the Florentines, whenever they got rid of, or tried to
+get rid of, the Medici, tyrannicide was a practice universally
+accepted and approved. After the flight of the Medici in
+1494, the bronze group of Donatello<a name="FNanchor_118_118" id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a>&mdash;Judith with the dead
+Holofernes&mdash;was taken from their collection and placed before
+the Palazzo della Signoria, on the spot where the ‘David’ of
+Michael Angelo now stands, with the inscription, ‘Exemplum
+salutis publicæ cives posuere 1495.’<a name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a> No example was more
+popular than that of the younger Brutus, who, in Dante,<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a> lies
+with Cassius and Judas Iscariot in the lowest pit of hell,
+because of his treason to the empire. Pietro Paolo Boscoli,
+whose plot against Guiliano, Giovanni, and Guilio Medici
+failed (1513), was an enthusiastic admirer of Brutus, and in
+order to follow his steps, only waited to find a Cassius. Such a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_060" id="page_060"></a>{60}</span>
+partner he met with in Agostino Capponi. His last utterances
+in prison<a name="FNanchor_121_121" id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a>&mdash;a striking evidence of the religious feeling of the
+time&mdash;show with what an effort he rid his mind of these
+classical imaginations, in order to die like a Christian. A
+friend and the confessor both had to assure him that St.
+Thomas Aquinas condemned conspirators absolutely; but the
+confessor afterwards admitted to the same friend that St.
+Thomas drew a distinction and permitted conspiracies against
+a tyrant who had forced himself on a people against their will.
+After Lorenzino Medici had murdered the Duke Alessandro
+(1537), and then escaped, an apology for the deed appeared,<a name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a>
+which is probably his own work, and certainly composed in
+his interest, and in which he praises tyrannicide as an act of
+the highest merit; on the supposition that Alessandro was a
+legitimate Medici, and, therefore, related to him, if only distantly,
+he boldly compares himself with Timoleon, who slew
+his brother for his country’s sake. Others, on the same
+occasion, made use of the comparison with Brutus, and that
+Michael Angelo himself, even late in life, was not unfriendly
+to ideas of this kind, may be inferred from his bust of Brutus
+in the Uffizi. He left it unfinished, like nearly all his works,
+but certainly not because the murder of Cæsar was repugnant
+to his feeling, as the couplet beneath declares.</p>
+
+<p>A popular radicalism in the form in which it is opposed to
+the monarchies of later times, is not to be found in the despotic
+states of the Renaissance. Each individual protested inwardly
+against despotism, but was rather disposed to make tolerable or
+profitable terms with it, than to combine with others for its
+destruction. Things must have been as bad as at Camerino,
+Fabriano, or Rimini (<a href="#page_028">p. 28</a>), before the citizens united to
+destroy or expel the ruling house. They knew in most cases
+only too well that this would but mean a change of masters.
+The star of the Republics was certainly on the decline.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_061" id="page_061"></a>{61}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VII-1" id="CHAPTER_VII-1"></a>CHAPTER VII.<br /><br />
+<small>THE REPUBLICS: VENICE AND FLORENCE.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> Italian municipalities had, in earlier days, given signal
+proof of that force which transforms the city into the state.
+It remained only that these cities should combine in a great
+confederation; and this idea was constantly recurring to Italian
+statesmen, whatever differences of form it might from time to
+time display. In fact, during the struggles of the twelfth and
+thirteenth centuries, great and formidable leagues actually
+were formed by the cities; and Sismondi (ii. 174) is of opinion
+that the time of the final armaments of the Lombard confederation
+against Barbarossa was the moment when a universal
+Italian league was possible. But the more powerful states had
+already developed characteristic features which made any such
+scheme impracticable. In their commercial dealings they
+shrank from no measures, however extreme, which might
+damage their competitors; they held their weaker neighbours
+in a condition of helpless dependence&mdash;in short, they each
+fancied they could get on by themselves without the assistance
+of the rest, and thus paved the way for future usurpation.
+The usurper was forthcoming when long conflicts between the
+nobility and the people, and between the different factions of
+the nobility, had awakened the desire for a strong government,
+and when bands of mercenaries ready and willing to sell their
+aid to the highest bidder had superseded the general levy of
+the citizens which party leaders now found unsuited to their
+purposes.<a name="FNanchor_123_123" id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a> The tyrants destroyed the freedom of most of the
+cities; here and there they were expelled, but not thoroughly,
+or only for a short time; and they were always restored, since<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a>{62}</span>
+the inward conditions were favourable to them, and the opposing
+forces were exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>Among the cities which maintained their independence are
+two of deep significance for the history of the human race:
+Florence, the city of incessant movement, which has left us a
+record of the thoughts and aspirations of each and all who, for
+three centuries, took part in this movement, and Venice, the
+city of apparent stagnation and of political secrecy. No contrast
+can be imagined stronger than that which is offered us
+by these two, and neither can be compared to anything else
+which the world has hitherto produced.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Venice recognised itself from the first as a strange and
+mysterious creation&mdash;the fruits of a higher power than human
+ingenuity. The solemn foundation of the city was the subject
+of a legend. On March 25, 413, at mid-day the emigrants
+from Padua laid the first stone at the Rialto, that they might
+have a sacred, inviolable asylum amid the devastations of the
+barbarians. Later writers attributed to the founders the presentiment
+of the future greatness of the city; M. Antonio
+Sabellico, who has celebrated the event in the dignified flow
+of his hexameters, makes the priest, who completes the act of
+consecration, cry to heaven, ‘When we hereafter attempt great
+things, grant us prosperity! Now we kneel before a poor
+altar; but if our vows are not made in vain, a hundred
+temples, O God, of gold and marble shall arise to Thee.’<a name="FNanchor_124_124" id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a> The
+island city at the end of the fifteenth century was the jewel-casket
+of the world. It is so described by the same Sabellico,<a name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a>
+with its ancient cupolas, its leaning towers, its inlaid marble<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a>{63}</span>
+façades, its compressed splendour, where the richest decoration
+did not hinder the practical employment of every corner of
+space. He takes us to the crowded Piazza before S. Giacometto
+at the Rialto, where the business of the world is transacted,
+not amid shouting and confusion, but with the subdued hum
+of many voices; where in the porticos round the square<a name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> and
+in those of the adjoining streets sit hundreds of money-changers
+and goldsmiths, with endless rows of shops and
+warehouses above their heads. He describes the great Fondaco
+of the Germans beyond the bridge, where their goods and their
+dwellings lay, and before which their ships are drawn up side
+by side in the canal; higher up is a whole fleet laden with
+wine and oil, and parallel with it, on the shore swarming with
+porters, are the vaults of the merchants; then from the Rialto
+to the square of St. Mark come the inns and the perfumers’
+cabinets. So he conducts the reader from one quarter of the
+city to another till he comes at last to the two hospitals which
+were among those institutions of public utility nowhere so
+numerous as at Venice. Care for the people, in peace as well
+as in war, was characteristic of this government, and its attention
+to the wounded, even to those of the enemy, excited the
+admiration of other states.<a name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a> Public institutions of every kind
+found in Venice their pattern; the pensioning of retired
+servants was carried out systematically, and included a provision
+for widows and orphans. Wealth, political security,
+and acquaintance with other countries, had matured the
+understanding of such questions. These slender fair-haired
+men,<a name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> with quiet cautious steps, and deliberate speech, differed
+but slightly in costume and bearing from one another; ornaments,
+especially pearls, were reserved for the women and girls.
+At that time the general prosperity, notwithstanding the losses
+sustained from the Turks, was still dazzling; the stores of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a>{64}</span>
+energy which the city possessed and the prejudice in its
+favour diffused throughout Europe, enabled it at a much later
+time to survive the heavy blows which were inflicted by the
+discovery of the sea route to the Indies, by the fall of the
+Mamelukes in Egypt, and by the war of the League of
+Cambray.</p>
+
+<p>Sabellico, born in the neighbourhood of Tivoli, and accustomed
+to the frank loquacity of the scholars of his day, remarks
+elsewhere<a name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> with some astonishment, that the young nobles
+who came of a morning to hear his lectures could not be prevailed
+on to enter into political discussions: ‘When I ask them
+what people think, say, and expect about this or that movement
+in Italy, they all answer with one voice that they know
+nothing about the matter.’ Still, in spite of the strict inquisition
+of the state, much was to be learned from the more corrupt
+members of the aristocracy by those who were willing to pay
+enough for it. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century
+there were traitors among the highest officials;<a name="FNanchor_130_130" id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a> the popes,
+the Italian princes, and even second-rate Condottieri in the
+service of the government had informers in their pay, sometimes
+with regular salaries; things went so far that the Council
+of Ten found it prudent to conceal important political news
+from the Council of the Pregadi, and it was even supposed that
+Ludovico Moro had control of a definite number of votes among
+the latter. Whether the hanging of single offenders and the
+high rewards&mdash;such as a life-pension of sixty ducats paid to
+those who informed against them&mdash;were of much avail, it is
+hard to decide; one of the chief causes of this evil, the poverty
+of many of the nobility, could not be removed in a day. In
+the year 1492 a proposal was urged by two of that order, that
+the state should annually spend 70,000 ducats for the relief of
+those poorer nobles who held no public office; the matter was
+near coming before the Great Council, in which it might have
+had a majority, when the Council of Ten interfered in time<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a>{65}</span>
+and banished the two proposers for life to Nicosia in Cyprus.<a name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a>
+About this time a Soranzo was hung, though not at Venice
+itself, for sacrilege, and a Contarini put in chains for burglary;
+another of the same family came in 1499 before the Signory,
+and complained that for many years he had been without an
+office, that he had only sixteen ducats a year and nine children,
+that his debts amounted to sixty ducats, that he knew no trade
+and had lately been turned on to the streets. We can understand
+why some of the wealthier nobles built houses, sometimes
+whole rows of them, to provide free lodging for their
+needy comrades. Such works figure in wills among deeds of
+charity.<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a></p>
+
+<p>But if the enemies of Venice ever founded serious hopes
+upon abuses of this kind, they were greatly in error. It might
+be thought that the commercial activity of the city, which put
+within reach of the humblest a rich reward for their labour,
+and the colonies on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean,
+would have diverted from political affairs the dangerous
+elements of society. But had not the political history of
+Genoa, notwithstanding similar advantages, been of the
+stormiest? The cause of the stability of Venice lies rather in
+a combination of circumstances which were found in union nowhere
+else. Unassailable from its position, it had been able
+from the beginning to treat of foreign affairs with the fullest
+and calmest reflection, and ignore nearly altogether the parties
+which divided the rest of Italy, to escape the entanglement of
+permanent alliances, and to set the highest price on those
+which it thought fit to make. The keynote of the Venetian
+character was, consequently, a spirit of proud and contemptuous
+isolation, which, joined to the hatred felt for the city by
+the other states of Italy, gave rise to a strong sense of solidarity
+within. The inhabitants meanwhile were united by the most
+powerful ties of interest in dealing both with the colonies and
+with the possessions on the mainland, forcing the population of
+the latter, that is, of all the towns up to Bergamo, to buy and
+sell in Venice alone. A power which rested on means so artifi<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a>{66}</span>cial
+could only be maintained by internal harmony and unity;
+and this conviction was so widely diffused among the citizens
+that the conspirator found few elements to work upon. And
+the discontented, if there were such, were held so far apart by
+the division between the noble and the burgher, that a mutual
+understanding was not easy. On the other hand, within the
+ranks of the nobility itself, travel, commercial enterprise, and
+the incessant wars with the Turks saved the wealthy and
+dangerous from that fruitful source of conspiracies&mdash;idleness.
+In these wars they were spared, often to a criminal extent, by
+the general in command, and the fall of the city was predicted
+by a Venetian Cato, if this fear of the nobles ‘to give one
+another pain’ should continue at the expense of justice.<a name="FNanchor_133_133" id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a>
+Nevertheless this free movement in the open air gave the
+Venetian aristocracy, as a whole, a healthy bias.</p>
+
+<p>And when envy and ambition called for satisfaction an
+official victim was forthcoming, and legal means and authorities
+were ready. The moral torture, which for years the Doge
+Francesco Foscari (d. 1457) suffered before the eyes of all
+Venice, is a frightful example of a vengeance possible only in
+an aristocracy. The Council of Ten, which had a hand in
+everything, which disposed without appeal of life and death, of
+financial affairs and military appointments, which included the
+Inquisitors among its number, and which overthrew Foscari,
+as it had overthrown so many powerful men before,&mdash;this
+Council was yearly chosen afresh from the whole governing
+body, the Gran Consilio, and was consequently the most direct
+expression of its will. It is not probable that serious intrigues
+occurred at these elections, as the short duration of the office
+and the accountability which followed rendered it an object of
+no great desire. But violent and mysterious as the proceedings
+of this and other authorities might be, the genuine Venetian
+courted rather than fled their sentence, not only because the
+Republic had long arms, and if it could not catch him might
+punish his family, but because in most cases it acted from
+rational motives and not from a thirst for blood.<a name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> No state,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a>{67}</span>
+indeed, has ever exercised a greater moral influence over its
+subjects, whether abroad or at home. If traitors were to be
+found among the Pregadi, there was ample compensation for
+this in the fact that every Venetian away from home was a
+born spy for his government. It was a matter of course that
+the Venetian cardinals at Rome sent home news of the transactions
+of the secret papal consistories. The Cardinal Domenico
+Grimani had the despatches intercepted in the neighbourhood
+of Rome (1500) which Ascanio Sforza was sending to his
+brother Ludovico Moro, and forwarded them to Venice; his
+father, then exposed to a serious accusation, claimed public
+credit for this service of his son before the Gran Consilio; in
+other words, before all the world.<a name="FNanchor_135_135" id="FNanchor_135_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a></p>
+
+<p>The conduct of the Venetian government to the Condottieri
+in its pay has been spoken of already. The only further
+guarantee of their fidelity which could be obtained lay in their
+great number, by which treachery was made as difficult as its
+discovery was easy. In looking at the Venetian army list, one
+is only surprised that among forces of such miscellaneous composition
+any common action was possible. In the catalogue
+for the campaign of 1495 we find 15,526 horsemen, broken up
+into a number of small divisions.<a name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a> Gonzaga of Mantua alone
+had as many as 1,200, and Gioffredo Borgia 740; then follow
+six officers with a contingent of 600 to 700, ten with 400, twelve
+with 400 to 200, fourteen or thereabouts with 200 to 100, nine
+with 80, six with 50 to 60, and so forth. These forces were
+partly composed of old Venetian troops, partly of veterans led
+by Venetian city or country nobles; the majority of the
+leaders were, however, princes and rulers of cities or their
+relatives. To these forces must be added 24,000 infantry&mdash;we
+are not told how they were raised or commanded&mdash;with 3,300
+additional troops, who probably belonged to the special services.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a>{68}</span>
+In time of peace the cities of the mainland were wholly unprotected
+or occupied by insignificant garrisons. Venice relied,
+if not exactly on the loyalty, at least on the good sense of
+its subjects; in the war of the League of Cambray (1509) it
+absolved them, as is well known, from their oath of allegiance,
+and let them compare the amenities of a foreign occupation
+with the mild government to which they had been accustomed.
+As there had been no treason in their desertion of St. Mark,
+and consequently no punishment was to be feared, they
+returned to their old masters with the utmost eagerness. This
+war, we may remark parenthetically, was the result of a
+century’s outcry against the Venetian desire for aggrandisement.
+The Venetians, in fact, were not free from the mistake
+of those over-clever people who will credit their opponents
+with no irrational and inconsiderate conduct.<a name="FNanchor_137_137" id="FNanchor_137_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a> Misled by this
+optimism, which is, perhaps, a peculiar weakness of aristocracies,
+they had utterly ignored not only the preparations of
+Mohammed II. for the capture of Constantinople, but even the
+armaments of Charles VIII., till the unexpected blow fell at
+last.<a name="FNanchor_138_138" id="FNanchor_138_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a> The League of Cambray was an event of the same
+character, in so far as it was clearly opposed to the interest of
+the two chief members, Louis XII. and Julius II. The hatred
+of all Italy against the victorious city seemed to be concentrated
+in the mind of the Pope, and to have blinded him to
+the evils of foreign intervention; and as to the policy of
+Cardinal Amboise and his king, Venice ought long before to
+have recognised it as a piece of malicious imbecility, and to
+have been thoroughly on its guard. The other members of
+the League took part in it from that envy which may be a
+salutary corrective to great wealth and power, but which in
+itself is a beggarly sentiment. Venice came out of the conflict
+with honour, but not without lasting damage.</p>
+
+<p>A power, whose foundations were so complicated, whose
+activity and interests filled so wide a stage, cannot be imagined
+without a systematic oversight of the whole, without a regular
+estimate of means and burdens, of profits and losses. Venice<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a>{69}</span>
+can fairly make good its claim to be the birthplace of statistical
+science, together, perhaps, with Florence, and followed by the
+more enlightened despotisms. The feudal state of the Middle
+Ages knew of nothing more than catalogues of signorial rights
+and possessions (Urbaria); it looked on production as a fixed
+quantity, which it approximately is, so long as we have to do
+with landed property only. The towns, on the other hand,
+throughout the West must from very early times have treated
+production, which with them depended on industry and commerce,
+as exceedingly variable; but, even in the most flourishing
+times of the Hanseatic League, they never got beyond a
+simple commercial balance-sheet. Fleets, armies, political
+power and influence fall under the debit and credit of a trader’s
+ledger. In the Italian States a clear political consciousness,
+the pattern of Mohammedan administration, and the long and
+active exercise of trade and commerce, combined to produce
+for the first time a true science of statistics.<a name="FNanchor_139_139" id="FNanchor_139_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a> The absolute
+monarchy of Frederick II. in Lower Italy was organised with
+the sole object of securing a concentrated power for the death-struggle
+in which he was engaged. In Venice, on the contrary,
+the supreme objects were the enjoyment of life and power, the
+increase of inherited advantages, the creation of the most
+lucrative forms of industry, and the opening of new channels
+for commerce.</p>
+
+<p>The writers of the time speak of these things with the
+greatest freedom.<a name="FNanchor_140_140" id="FNanchor_140_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_140_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a> We learn that the population of the city
+amounted in the year 1422 to 190,000 souls; the Italians were,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a>{70}</span>
+perhaps, the first to reckon, not according to hearths, or men
+able to bear arms, or people able to walk, and so forth, but
+according to ‘animæ,’ and thus to get the most neutral basis
+for further calculation. About this time,<a name="FNanchor_141_141" id="FNanchor_141_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_141_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a> when the Florentines
+wished to form an alliance with Venice against Filippo
+Maria Visconti, they were for the moment refused, in the
+belief, resting on accurate commercial returns, that a war
+between Venice and Milan, that is, between seller and buyer,
+was foolish. Even if the duke simply increased his army,
+the Milanese, through the heavier taxation they must pay,
+would become worse customers. ‘Better let the Florentines
+be defeated, and then, used as they are to the life of a free
+city, they will settle with us and bring their silk and woollen
+industry with them, as the Lucchese did in their distress.’
+The speech of the dying Doge Mocenigo (1423) to a few of
+the senators whom he had sent for to his bedside<a name="FNanchor_142_142" id="FNanchor_142_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a> is still
+more remarkable. It contains the chief elements of a statistical
+account of the whole resources of Venice. I cannot say
+whether or where a thorough elucidation of this perplexing
+document exists; by way of illustration, the following facts
+may be quoted. After repaying a war-loan of four million
+ducats, the public debt (‘il monte’) still amounted to six
+million ducats; the current trade reached (so it seems) ten
+millions, which yielded, the text informs us, a profit of four
+millions. The 3,000 ‘navigli,’ the 300 ‘navi,’ and the 45
+galleys were manned respectively by 17,000, 8,000, and 11,000
+seamen (more than 200 for each galley). To these must be
+added 16,000 shipwrights. The houses in Venice were valued
+at seven millions, and brought in a rent of half a million.<a name="FNanchor_143_143" id="FNanchor_143_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a>
+There were 1,000 nobles whose income ranged from 70 to 4,000
+ducats. In another passage the ordinary income of the state<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a>{71}</span>
+in that same year is put at 1,100,000 ducats; through the
+disturbance of trade caused by the wars it sank about the
+middle of the century to 800,000 ducats.<a name="FNanchor_144_144" id="FNanchor_144_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a></p>
+
+<p>If Venice, by this spirit of calculation, and by the practical
+turn which she gave it, was the first fully to represent one important
+side of modern political life, in that culture, on the
+other hand, which Italy then prized most highly she did not
+stand in the front rank. The literary impulse, in general, was
+here wanting, and especially that enthusiasm for classical antiquity
+which prevailed elsewhere.<a name="FNanchor_145_145" id="FNanchor_145_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a> The aptitude of the Venetians,
+says Sabellico, for philosophy and eloquence was in itself
+not less remarkable than for commerce and politics; but this
+aptitude was neither developed in themselves nor rewarded in
+strangers as it was rewarded elsewhere in Italy. Filelfo, summoned
+to Venice not by the state, but by private individuals,
+soon found his expectations deceived; and George of Trebizond,
+who, in 1459, laid the Latin translation of Plato’s Laws at the
+feet of the Doge, and was appointed professor of philology with
+a yearly salary of 150 ducats, and finally dedicated his ‘Rhetoric’
+to the Signoria,<a name="FNanchor_146_146" id="FNanchor_146_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a> soon left the city in dissatisfaction.
+Literature, in fact, like the rest at Venice, had mostly a practical
+end in view. If, accordingly, we look through the history
+of Venetian literature which Francesco Sansovino has appended
+to his well-known book,<a name="FNanchor_147_147" id="FNanchor_147_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a> we shall find in the fourteenth century
+almost nothing but history, and special works on theology,
+jurisprudence, and medicine; and in the fifteenth century, till
+we come to Ermolao Barbaro and Aldo Manucci, humanistic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a>{72}</span>
+culture is, for a city of such importance, most scantily represented.
+Similarly we find comparatively few traces of the
+passion, elsewhere so strong, for collecting books and manuscripts;
+and the valuable texts which formed part of Petrarch’s
+legacies were so badly preserved that soon all traces of them
+were lost. The library which Cardinal Bessarion bequeathed
+to the state (1468) narrowly escaped dispersion and destruction.
+Learning was certainly cultivated at the University of Padua,
+where, however, the physicians and the jurists&mdash;the latter as
+the authors of legal opinions&mdash;received by far the highest pay.
+The share of Venice in the poetical creations of the country was
+long insignificant, till, at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
+her deficiences were made good.<a name="FNanchor_148_148" id="FNanchor_148_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a> Even the art of the
+Renaissance was imported into the city from without, and it
+was not before the end of the fifteenth century that she
+learned to move in this field with independent freedom and
+strength. But we find more striking instances still of intellectual
+backwardness. This Government, which had the clergy
+so thoroughly in its control, which reserved to itself the appointment
+to all important ecclesiastical offices, and which, one
+time after another, dared to defy the court of Rome, displayed
+an official piety of a most singular kind.<a name="FNanchor_149_149" id="FNanchor_149_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_149_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a> The bodies of saints
+and other reliques imported from Greece after the Turkish conquest
+were bought at the greatest sacrifices and received by
+the Doge in solemn procession.<a name="FNanchor_150_150" id="FNanchor_150_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a> For the coat without a seam
+it was decided (1455) to offer 10,000 ducats, but it was not to
+be had. These measures were not the fruit of any popular
+excitement, but of the tranquil resolutions of the heads of the
+Government, and might have been omitted without attracting<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a>{73}</span>
+any comment, and at Florence, under similar circumstances,
+would certainly have been omitted. We shall say nothing of
+the piety of the masses, and of their firm belief in the indulgences
+of an Alexander VI. But the state itself, after absorbing
+the Church to a degree unknown elsewhere, had in truth
+a certain ecclesiastical element in its composition, and the Doge,
+the symbol of the state, appeared in twelve great processions
+(‘andate’)<a name="FNanchor_151_151" id="FNanchor_151_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_151_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a> in a half-clerical character. They were almost all
+festivals in memory of political events, and competed in splendour
+with the great feasts of the Church; the most brilliant of
+all, the famous marriage with the sea, fell on Ascension Day.</p>
+
+<p>The most elevated political thought and the most varied
+forms of human development are found united in the history
+of Florence, which in this sense deserves the name of the first
+modern state in the world. Here the whole people are busied
+with what in the despotic cities is the affair of a single family.
+That wondrous Florentine spirit, at once keenly critical and
+artistically creative, was incessantly transforming the social
+and political condition of the state, and as incessantly describing
+and judging the change. Florence thus became the home
+of political doctrines and theories, of experiments and sudden
+changes, but also, like Venice, the home of statistical science,
+and alone and above all other states in the world, the home of
+historical representation in the modern sense of the phrase.
+The spectacle of ancient Rome and a familiarity with its leading
+writers were not without influence; Giovanni Villani<a name="FNanchor_152_152" id="FNanchor_152_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_152_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a>
+confesses that he received the first impulse to his great work
+at the jubilee of the year 1300, and began it immediately on
+his return home. Yet how many among the 200,000 pilgrims
+of that year may have been like him in gifts and tendencies
+and still did not write the history of their native cities! For
+not all of them could encourage themselves with the thought:
+‘Rome is sinking; my native city is rising, and ready to
+achieve great things, and therefore I wish to relate its past<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a>{74}</span>
+history, and hope to continue the story to the present time, and
+as long as my life shall last.’ And besides the witness to its
+past, Florence obtained through its historians something further&mdash;a
+greater fame than fell to the lot of any other city of Italy.<a name="FNanchor_153_153" id="FNanchor_153_153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a></p>
+
+<p>Our present task is not to write the history of this remarkable
+state, but merely to give a few indications of the intellectual
+freedom and independence for which the Florentines were
+indebted to this history.<a name="FNanchor_154_154" id="FNanchor_154_154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a></p>
+
+<p>In no other city of Italy were the struggles of political
+parties so bitter, of such early origin, and so permanent. The
+descriptions of them, which belong, it is true, to a somewhat
+later period, give clear evidence of the superiority of Florentine
+criticism.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a>{75}</span></p>
+
+<p>And what a politician is the great victim of these crises,
+Dante Alighieri, matured alike by home and by exile! He
+uttered his scorn of the incessant changes and experiments in
+the constitution of his native city in verses of adamant, which
+will remain proverbial so long as political events of the same
+kind recur;<a name="FNanchor_155_155" id="FNanchor_155_155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a> he addressed his home in words of defiance and
+yearning which must have stirred the hearts of his countrymen.
+But his thoughts ranged over Italy and the whole
+world; and if his passion for the Empire, as he conceived it,
+was no more than an illusion, it must yet be admitted that
+the youthful dreams of a new-born political speculation are in
+his case not without a poetical grandeur. He is proud to be
+the first who had trod this path,<a name="FNanchor_156_156" id="FNanchor_156_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a> certainly in the footsteps
+of Aristotle, but in his own way independently. His ideal
+emperor is a just and humane judge, dependent on God only,
+the heir of the universal sway of Rome to which belonged
+the sanction of nature, of right and of the will of God. The
+conquest of the world was, according to this view, rightful,
+resting on a divine judgment between Rome and the other
+nations of the earth, and God gave his approval to this empire,
+since under it he became Man, submitting at his birth to the
+census of the Emperor Augustus, and at his death to the
+judgment of Pontius Pilate. We may find it hard to appreciate
+these and other arguments of the same kind, but Dante’s
+passion never fails to carry us with him. In his letters he
+appears as one of the earliest publicists,<a name="FNanchor_157_157" id="FNanchor_157_157"></a><a href="#Footnote_157_157" class="fnanchor">[157]</a> and is perhaps the
+first layman to publish political tracts in this form. He began
+early. Soon after the death of Beatrice he addressed a pamphlet
+on the state of Florence ‘to the Great ones of the Earth,’
+and the public utterances of his later years, dating from the
+time of his banishment, are all directed to emperors, princes,
+and cardinals. In these letters and in his book ‘De Vulgari
+Eloquio’ the feeling, bought with such bitter pains, is con<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a>{76}</span>stantly
+recurring that the exile may find elsewhere than in
+his native place an intellectual home in language and culture,
+which cannot be taken from him. On this point we shall
+have more to say in the sequel.</p>
+
+<p>To the two Villani, Giovanni as well as Matteo, we owe not
+so much deep political reflexion as fresh and practical observations,
+together with the elements of Florentine statistics
+and important notices of other states. Here too trade and
+commerce had given the impulse to economical as well as
+political science. Nowhere else in the world was such accurate
+information to be had on financial affairs. The wealth of the
+Papal court at Avignon, which at the death of John XXII.
+amounted to twenty-five millions of gold florins, would be
+incredible on any less trustworthy authority.<a name="FNanchor_158_158" id="FNanchor_158_158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158_158" class="fnanchor">[158]</a> Here only, at
+Florence, do we meet with colossal loans like that which the
+King of England contracted from the Florentine houses of
+Bardi and Peruzzi, who lost to his Majesty the sum of 1,365,000
+gold florins (1338)&mdash;their own money and that of their partners&mdash;and
+nevertheless recovered from the shock.<a name="FNanchor_159_159" id="FNanchor_159_159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159_159" class="fnanchor">[159]</a> Most important
+facts are here recorded as to the condition of Florence at this
+time:<a name="FNanchor_160_160" id="FNanchor_160_160"></a><a href="#Footnote_160_160" class="fnanchor">[160]</a> the public income (over 300,000 gold florins) and expenditure;
+the population of the city, here only roughly
+estimated, according to the consumption of bread, in ‘bocche,’
+<i>i.e.</i> mouths, put at 90,000, and the population of the whole
+territory; the excess of 300 to 500 male children among the
+5,800 to 6,000 annually baptized;<a name="FNanchor_161_161" id="FNanchor_161_161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161_161" class="fnanchor">[161]</a> the school-children, of
+whom 8,000 to 10,000 learned reading, 1,000 to 1,200 in six
+schools arithmetic; and besides these, 600 scholars who were<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a>{77}</span>
+taught Latin grammar and logic in four schools. Then follow
+the statistics of the churches and monasteries; of the hospitals,
+which held more than a thousand beds; of the wool-trade,
+with its most valuable details; of the mint, the provisioning
+of the city, the public officials, and so on.<a name="FNanchor_162_162" id="FNanchor_162_162"></a><a href="#Footnote_162_162" class="fnanchor">[162]</a> Incidentally we
+learn many curious facts; how, for instance, when the public
+funds (‘monte’) were first established, in the year 1353,
+the Franciscans spoke from the pulpit in favour of the
+measure, the Dominicans and Augustinians against it.<a name="FNanchor_163_163" id="FNanchor_163_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163_163" class="fnanchor">[163]</a> The
+economical results of the black death were and could be
+observed and described nowhere else in all Europe as in this
+city.<a name="FNanchor_164_164" id="FNanchor_164_164"></a><a href="#Footnote_164_164" class="fnanchor">[164]</a> Only a Florentine could have left it on record how it
+was expected that the scanty population would have made
+everything cheap, and how instead of that labour and commodities
+doubled in price; how the common people at first
+would do no work at all, but simply give themselves up to
+enjoyment; how in the city itself servants and maids were
+not to be had except at extravagant wages; how the peasants
+would only till the best lands, and left the rest uncultivated;
+and how the enormous legacies bequeathed to the poor at
+the time of the plague seemed afterwards useless, since the
+poor had either died or had ceased to be poor. Lastly, on
+the occasion of a great bequest, by which a childless philanthropist
+left six ‘danari’ to every beggar in the city, the
+attempt is made to give a comprehensive statistical account
+of Florentine mendicancy.<a name="FNanchor_165_165" id="FNanchor_165_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165_165" class="fnanchor">[165]</a></p>
+
+<p>This statistical view of things was at a later time still more
+highly cultivated at Florence. The noteworthy point about
+it is that, as a rule, we can perceive its connection with the
+higher aspects of history, with art, and with culture in general.
+An inventory of the year 1422<a name="FNanchor_166_166" id="FNanchor_166_166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166_166" class="fnanchor">[166]</a> mentions, within the compass
+of the same document, the seventy-two exchange offices which<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a>{78}</span>
+surrounded the ‘Mercato Nuovo;’ the amount of coined money
+in circulation (two million golden florins); the then new
+industry of gold spinning; the silk wares; Filippo Brunellesco,
+then busy in digging classical architecture from its grave;
+and Lionardo Aretino, secretary of the republic, at work at
+the revival of ancient literature and eloquence; lastly, it
+speaks of the general prosperity of the city, then free from
+political conflicts, and of the good fortune of Italy, which had
+rid itself of foreign mercenaries. The Venetian statistics
+quoted above (<a href="#page_070">p. 70</a>), which date from about the same year,
+certainly give evidence of larger property and profits and of
+a more extensive scene of action; Venice had long been
+mistress of the seas before Florence sent out its first galleys
+(1422) to Alexandria. But no reader can fail to recognise the
+higher spirit of the Florentine documents. These and similar
+lists recur at intervals of ten years, systematically arranged
+and tabulated, while elsewhere we find at best occasional
+notices. We can form an approximate estimate of the property
+and the business of the first Medici; they paid for charities,
+public buildings, and taxes from 1434 to 1471 no less than
+663,755 gold florins, of which more than 400,000 fell on Cosimo
+alone, and Lorenzo Magnifico was delighted that the money
+had been so well spent.<a name="FNanchor_167_167" id="FNanchor_167_167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167_167" class="fnanchor">[167]</a> In 1472 we have again a most
+important and in its way complete view of the commerce and
+trades of this city,<a name="FNanchor_168_168" id="FNanchor_168_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168_168" class="fnanchor">[168]</a> some of which may be wholly or partly
+reckoned among the fine arts&mdash;such as those which had to
+do with damasks and gold or silver embroidery, with woodcarving
+and ‘intarsia,’ with the sculpture of arabesques in
+marble and sandstone, with portraits in wax, and with jewellery
+and work in gold. The inborn talent of the Florentines
+for the systematisation of outward life is shown by their books
+on agriculture, business, and domestic economy, which are
+markedly superior to those of other European people in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a>{79}</span>
+fifteenth century. It has been rightly decided to publish
+selections of these works,<a name="FNanchor_169_169" id="FNanchor_169_169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169_169" class="fnanchor">[169]</a> although no little study will be
+needed to extract clear and definite results from them. At
+all events, we have no difficulty in recognising the city, where
+dying parents begged the Government in their wills to fine
+their sons 1,000 florins if they declined to practise a regular
+profession.<a name="FNanchor_170_170" id="FNanchor_170_170"></a><a href="#Footnote_170_170" class="fnanchor">[170]</a></p>
+
+<p>For the first half of the sixteenth century probably no state
+in the world possesses a document like the magnificent description
+of Florence by Varchi.<a name="FNanchor_171_171" id="FNanchor_171_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171_171" class="fnanchor">[171]</a> In descriptive statistics, as in so
+many things besides, yet another model is left to us, before the
+freedom and greatness of the city sank into the grave.<a name="FNanchor_172_172" id="FNanchor_172_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172_172" class="fnanchor">[172]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a>{80}</span></p>
+
+<p>This statistical estimate of outward life is, however, uniformly
+accompanied by the narrative of political events to which we
+have already referred.</p>
+
+<p>Florence not only existed under political forms more varied<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a>{81}</span>
+than those of the free states of Italy and of Europe generally,
+but it reflected upon them far more deeply. It is a faithful
+mirror of the relations of individuals and classes to a variable
+whole. The pictures of the great civic democracies in France
+and in Flanders, as they are delineated in Froissart, and the
+narratives of the German chroniclers of the fourteenth century,
+are in truth of high importance; but in comprehensiveness
+of thought and in the rational development of the story, none
+will bear comparison with the Florentines. The rule of the
+nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with
+the proletariate, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy,
+the primacy of a single house, the theocracy
+of Savonarola, and the mixed forms of government which
+prepared the way for the Medicean despotism&mdash;all are so
+described that the inmost motives of the actors are laid bare to
+the light.<a name="FNanchor_173_173" id="FNanchor_173_173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173_173" class="fnanchor">[173]</a> At length Macchiavelli in his Florentine history
+(down to 1492) represents his native city as a living organism<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a>{82}</span>
+and its development as a natural and individual process; he is
+the first of the moderns who has risen to such a conception.
+It lies without our province to determine whether and in what
+points Macchiavelli may have done violence to history, as is
+notoriously the case in his life of Castruccio Castracane&mdash;a
+fancy picture of the typical despot. We might find something
+to say against every line of the ‘Istorie Fiorentine,’ and yet
+the great and unique value of the whole would remain unaffected.
+And his contemporaries and successors, Jacopo Pitti,
+Guicciardini, Segni, Varchi, Vettori, what a circle of illustrious
+names! And what a story it is which these masters tell us!
+The great and memorable drama of the last decades of the
+Florentine republic is here unfolded. The voluminous record
+of the collapse of the highest and most original life which the
+world could then show may appear to one but as a collection
+of curiosities, may awaken in another a devilish delight at the
+shipwreck of so much nobility and grandeur, to a third may
+seem like a great historical assize; for all it will be an object
+of thought and study to the end of time. The evil, which was
+for ever troubling the peace of the city, was its rule over once
+powerful and now conquered rivals like Pisa&mdash;a rule of which
+the necessary consequence was a chronic state of violence.
+The only remedy, certainly an extreme one and which none
+but Savonarola could have persuaded Florence to accept, and
+that only with the help of favourable chances, would have
+been the well-timed resolution of Tuscany into a federal union
+of free cities. At a later period this scheme, then no more
+than the dream of a past age, brought (1548) a patriotic citizen
+of Lucca to the scaffold.<a name="FNanchor_174_174" id="FNanchor_174_174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174_174" class="fnanchor">[174]</a> From this evil and from the ill-starred<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a>{83}</span>
+Guelph sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince,
+which familiarised it with foreign intervention, came all the
+disasters which followed. But who does not admire the people,
+which was wrought up by its venerated preacher to a mood
+of such sustained loftiness, that for the first time in Italy it set
+the example of sparing a conquered foe, while the whole history
+of its past taught nothing but vengeance and extermination?
+The glow which melted patriotism into one with moral regeneration
+may seem, when looked at from a distance, to have
+soon passed away; but its best results shine forth again in the
+memorable siege of 1529-30. They were ‘fools,’ as Guicciardini
+then wrote, who drew down this storm upon Florence, but he
+confesses himself that they achieved things which seemed
+incredible; and when he declares that sensible people would
+have got out of the way of the danger, he means no more than
+that Florence ought to have yielded itself silently and ingloriously
+into the hands of its enemies. It would no doubt
+have preserved its splendid suburbs and gardens, and the lives
+and prosperity of countless citizens; but it would have been
+the poorer by one of its greatest and most ennobling memories.</p>
+
+<p>In many of their chief merits the Florentines are the
+pattern and the earliest type of Italians and modern Europeans
+generally; they are so also in many of their defects. When
+Dante compares the city which was always mending its constitution
+with the sick man who is continually changing his
+posture to escape from pain, he touches with the comparison
+a permanent feature of the political life of Florence. The
+great modern fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be
+manufactured by a combination of existing forces and tendencies,<a name="FNanchor_175_175" id="FNanchor_175_175"></a><a href="#Footnote_175_175" class="fnanchor">[175]</a>
+was constantly cropping up in stormy times; even Macchiavelli
+is not wholly free from it. Constitutional artists were never
+wanting who by an ingenious distribution and division of political<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a>{84}</span>
+power, by indirect elections of the most complicated kind, by
+the establishment of nominal offices, sought to found a lasting
+order of things, and to satisfy or to deceive the rich and the
+poor alike. They naïvely fetch their examples from classical
+antiquity, and borrow the party names ‘ottimati,’ ‘aristocrazia,’<a name="FNanchor_176_176" id="FNanchor_176_176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176_176" class="fnanchor">[176]</a>
+as a matter of course. The world since then has
+become used to these expressions and given them a conventional
+European sense, whereas all former party names were purely
+national, and either characterised the cause at issue or sprang
+from the caprice of accident. But how a name colours or
+discolours a political cause!</p>
+
+<p>But of all who thought it possible to construct a state, the
+greatest beyond all comparison was Macchiavelli.<a name="FNanchor_177_177" id="FNanchor_177_177"></a><a href="#Footnote_177_177" class="fnanchor">[177]</a> He treats
+existing forces as living and active, takes a large and an
+accurate view of alternative possibilities, and seeks to mislead
+neither himself nor others. No man could be freer from vanity
+or ostentation; indeed, he does not write for the public, but
+either for princes and administrators or for personal friends.
+The danger for him does not lie in an affectation of genius or
+in a false order of ideas, but rather in a powerful imagination
+which he evidently controls with difficulty. The objectivity of
+his political judgment is sometimes appalling in its sincerity;
+but it is the sign of a time of no ordinary need and peril, when
+it was a hard matter to believe in right, or to credit others with
+just dealing. Virtuous indignation at his expense is thrown
+away upon us who have seen in what sense political morality
+is understood by the statesmen of our own century. Macchiavelli
+was at all events able to forget himself in his cause. In
+truth, although his writings, with the exception of very few
+words, are altogether destitute of enthusiasm, and although the
+Florentines themselves treated him at last as a criminal,<a name="FNanchor_178_178" id="FNanchor_178_178"></a><a href="#Footnote_178_178" class="fnanchor">[178]</a> he
+was a patriot in the fullest meaning of the word. But free as
+he was, like most of his contemporaries, in speech and morals,
+the welfare of the state was yet his first and last thought.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a>{85}</span></p>
+
+<p>His most complete programme for the construction of a new
+political system at Florence is set forth in the memorial to
+Leo X.,<a name="FNanchor_179_179" id="FNanchor_179_179"></a><a href="#Footnote_179_179" class="fnanchor">[179]</a> composed after the death of the younger Lorenzo
+Medici, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519), to whom he had dedicated
+his ‘Prince.’ The state was by that time in extremities and
+utterly corrupt, and the remedies proposed are not always
+morally justifiable; but it is most interesting to see how he
+hopes to set up the republic in the form of a moderate democracy,
+as heiress to the Medici. A more ingenious scheme of
+concessions to the Pope, to the Pope’s various adherents, and to
+the different Florentine interests, cannot be imagined; we
+might fancy ourselves looking into the works of a clock.
+Principles, observations, comparisons, political forecasts, and
+the like are to be found in numbers in the ‘Discorsi,’ among
+them flashes of wonderful insight. He recognises, for example,
+the law of a continuous though not uniform development in
+republican institutions, and requires the constitution to be
+flexible and capable of change, as the only means of dispensing
+with bloodshed and banishments. For a like reason, in order
+to guard against private violence and foreign interference&mdash;‘the
+death of all freedom’&mdash;he wishes to see introduced a judicial
+procedure (‘accusa’) against hated citizens, in place of which
+Florence had hitherto had nothing but the court of scandal.
+With a masterly hand the tardy and involuntary decisions are
+characterised, which at critical moments play so important a
+part in republican states. Once, it is true, he is misled by his
+imagination and the pressure of events into unqualified praise
+of the people, which chooses its officers, he says, better than
+any prince, and which can be cured of its errors by ‘good
+advice.’<a name="FNanchor_180_180" id="FNanchor_180_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180_180" class="fnanchor">[180]</a> With regard to the government of Tuscany, he has
+no doubt that it belongs to his native city, and maintains, in a
+special ‘Discorso’ that the reconquest of Pisa is a question of
+life or death; he deplores that Arezzo, after the rebellion of
+1502, was not razed to the ground; he admits in general that
+Italian republics must be allowed to expand freely and add to
+their territory in order to enjoy peace at home, and not to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a>{86}</span>
+themselves attacked by others, but declares that Florence had
+always begun at the wrong end, and from the first made deadly
+enemies of Pisa, Lucca, and Siena, while Pistoja, ‘treated like
+a brother,’ had voluntarily submitted to her.<a name="FNanchor_181_181" id="FNanchor_181_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181_181" class="fnanchor">[181]</a></p>
+
+<p>It would be unreasonable to draw a parallel between the few
+other republics which still existed in the fifteenth century and
+this unique city&mdash;the most important workshop of the Italian,
+and indeed of the modern European spirit. Siena suffered
+from the gravest organic maladies, and its relative prosperity
+in art and industry must not mislead us on this point.
+Æneas Sylvius<a name="FNanchor_182_182" id="FNanchor_182_182"></a><a href="#Footnote_182_182" class="fnanchor">[182]</a> looks with longing from his native town over
+to the ‘merry’ German imperial cities, where life is embittered
+by no confiscations of land and goods, by no arbitrary officials,
+and by no political factions.<a name="FNanchor_183_183" id="FNanchor_183_183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183_183" class="fnanchor">[183]</a> Genoa scarcely comes within
+range of our task, as before the time of Andrea Doria it took
+almost no part in the Renaissance. Indeed, the inhabitant of
+the Riviera was proverbial among Italians for his contempt of
+all higher culture.<a name="FNanchor_184_184" id="FNanchor_184_184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184_184" class="fnanchor">[184]</a> Party conflicts here assumed so fierce a
+character, and disturbed so violently the whole course of life,
+that we can hardly understand how, after so many revolutions
+and invasions, the Genoese ever contrived to return to an
+endurable condition. Perhaps it was owing to the fact that
+nearly all who took part in public affairs were at the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a>{87}</span>
+time almost without exception active men of business.<a name="FNanchor_185_185" id="FNanchor_185_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185_185" class="fnanchor">[185]</a> The
+example of Genoa shows in a striking manner with what
+insecurity wealth and vast commerce, and with what internal
+disorder the possession of distant colonies, are compatible.</p>
+
+<p>Lucca is of small significance in the fifteenth century.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_088" id="page_088"></a>{88}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VIII-1" id="CHAPTER_VIII-1"></a>CHAPTER VIII.<br /><br />
+<small>THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ITALIAN STATES.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">A<small>S</small> the majority of the Italian states were in their internal
+constitution works of art, that is, the fruit of reflection and
+careful adaptation, so was their relation to one another and to
+foreign countries also a work of art. That nearly all of them
+were the result of recent usurpations, was a fact which exercised
+as fatal an influence in their foreign as in their internal
+policy. Not one of them recognised another without reserve;
+the same play of chance which had helped to found and consolidate
+one dynasty might upset another. Nor was it always
+a matter of choice with the despot whether to keep quiet or
+not. The necessity of movement and aggrandisement is
+common to all illegitimate powers. Thus Italy became the
+scene of a ‘foreign policy’ which gradually, as in other
+countries also, acquired the position of a recognised system of
+public law. The purely objective treatment of international
+affairs, as free from prejudice as from moral scruples, attained
+a perfection which sometimes is not without a certain beauty
+and grandeur of its own. But as a whole it gives us the impression
+of a bottomless abyss.</p>
+
+<p>Intrigues, armaments, leagues, corruption and treason make
+up the outward history of Italy at this period. Venice in particular
+was long accused on all hands of seeking to conquer
+the whole peninsula, or gradually so to reduce its strength that
+one state after another must fall into her hands.<a name="FNanchor_186_186" id="FNanchor_186_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186_186" class="fnanchor">[186]</a> But on a
+closer view it is evident that this complaint did not come from
+the people, but rather from the courts and official classes,
+which were commonly abhorred by their subjects, while the
+mild government of Venice had secured for it general confidence.
+Even Florence,<a name="FNanchor_187_187" id="FNanchor_187_187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187_187" class="fnanchor">[187]</a> with its restive subject cities, found<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a>{89}</span>
+itself in a false position with regard to Venice, apart from all
+commercial jealousy and from the progress of Venice in
+Romagna. At last the League of Cambray actually did strike
+a serious blow at the state (<a href="#page_068">p. 68</a>), which all Italy ought to
+have supported with united strength.</p>
+
+<p>The other states, also, were animated by feelings no less
+unfriendly, and were at all times ready to use against one
+another any weapon which their evil conscience might suggest.
+Ludovico Moro, the Aragonese kings of Naples, and
+Sixtus IV.&mdash;to say nothing of the smaller powers&mdash;kept Italy
+in a state of constant and perilous agitation. It would have
+been well if the atrocious game had been confined to Italy;
+but it lay in the nature of the case that intervention and help
+should at last be sought from abroad&mdash;in particular from the
+French and the Turks.</p>
+
+<p>The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on
+the side of France. Florence had never ceased to confess
+with shocking <i>naïveté</i> its old Guelph preference for the French.<a name="FNanchor_188_188" id="FNanchor_188_188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188_188" class="fnanchor">[188]</a>
+And when Charles VIII. actually appeared on the south of the
+Alps, all Italy accepted him with an enthusiasm which to himself
+and his followers seemed unaccountable.<a name="FNanchor_189_189" id="FNanchor_189_189"></a><a href="#Footnote_189_189" class="fnanchor">[189]</a> In the imagina<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a>{90}</span>tion
+of the Italians, to take Savonarola for an example, the ideal
+picture of a wise, just, and powerful saviour and ruler was still
+living, with the difference that he was no longer the emperor
+invoked by Dante, but the Capetian king of France. With
+his departure the illusion was broken; but it was long before
+all understood how completely Charles VIII., Louis XII., and
+Francis I. had mistaken their true relation to Italy, and by
+what inferior motives they were led. The princes, for their
+part, tried to make use of France in a wholly different way.
+When the Franco-English wars came to an end, when Louis
+XI. began to cast about his diplomatic nets on all sides, and
+Charles of Burgundy to embark on his foolish adventures, the
+Italian Cabinets came to meet them at every point. It became
+clear that the intervention of France was only a question
+of time, even though the claims on Naples and Milan had never
+existed, and that the old interference with Genoa and Piedmont
+was only a type of what was to follow. The Venetians,
+in fact, expected it as early as 1642.<a name="FNanchor_190_190" id="FNanchor_190_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190_190" class="fnanchor">[190]</a> The mortal terror of the
+Duke Galeazzo Maria of Milan during the Burgundian war, in
+which he was apparently the ally of Charles as well as of
+Louis, and consequently had reason to dread an attack from
+both, is strikingly shown in his correspondence.<a name="FNanchor_191_191" id="FNanchor_191_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191_191" class="fnanchor">[191]</a> The plan of
+an equilibrium of the four chief Italian powers, as understood
+by Lorenzo the Magnificent, was but the assumption of a cheerful
+optimistic spirit, which had outgrown both the recklessness
+of an experimental policy and the superstitions of Florentine
+Guelphism, and persisted in hoping the best. When Louis XI.
+offered him aid in the war against Ferrante of Naples and
+Sixtus IV., he replied, ‘I cannot set my own advantage above
+the safety of all Italy; would to God it never came into the
+mind of the French kings to try their strength in this country!
+Should they ever do so, Italy is lost.’<a name="FNanchor_192_192" id="FNanchor_192_192"></a><a href="#Footnote_192_192" class="fnanchor">[192]</a> For the other princes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a>{91}</span>
+the King of France was alternately a bugbear to themselves
+and their enemies, and they threatened to call him in whenever
+they saw no more convenient way out of their difficulties.
+The Popes, in their turn, fancied that they could make use of
+France without any danger to themselves, and even Innocent
+VIII. imagined that he could withdraw to sulk in the North, and
+return as a conqueror to Italy at the head of a French army.<a name="FNanchor_193_193" id="FNanchor_193_193"></a><a href="#Footnote_193_193" class="fnanchor">[193]</a></p>
+
+<p>Thoughtful men, indeed, foresaw the foreign conquest long
+before the expedition of Charles VIII.<a name="FNanchor_194_194" id="FNanchor_194_194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194_194" class="fnanchor">[194]</a> And when Charles
+was back again on the other side of the Alps, it was plain to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a>{92}</span>
+every eye that an era of intervention had begun. Misfortune
+now followed on misfortune; it was understood too late
+that France and Spain, the two chief invaders, had become
+great European powers, that they would be no longer satisfied
+with verbal homage, but would fight to the death for influence
+and territory in Italy. They had begun to resemble the centralised
+Italian states, and indeed to copy them, only on a
+gigantic scale. Schemes of annexation or exchange of territory
+were for a time indefinitely multiplied. The end, as is
+well known, was the complete victory of Spain, which, as
+sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held the
+Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections
+of the philosophers could only show them how those who had
+called in the barbarians all came to a bad end.</p>
+
+<p>Alliances were at the same time formed with the Turks too,
+with as little scruple or disguise; they were reckoned no worse
+than any other political expedients. The belief in the unity of
+Western Christendom had at various times in the course of the
+Crusades been seriously shaken, and Frederick II. had probably
+outgrown it. But the fresh advance of the Oriental nations,
+the need and the ruin of the Greek Empire, had revived the
+old feeling, though not in its former strength, throughout
+Western Europe. Italy, however, was a striking exception to
+this rule. Great as was the terror felt for the Turks, and the
+actual danger from them, there was yet scarcely a government
+of any consequence which did not conspire against other Italian
+states with Mohammed II. and his successors. And when
+they did not do so, they still had the credit of it; nor was it
+worse than the sending of emissaries to poison the cisterns of
+Venice, which was the charge brought against the heirs of
+Alfonso King of Naples.<a name="FNanchor_195_195" id="FNanchor_195_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195_195" class="fnanchor">[195]</a> From a scoundrel like Sigismondo
+Malatesta nothing better could be expected than that he should<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a>{93}</span>
+call the Turks into Italy.<a name="FNanchor_196_196" id="FNanchor_196_196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196_196" class="fnanchor">[196]</a> But the Aragonese monarchs of
+Naples, from whom Mohammed&mdash;at the instigation, we read,
+of other Italian governments, especially of Venice<a name="FNanchor_197_197" id="FNanchor_197_197"></a><a href="#Footnote_197_197" class="fnanchor">[197]</a>&mdash;had once
+wrested Otranto (1480), afterwards hounded on the Sultan
+Bajazet II. against the Venetians.<a name="FNanchor_198_198" id="FNanchor_198_198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198_198" class="fnanchor">[198]</a> The same charge was
+brought against Ludovico Moro. ‘The blood of the slain, and
+the misery of the prisoners in the hands of the Turks, cry to
+God for vengeance against him,’ says the state historian. In
+Venice, where the government was informed of everything, it
+was known that Giovanni Sforza, ruler of Pesaro, the cousin of
+the Moor, had entertained the Turkish ambassadors on their
+way to Milan.<a name="FNanchor_199_199" id="FNanchor_199_199"></a><a href="#Footnote_199_199" class="fnanchor">[199]</a> The two most respectable among the Popes of
+the fifteenth century, Nicholas V. and Pius II., died in the
+deepest grief at the progress of the Turks, the latter indeed
+amid the preparations for a crusade which he was hoping to
+lead in person; their successors embezzled the contributions
+sent for this purpose from all parts of Christendom, and degraded
+the indulgences granted in return for them into a private
+commercial speculation.<a name="FNanchor_200_200" id="FNanchor_200_200"></a><a href="#Footnote_200_200" class="fnanchor">[200]</a> Innocent VIII. consented to be
+gaoler to the fugitive Prince Djem, for a salary paid by the
+prisoner’s brother Bajazet II., and Alexander VI. supported the
+steps taken by Ludovico Moro in Constantinople to further a
+Turkish assault upon Venice (1498), whereupon the latter
+threatened him with a Council.<a name="FNanchor_201_201" id="FNanchor_201_201"></a><a href="#Footnote_201_201" class="fnanchor">[201]</a> It is clear that the notorious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a>{94}</span>
+alliance between Francis I. and Soliman II. was nothing new
+or unheard of.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, we find instances of whole populations to whom it
+seemed no particular crime to go over bodily to the Turks.
+Even if it were only held out as a threat to oppressive governments,
+this is at least a proof that the idea had become familiar.
+As early as 1480 Battista Mantovano gives us clearly to understand
+that most of the inhabitants of the Adriatic coast foresaw
+something of this kind, and that Ancona in particular desired
+it.<a name="FNanchor_202_202" id="FNanchor_202_202"></a><a href="#Footnote_202_202" class="fnanchor">[202]</a> When Romagna was suffering from the oppressive government
+of Leo X., a deputy from Ravenna said openly to the
+Legate, Cardinal Guilio Medici: ‘Monsignore, the honourable
+Republic of Venice will not have us, for fear of a dispute with
+the Holy See; but if the Turk comes to Ragusa we will put
+ourselves into his hands.’<a name="FNanchor_203_203" id="FNanchor_203_203"></a><a href="#Footnote_203_203" class="fnanchor">[203]</a></p>
+
+<p>It was a poor but not wholly groundless consolation for the
+enslavement of Italy then begun by the Spaniards, that the
+country was at least secured from the relapse into barbarism
+which would have awaited it under the Turkish rule.<a name="FNanchor_204_204" id="FNanchor_204_204"></a><a href="#Footnote_204_204" class="fnanchor">[204]</a> By
+itself, divided as it was, it could hardly have escaped this fate.</p>
+
+<p>If, with all these drawbacks, the Italian statesmanship of
+this period deserves our praise, it is only on the ground of its
+practical and unprejudiced treatment of those questions which
+were not affected by fear, passion, or malice. Here was no
+feudal system after the northern fashion, with its artificial<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a>{95}</span>
+scheme of rights; but the power which each possessed he held
+in practice as in theory. Here was no attendant nobility to
+foster in the mind of the prince the mediæval sense of honour,
+with all its strange consequences; but princes and counsellors
+were agreed in acting according to the exigencies of the particular
+case and to the end they had in view. Towards the men
+whose services were used and towards allies, come from what
+quarter they might, no pride of caste was felt which could possibly
+estrange a supporter; and the class of the Condottieri, in
+which birth was a matter of indifference, shows clearly enough
+in what sort of hands the real power lay; and lastly, the
+Government, in the hands of an enlightened despot, had an
+incomparably more accurate acquaintance with its own country
+and that of its neighbours, than was possessed by northern
+contemporaries, and estimated the economical and moral capacities
+of friend and foe down to the smallest particular. The
+rulers were, notwithstanding grave errors, born masters of statistical
+science. With such men negotiation was possible; it
+might be presumed that they would be convinced and their
+opinion modified when practical reasons were laid before them.
+When the great Alfonso of Naples was (1434) a prisoner of
+Filippo Maria Visconti, he was able to satisfy his gaoler that
+the rule of the House of Anjou instead of his own at Naples
+would make the French masters of Italy; Filippo Maria set
+him free without ransom and made an alliance with him.<a name="FNanchor_205_205" id="FNanchor_205_205"></a><a href="#Footnote_205_205" class="fnanchor">[205]</a> A
+northern prince would scarcely have acted in the same way,
+certainly not one whose morality in other respects was like
+that of Visconti. What confidence was felt in the power of
+self-interest is shown by the celebrated visit which Lorenzo
+the Magnificent, to the universal astonishment of the Florentines,
+paid the faithless Ferrante at Naples&mdash;a man who would
+be certainly tempted to keep him a prisoner, and was by no
+means too scrupulous to do so.<a name="FNanchor_206_206" id="FNanchor_206_206"></a><a href="#Footnote_206_206" class="fnanchor">[206]</a> For to arrest a powerful monarch,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a>{96}</span>
+and then to let him go alive, after extorting his signature
+and otherwise insulting him, as Charles the Bold did to Louis
+XI. at Péronne (1468), seemed madness to the Italians;<a name="FNanchor_207_207" id="FNanchor_207_207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207_207" class="fnanchor">[207]</a> so
+that Lorenzo was expected to come back covered with glory, or
+else not to come back at all. The art of political persuasion
+was at this time raised to a point&mdash;especially by the Venetian
+ambassadors&mdash;of which northern nations first obtained a conception
+from the Italians, and of which the official addresses
+give a most imperfect idea. These are mere pieces of humanistic
+rhetoric. Nor, in spite of an otherwise ceremonious etiquette,
+was there in case of need any lack of rough and frank
+speaking in diplomatic intercourse.<a name="FNanchor_208_208" id="FNanchor_208_208"></a><a href="#Footnote_208_208" class="fnanchor">[208]</a> A man like Macchiavelli
+appears in his ‘Legazioni’ in an almost pathetic light. Furnished
+with scanty instructions, shabbily equipped, and treated
+as an agent of inferior rank, he never loses his gift of free and
+wide observation or his pleasure in picturesque description.
+From that time Italy was and remained the country of political
+‘Istruzioni’ and ‘Relazioni.’ There was doubtless plenty of
+diplomatic ability in other states, but Italy alone at so early a
+period has preserved documentary evidence of it in considerable
+quantity. The long despatch on the last period of the
+life of Ferrante of Naples (January 17, 1494), written by the
+hand of Pontano and addressed to the Cabinet of Alexander
+VI., gives us the highest opinion of this class of political
+writing, although it is only quoted incidentally and as one of
+many written. And how many other despatches, as important
+and as vigorously written, in the diplomatic intercourse of this
+and later times, still remain unknown or unedited!<a name="FNanchor_209_209" id="FNanchor_209_209"></a><a href="#Footnote_209_209" class="fnanchor">[209]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a>{97}</span></p>
+
+<p>A special division of this work will treat of the study of man
+individually and nationally, which among the Italians went
+hand in hand with the study of the outward conditions of
+human life.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a>{98}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IX-1" id="CHAPTER_IX-1"></a>CHAPTER IX.<br /><br />
+<small>WAR AS A WORK OF ART.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">I<small>T</small> must here be briefly indicated by what steps the art
+of war assumed the character of a product of reflection.<a name="FNanchor_210_210" id="FNanchor_210_210"></a><a href="#Footnote_210_210" class="fnanchor">[210]</a>
+Throughout the countries of the West the education of the
+individual soldier in the middle ages was perfect within the
+limits of the then prevalent system of defence and attack:
+nor was there any want of ingenious inventors in the arts
+of besieging and of fortification. But the development both
+of strategy and of tactics was hindered by the character
+and duration of military service, and by the ambition of
+the nobles, who disputed questions of precedence in the face
+of the enemy, and through simple want of discipline caused
+the loss of great battles like Crécy and Maupertuis. Italy,
+on the contrary, was the first country to adopt the system
+of mercenary troops, which demanded a wholly different
+organisation; and the early introduction of fire-arms did its
+part in making war a democratic pursuit, not only because the
+strongest castles were unable to withstand a bombardment,
+but because the skill of the engineer, of the gun-founder, and
+of the artillerist&mdash;men belonging to another class than the
+nobility&mdash;was now of the first importance in a campaign. It
+was felt, with regret, that the value of the individual, which
+had been the soul of the small and admirably-organised bands
+of mercenaries, would suffer from these novel means of destruction,
+which did their work at a distance; and there were
+Condottieri who opposed to the utmost the introduction at least
+of the musket, which had been lately invented in Germany.<a name="FNanchor_211_211" id="FNanchor_211_211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211_211" class="fnanchor">[211]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a>{99}</span>
+We read that Paolo Vitelli,<a name="FNanchor_212_212" id="FNanchor_212_212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212_212" class="fnanchor">[212]</a> while recognising and himself
+adopting the cannon, put out the eyes and cut off the hands
+of the captured ‘schioppettieri,’ of the enemy, because he held
+it unworthy that a gallant, and it might be noble, knight
+should be wounded and laid low by a common, despised foot
+soldier. On the whole, however, the new discoveries were
+accepted and turned to useful account, till the Italians became
+the teachers of all Europe, both in the building of fortifications
+and in the means of attacking them.<a name="FNanchor_213_213" id="FNanchor_213_213"></a><a href="#Footnote_213_213" class="fnanchor">[213]</a> Princes like Federigo
+of Urbino and Alfonso of Ferrara acquired a mastery of the
+subject compared to which the knowledge even of Maximilian
+I. appears superficial. In Italy, earlier than elsewhere, there
+existed a comprehensive science and art of military affairs;
+here, for the first time, that impartial delight is taken in able
+generalship for its own sake, which might, indeed, be expected
+from the frequent change of party and from the wholly unsentimental
+mode of action of the Condottieri. During the
+Milano-Venetian war of 1451 and 1452, between Francesco
+Sforza and Jacopo Piccinino, the headquarters of the latter
+were attended by the scholar Gian Antonio Porcello dei
+Pandoni, commissioned by Alfonso of Naples to write a report
+of the campaign.<a name="FNanchor_214_214" id="FNanchor_214_214"></a><a href="#Footnote_214_214" class="fnanchor">[214]</a> It is written, not in the purest, but in
+a fluent Latin, a little too much in the style of the humanistic
+bombast of the day, is modelled on Cæsar’s Commentaries, and
+interspersed with speeches, prodigies, and the like. Since for
+the past hundred years it had been seriously disputed whether
+Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater,<a name="FNanchor_215_215" id="FNanchor_215_215"></a><a href="#Footnote_215_215" class="fnanchor">[215]</a> Piccinino<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a>{100}</span>
+through the whole book must needs be called Scipio and
+Sforza Hannibal. But something positive had to be reported
+too respecting the Milanese army; the sophist presented himself
+to Sforza, was led along the ranks, praised highly all that he
+saw, and promised to hand it down to posterity.<a name="FNanchor_216_216" id="FNanchor_216_216"></a><a href="#Footnote_216_216" class="fnanchor">[216]</a> Apart from
+him the Italian literature of the day is rich in descriptions
+of wars and strategic devices, written for the use of educated
+men in general as well as of specialists, while the contemporary
+narratives of northerners, such as the ‘Burgundian War’ by
+Diebold Schelling, still retain the shapelessness and matter-of-fact
+dryness of a mere chronicle. The greatest <i>dilettante</i> who
+has ever treated in that character<a name="FNanchor_217_217" id="FNanchor_217_217"></a><a href="#Footnote_217_217" class="fnanchor">[217]</a> of military affairs, was then
+busy writing his ‘Arte della Guerra.’ But the development
+of the individual soldier found its most complete expression in
+those public and solemn conflicts between one or more pairs
+of combatants which were practised long before the famous
+‘Challenge of Barletta’<a name="FNanchor_218_218" id="FNanchor_218_218"></a><a href="#Footnote_218_218" class="fnanchor">[218]</a> (1503). The victor was assured
+of the praises of poets and scholars, which were denied to the
+Northern warrior. The result of these combats was no longer
+regarded as a Divine judgment, but as a triumph of personal
+merit, and to the minds of the spectators seemed to be both the
+decision of an exciting competition and a satisfaction for the
+honour of the army or the nation.<a name="FNanchor_219_219" id="FNanchor_219_219"></a><a href="#Footnote_219_219" class="fnanchor">[219]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is obvious that this purely rational treatment of warlike
+affairs allowed, under certain circumstances, of the worst atrocities,
+even in the absence of a strong political hatred, as, for
+instance, when the plunder of a city had been promised to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a>{101}</span>
+troops. After the four days’ devastation of Piacenza, which
+Sforza was compelled to permit to his soldiers (1447), the town
+long stood empty, and at last had to be peopled by force.<a name="FNanchor_220_220" id="FNanchor_220_220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220_220" class="fnanchor">[220]</a>
+Yet outrages like these were nothing compared with the misery
+which was afterwards brought upon Italy by foreign troops,
+and most of all by the Spaniards, in whom perhaps a touch
+of Oriental blood, perhaps familiarity with the spectacles of
+the Inquisition, had unloosed the devilish element of human
+nature. After seeing them at work at Prato, Rome, and elsewhere,
+it is not easy to take any interest of the higher sort
+in Ferdinand the Catholic and Charles V., who knew what
+these hordes were, and yet unchained them. The mass of
+documents which are gradually brought to light from the
+cabinets of these rulers will always remain an important source
+of historical information; but from such men no fruitful
+political conception can be looked for.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a>{102}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_X-1" id="CHAPTER_X-1"></a>CHAPTER X.<br /><br />
+<small>THE PAPACY AND ITS DANGERS.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> Papacy and the dominions of the Church<a name="FNanchor_221_221" id="FNanchor_221_221"></a><a href="#Footnote_221_221" class="fnanchor">[221]</a> are creations
+of so peculiar a kind, that we have hitherto, in determining the
+general characteristics of Italian states, referred to them only
+occasionally. The deliberate choice and adaptation of political
+expedients, which gives so great an interest to the other states,
+is what we find least of all at Rome, since here the spiritual
+power could constantly conceal or supply the defects of the
+temporal. And what fiery trials did this state undergo in the
+fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, when
+the Papacy was led captive to Avignon! All, at first, was
+thrown into confusion; but the Pope had money, troops, and
+a great statesman and general, the Spaniard Alboronoz, who
+again brought the ecclesiastical state into complete subjection.
+The danger of a final dissolution was still greater at the time
+of the schism, when neither the Roman nor the French Pope
+was rich enough to reconquer the newly-lost state; but this
+was done under Martin V., after the unity of the Church was
+restored, and done again under Eugenius IV., when the same
+danger was renewed. But the ecclesiastical state was and
+remained a thorough anomaly among the powers of Italy; in
+and near Rome itself, the Papacy was defied by the great
+families of the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, and Anguillara; in
+Umbria, in the Marches, and in Romagna, those civic republics
+had almost ceased to exist, for whose devotion the Papacy had
+showed so little gratitude; their place had been taken by
+a crowd of princely dynasties, great or small, whose loyalty<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a>{103}</span>
+and obedience signified little. As self-dependent powers,
+standing on their own merits, they have an interest of their
+own; and from this point of view the most important of them
+have been already discussed (pp. 28 sqq., 44 sqq.).</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, a few general remarks on the Papacy can
+hardly be dispensed with. New and strange perils and trials
+came upon it in the course of the fifteenth century, as the
+political spirit of the nation began to lay hold upon it on
+various sides, and to draw it within the sphere of its action.
+The least of these dangers came from the populace or from
+abroad; the most serious had their ground in the characters
+of the Popes themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, for this moment, leave out of consideration the
+countries beyond the Alps. At the time when the Papacy
+was exposed to mortal danger in Italy, it neither received nor
+could receive the slightest assistance either from France, then
+under Louis XI., or from England, distracted by the wars of
+the Roses, or from the then disorganized Spanish monarchy,
+or from Germany, but lately betrayed at the Council of Basel.
+In Italy itself there were a certain number of instructed and
+even uninstructed people, whose national vanity was flattered
+by the Italian character of the Papacy; the personal interests
+of very many depended on its having and retaining this
+character; and vast masses of the people still believed in the
+virtue of the Papal blessing and consecration;<a name="FNanchor_222_222" id="FNanchor_222_222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222_222" class="fnanchor">[222]</a> among them<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a>{104}</span>
+notorious transgressors like that Vitellozzo Vitelli, who still
+prayed to be absolved by Alexander VI., when the Pope’s son
+had him slaughtered.<a name="FNanchor_223_223" id="FNanchor_223_223"></a><a href="#Footnote_223_223" class="fnanchor">[223]</a> But all these grounds of sympathy put
+together would not have sufficed to save the Papacy from its
+enemies, had the latter been really in earnest, and had they
+known how to take advantage of the envy and hatred with
+which the institution was regarded.</p>
+
+<p>And at the very time when the prospect of help from without
+was so small, the most dangerous symptoms appeared within
+the Papacy itself. Living, as it now did, and acting in the
+spirit of the secular Italian principalities, it was compelled to
+go through the same dark experiences as they; but its own
+exceptional nature gave a peculiar colour to the shadows.</p>
+
+<p>As far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, small account
+was taken of its internal agitations, so many were the Popes
+who had returned after being expelled by popular tumult, and
+so greatly did the presence of the Curia minister to the interests
+of the Roman people. But Rome not only displayed at times
+a specific anti-papal radicalism,<a name="FNanchor_224_224" id="FNanchor_224_224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224_224" class="fnanchor">[224]</a> but in the most serious plots
+which were then contrived, gave proof of the working of
+unseen hands from without. It was so in the case of the
+conspiracy of Stefano Porcaro against Nicholas V. (1453), the
+very Pope who had done most for the prosperity of the city,
+but who, by enriching the cardinals, and transforming Rome
+into a papal fortress, had aroused the discontent of the people.<a name="FNanchor_225_225" id="FNanchor_225_225"></a><a href="#Footnote_225_225" class="fnanchor">[225]</a>
+Porcaro aimed at the complete overthrow of the papal authority,
+and had distinguished accomplices, who, though their names<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a>{105}</span>
+are not handed down to us,<a name="FNanchor_226_226" id="FNanchor_226_226"></a><a href="#Footnote_226_226" class="fnanchor">[226]</a> are certainly to be looked for
+among the Italian governments of the time. Under the pontificate
+of the same man, Lorenzo Valla concluded his famous
+declamation against the gift of Constantine, with the wish for
+the speedy secularisation of the States of the Church.<a name="FNanchor_227_227" id="FNanchor_227_227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227_227" class="fnanchor">[227]</a></p>
+
+<p>The Catilinarian gang, with which Pius II. had to contend<a name="FNanchor_228_228" id="FNanchor_228_228"></a><a href="#Footnote_228_228" class="fnanchor">[228]</a>
+(1460), avowed with equal frankness their resolution to overthrow
+the government of the priests, and its leader, Tiburzio,
+threw the blame on the soothsayers, who had fixed the accomplishment
+of his wishes for this very year. Several of the chief
+men of Rome, the Prince of Tarentum, and the Condottiere
+Jacopo Piccinino, were accomplices and supporters of Tiburzio.
+Indeed, when we think of the booty which was accumulated
+in the palaces of wealthy prelates&mdash;the conspirators had the
+Cardinal of Aquileia especially in view&mdash;we are surprised that,
+in an almost unguarded city, such attempts were not more frequent
+and more successful. It was not without reason that
+Pius II. preferred to reside anywhere rather than in Rome,
+and even Paul II.<a name="FNanchor_229_229" id="FNanchor_229_229"></a><a href="#Footnote_229_229" class="fnanchor">[229]</a> was exposed to no small anxiety through a
+plot formed by some discharged abbreviators, who, under the
+command of Platina, besieged the Vatican for twenty days.
+The Papacy must sooner or later have fallen a victim to such
+enterprises, if it had not stamped out the aristocratic factions
+under whose protection these bands of robbers grew to a head.</p>
+
+<p>This task was undertaken by the terrible Sixtus IV. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a>{106}</span>
+was the first Pope who had Rome and the neighbourhood
+thoroughly under his control, especially after his successful
+attack on the House of Colonna, and consequently, both in his
+Italian policy and in the internal affairs of the Church, he could
+venture to act with a defiant audacity, and to set at nought
+the complaints and threats to summon a council which arose
+from all parts of Europe. He supplied himself with the necessary
+funds by simony, which suddenly grew to unheard-of proportions,
+and which extended from the appointment of cardinals
+down to the granting of the smallest favours.<a name="FNanchor_230_230" id="FNanchor_230_230"></a><a href="#Footnote_230_230" class="fnanchor">[230]</a> Sixtus himself
+had not obtained the papal dignity without recourse to the
+same means.</p>
+
+<p>A corruption so universal might sooner or later bring disastrous
+consequences on the Holy See, but they lay in the
+uncertain future. It was otherwise with nepotism, which
+threatened at one time to destroy the Papacy altogether. Of
+all the ‘nipoti,’ Cardinal Pietro Riario enjoyed at first the
+chief and almost exclusive favour of Sixtus. He soon drew
+upon him the eyes of all Italy,<a name="FNanchor_231_231" id="FNanchor_231_231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231_231" class="fnanchor">[231]</a> partly by the fabulous luxury
+of his life, partly through the reports which were current of his
+irreligion and his political plans. He bargained with Duke
+Galeazzo Maria of Milan (1473), that the latter should become
+King of Lombardy, and then aid him with money and troops
+to return to Rome and ascend the papal throne; Sixtus, it
+appears, would have voluntarily yielded it to him.<a name="FNanchor_232_232" id="FNanchor_232_232"></a><a href="#Footnote_232_232" class="fnanchor">[232]</a> This plan,
+which, by making the Papacy hereditary, would have ended
+in the secularization of the papal state, failed through the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a>{107}</span>
+sudden death of Pietro. The second ‘nipote,’ Girolamo Riario,
+remained a layman, and did not seek the Pontificate. From
+this time the ‘nipoti,’ by their endeavours to found principalities
+for themselves, became a new source of confusion to Italy.
+It had already happened that the Popes tried to make good
+their feudal claims on Naples in favour of their relatives;<a name="FNanchor_233_233" id="FNanchor_233_233"></a><a href="#Footnote_233_233" class="fnanchor">[233]</a>
+but since the failure of Calixtus III. such a scheme was no
+longer practicable, and Girolamo Riario, after the attempt to
+conquer Florence (and who knows how many other places) had
+failed, was forced to content himself with founding a state
+within the limits of the papal dominions themselves. This
+was, in so far, justifiable, as Romagna, with its princes and
+civic despots, threatened to shake off the papal supremacy
+altogether, and ran the risk of shortly falling a prey to Sforza
+or the Venetians, when Rome interfered to prevent it. But
+who, at times and in circumstances like these, could guarantee
+the continued obedience of ‘nipoti’ and their descendants, now
+turned into sovereign rulers, to Popes with whom they had no
+further concern? Even in his lifetime the Pope was not
+always sure of his own son or nephew, and the temptation was
+strong to expel the ‘nipote’ of a predecessor and replace him
+by one of his own. The reaction of the whole system on the
+Papacy itself was of the most serious character; all means of
+compulsion, whether temporal or spiritual, were used without
+scruple for the most questionable ends, and to these all the
+other objects of the Apostolic See were made subordinate.
+And when they were attained, at whatever cost of revolutions
+and proscriptions, a dynasty was founded which had no stronger
+interest than the destruction of the Papacy.</p>
+
+<p>At the death of Sixtus, Girolamo was only able to maintain
+himself in his usurped principality of Forli and Imola by the
+utmost exertions of his own, and by the aid of the House of
+Sforza. He was murdered in 1488. In the conclave (1484)
+which followed the death of Sixtus&mdash;that in which Innocent
+VIII. was elected&mdash;an incident occurred which seemed to furnish
+the Papacy with a new external guarantee. Two cardinals,
+who, at the same time, were princes of ruling houses, Giovanni<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a>{108}</span>
+d’Aragona, son of King Ferrante, and Ascanio Sforza, brother
+of the Moor, sold their votes with the most shameless effrontery;<a name="FNanchor_234_234" id="FNanchor_234_234"></a><a href="#Footnote_234_234" class="fnanchor">[234]</a>
+so that, at any rate, the ruling houses of Naples and
+Milan became interested, by their participation in the booty, in
+the continuance of the papal system. Once again, in the following
+Conclave, when all the cardinals but five sold themselves,
+Ascanio received enormous sums in bribes, not without
+cherishing the hope that at the next election he would himself
+be the favoured candidate.<a name="FNanchor_235_235" id="FNanchor_235_235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235_235" class="fnanchor">[235]</a></p>
+
+<p>Lorenzo the Magnificent, on his part, was anxious that the
+House of Medici should not be sent away with empty hands. He
+married his daughter Maddalena to the son of the new Pope&mdash;the
+first who publicly acknowledged his children&mdash;Franceschetto
+Cybò, and expected not only favours of all kinds for his own
+son, Cardinal Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., but also the rapid
+promotion of his son-in-law.<a name="FNanchor_236_236" id="FNanchor_236_236"></a><a href="#Footnote_236_236" class="fnanchor">[236]</a> But with respect to the latter,
+he demanded impossibilities. Under Innocent VIII. there was
+no opportunity for the audacious nepotism by which states had
+been founded, since Franceschetto himself was a poor creature
+who, like his father the Pope, sought power only for the lowest
+purpose of all&mdash;the acquisition and accumulation of money.<a name="FNanchor_237_237" id="FNanchor_237_237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237_237" class="fnanchor">[237]</a>
+The manner, however, in which father and son practised this
+occupation must have led sooner or later to a final catastrophe&mdash;the
+dissolution of the state. If Sixtus had filled his treasury
+by the rule of spiritual dignities and favours, Innocent and
+his son, for their part, established an office for the sale of secular
+favours, in which pardons for murder and manslaughter
+were sold for large sums of money. Out of every fine 150<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a>{109}</span>
+ducats were paid into the papal exchequer, and what was over
+to Franceschetto. Rome, during the latter part of this pontificate,
+swarmed with licensed and unlicensed assassins; the
+factions, which Sixtus had begun to put down, were again as
+active as ever; the Pope, well guarded in the Vatican, was
+satisfied with now and then laying a trap, in which a wealthy
+misdoer was occasionally caught. For Franceschetto the chief
+point was to know by what means, when the Pope died, he
+could escape with well-filled coffers. He betrayed himself at
+last, on the occasion of a false report (1490) of his father’s
+death; he endeavoured to carry off all the money in the papal
+treasury, and when this proved impossible, insisted that, at all
+events, the Turkish prince, Djem, should go with him, and
+serve as a living capital, to be advantageously disposed of, perhaps
+to Ferrante of Naples.<a name="FNanchor_238_238" id="FNanchor_238_238"></a><a href="#Footnote_238_238" class="fnanchor">[238]</a> It is hard to estimate the political
+possibilities of remote periods, but we cannot help asking ourselves
+the question, if Rome could have survived two or three
+pontificates of this kind. Even with reference to the believing
+countries of Europe, it was imprudent to let matters
+go so far that not only travellers and pilgrims, but a whole
+embassy of Maximilian, King of the Romans, were stripped to
+their shirts in the neighbourhood of Rome, and that envoys
+had constantly to turn back without setting foot within the
+city.</p>
+
+<p>Such a condition of things was incompatible with the conception
+of power and its pleasures which inspired the gifted
+Alexander VI. (1492-1503), and the first event that happened
+was the restoration, at least provisionally, of public order, and
+the punctual payment of every salary.</p>
+
+<p>Strictly speaking, as we are now discussing phases of Italian
+civilization, this pontificate might be passed over, since the
+Borgias are no more Italian than the House of Naples. Alexander
+spoke Spanish in public with Cæsar; Lucretia, at her
+entrance to Ferrara, where she wore a Spanish costume, was
+sung to by Spanish buffoons; their confidential servants consisted
+of Spaniards, as did also the most ill-famed company of
+the troops of Cæsar in the war of 1500; and even his hangman,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a>{110}</span>
+Don Micheletto, and his poisoner, Sebastian Pinzon,<a name="FNanchor_239_239" id="FNanchor_239_239"></a><a href="#Footnote_239_239" class="fnanchor">[239]</a> seem
+to have been of the same nation. Among his other achievements,
+Cæsar, in true Spanish fashion, killed, according to the
+rules of the craft, six wild bulls in an enclosed court. But the
+Roman corruption, which seemed to culminate in this family,
+was already far advanced when they came to the city.</p>
+
+<p>What they were and what they did has been often and fully
+described.<a name="FNanchor_240_240" id="FNanchor_240_240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240_240" class="fnanchor">[240]</a> Their immediate purpose, which, in fact, they
+attained, was the complete subjugation of the pontifical state.
+All the petty despots,<a name="FNanchor_241_241" id="FNanchor_241_241"></a><a href="#Footnote_241_241" class="fnanchor">[241]</a> who were mostly more or less refractory
+vassals of the Church, were expelled or destroyed; and in Rome
+itself the two great factions were annihilated, the so-called
+Guelph Orsini as well as the so-called Ghibelline Colonna. But
+the means employed were of so frightful a character, that they
+must certainly have ended in the ruin of the Papacy, had not
+the contemporaneous death of both father and son by poison
+suddenly intervened to alter the whole aspect of the situation.
+The moral indignation of Christendom was certainly no great
+source of danger to Alexander; at home he was strong enough
+to extort terror and obedience; foreign rulers were won over to
+his side, and Louis XII. even aided him to the utmost of his
+power. The mass of the people throughout Europe had hardly
+a conception of what was passing in Central Italy. The only
+moment which was really fraught with danger&mdash;when Charles
+VIII. was in Italy&mdash;went by with unexpected fortune, and even
+then it was not the Papacy as such that was in peril, but Alexander,
+who risked being supplanted by a more respectable
+Pope.<a name="FNanchor_242_242" id="FNanchor_242_242"></a><a href="#Footnote_242_242" class="fnanchor">[242]</a> The great, permanent, and increasing danger for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a>{111}</span>
+Papacy lay in Alexander himself, and, above all, in his son
+Cæsar Borgia.</p>
+
+<p>In the nature of the father, ambition, avarice, and sensuality
+were combined with strong and brilliant qualities. All the
+pleasures of power and luxury he granted himself from the
+first day of his pontificate in the fullest measure. In the choice
+of means to this end he was wholly without scruple; it
+was known at once that he would more than compensate himself
+for the sacrifices which his election had involved,<a name="FNanchor_243_243" id="FNanchor_243_243"></a><a href="#Footnote_243_243" class="fnanchor">[243]</a> and that
+the simony of the seller would far exceed the simony of the
+buyer. It must be remembered that the vice-chancellorship
+and other offices which Alexander had formerly held had
+taught him to know better and turn to more practical account
+the various sources of revenue than any other member of the
+Curia. As early as 1494, a Carmelite, Adam of Genoa, who
+had preached at Rome against simony, was found murdered in
+his bed with twenty wounds. Hardly a single cardinal was
+appointed without the payment of enormous sums of money.</p>
+
+<p>But when the Pope in course of time fell under the influence
+of his son Cæsar Borgia, his violent measures assumed that
+character of devilish wickedness which necessarily reacts upon
+the ends pursued. What was done in the struggle with the
+Roman nobles and with the tyrants of Romagna exceeded in
+faithlessness and barbarity even that measure to which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a>{112}</span>
+Aragonese rulers of Naples had already accustomed the world;
+and the genius for deception was also greater. The manner
+in which Cæsar isolated his father, murdering brother, brother-in-law,
+and other relations or courtiers, whenever their favour
+with the Pope or their position in any other respect became
+inconvenient to him, is literally appalling. Alexander was
+forced to acquiesce in the murder of his best-loved son, the
+Duke of Gandia, since he himself lived in hourly dread of
+Cæsar.<a name="FNanchor_244_244" id="FNanchor_244_244"></a><a href="#Footnote_244_244" class="fnanchor">[244]</a></p>
+
+<p>What were the final aims of the latter? Even in the last
+months of his tyranny, when he had murdered the Condottieri
+at Sinigaglia, and was to all intents and purposes master of the
+ecclesiastical state (1503) those who stood near him gave the
+modest reply, that the Duke merely wished to put down the
+factions and the despots, and all for the good of the Church
+only; that for himself he desired nothing more than the lordship
+of the Romagna, and that he had earned the gratitude of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a>{113}</span>
+all the following Popes by ridding them of the Orsini and
+Colonna.<a name="FNanchor_245_245" id="FNanchor_245_245"></a><a href="#Footnote_245_245" class="fnanchor">[245]</a> But no one will accept this as his ultimate design.
+The Pope Alexander himself, in his discussions with the Venetian
+ambassador, went farther than this, when committing his
+son to the protection of Venice: ‘I will see to it,’ he said,
+‘that one day the Papacy shall belong either to him or to
+you.’<a name="FNanchor_246_246" id="FNanchor_246_246"></a><a href="#Footnote_246_246" class="fnanchor">[246]</a> Cæsar certainly added that no one could become Pope
+without the consent of Venice, and for this end the Venetian
+cardinals had only to keep well together. Whether he referred
+to himself or not we are unable to say; at all events, the
+declaration of his father is sufficient to prove his designs on
+the pontifical throne. We further obtain from Lucrezia Borgia
+a certain amount of indirect evidence, in so far as certain passages
+in the poems of Ercole Strozza may be the echo of expressions
+which she as Duchess of Ferrara may easily have
+permitted herself to use. Here too Cæsar’s hopes of the Papacy
+are chiefly spoken of;<a name="FNanchor_247_247" id="FNanchor_247_247"></a><a href="#Footnote_247_247" class="fnanchor">[247]</a> but now and then a supremacy over
+all Italy is hinted at,<a name="FNanchor_248_248" id="FNanchor_248_248"></a><a href="#Footnote_248_248" class="fnanchor">[248]</a> and finally we are given to understand
+that as temporal ruler Cæsar’s projects were of the greatest,
+and that for their sake he had formerly surrendered his cardinalate.<a name="FNanchor_249_249" id="FNanchor_249_249"></a><a href="#Footnote_249_249" class="fnanchor">[249]</a>
+In fact, there can be no doubt whatever that Cæsar,
+whether chosen Pope or not after the death of Alexander,
+meant to keep possession of the pontifical state at any cost, and
+that this, after all the enormities he had committed, he could<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a>{114}</span>
+not as Pope have succeeded in doing permanently. He, if
+anybody, could have secularised the States of the Church, and
+he would have been forced to do so in order to keep them.<a name="FNanchor_250_250" id="FNanchor_250_250"></a><a href="#Footnote_250_250" class="fnanchor">[250]</a>
+Unless we are much deceived, this is the real reason of the
+secret sympathy with which Macchiavelli treats the great
+criminal; from Cæsar, or from nobody, could it be hoped that
+he ‘would draw the steel from the wound,’ in other words,
+annihilate the Papacy&mdash;the source of all foreign intervention
+and of all the divisions of Italy. The intriguers who thought
+to divine Cæsar’s aims, when holding out to him hopes of the
+kingdom of Tuscany, seem to have been dismissed with contempt.<a name="FNanchor_251_251" id="FNanchor_251_251"></a><a href="#Footnote_251_251" class="fnanchor">[251]</a></p>
+
+<p>But all logical conclusions from his premisses are idle, not
+because of the unaccountable genius which in fact characterized
+him as little as it did the Duke of Friedland, but because the
+means which he employed were not compatible with any large
+and consistent course of action. Perhaps, indeed, in the very
+excess of his wickedness some prospect of salvation for the
+Papacy may have existed even without the accident which put
+an end to his rule.</p>
+
+<p>Even if we assume that the destruction of the petty despots
+in the pontifical state had gained for him nothing but sympathy,
+even if we take as proof of his great projects the army,
+composed of the best soldiers and officers in Italy, with Lionardo
+da Vinci as chief engineer, which followed his fortunes in
+1503, other facts nevertheless wear such a character of unreason
+that our judgment, like that of contemporary observers,
+is wholly at a loss to explain them. One fact of this kind is
+the devastation and maltreatment of the newly won state,
+which Cæsar still intended to keep and to rule over.<a name="FNanchor_252_252" id="FNanchor_252_252"></a><a href="#Footnote_252_252" class="fnanchor">[252]</a> Another<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a>{115}</span>
+is the condition of Rome and of the Curia in the last decades
+of the pontificate. Whether it were that father and son had
+drawn up a formal list of proscribed persons,<a name="FNanchor_253_253" id="FNanchor_253_253"></a><a href="#Footnote_253_253" class="fnanchor">[253]</a> or that the
+murders were resolved upon one by one, in either case the
+Borgias were bent on the secret destruction of all who stood in
+their way or whose inheritance they coveted. Of this money
+and movable goods formed the smallest part; it was a much
+greater source of profit for the Pope that the incomes of the
+clerical dignitaries in question were suspended by their death,
+and that he received the revenues of their offices while vacant,
+and the price of these offices when they were filled by the
+successors of the murdered men. The Venetian ambassador,
+Paolo Capello<a name="FNanchor_254_254" id="FNanchor_254_254"></a><a href="#Footnote_254_254" class="fnanchor">[254]</a> announces in the year 1500: ‘Every night four
+or five murdered men are discovered&mdash;bishops, prelates and
+others&mdash;so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being destroyed
+by the Duke (Cæsar).’ He himself used to wander
+about Rome in the night time with his guards,<a name="FNanchor_255_255" id="FNanchor_255_255"></a><a href="#Footnote_255_255" class="fnanchor">[255]</a> and there is
+every reason to believe that he did so not only because, like
+Tiberius, he shrank from showing his now repulsive features
+by daylight, but also to gratify his insane thirst for blood,
+perhaps even on the persons of those unknown to him.</p>
+
+<p>As early as the year 1499 the despair was so great and so
+general that many of the Papal guards were waylaid and put
+to death.<a name="FNanchor_256_256" id="FNanchor_256_256"></a><a href="#Footnote_256_256" class="fnanchor">[256]</a> But those whom the Borgias could not assail with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a>{116}</span>
+open violence, fell victims to their poison. For the cases in
+which a certain amount of discretion seemed requisite, a white
+powder<a name="FNanchor_257_257" id="FNanchor_257_257"></a><a href="#Footnote_257_257" class="fnanchor">[257]</a> of an agreeable taste was made use of, which did not
+work on the spot, but slowly and gradually, and which could
+be mixed without notice in any dish or goblet. Prince Djem
+had taken some of it in a sweet draught, before Alexander surrendered
+him to Charles VIII. (1495), and at the end of their
+career father and son poisoned themselves with the same
+powder by accidentally tasting a sweetmeat intended for a
+wealthy cardinal, probably Adrian of Corneto.<a name="FNanchor_258_258" id="FNanchor_258_258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258_258" class="fnanchor">[258]</a> The official
+epitomiser of the history of the Popes, Onufrio Panvinio,<a name="FNanchor_259_259" id="FNanchor_259_259"></a><a href="#Footnote_259_259" class="fnanchor">[259]</a> mentions
+three cardinals, Orsini, Ferrerio, and Michiel, whom
+Alexander caused to be poisoned, and hints at a fourth, Giovanni
+Borgia, whom Cæsar took into his own charge&mdash;though
+probably wealthy prelates seldom died in Rome at that time
+without giving rise to suspicions of this sort. Even tranquil
+students who had withdrawn to some provincial town were not
+out of reach of the merciless poison. A secret horror seemed
+to hang about the Pope; storms and thunderbolts, crushing in
+walls and chambers, had in earlier times often visited and
+alarmed him; in the year 1500,<a name="FNanchor_260_260" id="FNanchor_260_260"></a><a href="#Footnote_260_260" class="fnanchor">[260]</a> when these phenomena were
+repeated, they were held to be ‘cosa diabolica.’ The report of
+these events seems at last, through the well-attended jubilee<a name="FNanchor_261_261" id="FNanchor_261_261"></a><a href="#Footnote_261_261" class="fnanchor">[261]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a>{117}</span>
+of 1500, to have been carried far and wide throughout the
+countries of Europe, and the infamous traffic in indulgences
+did what else was needed to draw all eyes upon Rome.<a name="FNanchor_262_262" id="FNanchor_262_262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262_262" class="fnanchor">[262]</a> Besides
+the returning pilgrims, strange white-robed penitents
+came from Italy to the North, among them disguised fugitives
+from the Papal State, who are not likely to have been silent.
+Yet none can calculate how far the scandal and indignation
+of Christendom might have gone, before they became a source
+of pressing danger to Alexander. ‘He would,’ says Panvinio
+elsewhere,<a name="FNanchor_263_263" id="FNanchor_263_263"></a><a href="#Footnote_263_263" class="fnanchor">[263]</a> ‘have put all the other rich cardinals and prelates
+out of the way, to get their property, had he not, in the midst
+of his great plans for his son, been struck down by death.’
+And what might not Cæsar have achieved if, at the moment
+when his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sick-bed!
+What a conclave would that have been, in which, armed
+with all his weapons, he had extorted his election from a college
+whose numbers he had judiciously reduced by poison&mdash;and
+this at a time when there was no French army at hand!
+In pursuing such a hypothesis the imagination loses itself in
+an abyss.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of this followed the conclave in which Pius III. was
+elected, and, after his speedy death, that which chose Julius II.&mdash;both
+elections the fruits of a general reaction.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever may have been the private morals of Julius II.
+in all essential respects he was the saviour of the Papacy. His
+familiarity with the course of events since the pontificate of
+his uncle Sixtus had given him a profound insight into the
+grounds and conditions of the Papal authority. On these he
+founded his own policy, and devoted to it the whole force and
+passion of his unshaken soul. He ascended the steps of St.
+Peter’s chair without simony and amid general applause, and
+with him ceased, at all events, the undisguised traffic in the
+highest offices of the Church. Julius had favourites, and
+among them were some the reverse of worthy, but a special
+fortune put him above the temptation to nepotism. His
+brother, Giovanni della Rovere, was the husband of the heiress<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a>{118}</span>
+of Urbino, sister of the last Montefeltro Guidobaldo, and from
+this marriage was born, in 1491, a son, Francesco Maria della
+Rovere, who was at the same time Papal ‘nipote’ and lawful
+heir to the duchy of Urbino. What Julius elsewhere acquired,
+either on the field of battle or by diplomatic means, he proudly
+bestowed on the Church, not on his family; the ecclesiastical
+territory, which he found in a state of dissolution, he bequeathed
+to his successor completely subdued, and increased
+by Parma and Piacenza. It was not his fault that Ferrara too
+was not added to the dominions of the Church. The 700,000
+ducats, which were stored up in the castle of St. Angelo, were
+to be delivered by the governor to none but the future Pope.
+He made himself heir of the cardinals, and, indeed, of all the
+clergy who died in Rome, and this by the most despotic
+means; but he murdered or poisoned none of them.<a name="FNanchor_264_264" id="FNanchor_264_264"></a><a href="#Footnote_264_264" class="fnanchor">[264]</a> That he
+should himself lead his forces to battle was for him an unavoidable
+necessity, and certainly did him nothing but good at
+a time when a man in Italy was forced to be either hammer
+or anvil, and when personality was a greater power than the
+most indisputable right. If, despite all his high-sounding
+‘Away with the barbarians!’ he nevertheless contributed
+more than any man to the firm settlement of the Spaniards in
+Italy, he may have thought it a matter of indifference to the
+Papacy, or even, as things stood, a relative advantage. And
+to whom, sooner than to Spain, could the Church look for a
+sincere and lasting respect,<a name="FNanchor_265_265" id="FNanchor_265_265"></a><a href="#Footnote_265_265" class="fnanchor">[265]</a> in an age when the princes of
+Italy cherished none but sacrilegious projects against her? Be
+this as it may, the powerful, original nature, which could
+swallow no anger and conceal no genuine good-will, made on
+the whole the impression most desirable in his situation&mdash;that
+of the ‘Pontefice terribile.’ He could even, with a comparatively
+clear conscience, venture to summon a council to Rome,
+and so bid defiance to that outcry for a council which was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a>{119}</span>
+raised by the opposition all over Europe. A ruler of this stamp
+needed some great outward symbol of his conceptions; Julius
+found it in the reconstruction of St. Peter’s. The plan of it,
+as Bramante wished to have it, is perhaps the grandest expression
+of power in unity which can be imagined. In other
+arts besides architecture the face and the memory of the Pope
+live on in their most ideal form, and it is not without significance
+that even the Latin poetry of those days gives proof of
+a wholly different enthusiasm for Julius than that shown for
+his predecessors. The entrance into Bologna, at the end of
+the ‘Iter Julii Secundi,’ by the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto,
+has a splendour of its own, and Giovan Antonio Flaminio,<a name="FNanchor_266_266" id="FNanchor_266_266"></a><a href="#Footnote_266_266" class="fnanchor">[266]</a> in
+one of the finest elegies, appealed to the patriot in the Pope to
+grant his protection to Italy.</p>
+
+<p>In a constitution of his Lateran Council, Julius had solemnly
+denounced the simony of the Papal elections.<a name="FNanchor_267_267" id="FNanchor_267_267"></a><a href="#Footnote_267_267" class="fnanchor">[267]</a> After his death
+in 1513, the money-loving cardinals tried to evade the prohibition
+by proposing that the endowments and offices hitherto
+held by the chosen candidate should be equally divided among
+themselves, in which case they would have elected the best-endowed
+cardinal, the incompetent Rafael Riario.<a name="FNanchor_268_268" id="FNanchor_268_268"></a><a href="#Footnote_268_268" class="fnanchor">[268]</a> But a reaction,
+chiefly arising from the younger members of the Sacred
+College, who, above all things, desired a liberal Pope, rendered
+the miserable combination futile; Giovanni Medici was elected&mdash;the
+famous Leo X.</p>
+
+<p>We shall often meet with him in treating of the noonday of
+the Renaissance; here we wish only to point out that under
+him the Papacy was again exposed to great inward and out<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a>{120}</span>ward
+dangers. Among these we do not reckon the conspiracy
+of the Cardinals Petrucci, De Saulis, Riario, and Corneto (1517)
+which at most could have occasioned a change of persons, and
+to which Leo found the true antidote in the unheard-of creation
+of thirty-nine new cardinals, a measure which had the additional
+advantage of rewarding, in some cases at least, real
+merit.<a name="FNanchor_269_269" id="FNanchor_269_269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269_269" class="fnanchor">[269]</a></p>
+
+<p>But some of the paths which Leo allowed himself to tread
+during the first two years of his office were perilous to the last
+degree. He seriously endeavoured to secure, by negotiation,
+the kingdom of Naples for his brother Giuliano, and for his
+nephew Lorenzo a powerful North Italian state, to comprise
+Milan, Tuscany, Urbino, and Ferrara.<a name="FNanchor_270_270" id="FNanchor_270_270"></a><a href="#Footnote_270_270" class="fnanchor">[270]</a> It is clear that the
+Pontifical State, thus hemmed in on all sides, would have become
+a mere Medicean appanage, and that, in fact, there would
+have been no further need to secularise it.</p>
+
+<p>The plan found an insuperable obstacle in the political conditions
+of the time. Giuliano died early. To provide for
+Lorenzo, Leo undertook to expel the Duke Francesco Maria
+della Rovere from Urbino, but reaped from the war nothing
+but hatred and poverty, and was forced, when in 1519 Lorenzo
+followed his uncle to the grave, to hand over the hardly-won
+conquests to the Church.<a name="FNanchor_271_271" id="FNanchor_271_271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271_271" class="fnanchor">[271]</a> He did on compulsion and without
+credit what, if it had been done voluntarily, would have been
+to his lasting honour. What, partly alone, and partly in
+alternate negotiations with Francis I. and Charles V., he
+attempted against Alfonso of Ferrara, and actually achieved
+against a few petty despots and Condottieri, was assuredly not
+of a kind to raise his reputation. And this was at a time
+when the monarchs of the West were yearly growing more
+and more accustomed to political gambling on a colossal scale,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a>{121}</span>
+of which the stakes were this or that province of Italy.<a name="FNanchor_272_272" id="FNanchor_272_272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272_272" class="fnanchor">[272]</a> Who
+could guarantee that, since the last decades had seen so great
+an increase of their power at home, their ambition could stop
+short of the States of the Church? Leo himself witnessed the
+prelude of what was fulfilled in the year 1527; a few bands of
+Spanish infantry appeared&mdash;of their own accord, it seems&mdash;at
+the end of 1520, on the borders of the Pontifical territory, with
+a view of laying the Pope under contribution,<a name="FNanchor_273_273" id="FNanchor_273_273"></a><a href="#Footnote_273_273" class="fnanchor">[273]</a> but were
+driven back by the Papal forces. The public feeling, too,
+against the corruptions of the hierarchy had of late years been
+drawing rapidly to a head, and men with an eye for the future,
+like the younger Pico della Mirandola, called urgently for reform.<a name="FNanchor_274_274" id="FNanchor_274_274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274_274" class="fnanchor">[274]</a>
+Meantime Luther had already appeared upon the
+scene.</p>
+
+<p>Under Adrian VI. (1522-1523), the few and timid improvements,
+carried out in the face of the great German Reformation,
+came too late. He could do little more than proclaim his
+horror of the course which things had taken hitherto, of
+simony, nepotism, prodigality, brigandage, and profligacy.
+The danger from the side of the Lutherans was by no means
+the greatest; an acute observer from Venice, Girolamo Negro,
+uttered his fears that a speedy and terrible disaster would
+befall the city of Rome itself.<a name="FNanchor_275_275" id="FNanchor_275_275"></a><a href="#Footnote_275_275" class="fnanchor">[275]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a>{122}</span></p>
+
+<p>Under Clement VII. the whole horizon of Rome was filled
+with vapours, like that leaden veil which the scirocco draws
+over the Campagna, and which makes the last months of
+summer so deadly. The Pope was no less detested at home
+than abroad. Thoughtful people were filled with anxiety,<a name="FNanchor_276_276" id="FNanchor_276_276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276_276" class="fnanchor">[276]</a>
+hermits appeared upon the streets and squares of Rome, foretelling
+the fate of Italy and of the world, and calling the Pope
+by the name of Antichrist;<a name="FNanchor_277_277" id="FNanchor_277_277"></a><a href="#Footnote_277_277" class="fnanchor">[277]</a> the faction of the Colonna raised
+its head defiantly; the indomitable Cardinal Pompeo Colonna,
+whose mere existence<a name="FNanchor_278_278" id="FNanchor_278_278"></a><a href="#Footnote_278_278" class="fnanchor">[278]</a> was a permanent menace to the Papacy,
+ventured to surprise the city in 1526, hoping with the help of
+Charles V., to become Pope then and there, as soon as Clement
+was killed or captured. It was no piece of good fortune for
+Rome that the latter was able to escape to the Castle of St.
+Angelo, and the fate for which himself was reserved may well
+be called worse than death.</p>
+
+<p>By a series of those falsehoods, which only the powerful can
+venture on, but which bring ruin upon the weak, Clement
+brought about the advance of the Germano-Spanish army
+under Bourbon and Frundsberg (1527). It is certain<a name="FNanchor_279_279" id="FNanchor_279_279"></a><a href="#Footnote_279_279" class="fnanchor">[279]</a> that the
+Cabinet of Charles V. intended to inflict on him a severe castigation,
+and that it could not calculate beforehand how far the
+zeal of its unpaid hordes would carry them. It would have
+been vain to attempt to enlist men in Germany without paying
+any bounty, if it had not been well known that Rome was
+the object of the expedition. It may be that the written
+orders to Bourbon will be found some day or other, and it is
+not improbable that they will prove to be worded mildly.
+But historical criticism will not allow itself to be led astray.
+The Catholic King and Emperor owed it to his luck and
+nothing else, that Pope and cardinals were not murdered by
+his troops. Had this happened, no sophistry in the world
+could clear him of his share in the guilt. The massacre of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a>{123}</span>
+countless people of less consequence, the plunder of the rest,
+and all the horrors of torture and traffic in human life, show
+clearly enough what was possible in the ‘Sacco di Roma.’</p>
+
+<p>Charles seems to have wished to bring the Pope, who had
+fled a second time to the Castle of St. Angelo, to Naples, after
+extorting from him vast sums of money, and Clement’s flight
+to Orvieto must have happened without any connivance on the
+part of Spain.<a name="FNanchor_280_280" id="FNanchor_280_280"></a><a href="#Footnote_280_280" class="fnanchor">[280]</a> Whether the Emperor ever thought seriously
+of the secularisation of the States of the Church,<a name="FNanchor_281_281" id="FNanchor_281_281"></a><a href="#Footnote_281_281" class="fnanchor">[281]</a> for which
+everybody was quite prepared, and whether he was really
+dissuaded from it by the representations of Henry VIII. of
+England, will probably never be made clear.</p>
+
+<p>But if such projects really existed, they cannot have lasted
+long: from the devastated city arose a new spirit of reform
+both in Church and State. It made itself felt in a moment.
+Cardinal Sadoleto, one witness of many, thus writes: ‘If
+through our suffering a satisfaction is made to the wrath and
+justice of God, if these fearful punishments again open the
+way to better laws and morals, then is our misfortune perhaps
+not of the greatest.... What belongs to God He will
+take care of; before us lies a life of reformation, which no
+violence can take from us. Let us so rule our deeds and
+thoughts as to seek in God only the true glory of the priesthood
+and our own true greatness and power.’<a name="FNanchor_282_282" id="FNanchor_282_282"></a><a href="#Footnote_282_282" class="fnanchor">[282]</a></p>
+
+<p>In point of fact, this critical year, 1527, so far bore fruit,
+that the voices of serious men could again make themselves
+heard. Rome had suffered too much to return, even under a
+Paul III., to the gay corruption of Leo X.</p>
+
+<p>The Papacy, too, when its sufferings became so great, began
+to excite a sympathy half religious and half political. The
+kings could not tolerate that one of their number should
+arrogate to himself the rights of Papal gaoler, and concluded
+(August 18, 1527) the Treaty of Amiens, one of the objects of
+which was the deliverance of Clement. They thus, at all<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a>{124}</span>
+events, turned to their own account the unpopularity which
+the deeds of the Imperial troops had excited. At the same
+time the Emperor became seriously embarrassed, even in Spain,
+where the prelates and grandees never saw him without
+making the most urgent remonstrances. When a general
+deputation of the clergy and laity, all clothed in mourning,
+was projected, Charles, fearing that troubles might arise out of
+it, like those of the insurrection quelled a few years before,
+forbad the scheme.<a name="FNanchor_283_283" id="FNanchor_283_283"></a><a href="#Footnote_283_283" class="fnanchor">[283]</a> Not only did he not dare to prolong the
+maltreatment of the Pope, but he was absolutely compelled,
+even apart from all considerations of foreign politics, to be
+reconciled with the Papacy which he had so grievously
+wounded. For the temper of the German people, which
+certainly pointed to a different course, seemed to him, like
+German affairs generally, to afford no foundation for a policy.
+It is possible, too, as a Venetian maintains,<a name="FNanchor_284_284" id="FNanchor_284_284"></a><a href="#Footnote_284_284" class="fnanchor">[284]</a> that the memory
+of the sack of Rome lay heavy on his conscience, and tended
+to hasten that expiation which was sealed by the permanent
+subjection of the Florentines to the Medicean family of which
+the Pope was a member. The ‘nipote’ and new Duke, Alessandro
+Medici, was married to the natural daughter of the
+Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>In the following years the plan of a Council enabled Charles
+to keep the Papacy in all essential points under his control,
+and at one and the same time to protect and to oppress it.
+The greatest danger of all&mdash;secularisation&mdash;the danger which
+came from within, from the Popes themselves and their
+‘nipoti,’ was adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation.
+Just as this alone had made the expedition against
+Rome (1527) possible and successful, so did it compel the
+Papacy to become once more the expression of a world-wide
+spiritual power, to raise itself from the soulless debasement in
+which it lay, and to place itself at the head of all the enemies
+of this reformation. The institution thus developed during the
+latter years of Clement VII., and under Paul III., Paul IV.,
+and their successors, in the face of the defection of half<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a>{125}</span>
+Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which avoided all
+the great and dangerous scandals of former times, particularly
+nepotism, with its attempts at territorial aggrandisement,<a name="FNanchor_285_285" id="FNanchor_285_285"></a><a href="#Footnote_285_285" class="fnanchor">[285]</a> and
+which, in alliance with the Catholic princes, and impelled by
+a new-born spiritual force, found its chief work in the recovery
+of what had been lost. It only existed and is only intelligible
+in opposition to the seceders. In this sense it can be said with
+perfect truth that, the moral salvation of the Papacy is due to
+its mortal enemies. And now its political position, too, though
+certainly under the permanent tutelage of Spain, became impregnable;
+almost without effort it inherited, on the extinction
+of its vassals, the legitimate line of Este and the house of Della
+Rovere, the duchies of Ferrara and Urbino. But without the
+Reformation&mdash;if, indeed, it is possible to think it away&mdash;the
+whole ecclesiastical State would long ago have passed into
+secular hands.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>In conclusion, let us briefly consider the effect of these
+political circumstances on the spirit of the nation at large.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that the general political uncertainty in Italy
+during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was of a kind to
+excite in the better spirits of the time a patriotic disgust and
+opposition. Dante and Petrarch,<a name="FNanchor_286_286" id="FNanchor_286_286"></a><a href="#Footnote_286_286" class="fnanchor">[286]</a> in their day, proclaimed
+loudly a common Italy, the object of the highest efforts of all
+her children. It may be objected that this was only the
+enthusiasm of a few highly-instructed men, in which the mass
+of the people had no share; but it can hardly have been otherwise
+even in Germany, although in name at least that country
+was united, and recognised in the Emperor one supreme head.
+The first patriotic utterances of German Literature, if we
+except some verses of the ‘Minnesänger,’ belong to the huma<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a>{126}</span>nists
+of the time of Maximilian I.<a name="FNanchor_287_287" id="FNanchor_287_287"></a><a href="#Footnote_287_287" class="fnanchor">[287]</a> and after, and read like an
+echo of Italian declamations, or like a reply to Italian criticism
+on the intellectual immaturity of Germany. And yet, as a
+matter of fact, Germany had been long a nation in a truer
+sense than Italy ever was since the Roman days. France
+owes the consciousness of its national unity mainly to its conflicts
+with the English, and Spain has never permanently
+succeeded in absorbing Portugal, closely related as the two
+countries are. For Italy, the existence of the ecclesiastical
+State, and the conditions under which alone it could continue,
+were a permanent obstacle to national unity, an obstacle
+whose removal seemed hopeless. When, therefore, in the
+political intercourse of the fifteenth century, the common
+fatherland is sometimes emphatically named, it is done in
+most cases to annoy some other Italian State.<a name="FNanchor_288_288" id="FNanchor_288_288"></a><a href="#Footnote_288_288" class="fnanchor">[288]</a> The first decades
+of the sixteenth century, the years when the Renaissance
+attained its fullest bloom, were not favourable to a revival of
+patriotism; the enjoyment of intellectual and artistic pleasures,
+the comforts and elegancies of life, and the supreme interests
+of self-development, destroyed or hampered the love of country.
+But those deeply serious and sorrowful appeals to national
+sentiment were not heard again till later, when the time for
+unity had gone by, when the country was inundated with
+Frenchmen and Spaniards, and when a German army had
+conquered Rome. The sense of local patriotism may be said
+in some measure to have taken the place of this feeling,
+though it was but a poor equivalent for it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a>{127}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_II" id="PART_II"></a><i>PART II.</i><br /><br />
+<small>THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL.</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a>{128}</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a>{129}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-2" id="CHAPTER_I-2"></a>CHAPTER I.<br /><br />
+<small>THE ITALIAN STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">I<small>N</small> the character of these states, whether republics or despotisms,
+lies, not the only, but the chief reason for the early
+development of the Italian. To this it is due that he was the
+first-born among the sons of modern Europe.</p>
+
+<p>In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness&mdash;that
+which was turned within as that which was turned without&mdash;lay
+dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil
+was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through
+which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues.
+Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people,
+party, family, or corporation&mdash;only through some general category.
+In Italy this veil first melted into air; an <i>objective</i>
+treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things
+of this world became possible. The <i>subjective</i> side at the same
+time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became
+a spiritual <i>individual</i>,<a name="FNanchor_289_289" id="FNanchor_289_289"></a><a href="#Footnote_289_289" class="fnanchor">[289]</a> and recognised himself as such. In the
+same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the
+barbarian, and the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a
+time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members
+of a race. It will not be difficult to show that this result was
+owing above all to the political circumstances of Italy.</p>
+
+<p>In far earlier times we can here and there detect a development
+of free personality which in Northern Europe either did
+not occur at all, or could not display itself in the same manner.
+The band of audacious wrongdoers in the sixteenth century
+described to us by Luidprand, some of the contemporaries of
+Gregory VII., and a few of the opponents of the first Hohenstaufen,
+show us characters of this kind. But at the close of
+the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality;
+the charm laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a>{130}</span>
+thousand figures meet us each in its own special shape and
+dress. Dante’s great poem would have been impossible in any
+other country of Europe, if only for the reason that they all still
+lay under the spell of race. For Italy the august poet, through
+the wealth of individuality which he set forth, was the most national
+herald of his time. But this unfolding of the treasures of
+human nature in literature and art&mdash;this many-sided representation
+and criticism&mdash;will be discussed in separate chapters; here
+we have to deal only with the psychological fact itself. This
+fact appears in the most decisive and unmistakeable form. The
+Italians of the fourteenth century knew little of false modesty
+or of hypocrisy in any shape; not one of them was afraid of
+singularity, of being and seeming<a name="FNanchor_290_290" id="FNanchor_290_290"></a><a href="#Footnote_290_290" class="fnanchor">[290]</a> unlike his neighbours.<a name="FNanchor_291_291" id="FNanchor_291_291"></a><a href="#Footnote_291_291" class="fnanchor">[291]</a></p>
+
+<p>Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the highest
+degree the individuality not only of the tyrant or Condottiere
+himself,<a name="FNanchor_292_292" id="FNanchor_292_292"></a><a href="#Footnote_292_292" class="fnanchor">[292]</a> but also of the men whom he protected or used as his
+tools&mdash;the secretary, minister, poet, and companion. These
+people were forced to know all the inward resources of their
+own nature, passing or permanent; and their enjoyment of
+life was enhanced and concentrated by the desire to obtain the
+greatest satisfaction from a possibly very brief period of power
+and influence.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a>{131}</span></p>
+
+<p>But even the subjects whom they ruled over were not free
+from the same impulse. Leaving out of account those who
+wasted their lives in secret opposition and conspiracies, we
+speak of the majority who were content with a strictly private
+station, like most of the urban population of the Byzantine
+empire and the Mohammedan states. No doubt it was often
+hard for the subjects of a Visconti to maintain the dignity of
+their persons and families, and multitudes must have lost in
+moral character through the servitude they lived under. But
+this was not the case with regard to individuality; for political
+impotence does not hinder the different tendencies and manifestations
+of private life from thriving in the fullest vigour
+and variety. Wealth and culture, so far as display and rivalry
+were not forbidden to them, a municipal freedom which did
+not cease to be considerable, and a Church which, unlike that
+of the Byzantine or of the Mohammedan world, was not identical
+with the State&mdash;all these conditions undoubtedly favoured
+the growth of individual thought, for which the necessary
+leisure was furnished by the cessation of party conflicts. The
+private man, indifferent to politics, and busied partly with
+serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a <i>dilettante</i>, seems
+to have been first fully formed in these despotisms of the
+fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course,
+be required on such a point. The novelists, from whom we
+might expect information, describe to us oddities in plenty,
+but only from one point of view and in so far as the needs of
+the story demand. Their scene, too, lies chiefly in the republican
+cities.</p>
+
+<p>In the latter, circumstances were also, but in another way,
+favourable to the growth of individual character. The more
+frequently the governing party was changed, the more the
+individual was led to make the utmost of the exercise and
+enjoyment of power. The statesmen and popular leaders,
+especially in Florentine history,<a name="FNanchor_293_293" id="FNanchor_293_293"></a><a href="#Footnote_293_293" class="fnanchor">[293]</a> acquired so marked a personal
+character, that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a
+parallel to them in contemporary history, hardly even in Jacob
+von Arteveldt.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a>{132}</span></p>
+
+<p>The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand,
+often came into a position like that of the subjects of the despotic
+States, with the difference that the freedom or power
+already enjoyed, and in some cases the hope of recovering
+them, gave a higher energy to their individuality. Among
+these men of involuntary leisure we find, for instance, an
+Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446), whose work on domestic economy<a name="FNanchor_294_294" id="FNanchor_294_294"></a><a href="#Footnote_294_294" class="fnanchor">[294]</a>
+is the first complete programme of a developed private life.
+His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the
+dangers and thanklessness of public life<a name="FNanchor_295_295" id="FNanchor_295_295"></a><a href="#Footnote_295_295" class="fnanchor">[295]</a> is in its way a true
+monument of the age.</p>
+
+<p>Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either
+wears the exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him.
+‘In all our more populous cities,’ says Giovanni Pontano,<a name="FNanchor_296_296" id="FNanchor_296_296"></a><a href="#Footnote_296_296" class="fnanchor">[296]</a> ‘we
+see a crowd of people who have left their homes of their own
+free-will; but a man takes his virtues with him wherever he
+goes.’ And, in fact, they were by no means only men who
+had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native place
+voluntarily, because they found its political or economical condition
+intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and
+the Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted
+circles is in itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as
+we have already said, finds a new home in the language and
+culture of Italy, but goes beyond even this in the words, ‘My<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a>{133}</span>
+country is the whole world.’<a name="FNanchor_297_297" id="FNanchor_297_297"></a><a href="#Footnote_297_297" class="fnanchor">[297]</a> And when his recall to Florence
+was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote back: ‘Can
+I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars;
+everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing
+ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people.
+Even my bread will not fail me.’<a name="FNanchor_298_298" id="FNanchor_298_298"></a><a href="#Footnote_298_298" class="fnanchor">[298]</a> The artists exult no less
+defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence.
+‘Only he who has learned everything,’ says Ghiberti,<a name="FNanchor_299_299" id="FNanchor_299_299"></a><a href="#Footnote_299_299" class="fnanchor">[299]</a>
+‘is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune and without
+friends, he is yet the citizen of every country, and can fearlessly
+despise the changes of fortune.’ In the same strain an
+exiled humanist writes: ‘Wherever a learned man fixes his
+seat, there is home.<a name="FNanchor_300_300" id="FNanchor_300_300"></a><a href="#Footnote_300_300" class="fnanchor">[300]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a>{134}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-2" id="CHAPTER_II-2"></a>CHAPTER II.<br /><br />
+<small>THE PERFECTING OF THE INDIVIDUAL.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">A<small>N</small> acute and practised eye might be able to trace, step by
+step, the increase in the number of complete men during the
+fifteenth century. Whether they had before them as a conscious
+object the harmonious development of their spiritual
+and material existence, is hard to say; but several of them
+attained it, so far as is consistent with the imperfection of all
+that is earthly. It may be better to renounce the attempt at
+an estimate of the share which fortune, character, and talent
+had in the life of Lorenzo Magnifico. But look at a personality
+like that of Ariosto, especially as shown in his satires. In
+what harmony are there expressed the pride of the man and
+the poet, the irony with which he treats his own enjoyments,
+the most delicate satire, and the deepest goodwill!</p>
+
+<p>When this impulse to the highest individual development<a name="FNanchor_301_301" id="FNanchor_301_301"></a><a href="#Footnote_301_301" class="fnanchor">[301]</a>
+was combined with a powerful and varied nature, which had
+mastered all the elements of the culture of the age, then arose
+the ‘all-sided man’&mdash;‘l’uomo universale’&mdash;who belonged to
+Italy alone. Men there were of encyclopædic knowledge in
+many countries during the Middle Ages, for this knowledge was
+confined within narrow limits; and even in the twelfth century
+there were universal artists, but the problems of architecture
+were comparatively simple and uniform, and in sculpture
+and painting the matter was of more importance than the
+form. But in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, we find
+artists who in every branch created new and perfect works,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a>{135}</span>
+and who also made the greatest impression as men. Others,
+outside the arts they practised, were masters of a vast circle of
+spiritual interests.</p>
+
+<p>Dante, who, even in his lifetime, was called by some a poet,
+by others a philosopher, by others a theologian,<a name="FNanchor_302_302" id="FNanchor_302_302"></a><a href="#Footnote_302_302" class="fnanchor">[302]</a> pours forth
+in all his writings a stream of personal force by which the
+reader, apart from the interest of the subject, feels himself
+carried away. What power of will must the steady, unbroken
+elaboration of the ‘Divine Comedy’ have required! And if
+we look at the matter of the poem, we find that in the whole
+spiritual or physical world there is hardly an important subject
+which the poet has not fathomed, and on which his utterances&mdash;often
+only a few words&mdash;are not the most weighty of his
+time. For the plastic arts he is of the first importance, and
+this for better reasons than the few references to contemporary
+artists&mdash;he soon became himself the source of inspiration.<a name="FNanchor_303_303" id="FNanchor_303_303"></a><a href="#Footnote_303_303" class="fnanchor">[303]</a></p>
+
+<p>The fifteenth century is, above all, that of the many-sided
+men. There is no biography which does not, besides the chief
+work of its hero, speak of other pursuits all passing beyond the
+limits of dilettantism. The Florentine merchant and statesman
+was often learned in both the classical languages; the
+most famous humanists read the ethics and politics of Aristotle
+to him and his sons;<a name="FNanchor_304_304" id="FNanchor_304_304"></a><a href="#Footnote_304_304" class="fnanchor">[304]</a> even the daughters of the house were
+highly educated. It is in these circles that private education
+was first treated seriously. The humanist, on his side, was
+compelled to the most varied attainments, since his philological
+learning was not limited, as it now is, to the theoretical knowledge
+of classical antiquity, but had to serve the practical needs
+of daily life. While studying Pliny,<a name="FNanchor_305_305" id="FNanchor_305_305"></a><a href="#Footnote_305_305" class="fnanchor">[305]</a> he made collections of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a>{136}</span>
+natural history; the geography of the ancients was his guide
+in treating of modern geography, their history was his pattern
+in writing contemporary chronicles, even when composed in
+Italian; he not only translated the comedies of Plautus, but
+acted as manager when they were put on the stage; every
+effective form of ancient literature down to the dialogues of
+Lucian he did his best to imitate; and besides all this, he
+acted as magistrate, secretary, and diplomatist&mdash;not always to
+his own advantage.</p>
+
+<p>But among these many-sided men, some who may truly be
+called all-sided, tower above the rest. Before analysing the
+general phases of life and culture of this period, we may here,
+on the threshold of the fifteenth century, consider for a moment
+the figure of one of these giants&mdash;Leon Battista Alberti
+(b. 1404? d. 1472).<a name="FNanchor_306_306" id="FNanchor_306_306"></a><a href="#Footnote_306_306" class="fnanchor">[306]</a> His biography,<a name="FNanchor_307_307" id="FNanchor_307_307"></a><a href="#Footnote_307_307" class="fnanchor">[307]</a> which is only a fragment,
+speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no mention at
+all of his great significance in the history of architecture. We
+shall now see what he was, apart from these special claims to
+distinction.</p>
+
+<p>In all by which praise is won, Leon Battista was from his
+childhood the first. Of his various gymnastic feats and exercises
+we read with astonishment how, with his feet together,
+he could spring over a man’s head; how, in the cathedral, he
+threw a coin in the air till it was heard to ring against the
+distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled under him. In
+three things he desired to appear faultless to others, in walking,
+in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a
+master, and yet his compositions were admired by professional
+judges. Under the pressure of poverty, he studied both civil
+and canonical law for many years, till exhaustion brought on a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a>{137}</span>
+severe illness. In his twenty-fourth year, finding his memory
+for words weakened, but his sense of facts unimpaired, he set
+to work at physics and mathematics. And all the while he
+acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity, cross-examining
+artists, scholars, and artisans of all descriptions,
+down to the cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of
+their craft. Painting and modelling he practised by the way,
+and especially excelled in admirable likenesses from memory.
+Great admiration was excited by his mysterious ‘camera
+obscura,’<a name="FNanchor_308_308" id="FNanchor_308_308"></a><a href="#Footnote_308_308" class="fnanchor">[308]</a> in which he showed at one time the stars and the
+moon rising over rocky hills, at another wide landscapes with
+mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective, and with
+fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that
+which others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every
+human achievement which followed the laws of beauty for
+something almost divine.<a name="FNanchor_309_309" id="FNanchor_309_309"></a><a href="#Footnote_309_309" class="fnanchor">[309]</a> To all this must be added his
+literary works, first of all those on art, which are landmarks
+and authorities of the first order for the Renaissance of Form,
+especially in architecture; then his Latin prose writings&mdash;novels
+and other works&mdash;of which some have been taken for
+productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous
+dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic
+life<a name="FNanchor_310_310" id="FNanchor_310_310"></a><a href="#Footnote_310_310" class="fnanchor">[310]</a> in four books; various moral, philosophical, and historical
+works; and many speeches and poems, including a funeral oration
+on his dog. Notwithstanding his admiration for the Latin
+language, he wrote in Italian, and encouraged others to do the
+same; himself a disciple of Greek science, he maintained the
+doctrine, that without Christianity the world would wander in a
+labyrinth of error. His serious and witty sayings were thought
+worth collecting, and specimens of them, many columns long,
+are quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew he<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a>{138}</span>
+imparted, as rich natures always do, without the least reserve,
+giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest
+spring of his nature has yet to be spoken of&mdash;the sympathetic
+intensity with which he entered into the whole life around
+him. At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he
+shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he honoured as
+‘a delight of nature,’ and could never look at them enough.
+Perfectly-formed animals won his goodwill as being specially
+favoured by nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the
+sight of a beautiful landscape cured him.<a name="FNanchor_311_311" id="FNanchor_311_311"></a><a href="#Footnote_311_311" class="fnanchor">[311]</a> No wonder that
+those who saw him in this close and mysterious communion
+with the world ascribed to him the gift of prophecy. He was
+said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the family of
+Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the Popes years
+before they happened, and to be able to read into the countenances
+and the hearts of men. It need not be added that an
+iron will pervaded and sustained his whole personality; like
+all the great men of the Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all
+things if they will.’</p>
+
+<p>And Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the
+beginner, as the master to the <i>dilettante</i>. Would only that
+Vasari’s work were here supplemented by a description like
+that of Alberti! The colossal outlines of Lionardo’s nature can
+never be more than dimly and distantly conceived.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a>{139}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-2" id="CHAPTER_III-2"></a>CHAPTER III.<br /><br />
+<small>THE MODERN IDEA OF FAME.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>O</small> this inward development of the individual corresponds a
+new sort of outward distinction&mdash;the modern form of glory.<a name="FNanchor_312_312" id="FNanchor_312_312"></a><a href="#Footnote_312_312" class="fnanchor">[312]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the other countries of Europe the different classes of
+society lived apart, each with its own mediæval caste sense
+of honour. The poetical fame of the Troubadours and Minnesänger
+was peculiar to the knightly order. But in Italy social
+equality had appeared before the time of the tyrannies or the
+democracies. We there find early traces of a general society,
+having, as will be shown more fully later on, a common ground
+in Latin and Italian literature; and such a ground was needed
+for this new element in life to grow in. To this must be
+added that the Roman authors, who were now zealously
+studied, and especially Cicero, the most read and admired of
+all, are filled and saturated with the conception of fame, and
+that their subject itself&mdash;the universal empire of Rome&mdash;stood
+as a permanent ideal before the minds of Italians. From
+henceforth all the aspirations and achievements of the people
+were governed by a moral postulate, which was still unknown
+elsewhere in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Here, again, as in all essential points, the first witness to be
+called is Dante. He strove for the poet’s garland<a name="FNanchor_313_313" id="FNanchor_313_313"></a><a href="#Footnote_313_313" class="fnanchor">[313]</a> with all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a>{140}</span>
+power of his soul. As publicist and man of letters, he laid
+stress on the fact that what he did was new, and that he
+wished not only to be, but to be esteemed the first in his own
+walks.<a name="FNanchor_314_314" id="FNanchor_314_314"></a><a href="#Footnote_314_314" class="fnanchor">[314]</a> But even in his prose writings he touches on the
+inconveniences of fame; he knows how often personal acquaintance
+with famous men is disappointing, and explains
+how this is due partly to the childish fancy of men, partly to
+envy, and partly to the imperfections of the hero himself.<a name="FNanchor_315_315" id="FNanchor_315_315"></a><a href="#Footnote_315_315" class="fnanchor">[315]</a>
+And in his great poem he firmly maintains the emptiness of
+fame, although in a manner which betrays that his heart was
+not set free from the longing for it. In Paradise the sphere of
+Mercury is the seat of such blessed ones<a name="FNanchor_316_316" id="FNanchor_316_316"></a><a href="#Footnote_316_316" class="fnanchor">[316]</a> as on earth strove
+after glory and thereby dimmed ‘the beams of true love.’ It
+is characteristic that the lost souls in hell beg of Dante to keep
+alive for them their memory and fame on earth,<a name="FNanchor_317_317" id="FNanchor_317_317"></a><a href="#Footnote_317_317" class="fnanchor">[317]</a> while those
+in Purgatory only entreat his prayers and those of others for
+their deliverance.<a name="FNanchor_318_318" id="FNanchor_318_318"></a><a href="#Footnote_318_318" class="fnanchor">[318]</a> And in a famous passage,<a name="FNanchor_319_319" id="FNanchor_319_319"></a><a href="#Footnote_319_319" class="fnanchor">[319]</a> the passion for
+fame&mdash;‘lo gran desio dell’eccellenza’&mdash;is reproved for the
+reason that intellectual glory is not absolute, but relative to
+the times, and may be surpassed and eclipsed by greater
+successors.</p>
+
+<p>The new race of poet-scholars which arose soon after Dante
+quickly made themselves masters of this fresh tendency.
+They did so in a double sense, being themselves the most
+acknowledged celebrities of Italy, and at the same time, as
+poets and historians, consciously disposing of the reputation
+of others. An outward symbol of this sort of fame was the
+coronation of the poets, of which we shall speak later on.</p>
+
+<p>A contemporary of Dante, Albertinus Musattus or Mussattus,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a>{141}</span>
+crowned poet at Padua by the bishop and rector, enjoyed a
+fame which fell little short of deification. Every Christmas
+Day the doctors and students of both colleges at the University
+came in solemn procession before his house with trumpets and,
+as it seems, with burning tapers, to salute him<a name="FNanchor_320_320" id="FNanchor_320_320"></a><a href="#Footnote_320_320" class="fnanchor">[320]</a> and bring him
+presents. His reputation lasted till, in 1318, he fell into disgrace
+with the ruling tyrant of the House of Carrara.</p>
+
+<p>This new incense, which once was offered only to saints and
+heroes, was given in clouds to Petrarch, who persuaded himself
+in his later years that it was but a foolish and troublesome
+thing. His letter ‘To Posterity’<a name="FNanchor_321_321" id="FNanchor_321_321"></a><a href="#Footnote_321_321" class="fnanchor">[321]</a> is the confession of an old
+and famous man, who is forced to gratify the public curiosity.
+He admits that he wishes for fame in the times to come, but
+would rather be without it in his own day.<a name="FNanchor_322_322" id="FNanchor_322_322"></a><a href="#Footnote_322_322" class="fnanchor">[322]</a> In his dialogue
+on fortune and misfortune,<a name="FNanchor_323_323" id="FNanchor_323_323"></a><a href="#Footnote_323_323" class="fnanchor">[323]</a> the interlocutor, who maintains the
+futility of glory, has the best of the contest. But, at the same
+time, Petrarch is pleased that the autocrat of Byzantium<a name="FNanchor_324_324" id="FNanchor_324_324"></a><a href="#Footnote_324_324" class="fnanchor">[324]</a>
+knows him as well by his writings as Charles IV.<a name="FNanchor_325_325" id="FNanchor_325_325"></a><a href="#Footnote_325_325" class="fnanchor">[325]</a> knows him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a>{142}</span>
+And in fact, even in his lifetime, his fame extended far beyond
+Italy. And the emotion which he felt was natural when his
+friends, on the occasion of a visit to his native Arezzo (1350),
+took him to the house where he was born, and told him how
+the city had provided that no change should be made in it.<a name="FNanchor_326_326" id="FNanchor_326_326"></a><a href="#Footnote_326_326" class="fnanchor">[326]</a>
+In former times the dwellings of certain great saints were
+preserved and revered in this way, like the cell of St. Thomas
+Aquinas in the Dominican convent at Naples, and the Portiuncula
+of St. Francis near Assisi; and one or two great jurists
+also enjoyed the half-mythical reputation which led to this
+honour. Towards the close of the fourteenth century the
+people at Bagnolo, near Florence, called an old building the
+‘Studio’ of Accursius (b. about 1150), but, nevertheless,
+suffered it to be destroyed.<a name="FNanchor_327_327" id="FNanchor_327_327"></a><a href="#Footnote_327_327" class="fnanchor">[327]</a> It is probable that the great
+incomes and the political influence which some jurists obtained
+as consulting lawyers made a lasting impression on the popular
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>To the cultus of the birthplaces of famous men must be
+added that of their graves,<a name="FNanchor_328_328" id="FNanchor_328_328"></a><a href="#Footnote_328_328" class="fnanchor">[328]</a> and, in the case of Petrarch, of the
+spot where he died. In memory of him Arquà became a
+favourite resort of the Paduans, and was dotted with graceful
+little villas.<a name="FNanchor_329_329" id="FNanchor_329_329"></a><a href="#Footnote_329_329" class="fnanchor">[329]</a> At this time there were no ‘classic spots’ in
+Northern Europe, and pilgrimages were only made to pictures
+and relics. It was a point of honour for the different cities to
+possess the bones of their own and foreign celebrities; and it
+is most remarkable how seriously the Florentines, even in the
+fourteenth century&mdash;long before the building of Santa Croce&mdash;laboured
+to make their cathedral a Pantheon. Accorso, Dante,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a>{143}</span>
+Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the jurist Zanobi della Strada were
+to have had magnificent tombs there erected to them.<a name="FNanchor_330_330" id="FNanchor_330_330"></a><a href="#Footnote_330_330" class="fnanchor">[330]</a> Late in
+the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Magnifico applied in person to
+the Spoletans, asking them to give up the corpse of the painter
+Fra Filippo Lippi for the cathedral, and received the answer
+that they had none too many ornaments to the city, especially
+in the shape of distinguished people, for which reason they
+begged him to spare them; and, in fact, he had to be contented
+with erecting a cenotaph.<a name="FNanchor_331_331" id="FNanchor_331_331"></a><a href="#Footnote_331_331" class="fnanchor">[331]</a> And even Dante, in spite of
+all the applications to which Boccaccio urged the Florentines
+with bitter emphasis,<a name="FNanchor_332_332" id="FNanchor_332_332"></a><a href="#Footnote_332_332" class="fnanchor">[332]</a> remained sleeping tranquilly by the
+side of San Francesco at Ravenna, ‘among ancient tombs of
+emperors and vaults of saints, in more honourable company
+than thou, O Home, couldst offer him.’ It even happened that
+a man once took away unpunished the lights from the altar on
+which the crucifix stood, and set them by the grave, with the
+words, ‘Take them; thou art more worthy of them than He,
+the Crucified One!’<a name="FNanchor_333_333" id="FNanchor_333_333"></a><a href="#Footnote_333_333" class="fnanchor">[333]</a></p>
+
+<p>And now the Italian cities began again to remember their
+ancient citizens and inhabitants. Naples, perhaps, had never
+forgotten its tomb of Virgil, since a kind of mythical halo had
+become attached to the name, and the memory of it had been
+revived by Petrarch and Boccaccio, who both stayed in the
+city.</p>
+
+<p>The Paduans, even in the sixteenth century, firmly believed
+that they possessed not only the genuine bones of their founder
+Antenor, but also those of the historian Livy.<a name="FNanchor_334_334" id="FNanchor_334_334"></a><a href="#Footnote_334_334" class="fnanchor">[334]</a> ‘Sulmona,’
+says Boccaccio,<a name="FNanchor_335_335" id="FNanchor_335_335"></a><a href="#Footnote_335_335" class="fnanchor">[335]</a> ‘bewails that Ovid lies buried far away in
+exile; and Parma rejoices that Cassius sleeps within its walls.’
+The Mantuans coined a medal in 1257 with the bust of Virgil,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a>{144}</span>
+and raised a statue to represent him. In a fit of aristocratic
+insolence,<a name="FNanchor_336_336" id="FNanchor_336_336"></a><a href="#Footnote_336_336" class="fnanchor">[336]</a> the guardian of the young Gonzaga, Carlo Malatesta,
+caused it to be pulled down in 1392, and was afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a>{145}</span>
+forced, when he found the fame of the old poet too strong for
+him, to set it up again. Even then, perhaps, the grotto, a
+couple of miles from the town, where Virgil was said to have
+meditated,<a name="FNanchor_337_337" id="FNanchor_337_337"></a><a href="#Footnote_337_337" class="fnanchor">[337]</a> was shown to strangers, like the ‘Scuola di Virgilio’
+at Naples. Como claimed both the Plinys<a name="FNanchor_338_338" id="FNanchor_338_338"></a><a href="#Footnote_338_338" class="fnanchor">[338]</a> for its own,
+and at the end of the fifteenth century erected statues in their
+honour, sitting under graceful baldachins on the façade of the
+cathedral.</p>
+
+<p>History and the new topography were now careful to leave
+no local celebrity unnoticed. At the same period the northern
+chronicles only here and there, among the list of popes,
+emperors, earthquakes, and comets, put in the remark, that at
+such a time this or that famous man ‘flourished.’ We shall
+elsewhere have to show how, mainly under the influence of
+this idea of fame, an admirable biographical literature was
+developed. We must here limit ourselves to the local patriotism
+of the topographers who recorded the claims of their
+native cities to distinction.</p>
+
+<p>In the Middle Ages, the cities were proud of their saints and
+of the bones and relics in their churches.<a name="FNanchor_339_339" id="FNanchor_339_339"></a><a href="#Footnote_339_339" class="fnanchor">[339]</a> With these the
+panegyrist of Padua in 1440, Michele Savonarola,<a name="FNanchor_340_340" id="FNanchor_340_340"></a><a href="#Footnote_340_340" class="fnanchor">[340]</a> begins his
+list; from them he passes to ‘the famous men who were no
+saints, but who, by their great intellect and force (<i>virtus</i>) deserve
+to be added (<i>adnecti</i>) to the saints’&mdash;just as in classical
+antiquity the distinguished man came close upon the hero.<a name="FNanchor_341_341" id="FNanchor_341_341"></a><a href="#Footnote_341_341" class="fnanchor">[341]</a>
+The further enumeration is most characteristic of the time.
+First comes Antenor, the brother of Priam, who founded Padua
+with a band of Trojan fugitives; King Dardanus, who defeated<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a>{146}</span>
+Attila in the Euganean hills, followed him in pursuit, and
+struck him dead at Rimini with a chess-board; the Emperor
+Henry IV., who built the cathedral; a King Marcus, whose
+head was preserved in Monselice (<i>monte silicis arce</i>); then a
+couple of cardinals and prelates as founders of colleges,
+churches, and so forth; the famous Augustinian theologian,
+Fra Alberto; a string of philosophers beginning with Paolo
+Veneto and the celebrated Pietro of Albano; the jurist Paolo
+Padovano; then Livy and the poets Petrarch, Mussato, Lovato.
+If there is any want of military celebrities in the list, the poet
+consoles himself for it by the abundance of learned men whom
+he has to show, and by the more durable character of intellectual
+glory; while the fame of the soldier is buried with his
+body, or, if it lasts, owes its permanence only to the scholar.<a name="FNanchor_342_342" id="FNanchor_342_342"></a><a href="#Footnote_342_342" class="fnanchor">[342]</a>
+It is nevertheless honourable to the city that foreign warriors
+lie buried here by their own wish, like Pietro de Rossi of Parma,
+Filippo Arcelli of Piacenza, and especially Gattamelata of
+Narni (d. 1642),<a name="FNanchor_343_343" id="FNanchor_343_343"></a><a href="#Footnote_343_343" class="fnanchor">[343]</a> whose brazen equestrian statue, ‘like a Cæsar
+in triumph,’ already stood by the church of the Santo. The
+author then names a crowd of jurists and physicians, among
+the latter two friends of Petrarch, Johannes ab Horologio and
+Jacob de Dondis, nobles ‘who had not only, like so many
+others, received, but deserved, the honour of knighthood.’
+Then follows a list of famous mechanicians, painters, and
+musicians, which is closed by the name of a fencing-master
+Michele Rosso, who, as the most distinguished man in his profession,
+was to be seen painted in many places.</p>
+
+<p>By the side of these local temples of fame, which myth,
+legend, popular admiration, and literary tradition combined to
+create, the poet-scholars built up a great Pantheon of worldwide
+celebrity. They made collections of famous men and
+famous women, often in direct imitation of Cornelius Nepos,
+the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (<i>Mulierum</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a>{147}</span>
+<i>virtutes</i>), Hieronymus (<i>De Viris Illustribus</i>), and others: or they
+wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies,
+as was done by Petrarch in his ‘Trionfo della Fama,’
+and Boccaccio in the ‘Amorosa Visione,’ with hundreds of
+names, of which three-fourths at least belong to antiquity and
+the rest to the Middle Ages.<a name="FNanchor_344_344" id="FNanchor_344_344"></a><a href="#Footnote_344_344" class="fnanchor">[344]</a> By-and-by this new and comparatively
+modern element was treated with greater emphasis;
+the historians began to insert descriptions of character, and
+collections arose of the biographies of distinguished contemporaries,
+like those of Filippo Villani, Vespasiano Fiorentino,
+Bartolommeo Facio, Paolo Cortese,<a name="FNanchor_345_345" id="FNanchor_345_345"></a><a href="#Footnote_345_345" class="fnanchor">[345]</a> and lastly of Paolo Giovio.<a name="FNanchor_346_346" id="FNanchor_346_346"></a><a href="#Footnote_346_346" class="fnanchor">[346]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a>{148}</span></p>
+
+<p>The North of Europe, until Italian influence began to tell
+upon its writers&mdash;for instance, on Trithemius, the first German
+who wrote the lives of famous men&mdash;possessed only either<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a>{149}</span>
+legends of the saints, or descriptions of princes and churchmen
+partaking largely of the character of legends and showing no
+traces of the idea of fame, that is, of distinction won by a ma<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a>{150}</span>n’s
+personal efforts. Poetical glory was still confined to certain
+classes of society, and the names of northern artists are only
+known to us at this period in so far as they were members of
+certain guilds or corporations.</p>
+
+<p>The poet-scholar in Italy had, as we have already said, the
+fullest consciousness that he was the giver of fame and immortality,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a>{151}</span> or, if he chose, of oblivion.<a name="FNanchor_347_347" id="FNanchor_347_347"></a><a href="#Footnote_347_347" class="fnanchor">[347]</a> Petrarch, notwithstanding
+all the idealism of his love to Laura, gives utterance
+to the feeling, that his sonnets confer immortality on his beloved
+as well as on himself.<a name="FNanchor_348_348" id="FNanchor_348_348"></a><a href="#Footnote_348_348" class="fnanchor">[348]</a> Boccaccio complains of a fair
+one to whom he had done homage, and who remained hard-hearted
+in order that he might go on praising her and making
+her famous, and he gives her a hint that he will try the effect
+of a little blame.<a name="FNanchor_349_349" id="FNanchor_349_349"></a><a href="#Footnote_349_349" class="fnanchor">[349]</a> Sannazaro, in two magnificent sonnets,
+threatens Alfonso of Naples with eternal obscurity on account
+of his cowardly flight before Charles VIII.<a name="FNanchor_350_350" id="FNanchor_350_350"></a><a href="#Footnote_350_350" class="fnanchor">[350]</a> Angelo Poliziano
+seriously exhorts (1491) King John of Portugal<a name="FNanchor_351_351" id="FNanchor_351_351"></a><a href="#Footnote_351_351" class="fnanchor">[351]</a> to think betimes
+of his immortality in reference to the new discoveries in
+Africa, and to send him materials to Florence, there to be put
+into shape (<i>operosius excolenda</i>), otherwise it would befall him
+as it had befallen all the others whose deeds, unsupported by
+the help of the learned, ‘lie hidden in the vast heap of human
+frailty.’ The king, or his humanistic chancellor, agreed to
+this, and promised that at least the Portuguese chronicles of
+African affairs should be translated into Italian, and sent to
+Florence to be done into Latin. Whether the promise was
+kept is not known. These pretensions are by no means so
+groundless as they may appear at first sight; for the form in
+which events, even the greatest, are told to the living and to
+posterity is anything but a matter of indifference. The Italian
+humanists, with their mode of exposition and their Latin style,
+had long the complete control of the reading world of Europe,
+and till last century the Italian poets were more widely known
+and studied than those of any other nation. The baptismal
+name of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci was given, on account
+of his book of travels&mdash;certainly at the proposal of its
+German translator into Latin, Martin Waldseemüller (Hylacomylus)<a name="FNanchor_352_352" id="FNanchor_352_352"></a><a href="#Footnote_352_352" class="fnanchor">[352]</a>&mdash;to
+a new quarter of the globe, and if Paolo Giovio,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_152" id="page_152"></a>{152}</span>
+with all his superficiality and graceful caprice, promised himself
+immortality,<a name="FNanchor_353_353" id="FNanchor_353_353"></a><a href="#Footnote_353_353" class="fnanchor">[353]</a> his expectation has not altogether been
+disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>Amid all these preparations outwardly to win and secure
+fame, the curtain is now and then drawn aside, and we see
+with frightful evidence a boundless ambition and thirst after
+greatness, independent of all means and consequences. Thus,
+in the preface to Macchiavelli’s Florentine history, in which
+he blames his predecessors Lionardo Aretino and Poggio for
+their too considerate reticence with regard to the political
+parties in the city: ‘They erred greatly and showed that they
+understood little the ambition of men and the desire to perpetuate
+a name. How many who could distinguish themselves
+by nothing praiseworthy, strove to do so by infamous deeds!
+Those writers did not consider that actions which are great in
+themselves, as is the case with the actions of rulers and of
+states, always seem to bring more glory than blame, of whatever
+kind they are and whatever the result of them may be.’<a name="FNanchor_354_354" id="FNanchor_354_354"></a><a href="#Footnote_354_354" class="fnanchor">[354]</a>
+In more than one remarkable and dreadful undertaking the
+motive assigned by serious writers is the burning desire to
+achieve something great and memorable. This motive is not
+a mere extreme case of ordinary vanity, but something demonic,
+involving a surrender of the will, the use of any means,
+however atrocious, and even an indifference to success itself.
+In this sense, for example, Macchiavelli conceives the character
+of Stefano Porcaro (<a href="#page_104">p. 104</a>);<a name="FNanchor_355_355" id="FNanchor_355_355"></a><a href="#Footnote_355_355" class="fnanchor">[355]</a> of the murderers of Galeazzo
+Maria Sforza (<a href="#page_057">p. 57</a>), the documents tell us about the same;
+and the assassination of Duke Alessandro of Florence (1537)
+is ascribed by Varchi himself to the thirst for fame which
+tormented the murderer Lorenzino Medici (<a href="#page_060">p. 60</a>). Still more
+stress is laid on this motive by Paolo Giovio.<a name="FNanchor_356_356" id="FNanchor_356_356"></a><a href="#Footnote_356_356" class="fnanchor">[356]</a> Lorenzino,
+according to him, pilloried by a pamphlet of Molza on account<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a>{153}</span>
+of the mutilation of some ancient statues at Rome, broods over
+a deed whose novelty shall make his disgrace forgotten, and
+ends by murdering his kinsman and prince. These are characteristic
+features of this age of overstrained and despairing
+passions and forces, and remind us of the burning of the temple
+of Diana at Ephesus in the time of Philip of Macedon.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a>{154}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-2" id="CHAPTER_IV-2"></a>CHAPTER IV.<br /><br />
+<small>MODERN WIT AND SATIRE.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> corrective, not only of this modern desire for fame, but of
+all highly developed individuality, is found in ridicule, especially
+when expressed in the victorious form of wit.<a name="FNanchor_357_357" id="FNanchor_357_357"></a><a href="#Footnote_357_357" class="fnanchor">[357]</a> We read
+in the Middle Ages how hostile armies, princes, and nobles,
+provoked one another with symbolical insult, and how the
+defeated party was loaded with symbolical outrage. Here and
+there, too, under the influence of classical literature, wit began
+to be used as a weapon in theological disputes, and the poetry
+of Provence produced a whole class of satirical compositions.
+Even the Minnesänger, as their political poems show, could
+adopt this tone when necessary.<a name="FNanchor_358_358" id="FNanchor_358_358"></a><a href="#Footnote_358_358" class="fnanchor">[358]</a> But wit could not be an
+independent element in life till its appropriate victim, the
+developed individual with personal pretentions, had appeared.
+Its weapons were then by no means limited to the tongue and
+the pen, but included tricks and practical jokes&mdash;the so-called
+‘burle’ and ‘beffe’&mdash;which form a chief subject of many
+collections of novels.</p>
+
+<p>The ‘Hundred Old Novels,’ which must have been composed
+about the end of the thirteenth century, have as yet neither
+wit, the fruit of contrast, nor the ‘burla,’ for their subject;<a name="FNanchor_359_359" id="FNanchor_359_359"></a><a href="#Footnote_359_359" class="fnanchor">[359]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_155" id="page_155"></a>{155}</span>
+their aim is merely to give simple and elegant expression to
+wise sayings and pretty stories or fables. But if anything
+proves the great antiquity of the collection, it is precisely
+this absence of satire. For with the fourteenth century
+comes Dante, who, in the utterance of scorn, leaves all other
+poets in the world far behind, and who, if only on account
+of his great picture of the deceivers,<a name="FNanchor_360_360" id="FNanchor_360_360"></a><a href="#Footnote_360_360" class="fnanchor">[360]</a> must be called the
+chief master of colossal comedy. With Petrarch<a name="FNanchor_361_361" id="FNanchor_361_361"></a><a href="#Footnote_361_361" class="fnanchor">[361]</a> begin the
+collections of witty sayings after the pattern of Plutarch
+(Apophthegmata, etc.).</p>
+
+<p>What stores of wit were concentrated in Florence during
+this century, is most characteristically shown in the novels of
+Franco Sacchetti. These are, for the most part, not stories
+but answers, given under certain circumstances&mdash;shocking
+pieces of <i>naïveté</i>, with which silly folks, court-jesters, rogues,
+and profligate women make their retort. The comedy of the
+tale lies in the startling contrast of this real or assumed <i>naïveté</i>
+with conventional morality and the ordinary relations of the
+world&mdash;things are made to stand on their heads. All means
+of picturesque representation are made use of, including the
+introduction of certain North Italian dialects. Often the place
+of wit is taken by mere insolence, clumsy trickery, blasphemy,
+and obscenity; one or two jokes told of Condottieri<a name="FNanchor_362_362" id="FNanchor_362_362"></a><a href="#Footnote_362_362" class="fnanchor">[362]</a> are among
+the most brutal and malicious which are recorded. Many of
+the ‘burle’ are thoroughly comic, but many are only real or
+supposed evidence of personal superiority, of triumph over
+another. How much people were willing to put up with, how
+often the victim was satisfied with getting the laugh on his
+side by a retaliatory trick, cannot be said; there was much
+heartless and pointless malice mixed up with it all, and life in
+Florence was no doubt often made unpleasant enough from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a>{156}</span>
+this cause.<a name="FNanchor_363_363" id="FNanchor_363_363"></a><a href="#Footnote_363_363" class="fnanchor">[363]</a> The inventors and retailers of jokes soon became
+inevitable figures,<a name="FNanchor_364_364" id="FNanchor_364_364"></a><a href="#Footnote_364_364" class="fnanchor">[364]</a> and among them there must have been
+some who were classical&mdash;far superior to all the mere court-jesters,
+to whom competition, a changing public, and the quick
+apprehension of the audience, all advantages of life in Florence,
+were wanting. Some Florentine wits went starring among
+the despotic courts of Lombardy and Romagna,<a name="FNanchor_365_365" id="FNanchor_365_365"></a><a href="#Footnote_365_365" class="fnanchor">[365]</a> and found
+themselves much better rewarded than at home, where their
+talent was cheap and plentiful. The better type of these
+people is the amusing man (l’uomo piacevole), the worse is the
+buffoon and the vulgar parasite who presents himself at weddings
+and banquets with the argument, ‘If I am not invited,
+the fault is not mine.’ Now and then the latter combine to
+pluck a young spendthrift,<a name="FNanchor_366_366" id="FNanchor_366_366"></a><a href="#Footnote_366_366" class="fnanchor">[366]</a> but in general they are treated
+and despised as parasites, while wits of higher position bear
+themselves like princes, and consider their talent as something
+sovereign. Dolcibene, whom Charles IV., ‘Imperator di
+Buem,’ had pronounced to be the ‘king of Italian jesters,’ said
+to him at Ferrara: ‘You will conquer the world, since you are
+my friend and the Pope’s; you fight with the sword, the Pope
+with his bulls, and I with my tongue.’<a name="FNanchor_367_367" id="FNanchor_367_367"></a><a href="#Footnote_367_367" class="fnanchor">[367]</a> This is no mere jest,
+but a foreshadowing of Pietro Aretino.</p>
+
+<p>The two most famous jesters about the middle of the fifteenth
+century were a priest near Florence, Arlotto (1483), for
+more refined wit (‘facezie’), and the court-fool of Ferrara,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a>{157}</span>
+Gonnella, for buffoonery. We can hardly compare their stories
+with those of the Parson of Kalenberg and Till Eulenspiegel,
+since the latter arose in a different and half-mythical manner,
+as fruits of the imagination of a whole people, and touch rather
+on what is general and intelligible to all, while Arlotto and
+Gonnella were historical beings, coloured and shaped by local
+influences. But if the comparison be allowed, and extended
+to the jests of the non-Italian nations, we shall find in general
+that the joke in the French <i>fabliaux</i>,<a name="FNanchor_368_368" id="FNanchor_368_368"></a><a href="#Footnote_368_368" class="fnanchor">[368]</a> as among the Germans,
+is chiefly directed to the attainment of some advantage or enjoyment;
+while the wit of Arlotto and the practical jokes of
+Gonnella are an end in themselves, and exist simply for the
+sake of the triumph of production. (Till Eulenspiegel again
+forms a class by himself, as the personified quiz, mostly pointless
+enough, of particular classes and professions). The court-fool
+of the Este saved himself more than once by his keen
+satire and refined modes of vengeance.<a name="FNanchor_369_369" id="FNanchor_369_369"></a><a href="#Footnote_369_369" class="fnanchor">[369]</a></p>
+
+<p>The type of the ‘uomo piacevole’ and the ‘buffone’ long
+survived the freedom of Florence. Under Duke Cosimo
+flourished Barlacchia, and at the beginning of the seventeenth
+century Francesco Ruspoli and Curzio Marignolli. In Pope
+Leo X., the genuine Florentine love of jesters showed itself
+strikingly. This prince, whose taste for the most refined intellectual
+pleasures was insatiable, endured and desired at his
+table a number of witty buffoons and jack-puddings, among
+them two monks and a cripple;<a name="FNanchor_370_370" id="FNanchor_370_370"></a><a href="#Footnote_370_370" class="fnanchor">[370]</a> at public feasts he treated
+them with deliberate scorn as parasites, setting before them
+monkeys and crows in the place of savoury meats. Leo, indeed,
+showed a peculiar fondness for the ‘burla’; it belonged
+to his nature sometimes to treat his own favourite pursuits&mdash;music
+and poetry&mdash;ironically, parodying them with his factotum,
+Cardinal Bibbiena.<a name="FNanchor_371_371" id="FNanchor_371_371"></a><a href="#Footnote_371_371" class="fnanchor">[371]</a> Neither of them found it beneath<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a>{158}</span>
+him to fool an honest old secretary till he thought himself a
+master of the art of music. The Improvisatore, Baraballo of
+Gaeta, was brought so far by Leo’s flattery, that he applied in
+all seriousness for the poet’s coronation on the Capitol. On the
+anniversary of S. Cosmas and S. Damian, the patrons of the
+House of Medici, he was first compelled, adorned with laurel
+and purple, to amuse the papal guests with his recitations, and
+at last, when all were ready to split with laughter, to mount a
+gold-harnessed elephant in the court of the Vatican, sent as a
+present to Rome by Emanuel the Great of Portugal, while the
+Pope looked down from above through his eye-glass.<a name="FNanchor_372_372" id="FNanchor_372_372"></a><a href="#Footnote_372_372" class="fnanchor">[372]</a> The
+brute, however, was so terrified by the noise of the trumpets
+and kettle-drums, and the cheers of the crowd, that there was
+no getting him over the bridge of S. Angelo.</p>
+
+<p>The parody of what is solemn or sublime, which here meets
+us in the case of a procession, had already taken an important
+place in poetry.<a name="FNanchor_373_373" id="FNanchor_373_373"></a><a href="#Footnote_373_373" class="fnanchor">[373]</a> It was naturally compelled to choose vic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a>{159}</span>tims
+of another kind than those of Aristophanes, who introduced
+the great tragedian into his plays. But the same
+maturity of culture which at a certain period produced parody
+among the Greeks, did the same in Italy. By the close of the
+fourteenth century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch’s sonnets
+and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists;
+and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines
+of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was
+offered by the ‘Divine Comedy,’ and Lorenzo Magnifico wrote
+the most admirable travesty in the style of the ‘Inferno’
+(‘Simposio’ or ‘I Beoni’). Luigi Pulei obviously imitates the
+Improvisatori in his ‘Morgante,’ and both his poetry and
+Bojardo’s are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the
+chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was
+deliberately undertaken by the great parodist Teofilo Folengo
+(about 1520). Under the name of Limerno Pitocco, he composed
+the ‘Orlandino,’ in which chivalry appears only as a
+ludicrous setting for a crowd of modern figures and ideas.
+Under the name of Merlinus Coccajus he described the journeys
+and exploits of his phantastic vagabonds (also in the
+same spirit of parody) in half-Latin hexameters, with all the
+affected pomp of the learned Epos of the day. (‘Opus Macaronicorum’).
+Since then caricature has been constantly, and
+often brilliantly, represented on the Italian Parnassus.</p>
+
+<p>About the middle period of the Renaissance a theoretical
+analysis of wit was undertaken, and its practical application
+in good society was regulated more precisely. The theorist
+was Gioviano Pontano.<a name="FNanchor_374_374" id="FNanchor_374_374"></a><a href="#Footnote_374_374" class="fnanchor">[374]</a> In his work on speaking, especially
+in the third and fourth books, he tries by means of the comparison
+of numerous jokes or ‘facetiæ’ to arrive at a general
+principle. How wit should be used among people of position
+is taught by Baldassar Castiglione in his ‘Cortigiano.’<a name="FNanchor_375_375" id="FNanchor_375_375"></a><a href="#Footnote_375_375" class="fnanchor">[375]</a> Its<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a>{160}</span>
+chief function is naturally to enliven those present by the repetition
+of comic or graceful stories and sayings; personal
+jokes, on the contrary, are discouraged on the ground that they
+wound unhappy people, show too much honour to wrong-doers,
+and make enemies of the powerful and the spoiled children of
+fortune;<a name="FNanchor_376_376" id="FNanchor_376_376"></a><a href="#Footnote_376_376" class="fnanchor">[376]</a> and even in repetition, a wide reserve in the use of
+dramatic gestures is recommended to the gentleman. Then
+follows, not only for purposes of quotation, but as patterns for
+future jesters, a large collection of puns and witty sayings,
+methodically arranged according to their species, among them
+some that are admirable. The doctrine of Giovanni della Casa,
+some twenty years later, in his guide to good manners, is much
+stricter and more cautious;<a name="FNanchor_377_377" id="FNanchor_377_377"></a><a href="#Footnote_377_377" class="fnanchor">[377]</a> with a view to the consequences,
+he wishes to see the desire of triumph banished altogether
+from jokes and ‘burle.’ He is the herald of a reaction, which
+was certain sooner or later to appear.</p>
+
+<p>Italy had, in fact, become a school for scandal, the like of
+which the world cannot show, not even in France at the time
+of Voltaire. In him and his comrades there was assuredly no
+lack of the spirit of negation; but where, in the eighteenth
+century, was to be found the crowd of suitable victims, that
+countless assembly of highly and characteristically-developed
+human beings, celebrities of every kind, statesmen, churchmen,
+inventors, and discoverers, men of letters, poets and
+artists, all of whom then gave the fullest and freest play to
+their individuality? This host existed in the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries, and by its side the general culture of the
+time had educated a poisonous brood of impotent wits, of born
+critics and railers, whose envy called for hecatombs of victims;
+and to all this was added the envy of the famous men among
+themselves. In this the philologists notoriously led the way&mdash;Filelfo,
+Poggio, Lorenzo Valla, and others&mdash;while the artists of
+the fifteenth century lived in peaceful and friendly competition
+with one another. The history of art may take note of
+the fact.</p>
+
+<p>Florence, the great market of fame, was in this point, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a>{161}</span>
+we have said, in advance of other cities. ‘Sharp eyes and
+bad tongues’ is the description given of the inhabitants.<a name="FNanchor_378_378" id="FNanchor_378_378"></a><a href="#Footnote_378_378" class="fnanchor">[378]</a> An
+easy-going contempt of everything and everybody was probably
+the prevailing tone of society. Macchiavelli, in the
+remarkable prologue to his ‘Mandragola,’ refers rightly or
+wrongly the visible decline of moral force to the general habit
+of evil speaking, and threatens his detractors with the news
+that he can say sharp things as well as they. Next to Florence
+comes the Papal court, which had long been a rendezvous of
+the bitterest and wittiest tongues. Poggio’s ‘Facetiæ’ are
+dated from the Chamber of Lies (<i>bugiale</i>) of the apostolic
+notaries; and when we remember the number of disappointed
+place-hunters, of hopeless competitors and enemies of the
+favourites, of idle, profligate prelates there assembled, it is intelligible
+how Rome became the home of the savage pasquinade
+as well as of more philosophical satire. If we add to this
+the wide-spread hatred borne to the priests, and the well-known
+instinct of the mob to lay any horror to the charge of
+the great, there results an untold mass of infamy.<a name="FNanchor_379_379" id="FNanchor_379_379"></a><a href="#Footnote_379_379" class="fnanchor">[379]</a> Those
+who were able protected themselves best by contempt both of
+the false and true accusations, and by brilliant and joyous
+display.<a name="FNanchor_380_380" id="FNanchor_380_380"></a><a href="#Footnote_380_380" class="fnanchor">[380]</a> More sensitive natures sank into utter despair when
+they found themselves deeply involved in guilt, and still more
+deeply in slander.<a name="FNanchor_381_381" id="FNanchor_381_381"></a><a href="#Footnote_381_381" class="fnanchor">[381]</a> In course of time calumny became universal,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a>{162}</span>
+and the strictest virtue was most certain of all to
+challenge the attacks of malice. Of the great pulpit orator,
+Fra Egidio of Viterbo, whom Leo made a cardinal on account
+of his merits, and who showed himself a man of the people
+and a brave monk in the calamity of 1527,<a name="FNanchor_382_382" id="FNanchor_382_382"></a><a href="#Footnote_382_382" class="fnanchor">[382]</a> Giovio gives us to
+understand that he preserved his ascetic pallor by the smoke
+of wet straw and other means of the same kind. Giovio is a
+genuine Curial in these matters.<a name="FNanchor_383_383" id="FNanchor_383_383"></a><a href="#Footnote_383_383" class="fnanchor">[383]</a> He generally begins by
+telling his story, then adds that he does not believe it, and then
+hints at the end that perhaps after all there may be something
+in it. But the true scape-goat of Roman scorn was the pious
+and moral Adrian VI. A general agreement seemed to be
+made to take him only on the comic side. Adrian had contemptuously
+referred to the Laöcoon group as ‘idola antiquorum,’
+had shut up the entrance to the Belvedere, had left
+the works of Raphael unfinished, and had banished the poets
+and players from the court; it was even feared that he would
+burn some ancient statues to lime for the new church of St.
+Peter. He fell out from the first with the formidable Francesco
+Berni, threatening to have thrown into the Tiber not, as
+people said,<a name="FNanchor_384_384" id="FNanchor_384_384"></a><a href="#Footnote_384_384" class="fnanchor">[384]</a> the statue of Pasquino, but the writers of the
+satires themselves. The vengeance for this was the famous
+‘Capitolo’ against Pope Adriano, inspired not exactly by
+hatred, but by contempt for the comical Dutch barbarian;<a name="FNanchor_385_385" id="FNanchor_385_385"></a><a href="#Footnote_385_385" class="fnanchor">[385]</a> the
+more savage menaces were reserved for the cardinals who had
+elected him. The plague, which then was prevalent in Rome,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a>{163}</span>
+was ascribed to him;<a name="FNanchor_386_386" id="FNanchor_386_386"></a><a href="#Footnote_386_386" class="fnanchor">[386]</a> Berni and others<a name="FNanchor_387_387" id="FNanchor_387_387"></a><a href="#Footnote_387_387" class="fnanchor">[387]</a> sketch the environment
+of the Pope&mdash;the Germans by whom he was governed<a name="FNanchor_388_388" id="FNanchor_388_388"></a><a href="#Footnote_388_388" class="fnanchor">[388]</a>&mdash;with
+the same sparkling untruthfulness with which the
+modern <i>feuilletoniste</i> turns black into white, and everything
+into anything. The biography which Paolo Giovio was commissioned
+to write by the Cardinal of Tortosa, and which was
+to have been a eulogy, is for any one who can read between the
+lines an unexampled piece of satire. It sounds ridiculous&mdash;at
+least for the Italians of that time&mdash;to hear how Adrian
+applied to the Chapter of Saragossa for the jaw-bone of St.
+Lambert; how the devout Spaniards decked him out till he
+looked ‘like a right well-dressed Pope;’ how he came in a
+confused and tasteless procession from Ostia to Rome, took
+counsel about burning or drowning Pasquino, would suddenly
+break off the most important business when dinner was announced;
+and lastly, at the end of an unhappy reign, how he
+died of drinking too much beer&mdash;whereupon the house of his
+physician was hung with garlands by midnight revellers, and
+adorned with the inscription, ‘Liberatori Patriæ S. P. Q. R.’
+It is true that Giovio had lost his money in the general confiscation
+of public funds, and had only received a benefice by
+way of compensation because he was ‘no poet,’ that is to say.
+no pagan.<a name="FNanchor_389_389" id="FNanchor_389_389"></a><a href="#Footnote_389_389" class="fnanchor">[389]</a> But it was decreed that Adrian should be the last<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a>{164}</span>
+great victim. After the disaster which befell Rome in 1527,
+slander visibly declined along with the unrestrained wickedness
+of private life.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But while it was still flourishing was developed, chiefly in
+Rome, the greatest railer of modern times, Pietro Aretino. A
+glance at his life and character will save us the trouble of
+noticing many less distinguished members of his class.</p>
+
+<p>We know him chiefly in the last thirty years of his life
+(1527-1557), which he passed in Venice, the only asylum
+possible for him. From hence he kept all that was famous in
+Italy in a kind of state of siege, and here were delivered the
+presents of the foreign princes who needed or dreaded his pen.
+Charles V. and Francis I. both pensioned him at the same
+time, each hoping that Aretino would do some mischief to the
+other. Aretino flattered both, but naturally attached himself
+more closely to Charles, because he remained master in Italy.
+After the Emperor’s victory at Tunis in 1535, this tone of
+adulation passed into the most ludicrous worship, in observing
+which it must not be forgotten that Aretino constantly
+cherished the hope that Charles would help him to a cardinal’s
+hat. It is probable that he enjoyed special protection as
+Spanish agent, as his speech or silence could have no small
+effect on the smaller Italian courts and on public opinion in
+Italy. He affected utterly to despise the Papal court because
+he knew it so well; the true reason was that Rome neither
+could nor would pay him any longer.<a name="FNanchor_390_390" id="FNanchor_390_390"></a><a href="#Footnote_390_390" class="fnanchor">[390]</a> Venice, which sheltered
+him, he was wise enough to leave unassailed. The rest of his
+relations with the great is mere beggary and vulgar extortion.</p>
+
+<p>Aretino affords the first great instance of the abuse of
+publicity to such ends. The polemical writings which a
+hundred years earlier Poggio and his opponents interchanged,
+are just as infamous in their tone and purpose, but they were
+not composed for the press, but for a sort of private circulation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a>{165}</span>
+Aretino made all his profit out of a complete publicity, and in
+a certain sense may be considered the father of modern journalism.
+His letters and miscellaneous articles were printed
+periodically, after they had already been circulated among a
+tolerably extensive public.<a name="FNanchor_391_391" id="FNanchor_391_391"></a><a href="#Footnote_391_391" class="fnanchor">[391]</a></p>
+
+<p>Compared with the sharp pens of the eighteenth century,
+Aretino had the advantage that he was not burdened with
+principles, neither with liberalism nor philanthropy nor any
+other virtue, nor even with science; his whole baggage consisted
+of the well-known motto, ‘Veritas odium parit.’ He
+never, consequently, found himself in the false position of
+Voltaire, who was forced to disown his ‘Pucelle’ and conceal
+all his life the authorship of other works. Aretino put his
+name to all he wrote, and openly gloried in his notorious
+‘Ragionamenti.’ His literary talent, his clear and sparkling
+style, his varied observation of men and things, would have
+made him a considerable writer under any circumstances
+destitute as he was of the power of conceiving a genuine work
+of art, such as a true dramatic comedy; and to the coarsest as
+well as the most refined malice he added a grotesque wit so
+brilliant that in some cases it does not fall short of that of
+Rabelais.<a name="FNanchor_392_392" id="FNanchor_392_392"></a><a href="#Footnote_392_392" class="fnanchor">[392]</a></p>
+
+<p>In such circumstances, and with such objects and means, he
+set to work to attack or circumvent his prey. The tone in
+which he appealed to Clement VII. not to complain or to think
+of vengeance,<a name="FNanchor_393_393" id="FNanchor_393_393"></a><a href="#Footnote_393_393" class="fnanchor">[393]</a> but to forgive, at the moment when the wailings
+of the devastated city were ascending to the Castle of St.
+Angelo, where the Pope himself was a prisoner, is the mockery
+of a devil or a monkey. Sometimes, when he is forced to give
+up all hope of presents, his fury breaks out into a savage howl,
+as in the ‘Capitolo’ to the Prince of Salerno, who after paying
+him for some time refused to do so any longer. On the other
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a>{166}</span>hand, it seems that the terrible Pierluigi Farnese, Duke of
+Parma, never took any notice of him at all. As this gentleman
+had probably renounced altogether the pleasures of a good
+reputation, it was not easy to cause him any annoyance;
+Aretino tried to do so by comparing his personal appearance to
+that of a constable, a miller, and a baker.<a name="FNanchor_394_394" id="FNanchor_394_394"></a><a href="#Footnote_394_394" class="fnanchor">[394]</a> Aretino is most
+comical of all in the expression of whining mendicancy, as in
+the ‘Capitolo’ to Francis I.; but the letters and poems made
+up of menaces and flattery cannot, notwithstanding all that
+is ludicrous in them, be read without the deepest disgust. A
+letter like that one of his written to Michelangelo in November
+1545<a name="FNanchor_395_395" id="FNanchor_395_395"></a><a href="#Footnote_395_395" class="fnanchor">[395]</a> is alone of its kind; along with all the admiration he
+expresses for the ‘Last Judgment’ he charges him with irreligion,
+indecency, and theft from the heirs of Julius II., and
+adds in a conciliating postscript, ‘I only want to show you that
+if you are “divino,” I am not “d’acqua.”&nbsp;’ Aretino laid great
+stress upon it&mdash;whether from the insanity of conceit or by way
+of caricaturing famous men&mdash;that he himself should be called
+divine, as one of his flatterers had already begun to do; and
+he certainly attained so much personal celebrity that his house
+at Arezzo passed for one of the sights of the place.<a name="FNanchor_396_396" id="FNanchor_396_396"></a><a href="#Footnote_396_396" class="fnanchor">[396]</a> There
+were indeed whole months during which he never ventured
+to cross his threshold at Venice, lest he should fall in with
+some incensed Florentine like the younger Strozzi. Nor did
+he escape the cudgels and the daggers of his enemies,<a name="FNanchor_397_397" id="FNanchor_397_397"></a><a href="#Footnote_397_397" class="fnanchor">[397]</a> although
+they failed to have the effect which Berni prophesied him in a
+famous sonnet. Aretino died in his house, of apoplexy.</p>
+
+<p>The differences he made in his modes of flattery are remarkable:
+in dealing with non-Italians he was grossly fulsome;<a name="FNanchor_398_398" id="FNanchor_398_398"></a><a href="#Footnote_398_398" class="fnanchor">[398]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a>{167}</span>
+people like Duke Cosimo of Florence he treated very differently.
+He praised the beauty of the then youthful prince, who in fact
+did share this quality with Augustus in no ordinary degree;
+he praised his moral conduct, with an oblique reference to the
+financial pursuits of Cosimo’s mother Maria Salviati, and concluded
+with a mendicant whine about the bad times and so
+forth. When Cosimo pensioned him,<a name="FNanchor_399_399" id="FNanchor_399_399"></a><a href="#Footnote_399_399" class="fnanchor">[399]</a> which he did liberally,
+considering his habitual parsimony&mdash;to the extent, at last, of
+160 ducats a year&mdash;he had doubtless an eye to Aretino’s dangerous
+character as Spanish agent. Aretino could ridicule and
+revile Cosimo, and in the same breath threaten the Florentine
+agent that he would obtain from the Duke his immediate
+recall; and if the Medicean prince felt himself at last to be
+seen through by Charles V. he would naturally not be anxious
+that Aretino’s jokes and rhymes against him should circulate
+at the Imperial court. A curiously qualified piece of flattery
+was that addressed to the notorious Marquis of Marignano,
+who as Castellan of Musso (<a href="#page_027">p. 27</a>) had attempted to found an
+independent state. Thanking him for the gift of a hundred
+crowns, Aretino writes: ‘All the qualities which a prince
+should have are present in you, and all men would think so,
+were it not that the acts of violence inevitable at the beginning
+of all undertakings cause you to appear a trifle rough
+(<i>aspro</i>).’<a name="FNanchor_400_400" id="FNanchor_400_400"></a><a href="#Footnote_400_400" class="fnanchor">[400]</a></p>
+
+<p>It has often been noticed as something singular that Aretino
+only reviled the world, and not God also. The religious belief
+of a man who lived as he did is a matter of perfect indifference,
+as are also the edifying writings which he composed for reasons
+of his own.<a name="FNanchor_401_401" id="FNanchor_401_401"></a><a href="#Footnote_401_401" class="fnanchor">[401]</a> It is in fact hard to say why he should have been
+a blasphemer. He was no professor, or theoretical thinker or
+writer; and he could extort no money from God by threats or
+flattery, and was consequently never goaded into blasphemy<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a>{168}</span>
+by a refusal. A man like him does not take trouble for
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>It is a good sign of the present spirit of Italy that such a
+character and such a career have become a thousand times
+impossible. But historical criticism will always find in Aretino
+an important study.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a>{169}</span></p>
+
+<h2><i><a name="PART_III" id="PART_III"></a>PART III.</i><br />
+<br />
+THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY.<br />
+</h2>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a>{170}</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a>{171}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-3" id="CHAPTER_I-3"></a>CHAPTER I.<br /><br />
+<small>INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">N<small>OW</small> that this point in our historical view of Italian civilization
+has been reached, it is time to speak of the influence of antiquity,
+the ‘new birth’ of which has been one-sidedly chosen as
+the name to sum up the whole period. The conditions which
+have been hitherto described would have sufficed, apart from
+antiquity, to upturn and to mature the national mind; and
+most of the intellectual tendencies which yet remain to be
+noticed would be conceivable without it. But both what has
+gone before and what we have still to discuss are coloured in a
+thousand ways by the influence of the ancient world; and
+though the essence of the phenomena might still have been
+the same without the classical revival, it is only with and
+through this revival that they are actually manifested to us.
+The Renaissance would not have been the process of worldwide
+significance which it is, if its elements could be so easily
+separated from one another. We must insist upon it, as one of
+the chief propositions of this book, that it was not the revival
+of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian
+people, which achieved the conquest of the western world.
+The amount of independence which the national spirit maintained
+in this union varied according to circumstances. In the
+modern Latin literature of the period, it is very small, while in
+plastic art, as well as in other spheres, it is remarkably great;
+and hence the alliance between two distant epochs in the
+civilisation of the same people, because concluded on equal
+terms, proved justifiable and fruitful. The rest of Europe was
+free either to repel or else partly or wholly to accept the
+mighty impulse which came forth from Italy. Where the
+latter was the case we may as well be spared the complaints
+over the early decay of mediæval faith and civilisation. Had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a>{172}</span>
+these been strong enough to hold their ground, they would be
+alive to this day. If those elegiac natures which long to see
+them return could pass but one hour in the midst of them,
+they would gasp to be back in modern air. That in a great
+historical process of this kind flowers of exquisite beauty may
+perish, without being made immortal in poetry or tradition
+is undoubtedly true; nevertheless, we cannot wish the process
+undone. The general result of it consists in this&mdash;that by the
+side of the Church which had hitherto held the countries of
+the West together (though it was unable to do so much longer)
+there arose a new spiritual influence which, spreading itself
+abroad from Italy, became the breath of life for all the more
+instructed minds in Europe. The worst that can be said of
+the movement is, that it was anti-popular, that through it
+Europe became for the first time sharply divided into the
+cultivated and uncultivated classes. The reproach will appear
+groundless when we reflect that even now the fact, though
+clearly recognised, cannot be altered. The separation, too, is
+by no means so cruel and absolute in Italy as elsewhere. The
+most artistic of her poets, Tasso, is in the hands of even the
+poorest.</p>
+
+<p>The civilisation of Greece and Rome, which, ever since the
+fourteenth century, obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life,
+as the source and basis of culture, as the object and ideal of
+existence, partly also as an avowed reaction against preceding
+tendencies&mdash;this civilisation had long been exerting a partial
+influence on mediæval Europe, even beyond the boundaries of
+Italy. The culture of which Charles the Great was a representative
+was, in face of the barbarism of the seventh and
+eighth centuries, essentially a Renaissance, and could appear
+under no other form. Just as in the Romanesque architecture
+of the North, beside the general outlines inherited from antiquity,
+remarkable direct imitations of the antique also occur,
+so too monastic scholarship had not only gradually absorbed
+an immense mass of materials from Roman writers, but the
+style of it, from the days of Eginhard onwards shows traces of
+conscious imitations.</p>
+
+<p>But the resuscitation of antiquity took a different form in
+Italy from that which it assumed in the North. The wave of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a>{173}</span>
+barbarism had scarcely gone by before the people, in whom
+the former life was but half effaced, showed a consciousness of
+its past and a wish to reproduce it. Elsewhere in Europe men
+deliberately and with reflection borrowed this or the other
+element of classical civilisation; in Italy the sympathies both
+of the learned and of the people were naturally engaged on the
+side of antiquity as a whole, which stood to them as a symbol
+of past greatness. The Latin language, too, was easy to an
+Italian, and the numerous monuments and documents in which
+the country abounded facilitated a return to the past. With
+this tendency other elements&mdash;the popular character which
+time had now greatly modified, the political institutions imported
+by the Lombards from Germany, chivalry and other
+northern forms of civilisation, and the influence of religion and
+the Church&mdash;combined to produce the modern Italian spirit,
+which was destined to serve as the model and ideal for the
+whole western world.</p>
+
+<p>How antiquity began to work in plastic art, as soon as the
+flood of barbarism had subsided, is clearly shown in the Tuscan
+buildings of the twelfth and in the sculptures of the thirteenth
+centuries. In poetry, too, there will appear no want of similar
+analogies to those who hold that the greatest Latin poet of
+the twelfth century, the writer who struck the key-note of a
+whole class of Latin poems, was an Italian. We mean the
+author of the best pieces in the so-called ‘Carmina Burana.’ A
+frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, as whose patrons the
+gods of heathendom are invoked, while Catos and Scipios hold
+the place of the saints and heroes of Christianity, flows in full
+current through the rhymed verses. Reading them through
+at a stretch, we can scarcely help coming to the conclusion
+that an Italian, probably a Lombard, is speaking; in fact,
+there are positive grounds for thinking so.<a name="FNanchor_402_402" id="FNanchor_402_402"></a><a href="#Footnote_402_402" class="fnanchor">[402]</a> To a certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a>{174}</span>
+degree these Latin poems of the ‘Clerici vagantes’ of the
+twelfth century, with all their remarkable frivolity, are, doubtless,
+a product in which the whole of Europe had a share; but
+the writer of the song ‘De Phyllide et Flora’<a name="FNanchor_403_403" id="FNanchor_403_403"></a><a href="#Footnote_403_403" class="fnanchor">[403]</a> and the
+‘Æstuans Interius’ can have been a northerner as little as the
+polished Epicurean observer to whom we owe ‘Dum Dianæ
+vitrea sero lampas oritur.’ Here, in truth, is a reproduction of
+the whole ancient view of life, which is all the more striking
+from the mediæval form of the verse in which it is set forth.
+There are many works of this and the following centuries, in
+which a careful imitation of the antique appears both in the
+hexameter and pentameter of the metre in the classical, often<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a>{175}</span>
+mythological, character of the subject, and which yet have not
+anything like the same spirit of antiquity about them. In the
+hexameter chronicles and other works of Gulielmus Apuliensis
+and his successors (from about 1100), we find frequent traces
+of a diligent study of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and
+Claudian; but this classical form is after all here a mere
+matter of archæology, as is the classical subject in collectors
+like Vincent of Beauvais, or in the mythological and allegorical
+writer, Alanus ab Insulis. The Renaissance is not a mere
+fragmentary imitation or compilation, but a new birth; and
+the signs of this are visible in the poems of the unknown
+‘Clericus’ of the twelfth century.</p>
+
+<p>But the great and general enthusiasm of the Italians for classical
+antiquity did not display itself before the fourteenth century.
+For this a development of civic life was required, which
+took place only in Italy, and there not till then. It was needful
+that noble and burgher should first learn to dwell together
+on equal terms, and that a social world should arise (see p. 139)
+which felt the want of culture, and had the leisure and the
+means to obtain it. But culture, as soon as it freed itself from
+the fantastic bonds of the Middle Ages, could not at once and
+without help find its way to the understanding of the physical
+and intellectual world. It needed a guide, and found one in
+the ancient civilisation, with its wealth of truth and knowledge
+in every spiritual interest. Both the form and the
+substance of this civilisation were adopted with admiring
+gratitude; it became the chief part of the culture of the age.<a name="FNanchor_404_404" id="FNanchor_404_404"></a><a href="#Footnote_404_404" class="fnanchor">[404]</a>
+The general condition of the country was favourable to this
+transformation. The mediæval empire, since the fall of the
+Hohenstaufen, had either renounced, or was unable to make
+good, its claims on Italy. The Popes had migrated to Avignon.
+Most of the political powers actually in existence owed their
+origin to violent and illegitimate means. The spirit of the
+people, now awakened to self-consciousness, sought for some
+new and stable ideal on which to rest. And thus the vision of
+the world-wide empire of Italy and Rome so possessed the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a>{176}</span>
+popular mind, that Cola di Rienzi could actually attempt to
+put it in practice. The conception he formed of his task, particularly
+when tribune for the first time, could only end in
+some extravagant comedy; nevertheless, the memory of
+ancient Rome was no slight support to the national sentiment.
+Armed afresh with its culture, the Italian soon felt himself in
+truth citizen of the most advanced nation in the world.</p>
+
+<p>It is now our task to sketch this spiritual movement, not
+indeed in all its fulness, but in its most salient features, and
+especially in its first beginnings.<a name="FNanchor_405_405" id="FNanchor_405_405"></a><a href="#Footnote_405_405" class="fnanchor">[405]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a>{177}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-3" id="CHAPTER_II-3"></a>CHAPTER II.<br /><br />
+<small>ROME, THE CITY OF RUINS.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">R<small>OME</small> itself, the city of ruins, now became the object of a
+wholly different sort of piety from that of the time when the
+‘Mirabilia Romæ’ and the collection of William of Malmesbury
+were composed. The imaginations of the devout pilgrim, or
+of the seeker after marvels<a name="FNanchor_406_406" id="FNanchor_406_406"></a><a href="#Footnote_406_406" class="fnanchor">[406]</a> and treasures, are supplanted in
+contemporary records by the interests of the patriot and the
+historian. In this sense we must understand Dante’s words,<a name="FNanchor_407_407" id="FNanchor_407_407"></a><a href="#Footnote_407_407" class="fnanchor">[407]</a>
+that the stones of the walls of Rome deserve reverence, and
+that the ground on which the city is built is more worthy than
+men say. The jubilees, incessant as they were, have scarcely
+left a single devout record in literature properly so called.
+The best thing that Giovanni Villani (<a href="#page_073">p. 73</a>) brought back
+from the jubilee of the year 1300 was the resolution to write
+his history which had been awakened in him by the sight of
+the ruins of Rome. Petrarch gives evidence of a taste divided
+between classical and Christian antiquity. He tells us how
+often with Giovanni Colonna he ascended the mighty vaults of
+the Baths of Diocletian,<a name="FNanchor_408_408" id="FNanchor_408_408"></a><a href="#Footnote_408_408" class="fnanchor">[408]</a> and there in the transparent air, amid<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a>{178}</span>
+the wide silence, with the broad panorama stretching far
+around them, they spoke, not of business, or political affairs,
+but of the history which the ruins beneath their feet suggested,
+Petrarch appearing in their dialogues as the partisan
+of classical, Giovanni of Christian antiquity; then they would
+discourse of philosophy and of the inventors of the arts. How
+often since that time, down to the days of Gibbon and
+Niebuhr, have the same ruins stirred men’s minds to the same
+reflections!</p>
+
+<p>This double current of feeling is also recognisable in the
+‘Dittamondo’ of Fazio degli Uberti, composed about the year
+1360&mdash;a description of visionary travels, in which the author
+is accompanied by the old geographer Solinus, as Dante was
+by Virgil. They visit Bari in memory of St. Nicholas, and
+Monte Gargano of the archangel Michael, and in Rome the
+legends of Araceli and of Santa Maria in Trastevere are mentioned.
+Still, the pagan splendour of ancient Rome unmistakably
+exercises a greater charm upon them. A venerable
+matron in torn garments&mdash;Rome herself is meant&mdash;tells
+them of the glorious past, and gives them a minute description
+of the old triumphs;<a name="FNanchor_409_409" id="FNanchor_409_409"></a><a href="#Footnote_409_409" class="fnanchor">[409]</a> she then leads the strangers
+through the city, and points out to them the seven hills and
+many of the chief ruins&mdash;‘che comprender potrai, quanto fui
+bella.’</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately this Rome of the schismatic and Avignonese
+popes was no longer, in respect of classical remains, what it
+had been some generations earlier. The destruction of 140 fortified
+houses of the Roman nobles by the senator Brancaleone in
+1257 must have wholly altered the character of the most important
+buildings then standing; for the nobles had no doubt<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a>{179}</span>
+ensconced themselves in the loftiest and best-preserved of the
+ruins.<a name="FNanchor_410_410" id="FNanchor_410_410"></a><a href="#Footnote_410_410" class="fnanchor">[410]</a> Nevertheless, far more was left than we now find, and
+probably many of the remains had still their marble incrustation,
+their pillared entrances, and their other ornaments, where
+we now see nothing but the skeleton of brickwork. In this
+state of things, the first beginnings of a topographical study of
+the old city were made.</p>
+
+<p>In Poggio’s walks through Rome<a name="FNanchor_411_411" id="FNanchor_411_411"></a><a href="#Footnote_411_411" class="fnanchor">[411]</a> the study of the remains
+themselves is for the first time more intimately combined with
+that of the ancient authors and inscriptions&mdash;the latter he
+sought out from among all the vegetation in which they were
+imbedded<a name="FNanchor_412_412" id="FNanchor_412_412"></a><a href="#Footnote_412_412" class="fnanchor">[412]</a>&mdash;the writer’s imagination is severely restrained,
+and the memories of Christian Rome carefully excluded. The
+only pity is that Poggio’s work was not fuller and was not
+illustrated with sketches. Far more was left in his time than
+was found by Raphael eighty years later. He saw the tomb
+of Cæcilia Metella and the columns in front of one of the
+temples on the slope of the Capitol first in full preservation,
+and then afterwards half destroyed, owing to that unfortunate
+quality which marble possesses of being easily burnt into lime.
+A vast colonnade near the Minerva fell piecemeal a victim to
+the same fate. A witness in the year 1443 tells us that this
+manufacture of lime still went on; ‘which is a shame, for the
+new buildings are pitiful, and the beauty of Rome is in its<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a>{180}</span>
+ruins.’<a name="FNanchor_413_413" id="FNanchor_413_413"></a><a href="#Footnote_413_413" class="fnanchor">[413]</a> The inhabitants of that day, in their peasants’ cloaks
+and boots, looked to foreigners like cowherds; and in fact the
+cattle were pastured in the city up to the Banchi. The only
+opportunities for social gatherings were the services at church,
+on which occasion it was possible to get a sight of the beautiful
+women.</p>
+
+<p>In the last years of Eugenius IV. (d. 1447) Blondus of Forli
+wrote his ‘Roma Instaurata,’ making use of Frontinus and of
+the old ‘Libri Regionali,’ as well as, it seems, of Anastasius.
+His object is not only the description of what existed, but still
+more the recovery of what was lost. In accordance with the
+dedication to the Pope, he consoles himself for the general ruin
+by the thought of the precious relics of the saints in which
+Rome was so rich.<a name="FNanchor_414_414" id="FNanchor_414_414"></a><a href="#Footnote_414_414" class="fnanchor">[414]</a></p>
+
+<p>With Nicholas V. (1447-1455) that new monumental spirit
+which was distinctive of the age of the Renaissance appeared
+on the papal throne. The new passion for embellishing the
+city brought with it on the one hand a fresh danger for the
+ruins, on the other a respect for them, as forming one of Rome’s
+claims to distinction. Pius II. was wholly possessed by antiquarian
+enthusiasm, and if he speaks little of the antiquities of
+Rome,<a name="FNanchor_415_415" id="FNanchor_415_415"></a><a href="#Footnote_415_415" class="fnanchor">[415]</a> he closely studied those of all other parts of Italy, and
+was the first to know and describe accurately the remains
+which abounded in the districts for miles around the capital.<a name="FNanchor_416_416" id="FNanchor_416_416"></a><a href="#Footnote_416_416" class="fnanchor">[416]</a>
+It is true that, both as priest and cosmographer, he is interested
+alike in classical and Christian monuments and in the marvels
+of nature. Or was he doing violence to himself when he wrote<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a>{181}</span>
+that Nola was more highly honoured by the memory of St.
+Paulinus than by all its classical reminiscences and by the heroic
+struggle of Marcellus? Not, indeed, that his faith in relics
+was assumed; but his mind was evidently rather disposed to
+an inquiring interest in nature and antiquity, to a zeal for
+monumental works, to a keen and delicate observation of human
+life. In the last years of his Papacy, afflicted with the gout
+and yet in the most cheerful mood, he was borne in his litter
+over hill and dale to Tusculum, Alba, Tibur, Ostia, Falerii,
+and Ocriculum, and whatever he saw he noted down. He
+followed the line of the Roman roads and aqueducts, and tried
+to fix the boundaries of the old tribes who dwelt round the city.
+On an excursion to Tivoli with the great Federigo of Urbino
+the time was happily spent in talk on the military system of the
+ancients, and particularly on the Trojan war. Even on his journey
+to the Congress of Mantua (1459) he searched, though unsuccessfully,
+for the labyrinth of Clusium mentioned by Pliny,
+and visited the so-called villa of Virgil on the Mincio. That such
+a Pope should demand a classical Latin style from his abbreviators,
+is no more than might be expected. It was he who, in the
+war with Naples, granted an amnesty to the men of Arpinum,
+as countrymen of Cicero and Marius, after whom many of
+them were named. It was to him alone, as both judge and
+patron, that Blondus could dedicate his ‘Roma Triumphans,’
+the first great attempt at a complete exposition of Roman
+antiquity.<a name="FNanchor_417_417" id="FNanchor_417_417"></a><a href="#Footnote_417_417" class="fnanchor">[417]</a></p>
+
+<p>Nor was the enthusiasm for the classical past of Italy confined
+at this period to the capital. Boccaccio<a name="FNanchor_418_418" id="FNanchor_418_418"></a><a href="#Footnote_418_418" class="fnanchor">[418]</a> had already
+called the vast ruins of Baiæ ‘old walls, yet new for modern
+spirits;’ and since this time they were held to be the most
+interesting sight near Naples. Collections of antiquities of all
+sorts now became common. Ciriaco of Ancona (d. 1457), who
+explained (1433) the Roman monuments to the Emperor Sigismund,
+travelled, not only through Italy, but through other
+countries of the old world, Hellas, and the islands of the Archipelago,
+and even parts of Asia and Africa, and brought back
+with him countless inscriptions and sketches. When asked<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a>{182}</span>
+why he took all this trouble, he replied, ‘To wake the dead.’<a name="FNanchor_419_419" id="FNanchor_419_419"></a><a href="#Footnote_419_419" class="fnanchor">[419]</a>
+The histories of the various cities of Italy had from the earliest
+times laid claim to some true or imagined connection with
+Rome, had alleged some settlement or colonisation which
+started from the capital;<a name="FNanchor_420_420" id="FNanchor_420_420"></a><a href="#Footnote_420_420" class="fnanchor">[420]</a> and the obliging manufacturers of
+pedigrees seem constantly to have derived various families from
+the oldest and most famous blood of Rome. So highly was
+the distinction valued, that men clung to it even in the light of
+the dawning criticism of the fifteenth century. When Pius II.
+was at Viterbo<a name="FNanchor_421_421" id="FNanchor_421_421"></a><a href="#Footnote_421_421" class="fnanchor">[421]</a> he said frankly to the Roman deputies who
+begged him to return, ‘Rome is as much at home as Siena,
+for my House, the Piccolomini, came in early times from the
+capital to Siena, as is proved by the constant use of the names
+Æneas and Sylvius in my family.’ He would probably have
+had no objection to be held a descendant of the Julii. Paul
+II., a Barbo of Venice, found his vanity flattered by deducing
+his House, notwithstanding an adverse pedigree, according to
+which it came from Germany, from the Roman Ahenobarbus,
+who led a colony to Parma, and whose successors were driven
+by party conflicts to migrate to Venice.<a name="FNanchor_421A_421A" id="FNanchor_421A_421A"></a><a href="#Footnote_421A_421A" class="fnanchor">[421A]</a> That the Massimi
+claimed descent from Q. Fabius Maximus, and the Cornaro
+from the Cornelii, cannot surprise us. On the other hand, it is
+a strikingly exceptional fact for the sixteenth century that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a>{183}</span>
+novellist Bandello tried to connect his blood with a noble family
+of Ostrogoths (i. nov. 23).</p>
+
+<p>To return to Rome. The inhabitants, ‘who then called
+themselves Romans,’ accepted greedily the homage which was
+offered them by the rest of Italy. Under Paul II., Sixtus IV.,
+and Alexander VI. magnificent processions formed part of the
+Carnival, representing the scene most attractive to the imagination
+of the time&mdash;the triumph of the Roman Imperator.
+The sentiment of the people expressed itself naturally in this
+shape and others like it. In this mood of public feeling, a
+report arose, that on April 15, 1485, the corpse of a young
+Roman lady of the classical period&mdash;wonderfully beautiful and
+in perfect preservation&mdash;had been discovered.<a name="FNanchor_422_422" id="FNanchor_422_422"></a><a href="#Footnote_422_422" class="fnanchor">[422]</a> Some Lombard
+masons digging out an ancient tomb on an estate of the convent
+of Santa Maria Novella, on the Appian Way beyond the
+Cæcilia Metella, were said to have found a marble sarcophagus
+with the inscription, ‘Julia, daughter of Claudius.’ On this
+basis the following story was built. The Lombards disappeared
+with the jewels and treasure which were found with
+the corpse in the sarcophagus. The body had been coated
+with an antiseptic essence, and was as fresh and flexible as
+that of a girl of fifteen the hour after death. It was said that
+she still kept the colours of life, with eyes and mouth half
+open. She was taken to the palace of the ‘Conservatori’ on
+the Capitol; and then a pilgrimage to see her began. Among
+the crowd were many who came to paint her; ‘for she was
+more beautiful than can be said or written, and, were it said
+or written, it would not be believed by those who had not
+seen her.’ By the order of Innocent VIII. she was secretly
+buried one night outside the Pincian Gate; the empty sarcophagus
+remained in the court of the ‘Conservatori.’ Probably
+a coloured mask of wax or some other material was
+modelled in the classical style on the face of the corpse, with
+which the gilded hair of which we read would harmonise
+admirably. The touching point in the story is not the fact<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a>{184}</span>
+itself, but the firm belief that an ancient body, which was
+now thought to be at last really before men’s eyes, must of
+necessity be far more beautiful than anything of modern
+date.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the material knowledge of old Rome was increased
+by excavations. Under Alexander VI. the so-called
+‘Grotesques,’ that is, the mural decorations of the ancients,
+were discovered, and the Apollo of the Belvedere was found at
+Porto d’Anzo. Under Julius II. followed the memorable discoveries
+of the Laöcoon, of the Venus of the Vatican, of the
+Torso, of the Cleopatra.<a name="FNanchor_423_423" id="FNanchor_423_423"></a><a href="#Footnote_423_423" class="fnanchor">[423]</a> The palaces of the nobles and the
+cardinals began to be filled with ancient statues and fragments.
+Raphael undertook for Leo X. that ideal restoration of the
+whole ancient city which his celebrated letter (1518 or 1519)
+speaks of.<a name="FNanchor_424_424" id="FNanchor_424_424"></a><a href="#Footnote_424_424" class="fnanchor">[424]</a> After a bitter complaint over the devastations
+which had not even then ceased, and which had been particularly
+frequent under Julius II., he beseeches the Pope to protect
+the few relics which were left to testify to the power and
+greatness of that divine soul of antiquity whose memory was
+inspiration to all who were capable of higher things. He then
+goes on with penetrating judgment to lay the foundations of a
+comparative history of art, and concludes by giving the definition
+of an architectural survey which has been accepted since
+his time; he requires the ground plan, section, and elevation
+separately of every building that remained. How archæology
+devoted itself after his day to the study of the venerated city
+and grew into a special science, and how the Vitruvian Academy
+at all events proposed to itself great aims,<a name="FNanchor_425_425" id="FNanchor_425_425"></a><a href="#Footnote_425_425" class="fnanchor">[425]</a> cannot here
+be related. Let us rather pause at the days of Leo X., under
+whom the enjoyment of antiquity combined with all other
+pleasures to give to Roman life a unique stamp and consecration.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a>{185}</span><a name="FNanchor_426_426" id="FNanchor_426_426"></a><a href="#Footnote_426_426" class="fnanchor">[426]</a>
+The Vatican resounded with song and music, and their
+echoes were heard through the city as a call to joy and gladness,
+though Leo did not succeed thereby in banishing care and
+pain from his own life, and his deliberate calculation to prolong
+his days by cheerfulness was frustrated by an early death.<a name="FNanchor_427_427" id="FNanchor_427_427"></a><a href="#Footnote_427_427" class="fnanchor">[427]</a>
+The Rome of Leo, as described by Paolo Giovio, forms a picture
+too splendid to turn away from, unmistakable as are also
+its darker aspects&mdash;the slavery of those who were struggling to
+rise; the secret misery of the prelates, who, notwithstanding
+heavy debts, were forced to live in a style befitting their rank;
+the system of literary patronage, which drove men to be parasites
+or adventurers; and, lastly, the scandalous maladministration
+of the finances of the state.<a name="FNanchor_428_428" id="FNanchor_428_428"></a><a href="#Footnote_428_428" class="fnanchor">[428]</a> Yet the same Ariosto who
+knew and ridiculed all this so well, gives in the sixth satire a
+longing picture of his expected intercourse with the accomplished
+poets who would conduct him through the city of ruins,
+of the learned counsel which he would there find for his own
+literary efforts, and of the treasures of the Vatican library.
+These, he says, and not the long-abandoned hope of Medicean
+protection, were the real baits which attracted him, when he
+was asked to go as Ferrarese ambassador to Rome.</p>
+
+<p>But the ruins within and outside Rome awakened not only
+archæological zeal and patriotic enthusiasm, but an elegiac
+or sentimental melancholy. In Petrarch and Boccaccio we
+find touches of this feeling (pp. 177, 181). Poggio (<a href="#page_181">p. 181</a>)
+often visited the temple of Venus and Rome, in the belief that
+it was that of Castor and Pollux, where the senate used so often
+to meet, and would lose himself in memories of the great orators
+Crassus, Hortensius, Cicero. The language of Pius II.,
+especially in describing Tivoli, has a thoroughly sentimental<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a>{186}</span>
+ring,<a name="FNanchor_429_429" id="FNanchor_429_429"></a><a href="#Footnote_429_429" class="fnanchor">[429]</a> and soon afterwards (1467) appeared the first pictures
+of ruins, with, a commentary by Polifilo.<a name="FNanchor_430_430" id="FNanchor_430_430"></a><a href="#Footnote_430_430" class="fnanchor">[430]</a> Ruins of mighty
+arches and colonnades, half hid in plane-trees, laurels, cypresses,
+and brushwood, figure in his pages. In the sacred legends it
+became the custom, we can hardly say how, to lay the scene of
+the birth of Christ in the ruins of a magnificent palace.<a name="FNanchor_431_431" id="FNanchor_431_431"></a><a href="#Footnote_431_431" class="fnanchor">[431]</a> That
+artificial ruins became afterwards a necessity of landscape
+gardening, is only a practical consequence of this feeling.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a>{187}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-3" id="CHAPTER_III-3"></a>CHAPTER III.<br /><br />
+<small>THE OLD AUTHORS.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">B<small>UT</small> the literary bequests of antiquity, Greek as well as Latin,
+were of far more importance than the architectural, and indeed
+than all the artistic remains which it had left. They were
+held in the most absolute sense to be the springs of all knowledge.
+The literary conditions of that age of great discoveries
+have been often set forth; no more can be here attempted than
+to point out a few less-known features of the picture.<a name="FNanchor_432_432" id="FNanchor_432_432"></a><a href="#Footnote_432_432" class="fnanchor">[432]</a></p>
+
+<p>Great as was the influence of the old writers on the Italian
+mind in the fourteenth century and before, yet that influence
+was due rather to the wide diffusion of what had long been
+known, than to the discovery of much that was new. The
+most popular Latin poets, historians, orators, and letter-writers,
+together with a number of Latin translations of single works
+of Aristotle, Plutarch, and a few other Greek authors, constituted
+the treasure from which a few favoured individuals in
+the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio drew their inspiration.
+The former, as is well known, owned and kept with religious
+care a Greek Homer, which he was unable to read. A complete
+Latin translation of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey,’ though
+a very bad one, was made at Petrarch’s suggestion and with
+Boccaccio’s help by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato.<a name="FNanchor_433_433" id="FNanchor_433_433"></a><a href="#Footnote_433_433" class="fnanchor">[433]</a> But
+with the fifteenth century began the long list of new discoveries,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a>{188}</span>
+the systematic creation of libraries by means of copies,
+and the rapid multiplication of translations from the Greek.<a name="FNanchor_434_434" id="FNanchor_434_434"></a><a href="#Footnote_434_434" class="fnanchor">[434]</a></p>
+
+<p>Had it not been for the enthusiasm of a few collectors of
+that age, who shrank from no effort or privation in their researches,
+we should certainly possess only a small part of the
+literature, especially that of the Greeks, which is now in our
+hands. Pope Nicholas V., when only a simple monk, ran
+deeply into debt through buying manuscripts or having them
+copied. Even then he made no secret of his passion for the
+two great interests of the Renaissance, books and buildings.<a name="FNanchor_435_435" id="FNanchor_435_435"></a><a href="#Footnote_435_435" class="fnanchor">[435]</a>
+As Pope he kept his word. Copyists wrote and spies searched
+for him through half the world. Perotto received 500 ducats
+for the Latin translation of Polybius; Guarino, 1,000 gold
+florins for that of Strabo, and he would have been paid 500
+more but for the death of the Pope. Filelfo was to have received
+10,000 gold florins for a metrical translation of Homer,
+and was only prevented by the Pope’s death from coming from
+Milan to Rome. Nicholas left a collection of 5,000, or, according
+to another way of calculating, of 9,000 volumes,<a name="FNanchor_436_436" id="FNanchor_436_436"></a><a href="#Footnote_436_436" class="fnanchor">[436]</a> for the
+use of the members of the Curia, which became the foundation
+of the library of the Vatican. It was to be preserved in the
+palace itself, as its noblest ornament, like the library of Ptolemy
+Philadelphus at Alexandria. When the plague (1450) drove
+him and his court to Fabriano, whence then, as now, the best
+paper was procured, he took his translators and compilers with
+him, that he might run no risk of losing them.</p>
+
+<p>The Florentine Niccolò Niccoli,<a name="FNanchor_437_437" id="FNanchor_437_437"></a><a href="#Footnote_437_437" class="fnanchor">[437]</a> a member of that accom<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a>{189}</span>plished
+circle of friends which surrounded the elder Cosimo de
+Medici, spent his whole fortune in buying books. At last,
+when his money was all gone, the Medici put their purse at
+his disposal for any sum which his purpose might require.
+We owe to him the completion of Ammianus Marcellinus, of
+the ‘De Oratore’ of Cicero, the text of Lucretius which still
+has most authority, and other works; he persuaded Cosimo to
+buy the best manuscript of Pliny from a monastery at Lübeck.
+With noble confidence he lent his books to those who asked
+for them, allowed all comers to study them in his own house,
+and was ready to converse with the students on what they had
+read. His collection of 800 volumes, valued at 6,000 gold
+florins, passed after his death, through Cosimo’s intervention,
+to the monastery of San Marco, on the condition that it should
+be accessible to the public, and is now one of the jewels of the
+Laurentian library.</p>
+
+<p>Of the two great book-finders, Guarino and Poggio, the
+latter,<a name="FNanchor_438_438" id="FNanchor_438_438"></a><a href="#Footnote_438_438" class="fnanchor">[438]</a> on the occasion of the Council of Constanz and acting
+partly as the agent of Niccoli, searched industriously among
+the abbeys of South Germany. He there discovered six orations
+of Cicero, and the first complete Quintilian, that of St.
+Gall, now at Zürich; in thirty-two days he is said to have
+copied the whole of it in a beautiful handwriting. He was
+able to make important additions to Silius Italicus, Manilius,
+Lucretius, Valerius, Flaccus, Asconius, Pedianus, Columella,
+Celsus, Aulus, Gellius, Statius, and others; and with the help
+of Lionardo Aretino he unearthed the last twelve comedies of
+Plautus, as well as the Verrine orations, the ‘Brutus’ and the
+‘De Oratore’ of Cicero.</p>
+
+<p>The famous Greek, Cardinal Bessarion,<a name="FNanchor_439_439" id="FNanchor_439_439"></a><a href="#Footnote_439_439" class="fnanchor">[439]</a> in whom patriotism
+was mingled with a zeal for letters, collected, at a great
+sacrifice (30,000 gold florins), 600 manuscripts of pagan and
+Christian authors. He then looked round for some receptacle
+where they could safely lie until his unhappy country, if she
+ever regained her freedom, could reclaim her lost literature.
+The Venetian government declared itself ready to erect a suit<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a>{190}</span>able
+building, and to this day the library of St. Mark retains a
+part of these treasures.<a name="FNanchor_440_440" id="FNanchor_440_440"></a><a href="#Footnote_440_440" class="fnanchor">[440]</a></p>
+
+<p>The formation of the celebrated Medicean library has a history
+of its own, into which we cannot here enter. The chief
+collector for Lorenzo Magnifico was Johannes Lascaris. It is
+well known that the collection, after the plundering in the
+year 1494, had to be recovered piecemeal by the Cardinal Giovanni
+Medici, afterwards Leo X.</p>
+
+<p>The library of Urbino,<a name="FNanchor_441_441" id="FNanchor_441_441"></a><a href="#Footnote_441_441" class="fnanchor">[441]</a> now in the Vatican, was wholly the
+work of the great Frederick of Montefeltro (<a href="#page_044">p. 44</a> sqq.). As a
+boy he had begun to collect; in after years he kept thirty or
+forty ‘scrittori’ employed in various places, and spent in the
+course of time no less than 30,000 ducats on the collection. It
+was systematically extended and completed, chiefly by the
+help of Vespasiano, and his account of it forms an ideal picture
+of a library of the Renaissance. At Urbino there were
+catalogues of the libraries of the Vatican, of St. Mark at
+Florence, of the Visconti at Pavia, and even of the library at
+Oxford. It was noted with pride that in richness and com<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a>{191}</span>pleteness
+none could rival Urbino. Theology and the Middle
+Ages were perhaps most fully represented. There was a complete
+Thomas Aquinas, a complete Albertus Magnus, a complete
+Buenaventura. The collection, however, was a many-sided
+one, and included every work on medicine which was then to
+be had. Among the ‘moderns’ the great writers of the fourteenth
+century&mdash;Dante and Boccaccio, with their complete
+works&mdash;occupied the first place. Then followed twenty-five
+select humanists, invariably with both their Latin and Italian
+writings and with all their translations. Among the Greek
+manuscripts the Fathers of the Church far outnumbered the
+rest; yet in the list of the classics we find all the works of
+Sophocles, all of Pindar, and all of Menander. The last must
+have quickly disappeared from Urbino,<a name="FNanchor_442_442" id="FNanchor_442_442"></a><a href="#Footnote_442_442" class="fnanchor">[442]</a> else the philologists
+would have soon edited it. There were men, however, in this
+book-collecting age who raised a warning voice against the
+vagaries of the passion. These were not the enemies of learning,
+but its friends, who feared that harm would come from a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a>{192}</span>
+pursuit which had become a mania. Petrarch himself protested
+against the fashionable folly of a useless heaping up of
+books; and in the same century Giovanni Manzini ridiculed
+Andreolo de Ochis, a septuagenarian from Brescia, who was
+ready to sacrifice house and land, his wife and himself, to add
+to the stores of his library.</p>
+
+<p>We have, further, a good deal of information as to the way
+in which manuscripts and libraries were multiplied.<a name="FNanchor_443_443" id="FNanchor_443_443"></a><a href="#Footnote_443_443" class="fnanchor">[443]</a> The
+purchase of an ancient manuscript, which contained a rare, or
+the only complete, or the only existing text of an old writer,
+was naturally a lucky accident of which we need take no
+further account. Among the professional copyists those who
+understood Greek took the highest place, and it was they especially
+who bore the honourable name of ‘scrittori.’ Their
+number was always limited, and the pay they received very
+large.<a name="FNanchor_444_444" id="FNanchor_444_444"></a><a href="#Footnote_444_444" class="fnanchor">[444]</a> The rest, simply called ‘copisti,’ were partly mere
+clerks who made their living by such work, partly schoolmasters
+and needy men of learning, who desired an addition to
+their income, partly monks, or even nuns, who regarded the
+pursuit as a work pleasing to God. In the early stages of the
+Renaissance the professional copyists were few and untrustworthy;
+their ignorant and dilatory ways were bitterly complained
+of by Petrarch. In the fifteenth century they were
+more numerous, and brought more knowledge to their calling,
+but in accuracy of work they never attained the conscientious
+precision of the old monks. They seem to have done their
+work in a sulky and perfunctory fashion, seldom putting their
+signatures at the foot of the codices, and showed no traces of
+that cheerful humour, or of that proud consciousness of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a>{193}</span>
+beneficent activity, which often surprises us in the French and
+German manuscripts of the same period. This is more curious,
+as the copyists at Rome in the time of Nicholas V. were mostly
+Germans or Frenchmen<a name="FNanchor_445_445" id="FNanchor_445_445"></a><a href="#Footnote_445_445" class="fnanchor">[445]</a>&mdash;‘barbarians’ as the Italian humanists
+called them, probably men who were in search of favours
+at the papal court, and who kept themselves alive meanwhile
+by this means. When Cosimo de’ Medici was in a hurry to
+form a library for his favourite foundation, the Badia below
+Fiesole, he sent for Vespasiano, and received from him the
+advice to give up all thoughts of purchasing books, since those
+which were worth getting could not be had easily, but rather
+to make use of the copyists; whereupon Cosimo bargained to
+pay him so much a day, and Vespasiano, with forty-five writers
+under him, delivered 200 volumes in twenty-two months.<a name="FNanchor_446_446" id="FNanchor_446_446"></a><a href="#Footnote_446_446" class="fnanchor">[446]</a>
+The catalogue of the works to be copied was sent to Cosimo by
+Nicholas V.<a name="FNanchor_447_447" id="FNanchor_447_447"></a><a href="#Footnote_447_447" class="fnanchor">[447]</a> who wrote it with his own hand. Ecclesiastical
+literature and the books needed for the choral services naturally
+held the chief place in the list.</p>
+
+<p>The handwriting was that beautiful modern Italian which
+was already in use in the preceding century, and which makes
+the sight of one of the books of that time a pleasure. Pope
+Nicholas V., Poggio, Giannozzo Manetti, Niccolò Niccoli, and
+other distinguished scholars, themselves wrote a beautiful hand,
+and desired and tolerated none other. The decorative adjuncts,
+even when miniatures formed no part of them, were full of
+taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a>{194}</span>
+with the light and graceful scrolls which begin and end the
+lines. The material used to write on, when the work was
+ordered by great or wealthy people, was always parchment;
+the binding, both in the Vatican and at Urbino, was a uniform
+crimson velvet with silver clasps. Where there was so much
+care to show honour to the contents of a book by the beauty of
+its outward form, it is intelligible that the sudden appearance
+of printed books was greeted at first with anything but favour.
+The envoys of Cardinal Bessarion, when they saw for the first
+time a printed book in the house of Constantino Lascaris,
+laughed at the discovery ‘made among the barbarians in some
+German city,’ and Frederick of Urbino ‘would have been
+ashamed to own a printed book.’<a name="FNanchor_448_448" id="FNanchor_448_448"></a><a href="#Footnote_448_448" class="fnanchor">[448]</a></p>
+
+<p>But the weary copyists&mdash;not those who lived by the trade,
+but the many who were forced to copy a book in order to have
+it&mdash;rejoiced at the German invention,<a name="FNanchor_449_449" id="FNanchor_449_449"></a><a href="#Footnote_449_449" class="fnanchor">[449]</a> ‘notwithstanding the
+praises and encouragements which the poets awarded to caligraphy.’
+It was soon applied in Italy to the multiplication
+first of the Latin and then of the Greek authors, and for a
+long period nowhere but in Italy, yet it spread with by no
+means the rapidity which might have been expected from the
+general enthusiasm for these works. After a while the modern
+relation between author and publisher began to develop itself,<a name="FNanchor_450_450" id="FNanchor_450_450"></a><a href="#Footnote_450_450" class="fnanchor">[450]</a>
+and under Alexander VI., when it was no longer easy to
+destroy a book, as Cosimo could make Filelfo promise to do,<a name="FNanchor_451_451" id="FNanchor_451_451"></a><a href="#Footnote_451_451" class="fnanchor">[451]</a>
+the prohibitive censorship made its appearance.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a>{195}</span></p>
+
+<p>The growth of textual criticism which accompanied the
+advancing study of languages and antiquity, belongs as little
+to the subject of this book as the history of scholarship in
+general. We are here occupied, not with the learning of the
+Italians in itself, but with the reproduction of antiquity in
+literature and life. One word more on the studies themselves
+may still be permissible.</p>
+
+<p>Greek scholarship was chiefly confined to Florence and to
+the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It
+was never so general as Latin scholarship, partly because of
+the far greater difficulties which it involved, partly and still
+more because of the consciousness of Roman supremacy and an
+instinctive hatred of the Greeks more than counterbalanced
+the attractions which Greek literature had for the Italians.<a name="FNanchor_452_452" id="FNanchor_452_452"></a><a href="#Footnote_452_452" class="fnanchor">[452]</a></p>
+
+<p>The impulse which proceeded from Petrarch and Boccaccio,
+superficial as was their own acquaintance with Greek, was
+powerful, but did not tell immediately on their contemporaries;<a name="FNanchor_453_453" id="FNanchor_453_453"></a><a href="#Footnote_453_453" class="fnanchor">[453]</a>
+on the other hand, the study of Greek literature died
+out about the year 1520<a name="FNanchor_454_454" id="FNanchor_454_454"></a><a href="#Footnote_454_454" class="fnanchor">[454]</a> with the last of the colony of learned<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a>{196}</span>
+Greek exiles, and it was a singular piece of fortune that
+northerners like Agricola, Reuchlin, Erasmus, the Stephani,
+and Budæus had meanwhile made themselves masters of the
+language. That colony had begun with Manuel Chrysoloras
+and his relation John, and with George of Trebizond. Then
+followed, about and after the time of the conquest of Constantinople,
+John Argyropulos, Theodore Gaza, Demetrios Chalcondylas,
+who brought up his sons Theophilos and Basilios to
+be excellent Hellenists, Andronikos Kallistos, Marcos Musuros
+and the family of the Lascaris, not to mention others. But
+after the subjection of Greece by the Turks was completed,
+the succession of scholars was maintained only by the sons of
+the fugitives and perhaps here and there by some Candian or
+Cyprian refugee. That the decay of Hellenistic studies began
+about the time of the death of Leo X. was owing partly to a
+general change of intellectual attitude,<a name="FNanchor_455_455" id="FNanchor_455_455"></a><a href="#Footnote_455_455" class="fnanchor">[455]</a> and to a certain satiety
+of classical influences which now made itself felt; but its coincidence
+with the death of the Greek fugitives was not wholly
+a matter of accident. The study of Greek among the Italians
+appears, if we take the year 1500 as our standard, to have been
+pursued with extraordinary zeal. The youths of that day
+learned to speak the language, and half a century later, like
+the Popes Paul III. and Paul IV., they could still do so in their
+old age.<a name="FNanchor_456_456" id="FNanchor_456_456"></a><a href="#Footnote_456_456" class="fnanchor">[456]</a> But this sort of mastery of the study presupposes
+intercourse with native Greeks.</p>
+
+<p>Besides Florence, Rome and Padua nearly always maintained
+paid teachers of Greek, and Verona, Ferrara, Venice, Perugia,
+Pavia and other cities occasional teachers.<a name="FNanchor_457_457" id="FNanchor_457_457"></a><a href="#Footnote_457_457" class="fnanchor">[457]</a> Hellenistic studies<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_197" id="page_197"></a>{197}</span>
+owed a priceless debt to the press of Aldo Manucci at Venice,
+where the most important and voluminous writers were for the
+first time printed in the original. Aldo ventured his all in the
+enterprise; he was an editor and publisher whose like the
+world has rarely seen.<a name="FNanchor_458_458" id="FNanchor_458_458"></a><a href="#Footnote_458_458" class="fnanchor">[458]</a></p>
+
+<p>Along with this classical revival, Oriental studies now
+assumed considerable proportions.<a name="FNanchor_459_459" id="FNanchor_459_459"></a><a href="#Footnote_459_459" class="fnanchor">[459]</a> Dante himself set a high
+value on Hebrew, though we cannot suppose that he understood
+it. From the fifteenth century onwards scholars were no
+longer content merely to speak of it with respect, but applied
+themselves to a thorough study of it. This scientific interest
+in the language was, however, from the beginning either
+furthered or hindered by religious considerations. Poggio,
+when resting from the labours of the Council of Constance,
+learnt Hebrew at that place and at Baden from a baptized
+Jew, whom he describes as ‘stupid, peevish, and ignorant, like
+most converted Jews;’ but he had to defend his conduct
+against Lionardo Bruni, who endeavoured to prove to him
+that Hebrew was useless or even injurious. The controversial
+writings of the great Florentine statesman and scholar, Giannozzo
+Manetti<a name="FNanchor_460_460" id="FNanchor_460_460"></a><a href="#Footnote_460_460" class="fnanchor">[460]</a> (d. 1459) against the Jews afford an early
+instance of a complete mastery of their language and science.
+His son Agnolo was from his childhood instructed in Latin,
+Greek, and Hebrew. The father, at the bidding of Nicholas
+V., translated the Psalms, but had to defend the principles of
+his translation in a work addressed to Alfonso. Commissioned
+by the same Pope, who had offered a reward of 5,000 ducats
+for the discovery of the original Hebrew text of the Evangelist
+Matthew, he made a collection of Hebrew manuscripts, which
+is still preserved in the Vatican, and began a great apologetic
+work against the Jews.<a name="FNanchor_461_461" id="FNanchor_461_461"></a><a href="#Footnote_461_461" class="fnanchor">[461]</a> The study of Hebrew was thus<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_198" id="page_198"></a>{198}</span>
+enlisted in the service of the Church. The Camaldolese monk
+Ambrogio Traversari learnt the language,<a name="FNanchor_462_462" id="FNanchor_462_462"></a><a href="#Footnote_462_462" class="fnanchor">[462]</a> and Pope Sixtus IV.,
+who erected the building for the Vatican library, and added
+to the collection extensive purchases of his own, took into his
+service ‘scrittori’ (<i>librarios</i>) for Hebrew as well as for Greek
+and Latin.<a name="FNanchor_463_463" id="FNanchor_463_463"></a><a href="#Footnote_463_463" class="fnanchor">[463]</a> The study of the language now became more
+general; Hebrew manuscripts were collected, and in some
+libraries, like that of Urbino, formed a specially valuable part
+of the rich treasure there stored up; the printing of Hebrew
+books began in Italy in 1475, and made the study easier both
+to the Italians themselves and to the other nations of Europe,
+who for many years drew their supply from Italy. Soon there
+was no good-sized town where there were not individuals who
+were masters of the language and many anxious to learn it,
+and in 1488 a chair for Hebrew was founded at Bologna, and
+another in 1514 at Rome. The study became so popular that
+it was even preferred to Greek.<a name="FNanchor_464_464" id="FNanchor_464_464"></a><a href="#Footnote_464_464" class="fnanchor">[464]</a><a name="FNanchor_465_465" id="FNanchor_465_465"></a><a href="#Footnote_465_465" class="fnanchor">[465]</a></p>
+
+<p>Among all those who busied themselves with Hebrew in the
+fifteenth century, no one was of more importance than Pico
+della Mirandola. He was not satisfied with a knowledge of
+the Hebrew grammar and Scriptures, but penetrated into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_199" id="page_199"></a>{199}</span>
+Jewish Cabbalah and even made himself familiar with the
+literature of the Talmud. That such pursuits, though they
+may not have gone very far, were at all possible to him, he
+owed to his Jewish teachers. Most of the instruction in
+Hebrew was in fact given by Jews, some of whom, though
+generally not till after conversion to Christianity, became distinguished
+University professors and much-esteemed writers.<a name="FNanchor_466_466" id="FNanchor_466_466"></a><a href="#Footnote_466_466" class="fnanchor">[466]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_200" id="page_200"></a>{200}</span></p>
+
+<p>Among the Oriental languages, Arabic was studied as well
+as Hebrew. The science of medicine, no longer satisfied with
+the older Latin translations of the great Arabian physicians,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_201" id="page_201"></a>{201}</span>
+had constant recourse to the originals, to which an easy access
+was offered by the Venetian consulates in the East, where
+Italian doctors were regularly kept. But the Arabian scholarship
+of the Renaissance is only a feeble echo of the influence
+which Arabian civilisation in the Middle Ages exercised over
+Italy and the whole cultivated world&mdash;an influence which not
+only preceded that of the Renaissance, but in some respects was
+hostile to it, and which did not surrender without a struggle
+the place which it had long and vigorously asserted. Hieronimo
+Ramusio, a Venetian physician, translated a great part of
+Avicenna from the Arabic and died at Damascus in 1486.
+Andrea Mongajo of Belluno,<a name="FNanchor_467_467" id="FNanchor_467_467"></a><a href="#Footnote_467_467" class="fnanchor">[467]</a> a disciple of the same Avicenna,
+lived long at Damascus, learnt Arabic, and improved on his
+master. The Venetian government afterwards appointed him
+as professor of this subject at Padua. The example set by<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_202" id="page_202"></a>{202}</span>
+Venice was followed by other governments. Princes and
+wealthy men rivalled one another in collecting Arabic manuscripts.
+The first Arabian printing-press was begun at Fano
+under Julius II. and consecrated in 1514 under Leo X.<a name="FNanchor_468_468" id="FNanchor_468_468"></a><a href="#Footnote_468_468" class="fnanchor">[468]</a></p>
+
+<p>We must here linger for a moment over Pico della Mirandola,
+before passing on to the general effects of humanism.
+He was the only man who loudly and vigorously defended the
+truth and science of all ages against the one-sided worship of
+classical antiquity.<a name="FNanchor_469_469" id="FNanchor_469_469"></a><a href="#Footnote_469_469" class="fnanchor">[469]</a> He knew how to value not only Averroes
+and the Jewish investigators, but also the scholastic
+writers of the Middle Ages, according to the matter of their
+writings. He seems to hear them say, ‘We shall live for ever,
+not in the schools of word-catchers, but in the circle of the
+wise, where they talk not of the mother of Andromache or of
+the sons of Niobe, but of the deeper causes of things human
+and divine; he who looks closely will see that even the barbarians
+had intelligence (<i>mercurium</i>), not on the tongue but
+in the breast.’ Himself writing a vigorous and not inelegant
+Latin, and a master of clear exposition, he despised the purism
+of pedants and the current over-estimate of borrowed forms,
+especially when joined, as they often are, with one-sidedness,
+and involving indifference to the wider truth of the things
+themselves. Looking at Pico, we can guess at the lofty flight
+which Italian philosophy would have taken had not the
+counter-reformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the
+people.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_203" id="page_203"></a>{203}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-3" id="CHAPTER_IV-3"></a>CHAPTER IV.<br /><br />
+<small>HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">W<small>HO</small> now were those who acted as mediators between their
+own age and a venerated antiquity, and made the latter a chief
+element in the culture of the former?</p>
+
+<p>They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing
+one face to-day and another to-morrow; but they clearly felt
+themselves, and it was fully recognised by their time, that
+they formed a wholly new element in society. The ‘clerici
+vagantes’ of the twelfth century, whose poetry we have already
+referred to (<a href="#page_174">p. 174</a>), may perhaps be taken as their forerunner&mdash;the
+same unstable existence, the same free and more than
+free views of life, and the germs at all events of the same pagan
+tendencies in their poetry. But now, as competitor with the
+whole culture of the Middle Ages, which was essentially clerical
+and was fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilisation,
+founding itself on that which lay on the other side of the
+Middle Ages. Its active representatives became influential<a name="FNanchor_470_470" id="FNanchor_470_470"></a><a href="#Footnote_470_470" class="fnanchor">[470]</a>
+because they knew what the ancients knew, because they tried
+to write as the ancients wrote, because they began to think,
+and soon to feel, as the ancients thought and felt. The tradition
+to which they devoted themselves passed at a thousand points
+into genuine reproduction.</p>
+
+<p>Some modern writers deplore the fact that the germs of a far
+more independent and essentially national culture, such as
+appeared in Florence about the year 1300, were afterwards so
+completely swamped by the humanists.<a name="FNanchor_471_471" id="FNanchor_471_471"></a><a href="#Footnote_471_471" class="fnanchor">[471]</a> There was then, we
+are told, nobody in Florence who could not read; even the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_204" id="page_204"></a>{204}</span>
+donkey-men sang the verses of Dante; the best Italian manuscripts
+which we possess belonged originally to Florentine
+artisans; the publication of a popular encyclopædia, like the
+‘Tesoro’ of Brunette Latini, was then possible; and all this
+was founded on a strength and soundness of character due to
+the universal participation in public affairs, to commerce and
+travel, and to the systematic reprobation of idleness. The
+Florentines, it is urged, were at that time respected and influential
+throughout the whole world, and were called in that
+year, not without reason, by Pope Boniface VIII., ‘the fifth
+element.’ The rapid progress of humanism after the year
+1400 paralysed native impulses. Henceforth men looked to
+antiquity only for the solution of every problem, and consequently
+allowed literature to sink into mere quotation. Nay,
+the very fall of civil freedom is partly to be ascribed to all this,
+since the new learning rested on obedience to authority,
+sacrificed municipal rights to Roman law, and thereby both
+sought and found the favour of the despots.</p>
+
+<p>These charges will occupy us now and then at a later stage
+of our inquiry, when we shall attempt to reduce them to their
+true value, and to weigh the losses against the gains of this
+movement. For the present we must confine ourselves to
+showing how the civilisation even of the vigorous fourteenth
+century necessarily prepared the way for the complete victory
+of humanism, and how precisely the greatest representatives
+of the national Italian spirit were themselves the men who
+opened wide the gate for the measureless devotion to antiquity
+in the fifteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with Dante. If a succession of men of equal genius
+had presided over Italian culture, whatever elements their
+natures might have absorbed from the antique, they still could
+not fail to retain a characteristic and strongly-marked national
+stamp. But neither Italy nor Western Europe produced
+another Dante, and he was and remained the man who first
+thrust antiquity into the foreground of national culture. In
+the ‘Divine Comedy’ he treats the ancient and the Christian
+worlds, not indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one
+another. Just as, at an earlier period of the Middle Ages types
+and antitypes were sought in the history of the Old and New<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_205" id="page_205"></a>{205}</span>
+Testaments, so does Dante constantly bring together a Christian
+and a pagan illustration of the same fact.<a name="FNanchor_472_472" id="FNanchor_472_472"></a><a href="#Footnote_472_472" class="fnanchor">[472]</a> It must be remembered
+that the Christian cycle of history and legend was
+familiar, while the ancient was relatively unknown, was full of
+promise and of interest, and must necessarily have gained the
+upper hand in the competition for public sympathy when there
+was no longer a Dante to hold the balance between the two.</p>
+
+<p>Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays
+chiefly as a great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries
+far rather to the fact that he was a kind of living
+representative of antiquity, that he imitated all styles of Latin
+poetry, endeavoured by his voluminous historical and philosophical
+writings not to supplant but to make known the works
+of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises on matters
+of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is
+unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without
+handbooks. Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his
+Latin writings would bring him fame with his contemporaries
+and with posterity, and thought so little of his Italian poems
+that, as he often tell us, he would gladly have destroyed them
+if he could have succeeded thereby in blotting them out from
+the memory of men.</p>
+
+<p>It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when
+but little was known of the ‘Decameron’<a name="FNanchor_473_473" id="FNanchor_473_473"></a><a href="#Footnote_473_473" class="fnanchor">[473]</a> north of the Alps,
+he was famous all over Europe simply on account of his Latin
+compilations on mythology, geography, and biography.<a name="FNanchor_474_474" id="FNanchor_474_474"></a><a href="#Footnote_474_474" class="fnanchor">[474]</a> One
+of these, ‘De Genealogia Deorum,’ contains in the fourteenth
+and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which he dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_206" id="page_206"></a>{206}</span>cusses
+the position of the then youthful humanism with regard
+to the age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references
+to ‘poesia,’ as closer observation shows that he means thereby
+the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars.<a name="FNanchor_475_475" id="FNanchor_475_475"></a><a href="#Footnote_475_475" class="fnanchor">[475]</a> This it is
+whose enemies he so vigorously combats&mdash;the frivolous ignoramuses
+who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the
+sophistical theologian, to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain,
+and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers,
+to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be
+made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically,
+but clearly enough, who made free with their charges
+of paganism and immorality.<a name="FNanchor_476_476" id="FNanchor_476_476"></a><a href="#Footnote_476_476" class="fnanchor">[476]</a> Then follows the defence of
+poetry, the proof that the poetry of the ancients and of their
+modern followers contains nothing mendacious, the praise of it,
+and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings which
+we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity
+which is intended to repel the dull minds of the ignorant.</p>
+
+<p>And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work,<a name="FNanchor_477_477" id="FNanchor_477_477"></a><a href="#Footnote_477_477" class="fnanchor">[477]</a>
+the writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to
+paganism. The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the
+Early Church had to fight its way among the heathen. Now&mdash;praised
+be Jesus Christ!&mdash;true religion was strengthened,
+paganism destroyed, and the victorious Church in possession
+of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and study
+paganism almost (<i>fere</i>) without danger. Boccaccio, however,
+did not hold this liberal view consistently. The ground of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_207" id="page_207"></a>{207}</span>
+apostasy lay partly in the mobility of his character, partly in
+the still powerful and widespread prejudice that classical pursuits
+were unbecoming in a theologian. To these reasons
+must be added the warning given him in the name of the dead
+Pietro Petroni by the monk Gioacchino Ciani to give up his
+pagan studies under pain of early death. He accordingly
+determined to abandon them, and was only brought back from
+this cowardly resolve by the earnest exhortations of Petrarch,
+and by the latter’s able demonstration that humanism was reconcileable
+with religion.<a name="FNanchor_478_478" id="FNanchor_478_478"></a><a href="#Footnote_478_478" class="fnanchor">[478]</a></p>
+
+<p>There was thus a new cause in the world and a new class of
+men to maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to
+have stopped short in its career of victory, to have restrained
+itself deliberately, and conceded the first place to purely
+national elements of culture. No conviction was more firmly
+rooted in the popular mind, than that antiquity was the highest
+title to glory which Italy possessed.</p>
+
+<p>There was a symbolical ceremony familiar to this generation
+of poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired
+it&mdash;the coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The
+origin of this system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the
+ritual of the ceremony never became fixed. It was a public
+demonstration, an outward and visible expression of literary
+enthusiasm,<a name="FNanchor_479_479" id="FNanchor_479_479"></a><a href="#Footnote_479_479" class="fnanchor">[479]</a> and naturally its form was variable. Dante, for
+instance, seems to have understood it in the sense of a half-religious
+consecration; he desired to assume the wreath in the
+baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other
+Florentine children, he had received baptism.<a name="FNanchor_480_480" id="FNanchor_480_480"></a><a href="#Footnote_480_480" class="fnanchor">[480]</a> He could, says
+his biographer, have anywhere received the crown in virtue of
+his fame, but desired it nowhere but in his native city, and
+therefore died uncrowned. From the same source we learn
+that the usage was till then uncommon, and was held to be
+inherited by the ancient Romans from the Greeks. The most<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_208" id="page_208"></a>{208}</span>
+recent source to which the practices could be referred is to be
+found in the Capitoline contests of musicians, poets, and other
+artists, founded by Domitian in imitation of the Greeks and
+celebrated every five years, which may possibly have survived
+for a time the fall of the Roman Empire; but as few other men
+would venture to crown themselves, as Dante desired to do, the
+question arises, to whom did this office belong? Albertino
+Mussato (<a href="#page_140">p. 140</a>) was crowned at Padua in 1310 by the bishop
+and the rector of the University. The University of Paris, the
+rector of which was then a Florentine (1341), and the municipal
+authorities of Rome, competed for the honour of crowning
+Petrarch. His self-elected examiner, King Robert of Anjou,
+would gladly have performed the ceremony at Naples, but
+Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the senator
+of Rome. This honour was long the highest object of ambition,
+and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian
+magistrate.<a name="FNanchor_481_481" id="FNanchor_481_481"></a><a href="#Footnote_481_481" class="fnanchor">[481]</a> Then came the Italian journey of Charles IV.,
+whom it amused to flatter the vanity of ambitious men, and
+impress the ignorant multitude by means of gorgeous ceremonies.
+Starting from the fiction that the coronation of poets
+was a prerogative of the old Roman emperors, and consequently
+was no less his own, he crowned (May 15, 1355) the Florentine
+scholar, Zanobi della Strada, at Pisa, to the annoyance of
+Petrarch, who complained that ‘the barbarian laurel had dared
+adorn the man loved by the Ausonian Muses,’ and to the great
+disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognise this ‘laurea
+Pisana’ as legitimate.<a name="FNanchor_482_482" id="FNanchor_482_482"></a><a href="#Footnote_482_482" class="fnanchor">[482]</a> Indeed it might be fairly asked with
+what right this stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in
+judgment on the merits of Italian poets. But from henceforth
+the emperors crowned poets wherever they went on their travels;
+and in the fifteenth century the popes and other princes
+assumed the same right, till at last no regard whatever was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_209" id="page_209"></a>{209}</span>
+paid to place or circumstances. In Rome, under Sixtus IV.,
+the academy<a name="FNanchor_483_483" id="FNanchor_483_483"></a><a href="#Footnote_483_483" class="fnanchor">[483]</a> of Pomponius Lætus gave the wreath on its own
+authority. The Florentines had the good taste not to crown
+their famous humanists till after death. Carlo Aretino and
+Lionardo Aretino were thus crowned; the eulogy of the first
+was pronounced by Matteo Palmieri, of the latter by Giannozzo
+Manetti, before the members of the council and the whole
+people, the orator standing at the head of the bier, on which
+the corpse lay clad in a silken robe.<a name="FNanchor_484_484" id="FNanchor_484_484"></a><a href="#Footnote_484_484" class="fnanchor">[484]</a> Carlo Aretino was
+further honoured by a tomb in Santa Croce, which is among
+the most beautiful in the whole course of the Renaissance.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_210" id="page_210"></a>{210}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-3" id="CHAPTER_V-3"></a>CHAPTER V.<br /><br />
+<small>THE UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> influence of antiquity on culture, of which we have now
+to speak, presupposes that the new learning had gained possession
+of the universities. This was so, but by no means to the
+extent and with the results which might have been expected.</p>
+
+<p>Few of the Italian universities<a name="FNanchor_485_485" id="FNanchor_485_485"></a><a href="#Footnote_485_485" class="fnanchor">[485]</a> show themselves in their
+full vigour till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when
+the increase of wealth rendered a more systematic care for
+education possible. At first there were generally three sorts of
+professorships&mdash;one for civil law, another for canonical law,
+the third for medicine; in course of time professorships of
+rhetoric, of philosophy, and of astronomy were added, the last
+commonly, though not always, identical with astrology. The
+salaries varied greatly in different cases. Sometimes a capital
+sum was paid down. With the spread of culture competition
+became so active that the different universities tried to entice
+away distinguished teachers from one another, under which
+circumstances Bologna is said to have sometimes devoted the
+half of its public income (20,000 ducats) to the university. The
+appointments were as a rule made only for a certain time,<a name="FNanchor_486_486" id="FNanchor_486_486"></a><a href="#Footnote_486_486" class="fnanchor">[486]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_211" id="page_211"></a>{211}</span>
+sometimes for only half a year, so that the teachers were
+forced to lead a wandering life, like actors. Appointments for
+life were, however, not unknown. Sometimes the promise was
+exacted not to teach elsewhere what had already been taught
+at one place. There were also voluntary, unpaid professors.</p>
+
+<p>Of the chairs which have been mentioned, that of rhetoric
+was especially sought by the humanist; yet it depended only
+on his familiarity with the matter of ancient learning whether
+or no he could aspire to those of law, medicine, philosophy, or astronomy.
+The inward conditions of the science of the day were
+as variable as the outward conditions of the teacher. Certain
+jurists and physicians received by far the largest salaries of all,
+the former chiefly as consulting lawyers for the suits and
+claims of the state which employed them. In Padua a lawyer
+of the fifteenth century received a salary of 1,000 ducats,<a name="FNanchor_487_487" id="FNanchor_487_487"></a><a href="#Footnote_487_487" class="fnanchor">[487]</a> and
+it was proposed to appoint a celebrated physician with a yearly
+payment of 2,000 ducats, and the right of private practice,<a name="FNanchor_488_488" id="FNanchor_488_488"></a><a href="#Footnote_488_488" class="fnanchor">[488]</a> the
+same man having previously received 700 gold florins at Pisa.
+When the jurist Bartolommeo Socini, professor at Pisa, accepted
+a Venetian appointment at Padua, and was on the point
+of starting on his journey, he was arrested by the Florentine
+government and only released on payment of bail to the
+amount of 18,000 gold florins.<a name="FNanchor_489_489" id="FNanchor_489_489"></a><a href="#Footnote_489_489" class="fnanchor">[489]</a> The high estimation in which
+these branches of science were held makes it intelligible why
+distinguished philologists turned their attention to law and
+medicine, while on the other hand specialists were more and
+more compelled to acquire something of a wide literary culture.
+We shall presently have occasion to speak of the work of the
+humanists in other departments of practical life.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the position of the philologists, as such, even
+where the salary was large,<a name="FNanchor_490_490" id="FNanchor_490_490"></a><a href="#Footnote_490_490" class="fnanchor">[490]</a> and did not exclude other sources
+of income, was on the whole uncertain and temporary, so that
+one and the same teacher could be connected with a great<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_212" id="page_212"></a>{212}</span>
+variety of institutions. It is evident that change was desired
+for its own sake, and something fresh expected from each new
+comer, as was natural at a time when science was in the
+making, and consequently depended to no small degree on the
+personal influence of the teacher. Nor was it always the case
+that a lecturer on classical authors really belonged to the
+university of the town where he taught. Communication was
+so easy, and the supply of suitable accommodation, in monasteries
+and elsewhere, was so abundant, that a private undertaking
+was often practicable. In the first decades of the
+fifteenth century,<a name="FNanchor_491_491" id="FNanchor_491_491"></a><a href="#Footnote_491_491" class="fnanchor">[491]</a> when the University of Florence was at its
+greatest brilliance, when the courtiers of Eugenius IV., and
+perhaps even of Martin V. thronged to the lecture-rooms, when
+Carlo Aretino and Filelfo were competing for the largest
+audience, there existed, not only an almost complete university
+among the Augustinians of Santo Spirito, not only an association
+of scholars among the Camaldolesi of the Angeli, but
+individuals of mark, either singly or in common, arranged to
+provide philosophical and philological teaching for themselves
+and others. Linguistic and antiquarian studies in Rome had
+next to no connection with the university (Sapienza), and depended
+almost exclusively either on the favour of individual
+popes and prelates, or on the appointments made in the Papal
+chancery. It was not till Leo X. (1513) that the great reorganisation
+of the Sapienza took place, with its eighty-eight
+lecturers, among whom there were able men, though none of
+the first rank, at the head of the archæological department.
+But this new brilliancy was of short duration. We have
+already spoken briefly of the Greek and Hebrew professorships
+in Italy (pp. 195 sqq.).</p>
+
+<p>To form an accurate picture of the method of scientific
+instruction, then pursued, we must turn away our eyes as far as
+possible from our present academic system. Personal intercourse
+between the teachers and the taught, public disputations,
+the constant use of Latin and often of Greek, the frequent
+changes of lecturers and the scarcity of books, gave the studies<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_213" id="page_213"></a>{213}</span>
+of that time a colour which we cannot represent to ourselves
+without effort.</p>
+
+<p>There were Latin schools in every town of the least importance,
+not by any means merely as preparatory to higher
+education, but because, next to reading, writing, and arithmetic,
+the knowledge of Latin was a necessity; and after
+Latin came logic. It is to be noted particularly that these
+schools did not depend on the Church, but on the municipality;
+some of them, too, were merely private enterprises.</p>
+
+<p>This school system, directed by a few distinguished humanists,
+not only attained a remarkable perfection of organisation,
+but became an instrument of higher education in the modern
+sense of the phrase. With the education of the children of
+two princely houses in North Italy institutions were connected
+which may be called unique of their kind.</p>
+
+<p>At the court of Giovan Francesco Gonzaga at Mantua (reg.
+1407 to 1444) appeared the illustrious Vittorino da Feltre<a name="FNanchor_492_492" id="FNanchor_492_492"></a><a href="#Footnote_492_492" class="fnanchor">[492]</a> (b.
+1397, d. 1446), otherwise Vittore dai Rambaldoni&mdash;he preferred
+to be called a Mantuan rather than a Feltrese&mdash;one of those
+men who devote their whole life to an object for which their
+natural gifts constitute a special vocation. He wrote almost
+nothing, and finally destroyed the few poems of his youth
+which he had long kept by him. He studied with unwearied
+industry; he never sought after titles, which, like all outward
+distinctions, he scorned; and he lived on terms of the closest
+friendship with teachers, companions, and pupils, whose goodwill
+he knew how to preserve. He excelled in bodily no less
+than in mental exercises, was an admirable rider, dancer, and
+fencer, wore the same clothes in winter as in summer, walked
+in nothing but sandals even during the severest frost, and lived
+so that till his old age he was never ill. He so restrained his
+passions, his natural inclination to sensuality and anger, that
+he remained chaste his whole life through, and hardly ever
+hurt any one by a hard word.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_214" id="page_214"></a>{214}</span></p>
+
+<p>He directed the education of the sons and daughters of the
+princely house, and one of the latter became under his care a
+woman of learning. When his reputation extended far and
+wide over Italy, and members of great and wealthy families
+came from long distances, even from Germany, in search of his
+instructions, Gonzaga was not only willing that they should be
+received, but seems to have held it an honour for Mantua to be
+the chosen school of the aristocratic world. Here for the first
+time gymnastics and all noble bodily exercises were treated
+along with scientific instruction as indispensable to a liberal
+education. Besides these pupils came others, whose instruction
+Vittorino probably held to be his highest earthly aim, the
+gifted poor, often as many as seventy together, whom he supported
+in his house and educated, ‘per l’amore di Dio,’ along
+with the high-born youths who here learned to live under the
+same roof with untitled genius. The greater the crowd of
+pupils who flocked to Mantua, the more teachers were needed
+to impart the instruction which Vittorino only directed&mdash;an
+instruction which aimed at giving each pupil that sort of learning
+which he was most fitted to receive. Gonzaga paid him a
+yearly salary of 240 gold florins, built him besides a splendid
+house, ‘La Giocosa,’ in which the master lived with his
+scholars, and contributed to the expenses caused by the poorer
+pupils. What was still further needed Vittorino begged from
+princes and wealthy people, who did not always, it is true,
+give a ready ear to his entreaties, and forced him by their
+hardheartedness to run into debt. Yet in the end he found
+himself in comfortable circumstances, owned a small property
+in town and an estate in the country, where he stayed with his
+pupils during the holidays, and possessed a famous collection
+of books which he gladly lent or gave away, though he was not
+a little angry when they were taken without leave. In the
+early morning he read religious books, then scourged himself
+and went to church; his pupils were also compelled to go to
+church, like him, to confess once a month, and to observe fast
+days most strictly. His pupils respected him, but trembled
+before his glance. When they did anything wrong, they were
+punished immediately after the offence. He was honoured by
+all contemporaries no less than by his pupils, and people took
+the journey to Mantua merely to see him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_215" id="page_215"></a>{215}</span></p>
+
+<p>More stress was laid on pure scholarship by Guarino of
+Verona<a name="FNanchor_493_493" id="FNanchor_493_493"></a><a href="#Footnote_493_493" class="fnanchor">[493]</a> (1370-1460), who in the year 1429 was called to
+Ferrara by Niccolò d’Este to educate his son Lionello, and
+who, when his pupil was nearly grown up in 1436, began to
+teach at the university as professor of eloquence and of the
+ancient languages. While still acting as tutor to Lionello, he
+had many other pupils from various parts of the country, and
+in his own house a select class of poor scholars, whom he partly
+or wholly supported. His evening hours till far into the
+night were devoted to hearing lessons or to instructive conversation.
+His house, too, was the home of a strict religion
+and morality. Guarino was a student of the Bible, and lived
+in friendly intercourse with pious contemporaries, though he
+did not hesitate to write a defence of pagan literature against
+them. It signified little to him or to Vittorino that most of
+the humanists of their day deserved small praise in the matter
+of morals or religion. It is inconceivable how Guarino, with
+all the daily work which fell upon him, still found time to
+write translations from the Greek and voluminous original
+works.<a name="FNanchor_494_494" id="FNanchor_494_494"></a><a href="#Footnote_494_494" class="fnanchor">[494]</a> He was wanting in that wise self-restraint and kindly
+sweetness which graced the character of Vittorino, and was
+easily betrayed into a violence of temper which led to frequent
+quarrels with his learned contemporaries.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_216" id="page_216"></a>{216}</span></p>
+
+<p>Not only in these two courts, but generally throughout Italy,
+the education of the princely families was in part and for
+certain years in the hands of the humanists, who thereby
+mounted a step higher in the aristocratic world. The writing
+of treatises on the education of princes, formerly the business
+of theologians, fell now within their province.</p>
+
+<p>From the time of Pier Paolo Vergerio the Italian princes
+were well taken care of in this respect, and the custom was
+transplanted into Germany by Æneas Sylvius, who addressed
+detailed exhortations to two young German princes of the
+House of Habsburg<a name="FNanchor_495_495" id="FNanchor_495_495"></a><a href="#Footnote_495_495" class="fnanchor">[495]</a> on the subject of their further education,
+in which they are both urged, as might be expected, to cultivate
+and nurture humanism, but are chiefly bidden to make themselves
+able rulers and vigorous, hardy warriors. Perhaps Æneas
+was aware that in addressing these youths he was talking in
+the air, and therefore took measures to put his treatise into
+public circulation. But the relations of the humanists to the
+rulers will be discussed separately.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_217" id="page_217"></a>{217}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI-3" id="CHAPTER_VI-3"></a>CHAPTER VI.<br /><br />
+<small>THE FURTHERERS OF HUMANISM.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">W<small>E</small> have here first to speak of those citizens, mostly Florentines,
+who made antiquarian interests one of the chief objects
+of their lives, and who were themselves either distinguished
+scholars, or else distinguished <i>dilettanti</i> who maintained the
+scholars. (Comp. pp. 193 sqq.) They were of peculiar significance
+during the period of transition at the beginning of the
+fifteenth century, since it was in them that humanism first
+showed itself practically as an indispensable element in daily
+life. It was not till after this time that the popes and princes
+began seriously to occupy themselves with it.</p>
+
+<p>Niccolò Niccoli and Giannozzo Manetti have been already
+spoken of more than once. Niccoli is described to us by Vespasiano<a name="FNanchor_496_496" id="FNanchor_496_496"></a><a href="#Footnote_496_496" class="fnanchor">[496]</a>
+as a man who would tolerate nothing around him out
+of harmony with his own classical spirit. His handsome long-robed
+figure, his kindly speech, his house adorned with the
+noblest remains of antiquity, made a singular impression. He
+was scrupulously cleanly in everything, most of all at table,
+where ancient vases and crystal goblets stood before him on
+the whitest linen.<a name="FNanchor_497_497" id="FNanchor_497_497"></a><a href="#Footnote_497_497" class="fnanchor">[497]</a> The way in which he won over a pleasure-loving
+young Florentine to intellectual interests is too charming
+not to be here described.<a name="FNanchor_498_498" id="FNanchor_498_498"></a><a href="#Footnote_498_498" class="fnanchor">[498]</a> Piero de’ Pazzi, son of a distinguished
+merchant, and himself destined to the same calling, fair to
+behold, and much given to the pleasures of the world, thought
+about anything rather than literature. One day, as he was
+passing the Palazzo del Podestà,<a name="FNanchor_499_499" id="FNanchor_499_499"></a><a href="#Footnote_499_499" class="fnanchor">[499]</a> Niccolò called the young man<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_218" id="page_218"></a>{218}</span>
+to him, and although they had never before exchanged a word,
+the youth obeyed the call of one so respected. Niccolò asked
+him who his father was. He answered, ‘Messer Andrea de’
+Pazzi.’ When he was further asked what his pursuit was,
+Piero replied, as young people are wont to do, ‘I enjoy myself’
+(‘attendo a darmi buon tempo’). Niccolò said to him, ‘As son
+of such a father, and so fair to look upon, it is a shame that
+thou knowest nothing of the Latin language, which would be
+so great an ornament to thee. If thou learnest it not, thou
+wilt be good for nothing, and as soon as the flower of youth is
+over, wilt be a man of no consequence’ (<i>virtù</i>). When Piero
+heard this, he straightway perceived that it was true, and said
+that he would gladly take pains to learn, if only he had a
+teacher. Whereupon Niccolò answered that he would see to
+that. And he found him a learned man for Latin and Greek,
+named Pontano, whom Piero treated as one of his own house,
+and to whom he paid 100 gold florins a year. Quitting all the
+pleasures in which he had hitherto lived, he studied day and
+night, and became a friend of all learned men and a noble-minded
+statesman. He learned by heart the whole ‘Æneid’
+and many speeches of Livy, chiefly on the way between
+Florence and his country house at Trebbio.<a name="FNanchor_500_500" id="FNanchor_500_500"></a><a href="#Footnote_500_500" class="fnanchor">[500]</a> Antiquity was
+represented in another and higher sense by Giannozzo Manetti
+(1393-1459).<a name="FNanchor_501_501" id="FNanchor_501_501"></a><a href="#Footnote_501_501" class="fnanchor">[501]</a> Precocious from his first years, he was hardly<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_219" id="page_219"></a>{219}</span>
+more than a child when he had finished his apprenticeship in
+commerce, and became book-keeper in a bank. But soon the
+life he led seemed to him empty and perishable, and he began
+to yearn after science, through which alone man can secure
+immortality. He then busied himself with books as few laymen
+had done before him, and became, as has been said
+(<a href="#page_209">p. 209</a>), one of the most profound scholars of his time. When
+appointed by the government as its representative magistrate
+and tax-collector at Pescia and Pistoja, he fulfilled his duties
+in accordance with the lofty ideal with which his religious
+feeling and humanistic studies combined to inspire him. He
+succeeded in collecting the most unpopular taxes which the
+Florentine state imposed, and declined payment for his services.
+As provincial governor he refused all presents, abhorred
+all bribes, checked gambling, kept the country well
+supplied with corn, required from his subordinates strict obedience
+and thorough disinterestedness, was indefatigable in
+settling law-suits amicably, and did wonders in calming inflamed
+passions by his goodness. The Pistojese loved and
+reverenced him as a saint, and were never able to discover to
+which of the two political parties he leaned; when his term of
+office was over, both sent ambassadors to Florence to beg that
+it might be prolonged. As if to symbolise the common rights
+and interests of all, he spent his leisure hours in writing the
+history of the city, which was preserved, bound in a purple
+cover, as a sacred relic in the town-hall.<a name="FNanchor_502_502" id="FNanchor_502_502"></a><a href="#Footnote_502_502" class="fnanchor">[502]</a> When he took his
+leave the city presented him with a banner bearing the municipal
+arms and a splendid silver helmet. On diplomatic missions
+to Venice, Rome, and King Alfonso, Manetti represented,
+as at Pistoja, the interests of his native city, watching vigilantly
+over its honour, but declining the distinctions which were
+offered to him, obtained great glory by his speeches and negotiations,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_220" id="page_220"></a>{220}</span>
+and acquired by his prudence and foresight the name
+of a prophet.</p>
+
+<p>For further information as to the learned citizens of Florence
+at this period the reader must all the more be referred to
+Vespasiano, who knew them all personally, because the tone
+and atmosphere in which he writes, and the terms and conditions
+on which he mixed in their society, are of even more
+importance than the facts which he records. Even in a translation,
+and still more in the brief indications to which we are
+here compelled to limit ourselves, this chief merit of his book
+is lost. Without being a great writer, he was thoroughly
+familiar with the subject he wrote on, and had a deep sense of
+its intellectual significance.</p>
+
+<p>If we seek to analyse the charm which the Medici of the
+fifteenth century, especially Cosimo the Elder (d. 1464) and
+Lorenzo the Magnificent (d. 1492) exercised over Florence and
+over all their contemporaries, we shall find that it lay less
+in their political capacity than in their leadership in the culture
+of the age. A man in Cosimo’s position&mdash;a great merchant
+and party leader, who also had on his side all the thinkers,
+writers, and investigators, a man who was the first of the
+Florentines by birth and the first of the Italians by culture&mdash;such
+a man was to all intents and purposes already a prince.
+To Cosimo belongs the special glory of recognising in the
+Platonic philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of
+thought,<a name="FNanchor_503_503" id="FNanchor_503_503"></a><a href="#Footnote_503_503" class="fnanchor">[503]</a> of inspiring his friends with the same belief, and
+thus of fostering within humanistic circles themselves another
+and a higher resuscitation of antiquity. The story is known
+to us minutely.<a name="FNanchor_504_504" id="FNanchor_504_504"></a><a href="#Footnote_504_504" class="fnanchor">[504]</a> It all hangs on the calling of the learned<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_221" id="page_221"></a>{221}</span>
+Johannes Argyropulos, and on the personal enthusiasm of
+Cosimo himself in his last years, which was such, that the
+great Marsilio Ficino could style himself, as far as Platonism
+was concerned, the spiritual son of Cosimo. Under Pietro
+Medici, Ficino was already at the head of a school; to him
+Pietro’s son and Cosimo’s grandson, the illustrious Lorenzo,
+came over from the Peripatetics. Among his most distinguished
+fellow-scholars were Bartolommeo Valori, Donato
+Acciajuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini. The enthusiastic teacher
+declares in several passages of his writings that Lorenzo had
+sounded all the depths of the Platonic philosophy, and had
+uttered his conviction that without Plato it would be hard to
+be a good Christian or a good citizen. The famous band of
+scholars which surrounded Lorenzo was united together, and
+distinguished from all other circles of the kind, by this passion
+for a higher and idealistic philosophy. Only in such a world
+could a man like Pico della Mirandola feel happy. But perhaps
+the best thing of all that can be said about it is, that,
+with all this worship of antiquity, Italian poetry found here a
+sacred refuge, and that of all the rays of light which streamed
+from the circle of which Lorenzo was the centre, none was
+more powerful than this. As a statesman, let each man judge
+him as he pleases; a foreigner will hesitate to pronounce what
+was due to human guilt and what to circumstances in the fate
+of Florence, but no more unjust charge was ever made than
+that in the field of culture Lorenzo was the protector of Mediocrity,
+that through his fault Lionardo da Vinci and the mathematician
+Fra Luca Pacciolo lived abroad, and that Toscanella,
+Vespucci, and others at least remained unsupported. He was
+not, indeed, a man of universal mind; but of all the great men
+who have striven to favour and promote spiritual interests, few
+certainly have been so many-sided, and in none probably was
+the inward need to do so equally deep.</p>
+
+<p>The age in which we live is loud enough in proclaiming the
+worth of culture, and especially of the culture of antiquity.
+But the enthusiastic devotion to it, the recognition that the
+need of it is the first and greatest of all needs, is nowhere to be
+found but among the Florentines of the fifteenth and the early
+part of the sixteenth centuries. On this point we have in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_222" id="page_222"></a>{222}</span>direct
+proof which precludes all doubt. It would not have
+been so common to give the daughters of the house a share in
+the same studies, had they not been held to be the noblest of
+earthly pursuits; exile would not have been turned into a
+happy retreat, as was done by Palla Strozzi; nor would men
+who indulged in every conceivable excess have retained the
+strength and the spirit to write critical treatises on the ‘Natural
+History’ of Pliny like Filippo Strozzi.<a name="FNanchor_505_505" id="FNanchor_505_505"></a><a href="#Footnote_505_505" class="fnanchor">[505]</a> Our business here is
+not to deal out either praise or blame, but to understand the
+spirit of the age in all its vigorous individuality.</p>
+
+<p>Besides Florence, there were many cities of Italy where
+individuals and social circles devoted all their energies to the
+support of humanism and the protection of the scholars who
+lived among them. The correspondence of that period is full
+of references to personal relations of this kind.<a name="FNanchor_506_506" id="FNanchor_506_506"></a><a href="#Footnote_506_506" class="fnanchor">[506]</a> The feeling of
+the instructed classes set strongly and almost exclusively in
+this direction.</p>
+
+<p>But it is now time to speak of humanism at the Italian courts.
+The natural alliance between the despot and the scholar, each
+relying solely on his personal talent, has already been touched
+upon (<a href="#page_009">p. 9</a>); that the latter should avowedly prefer the princely
+courts to the free cities, was only to be expected from the higher
+pay which they there received. At a time when the great
+Alfonso of Aragon seemed likely to become master of all Italy,
+Æneas Sylvius wrote to another citizen of Siena:<a name="FNanchor_507_507" id="FNanchor_507_507"></a><a href="#Footnote_507_507" class="fnanchor">[507]</a> ‘I had rather
+that Italy attained peace under his rule than under that of the
+free cities, for kingly generosity rewards excellence of every
+kind.<a name="FNanchor_508_508" id="FNanchor_508_508"></a><a href="#Footnote_508_508" class="fnanchor">[508]</a> Too much stress has latterly been laid on the unworthy<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_223" id="page_223"></a>{223}</span>
+side of this relation, and the mercenary flattery to which it
+gave rise, just as formerly the eulogies of the humanists led to a
+too favourable judgment on their patrons. Taking all things
+together, it is greatly to the honour of the latter that they felt
+bound to place themselves at the head of the culture of their
+age and country, one-sided though this culture was. In some
+of the popes,<a name="FNanchor_509_509" id="FNanchor_509_509"></a><a href="#Footnote_509_509" class="fnanchor">[509]</a> the fearlessness of the consequences to which the
+new learning might lead strikes us as something truly, but unconsciously,
+imposing. Nicholas V. was confident of the future
+of the Church, since thousands of learned men supported her.
+Pius II. was far from making such splendid sacrifices for
+humanism as were made by Nicholas, and the poets who frequented
+his court were few in number; but he himself was
+much more the personal head of the republic of letters than his
+predecessor, and enjoyed his position without the least misgiving.
+Paul II. was the first to dread and mistrust the culture of
+his secretaries, and his three successors, Sixtus, Innocent, and
+Alexander, accepted dedications and allowed themselves to be
+sung to the hearts’ content of the poets&mdash;there even existed a
+‘Borgiad,’ probably in hexameters<a name="FNanchor_510_510" id="FNanchor_510_510"></a><a href="#Footnote_510_510" class="fnanchor">[510]</a>&mdash;but were too busy elsewhere,
+and too occupied in seeking other foundations for their
+power, to trouble themselves much about the poet-scholars.
+Julius II. found poets to eulogise him, because he himself was
+no mean subject for poetry (<a href="#page_117">p. 117</a>), but he does not seem to
+have troubled himself much about them. He was followed by
+Leo X., ‘as Romulus by Numa’&mdash;in other words after the warlike
+turmoil of the first pontificate, a new one was hoped for
+wholly given to the muses. The enjoyment of elegant Latin
+prose and melodious verse was part of the programme of Le<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_224" id="page_224"></a>{224}</span>o’s
+life, and his patronage certainly had the result that his Latin
+poets have left us a living picture of that joyous and brilliant
+spirit of the Leonine days, with which the biography of Jovius
+is filled, in countless epigrams, elegies, odes, and orations.<a name="FNanchor_511_511" id="FNanchor_511_511"></a><a href="#Footnote_511_511" class="fnanchor">[511]</a> Probably
+in all European history there is no prince who, in proportion
+to the few striking events of his life, has received such
+manifold homage. The poets had access to him chiefly about
+noon, when the musicians had ceased playing;<a name="FNanchor_512_512" id="FNanchor_512_512"></a><a href="#Footnote_512_512" class="fnanchor">[512]</a> but one of the
+best among them<a name="FNanchor_513_513" id="FNanchor_513_513"></a><a href="#Footnote_513_513" class="fnanchor">[513]</a> tells us how they also pursued him when he
+walked in his garden or withdrew to the privacy of his chamber,
+and if they failed to catch him there, would try to win him
+with a mendicant ode or elegy, filled, as usual, with the whole
+population of Olympus.<a name="FNanchor_514_514" id="FNanchor_514_514"></a><a href="#Footnote_514_514" class="fnanchor">[514]</a> For Leo, prodigal of his money, and
+disliking to be surrounded by any but cheerful faces, displayed
+a generosity in his gifts which was fabulously exaggerated
+in the hard times that followed.<a name="FNanchor_515_515" id="FNanchor_515_515"></a><a href="#Footnote_515_515" class="fnanchor">[515]</a> His reorganisation of the
+Sapienza (<a href="#page_212">p. 212</a>) has been already spoken of. In order not to
+underrate Leo’s influence on humanism we must guard against
+being misled by the toy-work that was mixed up with it, and
+must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the apparent irony
+with which he himself sometimes treated these matters (<a href="#page_157">p. 157</a>).
+Our judgment must rather dwell on the countless spiritual
+possibilities which are included in the word ‘stimulus,’ and
+which, though they cannot be measured as a whole, can still,
+on closer study, be actually followed out in particular cases.
+Whatever influence in Europe the Italian humanists have had
+since 1520 depends in some way or other on the impulse which
+was given by Leo. He was the Pope who in granting per<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_225" id="page_225"></a>{225}</span>mission
+to print the newly found Tacitus,<a name="FNanchor_516_516" id="FNanchor_516_516"></a><a href="#Footnote_516_516" class="fnanchor">[516]</a> could say that the
+great writers were a rule of life and a consolation in misfortune;
+that helping learned men and obtaining excellent books had
+ever been one of his highest aims; and that he now thanked
+heaven that he could benefit the human race by furthering the
+publication of this book.</p>
+
+<p>The sack of Rome in the year 1527 scattered the scholars no
+less than the artists in every direction, and spread the fame
+of the great departed Mæcenas to the furthest boundaries of
+Italy.</p>
+
+<p>Among the secular princes of the fifteenth century, none
+displayed such enthusiasm for antiquity as Alfonso the Great of
+Aragon, King of Naples (see p. 35). It appears that his zeal
+was thoroughly unaffected, and that the monuments and
+writings of the ancient world made upon him, from the time of
+his arrival in Italy, an impression deep and powerful enough to
+reshape his life. Possibly he was influenced by the example of
+his ancestor Robert, Petrarch’s great patron, whom he may
+have wished to rival or surpass. With strange readiness he
+surrendered the stubborn Aragon to his brother, and devoted
+himself wholly to his new possessions. He had in his service,<a name="FNanchor_517_517" id="FNanchor_517_517"></a><a href="#Footnote_517_517" class="fnanchor">[517]</a>
+either successively or together, George of Trebizond, the younger
+Chrysoloras, Lorenzo Valla, Bartolommeo Facio and Antonio
+Panormita, of whom the two latter were his historians; Panormita
+daily instructed the King and his court in Livy, even during
+military expeditions. These men cost him yearly 20,000 gold
+florins. He gave Panormita 1,000 for his work: Facio received
+for the ‘Historia Alfonsi,’ besides a yearly income of 500 ducats,
+a present of 1,500 more when it was finished, with the words,
+‘It is not given to pay you, for your work would not be
+paid for if I gave you the fairest of my cities; but in time I
+hope to satisfy you.’<a name="FNanchor_518_518" id="FNanchor_518_518"></a><a href="#Footnote_518_518" class="fnanchor">[518]</a> When he took Giannozzo Manetti as his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_226" id="page_226"></a>{226}</span>
+secretary on the most brilliant conditions, he said to him, ‘My
+last crust I will share with you.’ When Giannozzo first came
+to bring the congratulations of the Florentine government on
+the marriage of Prince Ferrante, the impression he made was
+so great, that the King sat motionless on the throne, ‘like a
+brazen statue, and did not even brush away a fly, which had
+settled on his nose at the beginning of the oration.’ In restoring
+the castle, he took Vitruvius as his guide; wherever he went,
+he had the ancient classics with him; he looked on a day as
+lost in which he had read nothing; when he was reading, he
+suffered no disturbance, not even the sound of music; and he
+despised all contemporary princes who were not either scholars
+or the patrons of learning. His favourite haunt seems to have
+been the library of the castle at Naples, which he opened himself
+if the librarian was absent, and where he would sit at a
+window overlooking the bay, and listen to learned debates on
+the Trinity. For he was profoundly religious, and had the
+Bible, as well as Livy and Seneca, read to him, till after fourteen
+perusals he knew it almost by heart. He gave to those who
+wished to be nuns the money for their entrance to the monastery,
+was a zealous churchgoer, and listened with great attention to
+the sermon. Who can fully understand the feeling with which
+he regarded the supposititious remains (<a href="#page_143">p. 143</a>) of Livy at
+Padua? When, by dint of great entreaties, he obtained an
+arm-bone of the skeleton from the Venetians, and received
+it with solemn pomp at Naples, how strangely Christian
+and pagan sentiment must have been blended in his heart!
+During a campaign in the Abruzzi, when the distant Sulmona,
+the birthplace of Ovid, was pointed out to him, he saluted the
+spot and returned thanks to its tutelary genius. It gladdened
+him to make good the prophecy of the great poet as to his
+future fame.<a name="FNanchor_519_519" id="FNanchor_519_519"></a><a href="#Footnote_519_519" class="fnanchor">[519]</a> Once indeed, at his famous entry into the conquered
+city of Naples (1443), he himself chose to appear before
+the world in ancient style. Not far from the market a breach
+forty ells wide was made in the wall, and through this he drove<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_227" id="page_227"></a>{227}</span>
+in a gilded chariot like a Roman Triumphator.<a name="FNanchor_520_520" id="FNanchor_520_520"></a><a href="#Footnote_520_520" class="fnanchor">[520]</a> The memory
+of the scene is preserved by a noble triumphal arch of marble
+in the Castello Nuovo. His Neapolitan successors (<a href="#page_037">p. 37</a>) inherited
+as little of this passion for antiquity as of his other
+good qualities.</p>
+
+<p>Alfonso was far surpassed in learning by Frederick of Urbino<a name="FNanchor_521_521" id="FNanchor_521_521"></a><a href="#Footnote_521_521" class="fnanchor">[521]</a>&mdash;the
+great pupil of the great teacher Vittorino da Feltre&mdash;who
+had but few courtiers around him, squandered nothing,
+and in his appropriation of antiquity, as in all other things,
+went to work considerately. It was for him and for Nicholas
+V. that most of the translations from the Greek, and a number
+of the best commentaries and other such works, were written.
+He spent much on the scholars whose services he used, but
+spent it to good purpose. There were no traces of the official
+poet at Urbino, where the Duke himself was the most learned
+in the whole court. Classical antiquity, indeed, only formed a
+part of his culture. An accomplished ruler, captain, and gentleman,
+he had mastered the greater part of the science of the day,
+and this with a view to its practical application. As a theologian,
+he was able to compare Scotus with Aquinas, and was
+familiar with the writings of the old fathers of the Eastern and
+Western Churches, the former in Latin translations. In philosophy,
+he seems to have left Plato altogether to his contemporary
+Cosimo, but he knew thoroughly not only the ‘Ethics’
+and ‘Politics’ of Aristotle but the ‘Physics’ and some other
+works. The rest of his reading lay chiefly among the ancient
+historians, all of whom he possessed; these, and not the poets,
+‘he was always reading and having read to him.’</p>
+
+<p>The Sforza,<a name="FNanchor_522_522" id="FNanchor_522_522"></a><a href="#Footnote_522_522" class="fnanchor">[522]</a> too, were all of them men of more or less learning
+and patrons of literature; they have been already referred to
+in passing (pp. 38 sqq.). Duke Francesco probably looked on
+humanistic culture as a matter of course in the education of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_228" id="page_228"></a>{228}</span>
+children, if only for political reasons. It was felt universally
+to be an advantage if the Prince could mix with the most instructed
+men of his time on an equal footing. Ludovico Moro,
+himself an excellent Latin scholar, showed an interest in intellectual
+matters which extended far beyond classical antiquity
+(<a href="#page_041">p. 41</a> sqq.).</p>
+
+<p>Even the petty despots strove after similar distinctions,
+and we do them injustice by thinking that they only supported
+the scholars at their courts as a means of diffusing their own
+fame. A ruler like Borso of Ferrara (<a href="#page_049">p. 49</a>), with all his vanity,
+seems by no means to have looked for immortality from the
+poets, eager as they were to propitiate him with a ‘Borseid’
+and the like. He had far too proud a sense of his own position
+as a ruler for that. But intercourse with learned men, interest
+in antiquarian matters, and the passion for elegant Latin correspondence
+were a necessity for the princes of that age. What
+bitter complaints are those of Duke Alfonso, competent as he
+was in practical matters, that his weakliness in youth had forced
+him to seek recreation in manual pursuits only!<a name="FNanchor_523_523" id="FNanchor_523_523"></a><a href="#Footnote_523_523" class="fnanchor">[523]</a> or was this
+merely an excuse to keep the humanists at a distance? A
+nature like his was not intelligible even to contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>Even the most insignificant despots of Romagna found it
+hard to do without one or two men of letters about them. The
+tutor and secretary were often one and the same person, who
+sometimes, indeed, acted as a kind of court factotum.<a name="FNanchor_524_524" id="FNanchor_524_524"></a><a href="#Footnote_524_524" class="fnanchor">[524]</a> We are
+apt to treat the small scale of these courts as a reason for dismissing
+them with a too ready contempt, forgetting that the
+highest spiritual things are not precisely matters of measurement.</p>
+
+<p>Life and manners at the court of Rimini must have been a
+singular spectacle under the bold pagan Condottiere Sigismondo<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_229" id="page_229"></a>{229}</span>
+Malatesta. He had a number of scholars around him, some
+of whom he provided for liberally, even giving them landed
+estates, while others earned at least a livelihood as officers in
+his army.<a name="FNanchor_525_525" id="FNanchor_525_525"></a><a href="#Footnote_525_525" class="fnanchor">[525]</a> In his citadel&mdash;‘arx Sismundea’&mdash;they used to hold
+discussions, often of a very venomous kind, in the presence of
+the ‘rex,’ as they termed him. In their Latin poems they sing
+his praises and celebrate his amour with the fair Isotta, in
+whose honour and as whose monument the famous rebuilding
+of San Francesco at Rimini took place&mdash;‘Divæ Isottæ Sacrum.’
+When the humanists themselves came to die, they were laid in
+or under the sarcophagi with which the niches of the outside
+walls of the church were adorned, with an inscription testifying
+that they were laid here at the time when Sigismundus, the
+son of Pandulfus, ruled.<a name="FNanchor_526_526" id="FNanchor_526_526"></a><a href="#Footnote_526_526" class="fnanchor">[526]</a> It is hard for us nowadays to believe
+that a monster like this prince felt learning and the friendship
+of cultivated people to be a necessity of life; and yet the man
+who excommunicated him, made war upon him, and burnt him
+in effigy, Pope Pius II., says: ‘Sigismund knew history and
+had a great store of philosophy; he seemed born to all that he
+undertook.<a name="FNanchor_527_527" id="FNanchor_527_527"></a><a href="#Footnote_527_527" class="fnanchor">[527]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_230" id="page_230"></a>{230}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VII-3" id="CHAPTER_VII-3"></a>CHAPTER VII.<br /><br />
+<small>THE REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUITY: LATIN CORRESPONDENCE AND ORATIONS.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HERE</small> were two purposes, however, for which the humanist
+was as indispensable to the republics as to princes or popes,
+namely, the official correspondence of the state, and the making
+of speeches on public and solemn occasions.</p>
+
+<p>Not only was the secretary required to be a competent
+Latinist, but conversely, only a humanist was credited with
+the knowledge and ability necessary for the post of secretary.
+And thus the greatest men in the sphere of science during the
+fifteenth century mostly devoted a considerable part of their
+lives to serve the state in this capacity. No importance was
+attached to a man’s home or origin. Of the four great Florentine
+secretaries who filled the office between 1427 and 1465,<a name="FNanchor_528_528" id="FNanchor_528_528"></a><a href="#Footnote_528_528" class="fnanchor">[528]</a>
+three belonged to the subject city of Arezzo, namely, Lionardo
+(Bruni), Carlo (Marsuppini), and Benedetto Accolti; Poggio
+was from Terra Nuova, also in Florentine territory. For a
+long period, indeed, many of the highest officers of state were
+on principle given to foreigners. Lionardo, Poggio, and Giannozzo
+Manetti were at one time or another private secretaries
+to the popes, and Carlo Aretino was to have been so. Blondus
+of Forli, and, in spite of everything, at last even Lorenzo Valla,
+filled the same office. From the time of Nicholas V. and Pius
+II. onwards,<a name="FNanchor_529_529" id="FNanchor_529_529"></a><a href="#Footnote_529_529" class="fnanchor">[529]</a> the Papal chancery continued more and more to
+attract the ablest men, and this was still the case even under<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_231" id="page_231"></a>{231}</span>
+the last popes of the fifteenth century, little as they cared for
+letters. In Platina’s ‘History of the Popes,’ the life of Paul
+II. is a charming piece of vengeance taken by a humanist on
+the one Pope who did not know how to behave to his chancery&mdash;to
+that circle ‘of poets and orators who bestowed on the Papal
+court as much glory as they received from it.’ It is delightful
+to see the indignation of these haughty and wealthy gentlemen,
+who knew as well as the Pope himself how to use their position
+to plunder foreigners,<a name="FNanchor_530_530" id="FNanchor_530_530"></a><a href="#Footnote_530_530" class="fnanchor">[530]</a> when some squabble about precedence
+happened, when, for instance, the ‘Advocati consistoriales’
+claimed equal or superior rank to theirs.<a name="FNanchor_531_531" id="FNanchor_531_531"></a><a href="#Footnote_531_531" class="fnanchor">[531]</a> The Apostle John,
+to whom the ‘Secreta cœlestia’ were revealed; the secretary
+of Porsenna, whom Mucius Scævola mistook for the king;
+Mæcenas, who was private secretary to Augustus; the archbishops,
+who in Germany were called chancellors, are all
+appealed to in turn.<a name="FNanchor_532_532" id="FNanchor_532_532"></a><a href="#Footnote_532_532" class="fnanchor">[532]</a> ‘The apostolic secretaries have the most
+weighty business of the world in their hands. For who but
+they decide on matters of the Catholic faith, who else combat
+heresy, re-establish peace, and mediate between great
+monarchs? who but they write the statistical accounts of
+Christendom? It is they who astonish kings, princes, and
+nations by what comes forth from the Pope. They write commands
+and instructions for the legates, and receive their orders
+only from the Pope, on whom they wait day and night.’ But
+the highest summit of glory was only attained by the two
+famous secretaries and stylists of Leo X.: Pietro Bembo and
+Jacopo Sadoleto.<a name="FNanchor_533_533" id="FNanchor_533_533"></a><a href="#Footnote_533_533" class="fnanchor">[533]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_232" id="page_232"></a>{232}</span></p>
+
+<p>All the chanceries did not turn out equally elegant documents.
+A leathern official style, in the impurest of Latin, was
+very common. In the Milanese documents preserved by Corio
+there is a remarkable contrast between this sort of composition
+and the few letters written by members of the princely house,
+which must have been written, too, in moments of critical
+importance.<a name="FNanchor_534_534" id="FNanchor_534_534"></a><a href="#Footnote_534_534" class="fnanchor">[534]</a> They are models of pure Latinity. To maintain
+a faultless style under all circumstances was a rule of good
+breeding, and a result of habit. Besides these officials, private
+scholars of all kinds naturally had correspondence of their own.
+The object of letter-writing was seldom what it is nowadays,
+to give information as to the circumstances of the writer, or
+news of other people; it was rather treated as a literary work
+done to give evidence of scholarship and to win the consideration
+of those to whom it was addressed. These letters began
+early to serve the purpose of learned disquisition; and Petrarch,
+who introduced this form of letter-writing, revived the forms
+of the old epistolary style, putting the classical ‘thou’ in place
+of the ‘you’ of mediæval Latin. At a later period letters became
+collections of neatly-turned phrases, by which subjects
+were encouraged or humiliated, colleagues flattered or insulted,
+and patrons eulogised or begged from.<a name="FNanchor_535_535" id="FNanchor_535_535"></a><a href="#Footnote_535_535" class="fnanchor">[535]</a></p>
+
+<p>The letters of Cicero, Pliny, and others, were at this time<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_233" id="page_233"></a>{233}</span>
+diligently studied as models. As early as the fifteenth century
+a mass of forms and instructions for Latin correspondence had
+appeared, as accessory to the great grammatical and lexicographic
+works, the mass of which is astounding to us even now
+when we look at them in the libraries. But just as the existence
+of these helps tempted many to undertake a task to which they
+had no vocation, so were the really capable men stimulated to
+a more faultless excellence, till at length the letters of Politian,
+and at the beginning of the sixteenth century those of Pietro
+Bembo, appeared, and took their place as unrivalled masterpieces,
+not only of Latin style in general, but also of the more
+special art of letter-writing.</p>
+
+<p>Together with these there appeared in the sixteenth century
+the classical style of Italian correspondence, at the head of
+which stands Bembo again.<a name="FNanchor_536_536" id="FNanchor_536_536"></a><a href="#Footnote_536_536" class="fnanchor">[536]</a> Its form is wholly modern, and
+deliberately kept free from Latin influence, and yet its spirit is
+thoroughly penetrated and possessed by the ideas of antiquity.
+These letters, though partly of a confidential nature, are mostly
+written with a view to possible publication in the future, and
+always on the supposition that they might be worth showing
+on account of their elegance. After the year 1530, printed
+collections began to appear, either the letters of miscellaneous
+correspondents in irregular succession, or of single writers;
+and the same Bembo whose fame was so great as a Latin
+correspondent won as high a position in his own language.<a name="FNanchor_537_537" id="FNanchor_537_537"></a><a href="#Footnote_537_537" class="fnanchor">[537]</a></p>
+
+<p>But, at a time and among a people where ‘listening’ was
+among the chief pleasures of life, and where every imagination
+was filled with the memory of the Roman senate and its great
+speakers, the orator occupied a far more brilliant place than
+the letter-writer.<a name="FNanchor_538_538" id="FNanchor_538_538"></a><a href="#Footnote_538_538" class="fnanchor">[538]</a> Eloquence had shaken off the influence of
+the Church, in which it had found a refuge during the Middle
+Ages, and now became an indispensable element and ornament<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_234" id="page_234"></a>{234}</span>
+of all elevated lives. Many of the social hours which are now
+filled with music were then given to Latin or Italian oratory;
+and yet Bartolommeo Fazio complained that the orators of his
+time were at a disadvantage compared with those of antiquity;
+of three kinds of oratory which were open to the latter, one
+only was left to the former, since forensic oratory was abandoned
+to the jurists, and the speeches in the councils of the government
+had to be delivered in Italian.<a name="FNanchor_539_539" id="FNanchor_539_539"></a><a href="#Footnote_539_539" class="fnanchor">[539]</a></p>
+
+<p>The social position of the speaker was a matter of perfect
+indifference; what was desired was simply the most cultivated
+humanistic talent. At the court of Borso of Ferrara, the Duke’s
+physician, Jeronimo da Castello, was chosen to deliver the congratulatory
+address on the visits of Frederick III. and of Pius
+II.<a name="FNanchor_540_540" id="FNanchor_540_540"></a><a href="#Footnote_540_540" class="fnanchor">[540]</a> Married laymen ascended the pulpits of the churches at
+any scene of festivity or mourning, and even on the feast-days
+of the saints. It struck the non-Italian members of the Council
+of Basel as something strange, that the Archbishop of Milan
+should summon Æneas Sylvius, who was then unordained, to
+deliver a public discourse at the feast of Saint Ambrogius; but
+they suffered it in spite of the murmurs of the theologians, and
+listened to the speaker with the greatest curiosity.<a name="FNanchor_541_541" id="FNanchor_541_541"></a><a href="#Footnote_541_541" class="fnanchor">[541]</a></p>
+
+<p>Let us glance for a moment at the most frequent and important
+occasions of public speaking.</p>
+
+<p>It was not for nothing, in the first place, that the ambassadors
+from one state to another received the title of orators. Whatever
+else might be done in the way of secret negotiation, the
+envoy never failed to make a public appearance and deliver
+a public speech, under circumstances of the greatest possible
+pomp and ceremony.<a name="FNanchor_542_542" id="FNanchor_542_542"></a><a href="#Footnote_542_542" class="fnanchor">[542]</a> As a rule, however numerous the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_235" id="page_235"></a>{235}</span>
+embassy might be, one individual spake for all; but it happened
+to Pius II., a critic before whom all were glad to be heard, to
+be forced to sit and listen to a whole deputation, one after
+another.<a name="FNanchor_543_543" id="FNanchor_543_543"></a><a href="#Footnote_543_543" class="fnanchor">[543]</a> Learned princes who had the gift of speech were
+themselves fond of discoursing in Latin or Italian. The
+children of the House of Sforza were trained to this exercise.
+The boy Galeazzo Maria delivered in 1455 a fluent speech
+before the Great Council at Venice,<a name="FNanchor_544_544" id="FNanchor_544_544"></a><a href="#Footnote_544_544" class="fnanchor">[544]</a> and his sister Ippolita
+saluted Pope Pius II. with a graceful address at the Congress
+of Mantua.<a name="FNanchor_545_545" id="FNanchor_545_545"></a><a href="#Footnote_545_545" class="fnanchor">[545]</a> Pius himself through all his life did much by his
+oratory to prepare the way for his final elevation to the Papal
+chair. Great as he was both as scholar and diplomatist, he
+would probably never have become Pope without the fame and
+the charm of his eloquence. ‘For nothing was more lofty
+than the dignity of his oratory.’<a name="FNanchor_546_546" id="FNanchor_546_546"></a><a href="#Footnote_546_546" class="fnanchor">[546]</a> Without doubt this was a
+reason why multitudes held him to be the fittest man for the
+office, even before his election.</p>
+
+<p>Princes were also commonly received on public occasions
+with speeches, which sometimes lasted for hours. This happened
+of course only when the prince was known as a lover of
+eloquence,<a name="FNanchor_547_547" id="FNanchor_547_547"></a><a href="#Footnote_547_547" class="fnanchor">[547]</a> or wished to pass for such, and when a competent<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_236" id="page_236"></a>{236}</span>
+speaker was present, whether university professor, official,
+ecclesiastic, physician, or court-scholar.</p>
+
+<p>Every other political opportunity was seized with the same
+eagerness, and according to the reputation of the speaker, the
+concourse of the lovers of culture was great or small. At the
+yearly change of public officers, and even at the consecration of
+new bishops, a humanist was sure to come forward, and sometimes
+addressed his audience in hexameters or Sapphic verses.<a name="FNanchor_548_548" id="FNanchor_548_548"></a><a href="#Footnote_548_548" class="fnanchor">[548]</a>
+Often a newly appointed official was himself forced to deliver a
+speech more or less relevant to his department, as for instance,
+on justice; and lucky for him if he were well up in his part!
+At Florence even the Condottieri, whatever their origin or
+education might be, were compelled to accommodate themselves
+to the popular sentiment, and on receiving the insignia
+of their office, were harangued before the assembled people by
+the most learned secretary of state.<a name="FNanchor_549_549" id="FNanchor_549_549"></a><a href="#Footnote_549_549" class="fnanchor">[549]</a> It seems that beneath or
+close to the Loggia dei Lanzi&mdash;the porch where the government
+was wont to appear solemnly before the people&mdash;a tribune
+or platform (<i>rostra ringhiera</i>) was erected for such purposes.</p>
+
+<p>Anniversaries, especially those of the death of princes, were
+commonly celebrated by memorial speeches. Even the funeral
+oration strictly so-called was generally entrusted to a humanist,
+who delivered it in church, clothed in a secular dress; nor
+was it only princes, but officials, or persons otherwise distinguished,
+to whom this honour was paid.<a name="FNanchor_550_550" id="FNanchor_550_550"></a><a href="#Footnote_550_550" class="fnanchor">[550]</a> This was also the
+case with the speeches delivered at weddings or betrothals,
+with the difference that they seem to have been made in the
+palace, instead of in church, like that of Filelfo at the betrothal
+of Anna Sforza with Alfonso of Este in the castle of Milan. It
+is still possible that the ceremony may have taken place in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_237" id="page_237"></a>{237}</span>
+chapel of the castle. Private families of distinction no doubt
+also employed such wedding orators as one of the luxuries of
+high life. At Ferrara, Guarino was requested on these occasions
+to send some one or other of his pupils.<a name="FNanchor_551_551" id="FNanchor_551_551"></a><a href="#Footnote_551_551" class="fnanchor">[551]</a> The church
+simply took charge of the religious ceremonies at weddings
+and funerals.</p>
+
+<p>The academical speeches, both those made at the installation
+of a new teacher and at the opening of a new course of
+lectures,<a name="FNanchor_552_552" id="FNanchor_552_552"></a><a href="#Footnote_552_552" class="fnanchor">[552]</a> were delivered by the professor himself, and treated
+as occasions of great rhetorical display. The ordinary university
+lectures also usually had an oratorical character.<a name="FNanchor_553_553" id="FNanchor_553_553"></a><a href="#Footnote_553_553" class="fnanchor">[553]</a></p>
+
+<p>With regard to forensic eloquence, the quality of the audience
+determined the form of speech. In case of need it was
+enriched with all sorts of philosophical and antiquarian
+learning.</p>
+
+<p>As a special class of speeches we may mention the addresses
+made in Italian on the battle-field, either before or after the
+combat. Frederick of Urbino<a name="FNanchor_554_554" id="FNanchor_554_554"></a><a href="#Footnote_554_554" class="fnanchor">[554]</a> was esteemed a classic in this
+style; he used to pass round among his squadrons as they<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_238" id="page_238"></a>{238}</span>
+stood drawn up in order of battle, inspiring them in turn with
+pride and enthusiasm. Many of the speeches in the military
+historians of the fifteenth century, as for instance in Porcellius
+(<a href="#page_099">p. 99</a>), may be, in fact at least, imaginary, but may be also in
+part faithful representations of words actually spoken. The
+addresses again which were delivered to the Florentine Militia,<a name="FNanchor_555_555" id="FNanchor_555_555"></a><a href="#Footnote_555_555" class="fnanchor">[555]</a>
+organised in 1506 chiefly through the influence of Macchiavelli,
+and which were spoken first at reviews, and afterwards
+at special annual festivals, were of another kind. They were
+simply general appeals to the patriotism of the hearers, and
+were addressed to the assembled troops in the church of each
+quarter of the city by a citizen in armour, sword in hand.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the oratory of the pulpit began in the fifteenth
+century to lose its distinctive peculiarities. Many of the clergy
+had entered into the circle of classical culture, and were
+ambitious of success in it. The street-preacher Bernardino da
+Siena, who even in his lifetime passed for a saint and who was
+worshipped by the populace, was not above taking lessons in
+rhetoric from the famous Guarino, although he had only to
+preach in Italian. Never indeed was more expected from
+preachers than at that time&mdash;especially from the Lenten
+preachers; and there were not a few audiences which could not
+only tolerate, but which demanded a strong dose of philosophy
+from the pulpit.<a name="FNanchor_556_556" id="FNanchor_556_556"></a><a href="#Footnote_556_556" class="fnanchor">[556]</a> But we have here especially to speak of the
+distinguished occasional preachers in Latin. Many of their
+opportunities had been taken away from them, as has been
+observed, by learned laymen. Speeches on particular saints’
+days, at weddings and funerals, or at the installation of a
+bishop, and even the introductory speech at the first mass of a
+clerical friend, or the address at the festival of some religious
+order, were all left to laymen.<a name="FNanchor_557_557" id="FNanchor_557_557"></a><a href="#Footnote_557_557" class="fnanchor">[557]</a> But at all events at the Papal<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_239" id="page_239"></a>{239}</span>
+court in the fifteenth century, whatever the occasion might
+be, the preachers were generally monks. Under Sixtus IV.,
+Giacomo da Volterra regularly enumerates these preachers,
+and criticises them according to the rules of the art.<a name="FNanchor_558_558" id="FNanchor_558_558"></a><a href="#Footnote_558_558" class="fnanchor">[558]</a> Fedra
+Inghirami, famous as an orator under Julius II., had at least
+received holy orders and was canon at St. John Lateran; and
+besides him, elegant Latinists were now common enough
+among the prelates. In this matter, as in others, the exaggerated
+privileges of the profane humanists appear lessened in the
+sixteenth century&mdash;on which point we shall presently speak
+more fully.</p>
+
+<p>What now was the subject and general character of these
+speeches? The national gift of eloquence was not wanting to
+the Italians of the Middle Ages, and a so-called ‘rhetoric’
+belonged from the first to the seven liberal arts; but so far as
+the revival of the ancient methods is concerned, this merit
+must be ascribed, according to Filippo Villani,<a name="FNanchor_559_559" id="FNanchor_559_559"></a><a href="#Footnote_559_559" class="fnanchor">[559]</a> to the Florentine
+Bruno Casini, who died of the plague in 1348. With the
+practical purpose of fitting his countrymen to speak with ease
+and effect in public, he treated, after the pattern of the
+ancients, invention, declamation, bearing, and gesticulation,
+each in its proper connection. Elsewhere too we read of an
+oratorical training directed solely to practical application. No
+accomplishment was more highly esteemed than the power of
+elegant improvisation in Latin.<a name="FNanchor_560_560" id="FNanchor_560_560"></a><a href="#Footnote_560_560" class="fnanchor">[560]</a> The growing study of Cicero’s
+speeches and theoretical writings, of Quintilian and of the
+imperial panegyrists, the appearance of new and original
+treatises,<a name="FNanchor_561_561" id="FNanchor_561_561"></a><a href="#Footnote_561_561" class="fnanchor">[561]</a> the general progress of antiquarian learning, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_240" id="page_240"></a>{240}</span>
+stores of ancient matter and thought which now could and
+must be drawn from&mdash;all combined to shape the character of
+the new eloquence.</p>
+
+<p>This character nevertheless differed widely according to the
+individual. Many speeches breathe a spirit of true eloquence,
+especially those which keep to the matter treated of; of this
+kind is the mass of what is left to us of Pius II. The miraculous
+effects produced by Giannozzo Manetti<a name="FNanchor_562_562" id="FNanchor_562_562"></a><a href="#Footnote_562_562" class="fnanchor">[562]</a> point to an orator
+the like of whom has not been often seen. His great audiences
+as envoy before Nicholas V. and before the Doge and Council
+of Venice were events not to be soon forgotten. Many orators,
+on the contrary, would seize the opportunity, not only to
+flatter the vanity of distinguished hearers, but to load their
+speeches with an enormous mass of antiquarian rubbish. How
+it was possible to endure this infliction for two and even three
+hours, can only be understood when we take into account the
+intense interest then felt in everything connected with antiquity,
+and the rarity and defectiveness of treatises on the
+subject at a time when printing was but little diffused. Such
+orations had at least the value which we have claimed (<a href="#page_232">p. 232</a>)
+for many of Petrarch’s letters. But some speakers went too
+far. Most of Filelfo’s speeches are an atrocious patchwork of
+classical and biblical quotations, tacked on to a string of commonplaces,
+among which the great people he wishes to flatter
+are arranged under the head of the cardinal virtues, or some
+such category, and it is only with the greatest trouble, in his
+case and in that of many others, that we can extricate the few
+historical notices of value which they really contain. The
+speech, for instance, of a scholar and professor of Piacenza at
+the reception of the Duke Galeazzo Maria, in 1467, begins with
+Julius Cæsar, then proceeds to mix up a mass of classical
+quotations with a number from an allegorical work by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_241" id="page_241"></a>{241}</span>
+speaker himself, and concludes with some exceedingly indiscreet
+advice to the ruler.<a name="FNanchor_563_563" id="FNanchor_563_563"></a><a href="#Footnote_563_563" class="fnanchor">[563]</a> Fortunately it was late at night, and
+the orator had to be satisfied with handing his written panegyric
+to the prince. Filelfo begins a speech at a betrothal with
+the words: ‘Aristotle, the peripatetic.’ Others start with P.
+Cornelius Scipio, and the like, as though neither they nor their
+hearers could wait a moment for a quotation. At the end of
+the fifteenth century public taste suddenly improved, chiefly
+through Florentine influence, and the practice of quotation
+was restricted within due limits. Many works of reference
+were now in existence, in which the first comer could find as
+much as he wanted of what had hitherto been the admiration
+of princes and people.</p>
+
+<p>As most of the speeches were written out beforehand in the
+study, the manuscripts served as a means of further publicity
+afterwards. The great extemporaneous speakers, on the other
+hand, were attended by shorthand writers.<a name="FNanchor_564_564" id="FNanchor_564_564"></a><a href="#Footnote_564_564" class="fnanchor">[564]</a> We must further
+remember, that all the orations which have come down to us
+were not intended to be actually delivered. The panegyric,
+for example, of the elder Beroaldus on Ludovico Moro was
+presented to him in manuscript.<a name="FNanchor_565_565" id="FNanchor_565_565"></a><a href="#Footnote_565_565" class="fnanchor">[565]</a> In fact, just as letters were
+written addressed to all conceivable persons and parts of the
+world as exercises, as formularies, or even to serve a controversial
+end, so there were speeches for imaginary occasions<a name="FNanchor_566_566" id="FNanchor_566_566"></a><a href="#Footnote_566_566" class="fnanchor">[566]</a>
+to be used as models for the reception of princes, bishops, and
+other dignitaries.</p>
+
+<p>For oratory, as for the other arts, the death of Leo X. (1521)
+and the sack of Rome (1527) mark the epoch of decadence.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_242" id="page_242"></a>{242}</span>
+Giovio,<a name="FNanchor_567_567" id="FNanchor_567_567"></a><a href="#Footnote_567_567" class="fnanchor">[567]</a> but just escaped from the desolation of the eternal
+city, describes, not exhaustively, but on the whole truly, the
+causes of this decline.</p>
+
+<p>‘The plays of Plautus and Terence, once a school of Latin
+style for the educated Romans, are banished to make room for
+Italian comedies. Graceful speakers no longer find the recognition
+and reward which they once did. The Consistorial
+advocates no longer prepare anything but the introductions
+to their speeches, and deliver the rest&mdash;a confused muddle&mdash;on
+the inspiration of the moment. Sermons and occasional
+speeches have sunk to the same level. If a funeral oration is
+wanted for a cardinal or other great personage, the executors
+do not apply to the best orators in the city, to whom they
+would have to pay a hundred pieces of gold, but they hire for
+a trifle the first impudent pedant whom they come across, and
+who only wants to be talked of whether for good or ill. The
+dead, they say, is none the wiser if an ape stands in a black
+dress in the pulpit, and beginning with a hoarse, whimpering
+mumble, passes little by little into a loud howling. Even the
+sermons preached at great papal ceremonies are no longer
+profitable, as they used to be. Monks of all orders have again
+got them into their hands, and preach as if they were speaking
+to the mob. Only a few years ago a sermon at mass before the
+Pope, might easily lead the way to a bishopric.’<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_243" id="page_243"></a>{243}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VIII-3" id="CHAPTER_VIII-3"></a>CHAPTER VIII.<br /><br />
+<small>LATIN TREATISES AND HISTORY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">F<small>ROM</small> the oratory and the epistolary writings of the humanists,
+we shall here pass on to their other creations, which were all,
+to a greater or less extent, reproductions of antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>Among these must be placed the treatise, which often took
+the shape of a dialogue.<a name="FNanchor_568_568" id="FNanchor_568_568"></a><a href="#Footnote_568_568" class="fnanchor">[568]</a> In this case it was borrowed directly
+from Cicero. In order to do anything like justice to this class
+of literature&mdash;in order not to throw it aside at first sight as a
+bore&mdash;two things must be taken into consideration. The century
+which escaped from the influence of the Middle Ages felt
+the need of something to mediate between itself and antiquity
+in many questions of morals and philosophy; and this need
+was met by the writer of treatises and dialogues. Much which
+appears to us as mere commonplace in their writings, was for
+them and their contemporaries a new and hardly-won view of
+things upon which mankind had been silent since the days of
+antiquity. The language too, in this form of writing, whether
+Italian or Latin, moved more freely and flexibly than in historical
+narrative, in letters, or in oratory, and thus became in
+itself the source of a special pleasure. Several Italian compositions
+of this kind still hold their place as patterns of style.
+Many of these works have been, or will be mentioned on account
+of their contents; we here refer to them as a class.
+From the time of Petrarch’s letters and treatises down to near
+the end of the fifteenth century, the heaping up of learned
+quotations, as in the case of the orators, is the main business oi
+most of these writers. The whole style, especially in Italian,
+was then suddenly clarified, till, in the ‘Asolani,’ of Bembo,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_244" id="page_244"></a>{244}</span>
+and the ‘Vita Sobria,’ of Luigi Cornaro,<a name="FNanchor_569_569" id="FNanchor_569_569"></a><a href="#Footnote_569_569" class="fnanchor">[569]</a> a classical perfection
+was reached. Here too the decisive fact was, that antiquarian
+matter of every kind had meantime begun to be deposited in
+encyclopædic works (now printed), and no longer stood in the
+way of the essayist.</p>
+
+<p>It was inevitable too that the humanistic spirit should control
+the writing of history. A superficial comparison of the
+histories of this period with the earlier chronicles, especially
+with works so full of life, colour, and brilliancy as those of the
+Villani, will lead us loudly to deplore the change. How insipid
+and conventional appear by their side the best of the
+humanists, and particularly their immediate and most famous
+successors among the historians of Florence, Lionardo Aretino
+and Poggio!<a name="FNanchor_570_570" id="FNanchor_570_570"></a><a href="#Footnote_570_570" class="fnanchor">[570]</a> The enjoyment of the reader is incessantly
+marred by the sense that, in the classical phrases of Facius,
+Sabellicus, Folieta, Senarega, Platina in the chronicles of
+Mantua, Bembo in the annals of Venice, and even of Giovio in
+his histories, the best local and individual colouring and the
+full sincerity of interest in the truth of events have been lost.
+Our mistrust is increased when we hear that Livy, the pattern
+of this school of writers, was copied just where he is least
+worthy of imitation&mdash;on the ground, namely,<a name="FNanchor_571_571" id="FNanchor_571_571"></a><a href="#Footnote_571_571" class="fnanchor">[571]</a> ‘that he turned
+a dry and naked tradition into grace and richness.’ In the
+same place we meet with the suspicious declaration, that it
+is the function of the historian&mdash;just as if he were one with
+the poet&mdash;to excite, charm, or overwhelm the reader. We
+must further remember that many humanistic historians knew
+but little of what happened outside their own sphere, and this
+little they were often compelled to adapt to the taste of their
+patrons and employers. We ask ourselves finally, whether the
+contempt for modern things, which these same humanists
+sometimes avowed openly<a name="FNanchor_572_572" id="FNanchor_572_572"></a><a href="#Footnote_572_572" class="fnanchor">[572]</a> must not necessarily have had an<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_245" id="page_245"></a>{245}</span>
+unfortunate influence on their treatment of them. Unconsciously
+the reader finds himself looking with more interest
+and confidence on the unpretending Latin and Italian annalists,
+like those of Bologna and Ferrara, who remained true to the
+old style, and still more grateful does he feel to the best of the
+genuine chroniclers who wrote in Italian&mdash;to Marin Sanudo,
+Corio, and Infessura&mdash;who were followed at the beginning of
+the sixteenth century by that new and illustrious band of great
+national historians who wrote in their mother tongue.</p>
+
+<p>Contemporary history, no doubt, was written far better in the
+language of the day than when forced into Latin. Whether
+Italian was also more suitable for the narrative of events long
+past, or for historical research, is a question which admits, for
+that period, of more answers than one. Latin was, at that
+time, the ‘Lingua franca’ of instructed people, not only in an
+international sense, as a means of intercourse between Englishmen,
+Frenchmen, and Italians, but also in an interprovincial
+sense. The Lombard, the Venetian, and the Neapolitan modes
+of writing, though long modelled on the Tuscan, and bearing
+but slight traces of the dialect, were still not recognised by the
+Florentines. This was of less consequence in local contemporary
+histories, which were sure of readers at the place where
+they were written, than in the narratives of the past, for which
+a larger public was desired. In these the local interests of the
+people had to be sacrificed to the general interests of the
+learned. How far would the influence of a man like Blondus
+of Forli have reached if he had written his great monuments
+of learning in the dialect of the Romagna? They would have
+assuredly sunk into neglect, if only through the contempt of
+the Florentines, while written in Latin they exercised the profoundest
+influence on the whole European world of learning.
+And even the Florentines in the fifteenth century wrote Latin,
+not only because their minds were imbued with humanism,
+but in order to be more widely read.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, there exist certain Latin essays in contemporary
+history, which stand on a level with the best Italian works of
+the kind. When the continuous narrative after the manner<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_246" id="page_246"></a>{246}</span>
+of Livy&mdash;that Procrustean bed of so many writers&mdash;is abandoned,
+the change is marvellous. The same Platina and
+Giovio, whose great histories we only read because and so far
+as we must, suddenly come forward as masters in the biographical
+style. We have already spoken of Tristan Caracciolo,
+of the biographical works of Facius and of the Venetian topography
+of Sabellico, and others will be mentioned in the
+sequel. Historical composition, like letters and oratory, soon
+had its theory. Following the example of Cicero, it proclaims
+with pride the worth and dignity of history, boldly claims
+Moses and the Evangelists as simple historians, and concludes
+with earnest exhortations to strict impartiality and love of
+truth.<a name="FNanchor_573_573" id="FNanchor_573_573"></a><a href="#Footnote_573_573" class="fnanchor">[573]</a></p>
+
+<p>The Latin treatises on past history were naturally concerned,
+for the most part, with classical antiquity. What we
+are more surprised to find among these humanists are some
+considerable works on the history of the Middle Ages. The first
+of this kind was the chronicle of Matteo Palmieri (449-1449),
+beginning where Prosper Aquitanus ceases, the style of which
+was certainly an offence to later critics like Paolo Cortese. On
+opening the ‘Decades’ of Blondus of Forli, we are surprised to
+find a universal history, ‘ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii,’
+as in Gibbon, full of original studies on the authors of each
+century, and occupied, through the first 300 folio pages, with
+early mediæval history down to the death of Frederick II. And
+this when in Northern countries nothing more was wanted than
+chronicles of the popes and emperors, and the ‘Fasciculus temporum.’
+We cannot here stay to show what writings Blondus
+made use of, and where he found his materials, though this
+justice will some day be done to him by the historians of
+literature. This book alone would entitle us to say that it was
+the study of antiquity which made the study of the Middle
+Ages possible, by first training the mind to habits of impartial
+historical criticism. To this must be added, that the Middle
+Ages were now over for Italy, and that the Italian mind could
+the better appreciate them, because it stood outside them. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_247" id="page_247"></a>{247}</span>
+cannot, nevertheless, be said that it at once judged them fairly,
+and still less that it judged them with piety. In art a fixed
+prejudice showed itself against all that those centuries had
+created, and the humanists date the new era from the time of
+their own appearance. ‘I begin,’ says Boccaccio,<a name="FNanchor_574_574" id="FNanchor_574_574"></a><a href="#Footnote_574_574" class="fnanchor">[574]</a> ‘to hope
+and believe that God has had mercy on the Italian name, since
+I see that His infinite goodness puts souls into the breasts of
+the Italians like those of the ancients&mdash;souls which seek fame
+by other means than robbery and violence, but rather, on the
+path of poetry, which makes men immortal.’ But this narrow
+and unjust temper did not preclude investigation in the minds
+of the more gifted men, at a time, too, when elsewhere in
+Europe any such investigation would have been out of the
+question. A historical criticism<a name="FNanchor_575_575" id="FNanchor_575_575"></a><a href="#Footnote_575_575" class="fnanchor">[575]</a> of the Middle Ages was practicable,
+just because the rational treatment of all subjects by
+the humanists had trained the historical spirit. In the fifteenth
+century this spirit had so far penetrated the history
+even of the individual cities of Italy, that the stupid fairy tales
+about the origin of Florence, Venice, and Milan vanished,
+while at the same time, and long after, the chronicles of the
+North were stuffed with this fantastic rubbish, destitute for
+the most part of all poetical value, and invented as late as the
+fourteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>The close connection between local history and the sentiment
+of glory has already been touched on in reference to
+Florence (part i. chap. vii.). Venice would not be behind-hand.
+Just as a great rhetorical triumph of the Florentines<a name="FNanchor_576_576" id="FNanchor_576_576"></a><a href="#Footnote_576_576" class="fnanchor">[576]</a>
+would cause a Venetian embassy to write home post-haste for
+an orator to be sent after them, so too the Venetians felt the
+need of a history which would bear comparison with those of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_248" id="page_248"></a>{248}</span>
+Lionardo Aretino and Poggio. And it was to satisfy this feeling
+that, in the fifteenth century, after negotiations with
+Giovanni Maria Filelfo and others had failed, the ‘Decades’ of
+Sabellico appeared, and in the sixteenth the ‘Historia rerum
+Venetarum’ of Pietro Bembo, both written at the express
+charge of the republic, the latter a continuation of the former.</p>
+
+<p>The great Florentine historians at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century (pp. 81 sqq.) were men of a wholly different
+kind from the Latinists Bembo and Giovio. They wrote
+Italian, not only because they could not vie with the Ciceronian
+elegance of the philologists, but because, like Macchiavelli,
+they could only record in a living tongue the living
+results of their own immediate observations&mdash;and we may add
+in the case of Macchiavelli, of his observation of the past&mdash;and
+because, as in the case of Guicciardini, Varchi, and many
+others, what they most desired was, that their view of the
+course of events should have as wide and deep a practical effect
+as possible. Even when they only write for a few friends,
+like Francesco Vettori, they feel an inward need to utter their
+testimony on men and events, and to explain and justify their
+share in the latter.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, with all that is characteristic in their language and
+style, they were powerfully affected by antiquity, and, without
+its influence, would be inconceivable. They were not
+humanists, but they had passed through the school of humanism,
+and they have in them more of the spirit of the ancient
+historians than most of the imitators of Livy. Like the
+ancients, they were citizens who wrote for citizens.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_249" id="page_249"></a>{249}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IX-3" id="CHAPTER_IX-3"></a>CHAPTER IX.<br /><br />
+<small>GENERAL LATINISATION OF CULTURE.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">W<small>E</small> cannot attempt to trace the influence of humanism in
+the special sciences. Each has its own history, in which the
+Italian investigators of this period, chiefly through their rediscovery
+of the results attained by antiquity,<a name="FNanchor_577_577" id="FNanchor_577_577"></a><a href="#Footnote_577_577" class="fnanchor">[577]</a> mark a new
+epoch, with which the modern period of the science in question
+begins with more or less distinctness. With regard to philosophy,
+too, we must refer the reader to the special historical
+works on the subject. The influence of the old philosophers on
+Italian culture will appear at times immense, at times inconsiderable;
+the former, when we consider how the doctrines of
+Aristotle, chiefly drawn from the Ethics<a name="FNanchor_578_578" id="FNanchor_578_578"></a><a href="#Footnote_578_578" class="fnanchor">[578]</a> and Politics&mdash;both
+widely diffused at an early period&mdash;became the common property
+of educated Italians, and how the whole method of
+abstract thought was governed by him;<a name="FNanchor_579_579" id="FNanchor_579_579"></a><a href="#Footnote_579_579" class="fnanchor">[579]</a> the latter, when we<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_250" id="page_250"></a>{250}</span>
+remember how slight was the dogmatic influence of the old
+philosophies, and even of the enthusiastic Florentine Platonists,
+on the spirit of the people at large. What looks like such an
+influence is generally no more than a consequence of the new
+culture in general, and of the special growth and development
+of the Italian mind. When we come to speak of religion, we
+shall have more to say on this head. But in by far the greater
+number of cases, we have to do, not with the general culture of
+the people, but with the utterances of individuals or of learned
+circles; and here, too, a distinction must be drawn between
+the true assimilation of ancient doctrines and fashionable
+make-believe. For with many antiquity was only a fashion,
+even among very learned people.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, all that looks like affectation to our age, need
+not then have been actually so. The giving of Greek and
+Latin names to children, for example, is better and more
+respectable than the present practice of taking them, especially
+the female names, from novels. When the enthusiasm for the
+ancient world was greater than for the saints, it was simple
+and natural enough that noble families called their sons
+Agamemnon, Tydeus, and Achilles,<a name="FNanchor_580_580" id="FNanchor_580_580"></a><a href="#Footnote_580_580" class="fnanchor">[580]</a> and that a painter named
+his son Apelles and his daughter Minerva.<a name="FNanchor_581_581" id="FNanchor_581_581"></a><a href="#Footnote_581_581" class="fnanchor">[581]</a> Nor will it appear<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_251" id="page_251"></a>{251}</span>
+unreasonable that, instead of a family name, which people
+were often glad to get rid of, a well-sounding ancient name
+was chosen. A local name, shared by all residents in the place,
+and not yet transformed into a family name, was willingly
+given up, especially when its religious associations made it inconvenient;
+Filippo da San Gemignano called himself Callimachus.
+The man, misunderstood and insulted by his family,
+who made his fortune as a scholar in foreign cities, could afford,
+even if he were a Sanseverino, to change his name to Julius
+Pomponius Laetus. Even the simple translation of a name
+into Latin or Greek, as was almost uniformly the custom in
+Germany, may be excused to a generation which spoke and
+wrote Latin, and which needed names that could be not only
+declined, but used with facility in verse and prose. What was
+blameworthy and ridiculous was, the change of half a name,
+baptismal or family, to give it a classical sound and a new
+sense. Thus Giovanni was turned into Jovianus or Janus,
+Pietro to Petreius or Pierius, Antonio to Aonius, Sannazzaro to
+Syncerus, Luca Grasso to Lucius Crassus. Ariosto, who speaks
+with such derision of all this,<a name="FNanchor_582_582" id="FNanchor_582_582"></a><a href="#Footnote_582_582" class="fnanchor">[582]</a> lived to see children called after
+his own heroes and heroines.<a name="FNanchor_583_583" id="FNanchor_583_583"></a><a href="#Footnote_583_583" class="fnanchor">[583]</a></p>
+
+<p>Nor must we judge too severely the Latinisation of many
+usages of social life, such as the titles of officials, of ceremonies,
+and the like, in the writers of the period. As long as people
+were satisfied with a simple, fluent Latin style, as was the case
+with most writers from Petrarch to Æneas Sylvius, this practice
+was not so frequent and striking; it became inevitable when a
+faultless, Ciceronian Latin was demanded. Modern names and
+things no longer harmonised with the style, unless they were
+first artificially changed. Pedants found a pleasure in addressing
+municipal counsellors as ‘Patres Conscripti,’ nuns as
+‘Virgines Vestales,’ and entitling every saint ‘Divus’ or
+‘Deus;’ but men of better taste, such as Paolo Giovio, only<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_252" id="page_252"></a>{252}</span>
+did so when and because they could not help it. But as Giovio
+does it naturally, and lays no special stress upon it, we are not
+offended if, in his melodious language, the cardinals appear as
+‘Senatores,’ their dean as ‘Princeps Senatus,’ excommunication
+as ‘Dirae,’<a name="FNanchor_584_584" id="FNanchor_584_584"></a><a href="#Footnote_584_584" class="fnanchor">[584]</a> and the carnival as ‘Lupercalia.’ This example of
+this author alone is enough to warn us against drawing a hasty
+inference from these peculiarities of style as to the writer’s
+whole mode of thinking.</p>
+
+<p>The history of Latin composition cannot here be traced in
+detail. For fully two centuries the humanists acted as if Latin
+were, and must remain, the only language worthy to be written.
+Poggio<a name="FNanchor_585_585" id="FNanchor_585_585"></a><a href="#Footnote_585_585" class="fnanchor">[585]</a> deplores that Dante wrote his great poem in Italian;
+and Dante, as is well known, actually made the attempt in
+Latin, and wrote the beginning of the ‘Inferno’ first in hexameters.
+The whole future of Italian poetry hung on his not
+continuing in the same style,<a name="FNanchor_586_586" id="FNanchor_586_586"></a><a href="#Footnote_586_586" class="fnanchor">[586]</a> but even Petrarch relied more
+on his Latin poetry than on the Sonnets and ‘Canzoni,’ and
+Ariosto himself was desired by some to write his poem in
+Latin. A stronger coercion never existed in literature;<a name="FNanchor_587_587" id="FNanchor_587_587"></a><a href="#Footnote_587_587" class="fnanchor">[587]</a> but<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_253" id="page_253"></a>{253}</span>
+poetry shook it off for the most part, and it may be said, without
+the risk of too great optimism, that it was well for Italian
+poetry to have had both means of expressing itself. In both
+something great and characteristic was achieved, and in each
+we can see the reason why Latin or Italian was chosen. Perhaps
+the same may be said of prose. The position and influence
+of Italian culture throughout the world depended on the fact
+that certain subjects were treated in Latin<a name="FNanchor_588_588" id="FNanchor_588_588"></a><a href="#Footnote_588_588" class="fnanchor">[588]</a>&mdash;‘urbi et orbi’&mdash;while
+Italian prose was written best of all by those to whom it
+cost an inward struggle not to write in Latin.</p>
+
+<p>From the fourteenth century Cicero was recognised universally
+as the purest model of prose. This was by no means due
+solely to a dispassionate opinion in favour of his choice of
+language, of the structure of his sentences, and of his style
+of composition, but rather to the fact that the Italian spirit
+responded fully and instinctively to the amiability of the letter-writer,
+to the brilliancy of the orator, and to the lucid exposition
+of the philosophical thinker. Even Petrarch recognised
+clearly the weakness of Cicero as a man and a statesman,<a name="FNanchor_589_589" id="FNanchor_589_589"></a><a href="#Footnote_589_589" class="fnanchor">[589]</a>
+though he respected him too much to rejoice over them. After
+Petrarch’s time, the epistolary style was formed entirely on
+the pattern of Cicero; and the rest, with the exception of the
+narrative style, followed the same influence. Yet the true
+Ciceronianism, which rejected every phrase which could not be
+justified out of the great authority, did not appear till the end
+of the fifteenth century, when the grammatical writings of
+Lorenzo Valla had begun to tell on all Italy, and when the
+opinions of the Roman historians of literature had been sifted<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_254" id="page_254"></a>{254}</span>
+and compared.<a name="FNanchor_590_590" id="FNanchor_590_590"></a><a href="#Footnote_590_590" class="fnanchor">[590]</a> Then every shade of difference in the style of
+the ancients was studied with closer and closer attention, till
+the consoling conclusion was at last reached, that in Cicero
+alone was the perfect model to be found, or, if all forms of
+literature were to be embraced, in ‘that immortal and almost
+heavenly age of Cicero.’<a name="FNanchor_591_591" id="FNanchor_591_591"></a><a href="#Footnote_591_591" class="fnanchor">[591]</a> Men like Pietro Bembo and Pierio
+Valeriano now turned all their energies to this one object.
+Even those who had long resisted the tendency, and had formed
+for themselves an archaic style from the earlier authors,<a name="FNanchor_592_592" id="FNanchor_592_592"></a><a href="#Footnote_592_592" class="fnanchor">[592]</a>
+yielded at last, and joined in the worship of Cicero. Longolius,
+at Bembo’s advice, determined to read nothing but Cicero for
+five years long, and finally took an oath to use no word which
+did not occur in this author. It was this temper which broke
+out at last in the great war among the scholars, in which
+Erasmus and the elder Scaliger led the battle.</p>
+
+<p>For all the admirers of Cicero were by no means so one-sided
+as to consider him the only source of language. In the
+fifteenth century, Politian and Ermolao Barbaro made a conscious
+and deliberate effort to form a style of their own,<a name="FNanchor_593_593" id="FNanchor_593_593"></a><a href="#Footnote_593_593" class="fnanchor">[593]</a>
+naturally on the basis of their ‘overflowing’ learning, though
+they failed to inspire their pupils with a similar desire for independence;
+and our informant of this fact, Paolo Giovio, pursued
+the same end. He first attempted, not always successfully, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_255" id="page_255"></a>{255}</span>
+often with remarkable power and elegance, and at no small
+cost of effort, to reproduce in Latin a number of modern, particularly
+of æsthetic, ideas. His Latin characteristics of the
+great painters and sculptors of his time contain a mixture of
+the most intelligent and of the most blundering interpretation.<a name="FNanchor_594_594" id="FNanchor_594_594"></a><a href="#Footnote_594_594" class="fnanchor">[594]</a>
+Even Leo X., who placed his glory in the fact, ‘ut lingua
+latina nostra pontificatu dicatur factu auctior,’<a name="FNanchor_595_595" id="FNanchor_595_595"></a><a href="#Footnote_595_595" class="fnanchor">[595]</a> was inclined to
+a liberal and not too exclusive Latinity, which, indeed, was
+in harmony with his pleasure-loving nature. He was satisfied
+when the Latin which he had to read and hear was lively,
+elegant, and idiomatic. Then, too, Cicero offered no model for
+Latin conversation, so that here other gods had to be worshipped
+beside him. The want was supplied by representations
+of the comedies of Plautus and Terence, frequent both
+in and out of Rome, which for the actors were an incomparable
+exercise in Latin as the language of daily life. The impulse to
+the study of the old Latin comedies and to modern imitations
+of them was given by the discovery of plays by Plautus in the
+‘Cod. Ursinianus,’ which was brought to Rome in 1428 or 1429.
+A few years later, in the pontificate of Paul II., the learned
+Cardinal of Teano<a name="FNanchor_596_596" id="FNanchor_596_596"></a><a href="#Footnote_596_596" class="fnanchor">[596]</a> (probably Niccolò Forteguerra of Pistoja)
+became famous for his critical labours in this branch of scholarship.
+He set to work upon the most defective plays of
+Plautus, which were destitute even of the list of the characters,
+and went carefully through the whole remains of this author,
+chiefly with an eye to the language. Possibly it was he who
+gave the first impulse for the public representations of these
+plays. Afterwards Pomponius Laetus took up the same subject,
+and acted as manager when Plautus was put on the stage
+in the houses of great churchmen.<a name="FNanchor_597_597" id="FNanchor_597_597"></a><a href="#Footnote_597_597" class="fnanchor">[597]</a> That these representations<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_256" id="page_256"></a>{256}</span>
+became less common after 1520, is mentioned by Giovio, as we
+have seen (<a href="#page_242">p. 242</a>), among the causes of the decline of eloquence.</p>
+
+<p>We may mention, in conclusion, the analogy between Ciceronianism
+in literature and the revival of Vitruvius by the
+architects in the sphere of art.<a name="FNanchor_598_598" id="FNanchor_598_598"></a><a href="#Footnote_598_598" class="fnanchor">[598]</a> And here, too, the law holds
+good which prevails elsewhere in the history of the Renaissance,
+that each artistic movement is preceded by a corresponding
+movement in the general culture of the age. In this case,
+the interval is not more than about twenty years, if we reckon
+from Cardinal Hadrian of Corneto (1505?) to the first avowed
+Vitruvians.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_257" id="page_257"></a>{257}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_X-3" id="CHAPTER_X-3"></a>CHAPTER X.<br /><br />
+<small>MODERN LATIN POETRY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> chief pride of the humanists is, however, their modern
+Latin poetry. It lies within the limits of our task to treat of
+it, at least in so far as it serves to characterise the humanistic
+movement.</p>
+
+<p>How favourable public opinion was to that form of poetry,
+and how nearly it supplanted all others, has been already
+shown (<a href="#page_252">p. 252</a>). We may be very sure that the most gifted
+and highly developed nation then existing in the world did
+not renounce the use of a language such as the Italian out of
+mere folly and without knowing what they were doing. It
+must have been a weighty reason which led them to do so.</p>
+
+<p>This cause was the devotion to antiquity. Like all ardent
+and genuine devotion it necessarily prompted men to imitation.
+At other times and among other nations we find many isolated
+attempts of the same kind. But only in Italy were the two
+chief conditions present which were needful for the continuance
+and development of neo-Latin poetry: a general interest in the
+subject among the instructed classes, and a partial reawakening
+of the old Italian genius among the poets themselves&mdash;the
+wondrous echo of a far-off strain. The best of what is produced
+under these conditions is not imitation, but free production.
+If we decline to tolerate any borrowed forms in art, if we
+either set no value on antiquity at all, or attribute to it some
+magical and unapproachable virtue, or if we will pardon no
+slips in poets who were forced, for instance, to guess or to discover
+a multitude of syllabic quantities, then we had better let
+this class of literature alone. Its best works were not created
+in order to defy criticism, but to give pleasure to the poet and
+to thousands of his contemporaries.<a name="FNanchor_599_599" id="FNanchor_599_599"></a><a href="#Footnote_599_599" class="fnanchor">[599]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_258" id="page_258"></a>{258}</span></p>
+
+<p>The least success of all was attained by the epic narratives
+drawn from the history or legends of antiquity. The essential
+conditions of a living epic poetry were denied, not only to the
+Romans who now served as models, but even to the Greeks
+after Homer. They could not be looked for among the Latins
+of the Renaissance. And yet the ‘Africa’ of Petrarch<a name="FNanchor_600_600" id="FNanchor_600_600"></a><a href="#Footnote_600_600" class="fnanchor">[600]</a> probably
+found as many and as enthusiastic readers and hearers
+as any epos of modern times. The purpose and origin of the
+poem are not without interest. The fourteenth century recognised
+with sound historical tact the time of the second Punic
+war as the noon-day of Roman greatness; and Petrarch could
+not resist writing of this time. Had Silius Italicus been then
+discovered, Petrarch would probably have chosen another
+subject; but, as it was, the glorification of Scipio Africanus
+the Elder was so much in accordance with the spirit of the
+fourteenth century, that another poet, Zanobi di Strada, also
+proposed to himself the same task, and only from respect for
+Petrarch withdrew the poem with which he had already made
+great progress.<a name="FNanchor_601_601" id="FNanchor_601_601"></a><a href="#Footnote_601_601" class="fnanchor">[601]</a> If any justification were needed for the
+‘Africa,’ it lies in the fact that in Petrarch’s time and afterwards
+Scipio was as much an object of public interest as if he
+were then alive, and that he was held by many to be a greater
+man than Alexander, Pompey, and Cæsar.<a name="FNanchor_602_602" id="FNanchor_602_602"></a><a href="#Footnote_602_602" class="fnanchor">[602]</a> How many modern
+epics treat of a subject at once so popular, so historical in its
+basis, and so striking to the imagination? For us, it is true,
+the poem is unreadable. For other themes of the same kind
+the reader may be referred to the histories of literature.</p>
+
+<p>A richer and more fruitful vein was discovered in expanding
+and completing the Greco-Roman mythology. In this too<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_259" id="page_259"></a>{259}</span>
+Italian poetry began early to take a part, beginning with the
+‘Teseide’ of Boccaccio, which passes for his best poetical work.
+Under Martin V. Maffeo Vegio wrote in Latin a thirteenth
+book to the Æneid; besides which we meet with many less
+considerable attempts, especially in the style of Claudian&mdash;a
+‘Meleagris,’ a ‘Hesperis,’ and so forth. Still more curious
+were the newly-invented myths, which peopled the fairest
+regions of Italy with a primæval race of gods, nymphs, genii,
+and even shepherds, the epic and bucolic styles here passing
+into one another. In the narrative or conversational eclogue
+after the time of Petrarch, pastoral life was treated in a purely
+conventional manner,<a name="FNanchor_603_603" id="FNanchor_603_603"></a><a href="#Footnote_603_603" class="fnanchor">[603]</a> as a vehicle of all possible feelings and
+fancies; and this point will be touched on again in the sequel.
+For the moment, we have only to do with the new myths. In
+them, more clearly than anywhere else, we see the double significance
+of the old gods to the men of the Renaissance. On
+the one hand, they replace abstract terms in poetry, and render
+allegorical figures superfluous; and, on the other, they serve as
+free and independent elements in art, as forms of beauty which
+can be turned to some account in any and every poem. The
+example was boldly set by Boccaccio, with his fanciful world
+of gods and shepherds who people the country round Florence
+in his ‘Ninfale d’Ameto’ and ‘Ninfale Fiesolano.’ Both these
+poems were written in Italian. But the masterpiece in this
+style was the ‘Sarca’ of Pietro Bembo,<a name="FNanchor_604_604" id="FNanchor_604_604"></a><a href="#Footnote_604_604" class="fnanchor">[604]</a> which tells how the
+rivergod of that name wooed the nymph Garda; of the brilliant
+marriage feast in a cave of Monte Baldo; of the prophecies
+of Manto, daughter of Tiresias; of the birth of the child
+Mincius; of the founding of Mantua; and of the future glory
+of Virgil, son of Mincius and of Maia, nymph of Andes. This
+humanistic rococo is set forth by Bembo in verses of great
+beauty, concluding with an address to Virgil, which any poet
+might envy him. Such works are often slighted as mere<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_260" id="page_260"></a>{260}</span>
+declamation. This is a matter of taste on which we are all
+free to form our own opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Further, we find long epic poems in hexameters on biblical
+or ecclesiastical subjects. The authors were by no means
+always in search of preferment or of papal favour. With the
+best of them, and even with less gifted writers, like Battista
+Mantovano, the author of the ‘Parthenice,’ there was probably
+an honest desire to serve religion by their Latin verses&mdash;a
+desire with which their half-pagan conception of Catholicism
+harmonised well enough. Gyraldus goes through a list of
+these poets, among whom Vida, with his ‘Christiad’ and Sannazaro,
+with his three books, ‘De partu Virginis,’<a name="FNanchor_605_605" id="FNanchor_605_605"></a><a href="#Footnote_605_605" class="fnanchor">[605]</a> hold the
+first place. Sannazaro (b. 1458, d. 1530) is impressive by the
+steady and powerful flow of his verse, in which Christian and
+pagan elements are mingled without scruple, by the plastic
+vigour of his description, and by the perfection of his workmanship.
+He could venture to introduce Virgil’s fourth eclogue
+into his song of the shepherds at the manger (III. 200 sqq.)
+without fearing a comparison. In treating of the unseen world,
+he sometimes gives proofs of a boldness worthy of Dante, as
+when King David in the Limbo of the Patriarchs rises up to
+sing and prophesy (I. 236 sqq.), or when the Eternal, sitting on
+the throne clad in a mantle shining with pictures of all the
+elements, addresses the heavenly host (III. 17 sqq). At other
+times he does not hesitate to weave the whole classical mythology
+into his subject, yet without spoiling the harmony of the
+whole, since the pagan deities are only accessory figures, and
+play no important part in the story. To appreciate the artistic
+genius of that age in all its bearings, we must not refuse to
+notice such works as these. The merit of Sannazaro will
+appear the greater, when we consider that the mixture of
+Christian and pagan elements is apt to disturb us much more
+in poetry than in the plastic arts. The latter can still satisfy
+the eye by beauty of form and colour, and in general are much
+more independent of the significance of the subject than poetry.
+With them, the imagination is interested chiefly in the form,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_261" id="page_261"></a>{261}</span>
+with poetry, in the matter. Honest Battista Mantovano in his
+calendar of the festivals,<a name="FNanchor_606_606" id="FNanchor_606_606"></a><a href="#Footnote_606_606" class="fnanchor">[606]</a> tried another expedient. Instead of
+making the gods and demigods serve the purposes of sacred
+history, he put them, as the Fathers of the Church did, in
+active opposition to it. When the angel Gabriel salutes the
+Virgin at Nazareth, Mercury flies after him from Carmel, and
+listens at the door. He then announces the result of his eavesdropping
+to the assembled gods, and stimulates them thereby
+to desperate resolutions. Elsewhere,<a name="FNanchor_607_607" id="FNanchor_607_607"></a><a href="#Footnote_607_607" class="fnanchor">[607]</a> it is true, in his writings,
+Thetis, Ceres, Æolus, and other pagan deities pay willing
+homage to the glory of the Madonna.</p>
+
+<p>The fame of Sannazaro, the number of his imitators, the
+enthusiastic homage which was paid to him by the greatest
+men&mdash;by Bembo, who wrote his epitaph, and by Titian, who
+painted his portrait&mdash;all show how dear and necessary he was
+to his age. On the threshold of the Reformation he solved for
+the Church the problem, whether it were possible for a poet to
+be a Christian as well as a classic; and both Leo and Clement
+were loud in their thanks for his achievements.</p>
+
+<p>And, finally, contemporary history was now treated in hexameters
+or distichs, sometimes in a narrative and sometimes in a
+panegyrical style, but most commonly to the honour of some
+prince or princely family. We thus meet with a Sforziad,<a name="FNanchor_608_608" id="FNanchor_608_608"></a><a href="#Footnote_608_608" class="fnanchor">[608]</a> a
+Borseid, a Laurentiad, a Borgiad (see p. 223), a Triulziad, and
+the like. The object sought after was certainly not attained; for
+those who became famous and are now immortal owe it to
+anything rather than to this sort of poems, to which the world
+has always had an ineradicable dislike, even when they happen
+to be written by good poets. A wholly different effect is produced
+by smaller, simpler and more unpretentious scenes from
+the lives of distinguished men, such as the beautiful poem on
+Leo X.’s ‘Hunt at Palo,’<a name="FNanchor_609_609" id="FNanchor_609_609"></a><a href="#Footnote_609_609" class="fnanchor">[609]</a> or the ‘Journey of Julius II.’ by<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_262" id="page_262"></a>{262}</span>
+Hadrian of Corneto (<a href="#page_119">p. 119</a>). Brilliant descriptions of hunting-parties
+are found in Ercole Strozza, in the above-mentioned
+Hadrian, and in others; and it is a pity that the modern reader
+should allow himself to be irritated or repelled by the adulation
+with which they are doubtless filled. The masterly treatment
+and the considerable historical value of many of these most
+graceful poems, guarantee to them a longer existence than
+many popular works of our own day are likely to attain.</p>
+
+<p>In general, these poems are good in proportion to the sparing
+use of the sentimental and the general. Some of the smaller
+epic poems, even of recognised masters, unintentionally produce,
+by the ill-timed introduction of mythological elements,
+an impression that is indescribably ludicrous. Such, for instance,
+is the lament of Ercole Strozza<a name="FNanchor_610_610" id="FNanchor_610_610"></a><a href="#Footnote_610_610" class="fnanchor">[610]</a> on Cæsar Borgia. We
+there listen to the complaint of Rome, who had set all her
+hopes on the Spanish Popes Calixtus III. and Alexander VI.,
+and who saw her promised deliverer in Cæsar. His history is
+related down to the catastrophe of 1503. The poet then asks
+the Muse what were the counsels of the gods at that moment,<a name="FNanchor_611_611" id="FNanchor_611_611"></a><a href="#Footnote_611_611" class="fnanchor">[611]</a>
+and Crato tells how, upon Olympus, Pallas took the part of the
+Spaniards, Venus of the Italians, how both then embrace the
+knees of Jupiter, how thereupon he kisses them, soothes them,
+and explains to them that he can do nothing against the fate
+woven by the Parcæ, but that the divine promises will be
+fulfilled by the child of the House of Este-Borgia.<a name="FNanchor_612_612" id="FNanchor_612_612"></a><a href="#Footnote_612_612" class="fnanchor">[612]</a> After relating
+the fabulous origin of both families, he declares that he
+can confer immortality on Cæsar as little as he could once, in
+spite of all entreaties, on Memnon or Achilles; and concludes
+with the consoling assurance that Cæsar, before his own death,
+will destroy many people in war. Mars then hastens to Naples
+to stir up war and confusion, while Pallas goes to Nepi, and
+there appears to the dying Cæsar under the form of Alexander<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_263" id="page_263"></a>{263}</span>
+VI. After giving him the good advice to submit to his fate
+and be satisfied with the glory of his name, the papal goddess
+vanishes ‘like a bird.’</p>
+
+<p>Yet we should needlessly deprive ourselves of an enjoyment, which
+is sometimes very great, if we threw aside everything in
+which classical mythology plays a more or less appropriate
+part. Here, as in painting and sculpture, art has often ennobled
+what is in itself purely conventional. The beginnings
+of parody are also to be found by lovers of that class of literature
+(pp. 159 sqq.) <i>e.g.</i> in the Macaroneid&mdash;to which the comic
+Feast of the Gods, by Giovanni Bellini, forms an early parallel.</p>
+
+<p>Many, too, of the narrative poems in hexameters are merely
+exercises, or adaptations of histories in prose, which latter the
+reader will prefer, where he can find them. At last, everything&mdash;every
+quarrel and every ceremony&mdash;came to be put
+into verse, and this even by the German humanists of the
+Reformation.<a name="FNanchor_613_613" id="FNanchor_613_613"></a><a href="#Footnote_613_613" class="fnanchor">[613]</a> And yet it would be unfair to attribute this to
+mere want of occupation, or to an excessive facility in stringing
+verses together. In Italy, at all events, it was rather due
+to an abundant sense of style, as is further proved by the
+mass of contemporary reports, histories, and even pamphlets, in
+the ‘terza rima.’ Just as Niccolò da Uzzano published his
+scheme for a new constitution, Macchiavelli his view of the
+history of his own time, a third, the life of Savonarola, and a
+fourth, the siege of Piombino by Alfonso the Great,<a name="FNanchor_614_614" id="FNanchor_614_614"></a><a href="#Footnote_614_614" class="fnanchor">[614]</a> in this
+difficult metre, in order to produce a stronger effect, so did
+many others feel the need of hexameters, in order to win their
+special public. What was then tolerated and demanded, in
+this shape, is best shown by the didactic poetry of the time.
+Its popularity in the fifteenth century is something astounding.
+The most distinguished humanists were ready to celebrate in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_264" id="page_264"></a>{264}</span>
+Latin hexameters the most commonplace, ridiculous, or disgusting
+themes, such as the making of gold, the game of chess,
+the management of silkworms, astrology, and venereal diseases
+(<i>morbus gallicus</i>), to say nothing of many long Italian poems of
+the same kind. Nowadays this class of poems is condemned
+unread, and how far, as a matter of fact, they are really worth
+the reading, we are unable to say.<a name="FNanchor_615_615" id="FNanchor_615_615"></a><a href="#Footnote_615_615" class="fnanchor">[615]</a> One thing is certain, that
+epochs far above our own in the sense of beauty&mdash;the Renaissance
+and the Greco-Roman world&mdash;could not dispense with
+this form of poetry. It may be urged in reply, that it is not
+the lack of a sense of beauty, but the greater seriousness and
+the altered method of scientific treatment which renders the
+poetical form inappropriate, on which point it is unnecessary to
+enter.</p>
+
+<p>One of these didactic works has of late years been occasionally
+republished<a name="FNanchor_616_616" id="FNanchor_616_616"></a><a href="#Footnote_616_616" class="fnanchor">[616]</a>&mdash;the ‘Zodiac of Life,’ by Marcellus Palingenius
+(Pier Angello Manzolli), a secret adherent of Protestantism at
+Ferrara, written about 1528. With the loftiest speculations on
+God, virtue, and immortality, the writer connects the discussion
+of many questions of practical life, and is, on this account, an
+authority of some weight in the history of morals. On the
+whole, however, his work must be considered as lying outside
+the boundaries of the Renaissance, as is further indicated by
+the fact that, in harmony with the serious didactic purpose of
+the poem, allegory tends to supplant mythology.</p>
+
+<p>But it was in lyric, and more particularly in elegiac poetry,
+that the poet-scholar came nearest to antiquity; and next to
+this, in epigram.</p>
+
+<p>In the lighter style, Catullus exercised a perfect fascination
+over the Italians. Not a few elegant Latin madrigals, not a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_265" id="page_265"></a>{265}</span>
+few little satires and malicious epistles, are mere adaptations
+from him; and the death of parrots and lapdogs is bewailed,
+even where there is no verbal imitation, in precisely the tone
+and style of the verses on Lesbia’s Sparrow. There are short
+poems of this sort, the date of which even a critic would be
+unable to fix,<a name="FNanchor_617_617" id="FNanchor_617_617"></a><a href="#Footnote_617_617" class="fnanchor">[617]</a> in the absence of positive evidence that they are
+works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, we can find scarcely an ode in the
+Sapphic or Alcaic metre, which does not clearly betray its
+modern origin. This is shown mostly by a rhetorical verbosity,
+rare in antiquity before the time of Statius, and by a singular
+want of the lyrical concentration which is indispensable to this
+style of poetry. Single passages in an ode, sometimes two or
+three strophes together, may look like an ancient fragment;
+but a longer extract will seldom keep this character throughout.
+And where it does so, as, for instance, in the fine Ode to
+Venus, by Andrea Navagero, it is easy to detect a simple paraphrase
+of ancient masterpieces.<a name="FNanchor_618_618" id="FNanchor_618_618"></a><a href="#Footnote_618_618" class="fnanchor">[618]</a> Some of the ode-writers take
+the saints for their subject, and invoke them in verses tastefully
+modelled after the pattern of analogous odes of Horace
+and Catullus. This is the manner of Navagero, in the Ode to
+the Archangel Gabriel, and particularly of Sannazaro (<a href="#page_260">p. 260</a>),
+who goes still further in his appropriation of pagan sentiment.
+He celebrates above all his patron saint,<a name="FNanchor_619_619" id="FNanchor_619_619"></a><a href="#Footnote_619_619" class="fnanchor">[619]</a> whose chapel was
+attached to his lovely villa on the shores of Posilippo, ‘there
+where the waves of the sea drink up the stream from the rocks,
+and surge against the walls of the little sanctuary.’ His delight
+is in the annual feast of S. Nazzaro, and the branches
+and garlands with which the chapel is hung on this day, seem
+to him like sacrificial gifts. Full of sorrow, and far off in
+exile, at St. Nazaire, on the banks of the Loire, with the
+banished Frederick of Aragon, he brings wreaths of box and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_266" id="page_266"></a>{266}</span>oak leaves to his patron saint on the same anniversary, thinking
+of former years, when all the youth of Posilippo used to
+come forth to greet him on flower-hung boats, and praying
+that he may return home.<a name="FNanchor_620_620" id="FNanchor_620_620"></a><a href="#Footnote_620_620" class="fnanchor">[620]</a></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the most deceptive likeness to the classical style is
+borne by a class of poems in elegiacs or hexameters, whose
+subject ranges from elegy, strictly so-called, to epigram. As
+the humanists dealt most freely of all with the text of the
+Roman elegiac poets, so they felt themselves most at home
+in imitating them. The elegy of Navagero addressed to the
+night, like other poems of the same age and kind, is full of
+points which remind us of his models; but it has the finest
+antique ring about it. Indeed Navagero<a name="FNanchor_621_621" id="FNanchor_621_621"></a><a href="#Footnote_621_621" class="fnanchor">[621]</a> always begins by
+choosing a truly poetical subject, which he then treats, not
+with servile imitation, but with masterly freedom, in the style
+of the Anthology, of Ovid, of Catullus, or of the Virgilian
+eclogues. He makes a sparing use of mythology, only, for
+instance, to introduce a sketch of country life, in a prayer to
+Ceres and other rural divinities. An address to his country, on
+his return from an embassy to Spain, though left unfinished,
+might have been worthy of a place beside the ‘Bella Italia,
+amate sponde’ of Vincenzo Monti, if the rest had been equal to
+this beginning:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Salve, cura Deûm, mundi felicior ora,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Formosae Veneris dulces salvete recessus;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ut vos post tantos animi mentisque labores<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Aspicio lustroque libens, ut munere vestro<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sollicitas toto depello e pectore curas!’<a name="FNanchor_622_622" id="FNanchor_622_622"></a><a href="#Footnote_622_622" class="fnanchor">[622]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The elegiac or hexametral form was that in which all higher
+sentiment found expression, both the noblest patriotic enthusiasm
+(see p. 119, the elegy on Julius II.) and the most<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_267" id="page_267"></a>{267}</span>
+elaborate eulogies on the ruling houses,<a name="FNanchor_623_623" id="FNanchor_623_623"></a><a href="#Footnote_623_623" class="fnanchor">[623]</a> as well as the tender
+melancholy of a Tibullus. Francesco Mario Molza, who rivals
+Statius and Martial in his flattery of Clement VII. and the
+Farnesi, gives us in his elegy to his ‘comrades,’ written from a
+sick-bed, thoughts on death as beautiful and genuinely antique
+as can be found in any of the poets of antiquity, and this
+without borrowing anything worth speaking of from them.<a name="FNanchor_624_624" id="FNanchor_624_624"></a><a href="#Footnote_624_624" class="fnanchor">[624]</a>
+The spirit and range of the Roman elegy were best understood
+and reproduced by Sannazaro, and no other writer of his time
+offers us so varied a choice of good poems in this style as he.
+We shall have occasion now and then to speak of some of these
+elegies in reference to the matter they treat of.</p>
+
+<p>The Latin epigram finally became in those days an affair of
+serious importance, since a few clever lines, engraved on a
+monument or quoted with laughter in society, could lay the
+foundation of a scholar’s celebrity. This tendency showed
+itself early in Italy. When it was known that Guido della
+Polenta wished to erect a monument at Dante’s grave, epitaphs
+poured in from all directions,<a name="FNanchor_625_625" id="FNanchor_625_625"></a><a href="#Footnote_625_625" class="fnanchor">[625]</a> ‘written by such as wished to
+<i>show themselves</i>, or to honour the dead poet, or to win the
+favour of Polenta.’ On the tomb of the Archbishop Giovanni
+Visconti (d. 1354), in the Cathedral at Milan, we read at the
+foot of 36 hexameters: ‘Master Gabrius de Zamoreis of Parma,
+Doctor of Laws, wrote these verses.’ In course of time, chiefly
+under the influence of Martial, and partly of Catullus, an extensive
+literature of this sort was formed. It was held the
+greatest of all triumphs, when an epigram was mistaken for a
+genuine copy from some old marble,<a name="FNanchor_626_626" id="FNanchor_626_626"></a><a href="#Footnote_626_626" class="fnanchor">[626]</a> or when it was so good
+that all Italy learned it by heart, as happened in the case of
+some of Bembo’s. When the Venetian government paid San<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_268" id="page_268"></a>{268}</span>nazaro
+600 ducats for a eulogy in three distichs,<a name="FNanchor_627_627" id="FNanchor_627_627"></a><a href="#Footnote_627_627" class="fnanchor">[627]</a> no one
+thought it an act of generous prodigality. The epigram was
+prized for what it was, in truth, to all the educated classes of
+that age&mdash;the concentrated essence of fame. Nor, on the other
+hand, was any man then so powerful as to be above the reach
+of a satirical epigram, and even the most powerful needed, for
+every inscription which they set before the public eye, the
+aid of careful and learned scholars, lest some blunder or other
+should qualify it for a place in the collections of ludicrous
+epitaphs.<a name="FNanchor_628_628" id="FNanchor_628_628"></a><a href="#Footnote_628_628" class="fnanchor">[628]</a> The epigraph and the epigram were branches of
+the same pursuit; the reproduction of the former was based
+on a diligent study of ancient monuments.</p>
+
+<p>The city of epigrams and inscriptions was, above all others,
+Rome. In this state without hereditary honours, each man
+had to look after his own immortality, and at the same time
+found the epigram an effective weapon against his competitors.
+Pius II. counts with satisfaction the distichs which his chief
+poet Campanus wrote on any event of his government which
+could be turned to poetical account. Under the following
+popes satirical epigrams came into fashion, and reached, in the
+opposition to Alexander VI. and his family, the highest pitch
+of defiant invective. Sannazaro, it is true, wrote his verses in
+a place of comparative safety, but others in the immediate
+neighbourhood of the court ventured on the most reckless
+attacks (<a href="#page_112">p. 112</a>). On one occasion when eight threatening
+distichs were found fastened to the door of the library,<a name="FNanchor_629_629" id="FNanchor_629_629"></a><a href="#Footnote_629_629" class="fnanchor">[629]</a> Alexander
+strengthened his guard by 800 men; we can imagine
+what he would have done to the poet if he had caught him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_269" id="page_269"></a>{269}</span>
+Under Leo X., Latin epigrams were like daily bread. For
+complimenting or for reviling the pope, for punishing enemies
+and victims, named or unnamed, for real or imaginary subjects
+of wit, malice, grief, or contemplation, no form was held more
+suitable. On the famous group of the Virgin with Saint Anna
+and the Child, which Andrea Sansovino carved for S. Agostino,
+no less than 120 persons wrote Latin verses, not so much, it is
+true, from devotion, as from regard for the patron who ordered
+the work.<a name="FNanchor_630_630" id="FNanchor_630_630"></a><a href="#Footnote_630_630" class="fnanchor">[630]</a> This man, Johann Goritz of Luxemburg, papal
+referendary of petitions, not only held a religious service on
+the feast of Saint Anna, but gave a great literary dinner in his
+garden on the slopes of the Capitol. It was then worth while
+to pass in review, in a long poem ‘De poetis urbanis,’ the
+whole crowd of singers who sought their fortune at the court
+of Leo. This was done by Franciscus Arsillus<a name="FNanchor_631_631" id="FNanchor_631_631"></a><a href="#Footnote_631_631" class="fnanchor">[631]</a>&mdash;a man
+who needed the patronage neither of pope nor prince, and
+who dared to speak his mind, even against his colleagues.
+The epigram survived the pontificate of Paul III. only in
+a few rare echoes, while the epigraph continued to flourish
+till the seventeenth century, when it perished finally of
+bombast.</p>
+
+<p>In Venice, also, this form of poetry had a history of its own,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_270" id="page_270"></a>{270}</span>
+which we are able to trace with the help of the ‘Venezia’ of
+Francesco Sansovino. A standing task for the epigram-writers
+was offered by the mottos (Brievi) on the pictures of the Doges
+in the great hall of the ducal palace&mdash;two or four hexameters,
+setting forth the most noteworthy facts in the government of
+each.<a name="FNanchor_632_632" id="FNanchor_632_632"></a><a href="#Footnote_632_632" class="fnanchor">[632]</a> In addition to this, the tombs of the Doges in the
+fourteenth century bore short inscriptions in prose, recording
+merely facts, and beside them turgid hexameters or leonine
+verses. In the fifteenth century more care was taken with the
+style; in the sixteenth century it is seen at its best; and then
+soon after came pointless antithesis, prosopopœia, false pathos,
+praise of abstract qualities&mdash;in a word, affectation and bombast.
+A good many traces of satire can be detected, and veiled criticism
+of the living is implied in open praise of the dead. At
+a much later period we find a few instances of a deliberate
+recurrence to the old, simple style.</p>
+
+<p>Architectural works and decorative works in general were
+constructed with a view to receiving inscriptions, often in frequent
+repetition; while the Northern Gothic seldom, and with
+difficulty, offered a suitable place for them, and in sepulchral
+monuments, for example, left free only the most exposed parts&mdash;namely
+the edges.</p>
+
+<p>By what has been said hitherto we have, perhaps, failed to
+convince the reader of the characteristic value of this Latin
+poetry of the Italians. Our task was rather to indicate its
+position and necessity in the history of civilisation. In its own
+day, a caricature of it appeared<a name="FNanchor_633_633" id="FNanchor_633_633"></a><a href="#Footnote_633_633" class="fnanchor">[633]</a>&mdash;the so-called maccaronic
+poetry. The masterpiece of this style, the ‘opus maccaronicorum,’
+was written by Merlinus Coccaius (Teofilo Folengo of
+Mantua). We shall now and then have occasion to refer to
+the matter of this poem. As to the form&mdash;hexameter and
+other verses, made up of Latin words and Italian words with
+Latin endings&mdash;its comic effect lies chiefly in the fact that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_271" id="page_271"></a>{271}</span>
+these combinations sound like so many slips of the tongue,
+or the effusions of an over-hasty Latin ‘improvisatore.’ The
+German imitations do not give the smallest notion of this
+effect.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_272" id="page_272"></a>{272}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XI-3" id="CHAPTER_XI-3"></a>CHAPTER XI.<br /><br />
+<small>FALL OF THE HUMANISTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">A<small>FTER</small> a brilliant succession of poet-scholars had, since the
+beginning of the fourteenth century, filled Italy and the world
+with the worship of antiquity, had determined the forms of
+education and culture, had often taken the lead in political
+affairs and had, to no small extent, reproduced ancient literature&mdash;at
+length in the sixteenth century, before their doctrines
+and scholarship had lost hold of the public mind, the whole
+class fell into deep and general disgrace. Though they still
+served as models to the poets, historians, and orators, personally
+no one would consent to be reckoned of their number. To the
+two chief accusations against them&mdash;that of malicious self-conceit,
+and that of abominable profligacy&mdash;a third charge of
+irreligion was now loudly added by the rising powers of the
+Counter-reformation.</p>
+
+<p>Why, it may be asked, were not these reproaches, whether
+true or false, heard sooner? As a matter of fact, they were
+heard at a very early period, but the effect they produced was
+insignificant, for the plain reason that men were far too dependent
+on the scholars for their knowledge of antiquity&mdash;that
+the scholars were personally the possessors and diffusers of
+ancient culture. But the spread of printed editions of the
+classics,<a name="FNanchor_634_634" id="FNanchor_634_634"></a><a href="#Footnote_634_634" class="fnanchor">[634]</a> and of large and well-arranged hand-books and
+dictionaries, went far to free the people from the necessity of
+personal intercourse with the humanists, and, as soon as they
+could be but partly dispensed with, the change in popular
+feeling became manifest. It was a change under which the
+good and bad suffered indiscriminately.</p>
+
+<p>The first to make these charges were certainly the humanists<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_273" id="page_273"></a>{273}</span>
+themselves. Of all men who ever formed a class, they had the
+least sense of their common interests, and least respected what
+there was of this sense. All means were held lawful, if one
+of them saw a chance of supplanting another. From literary
+discussion they passed with astonishing suddenness to the
+fiercest and the most groundless vituperation. Not satisfied
+with refuting, they sought to annihilate an opponent. Something
+of this must be put to the account of their position and
+circumstances; we have seen how fiercely the age, whose
+loudest spokesmen they were, was borne to and fro by the
+passion for glory and the passion for satire. Their position, too,
+in practical life was one that they had continually to fight for.
+In such a temper they wrote and spoke and described one
+another. Poggio’s works alone contain dirt enough to create
+a prejudice against the whole class&mdash;and these ‘Opera Poggii’
+were just those most often printed, on the north, as well as on
+the south, side of the Alps. We must take care not to rejoice
+too soon, when we meet among these men a figure which seems
+immaculate; on further inquiry there is always a danger of
+meeting with some foul charge, which, even when it is incredible,
+still discolours the picture. The mass of indecent Latin
+poems in circulation, and such things as the ribaldry on the
+subject of his own family, in Pontano’s dialogue, ‘Antonius,’
+did the rest to discredit the class. The sixteenth century was
+not only familiar with all these ugly symptoms, but had also
+grown tired of the type of the humanist. These men had to
+pay both for the misdeeds they had done, and for the excess of
+honour which had hitherto fallen to their lot. Their evil fate
+willed it that the greatest poet of the nation wrote of them in a
+tone of calm and sovereign contempt.<a name="FNanchor_635_635" id="FNanchor_635_635"></a><a href="#Footnote_635_635" class="fnanchor">[635]</a></p>
+
+<p>Of the reproaches which combined to excite so much hatred,
+many were only too well founded. Yet a clear and unmistakable
+tendency to strictness in matters of religion and morality
+was alive in many of the philologists, and it is a proof of small
+knowledge of the period, if the whole class is condemned. Yet
+many, and among them the loudest speakers, were guilty.</p>
+
+<p>Three facts explain, and perhaps diminish their guilt: the
+overflowing excess of favour and fortune, when the luck was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_274" id="page_274"></a>{274}</span>
+on their side: the uncertainty of the future, in which luxury
+or misery depended on the caprice of a patron or the malice of
+an enemy; and finally, the misleading influence of antiquity.
+This undermined their morality, without giving them its own
+instead; and in religious matters, since they could never think
+of accepting the positive belief in the old gods, it affected them
+only on the negative and sceptical side. Just because they conceived
+of antiquity dogmatically&mdash;that is, took it as the model
+for all thought and action&mdash;its influence was here pernicious.
+But that an age existed, which idolised the ancient world and
+its products with an exclusive devotion, was not the fault of
+individuals. It was the work of a historical providence, and all
+the culture of the ages which have followed, and of the ages to
+come, rests upon the fact that it was so, and that all the ends
+of life but this one were then deliberately put aside.</p>
+
+<p>The career of the humanists was, as a rule, of such a kind
+that only the strongest characters could pass through it unscathed.
+The first danger came, in some cases, from the
+parents, who sought to turn a precocious child into a miracle
+of learning,<a name="FNanchor_636_636" id="FNanchor_636_636"></a><a href="#Footnote_636_636" class="fnanchor">[636]</a> with an eye to his future position in that class
+which then was supreme. Youthful prodigies, however, seldom
+rise above a certain level; or, if they do, are forced to achieve
+their further progress and development at the cost of the
+bitterest trials. For an ambitious youth, the fame and the
+brilliant position of the humanists were a perilous temptation;
+it seemed to him that he too ‘through inborn pride could no
+longer regard the low and common things of life.’ He was
+thus led to plunge into a life of excitement and vicissitude, in
+which exhausting studies, tutorships, secretaryships, professorships,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_275" id="page_275"></a>{275}</span>
+offices in princely households, mortal enmities and perils,
+luxury and beggary, boundless admiration and boundless contempt,
+followed confusedly one upon the other, and in which
+the most solid worth and learning were often pushed aside by
+superficial impudence. But the worst of all was, that the
+position of the humanist was almost incompatible with a fixed
+home, since it either made frequent changes of dwelling necessary
+for a livelihood, or so affected the mind of the individual
+that he could never be happy for long in one place. He grew
+tired of the people, and had no peace among the enmities which
+he excited, while the people themselves in their turn demanded
+something new (<a href="#page_211">p. 211</a>). Much as this life reminds us of the
+Greek sophists of the Empire, as described to us by Philostratus,
+yet the position of the sophists was more favourable. They
+often had money, or could more easily do without it than the
+humanists, and as professional teachers of rhetoric, rather than
+men of learning, their life was freer and simpler. But the
+scholar of the Renaissance was forced to combine great learning
+with the power of resisting the influence of ever-changing
+pursuits and situations. Add to this the deadening effect of
+licentious excess, and&mdash;since do what he might, the worst was
+believed of him&mdash;a total indifference to the moral laws recognised
+by others. Such men can hardly be conceived to exist
+without an inordinate pride. They needed it, if only to keep
+their heads above water, and were confirmed in it by the admiration
+which alternated with hatred in the treatment they
+received from the world. They are the most striking examples
+and victims of an unbridled subjectivity.</p>
+
+<p>The attacks and the satirical pictures began, as we have said,
+at an early period. For all strongly marked individuality, for
+every kind of distinction, a corrective was at hand in the
+national taste for ridicule. And in this case the men themselves
+offered abundant and terrible materials which satire had
+but to make use of. In the fifteenth century, Battista Mantovano,
+in discoursing of the seven monsters,<a name="FNanchor_637_637" id="FNanchor_637_637"></a><a href="#Footnote_637_637" class="fnanchor">[637]</a> includes the
+humanists, with many others, under the head ‘Superbia.’ He
+describes how, fancying themselves children of Apollo, they
+walk along with affected solemnity and with sullen, malicious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_276" id="page_276"></a>{276}</span>
+looks, now gazing at their own shadow, now brooding over the
+popular praise they hunted after, like cranes in search of food.
+But in the sixteenth century the indictment was presented in
+full. Besides Ariosto, their own historian Gyraldus<a name="FNanchor_638_638" id="FNanchor_638_638"></a><a href="#Footnote_638_638" class="fnanchor">[638]</a> gives
+evidence of this, whose treatise, written under Leo X., was
+probably revised about the year 1540. Warning examples
+from ancient and modern times of the moral disorder and the
+wretched existence of the scholars meet us in astonishing
+abundance, and along with these accusations of the most serious
+nature are brought formally against them. Among these are
+anger, vanity, obstinacy, self-adoration, a dissolute private life,
+immorality of all descriptions, heresy, atheism; further, the
+habit of speaking without conviction, a sinister influence on
+government, pedantry of speech, thanklessness towards teachers,
+and abject flattery of the great, who first give the scholar a
+taste of their favours and then leave him to starve. The description
+is closed by a reference to the golden age, when no
+such thing as science existed on the earth. Of these charges,
+that of heresy soon became the most dangerous, and Gyraldus
+himself, when he afterwards republished a perfectly harmless
+youthful work,<a name="FNanchor_639_639" id="FNanchor_639_639"></a><a href="#Footnote_639_639" class="fnanchor">[639]</a> was compelled to take refuge beneath the
+mantle of Duke Hercules II. of Ferrara,<a name="FNanchor_640_640" id="FNanchor_640_640"></a><a href="#Footnote_640_640" class="fnanchor">[640]</a> since men now had
+the upper hand who held that people had better spend their
+time on Christian themes than on mythological researches. He
+justifies himself on the ground that the latter, on the contrary,
+were at such a time almost the only harmless branches of
+study, as they deal with subjects of a perfectly neutral
+character.</p>
+
+<p>But if it is the duty of the historian to seek for evidence in
+which moral judgment is tempered by human sympathy, he
+will find no authority comparable in value to the work so often
+quoted of Pierio Valeriano,<a name="FNanchor_641_641" id="FNanchor_641_641"></a><a href="#Footnote_641_641" class="fnanchor">[641]</a> ‘On the Infelicity of the Scholar.’<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_277" id="page_277"></a>{277}</span>
+It was written under the gloomy impressions left by the sack
+of Rome, which seems to the writer, not only the direct cause
+of untold misery to the men of learning, but, as it were, the
+fulfilment of an evil destiny which had long pursued them.
+Pierio is here led by a simple and, on the whole, just feeling.
+He does not introduce a special power, which plagued the men
+of genius on account of their genius, but he states facts, in
+which an unlucky chance often wears the aspect of fatality.
+Not wishing to write a tragedy or to refer events to the conflict
+of higher powers, he is content to lay before us the scenes
+of every-day life. We are introduced to men, who in times
+of trouble lose, first their incomes, and then their places; to
+others, who in trying to get two appointments, miss both;
+to unsociable misers, who carry about their money sewn into
+their clothes, and die mad when they are robbed of it; to
+others, who accept well-paid offices, and then sicken with a
+melancholy, longing for their lost freedom. We read how
+some died young of a plague or fever, and how the writings
+which had cost them so much toil were burnt with their bed
+and clothes; how others lived in terror of the murderous
+threats of their colleagues; how one was slain by a covetous
+servant, and another caught by highwaymen on a journey,
+and left to pine in a dungeon, because unable to pay his
+ransom. Many died of unspoken grief for the insults they
+received and the prizes of which they were defrauded. We
+are told of the death of a Venetian, because his son, a youthful
+prodigy, was dead; and the mother and brothers followed, as
+if the lost child drew them all after him. Many, especially
+Florentines, ended their lives by suicide;<a name="FNanchor_642_642" id="FNanchor_642_642"></a><a href="#Footnote_642_642" class="fnanchor">[642]</a> others through the
+secret justice of a tyrant. Who, after all, is happy?&mdash;and by
+what means? By blunting all feeling for such misery? One
+of the speakers in the dialogue in which Pierio clothed his
+argument, can give an answer to these questions&mdash;the illustrious
+Gasparo Contarini, at the mention of whose name we
+turn with the expectation to hear at least something of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_278" id="page_278"></a>{278}</span>
+truest and deepest which was then thought on such matters.
+As a type of the happy scholar, he mentions Fra Urbano Valeriano
+of Belluno,<a name="FNanchor_643_643" id="FNanchor_643_643"></a><a href="#Footnote_643_643" class="fnanchor">[643]</a> who was for years teacher of Greek at Venice,
+who visited Greece and the East, and towards the close of his
+life travelled, now through this country, now through that,
+without ever mounting a horse; who never had a penny of his
+own, rejected all honours and distinctions, and after a gay old
+age, died in his eighty-fourth year, without, if we except a fall
+from a ladder, having ever known an hour of sickness. And
+what was the difference between such a man and the humanists?
+The latter had more free will, more subjectivity, than they
+could turn to purposes of happiness. The mendicant friar, who
+had lived from his boyhood in the monastery, and never eaten
+or slept except by rule, ceased to feel the compulsion under
+which he lived. Through the power of this habit he led, amid
+all outward hardships, a life of inward peace, by which he
+impressed his hearers far more than by his teaching. Looking
+at him, they could believe that it depends on ourselves whether
+we bear up against misfortune or surrender to it. ‘Amid want
+and toil he was happy, because he willed to be so, because he
+had contracted no evil habits, was not capricious, inconstant,
+immoderate; but was always contented with little or nothing.’
+If we heard Contarini himself, religious motives would no
+doubt play a part in the argument&mdash;but the practical philosopher
+in sandals speaks plainly enough. An allied character,
+but placed in other circumstances, is that of Fabio Calvi of
+Ravenna, the commentator of Hippocrates.<a name="FNanchor_644_644" id="FNanchor_644_644"></a><a href="#Footnote_644_644" class="fnanchor">[644]</a> He lived to a
+great age in Rome, eating only pulse ‘like the Pythagoreans,’
+and dwelt in a hovel little better than the tub of Diogenes.
+Of the pension, which Pope Leo gave him, he spent enough to
+keep body and soul together, and gave the rest away. He
+was not a healthy man, like Fra Urbano, nor is it likely that,
+like him, he died with a smile on his lips. At the age of
+ninety, in the sack of Rome, he was dragged away by the
+Spaniards, who hoped for a ransom, and died of hunger in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_279" id="page_279"></a>{279}</span>
+hospital. But his name has passed into the kingdom of the
+immortals, for Raphael loved the old man like a father, and
+honoured him as a teacher, and came to him for advice in all
+things. Perhaps they discoursed chiefly of the projected
+restoration of ancient Rome (<a href="#page_184">p. 184</a>), perhaps of still higher
+matters. Who can tell what a share Fabio may have had in
+the conception of the School of Athens, and in other great
+works of the master?</p>
+
+<p>We would gladly close this part of our essay with the
+picture of some pleasing and winning character. Pomponius
+Laetus, of whom we shall briefly speak, is known to us principally
+through the letter of his pupil Sabellicus,<a name="FNanchor_645_645" id="FNanchor_645_645"></a><a href="#Footnote_645_645" class="fnanchor">[645]</a> in which an
+antique colouring is purposely given to his character. Yet
+many of its features are clearly recognisable. He was (<a href="#page_251">p. 251</a>)
+a bastard of the House of the Neapolitan Sanseverini, princes
+of Salerno, whom he nevertheless refused to recognise, writing,
+in reply to an invitation to live with them, the famous letter:
+‘Pomponius Laetus cognatis et propinquis suis, salutem. Quod
+petitis fieri non potest. Valete.’ An insignificant little figure,
+with small, quick eyes, and quaint dress, he lived during the
+last decades of the fifteenth century, as professor in the University
+of Rome, either in his cottage in a garden on the Esquiline
+hill, or in his vineyard on the Quirinal. In the one he bred his
+ducks and fowls; the other he cultivated according to the
+strictest precepts of Cato, Varro, and Columella. He spent his
+holidays in fishing or bird-catching in the Campagna, or in
+feasting by some shady spring or on the banks of the Tiber.
+Wealth and luxury he despised. Free himself from envy and
+uncharitable speech, he would not suffer them in others. It
+was only against the hierarchy that he gave his tongue free
+play, and passed, till his latter years, for a scorner of religion
+altogether. He was involved in the persecution of the
+humanists begun by Pope Paul II., and surrendered to this
+pontiff by the Venetians; but no means could be found to
+wring unworthy confessions from him. He was afterwards
+befriended and supported by popes and prelates, and when his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_280" id="page_280"></a>{280}</span>
+house was plundered in the disturbances under Sixtus IV.,
+more was collected for him than he had lost. No teacher was
+more conscientious. Before daybreak he was to be seen descending
+the Esquiline with his lantern, and on reaching his
+lecture-room found it always filled to overflowing with pupils
+who had come at midnight to secure a place. A stutter compelled
+him to speak with care, but his delivery was even and
+effective. His few works give evidence of careful writing.
+No scholar treated the text of ancient authors more soberly and
+accurately. The remains of antiquity which surrounded him
+in Rome touched him so deeply, that he would stand before
+them as if entranced, or would suddenly burst into tears at the
+sight of them. As he was ready to lay aside his own studies
+in order to help others, he was much loved and had many
+friends; and at his death, even Alexander VI. sent his courtiers
+to follow the corpse, which was carried by the most distinguished
+of his pupils. The funeral service in the Araceli was attended
+by forty bishops and by all the foreign ambassadors.</p>
+
+<p>It was Laetus who introduced and conducted the representations
+of ancient, chiefly Plautine, plays in Rome (<a href="#page_255">p. 255</a>).
+Every year, he celebrated the anniversary of the foundation of
+the city by a festival, at which his friends and pupils recited
+speeches and poems. Such meetings were the origin of what
+acquired, and long retained, the name of the Roman Academy.
+It was simply a free union of individuals, and was connected
+with no fixed institution. Besides the occasions mentioned, it
+met<a name="FNanchor_646_646" id="FNanchor_646_646"></a><a href="#Footnote_646_646" class="fnanchor">[646]</a> at the invitation of a patron, or to celebrate the memory
+of a deceased member, as of Platina. At such times, a prelate
+belonging to the academy would first say mass; Pomponio
+would then ascend the pulpit and deliver a speech; some one
+else would then follow him and recite an elegy. The customary
+banquet, with declamations and recitations, concluded the
+festival, whether joyous or serious, and the academicians,
+notably Platina himself, early acquired the reputation of
+epicures.<a name="FNanchor_647_647" id="FNanchor_647_647"></a><a href="#Footnote_647_647" class="fnanchor">[647]</a> At other times, the guests performed farces in the
+old Atellan style. As a free association of very varied elements,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_281" id="page_281"></a>{281}</span>
+the academy lasted in its original form down to the sack of
+Rome, and included among its guests Angelus Coloccius, Joh.
+Corycius (<a href="#page_269">p. 269</a>) and others. Its precise value as an element
+in the intellectual life of the people is as hard to estimate as
+that of any other social union of the same kind; yet a man
+like Sadoleto<a name="FNanchor_648_648" id="FNanchor_648_648"></a><a href="#Footnote_648_648" class="fnanchor">[648]</a> reckoned it among the most precious memories
+of his youth. A large number of other academies appeared
+and passed away in many Italian cities, according to the
+number and significance of the humanists living in them, and
+to the patronage bestowed by the great and wealthy. Of these
+we may mention the Academy of Naples, of which Jovianus
+Pontanus was the centre, and which sent out a colony to
+Lecce,<a name="FNanchor_649_649" id="FNanchor_649_649"></a><a href="#Footnote_649_649" class="fnanchor">[649]</a> and that of Pordenone, which formed the court of the
+Condottiere Alviano. The circle of Ludovico Moro, and its
+peculiar importance for that prince, has been already spoken of
+(<a href="#page_042">p. 42</a>).</p>
+
+<p>About the middle of the sixteenth century, these associations
+seem to have undergone a complete change. The humanists,
+driven in other spheres from their commanding position, and
+viewed askance by the men of the Counter-reformation, lost
+the control of the academies: and here, as elsewhere, Latin
+poetry was replaced by Italian. Before long every town of the
+least importance had its academy, with some strange, fantastic
+name,<a name="FNanchor_650_650" id="FNanchor_650_650"></a><a href="#Footnote_650_650" class="fnanchor">[650]</a> and its own endowment and subscriptions. Besides
+the recitation of verses, the new institutions inherited from
+their predecessors the regular banquets and the representation
+of plays, sometimes acted by the members themselves, sometimes
+under their direction by young amateurs, and sometimes
+by paid players. The fate of the Italian stage, and afterwards
+of the opera, was long in the hands of these associations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_282" id="page_282"></a>{282}</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_283" id="page_283"></a>{283}</span></p>
+
+<h2>
+<i><a name="PART_IV" id="PART_IV"></a>PART IV.</i><br />
+<br />
+THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.<br />
+</h2>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_284" id="page_284"></a>{284}</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_285" id="page_285"></a>{285}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-4" id="CHAPTER_I-4"></a>CHAPTER I.<br /><br />
+<small>JOURNEYS OF THE ITALIANS.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">F<small>REED</small> from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe
+checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual
+development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity,
+the Italian mind now turned to the discovery of the outward
+universe, and to the representation of it in speech and in form.</p>
+
+<p>On the journeys of the Italians to distant parts of the world,
+we can here make but a few general observations. The
+crusades had opened unknown distances to the European mind,
+and awakened in all the passion for travel and adventure. It
+may be hard to indicate precisely the point where this passion
+allied itself with, or became the servant of, the thirst for knowledge;
+but it was in Italy that this was first and most completely
+the case. Even in the crusades the interest of the
+Italians was wider than that of other nations, since they already
+were a naval power and had commercial relations with the
+East. From time immemorial the Mediterranean sea had given
+to the nations that dwelt on its shores mental impulses different
+from those which governed the peoples of the North; and
+never, from the very structure of their character, could the
+Italians be adventurers in the sense which the word bore among
+the Teutons. After they were once at home in all the eastern
+harbours of the Mediterranean, it was natural that the most
+enterprising among them should be led to join that vast international
+movement of the Mohammedans which there found its
+outlet. A new half of the world lay, as it were, freshly discovered
+before them. Or, like Polo of Venice, they were caught
+in the current of the Mongolian peoples, and carried on to the
+steps of the throne of the Great Khan. At an early period, we
+find Italians sharing in the discoveries made in the Atlantic
+ocean; it was the Genoese who, in the 13th century, found the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_286" id="page_286"></a>{286}</span>
+Canary Islands.<a name="FNanchor_651_651" id="FNanchor_651_651"></a><a href="#Footnote_651_651" class="fnanchor">[651]</a> In the same year, 1291, when Ptolemais, the
+last remnant of the Christian East, was lost, it was again the
+Genoese who made the first known attempt to find a sea-passage
+to the East Indies.<a name="FNanchor_652_652" id="FNanchor_652_652"></a><a href="#Footnote_652_652" class="fnanchor">[652]</a> Columbus himself is but the greatest
+of a long list of Italians who, in the service of the western
+nations, sailed into distant seas. The true discoverer, however,
+is not the man who first chances to stumble upon anything, but
+the man who finds what he has sought. Such a one alone
+stands in a link with the thoughts and interests of his predecessors,
+and this relationship will also determine the account he
+gives of his search. For which reason the Italians, although
+their claim to be the first comers on this or that shore may be
+disputed, will yet retain their title to be pre-eminently the
+nation of discoverers for the whole latter part of the Middle
+Ages. The fuller proof of this assertion belongs to the special
+history of discoveries.<a name="FNanchor_653_653" id="FNanchor_653_653"></a><a href="#Footnote_653_653" class="fnanchor">[653]</a> Yet ever and again we turn with
+admiration to the august figure of the great Genoese, by whom
+a new continent beyond the ocean was demanded, sought and
+found; and who was the first to be able to say: ‘il mondo è
+poco’&mdash;the world is not so large as men have thought. At the
+time when Spain gave Alexander VI. to the Italians, Italy
+gave Columbus to the Spaniards. Only a few weeks before the
+death of that pope (July 7th, 1503), Columbus wrote from
+Jamaica his noble letter to the thankless Catholic kings, which
+the ages to come can never read without profound emotion.
+In a codicil to his will, dated Valladolid, May 4th, 1506, he
+bequeathed to ‘his beloved home, the Republic of Genoa, the
+prayer-book which Pope Alexander had given him, and which
+in prison, in conflict, and in every kind of adversity had been
+to him the greatest of comforts.’ It seems as if these words
+cast upon the abhorred name of Borgia one last gleam of grace
+and mercy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_287" id="page_287"></a>{287}</span></p>
+
+<p>The development of geographical and the allied sciences
+among the Italians must, like the history of their voyages, be
+touched upon but very briefly. A superficial comparison of
+their achievements with those of other nations shows an early
+and striking superiority on their part. Where, in the middle
+of the fifteenth century, could be found, anywhere but in Italy,
+such an union of geographical, statistical, and historical knowledge
+as was found in Æneas Sylvius? Not only in his great
+geographical work, but in his letters and commentaries, he
+describes with equal mastery landscapes, cities, manners, industries
+and products, political conditions and constitutions,
+wherever he can use his own observation or the evidence of
+eye-witnesses. What he takes from books is naturally of less
+moment. Even the short sketch<a name="FNanchor_654_654" id="FNanchor_654_654"></a><a href="#Footnote_654_654" class="fnanchor">[654]</a> of that valley in the
+Tyrolese Alps, where Frederick III. had given him a benefice,
+and still more his description of Scotland, leaves untouched
+none of the relations of human life, and displays a power and
+method of unbiassed observation and comparison impossible in
+any but a countryman of Columbus, trained in the school of
+the ancients. Thousands saw and, in part, knew what he did,
+but they felt no impulse to draw a picture of it, and were
+unconscious that the world desired such pictures.</p>
+
+<p>In geography<a name="FNanchor_655_655" id="FNanchor_655_655"></a><a href="#Footnote_655_655" class="fnanchor">[655]</a> as in other matters, it is vain to attempt to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_288" id="page_288"></a>{288}</span>
+distinguish how much is to be attributed to the study of the
+ancients, and how much to the special genius of the Italians.
+They saw and treated the things of this world from an objective
+point of view, even before they were familiar with ancient
+literature, partly because they were themselves a half-ancient
+people, and partly because their political circumstances predisposed
+them to it; but they would not so rapidly have attained
+to such perfection had not the old geographers showed them the
+way. The influence of the existing Italian geographies on the
+spirit and tendencies of the travellers and discoverers was also
+inestimable. Even the simple ‘dilettante’ of a science&mdash;if in
+the present case we should assign to Æneas Sylvius so low a
+rank&mdash;can diffuse just that sort of general interest in the subject
+which prepares for new pioneers the indispensable groundwork
+of a favourable predisposition in the public mind. True
+discoverers in any science know well what they owe to such
+mediation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_289" id="page_289"></a>{289}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-4" id="CHAPTER_II-4"></a>CHAPTER II.<br /><br />
+<small>NATURAL SCIENCE IN ITALY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">F<small>OR</small> the position of the Italians in the sphere of the natural
+sciences, we must refer the reader to the special treatises on
+the subject, of which the only one with which we are familiar
+is the superficial and depreciatory work of Libri.<a name="FNanchor_656_656" id="FNanchor_656_656"></a><a href="#Footnote_656_656" class="fnanchor">[656]</a> The dispute
+as to the priority of particular discoveries concerns us all the
+less, since we hold that, at any time, and among any civilised
+people, a man may appear who, starting with very scanty preparation,
+is driven by an irresistible impulse into the path of
+scientific investigation, and through his native gifts achieves
+the most astonishing success. Such men were Gerbert of
+Rheims and Roger Bacon. That they were masters of the
+whole knowledge of the age in their several departments, was
+a natural consequence of the spirit in which they worked.
+When once the veil of illusion was torn asunder, when once
+the dread of nature and the slavery to books and tradition
+were overcome, countless problems lay before them for solution.
+It is another matter when a whole people takes a natural delight
+in the study and investigation of nature, at a time when
+other nations are indifferent, that is to say, when the discoverer
+is not threatened or wholly ignored, but can count on the
+friendly support of congenial spirits. That this was the case
+in Italy, is unquestionable.<a name="FNanchor_657_657" id="FNanchor_657_657"></a><a href="#Footnote_657_657" class="fnanchor">[657]</a> The Italian students of nature
+trace with pride in the ‘Divine Comedy’ the hints and proofs<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_290" id="page_290"></a>{290}</span>
+of Dante’s scientific interest in nature.<a name="FNanchor_658_658" id="FNanchor_658_658"></a><a href="#Footnote_658_658" class="fnanchor">[658]</a> On his claim to priority
+in this or that discovery or reference, we must leave the men
+of science to decide; but every layman must be struck by the
+wealth of his observations on the external world, shown merely
+in his pictures and comparisons. He, more than any other
+modern poet, takes them from reality, whether in nature or
+human life, and uses them, never as mere ornament, but in
+order to give the reader the fullest and most adequate sense of
+his meaning. It is in astronomy that he appears chiefly as a
+scientific specialist, though it must not be forgotten that many
+astronomical allusions in his great poem, which now appear
+to us learned, must then have been intelligible to the general
+reader. Dante, learning apart, appeals to a popular knowledge
+of the heavens, which the Italians of his day, from the mere
+fact that they were a nautical people, had in common with the
+ancients. This knowledge of the rising and setting of the
+constellations has been rendered superfluous to the modern
+world by calendars and clocks, and with it has gone whatever
+interest in astronomy the people may once have had. Nowadays,
+with our schools and hand-books, every child knows&mdash;what
+Dante did not know&mdash;that the earth moves round the
+sun; but the interest once taken in the subject itself has given
+place, except in the case of astronomical specialists, to the most
+absolute indifference.</p>
+
+<p>The pseudo-science, which also dealt with the stars, proves
+nothing against the inductive spirit of the Italians of that day.
+That spirit was but crossed, and at times overcome, by the
+passionate desire to penetrate the future. We shall recur to
+the subject of astrology when we come to speak of the moral
+and religious character of the people.</p>
+
+<p>The Church treated this and other pseudo-sciences nearly
+always with toleration; and showed itself actually hostile even
+to genuine science only when a charge of heresy or necromancy<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_291" id="page_291"></a>{291}</span>
+was also in question&mdash;which certainly was often the case. A
+point which it would be interesting to decide is this: whether,
+and in what cases, the Dominican (and also the Franciscan)
+Inquisitors in Italy, were conscious of the falsehood of the
+charges, and yet condemned the accused, either to oblige some
+enemy of the prisoner or from hatred to natural science, and
+particularly to experiments. The latter doubtless occurred,
+but it is not easy to prove the fact. What helped to cause
+such persecutions in the North, namely, the opposition made to
+the innovators by the upholders of the received official, scholastic
+system of nature, was of little or no weight in Italy. Pietro
+of Albano, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, is well
+known to have fallen a victim to the envy of another physician,
+who accused him before the Inquisition of heresy and magic;<a name="FNanchor_659_659" id="FNanchor_659_659"></a><a href="#Footnote_659_659" class="fnanchor">[659]</a>
+and something of the same kind may have happened in the
+case of his Paduan contemporary, Giovannino Sanguinnacci,
+who was known as an innovator in medical practice. He
+escaped, however, with banishment. Nor must it be forgotten
+that the inquisitorial power of the Dominicans was exercised
+less uniformly in Italy than in the North. Tyrants and free
+cities in the fourteenth century treated the clergy at times
+with such sovereign contempt, that very different matters from
+natural science went unpunished.<a name="FNanchor_660_660" id="FNanchor_660_660"></a><a href="#Footnote_660_660" class="fnanchor">[660]</a> But when, with the fifteenth
+century, antiquity became the leading power in Italy, the
+breach it made in the old system was turned to account by
+every branch of secular science. Humanism, nevertheless, attracted
+to itself the best strength of the nation, and thereby,
+no doubt, did injury to the inductive investigation of nature.<a name="FNanchor_661_661" id="FNanchor_661_661"></a><a href="#Footnote_661_661" class="fnanchor">[661]</a>
+Here and there the Inquisition suddenly started into life, and
+punished or burned physicians as blasphemers or magicians.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_292" id="page_292"></a>{292}</span>
+In such cases it is hard to discover what was the true motive
+underlying the condemnation. And after all, Italy, at the
+close of the fifteenth century, with Paolo Toscanelli, Luca
+Paccioli and Lionardo da Vinci, held incomparably the highest
+place among European nations in mathematics and the natural
+sciences, and the learned men of every country, even Regiomontanus
+and Copernicus, confessed themselves its pupils.<a name="FNanchor_662_662" id="FNanchor_662_662"></a><a href="#Footnote_662_662" class="fnanchor">[662]</a></p>
+
+<p>A significant proof of the wide-spread interest in natural
+history is found in the zeal which showed itself at an early
+period for the collection and comparative study of plants and
+animals. Italy claims to be the first creator of botanical
+gardens, though possibly they may have served a chiefly
+practical end, and the claim to priority may be itself disputed.<a name="FNanchor_663_663" id="FNanchor_663_663"></a><a href="#Footnote_663_663" class="fnanchor">[663]</a>
+It is of far greater importance that princes and wealthy men
+in laying out their pleasure-gardens, instinctively made a point
+of collecting the greatest possible number of different plants
+in all their species and varieties. Thus in the fifteenth century
+the noble grounds of the Medicean Villa Careggi appear from
+the descriptions we have of them to have been almost a botanical
+garden,<a name="FNanchor_664_664" id="FNanchor_664_664"></a><a href="#Footnote_664_664" class="fnanchor">[664]</a> with countless specimens of different trees and
+shrubs. Of the same kind was a villa of the Cardinal Triulzio,
+at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the Roman
+Campagna towards Tivoli,<a name="FNanchor_665_665" id="FNanchor_665_665"></a><a href="#Footnote_665_665" class="fnanchor">[665]</a> with hedges made up of various
+species of roses, with trees of every description&mdash;the fruit-trees
+especially showing an astonishing variety&mdash;with twenty different
+sorts of vines and a large kitchen-garden. This is
+evidently something very different from the score or two of
+familiar medicinal plants, which were to be found in the garden
+of any castle or monastery in Western Europe. Along with a
+careful cultivation of fruit for the purposes of the table, we find<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_293" id="page_293"></a>{293}</span>
+an interest in the plant for its own sake, on account of the
+pleasure it gives to the eye. We learn from the history of
+art at how late a period this passion for botanical collections
+was laid aside, and gave place to what was considered the picturesque
+style of landscape-gardening.</p>
+
+<p>The collections, too, of foreign animals not only gratified
+curiosity, but served also the higher purposes of observation.
+The facility of transport from the southern and eastern harbours
+of the Mediterranean and the mildness of the Italian climate,
+made it practicable to buy the largest animals of the south, or
+to accept them as presents from the Sultans.<a name="FNanchor_666_666" id="FNanchor_666_666"></a><a href="#Footnote_666_666" class="fnanchor">[666]</a> The cities and
+princes were especially anxious to keep live lions, even when
+the lion was not, as in Florence, the emblem of the state.<a name="FNanchor_667_667" id="FNanchor_667_667"></a><a href="#Footnote_667_667" class="fnanchor">[667]</a>
+The lions’ den was generally in or near the government palace,
+as in Perugia and Florence; in Rome, it lay on the slope of
+the Capitol. The beasts sometimes served as executioners of
+political judgments,<a name="FNanchor_668_668" id="FNanchor_668_668"></a><a href="#Footnote_668_668" class="fnanchor">[668]</a> and no doubt, apart from this, they kept
+alive a certain terror in the popular mind. Their condition
+was also held to be ominous of good or evil. Their fertility,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_294" id="page_294"></a>{294}</span>
+especially, was considered a sign of public prosperity, and no
+less a man than Giovanni Villani thought it worth recording
+that he was present at the delivery of a lioness.<a name="FNanchor_669_669" id="FNanchor_669_669"></a><a href="#Footnote_669_669" class="fnanchor">[669]</a> The cubs
+were often given to allied states and princes, or to Condottieri,
+as a reward of valour.<a name="FNanchor_670_670" id="FNanchor_670_670"></a><a href="#Footnote_670_670" class="fnanchor">[670]</a> In addition to the lions, the Florentines
+began very early to keep leopards, for which a special keeper
+was appointed.<a name="FNanchor_671_671" id="FNanchor_671_671"></a><a href="#Footnote_671_671" class="fnanchor">[671]</a> Borso<a name="FNanchor_672_672" id="FNanchor_672_672"></a><a href="#Footnote_672_672" class="fnanchor">[672]</a> of Ferrara used to set his lions to fight
+with bulls, bears, and wild boars.</p>
+
+<p>By the end of the fifteenth century, however, true menageries
+(serragli), now reckoned part of the suitable appointments of a
+court, were kept by many of the princes. ‘It belongs to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_295" id="page_295"></a>{295}</span>
+position of the great,’ says Matarazzo,<a name="FNanchor_673_673" id="FNanchor_673_673"></a><a href="#Footnote_673_673" class="fnanchor">[673]</a> ‘to keep horses, dogs,
+mules, falcons, and other birds, court-jesters, singers, and foreign
+animals.’ The menagerie at Naples, in the time of Ferrante
+and others, contained a giraffe and a zebra, presented, it seems,
+by the ruler of Bagdad.<a name="FNanchor_674_674" id="FNanchor_674_674"></a><a href="#Footnote_674_674" class="fnanchor">[674]</a> Filippo Maria Visconti possessed not
+only horses which cost him each 500 or 1,000 pieces of gold,
+and valuable English dogs, but a number of leopards brought
+from all parts of the East; the expense of his hunting-birds
+which were collected from the countries of Northern Europe,
+amounted to 3,000 pieces of gold a month.<a name="FNanchor_675_675" id="FNanchor_675_675"></a><a href="#Footnote_675_675" class="fnanchor">[675]</a> ‘The Cremonese
+say that the Emperor Frederick II. brought an elephant into
+their city, sent him from India by Prester John,’ we read in
+Brunetto Latini; Petrarch records the dying out of the elephants
+in Italy.<a name="FNanchor_676_676" id="FNanchor_676_676"></a><a href="#Footnote_676_676" class="fnanchor">[676]</a> King Emanuel the Great of Portugal knew well
+what he was about when he presented Leo X. with an elephant
+and a rhinoceros.<a name="FNanchor_677_677" id="FNanchor_677_677"></a><a href="#Footnote_677_677" class="fnanchor">[677]</a> It was under such circumstances that the
+foundations of a scientific zoology and botany were laid.</p>
+
+<p>A practical fruit of these zoological studies was the establishment
+of studs, of which the Mantuan, under Francesco Gonzaga,
+was esteemed the first in Europe.<a name="FNanchor_678_678" id="FNanchor_678_678"></a><a href="#Footnote_678_678" class="fnanchor">[678]</a> All interest in, and knowledge
+of the different breeds of horses is as old, no doubt, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_296" id="page_296"></a>{296}</span>
+riding itself, and the crossing of the European with the Asiatic
+must have been common from the time of the crusades. In
+Italy, a special inducement to perfect the breed was offered by
+the prizes at the horse-races held in every considerable town in
+the peninsula. In the Mantuan stables were found the infallible
+winners in these contests, as well as the best military chargers,
+and the horses best suited by their stately appearance for
+presents to great people. Gonzaga kept stallions and mares
+from Spain, Ireland, Africa, Thrace, and Cilicia, and for the sake
+of the last he cultivated the friendship of the Sultan. All
+possible experiments were here tried, in order to produce the
+most perfect animals.</p>
+
+<p>Even human menageries were not wanting. The famous
+Cardinal Ippolito Medici,<a name="FNanchor_679_679" id="FNanchor_679_679"></a><a href="#Footnote_679_679" class="fnanchor">[679]</a> bastard of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours,
+kept at his strange court a troop of barbarians who talked no less
+than twenty different languages, and who were all of them perfect
+specimens of their races. Among them were incomparable
+<i>voltigeurs</i> of the best blood of the North African Moors, Tartar
+bowmen, Negro wrestlers, Indian divers, and Turks, who generally
+accompanied the Cardinal on his hunting expeditions.
+When he was overtaken by an early death (1535), this motley
+band carried the corpse on their shoulders from Itri to Rome,
+and mingled with the general mourning for the open-handed
+Cardinal their medley of tongues and violent gesticulations.<a name="FNanchor_680_680" id="FNanchor_680_680"></a><a href="#Footnote_680_680" class="fnanchor">[680]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_297" id="page_297"></a>{297}</span>These scattered notices of the relations of the Italians to
+natural science, and their interest in the wealth and variety of
+the products of nature, are only fragments of a great subject.
+No one is more conscious than the author of the defects in his
+knowledge on this point. Of the multitude of special works in
+which the subject is adequately treated, even the names are
+but imperfectly known to him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_298" id="page_298"></a>{298}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-4" id="CHAPTER_III-4"></a>CHAPTER III.<br /><br />
+<small>THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL BEAUTY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">B<small>UT</small>, outside the sphere of scientific investigation, there is
+another way to draw near to nature. The Italians are the first
+among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen
+and felt as something beautiful.<a name="FNanchor_681_681" id="FNanchor_681_681"></a><a href="#Footnote_681_681" class="fnanchor">[681]</a></p>
+
+<p>The power to do so is always the result of a long and complicated
+development, and its origin is not easily detected, since a
+dim feeling of this kind may exist long before it shows itself in
+poetry and painting, and thereby becomes conscious of itself.
+Among the ancients, for example, art and poetry had gone
+through the whole circle of human interests, before they turned
+to the representation of nature, and even then the latter filled
+always a limited and subordinate place. And yet, from the
+time of Homer downwards, the powerful impression made by
+nature upon man is shown by countless verses and chance expressions.
+The Germanic races, which founded their states on
+the ruins of the Roman Empire, were thoroughly and specially
+fitted to understand the spirit of natural scenery; and though
+Christianity compelled them for a while to see in the springs
+and mountains, in the lakes and woods, which they had till
+then revered, the working of evil demons, yet this transitional
+conception was soon outgrown. By the year 1200, at the
+height of the Middle Ages, a genuine, hearty enjoyment of
+the external world was again in existence, and found lively
+expression in the minstrelsy of different nations,<a name="FNanchor_682_682" id="FNanchor_682_682"></a><a href="#Footnote_682_682" class="fnanchor">[682]</a> which gives
+evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena
+of nature&mdash;spring with its flowers, the green fields and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_299" id="page_299"></a>{299}</span>
+woods. But these pictures are all foreground without perspective.
+Even the crusaders, who travelled so far and saw so
+much, are not recognisable as such in these poems. The epic
+poetry, which describes armour and costumes so fully, does
+not attempt more than a sketch of outward nature; and even
+the great Wolfram von Eschenbach scarcely anywhere gives
+us an adequate picture of the scene on which his heroes move.
+From these poems it would never be guessed that their noble
+authors in all countries inhabited or visited lofty castles,
+commanding distant prospects. Even in the Latin poems of
+the wandering clerks (<a href="#page_174">p. 174</a>), we find no traces of a distant
+view&mdash;of landscape properly so called&mdash;but what lies near is
+sometimes described with a glow and splendour which none of
+the knightly minstrels can surpass. What picture of the
+Grove of Love can equal that of the Italian poet&mdash;for such we
+take him to be&mdash;of the twelfth century?</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Immortalis fieret<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ibi manens homo;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Arbor ibi quaelibet<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Suo gaudet pomo;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Viae myrrha, cinnamo<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fragrant, et amomo&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Conjectari poterat<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dominus ex domo,’<a name="FNanchor_683_683" id="FNanchor_683_683"></a><a href="#Footnote_683_683" class="fnanchor">[683]</a> etc.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">To the Italian mind, at all events, nature had by this time
+lost its taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal
+powers. Saint Francis of Assisi, in his Hymn to the Sun,
+frankly praises the Lord for creating the heavenly bodies and
+the four elements.</p>
+
+<p>But the unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature
+on the human spirit begin with Dante. Not only does he
+awaken in us by a few vigorous lines the sense of the morning
+airs and the trembling light on the distant ocean, or of the
+grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he makes the ascent
+of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of enjoying the
+view<a name="FNanchor_684_684" id="FNanchor_684_684"></a><a href="#Footnote_684_684" class="fnanchor">[684]</a>&mdash;the first man, perhaps, since the days of antiquity who<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_300" id="page_300"></a>{300}</span>
+did so. In Boccaccio we can do little more than infer how
+country scenery affected him;<a name="FNanchor_685_685" id="FNanchor_685_685"></a><a href="#Footnote_685_685" class="fnanchor">[685]</a> yet his pastoral romances show
+his imagination to have been filled with it. But the significance
+of nature for a receptive spirit is fully and clearly
+displayed by Petrarch&mdash;one of the first truly modern men.
+That clear soul&mdash;who first collected from the literature of all
+countries evidence of the origin and progress of the sense of
+natural beauty, and himself, in his ‘Ansichten der Natur,’
+achieved the noblest masterpiece of description&mdash;Alexander
+von Humboldt, has not done full justice to Petrarch; and,
+following in the steps of the great reaper, we may still hope to
+glean a few ears of interest and value.</p>
+
+<p>Petrarch was not only a distinguished geographer&mdash;the first
+map of Italy is said to have been drawn by his direction<a name="FNanchor_686_686" id="FNanchor_686_686"></a><a href="#Footnote_686_686" class="fnanchor">[686]</a>&mdash;and
+not only a reproducer of the sayings of the ancients,<a name="FNanchor_687_687" id="FNanchor_687_687"></a><a href="#Footnote_687_687" class="fnanchor">[687]</a> but
+felt himself the influence of natural beauty. The enjoyment
+of nature is, for him, the favourite accompaniment of intellectual
+pursuits; it was to combine the two that he lived in
+learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that he from
+time to time fled from the world and from his age.<a name="FNanchor_688_688" id="FNanchor_688_688"></a><a href="#Footnote_688_688" class="fnanchor">[688]</a> We<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_301" id="page_301"></a>{301}</span>
+should do him wrong by inferring from his weak and undeveloped
+power of describing natural scenery that he did not
+feel it deeply. His picture, for instance, of the lovely Gulf of
+Spezzia and Porto Venere, which he inserts at the end of the
+sixth book of the ‘Africa,’ for the reason that none of the
+ancients or moderns had sung of it,<a name="FNanchor_689_689" id="FNanchor_689_689"></a><a href="#Footnote_689_689" class="fnanchor">[689]</a> is no more than a simple
+enumeration, but the descriptions in letters to his friends of
+Rome, Naples, and other Italian cities in which he willingly
+lingered, are picturesque and worthy of the subject. Petrarch
+is also conscious of the beauty of rock scenery, and is perfectly
+able to distinguish the picturesqueness from the utility of
+nature.<a name="FNanchor_690_690" id="FNanchor_690_690"></a><a href="#Footnote_690_690" class="fnanchor">[690]</a> During his stay among the woods of Reggio, the
+sudden sight of an impressive landscape so affected him that
+he resumed a poem which he had long laid aside.<a name="FNanchor_691_691" id="FNanchor_691_691"></a><a href="#Footnote_691_691" class="fnanchor">[691]</a> But the
+deepest impression of all was made upon him by the ascent of
+Mont Ventoux, near Avignon.<a name="FNanchor_692_692" id="FNanchor_692_692"></a><a href="#Footnote_692_692" class="fnanchor">[692]</a> An indefinable longing for a
+distant panorama grew stronger and stronger in him, till at
+length the accidental sight of a passage in Livy, where King
+Philip, the enemy of Rome, ascends the Hæmus, decided him.
+He thought that what was not blamed in a grey-headed
+monarch, might be well <i>excused</i> in a young man of private
+station. The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was unheard
+of, and there could be no thought of the companionship
+of friends or acquaintances. Petrarch took with him only
+his younger brother and two country people from the last
+place where he halted. At the foot of the mountain an old
+herdsman besought him to turn back, saying that he himself
+had attempted to climb it fifty years before, and had brought
+home nothing but repentance, broken bones, and torn clothes,
+and that neither before nor after had anyone ventured to do the
+same. Nevertheless, they struggled forward and upward, till<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_302" id="page_302"></a>{302}</span>
+the clouds lay beneath their feet, and at last they reached the
+top. A description of the view from the summit would be
+looked for in vain, not because the poet was insensible to it,
+but, on the contrary, because the impression was too over-whelming.
+His whole past life, with all its follies, rose before
+his mind; he remembered that ten years ago that day he had
+quitted Bologna a young man, and turned a longing gaze
+towards his native country; he opened a book which then was
+his constant companion, the ‘Confessions of St. Augustine,’
+and his eye fell on the passage in the tenth chapter, ‘and men
+go forth, and admire lofty mountains and broad seas, and roaring
+torrents, and the ocean, and the course of the stars, and
+forget their own selves while doing so.’ His brother, to whom
+he read these words, could not understand why he closed the
+book and said no more.</p>
+
+<p>Some decades later, about 1360, Fazio degli Uberti describes
+in his rhyming geography<a name="FNanchor_693_693" id="FNanchor_693_693"></a><a href="#Footnote_693_693" class="fnanchor">[693]</a> (<a href="#page_178">p. 178</a>), the wide panorama
+from the mountains of Auvergne, with the interest, it is true,
+of the geographer and antiquarian only, but still showing
+clearly that he himself had seen it. He must, however, have
+ascended far higher peaks, since he is familiar with facts which
+only occur at a height of 10,000 feet or more above the sea&mdash;mountain-sickness
+and its accompaniments&mdash;of which his
+imaginary comrade Solinus tries to cure him with a sponge
+dipped in an essence. The ascents of Parnassus and Olympus,<a name="FNanchor_694_694" id="FNanchor_694_694"></a><a href="#Footnote_694_694" class="fnanchor">[694]</a>
+of which he speaks, are perhaps only fictions.</p>
+
+<p>In the fifteenth century, the great masters of the Flemish
+school, Hubert and Johann van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil
+from nature. Their landscapes are not merely the fruit of an
+endeavour to reflect the real world in art, but have, even if
+expressed conventionally, a certain poetical meaning&mdash;in short,
+a soul. Their influence on the whole art of the West is undeniable,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_303" id="page_303"></a>{303}</span>
+and extended to the landscape-painting of the Italians,
+but without preventing the characteristic interest of the Italian
+eye for nature from finding its own expression.</p>
+
+<p>On this point, as in the scientific description of nature, Æneas
+Sylvius is again one of the most weighty voices of his time.
+Even if we grant the justice of all that has been said against
+his character, we must nevertheless admit that in few other
+men was the picture of the age and its culture so fully reflected,
+and that few came nearer to the normal type of the men of the
+early Renaissance. It may be added parenthetically, that even
+in respect to his moral character he will not be fairly judged, if
+we listen solely to the complaints of the German Church, which
+his fickleness helped to baulk of the Council it so ardently
+desired.<a name="FNanchor_695_695" id="FNanchor_695_695"></a><a href="#Footnote_695_695" class="fnanchor">[695]</a></p>
+
+<p>He here claims our attention as the first who not only
+enjoyed the magnificence of the Italian landscape, but described
+it with enthusiasm down to its minutest details. The
+ecclesiastical State and the south of Tuscany&mdash;his native home&mdash;he
+knew thoroughly, and after he became pope he spent his
+leisure during the favourable season chiefly in excursions to
+the country. Then at last the gouty man was rich enough to
+have himself carried in a litter through the mountains and
+valleys; and when we compare his enjoyments with those of
+the popes who succeeded him, Pius, whose chief delight was in
+nature, antiquity, and simple, but noble, architecture, appears
+almost a saint. In the elegant and flowing Latin of his
+‘Commentaries’ he freely tells us of his happiness.<a name="FNanchor_696_696" id="FNanchor_696_696"></a><a href="#Footnote_696_696" class="fnanchor">[696]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_304" id="page_304"></a>{304}</span></p>
+
+<p>His eye seems as keen and practised as that of any modern
+observer. He enjoys with rapture the panoramic splendour of
+the view from the summit of the Alban Hills&mdash;from the Monte
+Cavo&mdash;whence he could see the shores of St. Peter from Terracina
+and the promontory of Circe as far as Monte Argentaro,
+and the wide expanse of country round about, with the ruined
+cities of the past, and with the mountain-chains of central Italy
+beyond; and then his eye would turn to the green woods in
+the hollows beneath and the mountain-lakes among them. He
+feels the beauty of the position of Todi, crowning the vineyards
+and olive-clad slopes, looking down upon distant woods and
+upon the valley of the Tiber, where towns and castles rise above
+the winding river. The lovely hills about Siena, with villas
+and monasteries on every height, are his own home, and his
+descriptions of them are touched with a peculiar feeling. Single
+picturesque glimpses charm him too, like the little promontory
+of Capo di Monte that stretches out into the Lake of Bolsena.
+‘Rocky steps,’ we read, ‘shaded by vines, descend to the water’s
+edge, where the evergreen oaks stand between the cliffs, alive
+with the song of thrushes.’ On the path round the Lake of
+Nemi, beneath the chestnuts and fruit-trees, he feels that here,
+if anywhere, a poet’s soul must awake&mdash;here in the hiding-place
+of Diana! He often held consistories or received ambassadors
+under huge old chestnut-trees, or beneath the olives on the
+green sward by some gurgling spring. A view like that of a
+narrowing gorge, with a bridge arched boldly over it, awakens
+at once his artistic sense. Even the smallest details give him
+delight through something beautiful, or perfect, or characteristic
+in them&mdash;the blue fields of waving flax, the yellow gorse which
+covers the hills, even tangled thickets, or single trees, or springs,
+which seem to him like wonders of nature.</p>
+
+<p>The height of his enthusiasm for natural beauty was reached
+during his stay on Monte Amiata, in the summer of 1462, when
+plague and heat made the lowlands uninhabitable. Half-way
+up the mountain, in the old Lombard monastery of San Salvatore,
+he and his court took up their quarters. There, between
+the chestnuts which clothe the steep declivity, the eye may
+wander over all southern Tuscany, with the towers of Siena
+in the distance. The ascent of the highest peak he left to his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_305" id="page_305"></a>{305}</span>
+companions, who were joined by the Venetian envoy; they
+found at the top two vast blocks of stone one upon the other&mdash;perhaps
+the sacrificial altar of a pre-historical people&mdash;and
+fancied that in the far distance they saw Corsica and Sardinia<a name="FNanchor_697_697" id="FNanchor_697_697"></a><a href="#Footnote_697_697" class="fnanchor">[697]</a>
+rising above the sea. In the cool air of the hills, among the old
+oaks and chestnuts, on the green meadows where there were no
+thorns to wound the feet, and no snakes or insects to hurt or to
+annoy, the pope passed days of unclouded happiness. For the
+‘Segnatura,’ which took place on certain days of the week, he
+selected on each occasion some new shady retreat<a name="FNanchor_698_698" id="FNanchor_698_698"></a><a href="#Footnote_698_698" class="fnanchor">[698]</a> ‘novas in
+convallibus fontes et novas inveniens umbras, quæ dubiam
+facerent electionem.’ At such times the dogs would perhaps
+start a great stag from his lair, who, after defending himself a
+while with hoofs and antlers, would fly at last up the mountain.
+In the evening the pope was accustomed to sit before the monastery
+on the spot from which the whole valley of the Paglia
+was visible, holding lively conversations with the cardinals.
+The courtiers, who ventured down from the heights on their
+hunting expeditions, found the heat below intolerable, and the
+scorched plains like a very hell, while the monastery, with its
+cool, shady woods, seemed like an abode of the blessed.</p>
+
+<p>All this is genuine modern enjoyment, not a reflection of
+antiquity. As surely as the ancients themselves felt in the
+same manner, so surely, nevertheless, were the scanty expressions
+of the writers whom Pius knew insufficient to awaken in
+him such enthusiasm.<a name="FNanchor_699_699" id="FNanchor_699_699"></a><a href="#Footnote_699_699" class="fnanchor">[699]</a></p>
+
+<p>The second great age of Italian poetry, which now followed
+at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth
+centuries, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich
+in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_306" id="page_306"></a>{306}</span>
+The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice
+to convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is true, of natural
+scenery, are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age,
+the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something else to
+deal with. Bojardo and Ariosto paint nature vigorously, but as
+briefly as possible, and with no effort to appeal by their descriptions
+to the feelings of the reader,<a name="FNanchor_700_700" id="FNanchor_700_700"></a><a href="#Footnote_700_700" class="fnanchor">[700]</a> which they endeavour
+to reach solely by their narrative and characters. Letter-writers
+and the authors of philosophical dialogues are, in fact,
+better evidence of the growing love of nature than the poets.
+The novelist Bandello, for example, observes rigorously the
+rules of his department of literature; he gives us in his novels
+themselves not a word more than is necessary on the natural
+scenery amid which the action of his tales takes place,<a name="FNanchor_701_701" id="FNanchor_701_701"></a><a href="#Footnote_701_701" class="fnanchor">[701]</a> but in
+the dedications which always precede them we meet with
+charming descriptions of nature as the setting for his dialogues
+and social pictures. Among letter-writers, Aretino<a name="FNanchor_702_702" id="FNanchor_702_702"></a><a href="#Footnote_702_702" class="fnanchor">[702]</a> unfortunately
+must be named as the first who has fully painted
+in words the splendid effect of light and shadow in an Italian
+sunset.</p>
+
+<p>We sometimes find the feeling of the poets, also, attaching
+itself with tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito
+Strozza, about the year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy<a name="FNanchor_703_703" id="FNanchor_703_703"></a><a href="#Footnote_703_703" class="fnanchor">[703]</a> the
+dwelling of his mistress. We are shown an old ivy-clad house,
+half hidden in trees, and adorned with weather-stained frescoes
+of the saints, and near it a chapel, much damaged by the
+violence of the river Po, which flowed hard by; not far off, the
+priest ploughs his few barren roods with borrowed cattle. This
+is no reminiscence of the Roman elegists, but true modern sentiment;
+and the parallel to it&mdash;a sincere, unartificial description
+of country life in general&mdash;will be found at the end of this part
+of our work.</p>
+
+<p>It may be objected that the German painters at the begin<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_307" id="page_307"></a>{307}</span>ning
+of the sixteenth century succeed in representing with
+perfect mastery these scenes of country life, as, for instance,
+Albrecht Dürer, in his engraving of the Prodigal Son.<a name="FNanchor_704_704" id="FNanchor_704_704"></a><a href="#Footnote_704_704" class="fnanchor">[704]</a> But it
+is one thing if a painter, brought up in a school of realism,
+introduces such scenes, and quite another thing if a poet, accustomed
+to an ideal or mythological framework, is driven by
+inward impulse into realism. Besides which, priority in point
+of time is here, as in the descriptions of country life, on the side
+of the Italian poets.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_308" id="page_308"></a>{308}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-4" id="CHAPTER_IV-4"></a>CHAPTER IV.<br /><br />
+<small>THE DISCOVERY OF MAN. SPIRITUAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>O</small> the discovery of the outward world the Renaissance added a
+still greater achievement, by first discerning and bringing to
+light the full, whole nature of man.<a name="FNanchor_705_705" id="FNanchor_705_705"></a><a href="#Footnote_705_705" class="fnanchor">[705]</a></p>
+
+<p>This period, as we have seen, first gave the highest development
+to individuality, and then led the individual to the most
+zealous and thorough study of himself in all forms and under
+all conditions. Indeed, the development of personality is essentially
+involved in the recognition of it in oneself and in others.
+Between these two great processes our narrative has placed the
+influence of ancient literature, because the mode of conceiving
+and representing both the individual and human nature in
+general was defined and coloured by that influence. But the
+power of conception and representation lay in the age and in
+the people.</p>
+
+<p>The facts which we shall quote in evidence of our thesis will
+be few in number. Here, if anywhere in the course of this
+discussion, the author is conscious that he is treading on the
+perilous ground of conjecture, and that what seems to him a
+clear, if delicate and gradual, transition in the intellectual
+movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, may not
+be equally plain to others. The gradual awakening of the soul
+of a people is a phenomenon which may produce a different
+impression on each spectator. Time will judge which impression
+is the most faithful.</p>
+
+<p>Happily the study of the intellectual side of human nature
+began, not with the search after a theoretical psychology&mdash;for
+that, Aristotle still sufficed&mdash;but with the endeavour to observe
+and to describe. The indispensable ballast of theory was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_309" id="page_309"></a>{309}</span>
+limited to the popular doctrine of the four temperaments, in its
+then habitual union with the belief in the influence of the
+planets. Such conceptions may remain ineradicable in the
+minds of individuals, without hindering the general progress
+of the age. It certainly makes on us a singular impression,
+when we meet them at a time when human nature in its
+deepest essence and in all its characteristic expressions was not
+only known by exact observation, but represented by an immortal
+poetry and art. It sounds almost ludicrous when an
+otherwise competent observer considers Clement VII. to be of
+a melancholy temperament, but defers his judgment to that
+of the physicians, who declare the pope of a sanguine-choleric
+nature;<a name="FNanchor_706_706" id="FNanchor_706_706"></a><a href="#Footnote_706_706" class="fnanchor">[706]</a> or when we read that the same Gaston de Foix, the
+victor of Ravenna, whom Giorgione painted and Bambaja
+carved, and whom all the historians describe, had the saturnine
+temperament.<a name="FNanchor_707_707" id="FNanchor_707_707"></a><a href="#Footnote_707_707" class="fnanchor">[707]</a> No doubt those who use these expressions
+mean something by them; but the terms in which they tell
+us their meaning are strangely out of date in the Italy of the
+sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>As examples of the free delineation of the human spirit, we
+shall first speak of the great poets of the fourteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>If we were to collect the pearls from the courtly and knightly
+poetry of all the countries of the West during the two preceding
+centuries, we should have a mass of wonderful divinations
+and single pictures of the inward life, which at first sight would
+seem to rival the poetry of the Italians. Leaving lyrical poetry
+out of account, Godfrey of Strasburg gives us, in ‘Tristram
+and Isolt,’ a representation of human passion, some features
+of which are immortal. But these pearls lie scattered in the
+ocean of artificial convention, and they are altogether something
+very different from a complete objective picture of the inward
+man and his spiritual wealth.</p>
+
+<p>Italy, too, in the thirteenth century had, through the ‘Trovatori,’<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_310" id="page_310"></a>{310}</span>
+its share in the poetry of the courts and of chivalry.
+To them is mainly due the ‘Canzone,’ whose construction is
+as difficult and artificial as that of the songs of any northern
+minstrel. Their subject and mode of thought represents simply
+the conventional tone of the courts, be the poet a burgher
+or a scholar.</p>
+
+<p>But two new paths at length showed themselves, along which
+Italian poetry could advance to another and a characteristic
+future. They are not the less important for being concerned
+only with the formal and external side of the art.</p>
+
+<p>To the same Brunetto Latini&mdash;the teacher of Dante&mdash;who,
+in his ‘Canzoni,’ adopts the customary manner of the ‘Trovatori,’
+we owe the first-known ‘Versi Sciolti,’ or blank hendecasyllabic
+verses,<a name="FNanchor_708_708" id="FNanchor_708_708"></a><a href="#Footnote_708_708" class="fnanchor">[708]</a> and in his apparent absence of form, a true and
+genuine passion suddenly showed itself. The same voluntary
+renunciation of outward effect, through confidence in the power
+of the inward conception, can be observed some years later in
+fresco-painting, and later still in painting of all kinds, which
+began to cease to rely on colour for its effect, using simply
+a lighter or darker shade. For an age which laid so much
+stress on artificial form in poetry, these verses of Brunetto
+mark the beginning of a new epoch.<a name="FNanchor_709_709" id="FNanchor_709_709"></a><a href="#Footnote_709_709" class="fnanchor">[709]</a></p>
+
+<p>About the same time, or even in the first half of the thirteenth
+century, one of the many strictly-balanced forms of metre, in
+which Europe was then so fruitful, became a normal and recognised
+form in Italy&mdash;the sonnet. The order of rhymes and
+even the number of the lines varied for a whole century,<a name="FNanchor_710_710" id="FNanchor_710_710"></a><a href="#Footnote_710_710" class="fnanchor">[710]</a> till
+Petrarch fixed them permanently. In this form all higher
+lyrical or meditative subjects, and at a later time subjects of
+every possible description, were treated, and the madrigals, the
+sestine, and even the ‘Canzoni’ were reduced to a subordinate<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_311" id="page_311"></a>{311}</span>
+place. Later Italian writers complain, half jestingly, half resentfully,
+of this inevitable mould, this Procrustean bed, to which
+they were compelled to make their thoughts and feelings fit.
+Others were, and still are, quite satisfied with this particular
+form of verse, which they freely use to express any personal
+reminiscence or idle sing-song without necessity or serious
+purpose. For which reason there are many more bad or insignificant
+sonnets than good ones.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the sonnet must be held to have been an unspeakable
+blessing for Italian poetry. The clearness and beauty
+of its structure, the invitation it gave to elevate the thought in
+the second and more rapidly moving half, and the ease with
+which it could be learned by heart, made it valued even by the
+greatest masters. In fact, they would not have kept it in use
+down to our own century, had they not been penetrated with a
+sense of its singular worth. These masters could have given us
+the same thoughts in other and wholly different forms. But
+when once they had made the sonnet the normal type of lyrical
+poetry, many other writers of great, if not the highest, gifts,
+who otherwise would have lost themselves in a sea of diffusiveness,
+were forced to concentrate their feelings. The sonnet became
+for Italian literature a condenser of thoughts and emotions
+such as was possessed by the poetry of no other modern people.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the world of Italian sentiment comes before us in a series
+of pictures, clear, concise, and most effective in their brevity.
+Had other nations possessed a form of expression of the same
+kind, we should perhaps have known more of their inward life;
+we might have had a number of pictures of inward and outward
+situations&mdash;reflexions of the national character and temper&mdash;and
+should not be dependent for such knowledge on the so-called
+lyrical poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who can
+hardly ever be read with any serious enjoyment. In Italy we
+can trace an undoubted progress from the time when the sonnet
+came into existence. In the second half of the thirteenth
+century the ‘Trovatori della transizione,’ as they have been
+recently named,<a name="FNanchor_711_711" id="FNanchor_711_711"></a><a href="#Footnote_711_711" class="fnanchor">[711]</a> mark the passage from the Troubadours to the
+poets&mdash;that is, to those who wrote under the influence of antiquity.
+The simplicity and strength of their feeling, the vigorous<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_312" id="page_312"></a>{312}</span>
+delineation of fact, the precise expression and rounding off of
+their sonnets and other poems, herald the coming of a Dante.
+Some political sonnets of the Guelphs and Ghibellines (1260-1270)
+have about them the ring of his passion, and others remind
+us of his sweetest lyrical notes.</p>
+
+<p>Of his own theoretical view of the sonnet, we are unfortunately
+ignorant, since the last books of his work, ‘De vulgari eloquio,’
+in which he proposed to treat of ballads and sonnets, either remained
+unwritten or have been lost. But, as a matter of fact,
+he has left us in his Sonnets and ‘Canzoni,’ a treasure of inward
+experience. And in what a framework he has set them! The
+prose of the ‘Vita Nuova,’ in which he gives an account of the
+origin of each poem, is as wonderful as the verses themselves,
+and forms with them a uniform whole, inspired with the deepest
+glow of passion. With unflinching frankness and sincerity he
+lays bare every shade of his joy and his sorrow, and moulds it
+resolutely into the strictest forms of art. Reading attentively
+these Sonnets and ‘Canzoni,’ and the marvellous fragments of
+the diary of his youth which lie between them, we fancy that
+throughout the Middle Ages the poets have been purposely fleeing
+from themselves, and that he was the first to seek his own
+soul. Before his time we meet with many an artistic verse;
+but he is the first artist in the full sense of the word&mdash;the first
+who consciously cast immortal matter into an immortal form.
+Subjective feeling has here a full objective truth and greatness,
+and most of it is so set forth that all ages and peoples can make
+it their own.<a name="FNanchor_712_712" id="FNanchor_712_712"></a><a href="#Footnote_712_712" class="fnanchor">[712]</a> Where he writes in a thoroughly objective spirit,
+and lets the force of his sentiment be guessed at only by some
+outward fact, as in the magnificent sonnets ‘Tanto gentile,’
+etc., and ‘Vedi perfettamente,’ etc., he seems to feel the need of
+excusing himself.<a name="FNanchor_713_713" id="FNanchor_713_713"></a><a href="#Footnote_713_713" class="fnanchor">[713]</a> The most beautiful of these poems really
+belongs to this class&mdash;the ‘Deh peregrini che pensosi andate.’</p>
+
+<p>Even apart from the ‘Divine Comedy,’ Dante would have
+marked by these youthful poems the boundary between mediæ<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_313" id="page_313"></a>{313}</span>valism
+and modern times. The human spirit had taken a
+mighty step towards the consciousness of its own secret life.</p>
+
+<p>The revelations in this matter which are contained in the
+‘Divine Comedy’ itself are simply immeasurable; and it would
+be necessary to go through the whole poem, one canto after
+another, in order to do justice to its value from this point of
+view. Happily we have no need to do this, as it has long been
+a daily food of all the countries of the West. Its plan, and the
+ideas on which it is based, belong to the Middle Ages, and appeal
+to our interest only historically; but it is nevertheless the
+beginning of all modern poetry, through the power and richness
+shown in the description of human nature in every shape and
+attitude.<a name="FNanchor_714_714" id="FNanchor_714_714"></a><a href="#Footnote_714_714" class="fnanchor">[714]</a></p>
+
+<p>From this time forwards poetry may have experienced unequal
+fortunes, and may show, for half a century together, a so-called
+relapse. But its nobler and more vital principle was saved for
+ever; and whenever in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and in the
+beginning of the sixteenth centuries, an original mind devotes
+himself to it, he represents a more advanced stage than any poet
+out of Italy, given&mdash;what is certainly not always easy to settle
+satisfactorily&mdash;an equality of natural gifts to start with.</p>
+
+<p>Here, as in other things, in Italy, culture&mdash;to which poetry
+belongs&mdash;precedes the plastic arts and, in fact, gives them their
+chief impulse. More than a century elapsed before the spiritual
+element in painting and sculpture attained a power of expression
+in any way analogous to that of the ‘Divine Comedy.’
+How far the same rule holds good for the artistic development
+of other nations,<a name="FNanchor_715_715" id="FNanchor_715_715"></a><a href="#Footnote_715_715" class="fnanchor">[715]</a> and of what importance the whole question
+may be, does not concern us here. For Italian civilisation it
+is of decisive weight.</p>
+
+<p>The position to be assigned to Petrarch in this respect must
+be settled by the many readers of the poet. Those who come
+to him in the spirit of a cross-examiner, and busy themselves in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_314" id="page_314"></a>{314}</span>
+detecting the contradictions between the poet and the man, his
+infidelities in love, and the other weak sides of his character,
+may perhaps, after sufficient effort, end by losing all taste for
+his poetry. In place, then, of artistic enjoyment, we may acquire
+a knowledge of the man in his ‘totality.’ What a pity that
+Petrarch’s letters from Avignon contain so little gossip to take
+hold of, and that the letters of his acquaintances and of the
+friends of these acquaintances have either been lost or never
+existed! Instead of Heaven being thanked when we are not
+forced to enquire how and through what struggles a poet has
+rescued something immortal from his own poor life and lot, a
+biography has been stitched together for Petrarch out of these
+so-called ‘remains,’ which reads like an indictment. But the
+poet may take comfort. If the printing and editing of the
+correspondence of celebrated people goes on for another half-century
+as it has begun in England and Germany, he will have
+illustrious company enough sitting with him on the stool of
+repentance.</p>
+
+<p>Without shutting our eyes to much that is forced and artificial
+in his poetry, where the writer is merely imitating himself
+and singing on in the old strain, we cannot fail to admire the
+marvellous abundance of pictures of the inmost soul&mdash;descriptions
+of moments of joy and sorrow which must have been
+thoroughly his own, since no one before him gives us anything
+of the kind, and on which his significance rests for his country
+and for the world. His verse is not in all places equally transparent;
+by the side of his most beautiful thoughts, stand at
+times some allegorical conceit, or some sophistical trick of logic,
+altogether foreign to our present taste. But the balance is on
+the side of excellence.</p>
+
+<p>Boccaccio, too, in his imperfectly-known Sonnets,<a name="FNanchor_716_716" id="FNanchor_716_716"></a><a href="#Footnote_716_716" class="fnanchor">[716]</a> succeeds
+sometimes in giving a most powerful and effective picture of his
+feeling. The return to a spot consecrated by love (Son. 22), the
+melancholy of spring (Son. 33), the sadness of the poet who feels
+himself growing old (Son. 65), are admirably treated by him.
+And in the ‘Ameto’ he has described the ennobling and trans<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_315" id="page_315"></a>{315}</span>figuring
+power of love in a manner which would hardly be
+expected from the author of the ‘Decamerone.’<a name="FNanchor_717_717" id="FNanchor_717_717"></a><a href="#Footnote_717_717" class="fnanchor">[717]</a> In the ‘Fiammetta’
+we have another great and minutely-painted picture of
+the human soul, full of the keenest observation, though executed
+with anything but uniform power, and in parts marred by the
+passion for high-sounding language and by an unlucky mixture
+of mythological allusions and learned quotations. The ‘Fiammetta,’
+if we are not mistaken, is a sort of feminine counterpart
+to the ‘Vita Nuova’ of Dante, or at any rate owes its origin
+to it.</p>
+
+<p>That the ancient poets, particularly the elegists, and Virgil, in
+the fourth book of the Æneid, were not without influence<a name="FNanchor_718_718" id="FNanchor_718_718"></a><a href="#Footnote_718_718" class="fnanchor">[718]</a> on
+the Italians of this and the following generation is beyond a
+doubt; but the spring of sentiment within the latter was nevertheless
+powerful and original. If we compare them in this
+respect with their contemporaries in other countries, we shall
+find in them the earliest complete expression of modern European
+feeling. The question, be it remembered, is not to know
+whether eminent men of other nations did not feel as deeply
+and as nobly, but who first gave documentary proof of the
+widest knowledge of the movements of the human heart.</p>
+
+<p>Why did the Italians of the Renaissance do nothing above
+the second rank in tragedy? That was the field on which to
+display human character, intellect, and passion, in the thousand
+forms of their growth, their struggles, and their decline. In
+other words: why did Italy produce no Shakespeare? For
+with the stage of other northern countries besides England the
+Italians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had no
+reason to fear a comparison; and with the Spaniards they could
+not enter into competition, since Italy had long lost all traces of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_316" id="page_316"></a>{316}</span>
+religious fanaticism, treated the chivalrous code of honour only
+as a form, and was both too proud and too intelligent to bow
+down before its tyrannical and illegitimate masters.<a name="FNanchor_719_719" id="FNanchor_719_719"></a><a href="#Footnote_719_719" class="fnanchor">[719]</a> We have
+therefore only to consider the English stage in the period of its
+brief splendour.</p>
+
+<p>It is an obvious reply that all Europe produced but one
+Shakespeare, and that such a mind is the rarest of Heaven’s
+gifts. It is further possible that the Italian stage was on the
+way to something great when the Counter-reformation broke in
+upon it, and, aided by the Spanish rule over Naples and Milan,
+and indirectly over the whole peninsula, withered the best
+flowers of the Italian spirit. It would be hard to conceive of
+Shakespeare himself under a Spanish viceroy, or in the neighbourhood
+of the Holy Inquisition at Rome, or even in his own
+country a few decades later, at the time of the English Revolution.
+The stage, which in its perfection is a late product of
+every civilisation, must wait for its own time and fortune.</p>
+
+<p>We must not, however, quit this subject without mentioning
+certain circumstances, which were of a character to hinder or
+retard a high development of the drama in Italy, till the time
+for it had gone by.</p>
+
+<p>As the most weighty of these causes we must mention without
+doubt that the scenic tastes of the people were occupied
+elsewhere, and chiefly in the mysteries and religious processions.
+Throughout all Europe dramatic representations of
+sacred history and legend form the origin of the secular drama;
+but Italy, as it will be shown more fully in the sequel, had
+spent on the mysteries such a wealth of decorative splendour as
+could not but be unfavourable to the dramatic element. Out of
+all the countless and costly representations, there sprang not
+even a branch of poetry like the ‘Autos Sagramentales’ of
+Calderon and other Spanish poets, much less any advantage or
+foundation for the legitimate drama.<a name="FNanchor_720_720" id="FNanchor_720_720"></a><a href="#Footnote_720_720" class="fnanchor">[720]</a></p>
+
+<p>And when the latter did at length appear, it at once gave
+itself up to magnificence of scenic effects, to which the mysteries
+had already accustomed the public taste to far too<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_317" id="page_317"></a>{317}</span>
+great an extent. We learn with astonishment how rich and
+splendid the scenes in Italy were, at a time when in the North
+the simplest indication of the place was thought sufficient.
+This alone might have had no such unfavourable effect on the
+drama, if the attention of the audience had not been drawn
+away from the poetical conception of the play partly by the
+splendour of the costumes, partly and chiefly by fantastic
+interludes (Intermezzi).</p>
+
+<p>That in many places, particularly in Rome and Ferrara,
+Plautus and Terence, as well as pieces by the old tragedians,
+were given in Latin or in Italian (pp. 242, 255), that the
+academies (<a href="#page_280">p. 280</a>) of which we have already spoken, made
+this one of their chief objects, and that the poets of the
+Renaissance followed these models too servilely, were all untoward
+conditions for the Italian stage at the period in question.
+Yet I hold them to be of secondary importance. Had not the
+Counter-reformation and the rule of foreigners intervened,
+these very disadvantages might have been turned into useful
+means of transition. At all events, by the year 1520 the victory
+of the mother-tongue in tragedy and comedy was, to the great
+disgust of the humanists, as good as won.<a name="FNanchor_721_721" id="FNanchor_721_721"></a><a href="#Footnote_721_721" class="fnanchor">[721]</a> On this side, then,
+no obstacle stood in the way of the most developed people in
+Europe, to hinder them from raising the drama, in its noblest
+forms, to be a true reflexion of human life and destiny. It was
+the Inquisitors and Spaniards who cowed the Italian spirit, and
+rendered impossible the representation of the greatest and most
+sublime themes, most of all when they were associated with
+patriotic memories. At the same time, there is no doubt that
+the distracting ‘Intermezzi’ did serious harm to the drama.
+We must now consider them a little more closely.</p>
+
+<p>When the marriage of Alfonso of Ferrara with Lucrezia
+Borgia was celebrated, Duke Hercules in person showed his
+illustrious guests the 110 costumes which were to serve at the
+representation of five comedies of Plautus, in order that all
+might see that not one of them was used twice.<a name="FNanchor_722_722" id="FNanchor_722_722"></a><a href="#Footnote_722_722" class="fnanchor">[722]</a> But all this<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_318" id="page_318"></a>{318}</span>
+display of silk and camlet was nothing to the ballets and pantomimes
+which served as interludes between the acts of the
+Plautine dramas. That in comparison, Plautus himself seemed
+mortally dull to a lively young lady like Isabella Gonzaga, and
+that while the play was going on everybody was longing for
+the interludes, is quite intelligible, when we think of the
+picturesque brilliancy with which they were put on the stage.
+There were to be seen combats of Roman warriors, who brandished
+their weapons to the sound of music, torch-dances
+executed by Moors, a dance of savages with horns of plenty, out
+of which streamed waves of fire&mdash;all as the ballet of a pantomime
+in which a maiden was delivered from a dragon. Then
+came a dance of fools, got up as punches, beating one another
+with pigs’ bladders, with more of the same kind. At the
+Court of Ferrara they never gave a comedy without ‘its’ ballet
+(Moresca).<a name="FNanchor_723_723" id="FNanchor_723_723"></a><a href="#Footnote_723_723" class="fnanchor">[723]</a> In what style the ‘Amphitryo’ of Plautus was
+there represented (1491, at the first marriage of Alfonso with
+Anna Sforza), is doubtful. Possibly it was given rather as a
+pantomime with music, than as a drama.<a name="FNanchor_724_724" id="FNanchor_724_724"></a><a href="#Footnote_724_724" class="fnanchor">[724]</a> In any case, the
+accessories were more considerable than the play itself. There
+was a choral dance of ivy-clad youths, moving in intricate
+figures, done to the music of a ringing orchestra; then came<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_319" id="page_319"></a>{319}</span>
+Apollo, striking the lyre with the plectrum, and singing an
+ode to the praise of the House of Este; then followed, as
+an interlude within an interlude, a kind of rustic farce, after
+which the stage was again occupied by classical mythology&mdash;Venus,
+Bacchus and their followers&mdash;and by a pantomime
+representing the judgment of Paris. Not till then was the
+second half of the fable of Amphitryo performed, with unmistakable
+references to the future birth of a Hercules of the House
+of Este. At a former representation of the same piece in the
+courtyard of the palace (1487), ‘a paradise with stars and
+other wheels,’ was constantly burning, by which is probably
+meant an illumination with fireworks, that, no doubt, absorbed
+most of the attention of the spectators. It was certainly better
+when such performances were given separately, as was the case
+at other courts. We shall have to speak of the entertainments
+given by the Cardinal Pietro Riario, by the Bentivogli at
+Bologna, and by others, when we come to treat of the festivals
+in general.</p>
+
+<p>This scenic magnificence, now become universal, had a
+disastrous effect on Italian tragedy. ‘In Venice formerly,’
+writes Francesco Sansovino,<a name="FNanchor_725_725" id="FNanchor_725_725"></a><a href="#Footnote_725_725" class="fnanchor">[725]</a> ‘besides comedies, tragedies by
+ancient and modern writers were put on the stage with great
+pomp. The fame of the scenic arrangements (<i>apparati</i>)
+brought spectators from far and near. Nowadays, performances
+are given by private individuals in their own houses,
+and the custom has long been fixed of passing the carnival in
+comedies and other cheerful entertainments.’ In other words,
+scenic display had helped to kill tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>The various starts or attempts of these modern tragedians,
+among which the ‘Sofonisba’ of Trissino was the most celebrated,
+belong to the history of literature. The same may be
+said of genteel comedy, modelled on Plautus and Terence.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_320" id="page_320"></a>{320}</span>
+Even Ariosto could do nothing of the first order in this style.
+On the other hand, popular prose-comedy, as treated by
+Macchiavelli, Bibiena, and Aretino, might have had a future, if
+its matter had not condemned it to destruction. This was, on
+the one hand, licentious to the last degree, and on the other,
+aimed at certain classes in society, which, after the middle
+of the sixteenth century, ceased to afford a ground for public
+attacks. If in the ‘Sofonisba’ the portrayal of character gave
+place to brilliant declamation, the latter, with its half-sister caricature,
+was used far too freely in comedy also. Nevertheless,
+these Italian comedies, if we are not mistaken, were the first
+written in prose and copied from real life, and for this reason
+deserve mention in the history of European literature.</p>
+
+<p>The writing of tragedies and comedies, and the practice of
+putting both ancient and modern plays on the stage, continued
+without intermission; but they served only as occasions for
+display. The national genius turned elsewhere for living
+interest. When the opera and the pastoral fable came up,
+these attempts were at length wholly abandoned.</p>
+
+<p>One form of comedy only was and remained national&mdash;the
+unwritten, improvised ‘Commedia dell’Arte.’ It was of no
+great service in the delineation of character, since the masks
+used were few in number and familiar to everybody. But the
+talent of the nation had such an affinity for this style, that
+often in the middle of written comedies the actors would throw
+themselves on their own inspiration,<a name="FNanchor_726_726" id="FNanchor_726_726"></a><a href="#Footnote_726_726" class="fnanchor">[726]</a> so that a new mixed
+form of comedy came into existence in some places. The plays
+given in Venice by Burchiello, and afterwards by the company
+of Armonio, Val. Zuccato, Lod. Dolce, and others, were perhaps
+of this character.<a name="FNanchor_727_727" id="FNanchor_727_727"></a><a href="#Footnote_727_727" class="fnanchor">[727]</a> Of Burchiello we know expressly that he
+used to heighten the comic effect by mixing Greek and Sclavonic
+words with the Venetian dialect. A complete ‘Commedia
+dell’Arte,’ or very nearly so, was represented by Angelo
+Beolco, known as ‘Il Ruzzante’ (1502-1542), who enjoyed the
+highest reputation as poet and actor, was compared as poet to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_321" id="page_321"></a>{321}</span>
+Plautus, and as actor to Roscius, and who formed a company
+with several of his friends, who appeared in his pieces as
+Paduan peasants, with the names Menato, Vezzo, Billora, &amp;c.
+He studied their dialect when spending the summer at the
+villa of his patron Luigi Cornaro (Aloysius Cornelius) at Codevico.<a name="FNanchor_728_728" id="FNanchor_728_728"></a><a href="#Footnote_728_728" class="fnanchor">[728]</a>
+Gradually all the famous local masks made their
+appearance, whose remains still delight the Italian populace at
+our day: Pantalone, the Doctor, Brighella, Pulcinella, Arlecchino,
+and the rest. Most of them are of great antiquity, and
+possibly are historically connected with the masks in the old
+Roman farces; but it was not till the sixteenth century that
+several of them were combined in one piece. At the present
+time this is less often the case; but every great city still keeps
+to its local mask&mdash;Naples to the Pulcinella, Florence to the
+Stentorello, Milan to its often so admirable Meneghino.<a name="FNanchor_729_729" id="FNanchor_729_729"></a><a href="#Footnote_729_729" class="fnanchor">[729]</a></p>
+
+<p>This is indeed scanty compensation for a people which possessed
+the power, perhaps to a greater degree than any other,
+to reflect and contemplate its own highest qualities in the
+mirror of the drama. But this power was destined to be marred
+for centuries by hostile forces, for whose predominance the
+Italians were only in part responsible. The universal talent
+for dramatic representation could not indeed be uprooted, and
+in music Italy long made good its claim to supremacy in Europe.
+Those who can find in this world of sound a compensation for
+the drama, to which all future was denied, have, at all events,
+no meagre source of consolation.</p>
+
+<p>But perhaps we can find in epic poetry what the stage fails
+to offer us. Yet the chief reproach made against the heroic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_322" id="page_322"></a>{322}</span>
+poetry of Italy is precisely on the score of the insignificance
+and imperfect representation of its characters.</p>
+
+<p>Other merits are allowed to belong to it, among the rest, that
+for three centuries it has been actually read and constantly
+reprinted, while nearly the whole of the epic poetry of other
+nations has become a mere matter of literary or historical
+curiosity. Does this perhaps lie in the taste of the readers,
+who demand something different from what would satisfy a
+northern public? Certainly, without the power of entering to
+some degree into Italian sentiment, it is impossible to appreciate
+the characteristic excellence of these poems, and many distinguished
+men declare that they can make nothing of them.
+And in truth, if we criticise Pulci, Bojardo, Ariosto, and Berni
+solely with an eye to their thought and matter, we shall fail
+to do them justice. They are artists of a peculiar kind, who
+write for a people which is distinctly and eminently artistic.</p>
+
+<p>The mediæval legends had lived on after the gradual extinction
+of the poetry of chivalry, partly in the form of rhyming
+adaptations and collections, and partly of novels in prose.
+The latter was the case in Italy during the fourteenth century;
+but the newly-awakened memories of antiquity were rapidly
+growing up to a gigantic size, and soon cast into the shade
+all the fantastic creations of the Middle Ages. Boccaccio, for
+example, in his ‘Visione Amorosa,’ names among the heroes
+in his enchanted palace Tristram, Arthur, Galeotto, and others,
+but briefly, as if he were ashamed to speak of them (<a href="#page_206">p. 206</a>);
+and following writers either do not name them at all, or name
+them only for purposes of ridicule. But the people kept
+them in its memory, and from the people they passed into the
+hands of the poets of the fifteenth century. These were now
+able to conceive and represent their subject in a wholly new
+manner. But they did more. They introduced into it a
+multitude of fresh elements, and in fact recast it from beginning
+to end. It must not be expected of them that they should
+treat such subjects with the respect once felt for them. All
+other countries must envy them the advantage of having a
+popular interest of this kind to appeal to; but they could not
+without hypocrisy treat these myths with any respect.<a name="FNanchor_730_730" id="FNanchor_730_730"></a><a href="#Footnote_730_730" class="fnanchor">[730]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_323" id="page_323"></a>{323}</span></p>
+
+<p>Instead of this, they moved with victorious freedom in the
+new field which poetry had won. What they chiefly aimed at
+seems to have been that their poems, when recited, should
+produce the most harmonious and exhilarating effect. These
+works indeed gain immensely when they are repeated, not as
+a whole, but piecemeal, and with a slight touch of comedy in
+voice and gesture. A deeper and more detailed portrayal of
+character would do little to enhance this effect; though the
+reader may desire it, the hearer, who sees the rhapsodist standing
+before him, and who hears only one piece at a time, does
+not think about it at all. With respect to the figures which
+the poet found ready made for him, his feeling was of a double
+kind; his humanistic culture protested against their mediæval
+character, and their combats as counterparts of the battles and
+tournaments of the poet’s own age exercised all his knowledge
+and artistic power, while at the same time they called forth all
+the highest qualities in the reciter. Even in Pulci,<a name="FNanchor_731_731" id="FNanchor_731_731"></a><a href="#Footnote_731_731" class="fnanchor">[731]</a> accordingly,
+we find no parody, strictly speaking, of chivalry, nearly
+as the rough humour of his paladins at times approaches it.
+By their side stands the ideal of pugnacity&mdash;the droll and
+jovial Morgante&mdash;who masters whole armies with his bell-clapper,
+and who is himself thrown into relief by contrast with
+the grotesque and most interesting monster Margutte. Yet
+Pulci lays no special stress on these two rough and vigorous
+characters, and his story, long after they had disappeared from
+it, maintains its singular course. Bojardo<a name="FNanchor_732_732" id="FNanchor_732_732"></a><a href="#Footnote_732_732" class="fnanchor">[732]</a> treats his characters
+with the same mastery, using them for serious or comic purposes
+as he pleases; he has his fun even out of supernatural
+beings, whom he sometimes intentionally depicts as louts.
+But there is one artistic aim which he pursues as earnestly as
+Pulci, namely, the lively and exact description of all that goes
+forward. Pulci recited his poem, as one book after another<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_324" id="page_324"></a>{324}</span>
+was finished, before the society of Lorenzo Magnifico, and in
+the same way Bojardo recited his at the court of Hercules of
+Ferrara. It may be easily imagined what sort of excellence
+such an audience demanded, and how little thanks a profound
+exposition of character would have earned for the poet. Under
+these circumstances the poems naturally formed no complete
+whole, and might just as well be half or twice as long as they
+now are. Their composition is not that of a great historical
+picture, but rather that of a frieze, or of some rich festoon
+entwined among groups of picturesque figures. And precisely
+as in the figures or tendrils of a frieze we do not look for
+minuteness of execution in the individual forms, or for distant
+perspectives and different planes, so we must as little expect
+anything of the kind from these poems.</p>
+
+<p>The varied richness of invention which continually astonishes
+us, most of all in the case of Bojardo, turns to ridicule all our
+school definitions as to the essence of epic poetry. For that
+age, this form of literature was the most agreeable diversion
+from archæological studies, and, indeed, the only possible means
+of re-establishing an independent class of narrative poetry.
+For the versification of ancient history could only lead to the
+false tracks which were trodden by Petrarch in his ‘Africa,’
+written in Latin hexameters, and a hundred and fifty years
+later by Trissino in his ‘Italy delivered from the Goths,’ composed
+in ‘versi sciolti’&mdash;a never-ending poem of faultless
+language and versification, which only makes us doubt whether
+an unlucky alliance has been most disastrous to history or to
+poetry.<a name="FNanchor_733_733" id="FNanchor_733_733"></a><a href="#Footnote_733_733" class="fnanchor">[733]</a></p>
+
+<p>And whither did the example of Dante beguile those who
+imitated him? The visionary ‘Trionfi’ of Petrarch were the
+last of the works written under this influence which satisfy
+our taste. The ‘Amorosa Visione’ of Boccaccio is at bottom
+no more than an enumeration of historical or fabulous characters,
+arranged under allegorical categories.<a name="FNanchor_734_734" id="FNanchor_734_734"></a><a href="#Footnote_734_734" class="fnanchor">[734]</a> Others preface<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_325" id="page_325"></a>{325}</span>
+what they have to tell with a baroque imitation of Dante’s
+first canto, and provide themselves with some allegorical comparison,
+to take the place of Virgil. Uberti, for example, chose
+Solinus for his geographical poem&mdash;the ‘Dittamondo’&mdash;and
+Giovanni Santi, Plutarch for his encomium on Frederick of
+Urbino.<a name="FNanchor_735_735" id="FNanchor_735_735"></a><a href="#Footnote_735_735" class="fnanchor">[735]</a> The only salvation of the time from these false
+tendencies lay in the new epic poetry which was represented
+by Pulci and Bojardo. The admiration and curiosity with
+which it was received, and the like of which will perhaps
+never fall again to the lot of epic poetry to the end of time, is
+a brilliant proof how great was the need of it. It is idle to
+ask whether that epic ideal which our own day has formed
+from Homer and the ‘Nibelungenlied’ is or is not realised in
+these works; an ideal of their own age certainly was. By
+their endless descriptions of combats, which to us are the most
+fatiguing part of these poems, they satisfied, as we have already
+said, a practical interest of which it is hard for us to form a
+just conception<a name="FNanchor_736_736" id="FNanchor_736_736"></a><a href="#Footnote_736_736" class="fnanchor">[736]</a>&mdash;as hard, indeed, as of the esteem in which a
+lively and faithful reflection of the passing moment was then
+held.</p>
+
+<p>Nor can a more inappropriate test be applied to Ariosto than
+the degree in which his ‘Orlando Furioso’<a name="FNanchor_737_737" id="FNanchor_737_737"></a><a href="#Footnote_737_737" class="fnanchor">[737]</a> serves for the representation
+of character. Characters, indeed, there are, and
+drawn with an affectionate care; but the poem does not depend
+on these for its effect, and would lose, rather than gain, if more
+stress were laid upon them. But the demand for them is part
+of a wider and more general desire which Ariosto fails to
+satisfy as our day would wish it satisfied. From a poet of such
+fame and such mighty gifts we would gladly receive something
+better than the adventures of Orlando. From him we might
+have hoped for a work expressing the deepest conflicts of the
+human soul, the highest thoughts of his time on human and
+divine things&mdash;in a word, one of those supreme syntheses
+like the ‘Divine Comedy’ or ‘Faust.’ Instead of which he
+goes to work like the plastic artists of his own day, not caring
+for originality in our sense of the word, simply reproducing a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_326" id="page_326"></a>{326}</span>
+familiar circle of figures, and even, when it suits his purpose,
+making use of the details left him by his predecessors. The
+excellence which, in spite of all this, can nevertheless be attained,
+will be the more incomprehensible to people born without
+the artistic sense, the more learned and intelligent in other
+respects they are. The artistic aim of Ariosto is brilliant,
+living action, which he distributes equally through the whole
+of his great poem. For this end he needs to be excused, not
+only from all deeper expression of character, but also from
+maintaining any strict connection in his narrative. He must
+be allowed to take up lost and forgotten threads when and
+where he pleases; his heroes must come and go, not because
+their character, but because the story requires it. Yet in this
+apparently irrational and arbitrary style of composition he displays
+a harmonious beauty, never losing himself in description,
+but giving only such a sketch of scenes and persons as does
+not hinder the flowing movement of the narrative. Still less
+does he lose himself in conversation and monologue,<a name="FNanchor_738_738" id="FNanchor_738_738"></a><a href="#Footnote_738_738" class="fnanchor">[738]</a> but maintains
+the lofty privilege of the true epos, by transforming all
+into living narrative. His pathos does not lie in the words,<a name="FNanchor_739_739" id="FNanchor_739_739"></a><a href="#Footnote_739_739" class="fnanchor">[739]</a>
+not even in the famous twenty-third and following cantos,
+where Roland’s madness is described. That the love-stories in
+the heroic poem are without all lyrical tenderness, must be
+reckoned a merit, though from a moral point of view they cannot
+be always approved. Yet at times they are of such truth
+and reality, notwithstanding all the magic and romance which
+surrounds them, that we might think them personal affairs of
+the poet himself. In the full consciousness of his own genius,
+he does not scruple to interweave the events of his own day
+into the poem, and to celebrate the fame of the house of Este
+in visions and prophecies. The wonderful stream of his octaves
+bears it all forwards in even and dignified movement.</p>
+
+<p>With Teofilo Folengo, or, as he here calls himself, Limerno
+Pitocco, the parody of the whole system of chivalry attained
+the end it had so long desired.<a name="FNanchor_740_740" id="FNanchor_740_740"></a><a href="#Footnote_740_740" class="fnanchor">[740]</a> But here comedy, with its
+realism, demanded of necessity a stricter delineation of character.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_327" id="page_327"></a>{327}</span>
+Exposed to all the rough usage of the half-savage
+street-lads in a Roman country town, Sutri, the little Orlando
+grows up before our eyes into the hero, the priest-hater, and
+the disputant. The conventional world which had been recognised
+since the time of Pulci and had served as framework for
+the epos, falls here to pieces. The origin and position of the
+paladins is openly ridiculed, as in the tournament of donkeys
+in the second book, where the knights appear with the most
+ludicrous armament. The poet utters his ironical regrets over
+the inexplicable faithlessness which seems implanted in the
+house of Gano of Mainz, over the toilsome acquisition of the
+sword Durindana, and so forth. Tradition, in fact, serves him
+only as a substratum for episodes, ludicrous fancies, allusions to
+events of the time (among which some, like the close of cap. vi.
+are exceedingly fine), and indecent jokes. Mixed with all this,
+a certain derision of Ariosto is unmistakable, and it was fortunate
+for the ‘Orlando Furioso’ that the ‘Orlandino,’ with its
+Lutheran heresies, was soon put out of the way by the Inquisition.
+The parody is evident when (cap. v. str. 28) the house
+of Gonzaga is deduced from the paladin Guidone, since the
+Colonna claimed Orlando, the Orsini Rinaldo, and the house of
+Este&mdash;according to Ariosto&mdash;Ruggiero as their ancestors. Perhaps
+Ferrante Gonzaga, the patron of the poet, was a party to
+this sarcasm on the house of Este.</p>
+
+<p>That in the ‘Jerusalem Delivered’ of Torquato Tasso the
+delineation of character is one of the chief tasks of the poet,
+proves only how far his mode of thought differed from that
+prevalent half a century before. His admirable work is a true
+monument of the Counter-reformation which had been meanwhile
+accomplished, and of the spirit and tendency of that
+movement.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_328" id="page_328"></a>{328}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-4" id="CHAPTER_V-4"></a>CHAPTER V.<br /><br />
+<small>BIOGRAPHY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">O<small>UTSIDE</small> the sphere of poetry also, the Italians were the first
+of all European nations who displayed any remarkable power
+and inclination accurately to describe man as shown in history,
+according to his inward and outward characteristics.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that in the Middle Ages considerable attempts
+were made in the same direction; and the legends of the
+Church, as a kind of standing biographical task, must, to some
+extent, have kept alive the interest and the gift for such descriptions.
+In the annals of the monasteries and cathedrals,
+many of the churchmen, such as Meinwerk of Paderborn,
+Godehard of Kildesheim, and others, are brought vividly before
+our eyes; and descriptions exist of several of the German
+emperors, modelled after old authors&mdash;particularly Suetonius&mdash;which
+contain admirable features. Indeed these and other
+profane ‘vitae’ came in time to form a continuous counterpart
+to the sacred legends. Yet neither Einhard nor Radevicus<a name="FNanchor_741_741" id="FNanchor_741_741"></a><a href="#Footnote_741_741" class="fnanchor">[741]</a>
+can be named by the side of Joinville’s picture of St. Louis,
+which certainly stands almost alone as the first complete spiritual
+portrait of a modern European nature. Characters like
+St. Louis are rare at all times, and his was favoured by the
+rare good fortune that a sincere and naïve observer caught the
+spirit of all the events and actions of his life, and represented
+it admirably. From what scanty sources are we left to guess
+at the inward nature of Frederick II. or of Philip the Fair.
+Much of what, till the close of the Middle Ages, passed for
+biography, is properly speaking nothing but contemporary
+narrative, written without any sense of what is individual in
+the subject of the memoir.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_329" id="page_329"></a>{329}</span></p>
+
+<p>Among the Italians, on the contrary, the search for the
+characteristic features of remarkable men was a prevailing
+tendency; and this it is which separates them from the other
+western peoples, among whom the same thing happens but
+seldom, and in exceptional cases. This keen eye for individuality
+belongs only to those who have emerged from the half-conscious
+life of the race and become themselves individuals.</p>
+
+<p>Under the influence of the prevailing conception of fame
+(<a href="#page_139">p. 139</a>, sqq.), an art of comparative biography arose which
+no longer found it necessary, like Anastasius,<a name="FNanchor_742_742" id="FNanchor_742_742"></a><a href="#Footnote_742_742" class="fnanchor">[742]</a> Agnellus,<a name="FNanchor_743_743" id="FNanchor_743_743"></a><a href="#Footnote_743_743" class="fnanchor">[743]</a>
+and their successors, or like the biographers of the Venetian
+doges, to adhere to a dynastic or ecclesiastical succession. It
+felt itself free to describe a man if and because he was remarkable.
+It took as models Suetonius, Nepos (the ‘viri illustres’),
+and Plutarch, so far as he was known and translated; for
+sketches of literary history, the lives of the grammarians,
+rhetoricians, and poets, known to us as the ‘Appendices’ to
+Suetonius,<a name="FNanchor_744_744" id="FNanchor_744_744"></a><a href="#Footnote_744_744" class="fnanchor">[744]</a> seem to have served as patterns, as well as the
+widely-read life of Virgil by Donatus.</p>
+
+<p>It has been already mentioned that biographical collections&mdash;lives
+of famous men and famous women&mdash;began to appear
+in the fourteenth century (<a href="#page_146">p. 146</a>). Where they do not describe
+contemporaries, they are naturally dependent on earlier
+narratives. The first great original effort is the life of Dante
+by Boccaccio. Lightly and rhetorically written, and full, as it
+is, of arbitrary fancies, this work nevertheless gives us a lively
+sense of the extraordinary features in Dante’s nature.<a name="FNanchor_745_745" id="FNanchor_745_745"></a><a href="#Footnote_745_745" class="fnanchor">[745]</a> Then
+follow, at the end of the fourteenth century, the ‘vite’ of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_330" id="page_330"></a>{330}</span>
+illustrious Florentines, by Filippo Villani. They are men of
+every calling: poets, jurists, physicians, scholars, artists, statesmen,
+and soldiers, some of them then still living. Florence is
+here treated like a gifted family, in which all the members are
+noticed in whom the spirit of the house expresses itself vigorously.
+The descriptions are brief, but show a remarkable eye
+for what is characteristic, and are noteworthy for including the
+inward and outward physiognomy in the same sketch.<a name="FNanchor_746_746" id="FNanchor_746_746"></a><a href="#Footnote_746_746" class="fnanchor">[746]</a> From
+that time forward,<a name="FNanchor_747_747" id="FNanchor_747_747"></a><a href="#Footnote_747_747" class="fnanchor">[747]</a> the Tuscans never ceased to consider the
+description of man as lying within their special competence,
+and to them we owe the most valuable portraits of the Italians
+of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Giovanni Cavalcanti,
+in the appendices to his Florentine history, written before the
+year 1450,<a name="FNanchor_748_748" id="FNanchor_748_748"></a><a href="#Footnote_748_748" class="fnanchor">[748]</a> collects instances of civil virtue and abnegation,
+of political discernment and of military valour, all shown by
+Florentines. Pius II. gives us in his ‘Commentaries’ valuable
+portraits of famous contemporaries; and not long ago a separate
+work of his earlier years,<a name="FNanchor_749_749" id="FNanchor_749_749"></a><a href="#Footnote_749_749" class="fnanchor">[749]</a> which seems preparatory to these
+portraits, but which has colours and features that are very
+singular, was reprinted. To Jacob of Volterra we owe piquant
+sketches of members of the Curia<a name="FNanchor_750_750" id="FNanchor_750_750"></a><a href="#Footnote_750_750" class="fnanchor">[750]</a> in the time of Sixtus IV.
+Vespasiano Fiorentino has been often referred to already, and
+as a historical authority a high place must be assigned to him;
+but his gift as a painter of character is not to be compared
+with that of Macchiavelli, Niccolò Valori, Guicciardini, Varchi,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_331" id="page_331"></a>{331}</span>
+Francesco Vettori, and others, by whom European history has
+been probably as much influenced in this direction as by the
+ancients. It must not be forgotten that some of these authors
+soon found their way into northern countries by means of Latin
+translations. And without Giorgio Vasari of Arezzo and his
+all-important work, we should perhaps to this day have no
+history of northern art, or of the art of modern Europe, at all.<a name="FNanchor_751_751" id="FNanchor_751_751"></a><a href="#Footnote_751_751" class="fnanchor">[751]</a></p>
+
+<p>Among the biographers of North Italy in the fifteenth
+century, Bartolommeo Facio of Spezzia holds a high rank
+(<a href="#page_147">p. 147</a>). Platina, born in the territory of Cremona, gives us,
+in his ‘Life of Paul II.’ (<a href="#page_231">p. 231</a>), examples of biographical
+caricatures. The description of the last Visconti,<a name="FNanchor_752_752" id="FNanchor_752_752"></a><a href="#Footnote_752_752" class="fnanchor">[752]</a> written by
+Piercandido Decembrio&mdash;an enlarged imitation of Suetonius&mdash;is
+of special importance. Sismondi regrets that so much
+trouble has been spent on so unworthy an object, but the author
+would hardly have been equal to deal with a greater man,
+while he was thoroughly competent to describe the mixed
+nature of Filippo Maria, and in and through it to represent
+with accuracy the conditions, the forms, and the consequences
+of this particular kind of despotism. The picture of the fifteenth
+century would be incomplete without this unique biography,
+which is characteristic down to its minutest details.
+Milan afterwards possessed, in the historian Corio, an excellent
+portrait-painter; and after him came Paolo Giovio of Como,
+whose larger biographies and shorter ‘Elogia’ have achieved
+a world-wide reputation, and become models for future writers
+in all countries. It is easy to prove by a hundred passages how
+superficial and even dishonest he was; nor from a man like
+him can any high and serious purpose be expected. But the
+breath of the age moves in his pages, and his Leo, his Alfonso,
+his Pompeo Colonna, live and act before us with such perfect
+truth and reality, that we seem admitted to the deepest recesses
+of their nature.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_332" id="page_332"></a>{332}</span></p>
+
+<p>Among Neapolitan writers, Tristano Caracciolo (<a href="#page_036">p. 36</a>), so
+far as we are able to judge, holds indisputably the first
+place in this respect, although his purpose was not strictly
+biographical. In the figures which he brings before us, guilt
+and destiny are wondrously mingled. He is a kind of unconscious
+tragedian. That genuine tragedy which then found
+no place on the stage, ‘swept by’ in the palace, the street, and
+the public square. The ‘Words and Deeds of Alfonso the
+Great,’ written by Antonio Panormita<a name="FNanchor_753_753" id="FNanchor_753_753"></a><a href="#Footnote_753_753" class="fnanchor">[753]</a> during the lifetime of
+the king, and consequently showing more of the spirit of
+flattery than is consistent with historical truth, are remarkable
+as one of the first of such collections of anecdotes and of wise
+and witty sayings.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of Europe followed the example of Italy in this
+respect but slowly,<a name="FNanchor_754_754" id="FNanchor_754_754"></a><a href="#Footnote_754_754" class="fnanchor">[754]</a> although great political and religious
+movements had broken so many bands, and had awakened
+so many thousands to new spiritual life. Italians, whether
+scholars or diplomatists, still remained, on the whole, the best
+source of information for the characters of the leading men all
+over Europe. It is well known how speedily and unanimously
+in recent times the reports of the Venetian embassies in the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been recognised as
+authorities of the first order for personal description.<a name="FNanchor_755_755" id="FNanchor_755_755"></a><a href="#Footnote_755_755" class="fnanchor">[755]</a> Even
+autobiography takes here and there in Italy a bold and
+vigorous flight, and puts before us, together with the most
+varied incidents of external life, striking revelations of the
+inner man. Among other nations, even in Germany at the
+time of the Reformation, it deals only with outward experiences,
+and leaves us to guess at the spirit within from the style of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_333" id="page_333"></a>{333}</span>
+narrative.<a name="FNanchor_756_756" id="FNanchor_756_756"></a><a href="#Footnote_756_756" class="fnanchor">[756]</a> It seems as though Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova,’ with the
+inexorable truthfulness which runs through it, had shown his
+people the way.</p>
+
+<p>The beginnings of autobiography are to be traced in the
+family histories of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
+which are said to be not uncommon as manuscripts in the
+Florentine libraries&mdash;unaffected narratives written for the
+sake of the individual or of his family, like that of Buonaccorso
+Pitti.</p>
+
+<p>A profound self-analysis is not to be looked for in the
+‘Commentaries’ of Pius II. What we here learn of him as a
+man seems at first sight to be chiefly confined to the account
+which he gives of the different steps in his career. But further
+reflexion will lead us to a different conclusion with regard to
+this remarkable book. There are men who are by nature
+mirrors of what surrounds them. It would be irrelevant to
+ask incessantly after their convictions, their spiritual struggles,
+their inmost victories and achievements. Æneas Sylvius lived
+wholly in the interest which lay near, without troubling himself
+about the problems and contradictions of life. His Catholic
+orthodoxy gave him all the help of this kind which he needed.
+And at all events, after taking part in every intellectual movement
+which interested his age, and notably furthering some
+of them, he still at the close of his earthly course retained
+character enough to preach a crusade against the Turks, and
+to die of grief when it came to nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, any more
+than that of Pius II., founded on introspection. And yet it
+describes the whole man&mdash;not always willingly&mdash;with marvellous
+truth and completeness. It is no small matter that
+Benvenuto, whose most important works have perished half
+finished, and who, as an artist, is perfect only in his little
+decorative specialty, but in other respects, if judged by the
+works of him which remain, is surpassed by so many of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_334" id="page_334"></a>{334}</span>
+greater contemporaries&mdash;that Benvenuto as a man will interest
+mankind to the end of time. It does not spoil the impression
+when the reader often detects him bragging or lying; the
+stamp of a mighty, energetic, and thoroughly developed nature
+remains. By his side our northern autobiographers, though
+their tendency and moral character may stand much higher,
+appear incomplete beings. He is a man who can do all and
+dares do all, and who carries his measure in himself.<a name="FNanchor_757_757" id="FNanchor_757_757"></a><a href="#Footnote_757_757" class="fnanchor">[757]</a> Whether
+we like him or not, he lives, such as he was, as a significant
+type of the modern spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Another man deserves a brief mention in connection with
+this subject&mdash;a man who, like Benvenuto, was not a model of
+veracity: Girolamo Cardano of Milan (b. 1500). His little
+book, ‘De propria vita’<a name="FNanchor_758_758" id="FNanchor_758_758"></a><a href="#Footnote_758_758" class="fnanchor">[758]</a> will outlive and eclipse his fame in
+philosophy and natural science, just as Benvenuto’s life, though
+its value is of another kind, has thrown his works into the
+shade. Cardano is a physician who feels his own pulse, and
+describes his own physical, moral, and intellectual nature,
+together with all the conditions under which it had developed,
+and this, to the best of his ability, honestly and sincerely.
+The work which he avowedly took as his model&mdash;the ‘Confessions’
+of Marcus Aurelius&mdash;he was able, hampered as he was
+by no stoical maxims, to surpass in this particular. He desires
+to spare neither himself nor others, and begins the narrative of
+his career with the statement that his mother tried, and failed,
+to procure abortion. It is worth remark that he attributes to
+the stars which presided over his birth only the events of his
+life and his intellectual gifts, but not his moral qualities; he
+confesses (cap. 10) that the astrological prediction that he
+would not live to the age of forty or fifty years did him much
+harm in his youth. But there is no need to quote from so
+well-known and accessible a book; whoever opens it will not
+lay it down till the last page. Cardano admits that he cheated
+at play, that he was vindictive, incapable of all compunction,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_335" id="page_335"></a>{335}</span>
+purposely cruel in his speech. He confesses it without impudence
+and without feigned contrition, without even wishing to
+make himself an object of interest, but with the same simple
+and sincere love of fact which guided him in his scientific researches.
+And, what is to us the most repulsive of all, the old
+man, after the most shocking experiences<a name="FNanchor_759_759" id="FNanchor_759_759"></a><a href="#Footnote_759_759" class="fnanchor">[759]</a> and with his confidence
+in his fellow-men gone, finds himself after all tolerably
+happy and comfortable. He has still left him a grandson,
+immense learning, the fame of his works, money, rank and
+credit, powerful friends, the knowledge of many secrets, and,
+best of all, belief in God. After this, he counts the teeth in
+his head, and finds that he has fifteen.</p>
+
+<p>Yet when Cardano wrote, Inquisitors and Spaniards were
+already busy in Italy, either hindering the production of such
+natures, or, where they existed, by some means or other putting
+them out of the way. There lies a gulf between this
+book and the memoirs of Alfieri.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it would be unjust to close this list of autobiographers
+without listening to a word from one man who was both
+worthy and happy. This is the well-known philosopher of
+practical life, Luigi Cornaro, whose dwelling at Padua, classical
+as an architectural work, was at the same time the home of all
+the muses. In his famous treatise ‘On the Sober Life,’<a name="FNanchor_760_760" id="FNanchor_760_760"></a><a href="#Footnote_760_760" class="fnanchor">[760]</a> he describes
+the strict regimen by which he succeeded, after a sickly
+youth, in reaching an advanced and healthy age, then of eighty-three
+years. He goes on to answer those who despise life after
+the age of sixty-five as a living death, showing them that his
+own life had nothing deadly about it. ‘Let them come and
+see, and wonder at my good health, how I mount on horseback
+without help, how I run upstairs and up hills, how cheerful,
+amusing, and contented I am, how free from care and disagreeable
+thoughts. Peace and joy never quit me....
+My friends are wise, learned, and distinguished people of good
+position, and when they are not with me I read and write, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_336" id="page_336"></a>{336}</span>
+try thereby, as by all other means, to be useful to others.
+Each of these things I do at the proper time, and at my ease,
+in my dwelling, which is beautiful and lies in the best part of
+Padua, and is arranged both for summer and winter with all
+the resources of architecture, and provided with a garden by
+the running water. In the spring and autumn, I go for a while
+to my hill in the most beautiful part of the Euganean mountains,
+where I have fountains and gardens, and a comfortable
+dwelling; and there I amuse myself with some easy and
+pleasant chase, which is suitable to my years. At other times
+I go to my villa on the plain;<a name="FNanchor_761_761" id="FNanchor_761_761"></a><a href="#Footnote_761_761" class="fnanchor">[761]</a> there all the paths lead to an
+open space, in the middle of which stands a pretty church; an
+arm of the Brenta flows through the plantations&mdash;fruitful,
+well-cultivated fields, now fully peopled, which the marshes
+and the foul air once made fitter for snakes than for men. It
+was I who drained the country; then the air became good, and
+people settled there and multiplied, and the land became cultivated
+as it now is, so that I can truly say: “On this spot I
+gave to God an altar and a temple, and souls to worship Him.”
+This is my consolation and my happiness whenever I come
+here. In the spring and autumn, I also visit the neighbouring
+towns, to see and converse with my friends, through whom I
+make the acquaintance of other distinguished men, architects,
+painters, sculptors, musicians, and cultivators of the soil. I
+see what new things they have done, I look again at what
+I know already, and learn much that is of use to me. I see
+palaces, gardens, antiquities, public grounds, churches, and
+fortifications. But what most of all delights me when I travel,
+is the beauty of the country and the cities, lying now on the
+plain, now on the slopes of the hills, or on the banks of rivers
+and streams, surrounded by gardens and villas. And these
+enjoyments are not diminished through weakness of the eyes
+or the ears; all my senses (thank God!) are in the best condition,
+including the sense of taste; for I enjoy more the simple
+food which I now take in moderation, than all the delicacies
+which I ate in my years of disorder.’</p>
+
+<p>After mentioning the works he had undertaken on behalf of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_337" id="page_337"></a>{337}</span>
+the republic for draining the marshes, and the projects which
+he had constantly advocated for preserving the lagunes, he
+thus concludes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>‘These are the true recreations of an old age which God has
+permitted to be healthy, and which is free from those mental
+and bodily sufferings to which so many young people and so
+many sickly older people succumb. And if it be allowable to
+add the little to the great, to add jest to earnest, it may be
+mentioned as a result of my moderate life, that in my eighty-third
+year I have written a most amusing comedy, full of
+blameless wit. Such works are generally the business of
+youth, as tragedy is the business of old age. If it is reckoned
+to the credit of the famous Greek that he wrote a tragedy in
+his seventy-third year, must I not, with my ten years more, be
+more cheerful and healthy than he ever was? And that no
+consolation may be wanting in the overflowing cup of my old
+age, I see before my eyes a sort of bodily immortality in the
+persons of my descendants. When I come home I see before
+me, not one or two, but eleven grandchildren, between the
+ages of two and eighteen, all from the same father and mother,
+all healthy, and, so far as can already be judged, all gifted
+with the talent and disposition for learning and a good life.
+One of the younger I have as my playmate (buffoncello), since
+children from the third to the fifth year are born to tricks;
+the elder ones I treat as my companions, and, as they have
+admirable voices, I take delight in hearing them sing and play
+on different instruments. And I sing myself, and find my
+voice better, clearer, and louder than ever. These are the
+pleasures of my last years. My life, therefore, is alive, and
+not dead; nor would I exchange my age for the youth of such
+as live in the service of their passions.</p>
+
+<p>In the ‘Exhortation’ which Cornaro added at a much later
+time, in his ninety-fifth year, he reckons it among the elements
+of his happiness that his ‘Treatise’ had made many converts.
+He died at Padua in 1565, at the age of over a hundred years.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_338" id="page_338"></a>{338}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI-4" id="CHAPTER_VI-4"></a>CHAPTER VI.<br /><br />
+<small>THE DESCRIPTION OF NATIONS AND CITIES.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HIS</small> national gift did not, however, confine itself to the criticism
+and description of individuals, but felt itself competent
+to deal with the qualities and characteristics of whole peoples.
+Throughout the Middle Ages the cities, families, and nations of
+all Europe were in the habit of making insulting and derisive
+attacks on one another, which, with much caricature, contained
+commonly a kernel of truth. But from the first the Italians
+surpassed all others in their quick apprehension of the mental
+differences among cities and populations. Their local patriotism,
+stronger probably than in any other mediæval people, soon found
+expression in literature, and allied itself with the current conception
+of ‘Fame.’ Topography became the counterpart of
+biography (<a href="#page_145">p. 145</a>); while all the more important cities began
+to celebrate their own praises in prose and verse,<a name="FNanchor_762_762" id="FNanchor_762_762"></a><a href="#Footnote_762_762" class="fnanchor">[762]</a> writers
+appeared who made the chief towns and districts the subject
+partly of a serious comparative description, partly of satire, and
+sometimes of notices in which jest and earnest are not easy
+to be distinguished. Brunetto Latini must first be mentioned.
+Besides his own country, he knew France from a residence of
+seven years, and gives a long list of the characteristic differences
+in costume and modes of life between Frenchmen and Italians,
+noticing the distinction between the monarchical government
+of France and the republican constitution of the Italian cities.<a name="FNanchor_763_763" id="FNanchor_763_763"></a><a href="#Footnote_763_763" class="fnanchor">[763]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_339" id="page_339"></a>{339}</span>
+After this, next to some famous passages in the ‘Divine Comedy,’
+comes the ‘Dittamondo’ of Uberti (about 1360). As a rule,
+only single remarkable facts and characteristics are here mentioned:
+the Feast of the Crows at Sant’ Apollinare in Ravenna,
+the springs at Treviso, the great cellar near Vicenza, the high
+duties at Mantua, the forest of towers at Lucca. Yet mixed up
+with all this, we find laudatory and satirical criticisms of every
+kind. Arezzo figures with the crafty disposition of its citizens,
+Genoa with the artificially blackened eyes and teeth (?) of its
+women, Bologna with its prodigality, Bergamo with its coarse
+dialect and hard-headed people.<a name="FNanchor_764_764" id="FNanchor_764_764"></a><a href="#Footnote_764_764" class="fnanchor">[764]</a> In the fifteenth century the
+fashion was to belaud one’s own city even at the expense of
+others. Michele Savonarola allows that, in comparison with his
+native Padua, only Rome and Venice are more splendid, and
+Florence perhaps more joyous<a name="FNanchor_765_765" id="FNanchor_765_765"></a><a href="#Footnote_765_765" class="fnanchor">[765]</a>&mdash;by which our knowledge is naturally
+not much extended. At the end of the century, Jovianus
+Pontanus, in his ‘Antonius,’ writes an imaginary journey
+through Italy, simply as a vehicle for malicious observations.
+But in the sixteenth century we meet with a series of exact and
+profound studies of national characteristics, such as no other
+people of that time could rival.<a name="FNanchor_766_766" id="FNanchor_766_766"></a><a href="#Footnote_766_766" class="fnanchor">[766]</a> Macchiavelli sets forth in some
+of his valuable essays the character and the political condition of
+the Germans and French in such a way, that the born northerner,
+familiar with the history of his own country, is grateful to the
+Florentine thinker for his flashes of insight. The Florentines
+(<a href="#page_071">p. 71</a> sqq.) begin to take pleasure in describing themselves;<a name="FNanchor_767_767" id="FNanchor_767_767"></a><a href="#Footnote_767_767" class="fnanchor">[767]</a>
+and basking in the well-earned sunshine of their intellectual<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_340" id="page_340"></a>{340}</span>
+glory, their pride seems to attain its height when they derive
+the artistic pre-eminence of Tuscany among Italians, not from
+any special gifts of nature, but from hard patient work.<a name="FNanchor_768_768" id="FNanchor_768_768"></a><a href="#Footnote_768_768" class="fnanchor">[768]</a> The
+homage of famous men from other parts of Italy, of which
+the sixteenth Capitolo of Ariosto is a splendid example, they
+accepted as a merited tribute to their excellence.</p>
+
+<p>An admirable description of the Italians, with their various
+pursuits and characteristics, though in few words and with
+special stress laid on the Lucchese, to whom the work was dedicated,
+was given by Ortensio Landi, who, however, is so fond of
+playing hide-and-seek with his own name, and fast-and-loose with
+historical facts, that even when he seems to be most in earnest,
+he must be accepted with caution and only after close examination.<a name="FNanchor_769_769" id="FNanchor_769_769"></a><a href="#Footnote_769_769" class="fnanchor">[769]</a>
+The same Landi published an anonymous ‘Commentario’<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_341" id="page_341"></a>{341}</span>
+some ten years later,<a name="FNanchor_770_770" id="FNanchor_770_770"></a><a href="#Footnote_770_770" class="fnanchor">[770]</a> which contains among many follies not a
+few valuable hints on the unhappy ruined condition of Italy in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_342" id="page_342"></a>{342}</span>
+the middle of the century.<a name="FNanchor_771_771" id="FNanchor_771_771"></a><a href="#Footnote_771_771" class="fnanchor">[771]</a> Leandro Alberti<a name="FNanchor_772_772" id="FNanchor_772_772"></a><a href="#Footnote_772_772" class="fnanchor">[772]</a> is not so fruitful
+as might be expected in his description of the character of the
+different cities.</p>
+
+<p>To what extent this comparative study of national and local
+characteristics may, by means of Italian humanism, have influenced
+the rest of Europe, we cannot say with precision. To
+Italy, at all events, belongs the priority in this respect, as in
+the description of the world in general.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_343" id="page_343"></a>{343}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VII-4" id="CHAPTER_VII-4"></a>CHAPTER VII.<br /><br />
+<small>DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTWARD MAN.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">B<small>UT</small> the discoveries made with regard to man were not confined
+to the spiritual characteristics of individuals and nations;
+his outward appearance was in Italy the subject of an entirely
+different interest from that shown in it by northern peoples.<a name="FNanchor_773_773" id="FNanchor_773_773"></a><a href="#Footnote_773_773" class="fnanchor">[773]</a></p>
+
+<p>Of the position held by the great Italian physicians with
+respect to the progress of physiology, we cannot venture to
+speak; and the artistic study of the human figure belongs, not
+to a work like the present, but to the history of art. But something
+must here be said of that universal education of the eye,
+which rendered the judgment of the Italians as to bodily beauty
+or ugliness perfect and final.</p>
+
+<p>On reading the Italian authors of that period attentively, we
+are astounded at the keenness and accuracy with which outward
+features are seized, and at the completeness with which
+personal appearance in general is described.<a name="FNanchor_774_774" id="FNanchor_774_774"></a><a href="#Footnote_774_774" class="fnanchor">[774]</a> Even to-day the
+Italians, and especially the Romans, have the art of sketching
+a man’s picture in a couple of words. This rapid apprehension
+of what is characteristic is an essential condition for detecting
+and representing the beautiful. In poetry, it is true, circumstantial
+description may be a fault, not a merit, since a single
+feature, suggested by deep passion or insight, will often awaken
+in the reader a far more powerful impression of the figure described.
+Dante gives us nowhere a more splendid idea of his
+Beatrice than where he only describes the influence which goes
+forth from her upon all around. But here we have not to treat<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_344" id="page_344"></a>{344}</span>
+particularly of poetry, which follows its own laws and pursues
+its own ends, but rather of the general capacity to paint in
+words real or imaginary forms.</p>
+
+<p>In this Boccaccio is a master&mdash;not in the ‘Decameron,’ where
+the character of the tales forbids lengthy description, but in
+the romances, where he is free to take his time. In his
+‘Ameto’<a name="FNanchor_775_775" id="FNanchor_775_775"></a><a href="#Footnote_775_775" class="fnanchor">[775]</a> he describes a blonde and a brunette much as an
+artist a hundred years later would have painted them&mdash;for
+here, too, culture long precedes art. In the account of the
+brunette&mdash;or, strictly speaking, of the less blonde of the two&mdash;there
+are touches which deserve to be called classical. In the
+words ‘la spaziosa testa e distesa’ lies the feeling for grander
+forms, which go beyond a graceful prettiness; the eyebrows
+with him no longer resemble two bows, as in the Byzantine
+ideal, but a single wavy line; the nose seems to have been
+meant to be aquiline;<a name="FNanchor_776_776" id="FNanchor_776_776"></a><a href="#Footnote_776_776" class="fnanchor">[776]</a> the broad, full breast, the arms of
+moderate length, the effect of the beautiful hand, as it lies on
+the purple mantle&mdash;all both foretells the sense of beauty of a
+coming time, and unconsciously approaches to that of classical
+antiquity. In other descriptions Boccaccio mentions a flat (not
+mediævally rounded) brow, a long, earnest, brown eye, and
+round, not hollowed neck, as well as&mdash;in a very modern tone&mdash;the
+‘little feet’ and the ‘two roguish eyes’ of a black-haired
+nymph.<a name="FNanchor_777_777" id="FNanchor_777_777"></a><a href="#Footnote_777_777" class="fnanchor">[777]</a></p>
+
+<p>Whether the fifteenth century has left any written account
+of its ideal of beauty, I am not able to say. The works of the
+painters and sculptors do not render such an account as unnecessary
+as might appear at first sight, since possibly, as
+opposed to their realism, a more ideal type might have been
+favoured and preserved by the writers.<a name="FNanchor_778_778" id="FNanchor_778_778"></a><a href="#Footnote_778_778" class="fnanchor">[778]</a> In the sixteenth cen<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_345" id="page_345"></a>{345}</span>tury
+Firenzuola came forward with his remarkable work on
+female beauty.<a name="FNanchor_779_779" id="FNanchor_779_779"></a><a href="#Footnote_779_779" class="fnanchor">[779]</a> We must clearly distinguish in it what he
+had learned from old authors or from artists, such as the fixing
+of proportions according to the length of the head, and certain
+abstract conceptions. What remains, is his own genuine observation,
+illustrated with examples of women and girls from
+Prato. As his little work is a kind of lecture, delivered before
+the women of this city&mdash;that is to say, before very severe critics&mdash;he
+must have kept pretty closely to the truth. His principle
+is avowedly that of Zeuxis and of Lucian&mdash;to piece together an
+ideal beauty out of a number of beautiful parts. He defines
+the shades of colour which occur in the hair and skin, and
+gives to the ‘biondo’ the preference, as the most beautiful
+colour for the hair,<a name="FNanchor_780_780" id="FNanchor_780_780"></a><a href="#Footnote_780_780" class="fnanchor">[780]</a> understanding by it a soft yellow, inclining
+to brown. He requires that the hair should be thick, long, and
+locky; the forehead serene, and twice as broad as high; the
+skin bright and clear (candida), but not of a dead white (bianchezza);
+the eyebrows dark, silky, most strongly marked in
+the middle, and shading off towards the ears and the nose; the
+white of the eye faintly touched with blue, the iris not actually
+black, though all the poets praise ‘occhi neri’ as a gift of
+Venus, despite that even goddesses were known for their eyes
+of heavenly blue, and that soft, joyous, brown eyes were admired
+by everybody. The eye itself should be large and full,
+and brought well forward; the lids white, and marked with
+almost invisible tiny red veins; the lashes neither too long,
+nor too thick, nor too dark. The hollow round the eye should
+have the same colour as the cheek.<a name="FNanchor_781_781" id="FNanchor_781_781"></a><a href="#Footnote_781_781" class="fnanchor">[781]</a> The ear, neither too large<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_346" id="page_346"></a>{346}</span>
+nor too small, firmly and neatly fitted on, should show a
+stronger colour in the winding than in the even parts, with an
+edge of the transparent ruddiness of the pomegranate. The
+temples must be white and even, and for the most perfect
+beauty ought not to be too narrow. The red should grow
+deeper as the cheek gets rounder. The nose, which chiefly
+determines the value of the profile, must recede gently and
+uniformly in the direction of the eyes; where the cartilage
+ceases, there may be a slight elevation, but not so marked as
+to make the nose aquiline, which is not pleasing in women;
+the lower part must be less strongly coloured than the ears, but
+not of a chilly whiteness, and the middle partition above the
+lips lightly tinted with red. The mouth, our author would
+have rather small, and neither projecting to a point, nor quite
+flat, with the lips not too thin, and fitting neatly together; an
+accidental opening, that is, when the woman is neither speaking
+nor laughing, should not display more than six upper teeth.
+As delicacies of detail, he mentions a dimple in the upper lip,
+a certain fulness of the under lip, and a tempting smile in the
+left corner of the mouth&mdash;and so on. The teeth should not be
+too small, regular, well marked off from one another, and of the
+colour of ivory; and the gums must not be too dark or even
+like red velvet. The chin is to be round, neither pointed nor
+curved outwards, and growing slightly red as it rises; its glory
+is the dimple. The neck should be white and round and rather<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_347" id="page_347"></a>{347}</span>
+long than short, with the hollow and the Adam’s apple but
+faintly marked; and the skin at every movement must show
+pleasing lines. The shoulders he desires broad, and in the
+breadth of the bosom sees the first condition of its beauty. No
+bone may be visible upon it, its fall and swell must be gentle
+and gradual, its colour ‘candidissimo.’ The leg should be long
+and not too hard in the lower parts, but still not without flesh
+on the shin, which must be provided with white, full calves.
+He likes the foot small, but not bony, the instep (it seems) high,
+and the colour white as alabaster. The arms are to be white,
+and in the upper parts tinted with red; in their consistence
+fleshy and muscular, but still soft as those of Pallas, when she
+stood before the shepherd on Mount Ida&mdash;in a word, ripe, fresh,
+and firm. The hand should be white, especially towards the
+wrist, but large and plump, feeling soft as silk, the rosy palm
+marked with a few, but distinct and not intricate lines; the
+elevations in it should be not too great, the space between
+thumb and forefinger brightly coloured and without wrinkles,
+the fingers long, delicate, and scarcely at all thinner towards
+the tips, with nails clear, even, not too long nor too square, and
+cut so as to show a white margin about the breadth of a knife’s
+back.</p>
+
+<p>Æsthetic principles of a general character occupy a very
+subordinate place to these particulars. The ultimate principles
+of beauty, according to which the eye judges ‘senza appello,’
+are for Firenzuola a secret, as he frankly confesses; and his
+definitions of ‘Leggiadria,’ ‘Grazia,’ ‘Vaghezza,’ ‘Venustà,’
+‘Aria,’ ‘Maestà,’ are partly, as has been remarked, philological,
+and partly vain attempts to utter the unutterable. Laughter
+he prettily defines, probably following some old author, as a
+radiance of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>The literature of all countries can, at the close of the Middle
+Ages, show single attempts to lay down theoretic principles of
+beauty;<a name="FNanchor_782_782" id="FNanchor_782_782"></a><a href="#Footnote_782_782" class="fnanchor">[782]</a> but no other work can be compared to that of Firenzuola.
+Brantome, who came a good half-century later, is a
+bungling critic by his side, because governed by lasciviousness
+and not by a sense of beauty.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_348" id="page_348"></a>{348}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VIII-4" id="CHAPTER_VIII-4"></a>CHAPTER VIII.<br /><br />
+<small>DESCRIPTIONS OF LIFE IN MOVEMENT.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">A<small>MONG</small> the new discoveries made with regard to man, we must
+reckon, in conclusion, the interest taken in descriptions of the
+daily course of human life.</p>
+
+<p>The comical and satirical literature of the Middle Ages could
+not dispense with pictures of every-day events. But it is
+another thing, when the Italians of the Renaissance dwelt on
+this picture for its own sake&mdash;for its inherent interest&mdash;and
+because it forms part of that great, universal life of the world
+whose magic breath they felt everywhere around them.
+Instead of and together with the satirical comedy, which
+wanders through houses, villages, and streets, seeking food for
+its derision in parson, peasant, and burgher, we now see in
+literature the beginnings of a true <i>genre</i>, long before it found
+any expression in painting. That <i>genre</i> and satire are often
+met with in union, does not prevent them from being wholly
+different things.</p>
+
+<p>How much of earthly business must Dante have watched
+with attentive interest, before he was able to make us see with
+our own eyes all that happened in his spiritual world.<a name="FNanchor_783_783" id="FNanchor_783_783"></a><a href="#Footnote_783_783" class="fnanchor">[783]</a> The
+famous pictures of the busy movement in the arsenal at
+Venice, of the blind men laid side by side before the church
+door,<a name="FNanchor_784_784" id="FNanchor_784_784"></a><a href="#Footnote_784_784" class="fnanchor">[784]</a> and the like, are by no means the only instances of this
+kind: for the art, in which he is a master, of expressing the
+inmost soul by the outward gesture, cannot exist without a
+close and incessant study of human life.</p>
+
+<p>The poets who followed rarely came near him in this respect,
+and the novelists were forbidden by the first laws of their
+literary style to linger over details. Their prefaces and narratives
+might be as long as they pleased, but what we under<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_349" id="page_349"></a>{349}</span>stand
+by <i>genre</i> was outside their province. The taste for this
+class of description was not fully awakened till the time of the
+revival of antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>And here we are again met by the man who had a heart for
+everything&mdash;Æneas Sylvius. Not only natural beauty, not
+only that which has an antiquarian or a geographical interest,
+finds a place in his descriptions (<a href="#page_248">p. 248</a>; ii. p. 28), but any
+living scene of daily life.<a name="FNanchor_785_785" id="FNanchor_785_785"></a><a href="#Footnote_785_785" class="fnanchor">[785]</a> Among the numerous passages in
+his memoirs in which scenes are described which hardly one
+of his contemporaries would have thought worth a line of
+notice, we will here only mention the boat-race on the Lake of
+Bolsena.<a name="FNanchor_786_786" id="FNanchor_786_786"></a><a href="#Footnote_786_786" class="fnanchor">[786]</a> We are not able to detect from what old letter-writer
+or story-teller the impulse was derived to which we owe
+such life-like pictures. Indeed, the whole spiritual communion
+between antiquity and the Renaissance is full of delicacy and
+of mystery.</p>
+
+<p>To this class belong those descriptive Latin poems of which
+we have already spoken (<a href="#page_262">p. 262</a>)&mdash;hunting-scenes, journeys,
+ceremonies, and so forth. In Italian we also find something of
+the same kind, as, for example, the descriptions of the famous
+Medicean tournament by Politian and Luca Pulci.<a name="FNanchor_787_787" id="FNanchor_787_787"></a><a href="#Footnote_787_787" class="fnanchor">[787]</a> The true
+epic poets, Luigi Pulci, Bojardo, and Ariosto, are carried on
+more rapidly by the stream of their narrative; yet in all of
+them we must recognise the lightness and precision of their
+descriptive touch, as one of the chief elements of their greatness.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_350" id="page_350"></a>{350}</span>
+Franco Sacchetti amuses himself with repeating the
+short speeches of a troop of pretty women caught in the woods
+by a shower of rain.<a name="FNanchor_788_788" id="FNanchor_788_788"></a><a href="#Footnote_788_788" class="fnanchor">[788]</a></p>
+
+<p>Other scenes of moving life are to be looked for in the
+military historians (<a href="#page_099">p. 99</a>). In a lengthy poem,<a name="FNanchor_789_789" id="FNanchor_789_789"></a><a href="#Footnote_789_789" class="fnanchor">[789]</a> dating from
+an earlier period, we find a faithful picture of a combat of
+mercenary soldiers in the fourteenth century, chiefly in the
+shape of the orders, cries of battle, and dialogue with which it
+is accompanied.</p>
+
+<p>But the most remarkable productions of this kind are the
+realistic descriptions of country life, which are found most
+abundantly in Lorenzo Magnifico and the poets of his circle.</p>
+
+<p>Since the time of Petrarch,<a name="FNanchor_790_790" id="FNanchor_790_790"></a><a href="#Footnote_790_790" class="fnanchor">[790]</a> an unreal and conventional
+style of bucolic poetry had been in vogue, which, whether
+written in Latin or Italian, was essentially a copy of Virgil.
+Parallel to this, we find the pastoral novel of Boccaccio
+(<a href="#page_259">p. 259</a>) and other works of the same kind down to the
+‘Arcadia’ of Sannazaro, and later still, the pastoral comedy
+of Tasso and Guarini. They are works whose style, whether
+poetry or prose, is admirably finished and perfect, but in which
+pastoral life is only an ideal dress for sentiments which belong
+to a wholly different sphere of culture.<a name="FNanchor_791_791" id="FNanchor_791_791"></a><a href="#Footnote_791_791" class="fnanchor">[791]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_351" id="page_351"></a>{351}</span></p>
+
+<p>But by the side of all this there appeared in Italian poetry,
+towards the close of the fifteenth century, signs of a more
+realistic treatment of rustic life. This was not possible out of
+Italy; for here only did the peasant, whether labourer or proprietor,
+possess human dignity, personal freedom, and the right
+of settlement, hard as his lot might sometimes be in other
+respects.<a name="FNanchor_792_792" id="FNanchor_792_792"></a><a href="#Footnote_792_792" class="fnanchor">[792]</a> The difference between town and country is far
+from being so marked here as in northern countries. Many of
+the smaller towns are peopled almost exclusively by peasants
+who, on coming home at nightfall from their work, are transformed
+into townsfolk. The masons of Como wandered over
+nearly all Italy; the child Giotto was free to leave his sheep
+and join a guild at Florence; everywhere there was a human
+stream flowing from the country into the cities, and some
+mountain populations seemed born to supply this current.<a name="FNanchor_793_793" id="FNanchor_793_793"></a><a href="#Footnote_793_793" class="fnanchor">[793]</a>
+It is true that the pride and local conceit supplied poets and
+novelists with abundant motives for making game of the
+‘villano,’<a name="FNanchor_794_794" id="FNanchor_794_794"></a><a href="#Footnote_794_794" class="fnanchor">[794]</a> and what they left undone was taken charge of by
+the comic improvisers (<a href="#page_320">p. 320</a> sqq.). But nowhere do we find a
+trace of that brutal and contemptuous class-hatred against the
+‘vilains’ which inspired the aristocratic poets of Provence, and
+often, too, the French chroniclers. On the contrary,<a name="FNanchor_795_795" id="FNanchor_795_795"></a><a href="#Footnote_795_795" class="fnanchor">[795]</a> Italian<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_352" id="page_352"></a>{352}</span>
+authors of every sort gladly recognise and accentuate what
+is great or remarkable in the life of the peasant. Gioviano
+Pontano mentions with admiration instances of the fortitude
+of the savage inhabitants of the Abruzzi;<a name="FNanchor_796_796" id="FNanchor_796_796"></a><a href="#Footnote_796_796" class="fnanchor">[796]</a> in the biographical
+collections and in the novelists we meet with the figure of
+the heroic peasant-maiden<a name="FNanchor_797_797" id="FNanchor_797_797"></a><a href="#Footnote_797_797" class="fnanchor">[797]</a> who hazards her life to defend her
+family and her honour.<a name="FNanchor_798_798" id="FNanchor_798_798"></a><a href="#Footnote_798_798" class="fnanchor">[798]</a></p>
+
+<p>Such conditions made the poetical treatment of country-life
+possible. The first instance we shall mention is that of
+Battista Mantovano, whose eclogues, once much read and still
+worth reading, appeared among his earliest works about 1480.
+They are a mixture of real and conventional rusticity, but the
+former tends to prevail. They represent the mode of thought
+of a well-meaning village clergyman, not without a certain
+leaning to liberal ideas. As Carmelite monk, the writer may
+have had occasion to mix freely with the peasantry.<a name="FNanchor_799_799" id="FNanchor_799_799"></a><a href="#Footnote_799_799" class="fnanchor">[799]</a></p>
+
+<p>But it is with a power of a wholly different kind that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_353" id="page_353"></a>{353}</span>
+Lorenzo Magnifico transports himself into the peasant’s world
+His ‘Nencia di Barberino’<a name="FNanchor_800_800" id="FNanchor_800_800"></a><a href="#Footnote_800_800" class="fnanchor">[800]</a> reads like a crowd of genuine
+extracts from the popular songs of the Florentine country,
+fused into a great stream of octaves. The objectivity of the
+writer is such that we are in doubt whether the speaker&mdash;the
+young peasant Vallera, who declares his love to Nencia&mdash;awakens
+his sympathy or ridicule. The deliberate contrast to
+the conventional eclogue is unmistakable. Lorenzo surrenders
+himself purposely to the realism of simple, rough country-life,
+and yet his work makes upon us the impression of true poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The ‘Beca da Dicomano’ of Luigi Pulci<a name="FNanchor_801_801" id="FNanchor_801_801"></a><a href="#Footnote_801_801" class="fnanchor">[801]</a> is an admitted
+counterpart to the ‘Nencia’ of Lorenzo. But the deeper purpose
+is wanting. The ‘Beca’ is written not so much from
+the inward need to give a picture of popular life, as from the
+desire to win the approbation of the educated Florentine world
+by a successful poem. Hence the greater and more deliberate
+coarseness of the scenes, and the indecent jokes. Nevertheless,
+the point of view of the rustic lover is admirably maintained.</p>
+
+<p>Third in this company of poets comes Angelo Poliziano,
+with his ‘Rusticus’<a name="FNanchor_802_802" id="FNanchor_802_802"></a><a href="#Footnote_802_802" class="fnanchor">[802]</a> in Latin hexameters. Keeping clear of
+all imitation of Virgil’s Georgics, he describes the year of the
+Tuscan peasant, beginning with the late autumn, when the
+countryman gets ready his new plough and prepares the seed
+for the winter. The picture of the meadows in spring is full
+and beautiful, and the ‘Summer’ has fine passages; but the
+vintage-feast in autumn is one of the gems of modern Latin
+poetry. Politian wrote poems in Italian as well as Latin, from
+which we may infer that in Lorenzo’s circle it was possible
+to give a realistic picture of the passionate life of the lower<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_354" id="page_354"></a>{354}</span>
+classes. His gipsy’s love-song<a name="FNanchor_803_803" id="FNanchor_803_803"></a><a href="#Footnote_803_803" class="fnanchor">[803]</a> is one of the earliest products
+of that wholly modern tendency to put oneself with poetic consciousness
+into the position of another class. This had probably
+been attempted for ages with a view to satire,<a name="FNanchor_804_804" id="FNanchor_804_804"></a><a href="#Footnote_804_804" class="fnanchor">[804]</a> and the
+opportunity for it was offered in Florence at every carnival by
+the songs of the maskers. But the sympathetic understanding
+of the feelings of another class was new; and with it the
+‘Nencia’ and this ‘Canzone zingaresca’ mark a new starting-point
+in the history of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Here, too, we must briefly indicate how culture prepared the
+way for artistic development. From the time of the ‘Nencia,’
+a period of eighty years elapses to the rustic genre-painting
+of Jacopo Bassano and his school.</p>
+
+<p>In the next part of this work we shall show how differences
+of birth had lost their significance in Italy. Much of this was
+doubtless owing to the fact that men and man were here first
+thoroughly and profoundly understood. This one single result
+of the Renaissance is enough to fill us with everlasting thankfulness.
+The logical notion of humanity was old enough&mdash;but
+here the notion became a fact.</p>
+
+<p>The loftiest conceptions on this subject were uttered by Pico
+della Mirandola in his speech on the dignity of man,<a name="FNanchor_805_805" id="FNanchor_805_805"></a><a href="#Footnote_805_805" class="fnanchor">[805]</a> which<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_355" id="page_355"></a>{355}</span>
+may justly be called one of the noblest bequests of that great
+age. God, he tells us, made man at the close of the creation,
+to know the laws of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire
+its greatness. He bound him to no fixed place, to no prescribed
+form of work, and by no iron necessity, but gave him freedom
+to will and to move. ‘I have set thee,’ says the Creator to
+Adam, ‘in the midst of the world, that thou mayst the more
+easily behold and see all that is therein. I created thee a being
+neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal only,
+that thou mightest be free to shape and to overcome thyself.
+Thou mayst sink into a beast, and be born anew to the divine
+likeness. The brutes bring from their mother’s body what
+they will carry with them as long as they live; the higher
+spirits are from the beginning, or soon after,<a name="FNanchor_806_806" id="FNanchor_806_806"></a><a href="#Footnote_806_806" class="fnanchor">[806]</a> what they will be
+for ever. To thee alone is given a growth and a development
+depending on thine own free will. Thou bearest in thee the
+germs of a universal life.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_356" id="page_356"></a>{356}</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_357" id="page_357"></a>{357}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_V" id="PART_V"></a><i>PART V.</i><br /><br />
+<small>SOCIETY AND FESTIVALS.</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_358" id="page_358"></a>{358}</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_359" id="page_359"></a>{359}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-5" id="CHAPTER_I-5"></a>CHAPTER I.<br /><br />
+<small>THE EQUALISATION OF CLASSES.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">E<small>VERY</small> period of civilisation, which forms a complete and consistent
+whole, manifests itself not only in political life, in
+religion, art, and science, but also sets its characteristic stamp
+on social life. Thus the Middle Ages had their courtly and
+aristocratic manners and etiquette, differing but little in the
+various countries of Europe, as well as their peculiar forms of
+middle-class life.</p>
+
+<p>Italian customs at the time of the Renaissance offer in these
+respects the sharpest contrast to mediævalism. The foundation
+on which they rest is wholly different. Social intercourse in its
+highest and most perfect form now ignored all distinctions of
+caste, and was based simply on the existence of an educated
+class as we now understand the word. Birth and origin were
+without influence, unless combined with leisure and inherited
+wealth. Yet this assertion must not be taken in an absolute
+and unqualified sense, since mediæval distinctions still sometimes
+made themselves felt to a greater or less degree, if only
+as a means of maintaining equality with the aristocratic pretensions
+of the less advanced countries of Europe. But the
+main current of the time went steadily towards the fusion of
+classes in the modern sense of the phrase.</p>
+
+<p>The fact was of vital importance that, from certainly the
+twelfth century onwards, the nobles and the burghers dwelt
+together within the walls of the cities.<a name="FNanchor_807_807" id="FNanchor_807_807"></a><a href="#Footnote_807_807" class="fnanchor">[807]</a> The interests and
+pleasures of both classes were thus identified, and the feudal
+lord learned to look at society from another point of view than<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_360" id="page_360"></a>{360}</span>
+that of his mountain-castle. The Church, too, in Italy never
+suffered itself, as in northern countries, to be used as a means
+of providing for the younger sons of noble families. Bishoprics,
+abbacies, and canonries were often given from the most
+unworthy motives, but still not according to the pedigrees of
+the applicants; and if the bishops in Italy were more numerous,
+poorer, and, as a rule, destitute of all sovereign rights, they still
+lived in the cities where their cathedrals stood, and formed,
+together with their chapters, an important element in the cultivated
+society of the place. In the age of despots and absolute
+princes which followed, the nobility in most of the cities had
+the motives and the leisure to give themselves up to a private
+life (<a href="#page_131">p. 131</a>) free from political danger and adorned with all
+that was elegant and enjoyable, but at the same time hardly
+distinguishable from that of the wealthy burgher. And after
+the time of Dante, when the new poetry and literature were
+in the hands of all Italy,<a name="FNanchor_808_808" id="FNanchor_808_808"></a><a href="#Footnote_808_808" class="fnanchor">[808]</a> when to this was added the revival
+of ancient culture and the new interest in man as such,
+when the successful Condottiere became a prince, and not only
+good birth, but legitimate birth, ceased to be indispensable
+for a throne (<a href="#page_021">p. 21</a>), it might well seem that the age of
+equality had dawned, and the belief in nobility vanished for
+ever.</p>
+
+<p>From a theoretical point of view, when the appeal was made
+to antiquity, the conception of nobility could be both justified
+and condemned from Aristotle alone. Dante, for example,<a name="FNanchor_809_809" id="FNanchor_809_809"></a><a href="#Footnote_809_809" class="fnanchor">[809]</a>
+adapts from the Aristotelian definition, ‘Nobility rests on excellence
+and inherited wealth,’ his own saying, ‘Nobility rests
+on personal excellence or on that of predecessors.’ But elsewhere
+he is not satisfied with this conclusion. He blames himself,<a name="FNanchor_810_810" id="FNanchor_810_810"></a><a href="#Footnote_810_810" class="fnanchor">[810]</a>
+because even in Paradise, while talking with his ancestor
+Cacciaguida, he made mention of his noble origin, which is but
+as a mantle from which time is ever cutting something away,
+unless we ourselves add daily fresh worth to it. And in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_361" id="page_361"></a>{361}</span>
+‘Convito’<a name="FNanchor_811_811" id="FNanchor_811_811"></a><a href="#Footnote_811_811" class="fnanchor">[811]</a> he disconnects ‘nobile’ and ‘nobiltà’ from every
+condition of birth, and identifies the idea with the capacity for
+moral and intellectual eminence, laying a special stress on high
+culture by calling ‘nobiltà’ the sister of ‘filosofia.’</p>
+
+<p>And as time went on, the greater the influence of humanism
+on the Italian mind, the firmer and more widespread became
+the conviction that birth decides nothing as to the goodness or
+badness of a man. In the fifteenth century this was the prevailing
+opinion. Poggio, in his dialogue ‘On nobility,’<a name="FNanchor_812_812" id="FNanchor_812_812"></a><a href="#Footnote_812_812" class="fnanchor">[812]</a> agrees
+with his interlocutors&mdash;Niccolò Niccoli, and Lorenzo Medici,
+brother of the great Cosimo&mdash;that there is no other nobility
+than that of personal merit. The keenest shafts of his ridicule
+are directed against much of what vulgar prejudice thinks indispensable
+to an aristocratic life. ‘A man is all the farther
+removed from true nobility, the longer his forefathers have
+plied the trade of brigands. The taste for hawking and hunting
+savours no more of nobility than the nests and lairs of
+the hunted creatures of spikenard. The cultivation of the
+soil, as practised by the ancients, would be much nobler than
+this senseless wandering through the hills and woods, by which
+men make themselves liker to the brutes than to the reasonable
+creatures. It may serve well enough as a recreation, but not as
+the business of a lifetime.’ The life of the English and French
+chivalry in the country or in the woody fastnesses seems to him
+thoroughly ignoble, and worst of all the doings of the robber-knights
+of Germany. Lorenzo here begins to take the part of
+the nobility, but not&mdash;which is characteristic&mdash;appealing to any
+natural sentiment in its favour, but because Aristotle in the fifth
+book of the ‘Politics’ recognises the nobility as existent, and
+defines it as resting on excellence and inherited wealth. To
+this Niccoli retorts that Aristotle gives this not as his own conviction,
+but as the popular impression; in his ‘Ethics,’ where<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_362" id="page_362"></a>{362}</span>
+he speaks as he thinks, he calls him noble who strives after that
+which is truly good. Lorenzo urges upon him vainly that the
+Greek word for nobility means good birth; Niccoli thinks the
+Roman word ‘nobilis’ (<i>i.e.</i> remarkable) a better one, since it
+makes nobility depend on a man’s deeds.<a name="FNanchor_813_813" id="FNanchor_813_813"></a><a href="#Footnote_813_813" class="fnanchor">[813]</a> Together with these
+discussions, we find a sketch of the condition of the nobles in
+various parts of Italy. In Naples they will not work, and busy
+themselves neither with their own estates nor with trade and
+commerce, which they hold to be discreditable; they either loiter
+at home or ride about on horseback.<a name="FNanchor_814_814" id="FNanchor_814_814"></a><a href="#Footnote_814_814" class="fnanchor">[814]</a> The Roman nobility also
+despise trade, but farm their own property; the cultivation of
+the land even opens the way to a title;<a name="FNanchor_815_815" id="FNanchor_815_815"></a><a href="#Footnote_815_815" class="fnanchor">[815]</a> ‘it is a respectable
+but boorish nobility.’ In Lombardy the nobles live upon the
+rent of their inherited estates; descent and the abstinence
+from any regular calling constitute nobility.<a name="FNanchor_816_816" id="FNanchor_816_816"></a><a href="#Footnote_816_816" class="fnanchor">[816]</a> In Venice, the
+‘nobili,’ the ruling caste, were all merchants. Similarly in
+Genoa the nobles and non-nobles were alike merchants and
+sailors, and only separated by their birth; some few of the
+former, it is true, still lurked as brigands in their mountain-castles.
+In Florence a part of the old nobility had devoted
+themselves to trade; another, and certainly by far the smaller
+part, enjoyed the satisfaction of their titles, and spent their
+time, either in nothing at all, or else in hunting and hawking.<a name="FNanchor_817_817" id="FNanchor_817_817"></a><a href="#Footnote_817_817" class="fnanchor">[817]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_363" id="page_363"></a>{363}</span></p>
+
+<p>The decisive fact was, that nearly everywhere in Italy, even
+those who might be disposed to pride themselves on their birth
+could not make good the claims against the power of culture
+and of wealth, and that their privileges in politics and at
+court were not sufficient to encourage any strong feeling of
+caste. Venice offers only an apparent exception to this rule,
+for there the ‘nobili’ led the same life as their fellow-citizens,
+and were distinguished by few honorary privileges. The case
+was certainly different at Naples, which the strict isolation and
+the ostentatious vanity of its nobility excluded, above all other
+causes, from the spiritual movement of the Renaissance. The
+traditions of mediæval Lombardy and Normandy, and the
+French aristocratic influences which followed, all tended in
+this direction; and the Aragonese government, which was
+established by the middle of the fifteenth century, completed
+the work, and accomplished in Naples what followed a hundred
+years later in the rest of Italy&mdash;a social transformation in
+obedience to Spanish ideas, of which the chief features were
+the contempt for work and the passion for titles. The effect
+of this new influence was evident, even in the smaller towns,
+before the year 1500. We hear complaints from La Cava that
+the place had been proverbially rich, as long at it was filled
+with masons and weavers; whilst now, since instead of looms
+and trowels nothing but spurs, stirrups and gilded belts was to
+be seen, since everybody was trying to become Doctor of Laws
+or of Medicine, Notary, Officer or Knight, the most intolerable
+poverty prevailed.<a name="FNanchor_818_818" id="FNanchor_818_818"></a><a href="#Footnote_818_818" class="fnanchor">[818]</a> In Florence an analogous change appears
+to have taken place by the time of Cosimo, the first Grand<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_364" id="page_364"></a>{364}</span>
+Duke; he is thanked for adopting the young people, who now
+despise trade and commerce, as knights of his order of St.
+Stephen.<a name="FNanchor_819_819" id="FNanchor_819_819"></a><a href="#Footnote_819_819" class="fnanchor">[819]</a> This goes straight in the teeth of the good old
+Florentine custom,<a name="FNanchor_820_820" id="FNanchor_820_820"></a><a href="#Footnote_820_820" class="fnanchor">[820]</a> by which fathers left property to their
+children on the condition that they should have some occupation
+(<a href="#page_079">p. 79</a>). But a mania for title of a curious and
+ludicrous sort sometimes crossed and thwarted, especially
+among the Florentines, the levelling influence of art and
+culture. This was the passion for knighthood, which became
+one of the most striking follies of the day, at a time when the
+dignity itself had lost every shadow of significance.</p>
+
+<p>‘A few years ago,’ writes Franco Sacchetti,<a name="FNanchor_821_821" id="FNanchor_821_821"></a><a href="#Footnote_821_821" class="fnanchor">[821]</a> towards the end
+of the fourteenth century, ‘everybody saw how all the work-people
+down to the bakers, how all the wool-carders, usurers,
+money-changers and blackguards of all descriptions, became
+knights. Why should an official need knighthood when he
+goes to preside over some little provincial town? What has
+this title to do with any ordinary bread-winning pursuit?
+How art thou sunken, unhappy dignity! Of all the long list
+of knightly duties, what single one do these knights of ours
+discharge? I wished to speak of these things that the reader
+might see that knighthood is dead.<a name="FNanchor_822_822" id="FNanchor_822_822"></a><a href="#Footnote_822_822" class="fnanchor">[822]</a> And as we have gone so
+far as to confer the honour upon dead men, why not upon
+figures of wood and stone, and why not upon an ox?’ The
+stories which Sacchetti tells by way of illustration speak
+plainly enough. There we read how Bernabò Visconti knighted
+the victor in a drunken brawl, and then did the same derisively
+to the vanquished; how German knights with their
+decorated helmets and devices were ridiculed&mdash;and more of
+the same kind. At a later period Poggio<a name="FNanchor_823_823" id="FNanchor_823_823"></a><a href="#Footnote_823_823" class="fnanchor">[823]</a> makes merry over<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_365" id="page_365"></a>{365}</span>
+the many knights of his day without a horse and without
+military training. Those who wished to assert the privilege
+of the order, and ride out with lance and colours, found in
+Florence that they might have to face the government as well
+as the jokers.<a name="FNanchor_824_824" id="FNanchor_824_824"></a><a href="#Footnote_824_824" class="fnanchor">[824]</a></p>
+
+<p>On considering the matter more closely, we shall find that
+this belated chivalry, independent of all nobility of birth,
+though partly the fruit of an insane passion for title, had
+nevertheless another and a better side. Tournaments had not
+yet ceased to be practised, and no one could take part in them
+who was not a knight. But the combat in the lists, and especially
+the difficult and perilous tilting with the lance, offered
+a favourable opportunity for the display of strength, skill, and
+courage, which no one, whatever might be his origin, would
+willingly neglect in an age which laid such stress on personal
+merit.<a name="FNanchor_825_825" id="FNanchor_825_825"></a><a href="#Footnote_825_825" class="fnanchor">[825]</a></p>
+
+<p>It was in vain that from the time of Petrarch downwards
+the tournament was denounced as a dangerous folly. No one
+was converted by the pathetic appeal of the poet: ‘In what
+book do we read that Scipio and Cæsar were skilled at the
+joust?’<a name="FNanchor_826_826" id="FNanchor_826_826"></a><a href="#Footnote_826_826" class="fnanchor">[826]</a> The practice became more and more popular in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_366" id="page_366"></a>{366}</span>
+Florence. Every honest citizen came to consider his tournament&mdash;now,
+no doubt, less dangerous than formerly&mdash;as a
+fashionable sport. Franco Sacchetti<a name="FNanchor_827_827" id="FNanchor_827_827"></a><a href="#Footnote_827_827" class="fnanchor">[827]</a> has left us a ludicrous
+picture of one of these holiday cavaliers&mdash;a notary seventy
+years old. He rides out on horseback to Peretola, where the
+tournament was cheap, on a jade hired from a dyer. A thistle
+is stuck by some wag under the tail of the steed, who takes
+fright, runs away, and carries the helmeted rider, bruised and
+shaken, back into the city. The inevitable conclusion of the
+story is a severe curtain-lecture from the wife, who is not a
+little enraged at these break-neck follies of her husband.<a name="FNanchor_828_828" id="FNanchor_828_828"></a><a href="#Footnote_828_828" class="fnanchor">[828]</a></p>
+
+<p>It may be mentioned in conclusion that a passionate interest
+in this sport was displayed by the Medici, as if they wished to
+show&mdash;private citizens as they were, without noble blood in
+their veins&mdash;that the society which surrounded them was in no
+respects inferior to a Court.<a name="FNanchor_829_829" id="FNanchor_829_829"></a><a href="#Footnote_829_829" class="fnanchor">[829]</a> Even under Cosimo (1459), and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_367" id="page_367"></a>{367}</span>
+afterwards under the elder Pietro, brilliant tournaments were
+held at Florence. The younger Pietro neglected the duties of
+government for these amusements, and would never suffer
+himself to be painted except clad in armour. The same
+practice prevailed at the Court of Alexander VI., and when
+the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza asked the Turkish Prince Djem
+(pp. 109, 115) how he liked the spectacle, the barbarian replied
+with much discretion that such combats in his country only
+took place among slaves, since then, in the case of accident,
+nobody was the worse for it. The oriental was unconsciously
+in accord with the old Romans in condemning the manners
+of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>Apart, however, from this particular prop of knighthood,
+we find here and there in Italy, for example at Ferrara
+(<a href="#page_046">p. 46</a> sqq.), orders of court service, whose members had a right
+to the title.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But, great as were individual ambitions and the vanities of
+nobles and knights, it remains a fact that the Italian nobility
+took its place in the centre of social life, and not at the extremity.
+We find it habitually mixing with other classes on a
+footing of perfect equality, and seeking its natural allies in culture
+and intelligence. It is true that for the courtier a certain
+rank of nobility was required,<a name="FNanchor_830_830" id="FNanchor_830_830"></a><a href="#Footnote_830_830" class="fnanchor">[830]</a> but this exigence is expressly
+declared to be caused by a prejudice rooted in the public mind&mdash;‘per
+l’oppenion universale’&mdash;and never was held to imply
+the belief that the personal worth of one who was not of noble
+blood was in any degree lessened thereby, nor did it follow
+from this rule that the prince was limited to the nobility for his
+society. It was meant simply that the perfect man&mdash;the true
+courtier&mdash;should not be wanting in any conceivable advantage,
+and therefore not in this. If in all the relations of life he was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_368" id="page_368"></a>{368}</span>
+specially bound to maintain a dignified and reserved demeanour,
+the reason was not found in the blood which flowed in his
+veins, but in the perfection of manner which was demanded
+from him. We are here in the presence of a modern distinction,
+based on culture and on wealth, but on the latter solely
+because it enables men to devote their life to the former, and
+effectually to promote its interests and advancement.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_369" id="page_369"></a>{369}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-5" id="CHAPTER_II-5"></a>CHAPTER II.<br /><br />
+<small>THE OUTWARD REFINEMENT OF LIFE.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">B<small>UT</small> in proportion as distinctions of birth ceased to confer any
+special privilege, was the individual himself compelled to make
+the most of his personal qualities, and society to find its worth
+and charm in itself. The demeanour of individuals, and all
+the higher forms of social intercourse, became ends pursued
+with a deliberate and artistic purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Even the outward appearance of men and women and the
+habits of daily life were more perfect, more beautiful, and
+more polished than among the other nations of Europe. The
+dwellings of the upper classes fall rather within the province
+of the history of art; but we may note how far the castle
+and the city mansion in Italy surpassed in comfort, order, and
+harmony the dwellings of the northern noble. The style of
+dress varied so continually that it is impossible to make any
+complete comparison with the fashions of other countries, all
+the more because since the close of the fifteenth century imitations
+of the latter were frequent. The costumes of the time,
+as given us by the Italian painters, are the most convenient
+and the most pleasing to the eye which were then to be found
+in Europe; but we cannot be sure if they represent the prevalent
+fashion, or if they are faithfully reproduced by the artist.
+It is nevertheless beyond a doubt that nowhere was so much
+importance attached to dress as in Italy. The people was, and
+is, vain; and even serious men among it looked on a handsome
+and becoming costume as an element in the perfection of the
+individual. At Florence, indeed, there was a brief period,
+when dress was a purely personal matter, and every man set
+the fashion for himself (<a href="#page_130">p. 130</a>, note 1), and till far into the
+sixteenth century there were exceptional people who still had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_370" id="page_370"></a>{370}</span>
+the courage to do so;<a name="FNanchor_831_831" id="FNanchor_831_831"></a><a href="#Footnote_831_831" class="fnanchor">[831]</a> and the majority at all events showed
+themselves capable of varying the fashion according to their
+individual tastes. It is a symptom of decline when Giovanni
+della Casa warns his readers not to be singular or to depart
+from existing fashions.<a name="FNanchor_832_832" id="FNanchor_832_832"></a><a href="#Footnote_832_832" class="fnanchor">[832]</a> Our own age, which, in men’s dress
+at any rate, treats uniformity as the supreme law, gives up by
+so doing far more than it is itself aware of. But it saves itself
+much time, and this, according to our notions of business, outweighs
+all other disadvantages.</p>
+
+<p>In Venice<a name="FNanchor_833_833" id="FNanchor_833_833"></a><a href="#Footnote_833_833" class="fnanchor">[833]</a> and Florence at the time of the Renaissance there
+were rules and regulations prescribing the dress of the men and
+restraining the luxury of the women. Where the fashions
+were less free, as in Naples, the moralists confess with regret
+that no difference can be observed between noble and burgher.<a name="FNanchor_834_834" id="FNanchor_834_834"></a><a href="#Footnote_834_834" class="fnanchor">[834]</a>
+They further deplore the rapid changes of fashion, and&mdash;if we
+rightly understand their words&mdash;the senseless idolatry of whatever
+comes from France, though in many cases the fashions
+which were received back from the French were originally
+Italian. It does not further concern us, how far these frequent
+changes, and the adoption of French and Spanish ways,<a name="FNanchor_835_835" id="FNanchor_835_835"></a><a href="#Footnote_835_835" class="fnanchor">[835]</a> con<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_371" id="page_371"></a>{371}</span>tributed
+to the national passion for external display; but we
+find in them additional evidence of the rapid movement of life
+in Italy in the decades before and after the year 1500. The
+occupation of different parts of Italy by foreigners caused the
+inhabitants not only to adopt foreign fashions, but sometimes
+to abandon all luxury in matters of dress. Such a change in
+public feeling at Milan is recorded by Landi. But the differences,
+he tells us, in costume continued to exist, Naples distinguishing
+itself by splendour, and Florence, to the eye of the
+writer, by absurdity.<a name="FNanchor_836_836" id="FNanchor_836_836"></a><a href="#Footnote_836_836" class="fnanchor">[836]</a></p>
+
+<p>We may note in particular the efforts of the women to alter
+their appearance by all the means which the toilette could
+afford. In no country of Europe since the fall of the Roman
+empire was so much trouble taken to modify the face, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_372" id="page_372"></a>{372}</span>
+colour of skin and the growth of the hair, as in Italy at this
+time.<a name="FNanchor_837_837" id="FNanchor_837_837"></a><a href="#Footnote_837_837" class="fnanchor">[837]</a> All tended to the formation of a conventional type,
+at the cost of the most striking and transparent deceptions.
+Leaving out of account costume in general, which in the
+fourteenth century<a name="FNanchor_838_838" id="FNanchor_838_838"></a><a href="#Footnote_838_838" class="fnanchor">[838]</a> was in the highest degree varied in colour
+and loaded with ornament, and at a later period assumed a
+character of more harmonious richness, we here limit ourselves
+more particularly to the toilette in the narrower sense.</p>
+
+<p>No sort of ornament was more in use than false hair, often
+made of white or yellow silk.<a name="FNanchor_839_839" id="FNanchor_839_839"></a><a href="#Footnote_839_839" class="fnanchor">[839]</a> The law denounced and forbade
+it in vain, till some preacher of repentance touched the worldly
+minds of the wearers. Then was seen, in the middle of the
+public square, a lofty pyre (talamo), on which, beside lutes,
+dice-boxes, masks, magical charms, song-books, and other
+vanities, lay masses of false hair,<a name="FNanchor_840_840" id="FNanchor_840_840"></a><a href="#Footnote_840_840" class="fnanchor">[840]</a> which the purging fires soon
+turned into a heap of ashes. The ideal colour sought for both
+in natural and artificial hair, was blond. And as the sun was
+supposed to have the power of making the hair of this colour,<a name="FNanchor_841_841" id="FNanchor_841_841"></a><a href="#Footnote_841_841" class="fnanchor">[841]</a>
+many ladies would pass their whole time in the open air on
+sunshiny days.<a name="FNanchor_842_842" id="FNanchor_842_842"></a><a href="#Footnote_842_842" class="fnanchor">[842]</a> Dyes and other mixtures were also used freely<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_373" id="page_373"></a>{373}</span>
+for the same purpose. Besides all these, we meet with an
+endless list of beautifying waters, plasters, and paints for every
+single part of the face&mdash;even for the teeth and eyelids&mdash;of
+which in our day we can form no conception. The ridicule
+of the poets,<a name="FNanchor_843_843" id="FNanchor_843_843"></a><a href="#Footnote_843_843" class="fnanchor">[843]</a> the invectives of the preachers, and the experience
+of the baneful effects of these cosmetics on the skin, were
+powerless to hinder women from giving their faces an unnatural
+form and colour. It is possible that the frequent and splendid
+representations of Mysteries,<a name="FNanchor_844_844" id="FNanchor_844_844"></a><a href="#Footnote_844_844" class="fnanchor">[844]</a> at which hundreds of people
+appeared painted and masked, helped to further this practice
+in daily life. It is certain that it was widely spread, and that
+the countrywomen vied in this respect with their sisters in the
+towns.<a name="FNanchor_845_845" id="FNanchor_845_845"></a><a href="#Footnote_845_845" class="fnanchor">[845]</a> It was vain to preach that such decorations were the
+mark of the courtesan; the most honourable matrons, who all
+the year round never touched paint, used it nevertheless on
+holidays when they showed themselves in public.<a name="FNanchor_846_846" id="FNanchor_846_846"></a><a href="#Footnote_846_846" class="fnanchor">[846]</a> But whether
+we look on this bad habit as a remnant of barbarism, to which
+the painting of savages is a parallel, or as a consequence of the
+desire for perfect youthful beauty in features and in colour, as
+the art and complexity of the toilette would lead us to think&mdash;in
+either case there was no lack of good advice on the part of
+the men.</p>
+
+<p>The use of perfumes, too, went beyond all reasonable limits.
+They were applied to everything with which human beings<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_374" id="page_374"></a>{374}</span>
+came into contact. At festivals even the mules were treated
+with scents and ointments,<a name="FNanchor_847_847" id="FNanchor_847_847"></a><a href="#Footnote_847_847" class="fnanchor">[847]</a> Pietro Aretino thanks Cosimo I.
+for a perfumed roll of money.<a name="FNanchor_848_848" id="FNanchor_848_848"></a><a href="#Footnote_848_848" class="fnanchor">[848]</a></p>
+
+<p>The Italians of that day lived in the belief that they were
+more cleanly than other nations. There are in fact general
+reasons which speak rather for than against this claim. Cleanliness
+is indispensable to our modern notion of social perfection,
+which was developed in Italy earlier than elsewhere. That
+the Italians were one of the richest of existing peoples, is
+another presumption in their favour. Proof, either for or
+against these pretensions, can of course never be forthcoming,
+and if the question were one of priority in establishing rules of
+cleanliness, the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages is perhaps
+in advance of anything that Italy can produce. It is nevertheless
+certain that the singular neatness and cleanliness of
+some distinguished representatives of the Renaissance, especially
+in their behaviour at meals, was noticed expressly,<a name="FNanchor_849_849" id="FNanchor_849_849"></a><a href="#Footnote_849_849" class="fnanchor">[849]</a> and
+that ‘German’ was the synonym in Italy for all that is filthy.<a name="FNanchor_850_850" id="FNanchor_850_850"></a><a href="#Footnote_850_850" class="fnanchor">[850]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_375" id="page_375"></a>{375}</span>
+The dirty habits which Massimiliano Sforza picked up in the
+course of his German education, and the notice they attracted
+on his return to Italy, are recorded by Giovio.<a name="FNanchor_851_851" id="FNanchor_851_851"></a><a href="#Footnote_851_851" class="fnanchor">[851]</a> It is at the
+same time very curious that, at least in the fifteenth century,
+the inns and hotels were left chiefly in the hands of Germans,<a name="FNanchor_852_852" id="FNanchor_852_852"></a><a href="#Footnote_852_852" class="fnanchor">[852]</a>
+who probably, however, made their profit mostly out of the
+pilgrims journeying to Rome. Yet the statements on this
+point may refer rather to the country districts, since it is
+notorious that in the great cities Italian hotels held the first
+place.<a name="FNanchor_853_853" id="FNanchor_853_853"></a><a href="#Footnote_853_853" class="fnanchor">[853]</a> The want of decent inns in the country may also be
+explained by the general insecurity of life and property.</p>
+
+<p>To the first half of the sixteenth century belongs the manual
+of politeness which Giovanni della Casa, a Florentine by birth,
+published under the title ‘Il Galateo.’ Not only cleanliness in
+the strict sense of the word, but the dropping of all the tricks
+and habits which we consider unbecoming, is here prescribed<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_376" id="page_376"></a>{376}</span>
+with the same unfailing tact with which the moralist discerns
+the highest ethical truths. In the literature of other countries
+the same lessons are taught, though less systematically, by the
+indirect influence of repulsive descriptions.<a name="FNanchor_854_854" id="FNanchor_854_854"></a><a href="#Footnote_854_854" class="fnanchor">[854]</a></p>
+
+<p>In other respects also, the ‘Galateo’ is a graceful and intelligent
+guide to good manners&mdash;a school of tact and delicacy.
+Even now it may be read with no small profit by people of all
+classes, and the politeness of European nations is not likely to
+outgrow its precepts. So far as tact is an affair of the heart, it
+has been inborn in some men from the dawn of civilization,
+and acquired through force of will by others; but the Italian
+first recognised it as a universal social duty and a mark of
+culture and education. And Italy itself had altered much in
+the course of two centuries. We feel at their close that the
+time for practical jokes between friends and acquaintances&mdash;for
+‘burle’ and ‘beffe’ (<a href="#page_155">p. 155</a> sqq.)&mdash;was over in good society,<a name="FNanchor_855_855" id="FNanchor_855_855"></a><a href="#Footnote_855_855" class="fnanchor">[855]</a>
+that the people had emerged from the walls of the cities and
+had learned a cosmopolitan politeness and consideration. We
+shall speak later on of the intercourse of society in the narrower
+sense.</p>
+
+<p>Outward life, indeed, in the fifteenth and the early part of
+the sixteenth centuries was polished and ennobled as among no
+other people in the world. A countless number of those small
+things and great things which combine to make up what we
+mean by comfort, we know to have first appeared in Italy. In
+the well-paved streets of the Italian cities,<a name="FNanchor_856_856" id="FNanchor_856_856"></a><a href="#Footnote_856_856" class="fnanchor">[856]</a> driving was universal,
+while elsewhere in Europe walking or riding was the
+customs, and at all events no one drove for amusement. We<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_377" id="page_377"></a>{377}</span>
+read in the novelists of soft, elastic beds, of costly carpets and
+bedroom furniture, of which we hear nothing in other countries.<a name="FNanchor_857_857" id="FNanchor_857_857"></a><a href="#Footnote_857_857" class="fnanchor">[857]</a>
+We often hear especially of the abundance and beauty of the
+linen. Much of all this is drawn within the sphere of art. We
+note with admiration the thousand ways in which art ennobles
+luxury, not only adorning the massive sideboard or the light
+brackets with noble vases and clothing the walls with the
+moving splendour of tapestry, and covering the toilet-table
+with numberless graceful trifles, but absorbing whole branches
+of mechanical work&mdash;especially carpentering&mdash;into its province.
+All western Europe, as soon as its wealth enabled it to do so,
+set to work in the same way at the close of the Middle Ages.
+But its efforts produced either childish and fantastic toy-work,
+or were bound by the chains of a narrow and purely Gothic
+art, while the Renaissance moved freely, entering into the
+spirit of every task it undertook and working for a far larger
+circle of patrons and admirers than the northern artist. The
+rapid victory of Italian decorative art over northern in the
+course of the sixteenth century is due partly to this fact, though
+partly the result of wider and more general causes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_378" id="page_378"></a>{378}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-5" id="CHAPTER_III-5"></a>CHAPTER III.<br /><br />
+<small>LANGUAGE AS THE BASIS OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> higher forms of social intercourse, which here meet us as a
+work of art&mdash;as a conscious product and one of the highest
+products of national life&mdash;have no more important foundation
+and condition than language.</p>
+
+<p>In the most flourishing period of the Middle Ages, the nobility
+of Western Europe had sought to establish a ‘courtly’ speech
+for social intercourse as well as for poetry. In Italy, too, where
+the dialects differed so greatly from one another, we find in the
+thirteenth century a so-called ‘Curiale,’ which was common to
+the courts and to the poets. It is of decisive importance for
+Italy that the attempt was there seriously and deliberately
+made to turn this into the language of literature and society.
+The introduction to the ‘Cento Novelle Antiche,’ which were
+put into their present shape before 1300, avow this object
+openly. Language is here considered apart from its uses in
+poetry; its highest function is clear, simple, intelligent utterance
+in short speeches, epigrams, and answers. This faculty was
+admired in Italy, as nowhere else but among the Greeks and
+Arabians: ‘how many in the course of a long life have scarcely
+produced a single “bel parlare.”&nbsp;’</p>
+
+<p>But the matter was rendered more difficult by the diversity
+of the aspects under which it was considered. The writings of
+Dante transport us into the midst of the struggle. His work
+on ‘the Italian language’<a name="FNanchor_858_858" id="FNanchor_858_858"></a><a href="#Footnote_858_858" class="fnanchor">[858]</a> is not only of the utmost importance
+for the subject itself, but is also the first complete treatise on
+any modern language. His method and results belong to the
+history of linguistic science, in which they will always hold a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_379" id="page_379"></a>{379}</span>
+high place. We must here content ourselves with the remark
+that long before the appearance of this book the subject must
+have been one of daily and pressing importance, that the
+various dialects of Italy had long been the objects of eager
+study and dispute, and that the birth of the one classical
+language was not accomplished without many throes.<a name="FNanchor_859_859" id="FNanchor_859_859"></a><a href="#Footnote_859_859" class="fnanchor">[859]</a></p>
+
+<p>Nothing certainly contributed so much to this end as the
+great poem of Dante. The Tuscan dialect became the basis of
+the new national speech.<a name="FNanchor_860_860" id="FNanchor_860_860"></a><a href="#Footnote_860_860" class="fnanchor">[860]</a> If this assertion may seem to some
+to go too far, as foreigners we may be excused, in a matter on
+which much difference of opinion prevails, for following the
+general belief.</p>
+
+<p>Literature and poetry probably lost more than they gained
+by the contentious purism which was long prevalent in Italy,
+and which marred the freshness and vigour of many an able
+writer. Others, again, who felt themselves masters of this
+magnificent language, were tempted to rely upon its harmony
+and flow, apart from the thought which it expressed. A very
+insignificant melody, played upon such an instrument, can
+produce a very great effect. But however this may be, it is
+certain that socially the language had great value. It was, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_380" id="page_380"></a>{380}</span>
+it were, the crown of a noble and dignified behaviour, and compelled
+the gentleman, both in his ordinary bearing and in exceptional
+moments to observe external propriety. No doubt
+this classical garment, like the language of Attic society,
+served to drape much that was foul and malicious; but it was
+also the adequate expression of all that is noblest and most
+refined. But politically and nationally it was of supreme
+importance, serving as an ideal home for the educated classes
+in all the states of the divided peninsula.<a name="FNanchor_861_861" id="FNanchor_861_861"></a><a href="#Footnote_861_861" class="fnanchor">[861]</a> Nor was it the
+special property of the nobles or of any one class, but the
+poorest and humblest might learn it if they would. Even
+now&mdash;and perhaps more than ever&mdash;in those parts of Italy
+where, as a rule, the most unintelligible dialect prevails, the
+stranger is often astonished at hearing pure and well-spoken
+Italian from the mouths of peasants or artisans, and looks in
+vain for anything analogous in France or in Germany, where
+even the educated classes retain traces of a provincial speech.
+There are certainly a larger number of people able to read in
+Italy than we should be led to expect from the condition of
+many parts of the country&mdash;as for instance, the States of the
+Church&mdash;in other respects; but what is of more importance
+is the general and undisputed respect for pure language and
+pronunciation as something precious and sacred. One part of
+the country after another came to adopt the classical dialect
+officially. Venice, Milan, and Naples did so at the noontime
+of Italian literature, and partly through its influences. It was
+not till the present century that Piedmont became of its own
+free will a genuine Italian province by sharing in this chief
+treasure of the people&mdash;pure speech.<a name="FNanchor_862_862" id="FNanchor_862_862"></a><a href="#Footnote_862_862" class="fnanchor">[862]</a> The dialects were from
+the beginning of the sixteenth century purposely left to deal
+with a certain class of subjects, serious as well as comic,<a name="FNanchor_863_863" id="FNanchor_863_863"></a><a href="#Footnote_863_863" class="fnanchor">[863]</a> and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_381" id="page_381"></a>{381}</span>
+the style which was thus developed proved equal to all its
+tasks. Among other nations a conscious separation of this kind
+did not occur till a much later period.</p>
+
+<p>The opinion of educated people as to the social value of
+language, is fully set forth in the ‘Cortigiano.’<a name="FNanchor_864_864" id="FNanchor_864_864"></a><a href="#Footnote_864_864" class="fnanchor">[864]</a> There were
+then persons, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, who
+purposely kept to the antiquated expressions of Dante and the
+other Tuscan writers of his time, simply because they were
+old. Our author forbids the use of them altogether in speech,
+and is unwilling to permit them even in writing, which he
+considers a form of speech. Upon this follows the admission
+that the best style of speech is that which most resembles
+good writing. We can clearly recognise the author’s feeling
+that people who have anything of importance to say must
+shape their own speech, and that language is something
+flexible and changing because it is something living. It is
+allowable to make use of any expression, however ornate, as
+long as it is used by the people; nor are non-Tuscan words, or
+even French and Spanish words forbidden, if custom has once
+applied them to definite purposes.<a name="FNanchor_865_865" id="FNanchor_865_865"></a><a href="#Footnote_865_865" class="fnanchor">[865]</a> Thus care and intelligence
+will produce a language, which, if not the pure old Tuscan, is
+still Italian, rich in flowers and fruit like a well-kept garden.
+It belongs to the completeness of the ‘Cortigiano’ that his wit,
+his polished manners, and his poetry, must be clothed in this
+perfect dress.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_382" id="page_382"></a>{382}</span></p>
+
+<p>When style and language had once become the property
+of a living society, all the efforts of purists and archaists failed
+to secure their end. Tuscany itself was rich in writers and
+talkers of the first order, who ignored and ridiculed these
+endeavours. Ridicule in abundance awaited the foreign
+scholar who explained to the Tuscans how little they understood
+their own language.<a name="FNanchor_866_866" id="FNanchor_866_866"></a><a href="#Footnote_866_866" class="fnanchor">[866]</a> The life and influence of a writer
+like Macchiavelli was enough to sweep away all these cobwebs.
+His vigorous thoughts, his clear and simple mode of expression
+wore a form which had any merit but that of the ‘Trecentisti.’
+And on the other hand there were too many North Italians,
+Romans, and Neapolitans, who were thankful if the demand
+for purity of style in literature and conversation was not pressed
+too far. They repudiated, indeed, the forms and idioms of
+their dialect; and Bandello, with what a foreigner might
+suspect to be false modesty, is never tired of declaring: ‘I
+have no style; I do not write like a Florentine, but like a
+barbarian; I am not ambitious of giving new graces to my
+language; I am a Lombard, and from the Ligurian border
+into the bargain.’<a name="FNanchor_867_867" id="FNanchor_867_867"></a><a href="#Footnote_867_867" class="fnanchor">[867]</a> But the claims of the purists were most
+successfully met by the express renunciation of the higher
+qualities of style, and the adoption of a vigorous, popular language
+in their stead. Few could hope to rival Pietro Bembo
+who, though born in Venice, nevertheless wrote the purest
+Tuscan, which to him was a foreign language, or the Neapolitan
+Sannazaro, who did the same. But the essential point
+was that language, whether spoken or written, was held to be
+an object of respect. As long as this feeling was prevalent,
+the fanaticism of the purists&mdash;their linguistic congresses and
+the rest of it<a name="FNanchor_868_868" id="FNanchor_868_868"></a><a href="#Footnote_868_868" class="fnanchor">[868]</a>&mdash;did little harm. Their bad influence was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_383" id="page_383"></a>{383}</span>
+not felt till much later, when the original power of Italian
+literature relaxed, and yielded to other and far worse influences.
+At last it became possible for the Accademia della Crusca to
+treat Italian like a dead language. But this association proved
+so helpless that it could not even hinder the invasion of
+Gallicism in the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>This language&mdash;loved, tended, and trained to every use&mdash;now
+served as the basis of social intercourse. In northern
+countries, the nobles and the princes passed their leisure either
+in solitude, or in hunting, fighting, drinking, and the like;
+the burghers in games and bodily exercises, with a mixture of
+literary or festive amusement. In Italy there existed a neutral
+ground, where people of every origin, if they had the needful
+talent and culture, spent their time in conversation and the
+polished interchange of jest and earnest. As eating and drinking
+formed a small part of such entertainments,<a name="FNanchor_869_869" id="FNanchor_869_869"></a><a href="#Footnote_869_869" class="fnanchor">[869]</a> it was not
+difficult to keep at a distance those who sought society for
+these objects. If we are to take the writers of dialogues
+literally, the loftiest problems of human existence were not
+excluded from the conversation of thinking men, and the
+production of noble thoughts was not, as was commonly the
+case in the North, the work of solitude, but of society. But we
+must here limit ourselves to the less serious side of social
+intercourse&mdash;to the side which existed only for the sake of
+amusement.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_384" id="page_384"></a>{384}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-5" id="CHAPTER_IV-5"></a>CHAPTER IV.<br /><br />
+<small>THE HIGHER FORMS OF SOCIETY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HIS</small> society, at all events at the beginning of the sixteenth
+century, was a matter of art; and had, and rested on, tacit or
+avowed rules of good sense and propriety, which are the exact
+reverse of all mere etiquette. In less polished circles, where
+society took the form of a permanent corporation, we meet
+with a system of formal rules and a prescribed mode of entrance,
+as was the case with those wild sets of Florentine
+artists of whom Vasari tells us that they were capable of giving
+representations of the best comedies of the day.<a name="FNanchor_870_870" id="FNanchor_870_870"></a><a href="#Footnote_870_870" class="fnanchor">[870]</a> In the easier
+intercourse of society it was not unusual to select some distinguished
+lady as president, whose word was law for the
+evening. Everybody knows the introduction to Boccaccio’s
+‘Decameron,’ and looks on the presidency of Pampinea as a
+graceful fiction. That it was so in this particular case is a
+matter of course; but the fiction was nevertheless based on
+a practice which often occurred in reality. Firenzuola, who
+nearly two centuries later (1523) prefaces his collection of tales
+in a similar manner, with express reference to Boccaccio, comes
+assuredly nearer to the truth when he puts into the mouth of
+the queen of the society a formal speech on the mode of spending
+the hours during the stay which the company proposed to
+make in the country. The day was to begin with a stroll
+among the hills passed in philosophical talk; then followed
+breakfast,<a name="FNanchor_871_871" id="FNanchor_871_871"></a><a href="#Footnote_871_871" class="fnanchor">[871]</a> with music and singing, after which came the recitation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_385" id="page_385"></a>{385}</span>
+in some cool, shady spot, of a new poem, the subject of
+which had been given the night before; in the evening the
+whole party walked to a spring of water where they all sat
+down and each one told a tale; last of all came supper and
+lively conversation ‘of such a kind that the women might
+listen to it without shame and the men might not seem to be
+speaking under the influence of wine.’ Bandello, in the introductions
+and dedications to single novels, does not give us,
+it is true, such inaugural discourses as this, since the circles
+before which the stories are told are represented as already
+formed; but he gives us to understand in other ways how rich,
+how manifold, and how charming the conditions of society
+must have been. Some readers may be of opinion that no
+good was to be got from a world which was willing to be
+amused by such immoral literature. It would be juster to
+wonder at the secure foundations of a society which, notwithstanding
+these tales, still observed the rules of order and decency,
+and which knew how to vary such pastimes with serious
+and solid discussion. The need of noble forms of social intercourse
+was felt to be stronger than all others. To convince
+ourselves of it, we are not obliged to take as our standard the
+idealised society which Castiglione depicts as discussing the
+loftiest sentiments and aims of human life at the court of
+Guidobaldo of Urbino, and Pietro Bembo at the castle of Asolo.
+The society described by Bandello, with all the frivolities
+which may be laid to its charge, enables us to form the best
+notion of the easy and polished dignity, of the urbane kindliness,
+of the intellectual freedom, of the wit and the graceful
+dilettantism which distinguished these circles. A significant
+proof of the value of such circles lies in the fact that the women
+who were the centres of them could become famous and illustrious
+without in any way compromising their reputation.
+Among the patronesses of Bandello, for example, Isabella
+Gonzaga (born an Este, p. 44) was talked of unfavourably
+not through any fault of her own, but on account of the too
+free-lived young ladies who filled her court.<a name="FNanchor_872_872" id="FNanchor_872_872"></a><a href="#Footnote_872_872" class="fnanchor">[872]</a> Giulia Gonzaga
+Colonna, Ippolita Sforza married to a Bentivoglio, Bianca Rangona,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_386" id="page_386"></a>{386}</span>
+Cecilia Gallerana, Camilla Scarampa, and others were
+either altogether irreproachable, or their social fame threw into
+the shade whatever they may have done amiss. The most
+famous woman of Italia, Vittoria Colonna<a name="FNanchor_873_873" id="FNanchor_873_873"></a><a href="#Footnote_873_873" class="fnanchor">[873]</a> (b. 1490, d. 1547),
+the friend of Castiglione and Michelangelo, enjoyed the reputation
+of a saint. It is hard to give such a picture of the
+unconstrained intercourse of these circles in the city, at the
+baths, or in the country, as will furnish literal proof of the
+superiority of Italy in this respect over the rest of Europe.
+But let us read Bandello,<a name="FNanchor_874_874" id="FNanchor_874_874"></a><a href="#Footnote_874_874" class="fnanchor">[874]</a> and then ask ourselves if anything
+of the same kind would have been then possible, say, in France,
+before this kind of society was there introduced by people like
+himself. No doubt the supreme achievements of the human
+mind were then produced independently of the helps of the
+drawing-room. Yet it would be unjust to rate the influence of
+the latter on art and poetry too low, if only for the reason that
+society helped to shape that which existed in no other country&mdash;a
+widespread interest in artistic production and an intelligent
+and critical public opinion. And apart from this, society of
+the kind we have described was in itself a natural flower of
+that life and culture which then was purely Italian, and which
+since then has extended to the rest of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>In Florence society was powerfully affected by literature and
+politics. Lorenzo the Magnificent was supreme over his circle,
+not, as we might be led to believe, through the princely position
+which he occupied, but rather through the wonderful tact
+he displayed in giving perfect freedom of action to the many
+and varied natures which surrounded him.<a name="FNanchor_875_875" id="FNanchor_875_875"></a><a href="#Footnote_875_875" class="fnanchor">[875]</a> We see how
+gently he dealt with his great tutor Politian, and how the
+sovereignty of the poet and scholar was reconciled, though not
+without difficulty, with the inevitable reserve prescribed by
+the approaching change in the position of the house of Medici
+and by consideration for the sensitiveness of the wife. In re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_387" id="page_387"></a>{387}</span>turn
+for the treatment he received, Politian became the herald
+and the living symbol of Medicean glory. Lorenzo, after the
+fashion of a true Medici, delighted in giving an outward and
+artistic expression to his social amusements. In his brilliant
+improvisation&mdash;the Hawking Party&mdash;he gives us a humorous
+description of his comrades, and in the Symposium a burlesque
+of them, but in both cases in such a manner that we clearly
+feel his capacity for more serious companionship.<a name="FNanchor_876_876" id="FNanchor_876_876"></a><a href="#Footnote_876_876" class="fnanchor">[876]</a> Of this
+intercourse his correspondence and the records of his literary
+and philosophical conversation give ample proof. Some of the
+social unions which were afterwards formed in Florence were
+in part political clubs, though not without a certain poetical
+and philosophical character also. Of this kind was the so-called
+Platonic Academy which met after Lorenzo’s death in the
+gardens of the Ruccellai.<a name="FNanchor_877_877" id="FNanchor_877_877"></a><a href="#Footnote_877_877" class="fnanchor">[877]</a></p>
+
+<p>At the courts of the princes, society naturally depended on
+the character of the ruler. After the beginning of the sixteenth
+century they became few in number, and these few
+soon lost their importance. Rome, however, possessed in the
+unique court of Leo X. a society to which the history of the
+world offers no parallel.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_388" id="page_388"></a>{388}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-5" id="CHAPTER_V-5"></a>CHAPTER V.<br /><br />
+<small>THE PERFECT MAN OF SOCIETY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">I<small>T</small> was for this society&mdash;or rather for his own sake&mdash;that the
+‘Cortigiano,’ as described to us by Castiglione, educated himself.
+He was the ideal man of society, and was regarded by
+the civilisation of that age as its choicest flower; and the
+court existed for him far rather than he for the court. Indeed,
+such a man would have been out of place at any court, since
+he himself possessed all the gifts and the bearing of an accomplished
+ruler, and because his calm supremacy in all things,
+both outward and spiritual, implied a too independent nature.
+The inner impulse which inspired him was directed, though
+our author does not acknowledge the fact, not to the service of
+the prince, but to his own perfection. One instance will make
+this clear.<a name="FNanchor_878_878" id="FNanchor_878_878"></a><a href="#Footnote_878_878" class="fnanchor">[878]</a> In time of war the courtier refuses even useful and
+perilous tasks, if they are not beautiful and dignified in themselves,
+such as for instance the capture of a herd of cattle;
+what urges him to take part in war is not duty, but ‘l’onore.’
+The moral relation to the prince, as prescribed in the fourth
+book, is singularly free and independent. The theory of well-bred
+love-making, set forth in the third book, is full of delicate
+psychological observation, which perhaps would be more in
+place in a treatise on human nature generally; and the magnificent
+praise of ideal love, which occurs at the end of the fourth
+book, and which rises to a lyrical elevation of feeling, has no
+connection whatever with the special object of the work. Yet
+here, as in the ‘Asolani’ of Bembo, the culture of the time
+shows itself in the delicacy with which this sentiment is represented
+and analysed. It is true that these writers are not in
+all cases to be taken literally; but that the discourses they
+give us were actually frequent in good society, cannot be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_389" id="page_389"></a>{389}</span>
+doubted, and that it was no affectation, but genuine passion,
+which appeared in this dress, we shall see further on.</p>
+
+<p>Among outward accomplishments, the so-called knightly
+exercises were expected in thorough perfection from the courtier,
+and besides these much that could only exist at courts
+highly organised and based on personal emulation, such as were
+not to be found out of Italy. Other points obviously rest on
+an abstract notion of individual perfection. The courtier must
+be at home in all noble sports, among them running, leaping,
+swimming, and wrestling; he must, above all things, be a
+good dancer and, as a matter of course, an accomplished rider.
+He must be master of several languages; at all events of
+Latin and Italian; he must be familiar with literature and
+have some knowledge of the fine arts. In music a certain
+practical skill was expected of him, which he was bound, nevertheless,
+to keep as secret as possible. All this is not to be taken
+too seriously, except what relates to the use of arms. The
+mutual interaction of these gifts and accomplishments results
+in the perfect man, in whom no one quality usurps the place
+of the rest.</p>
+
+<p>So much is certain, that in the sixteenth century the Italians
+had all Europe for their pupils both theoretically and practically
+in every noble bodily exercise and in the habits and manners
+of good society. Their instructions and their illustrated
+books on riding, fencing, and dancing served as the model to
+other countries. Gymnastics as an art, apart both from military
+training and from mere amusement, was probably first
+taught by Vittorino da Feltre (<a href="#page_213">p. 213</a>) and after his time became
+essential to a complete education.<a name="FNanchor_879_879" id="FNanchor_879_879"></a><a href="#Footnote_879_879" class="fnanchor">[879]</a> The important fact<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_390" id="page_390"></a>{390}</span>
+is that they were taught systematically, though what exercises
+were most in favour, and whether they resembled those now in
+use, we are unable to say. But we may infer, not only from
+the general character of the people, but from positive evidence
+which has been left for us, that not only strength and skill, but
+grace of movement was one of the main objects of physical
+training. It is enough to remind the reader of the great
+Frederick of Urbino (<a href="#page_044">p. 44</a>) directing the evening games of
+the young people committed to his care.</p>
+
+<p>The games and contests of the popular classes did not differ
+essentially from those which prevailed elsewhere in Europe.
+In the maritime cities boat-racing was among the number, and
+the Venetian regattas were famous at an early period.<a name="FNanchor_880_880" id="FNanchor_880_880"></a><a href="#Footnote_880_880" class="fnanchor">[880]</a> The
+classical game of Italy was and is the ball; and this was
+probably played at the time of the Renaissance with more zeal
+and brilliancy than elsewhere. But on this point no distinct
+evidence is forthcoming.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>A few words on music will not be out of place in this part of
+our work.<a name="FNanchor_881_881" id="FNanchor_881_881"></a><a href="#Footnote_881_881" class="fnanchor">[881]</a> Musical composition down to the year 1500 was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_391" id="page_391"></a>{391}</span>
+chiefly in the hands of the Flemish school, whose originality
+and artistic dexterity were greatly admired. Side by side with
+this, there nevertheless existed an Italian school, which probably
+stood nearer to our present taste. Half a century later
+came Palestrina, whose genius still works powerfully among
+us. We learn among other facts that he was a great innovator;
+but whether he or others took the decisive part in shaping
+the musical language of the modern world lies beyond the
+judgment of the unprofessional critic. Leaving on one side
+the history of musical composition, we shall confine ourselves
+to the position which music held in the social life of the day.</p>
+
+<p>A fact most characteristic of the Renaissance and of Italy
+is the specialisation of the orchestra, the search for new instru<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_392" id="page_392"></a>{392}</span>ments
+and modes of sound, and, in close connection with this
+tendency, the formation of a class of ‘virtuosi,’ who devoted
+their whole attention to particular instruments or particular
+branches of music.</p>
+
+<p>Of the more complex instruments, which were perfected and
+widely diffused at a very early period, we find not only the
+organ, but a corresponding string-instrument, the ‘gravicembalo’
+or ‘clavicembalo.’ Fragments of these, dating from the
+beginning of the fourteenth century, have come down to our
+own days, adorned with paintings from the hands of the
+greatest masters. Among other instruments the first place
+was held by the violin, which even then conferred great celebrity
+on the successful player. At the court of Leo X., who,
+when cardinal, had filled his house with singers and musicians,
+and who enjoyed the reputation of a critic and performer, the
+Jew Giovan Maria and Jacopo Sansecondo were among the
+most famous. The former received from Leo the title of count
+and a small town;<a name="FNanchor_882_882" id="FNanchor_882_882"></a><a href="#Footnote_882_882" class="fnanchor">[882]</a> the latter has been taken to be the Apollo
+in the Parnassus of Raphael. In the course of the sixteenth
+century, celebrities in every branch of music appeared in abundance,
+and Lomazzo (about the year 1580) names the then
+most distinguished masters of the art of singing, of the organ,
+the lute, the lyre, the ‘viola da gamba,’ the harp, the cithern,
+the horn, and the trumpet, and wishes that their portraits
+might be painted on the instruments themselves.<a name="FNanchor_883_883" id="FNanchor_883_883"></a><a href="#Footnote_883_883" class="fnanchor">[883]</a> Such many-sided<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_393" id="page_393"></a>{393}</span>
+comparative criticism would have been impossible anywhere
+but in Italy, although the same instruments were to be
+found in other countries.</p>
+
+<p>The number and variety of these instruments is shown by
+the fact that collections of them were now made from curiosity.
+In Venice, which was one of the most musical cities of Italy,<a name="FNanchor_884_884" id="FNanchor_884_884"></a><a href="#Footnote_884_884" class="fnanchor">[884]</a>
+there were several such collections, and when a sufficient
+number of performers happened to be on the spot, a concert
+was at once improvised. In one of these museums there were
+a large number of instruments, made after ancient pictures and
+descriptions, but we are not told if anybody could play them,
+or how they sounded. It must not be forgotten that such
+instruments were often beautifully decorated, and could be
+arranged in a manner pleasing to the eye. We thus meet with
+them in collections of other rarities and works of art.</p>
+
+<p>The players, apart from the professional performers, were
+either single amateurs, or whole orchestras of them, organised
+into a corporate Academy.<a name="FNanchor_885_885" id="FNanchor_885_885"></a><a href="#Footnote_885_885" class="fnanchor">[885]</a> Many artists in other branches
+were at home in music, and often masters of the art. People
+of position were averse to wind-instruments, for the same
+reason<a name="FNanchor_886_886" id="FNanchor_886_886"></a><a href="#Footnote_886_886" class="fnanchor">[886]</a> which made them distasteful to Alcibiades and Pallas
+Athene. In good society singing, either alone or accompanied
+with the violin, was usual; but quartettes of string-instruments
+were also common,<a name="FNanchor_887_887" id="FNanchor_887_887"></a><a href="#Footnote_887_887" class="fnanchor">[887]</a> and the ‘clavicembalo’ was liked
+on account of its varied effects. In singing the solo only was
+permitted, ‘for a single voice is heard, enjoyed, and judged far<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_394" id="page_394"></a>{394}</span>
+better.’ In other words, as singing, notwithstanding all conventional
+modesty, is an exhibition of the individual man
+of society, it is better that each should be seen and heard
+separately. The tender feelings produced in the fair listeners
+are taken for granted, and elderly people are therefore recommended
+to abstain from such forms of art, even though they
+excel in them. It was held important that the effect of the
+song should be enhanced by the impression made on the sight.
+We hear nothing however of the treatment in these circles of
+musical composition as an independent branch of art. On the
+other hand it happened sometimes that the subject of the song
+was some terrible event which had befallen the singer himself.<a name="FNanchor_888_888" id="FNanchor_888_888"></a><a href="#Footnote_888_888" class="fnanchor">[888]</a></p>
+
+<p>This dilettantism, which pervaded the middle as well as the
+upper classes, was in Italy both more widely spread and more
+genuinely artistic than in any other country of Europe.
+Wherever we meet with a description of social intercourse,
+there music and singing are always and expressly mentioned.
+Hundreds of portraits show us men and women, often several
+together, playing or holding some musical instrument, and the
+angelic concerts represented in the ecclesiastical pictures prove
+how familiar the painters were with the living effects of music.
+We read of the lute-player Antonio Rota, at Padua (d. 1549),
+who became a rich man by his lessons, and published a handbook
+to the practice of the lute.<a name="FNanchor_889_889" id="FNanchor_889_889"></a><a href="#Footnote_889_889" class="fnanchor">[889]</a></p>
+
+<p>At a time when there was no opera to concentrate and
+monopolise musical talent, this general cultivation of the art
+must have been something wonderfully varied, intelligent, and
+original. It is another question how much we should find to
+satisfy us in these forms of music, could they now be reproduced
+for us.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_395" id="page_395"></a>{395}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI-5" id="CHAPTER_VI-5"></a>CHAPTER VI.<br /><br />
+<small>THE POSITION OF WOMEN.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>O</small> understand the higher forms of social intercourse at this
+period, we must keep before our minds the fact that women
+stood on a footing of perfect equality with men.<a name="FNanchor_890_890" id="FNanchor_890_890"></a><a href="#Footnote_890_890" class="fnanchor">[890]</a> We must
+not suffer ourselves to be misled by the sophistical and often
+malicious talk about the assumed inferiority of the female sex,
+which we meet with now and then in the dialogues of this
+time,<a name="FNanchor_891_891" id="FNanchor_891_891"></a><a href="#Footnote_891_891" class="fnanchor">[891]</a> nor by such satires as the third of Ariosto,<a name="FNanchor_892_892" id="FNanchor_892_892"></a><a href="#Footnote_892_892" class="fnanchor">[892]</a> who treats
+woman as a dangerous grown-up child, whom a man must
+learn how to manage, in spite of the great gulf between them.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_396" id="page_396"></a>{396}</span>
+There is, indeed, a certain amount of truth in what he says.
+Just because the educated woman was on a level with the
+man, that communion of mind and heart which comes from
+the sense of mutual dependence and completion, could not be
+developed in marriage at this time, as it has been developed
+later in the cultivated society of the North.</p>
+
+<p>The education given to women in the upper classes was
+essentially the same as that given to men. The Italian, at
+the time of the Renaissance, felt no scruple in putting sons
+and daughters alike under the same course of literary and
+even philological instruction (<a href="#page_222">p. 222</a>). Indeed, looking at this
+ancient culture as the chief treasure of life, he was glad that
+his girls should have a share in it. We have seen what perfection
+was attained by the daughters of princely houses in
+writing and speaking Latin (<a href="#page_234">p. 234</a>).<a name="FNanchor_893_893" id="FNanchor_893_893"></a><a href="#Footnote_893_893" class="fnanchor">[893]</a> Many others must
+at least have been able to read it, in order to follow the
+conversation of the day, which turned largely on classical
+subjects. An active interest was taken by many in Italian
+poetry, in which, whether prepared or improvised, a large
+number of Italian women, from the time of the Venetian
+Cassandra Fedele onwards (about the close of the fifteenth
+century), made themselves famous.<a name="FNanchor_894_894" id="FNanchor_894_894"></a><a href="#Footnote_894_894" class="fnanchor">[894]</a> One, indeed, Vittoria
+Colonna, may be called immortal. If any proof were needed
+of the assertion made above, it would be found in the manly
+tone of this poetry. Even the love-sonnets and religious
+poems are so precise and definite in their character, and so
+far removed from the tender twilight of sentiment, and from
+all the dilettantism which we commonly find in the poetry of
+women, that we should not hesitate to attribute them to male
+authors, if we had not clear external evidence to prove the
+contrary.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_397" id="page_397"></a>{397}</span>For, with education, the individuality of women in the
+upper classes was developed in the same way as that of men.
+Till the time of the Reformation, the personality of women out
+of Italy, even of the highest rank, comes forward but little.
+Exceptions like Isabella of Bavaria, Margaret of Anjou, and
+Isabella of Castille, are the forced result of very unusual circumstances.
+In Italy, throughout the whole of the fifteenth
+century, the wives of the rulers, and still more those of the
+Condottieri, have nearly all a distinct, recognisable personality,
+and take their share of notoriety and glory. To these came
+gradually to be added a crowd of famous women of the most
+varied kind (i. p. 147, note 1); among them those whose distinction
+consisted in the fact that their beauty, disposition,
+education, virtue, and piety, combined to render them harmonious
+human beings.<a name="FNanchor_895_895" id="FNanchor_895_895"></a><a href="#Footnote_895_895" class="fnanchor">[895]</a> There was no question of ‘woman’s
+rights’ or female emancipation, simply because the thing itself
+was a matter of course. The educated woman, no less than
+the man, strove naturally after a characteristic and complete
+individuality. The same intellectual and emotional development
+which perfected the man, was demanded for the perfection
+of the woman. Active literary work, nevertheless, was
+not expected from her, and if she were a poet, some powerful
+utterance of feeling, rather than the confidences of the novel<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_398" id="page_398"></a>{398}</span>
+or the diary, was looked for. These women had no thought of
+the public;<a name="FNanchor_896_896" id="FNanchor_896_896"></a><a href="#Footnote_896_896" class="fnanchor">[896]</a> their function was to influence distinguished men,
+and to moderate male impulse and caprice.</p>
+
+<p>The highest praise which could then be given to the great
+Italian women was that they had the mind and the courage of
+men. We have only to observe the thoroughly manly bearing
+of most of the women in the heroic poems, especially those of
+Bojardo and Ariosto, to convince ourselves that we have before
+us the ideal of the time. The title ‘virago,’ which is an
+equivocal compliment in the present day, then implied nothing
+but praise. It was borne in all its glory by Caterina Sforza,
+wife and afterwards widow of Giroloma Riario, whose hereditary
+possession, Forli, she gallantly defended first against his
+murderers, and then against Cæsar Borgia. Though finally
+vanquished, she retained the admiration of her countrymen
+and the title ‘prima donna d’Italia.’<a name="FNanchor_897_897" id="FNanchor_897_897"></a><a href="#Footnote_897_897" class="fnanchor">[897]</a> This heroic vein can
+be detected in many of the women of the Renaissance, though
+none found the same opportunity of showing their heroism to
+the world. In Isabella Gonzaga this type is clearly recognisable,
+and not less in Clarice, of the House of Medici, the
+wife of Filippo Strozzi.<a name="FNanchor_898_898" id="FNanchor_898_898"></a><a href="#Footnote_898_898" class="fnanchor">[898]</a></p>
+
+<p>Women of this stamp could listen to novels like those of
+Bandello, without social intercourse suffering from it. The
+ruling genius of society was not, as now, womanhood, or the
+respect for certain presuppositions, mysteries, and susceptibilities,
+but the consciousness of energy, of beauty, and of a social
+state full of danger and opportunity. And for this reason we
+find, side by side with the most measured and polished social<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_399" id="page_399"></a>{399}</span>
+forms, something our age would call immodesty,<a name="FNanchor_899_899" id="FNanchor_899_899"></a><a href="#Footnote_899_899" class="fnanchor">[899]</a> forgetting
+that by which it was corrected and counterbalanced&mdash;the
+powerful characters of the women who were exposed to it.</p>
+
+<p>That in all the dialogues and treatises together we can find
+no absolute evidence on these points is only natural, however
+freely the nature of love and the position and capacities of
+women were discussed.</p>
+
+<p>What seems to have been wanting in this society were the
+young girls,<a name="FNanchor_900_900" id="FNanchor_900_900"></a><a href="#Footnote_900_900" class="fnanchor">[900]</a> who, even when not brought up in the monasteries,
+were still carefully kept away from it. It is not easy
+to say whether their absence was the cause of the greater
+freedom of conversation, or whether they were removed on
+account of it.</p>
+
+<p>Even the intercourse with courtesans seems to have assumed
+a more elevated character, reminding us of the position of the
+Hetairae in Classical Athens. The famous Roman courtesan
+Imperia was a woman of intelligence and culture, had learned
+from a certain Domenico Campana the art of making sonnets,
+and was not without musical accomplishments.<a name="FNanchor_901_901" id="FNanchor_901_901"></a><a href="#Footnote_901_901" class="fnanchor">[901]</a> The beautiful
+Isabella de Luna, of Spanish extraction, who was reckoned
+amusing company, seems to have been an odd compound of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_400" id="page_400"></a>{400}</span>
+kind heart with a shockingly foul tongue, which latter sometimes
+brought her into trouble.<a name="FNanchor_902_902" id="FNanchor_902_902"></a><a href="#Footnote_902_902" class="fnanchor">[902]</a> At Milan, Bandello knew the
+majestic Caterina di San Celso,<a name="FNanchor_903_903" id="FNanchor_903_903"></a><a href="#Footnote_903_903" class="fnanchor">[903]</a> who played and sang and
+recited superbly. It is clear from all we read on the subject
+that the distinguished people who visited these women, and
+from time to time lived with them, demanded from them a
+considerable degree of intelligence and instruction, and that
+the famous courtesans were treated with no slight respect and
+consideration. Even when relations with them were broken
+off, their good opinion was still desired,<a name="FNanchor_904_904" id="FNanchor_904_904"></a><a href="#Footnote_904_904" class="fnanchor">[904]</a> which shows that
+departed passion had left permanent traces behind. But on
+the whole this intellectual intercourse is not worth mentioning
+by the side of that sanctioned by the recognised forms of social
+life, and the traces which it has left in poetry and literature
+are for the most part of a scandalous nature. We may well
+be astonished that among the 6,800 persons of this class, who
+were to be found in Rome in 1490<a name="FNanchor_905_905" id="FNanchor_905_905"></a><a href="#Footnote_905_905" class="fnanchor">[905]</a>&mdash;that is, before the appear<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_401" id="page_401"></a>{401}</span>ance
+of syphilis&mdash;scarcely a single woman seems to have been
+remarkable for any higher gifts. These whom we have mentioned
+all belong to the period which immediately followed.
+The mode of life, the morals and the philosophy of the public
+women, who with all their sensuality and greed were not
+always incapable of deeper passions, as well as the hypocrisy
+and devilish malice shown by some in their later years, are best
+set forth by Giraldi, in the novels which form the introduction
+to the ‘Hecatommithi.’ Pietro Aretino, in his ‘Ragionamenti,’
+gives us rather a picture of his own depraved character
+than of this unhappy class of women as they really were.</p>
+
+<p>The mistresses of the princes, as has already been pointed
+out (<a href="#page_053">p. 53</a>), were sung by poets and painted by artists, and
+in consequence have been personally familiar to their contemporaries
+and to posterity. We hardly know more than the
+name of Alice Perrers and of Clara Dettin, the mistress of
+Frederick the Victorious, and of Agnes Sorel have only a half-legendary
+story. With the monarchs of the age of the
+Renaissance&mdash;Francis I. and Henry II.&mdash;the case is different.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_402" id="page_402"></a>{402}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VII-5" id="CHAPTER_VII-5"></a>CHAPTER VII.<br /><br />
+<small>DOMESTIC ECONOMY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">A<small>FTER</small> treating of the intercourse of society, let us glance for
+a moment at the domestic life of this period. We are commonly
+disposed to look on the family life of the Italians at this
+time as hopelessly ruined by the national immorality, and this
+side of the question will be more fully discussed in the sequel.
+For the moment we must content ourselves with pointing out
+that conjugal infidelity has by no means so disastrous an influence
+on family life in Italy as in the North, so long at least
+as certain limits are not overstepped.</p>
+
+<p>The domestic life of the Middle Ages was a product of
+popular morals, or if we prefer to put it otherwise, a result of
+the inborn tendencies of national life, modified by the varied
+circumstances which affected them. Chivalry at the time of
+its splendour left domestic economy untouched. The knight
+wandered from court to court, and from one battle-field to
+another. His homage was given systematically to some other
+woman than his own wife, and things went how they might
+at home in the castle.<a name="FNanchor_906_906" id="FNanchor_906_906"></a><a href="#Footnote_906_906" class="fnanchor">[906]</a> The spirit of the Renaissance first
+brought order into domestic life, treating it as a work of
+deliberate contrivance. Intelligent economical views (<a href="#page_077">p. 77</a>),
+and a rational style of domestic architecture served to promote
+this end. But the chief cause of the change was the thoughtful
+study of all questions relating to social intercourse, to
+education, to domestic service and organisation.</p>
+
+<p>The most precious document on this subject is the treatise
+on the management of the home by Agnolo Pandolfini (L. B.
+Alberti).<a name="FNanchor_907_907" id="FNanchor_907_907"></a><a href="#Footnote_907_907" class="fnanchor">[907]</a> He represents a father speaking to his grown-up<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_403" id="page_403"></a>{403}</span>
+sons, and initiating them into his method of administration.
+We are introduced into a large and wealthy household, which
+if governed with moderation and reasonable economy, promises
+happiness and prosperity for generations to come. A considerable
+landed estate, whose produce furnishes the table of the
+house, and serves as the basis of the family fortune, is combined
+with some industrial pursuit, such as the weaving of
+wool or silk. The dwelling is solid and the food good. All
+that has to do with the plan and arrangement of the house is
+great, durable, and costly, but the daily life within it is as simple
+as possible. All other expenses, from the largest in which the
+family honour is at stake, down to the pocket-money of the
+younger sons, stand to one another in a rational, not a conventional
+relation. Nothing is considered of so much importance
+as education, which the head of the house gives not only
+to the children, but to the whole household. He first develops
+his wife from a shy girl, brought up in careful seclusion, to the
+true woman of the house, capable of commanding and guiding
+the servants. The sons are brought up without any undue
+severity,<a name="FNanchor_908_908" id="FNanchor_908_908"></a><a href="#Footnote_908_908" class="fnanchor">[908]</a> carefully watched and counselled, and controlled
+‘rather by authority than by force.’ And finally the servants<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_404" id="page_404"></a>{404}</span>
+are chosen and treated on such principles that they gladly and
+faithfully hold by the family.</p>
+
+<p>One feature of this book must be referred to, which is by no
+means peculiar to it, but which it treats with special warmth&mdash;the
+love of the educated Italian for country life.<a name="FNanchor_909_909" id="FNanchor_909_909"></a><a href="#Footnote_909_909" class="fnanchor">[909]</a> In northern
+countries the nobles lived in the country in their castles, and
+the monks of the higher orders in their well-guarded monasteries,
+while the wealthiest burghers dwelt from one year’s end
+to another in the cities. But in Italy, so far as the neighbourhood
+of certain towns at all events was concerned,<a name="FNanchor_910_910" id="FNanchor_910_910"></a><a href="#Footnote_910_910" class="fnanchor">[910]</a> the security
+of life and property was so great, and the passion for a country
+residence was so strong, that men were willing to risk a loss in
+time of war. Thus arose the villa, the country-house of the
+well-to-do citizen. This precious inheritance of the old Roman
+world was thus revived, as soon as the wealth and culture of
+the people were sufficiently advanced.</p>
+
+<p>One author finds at his villa a peace and happiness, for an
+account of which the reader must hear him speak himself:
+‘While every other possession causes work and danger, fear
+and disappointment, the villa brings a great and honourable
+advantage; the villa is always true and kind; if you dwell in
+it at the right time and with love, it will not only satisfy you,
+but add reward to reward. In spring the green trees and the
+song of the birds will make you joyful and hopeful; in autumn
+a moderate exertion will bring forth fruit a hundredfold; all
+through the year melancholy will be banished from you. The
+villa is the spot where good and honest men love to congregate.
+Nothing secret, nothing treacherous, is done here; all see all;
+here is no need of judges or witnesses, for all are kindly and
+peaceably disposed one to another. Hasten hither, and fly
+away from the pride of the rich, and the dishonour of the bad.
+O blessed life in the villa, O unknown fortune!’ The econ<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_405" id="page_405"></a>{405}</span>omical
+side of the matter is that one and the same property
+must, if possible, contain everything&mdash;corn, wine, oil, pasture-land
+and woods, and that in such cases the property was paid
+for well, since nothing needed then to be got from the market.
+But the higher enjoyment derived from the villa is shown by
+some words of the introduction: ‘Round about Florence lie
+many villas in a transparent atmosphere, amid cheerful scenery,
+and with a splendid view; there is little fog, and no injurious
+winds; all is good, and the water pure and healthy. Of the
+numerous buildings many are like palaces, many like castles,
+costly and beautiful to behold.’ He is speaking of those unrivalled
+villas, of which the greater number were sacrificed,
+though vainly, by the Florentines themselves in the defence
+of their city in the year 1529.<a name="FNanchor_911_911" id="FNanchor_911_911"></a><a href="#Footnote_911_911" class="fnanchor">[911]</a></p>
+
+<p>In these villas, as in those on the Brenta, on the Lombard
+hills, at Posilippo and on the Vomero, social life assumed a
+freer and more rural character than in the palaces within the
+city. We meet with charming descriptions of the intercourse
+of the guests, the hunting-parties, and all the open-air pursuits
+and amusements.<a name="FNanchor_912_912" id="FNanchor_912_912"></a><a href="#Footnote_912_912" class="fnanchor">[912]</a> But the noblest achievements of poetry
+and thought are sometimes also dated from these scenes of
+rural peace.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_406" id="page_406"></a>{406}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VIII-5" id="CHAPTER_VIII-5"></a>CHAPTER VIII.<br /><br />
+<small>THE FESTIVALS.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">I<small>T</small> is by no arbitrary choice that in discussing the social life of
+this period, we are led to treat of the processions and shows
+which formed part of the popular festivals.<a name="FNanchor_913_913" id="FNanchor_913_913"></a><a href="#Footnote_913_913" class="fnanchor">[913]</a> The artistic power
+of which the Italians of the Renaissance gave proof on such
+occasions,<a name="FNanchor_914_914" id="FNanchor_914_914"></a><a href="#Footnote_914_914" class="fnanchor">[914]</a> was attained only by means of that free intercourse
+of all classes which formed the basis of Italian society. In
+Northern Europe the monasteries, the courts, and the burghers
+had their special feasts and shows as in Italy; but in the one
+case the form and substance of these displays differed according
+to the class which took part in them, in the other an art and
+culture common to the whole nation stamped them with both a
+higher and a more popular character. The decorative architecture,
+which served to aid in these festivals, deserves a chapter
+to itself in the history of art, although our imagination can
+only form a picture of it from the descriptions which have been
+left to us. We are here more especially concerned with the
+festival as a higher phase in the life of the people, in which its
+religious, moral, and poetical ideas took visible shape. The
+Italian festivals in their best form mark the point of transition
+from real life into the world of art.</p>
+
+<p>The two chief forms of festal display were originally here,
+as elsewhere in the West, the Mystery, or the dramatisation of
+sacred history and legend, and the Procession, the motive and
+character of which was also purely ecclesiastical.</p>
+
+<p>The performances of the Mysteries in Italy were from the
+first more frequent and splendid than elsewhere, and were most
+favourably affected by the progress of poetry and of the other<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_407" id="page_407"></a>{407}</span>
+arts. In the course of time not only did the farce and the
+secular drama branch off from the Mystery, as in other countries
+of Europe, but the pantomime also, with its accompaniments
+of singing and dancing, the effect of which depended
+on the richness and beauty of the spectacle.</p>
+
+<p>The Procession, in the broad, level, and well-paved streets
+of the Italian cities,<a name="FNanchor_915_915" id="FNanchor_915_915"></a><a href="#Footnote_915_915" class="fnanchor">[915]</a> was soon developed into the ‘Trionfo,’ or
+train of masked figures on foot and in chariots, the ecclesiastical
+character of which gradually gave way to the secular. The
+processions at the Carnival and at the feast of Corpus Christi<a name="FNanchor_916_916" id="FNanchor_916_916"></a><a href="#Footnote_916_916" class="fnanchor">[916]</a>
+were alike in the pomp and brilliancy with which they were
+conducted, and set the pattern afterwards followed by the royal
+or princely progresses. Other nations were willing to spend
+vast sums of money on these shows, but in Italy alone do we
+find an artistic method of treatment which arranged the procession
+as a harmonious and significative whole.</p>
+
+<p>What is left of these festivals is but a poor remnant of what
+once existed. Both religious and secular displays of this kind
+have abandoned the dramatic element&mdash;the costumes&mdash;partly
+from dread of ridicule, and partly because the cultivated classes,
+who formerly gave their whole energies to these things, have
+for several reasons lost their interest in them. Even at the
+Carnival, the great processions of masks are out of fashion.
+What still remains, such as the costumes adopted in imitation
+of certain religious confraternities, or even the brilliant festival
+of Santa Rosalia at Palermo, shows clearly how far the higher
+culture of the country has withdrawn from such interests.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The festivals did not reach their full development till after
+the decisive victory of the modern spirit in the fifteenth century,<a name="FNanchor_917_917" id="FNanchor_917_917"></a><a href="#Footnote_917_917" class="fnanchor">[917]</a>
+unless perhaps Florence was here, as in other things, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_408" id="page_408"></a>{408}</span>
+advance of the rest of Italy. In Florence, the several quarters
+of the city were, in early times, organized with a view to such
+exhibitions, which demanded no small expenditure of artistic
+effort. Of this kind was the representation of Hell, with a
+scaffold and boats in the Arno, on the 1st of May, 1304, when
+the Ponte alla Carraja broke down under the weight of the
+spectators.<a name="FNanchor_918_918" id="FNanchor_918_918"></a><a href="#Footnote_918_918" class="fnanchor">[918]</a> That at a later time Florentines used to travel
+through Italy as directors of festivals (festaiuoli), shows that
+the art was early perfected at home.<a name="FNanchor_919_919" id="FNanchor_919_919"></a><a href="#Footnote_919_919" class="fnanchor">[919]</a></p>
+
+<p>In setting forth the chief points of superiority in the Italian
+festivals over those of other countries, the first that we shall
+have to remark is the developed sense of individual characteristics,
+in other words, the capacity to invent a given mask, and
+to act the part with dramatic propriety. Painters and sculptors
+not merely did their part towards the decoration of the
+place where the festival was held, but helped in getting up the
+characters themselves, and prescribed the dress, the paints
+(<a href="#page_373">p. 373</a>), and the other ornaments to be used. The second fact
+to be pointed out is the universal familiarity of the people with
+the poetical basis of the show. The Mysteries, indeed, were
+equally well understood all over Europe, since the biblical story
+and the legends of the saints were the common property of
+Christendom; but in all other respects the advantage was on
+the side of Italy. For the recitations, whether of religious or
+secular heroes, she possessed a lyrical poetry so rich and harmonious
+that none could resist its charm.<a name="FNanchor_920_920" id="FNanchor_920_920"></a><a href="#Footnote_920_920" class="fnanchor">[920]</a> The majority, too,
+of the spectators&mdash;at least in the cities&mdash;understood the meaning
+of mythological figures, and could guess without much
+difficulty at the allegorical and historical, which were drawn
+from sources familiar to the mass of Italians.</p>
+
+<p>This point needs to be more fully discussed. The Middle
+Ages were essentially the ages of allegory. Theology and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_409" id="page_409"></a>{409}</span>
+philosophy treated their categories as independent beings,<a name="FNanchor_921_921" id="FNanchor_921_921"></a><a href="#Footnote_921_921" class="fnanchor">[921]</a> and
+poetry and art had but little to add, in order to give them personality.
+Here all the countries of the West were on the same
+level. Their world of ideas was rich enough in types and
+figures, but when these were put into concrete shape, the costume
+and attributes were likely to be unintelligible and unsuited
+to the popular taste. This, even in Italy, was often the
+case, and not only so during the whole period of the Renaissance,
+but down to a still later time. To produce the confusion,
+it was enough if a predicate of the allegorical figures was
+wrongly translated by an attribute. Even Dante is not wholly
+free from such errors,<a name="FNanchor_922_922" id="FNanchor_922_922"></a><a href="#Footnote_922_922" class="fnanchor">[922]</a> and, indeed, he prides himself on the
+obscurity of his allegories in general.<a name="FNanchor_923_923" id="FNanchor_923_923"></a><a href="#Footnote_923_923" class="fnanchor">[923]</a> Petrarch, in his ‘Trionfi,’
+attempts to give clear, if short, descriptions of at all events the
+figures of Love, of Chastity, of Death, and of Fame. Others
+again load their allegories with inappropriate attributes. In
+the Satires of Vinciguerra,<a name="FNanchor_924_924" id="FNanchor_924_924"></a><a href="#Footnote_924_924" class="fnanchor">[924]</a> for example, Envy is depicted with
+rough, iron teeth, Gluttony as biting its own lips, and with a
+shock of tangled hair, the latter probably to show its indifference
+to all that is not meat and drink. We cannot here discuss
+the bad influence of these misunderstandings on the plastic
+arts. They, like poetry, might think themselves fortunate if
+allegory could be expressed by a mythological figure&mdash;by a
+figure which antiquity saved from absurdity&mdash;if Mars might
+stand for war, and Diana<a name="FNanchor_925_925" id="FNanchor_925_925"></a><a href="#Footnote_925_925" class="fnanchor">[925]</a> for the love of the chase.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_410" id="page_410"></a>{410}</span></p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless art and poetry had better allegories than these
+to offer, and we may assume with regard to such figures of
+this kind as appeared in the Italian festivals, that the public
+required them to be clearly and vividly characteristic, since its
+previous training had fitted it to be a competent critic. Elsewhere,
+particularly at the Burgundian court, the most inexpressive
+figures, and even mere symbols, were allowed to pass,
+since to understand, or to seem to understand them, was a part
+of aristocratic breeding. On the occasion of the famous ‘Oath
+of the Pheasant’ in the year 1453,<a name="FNanchor_926_926" id="FNanchor_926_926"></a><a href="#Footnote_926_926" class="fnanchor">[926]</a> the beautiful young horsewoman,
+who appears as ‘Queen of Pleasure,’ is the only pleasing
+allegory. The huge dishes, with automatic or even living
+figures within them, are either mere curiosities or are intended
+to convey some clumsy moral lesson. A naked female statue
+guarding a live lion was supposed to represent Constantinople
+and its future saviour, the Duke of Burgundy. The rest, with
+the exception of a Pantomime&mdash;Jason in Colchis&mdash;seems either
+too recondite to be understood or to have no sense at all.
+Olivier himself, to whom we owe the description of the scene,
+appeared costumed as ‘The Church,’ in a tower on the back
+of an elephant, and sang a long elegy on the victory of the
+unbelievers.<a name="FNanchor_927_927" id="FNanchor_927_927"></a><a href="#Footnote_927_927" class="fnanchor">[927]</a></p>
+
+<p>But although the allegorical element in the poetry, the art,
+and the festivals of Italy is superior both in good taste and in
+unity of conception to what we find in other countries, yet it
+is not in these qualities that it is most characteristic and unique.
+The decisive point of superiority<a name="FNanchor_928_928" id="FNanchor_928_928"></a><a href="#Footnote_928_928" class="fnanchor">[928]</a> lay rather in the fact, that
+besides the personifications of abstract qualities, historical representatives
+of them were introduced in great number&mdash;that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_411" id="page_411"></a>{411}</span>
+both poetry and plastic art were accustomed to represent
+famous men and women. The ‘Divine Comedy,’ the ‘Trionfi’
+of Petrarch, the ‘Amorosa Visione’ of Boccaccio&mdash;all of them
+works constructed on this principle&mdash;and the great diffusion of
+culture which took place under the influence of antiquity, had
+made the nation familiar with this historical element. These
+figures now appeared at festivals, either individualised, as
+definite masks, or in groups, as characteristic attendants on
+some leading allegorical figure. The art of grouping and composition
+was thus learnt in Italy at a time when the most
+splendid exhibitions in other countries were made up of unintelligible
+symbolism or unmeaning puerilities.</p>
+
+<p>Let us begin with that kind of festival which is perhaps the
+oldest of all&mdash;the Mysteries.<a name="FNanchor_929_929" id="FNanchor_929_929"></a><a href="#Footnote_929_929" class="fnanchor">[929]</a> They resembled in their main
+features those performed in the rest of Europe. In the public
+squares, in the churches, and in the cloisters extensive scaffolds
+were constructed, the upper story of which served as a Paradise
+to open and shut at will, and the ground-floor often as a Hell,
+while between the two lay the stage properly so called, representing
+the scene of all the earthly events of the drama. In
+Italy, as elsewhere, the biblical or legendary play often began
+with an introductory dialogue between Apostles, Prophets,
+Sibyls, Virtues, and Fathers of the Church, and sometimes
+ended with a dance. As a matter of course the half-comic
+‘Intermezzi’ of secondary characters were not wanting in Italy,
+yet this feature was hardly so broadly marked as in northern
+countries.<a name="FNanchor_930_930" id="FNanchor_930_930"></a><a href="#Footnote_930_930" class="fnanchor">[930]</a> The artificial means by which figures were made
+to rise and float in the air&mdash;one of the chief delights of these
+representations&mdash;were probably much better understood in Italy
+than elsewhere; and at Florence in the fourteenth century the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_412" id="page_412"></a>{412}</span>
+hitches in these performances were a stock subject of ridicule.<a name="FNanchor_931_931" id="FNanchor_931_931"></a><a href="#Footnote_931_931" class="fnanchor">[931]</a>
+Soon after Brunellesco invented for the Feast of the Annunciation
+in the Piazza San Felice a marvellous apparatus consisting
+of a heavenly globe surrounded by two circles of angels, out
+of which Gabriel flew down in a machine shaped like an almond.
+Cecca, too, devised the mechanism for such displays.<a name="FNanchor_932_932" id="FNanchor_932_932"></a><a href="#Footnote_932_932" class="fnanchor">[932]</a> The
+spiritual corporations or the quarters of the city which undertook
+the charge and in part the performance of these plays
+spared, at all events in the larger towns, no trouble and expense
+to render them as perfect and artistic as possible. The same
+was no doubt the case at the great court festivals, when Mysteries
+were acted as well as pantomimes and secular dramas.
+The court of Pietro Riario (<a href="#page_106">p. 106</a>), and that of Ferrara were
+assuredly not wanting in all that human invention could produce.<a name="FNanchor_933_933" id="FNanchor_933_933"></a><a href="#Footnote_933_933" class="fnanchor">[933]</a>
+When we picture to ourselves the theatrical talent
+and the splendid costumes of the actors, the scenes constructed
+in the style of the architecture of the period, and hung with
+garlands and tapestry, and in the background the noble buildings
+of an Italian piazza, or the slender columns of some great
+courtyard or cloister, the effect is one of great brilliance. But
+just as the secular drama suffered from this passion for display,
+so the higher poetical development of the Mystery was arrested
+by the same cause. In the texts which are left we find for the
+most part the poorest dramatic groundwork, relieved now and
+then by a fine lyrical or rhetorical passage, but no trace of the
+grand symbolic enthusiasm which distinguishes the ‘Autos
+Sagramentales’ of Calderon.</p>
+
+<p>In the smaller towns, where the scenic display was less, the
+effect of these spiritual plays on the character of the spectators<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_413" id="page_413"></a>{413}</span>
+may have been greater. We read<a name="FNanchor_934_934" id="FNanchor_934_934"></a><a href="#Footnote_934_934" class="fnanchor">[934]</a> that one of the great
+preachers of repentance of whom more will be said later on,
+Roberto da Lecce, closed his Lenten sermons during the plague
+of 1448, at Perugia, with a representation of the Passion. The
+piece followed the New Testament closely. The actors were
+few, but the whole people wept aloud. It is true that on such
+occasions emotional stimulants were resorted to which were
+borrowed from the crudest realism. We are reminded of the
+pictures of Matteo da Siena, or of the groups of clay-figures by
+Guido Mazzoni, when we read that the actor who took the part
+of Christ appeared covered with wales and apparently sweating
+blood, and even bleeding from a wound in the side.<a name="FNanchor_935_935" id="FNanchor_935_935"></a><a href="#Footnote_935_935" class="fnanchor">[935]</a></p>
+
+<p>The special occasions on which these mysteries were performed,
+apart from the great festivals of the Church, from
+princely weddings, and the like, were of various kinds. When,
+for example, S. Bernardino of Siena was canonised by the
+Pope (1450), a sort of dramatic imitation of the ceremony took
+place (rappresentazione), probably on the great square of his
+native city, and for two days there was feasting with meat
+and drink for all comers.<a name="FNanchor_936_936" id="FNanchor_936_936"></a><a href="#Footnote_936_936" class="fnanchor">[936]</a> We are told that a learned monk
+celebrated his promotion to the degree of Doctor of Theology,
+by giving a representation of the legend about the patron saint
+of the city.<a name="FNanchor_937_937" id="FNanchor_937_937"></a><a href="#Footnote_937_937" class="fnanchor">[937]</a> Charles VIII. had scarcely entered Italy before
+he was welcomed at Turin by the widowed Duchess Bianca
+of Savoy with a sort of half-religious pantomime,<a name="FNanchor_938_938" id="FNanchor_938_938"></a><a href="#Footnote_938_938" class="fnanchor">[938]</a> in which a
+pastoral scene first symbolised the Law of Nature, and then a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_414" id="page_414"></a>{414}</span>
+procession of patriarchs the Law of Grace. Afterwards followed
+the story of Lancelot of the Lake, and that ‘of Athens.’ And
+no sooner had the King reached Chieri, than he was received
+with another pantomime, in which a woman in childbed was
+shown, surrounded by distinguished visitors.</p>
+
+<p>If any church festival was held by universal consent to call
+for exceptional efforts, it was the feast of Corpus Christi, which
+in Spain (<a href="#page_413">p. 413</a>) gave rise to a special class of poetry. We
+possess a splendid description of the manner in which that
+feast was celebrated at Viterbo by Pius II. in 1482.<a name="FNanchor_939_939" id="FNanchor_939_939"></a><a href="#Footnote_939_939" class="fnanchor">[939]</a> The
+procession itself, which advanced from a vast and gorgeous
+tent in front of S. Francesco along the main street to the
+Cathedral, was the least part of the ceremony. The cardinals
+and wealthy prelates had divided the whole distance into
+parts, over which they severally presided, and which they
+decorated with curtains, tapestry, and garlands.<a name="FNanchor_940_940" id="FNanchor_940_940"></a><a href="#Footnote_940_940" class="fnanchor">[940]</a> Each of
+them had also erected a stage of his own, on which, as the
+procession passed by, short historical and allegorical scenes
+were represented. It is not clear from the account whether
+all the characters were living beings or some merely draped
+figures;<a name="FNanchor_941_941" id="FNanchor_941_941"></a><a href="#Footnote_941_941" class="fnanchor">[941]</a> the expense was certainly very great. There was a
+suffering Christ amid singing cherubs, the Last Supper with a
+figure of St. Thomas Aquinas, the combat between the Archangel
+Michael and the devils, fountains of wine and orchestras
+of angels, the grave of Christ with all the scene of the Resurrection,
+and finally, on the square before the Cathedral, the
+tomb of the Virgin. It opened after High Mass and the benediction,
+and the Mother of God ascended singing to Paradise,
+where she was crowned by her Son, and led into the presence
+of the Eternal Father.</p>
+
+<p>Among these representations in the public street, that given
+by the Cardinal Vice-Chancellor Roderigo Borgia, afterwards
+Pope Alexander VI., was remarkable for its splendour and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_415" id="page_415"></a>{415}</span>
+obscure symbolism.<a name="FNanchor_942_942" id="FNanchor_942_942"></a><a href="#Footnote_942_942" class="fnanchor">[942]</a> It offers an early instance of the fondness
+for salvos of artillery<a name="FNanchor_943_943" id="FNanchor_943_943"></a><a href="#Footnote_943_943" class="fnanchor">[943]</a> which was characteristic of the
+house of Borgia.</p>
+
+<p>The account is briefer which Pius II. gives us of the procession
+held the same year in Rome on the arrival of the skull of
+St. Andrew from Greece. There, too, Roderigo Borgia distinguished
+himself by his magnificence; but this festival had a
+more secular character than the other, as, besides the customary
+choirs of angels, other masks were exhibited, as well as ‘strong
+men,’ who seemed to have performed various feats of muscular
+prowess.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Such representations as were wholly or chiefly secular in
+their character were arranged, especially at the more important
+princely courts, mainly with a view to splendid and striking
+scenic effects. The subjects were mythological or allegorical,
+and the interpretation commonly lay on the surface. Extravagancies,
+indeed, were not wanting&mdash;gigantic animals from
+which a crowd of masked figures suddenly emerged, as at
+Siena<a name="FNanchor_944_944" id="FNanchor_944_944"></a><a href="#Footnote_944_944" class="fnanchor">[944]</a> in the year 1465, when at a public reception a ballet of
+twelve persons came out of a golden wolf; living table ornaments,
+not always, however, showing the tasteless exaggeration
+of the Burgundian Court (<a href="#page_182">p. 182</a>)&mdash;and the like. Most of them
+showed some artistic or poetical feeling. The mixture of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_416" id="page_416"></a>{416}</span>
+pantomime and the drama at the Court of Ferrara has been
+already referred to in the treating of poetry (<a href="#page_318">p. 318</a>). The
+entertainments given in 1473 by the Cardinal Pietro Riario at
+Rome when Leonora of Aragon, the destined bride of Prince
+Hercules of Ferrara, was passing through the city, were famous
+far beyond the limits of Italy.<a name="FNanchor_945_945" id="FNanchor_945_945"></a><a href="#Footnote_945_945" class="fnanchor">[945]</a> The plays acted were mysteries
+on some ecclesiastical subject, the pantomimes on the contrary,
+were mythological. There were represented Orpheus with the
+beasts, Perseus and Andromeda, Ceres drawn by dragons,
+Bacchus and Ariadne by panthers, and finally the education of
+Achilles. Then followed a ballet of the famous lovers of
+ancient times, with a troop of nymphs, which was interrupted
+by an attack of predatory centaurs, who in their turn were
+vanquished and put to flight by Hercules. The fact, in itself
+a trifle, may be mentioned, as characteristic of the taste of the
+time, that the human beings who at all the festivals appeared
+as statues in niches or on pillars and triumphal arches, and
+then showed themselves to be alive by singing or speaking,
+wore their natural complexion and a natural costume, and thus
+the sense of incongruity was removed; while in the house of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_417" id="page_417"></a>{417}</span>
+Riario there was exhibited a living child, gilt from head to
+foot, who showered water round him from a spring.<a name="FNanchor_946_946" id="FNanchor_946_946"></a><a href="#Footnote_946_946" class="fnanchor">[946]</a></p>
+
+<p>Brilliant pantomimes of the same kind were given at Bologna,
+at the marriage of Annibale Bentivoglio with Lucrezia of Este.<a name="FNanchor_947_947" id="FNanchor_947_947"></a><a href="#Footnote_947_947" class="fnanchor">[947]</a>
+Instead of the orchestra, choral songs were sung, while the
+fairest of Diana’s nymphs flew over to the Juno Pronuba,
+and while Venus walked with a lion&mdash;which in this case was
+a disguised man&mdash;among a troop of savages. The decorations
+were a faithful representation of a forest. At Venice, in 1491,
+the princesses of the house of Este<a name="FNanchor_948_948" id="FNanchor_948_948"></a><a href="#Footnote_948_948" class="fnanchor">[948]</a> were met and welcomed
+by the Bucentaur, and entertained by boat-races and a splendid
+pantomime, called ‘Meleager,’ in the court of the ducal palace.
+At Milan Lionardo da Vinci<a name="FNanchor_949_949" id="FNanchor_949_949"></a><a href="#Footnote_949_949" class="fnanchor">[949]</a> directed the festivals of the Duke
+and of some leading citizens. One of his machines, which
+must have rivalled that of Brunellesco (<a href="#page_411">p. 411</a>), represented the
+heavenly bodies with all their movements on a colossal scale.
+Whenever a planet approached Isabella, the bride of the young
+Duke, the divinity whose name it bore stepped forth from the
+globe,<a name="FNanchor_950_950" id="FNanchor_950_950"></a><a href="#Footnote_950_950" class="fnanchor">[950]</a> and sang some verses written by the court-poet Bellincioni
+(1489). At another festival (1493) the model of the equestrian
+statue of Francesco Sforza appeared with other objects
+under a triumphal arch on the square before the castle. We
+read in Vasari of the ingenious automata which Lionardo
+invented to welcome the French kings as masters of Milan.
+Even in the smaller cities great efforts were sometimes made
+on these occasions. When Duke Borso came in 1453 to Reggio<a name="FNanchor_951_951" id="FNanchor_951_951"></a><a href="#Footnote_951_951" class="fnanchor">[951]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_418" id="page_418"></a>{418}</span>
+to receive the homage of the city, he was met at the door by a
+great machine, on which S. Prospero, the patron saint of the
+town, appeared to float, shaded by a baldachino held by angels,
+while below him was a revolving disc with eight singing
+cherubs, two of whom received from the saint the sceptre and
+keys of the city, which they then delivered to the Duke, while
+saints and angels held forth in his praise. A chariot drawn by
+concealed horses now advanced, bearing an empty throne,
+behind which stood a figure of Justice attended by a genius.
+At the corners of the chariot sat four grey-headed lawgivers,
+encircled by angels with banners; by its side rode standard-bearers
+in complete armour. It need hardly be added that the
+goddess and the genius did not suffer the Duke to pass by
+without an address. A second car, drawn by an unicorn, bore
+a Caritas with a burning torch; between the two came the
+classical spectacle of a car in the form of a ship, moved by men
+concealed within it. The whole procession now advanced
+before the Duke. In front of the Church of S. Pietro, a halt
+was again made. The saint, attended by two angels, descended
+in an aureole from the façade, placed a wreath of laurel
+on the head of the Duke, and then floated back to his former
+position.<a name="FNanchor_952_952" id="FNanchor_952_952"></a><a href="#Footnote_952_952" class="fnanchor">[952]</a> The clergy provided another allegory of a purely
+religious kind. Idolatry and Faith stood on two lofty pillars,
+and after Faith, represented by a beautiful girl, had uttered
+her welcome, the other column fell to pieces with the lay figure
+upon it. Further on, Borso was met by Cæsar with seven
+beautiful women, who were presented to him as the seven
+Virtues which he was exhorted to pursue. At last the Cathedral
+was reached, but after the service the Duke again took his
+seat on a lofty golden throne, and a second time received the
+homage of some of the masks already mentioned. To conclude
+all, three angels flew down from an adjacent building, and,
+amid songs of joy, delivered to him branches of palm, as
+symbols of peace.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Let us now give a glance at those festivals the chief feature
+of which was the procession itself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_419" id="page_419"></a>{419}</span></p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that from an early period of the Middle
+Ages the religious processions gave rise to the use of masks.
+Little angels accompanied the sacrament or the sacred pictures
+and reliques on their way through the streets; or characters in
+the Passion&mdash;such as Christ with the cross, the thieves and the
+soldiers, or the faithful women&mdash;were represented for public
+edification. But the great feasts of the Church were from an
+early time accompanied by a civic procession, and the naïveté
+of the Middle Ages found nothing unfitting in the many secular
+elements which it contained. We may mention especially the
+naval car (<i>carrus navalis</i>), which had been inherited from pagan
+times,<a name="FNanchor_953_953" id="FNanchor_953_953"></a><a href="#Footnote_953_953" class="fnanchor">[953]</a> and which, as an instance already quoted shows, was
+admissible at festivals of very various kinds, and has permanently
+left its name on one of them in particular&mdash;the
+Carnival. Such ships, decorated with all possible splendour,
+delighted the eyes of spectators long after the original meaning
+of them was forgotten. When Isabella of England met
+her bridegroom, the Emperor Frederick II., at Cologne, she was
+met by a number of such chariots, drawn by invisible horses,
+and filled with a crowd of priests who welcomed her with music
+and singing.</p>
+
+<p>But the religious processions were not only mingled with
+secular accessories of all kinds, but were often replaced by processions
+of clerical masks. Their origin is perhaps to be found
+in the parties of actors who wound their way through the
+streets of the city to the place where they were about to act
+the mystery; but it is possible that at an early period the
+clerical procession may have constituted itself as a distinct
+species. Dante<a name="FNanchor_954_954" id="FNanchor_954_954"></a><a href="#Footnote_954_954" class="fnanchor">[954]</a> describes the ‘Trionfo’ of Beatrice, with the
+twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse, with the four mystical
+Beasts, with the three Christian and four Cardinal Virtues,
+and with Saint Luke, Saint Paul, and other Apostles, in a way
+which almost forces us to conclude that such processions<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_420" id="page_420"></a>{420}</span>
+actually occurred before his time. We are chiefly led to this
+conclusion by the chariot in which Beatrice drives, and which
+in the miraculous forest of the vision would have been unnecessary
+or rather out of place. It is possible, on the other
+hand, that Dante looked on the chariot as a symbol of victory
+and triumph, and that his poem rather served to give rise to
+these processions, the form of which was borrowed from the
+triumph of the Roman Emperors. However this may be, poetry
+and theology continued to make free use of the symbol. Savonarola<a name="FNanchor_955_955" id="FNanchor_955_955"></a><a href="#Footnote_955_955" class="fnanchor">[955]</a>
+in his ‘Triumph of the Cross’ represents Christ on a Chariot
+of Victory, above his head the shining sphere of the Trinity, in
+his left hand the Cross, in his right the Old and New Testaments;
+below him the Virgin Mary; on both sides the Martyrs
+and Doctors of the Church with open books; behind him all
+the multitude of the saved; and in the distance the countless
+host of his enemies&mdash;emperors, princes, philosophers, heretics&mdash;all
+vanquished, their idols broken, and their books burned.
+A great picture of Titian, which is known only as a woodcut,
+has a good deal in common with this description. The ninth
+and tenth of Sabellico’s (<a href="#page_062">p. 62</a>) thirteen Elegies on the Mother
+of God contain a minute account of her triumph, richly adorned
+with allegories, and especially interesting from that matter-of-fact
+air which also characterises the realistic painting of the
+fifteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the secular ‘Trionfi’ were far more frequent
+than the religious. They were modelled on the procession of
+the Roman Imperator, as it was known from the old reliefs
+and from the writings of ancient authors.<a name="FNanchor_956_956" id="FNanchor_956_956"></a><a href="#Footnote_956_956" class="fnanchor">[956]</a> The historical
+conceptions then prevalent in Italy, with which these shows
+were closely connected, have been already discussed (p.
+139).</p>
+
+<p>We now and then read of the actual triumphal entrance of a
+victorious general, which was organised as far as possible on
+the ancient pattern, even against the will of the hero himself.
+Francesco Sforza had the courage (1450) to refuse the triumphal<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_421" id="page_421"></a>{421}</span>
+chariot which had been prepared for his return to Milan, on
+the ground that such things were monarchical superstitions.<a name="FNanchor_957_957" id="FNanchor_957_957"></a><a href="#Footnote_957_957" class="fnanchor">[957]</a>
+Alfonso the Great, on his entrance into Naples (1443), declined
+the wreath of laurel,<a name="FNanchor_958_958" id="FNanchor_958_958"></a><a href="#Footnote_958_958" class="fnanchor">[958]</a> which Napoleon did not disdain to wear
+at his coronation in Notre-Dame. For the rest, Alfonso’s procession,
+which passed by a breach in the wall through the city
+to the cathedral, was a strange mixture of antique, allegorical,
+and purely comic elements. The car, drawn by four white
+horses, on which he sat enthroned, was lofty and covered with
+gilding; twenty patricians carried the poles of the canopy of
+cloth of gold which shaded his head. The part of the procession
+which the Florentines then present in Naples had undertaken
+was composed of elegant young cavaliers, skilfully brandishing
+their lances, of a chariot with the figure of Fortune,
+and of seven Virtues on horseback. The goddess herself,<a name="FNanchor_959_959" id="FNanchor_959_959"></a><a href="#Footnote_959_959" class="fnanchor">[959]</a> in
+accordance with the inexorable logic of allegory to which even
+the painters at that time conformed, wore hair only on the
+front part of her head, while the back part was bald, and the
+genius who sat on the lower steps of the car, and who symbolised
+the fugitive character of fortune, had his feet immersed (?)
+in a basin of water. Then followed, equipped by the same
+Florentines, a troop of horsemen in the costumes of various
+nations, dressed as foreign princes and nobles, and then,
+crowned with laurel and standing above a revolving globe, a
+Julius Cæsar,<a name="FNanchor_960_960" id="FNanchor_960_960"></a><a href="#Footnote_960_960" class="fnanchor">[960]</a> who explained to the king in Italian verse the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_422" id="page_422"></a>{422}</span>
+meaning of the allegories, and then took his place in the procession.
+Sixty Florentines, all in purple and scarlet, closed
+this splendid display of what their home could achieve. Then
+a band of Catalans advanced on foot, with lay figures of horses
+fastened on to them before and behind, and engaged in a mock
+combat with a body of Turks, as though in derision of the
+Florentine sentimentalism. Last of all came a gigantic tower,
+the door of which was guarded by an angel with a drawn
+sword; on it stood four Virtues, who each addressed the king
+with a song. The rest of the show had nothing specially
+characteristic about it.</p>
+
+<p>At the entrance of Louis XII. into Milan in the year 1507<a name="FNanchor_961_961" id="FNanchor_961_961"></a><a href="#Footnote_961_961" class="fnanchor">[961]</a>
+we find, besides the inevitable chariot with Virtues, a living
+group representing Jupiter, Mars, and a figure of Italy caught
+in a net. After which came a car laden with trophies, and
+so forth.</p>
+
+<p>And when there were in reality no triumphs to celebrate,
+the poets found a compensation for themselves and their
+patrons. Petrarch and Boccaccio had described the representation
+of every sort of fame as attendants each of an allegorical
+figure (<a href="#page_409">p. 409</a>); the celebrities of past ages were now made
+attendants of the prince. The poetess Cleofe Gabrielli of
+Gubbio paid this honour to Borso of Ferrara.<a name="FNanchor_962_962" id="FNanchor_962_962"></a><a href="#Footnote_962_962" class="fnanchor">[962]</a> She gave him
+seven queens&mdash;the seven liberal arts&mdash;as his handmaids, with
+whom he mounted a chariot; further, a crowd of heroes, distinguished
+by names written on their foreheads; then followed
+all the famous poets; and after them the gods driving in their
+chariots. There is, in fact, at this time simply no end to
+the mythological and allegorical charioteering, and the most
+important work of art of Borso’s time&mdash;the frescoes in the
+Palazzo Schifanoja&mdash;shows us a whole frieze filled with these
+motives.<a name="FNanchor_963_963" id="FNanchor_963_963"></a><a href="#Footnote_963_963" class="fnanchor">[963]</a> Raphael, when he had to paint the Camera della<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_423" id="page_423"></a>{423}</span>
+Segnatura, found this mode of artistic thought completely
+vulgarised and worn out. The new and final consecration
+which he gave to it will remain a wonder to all ages.</p>
+
+<p>The triumphal processions, strictly speaking, of victorious
+generals, formed the exception. But all the festive processions,
+whether they celebrated any special event or were mainly held
+for their own sakes, assumed more or less the character and
+nearly always the name of a ‘Trionfo.’ It is a wonder that
+funerals were not also treated in the same way.<a name="FNanchor_964_964" id="FNanchor_964_964"></a><a href="#Footnote_964_964" class="fnanchor">[964]</a></p>
+
+<p>It was the practice, both at the Carnival and on other occasions,
+to represent the triumphs of ancient Roman commanders,
+such as that of Paulus Æmilius under Lorenzo the Magnificent
+at Florence, and that of Camillus on the visit of Leo X. Both
+were conducted by the painter Francesco Gronacci.<a name="FNanchor_965_965" id="FNanchor_965_965"></a><a href="#Footnote_965_965" class="fnanchor">[965]</a> In Rome,
+the first complete exhibition of this kind was the triumph of
+Augustus after the victory over Cleopatra,<a name="FNanchor_966_966" id="FNanchor_966_966"></a><a href="#Footnote_966_966" class="fnanchor">[966]</a> under Paul II.,
+where, besides the comic and mythological masks, which, as a
+matter of fact, were not wanting in the ancient triumphs, all
+the other requisites were to be found&mdash;kings in chains, tablets
+with decrees of the senate and people, a senate clothed in the
+ancient costume, praetors, aediles, and quaestors, four chariots
+filled with singing masks, and, doubtless, cars laden with
+trophies. Other processions rather aimed at setting forth, in a
+general way, the universal empire of ancient Rome; and in
+answer to the very real danger which threatened Europe from
+the side of the Turks, a cavalcade of camels bearing masks
+representing Ottoman prisoners, appeared before the people.
+Later, at the Carnival of the year 1500, Cæsar Borgia, with a
+bold allusion to himself, celebrated the triumph of Julius Cæsar,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_424" id="page_424"></a>{424}</span>
+with a procession of eleven magnificent chariots,<a name="FNanchor_967_967" id="FNanchor_967_967"></a><a href="#Footnote_967_967" class="fnanchor">[967]</a> doubtless to
+the scandal of the pilgrims who had come for the Jubilee (vol. i.
+p. 116). Two ‘Trionfi,’ famous for their taste and beauty,
+were given by rival companies in Florence, on the election of
+Leo X. to the Papacy.<a name="FNanchor_968_968" id="FNanchor_968_968"></a><a href="#Footnote_968_968" class="fnanchor">[968]</a> One of them represented the three
+Ages of Man, the other the four Ages of the World, ingeniously
+set forth in five scenes of Roman history, and in two
+allegories of the golden age of Saturn and of its final return.
+The imagination displayed in the adornment of the chariots,
+when the great Florentine artists undertook the work, made
+the scene so impressive that such representations became in
+time a permanent element in the popular life. Hitherto the
+subject cities had been satisfied merely to present their symbolical
+gifts&mdash;costly stuffs and wax-candles&mdash;on the day when
+they annually did homage. The guild of merchants now built
+ten chariots, to which others were afterwards to be added, not
+so much to carry as to symbolise the tribute, and Andrea del
+Sarto, who painted some of them, no doubt did his work to perfection.<a name="FNanchor_969_969" id="FNanchor_969_969"></a><a href="#Footnote_969_969" class="fnanchor">[969]</a>
+These cars, whether used to hold tribute or trophies,
+now formed a part of all such celebrations, even when there
+was not much money to be laid out. The Sienese announced,
+in 1477, the alliance between Ferrante and Sixtus IV., with
+which they themselves were associated, by driving a chariot
+round the city, with ‘one clad as the goddess of peace standing
+on a hauberk and other arms.’<a name="FNanchor_970_970" id="FNanchor_970_970"></a><a href="#Footnote_970_970" class="fnanchor">[970]</a></p>
+
+<p>At the Venetian festivals the processions, not on land but on
+water, were marvellous in their fantastic splendour. The sailing
+of the Bucentaur to meet the Princess of Ferrara in the
+year 1491 (<a href="#page_136">p. 136</a>) seems to have been something belonging to
+fairyland.<a name="FNanchor_971_971" id="FNanchor_971_971"></a><a href="#Footnote_971_971" class="fnanchor">[971]</a> Countless vessels with garlands and hangings,
+filled with the richly-dressed youth of the city, moved in front;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_425" id="page_425"></a>{425}</span>
+genii with attributes symbolising the various gods, floated on
+machines hung in the air; below stood others grouped as tritons
+and nymphs; the air was filled with music, sweet odours,
+and the fluttering of embroidered banners. The Bucentaur
+was followed by such a crowd of boats of every sort that for a
+mile all round (<i>octo stadia</i>) the water could not be seen. With
+regard to the rest of the festivities, besides the pantomime
+mentioned above, we may notice as something new, a boat-race
+of fifty powerful girls. In the sixteenth century,<a name="FNanchor_972_972" id="FNanchor_972_972"></a><a href="#Footnote_972_972" class="fnanchor">[972]</a> the
+nobility were divided into corporations with a view to these
+festivals, whose most noteworthy feature was some extraordinary
+machine placed on a ship. So, for instance, in the year
+1541, at the festival of the ‘Sempiterni,’ a round ‘universe’
+floated along the Grand Canal, and a splendid ball was given
+inside it. The Carnival, too, in this city was famous for its
+dances, processions, and exhibitions of every kind. The Square
+of St. Mark was found to give space enough not only for tournaments
+(<a href="#page_390">p. 390</a>), but for ‘Trionfi,’ similar to those common on
+the mainland. At a festival held on the conclusion of peace,<a name="FNanchor_973_973" id="FNanchor_973_973"></a><a href="#Footnote_973_973" class="fnanchor">[973]</a>
+the pious brotherhoods (‘scuole’) took each its part in the procession.
+There, among golden chandeliers with red candles,
+among crowds of musicians and winged boys with golden
+bowls and horns of plenty, was seen a car on which Noah and
+David sat together enthroned; then came Abigail, leading a
+camel laden with treasures, and a second car with a group of
+political figures&mdash;Italy sitting between Venice and Liguria, the
+two last with their coats of arms, the former with a stork, the
+symbol of unity&mdash;and on a raised step three female symbolical
+figures with the arms of the allied princes. This was
+followed by a great globe with the constellations, as it seems,
+round it. The princes themselves, or rather their bodily representatives,
+appeared on other chariots with their servants and
+their coats of arms, if we have rightly interpreted our author.<a name="FNanchor_974_974" id="FNanchor_974_974"></a><a href="#Footnote_974_974" class="fnanchor">[974]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_426" id="page_426"></a>{426}</span>
+There was also music at these and all other similar processions.</p>
+
+<p>The Carnival, properly so called, apart from these great triumphal
+marches, had nowhere, perhaps, in the fifteenth century,
+so varied a character as in Rome.<a name="FNanchor_975_975" id="FNanchor_975_975"></a><a href="#Footnote_975_975" class="fnanchor">[975]</a> There were races of
+every kind&mdash;of horses, asses, buffalos, old men, young men,
+Jews, and so on. Paul II. entertained the people in crowds
+before the Palazzo di Venezia, in which he lived. The games
+in the Piazza Navona, which had probably never altogether
+ceased since the classical times, were remarkable for their warlike
+splendour. We read of a sham fight of cavalry, and a
+review of all the citizens in arms. The greatest freedom existed
+with regard to the use of masks, which were sometimes allowed
+for several months together.<a name="FNanchor_976_976" id="FNanchor_976_976"></a><a href="#Footnote_976_976" class="fnanchor">[976]</a> Sixtus IV. ventured, in the most
+populous part of the city&mdash;at the Campofiore and near the
+Banchi&mdash;to make his way through crowds of masks, though
+he declined to receive them as visitors in the Vatican. Under
+Innocent VIII., a discreditable usage, which had already appeared
+among the Cardinals, attained its height. In the Carnival
+of 1491, they sent one another chariots full of splendid
+masks, of singers, and of buffoons, chanting scandalous verses.
+They were accompanied by men on horseback.<a name="FNanchor_977_977" id="FNanchor_977_977"></a><a href="#Footnote_977_977" class="fnanchor">[977]</a> Apart from
+the Carnival, the Romans seem to have been the first to discover
+the effect of a great procession by torchlight. When
+Pius II. came back from the Congress of Mantua in 1459,<a name="FNanchor_978_978" id="FNanchor_978_978"></a><a href="#Footnote_978_978" class="fnanchor">[978]</a> the
+people waited on him with a squadron of horsemen bearing
+torches, who rode in shining circles before his palace. Sixtus
+IV., however, thought it better to decline a nocturnal visit of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_427" id="page_427"></a>{427}</span>
+the people, who proposed to wait on him with torches and
+olive-branches.<a name="FNanchor_979_979" id="FNanchor_979_979"></a><a href="#Footnote_979_979" class="fnanchor">[979]</a></p>
+
+<p>But the Florentine Carnival surpassed the Roman in a certain
+class of processions, which have left their mark even in
+literature.<a name="FNanchor_980_980" id="FNanchor_980_980"></a><a href="#Footnote_980_980" class="fnanchor">[980]</a> Among a crowd of masks on foot and on horseback
+appeared some huge, fantastic chariot, and upon it an allegorical
+figure or group of figures with the proper accompaniments,
+such as Jealousy with four spectacled faces on one head; the
+four temperaments (<a href="#page_309">p. 309</a>) with the planets belonging to them;
+the three Fates; Prudence enthroned above Hope and Fear,
+which lay bound before her; the four Elements, Ages, Winds,
+Seasons, and so on; as well as the famous chariot of Death
+with the coffins, which presently opened. Sometimes we meet
+with a splendid scene from classical mythology&mdash;Bacchus and
+Ariadne, Paris and Helen, and others. Or else a chorus of
+figures forming some single class or category, as the beggars,
+the hunters and nymphs, the lost souls, who in their lifetime
+were hard-hearted women, the hermits, the astrologers, the
+vagabonds, the devils, the sellers of various kinds of wares,
+and even on one occasion ‘il popolo,’ the people as such, who
+all reviled one another in their songs. The songs, which
+still remain and have been collected, give the explanation
+of the masquerade sometimes in a pathetic, sometimes in a
+humorous, and sometimes in an excessively indecent tone.
+Some of the worst in this respect are attributed to Lorenzo
+the Magnificent, probably because the real author did not
+venture to declare himself. However this may be, we must
+certainly ascribe to him the beautiful song which accompanied
+the masque of Bacchus and Ariadne, whose refrain
+still echoes to us from the fifteenth century, like a regret<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_428" id="page_428"></a>{428}</span>ful
+presentiment of the brief splendour of the Renaissance
+itself:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Quanto è bella giovinezza,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Che si fugge tuttavia!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Di doman non c’è certezza.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_429" id="page_429"></a>{429}</span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_VI" id="PART_VI"></a><i>PART VI.</i><br /><br />
+<small>MORALITY AND RELIGION.</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_430" id="page_430"></a>{430}</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_431" id="page_431"></a>{431}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-6" id="CHAPTER_I-6"></a>CHAPTER I.<br /><br />
+<small>MORALITY.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> relation of the various peoples of the earth to the supreme
+interests of life, to God, virtue, and immortality, may be investigated
+up to a certain point, but can never be compared
+to one another with absolute strictness and certainty. The
+more plainly in these matters our evidence seems to speak, the
+more carefully must we refrain from unqualified assumptions
+and rash generalisations.</p>
+
+<p>This remark is especially true with regard to our judgment
+on questions of morality. It may be possible to indicate many
+contrasts and shades of difference among different nations, but
+to strike the balance of the whole is not given to human insight.
+The ultimate truth with respect to the character, the conscience,
+and the guilt of a people remains for ever a secret; if
+only for the reason that its defects have another side, where
+they reappear as peculiarities or even as virtues. We must
+leave those who find a pleasure in passing sweeping censures
+on whole nations, to do so as they like. The peoples of Europe
+can maltreat, but happily not judge one another. A great
+nation, interwoven by its civilisation, its achievements, and its
+fortunes with the whole life of the modern world, can afford
+to ignore both its advocates and its accusers. It lives on with
+or without the approval of theorists.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, what here follows is no judgment, but rather
+a string of marginal notes, suggested by a study of the Italian
+Renaissance extending over some years. The value to be
+attached to them is all the more qualified as they mostly touch
+on the life of the upper classes, with respect to which we
+are far better informed in Italy than in any other country in
+Europe at that period. But though both fame and infamy
+sound louder here than elsewhere, we are not helped thereby
+in forming an adequate moral estimate of the people.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_432" id="page_432"></a>{432}</span></p>
+
+<p>What eye can pierce the depths in which the character and
+fate of nations are determined?&mdash;in which that which is inborn
+and that which has been experienced combine to form a new
+whole and a fresh nature?&mdash;in which even those intellectual
+capacities, which at first sight we should take to be most
+original, are in fact evolved late and slowly? Who can tell if
+the Italian before the thirteenth century possessed that flexible
+activity and certainty in his whole being&mdash;that play of power
+in shaping whatever subject he dealt with in word or in
+form, which was peculiar to him later? And if no answer
+can be found to these questions, how can we possibly judge
+of the infinite and infinitely intricate channels through which
+character and intellect are incessantly pouring their influence
+one upon the other. A tribunal there is for each one of us,
+whose voice is our conscience; but let us have done with these
+generalities about nations. For the people that seems to be
+most sick the cure may be at hand; and one that appears to be
+healthy may bear within it the ripening germs of death, which
+the hour of danger will bring forth from their hiding-place.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the civilisation
+of the Renaissance had reached its highest pitch, and at
+the same time the political ruin of the nation seemed inevitable,
+there were not wanting serious thinkers who saw a connexion
+between this ruin and the prevalent immorality. It was not
+one of those methodistical moralists who in every age think
+themselves called to declaim against the wickedness of the
+time, but it was Macchiavelli, who, in one of his most well-considered
+works,<a name="FNanchor_981_981" id="FNanchor_981_981"></a><a href="#Footnote_981_981" class="fnanchor">[981]</a> said openly: ‘We Italians are irreligious
+and corrupt above others.’ Another man had perhaps said,
+‘We are individually highly developed; we have outgrown the
+limits of morality and religion which were natural to us in our
+undeveloped state, and we despise outward law, because our
+rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and officers wicked<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_433" id="page_433"></a>{433}</span>
+men.’ Macchiavelli adds, ‘because the Church and her representatives
+set us the worst example.’</p>
+
+<p>Shall we add also, ‘because the influence exercised by
+antiquity was in this respect unfavourable’? The statement
+can only be received with many qualifications. It may
+possibly be true of the humanists (<a href="#page_272">p. 272</a> sqq.), especially
+as regards the profligacy of their lives. Of the rest it may
+perhaps be said with some approach to accuracy, that, after
+they became familiar with antiquity, they substituted for
+holiness&mdash;the Christian ideal of life&mdash;the cultus of historical
+greatness (see Part II. chap. iii.). We can understand, therefore,
+how easily they would be tempted to consider those
+faults and vices to be matters of indifference, in spite of which
+their heroes were great. They were probably scarcely conscious
+of this themselves, for if we are summoned to quote any
+statement of doctrine on this subject, we are again forced to
+appeal to humanists like Paolo Giovio, who excuses the perjury
+of Giangaleazzo Visconti, through which he was enabled to
+found an empire, by the example of Julius Cæsar.<a name="FNanchor_982_982" id="FNanchor_982_982"></a><a href="#Footnote_982_982" class="fnanchor">[982]</a> The great
+Florentine historians and statesmen never stoop to these slavish
+quotations, and what seems antique in their deeds and their
+judgments is so because the nature of their political life
+necessarily fostered in them a mode of thought which has
+some analogy with that of antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Italy at the beginning
+of the sixteenth century found itself in the midst of a grave
+moral crisis, out of which the best men saw hardly any
+escape.</p>
+
+<p>Let us begin by saying a few words about that moral force
+which was then the strongest bulwark against evil. The
+highly gifted men of that day thought to find it in the sentiment
+of honour. This is that enigmatic mixture of conscience
+and egoism which often survives in the modern man after he
+has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and
+hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness
+and great vices, and may be the victim of astonishing
+illusions; yet, nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_434" id="page_434"></a>{434}</span>
+in the wreck of a character may gather around it, and from
+this fountain may draw new strength. It has become, in a far
+wider sense than is commonly believed, a decisive test of conduct
+in the minds of the cultivated Europeans of our own day,
+and many of those who yet hold faithfully by religion and
+morality are unconsciously guided by this feeling in the
+gravest decisions of their lives.<a name="FNanchor_983_983" id="FNanchor_983_983"></a><a href="#Footnote_983_983" class="fnanchor">[983]</a></p>
+
+<p>It lies without the limits of our task to show how the men
+of antiquity also experienced this feeling in a peculiar form,
+and how, afterwards, in the Middle Ages, a special sense of
+honour became the mark of a particular class. Nor can we
+here dispute with those who hold that conscience, rather than
+honour, is the motive power. It would indeed be better and
+nobler if it were so; but since it must be granted that even
+our worthier resolutions result from ‘a conscience more or less
+dimmed by selfishness,’ it is better to call the mixture by its
+right name.<a name="FNanchor_984_984" id="FNanchor_984_984"></a><a href="#Footnote_984_984" class="fnanchor">[984]</a> It is certainly not always easy, in treating of the
+Italian of this period, to distinguish this sense of honour from
+the passion for fame, into which, indeed, it easily passes. Yet
+the two sentiments are essentially different.</p>
+
+<p>There is no lack of witnesses on this subject. One who
+speaks plainly may here be quoted as a representative of the
+rest. We read in the recently-published ‘Aphorisms’ of Guicciardini:<a name="FNanchor_985_985" id="FNanchor_985_985"></a><a href="#Footnote_985_985" class="fnanchor">[985]</a>
+‘He who esteems honour highly, succeeds in all
+that he undertakes, since he fears neither trouble, danger, nor
+expense; I have found it so in my own case, and may say it
+and write it; vain and dead are the deeds of men which have
+not this as their motive.’ It is necessary to add that, from
+what is known of the life of the writer, he can here be only
+speaking of honour, and not of fame. Rabelais has put the
+matter more clearly than perhaps any Italian. We quote him,
+indeed, unwillingly in these pages. What the great, baroque
+Frenchman gives us, is a picture of what the Renaissance<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_435" id="page_435"></a>{435}</span>
+would be without form and without beauty.<a name="FNanchor_986_986" id="FNanchor_986_986"></a><a href="#Footnote_986_986" class="fnanchor">[986]</a> But his description
+of an ideal state of things in the Thelemite monastery is
+decisive as historical evidence. In speaking of his gentlemen
+and ladies of the Order of Free Will,<a name="FNanchor_987_987" id="FNanchor_987_987"></a><a href="#Footnote_987_987" class="fnanchor">[987]</a> he tells us as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>‘En leur reigle n’estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras.
+Parce que gens liberes, bien nayz,<a name="FNanchor_988_988" id="FNanchor_988_988"></a><a href="#Footnote_988_988" class="fnanchor">[988]</a> bien instruictz,
+conversans en compaignies honnestes, ont par nature ung
+instinct et aguillon qui toujours les poulse à faitz vertueux, et
+retire de vice; lequel ilz nommoyent honneur.’</p>
+
+<p>This is that same faith in the goodness of human nature
+which inspired the men of the second half of the eighteenth
+century, and helped to prepare the way for the French
+Revolution. Among the Italians, too, each man appeals to
+this noble instinct within him, and though with regard to
+the people as a whole&mdash;chiefly in consequence of the national
+disasters&mdash;judgments of a more pessimistic sort became prevalent,
+the importance of this sense of honour must still be rated
+highly. If the boundless development of individuality, stronger
+than the will of the individual, be the work of a historical
+providence, not less so is the opposing force which then
+manifested itself in Italy. How often, and against what
+passionate attacks of selfishness it won the day, we cannot
+tell, and therefore no human judgment can estimate with
+certainty the absolute moral value of the nation.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>A force which we must constantly take into account in
+judging of the morality of the more highly-developed Italian<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_436" id="page_436"></a>{436}</span>
+of this period, is that of the imagination. It gives to his
+virtues and vices a peculiar colour, and under its influence his
+unbridled egoism shows itself in its most terrible shape.</p>
+
+<p>The force of his imagination explains, for example, the fact
+that he was the first gambler on a large scale in modern times.
+Pictures of future wealth and enjoyment rose in such life-like
+colours before his eyes, that he was ready to hazard everything
+to reach them. The Mohammedan nations would doubtless
+have anticipated him in this respect, had not the Koran, from
+the beginning, set up the prohibition against gambling as a
+chief safeguard of public morals, and directed the imagination
+of its followers to the search after buried treasures. In Italy,
+the passion for play reached an intensity which often threatened
+or altogether broke up the existence of the gambler. Florence
+had already, at the end of the fourteenth century, its Casanova&mdash;a
+certain Buonaccorso Pitti,<a name="FNanchor_989_989" id="FNanchor_989_989"></a><a href="#Footnote_989_989" class="fnanchor">[989]</a> who, in the course of his incessant
+journeys as merchant, political agent, diplomatist and
+professional gambler, won and lost sums so enormous that none
+but princes like the Dukes of Brabant, Bavaria, and Savoy,
+were able to compete with him. That great lottery-bank,
+which was called the Court of Rome, accustomed people to
+a need of excitement, which found its satisfaction in games
+of hazard during the intervals between one intrigue and
+another. We read, for example, how Franceschetto Cybò,
+in two games with the Cardinal Raffaello Riario, lost no
+less than 14,000 ducats, and afterwards complained to the
+Pope that his opponent had cheated him.<a name="FNanchor_990_990" id="FNanchor_990_990"></a><a href="#Footnote_990_990" class="fnanchor">[990]</a> Italy has since
+that time been the home of the lottery.</p>
+
+<p>It was to the imagination of the Italians that the peculiar
+character of their vengeance was due. The sense of justice
+was, indeed, one and the same throughout Europe, and any
+violation of it, so long as no punishment was inflicted, must
+have been felt in the same manner. But other nations, though
+they found it no easier to forgive, nevertheless forgot more
+easily, while the Italian imagination kept the picture of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_437" id="page_437"></a>{437}</span>
+wrong alive with frightful vividness.<a name="FNanchor_991_991" id="FNanchor_991_991"></a><a href="#Footnote_991_991" class="fnanchor">[991]</a> The fact that, according
+to the popular morality, the avenging of blood is a duty&mdash;a
+duty often performed in a way to make us shudder&mdash;gives to
+this passion a peculiar and still firmer basis. The government
+and the tribunals recognise its existence and justification, and
+only attempt to keep it within certain limits. Even among
+the peasantry, we read of Thyestean banquets and mutual
+assassination on the widest scale. Let us look at an instance.<a name="FNanchor_992_992" id="FNanchor_992_992"></a><a href="#Footnote_992_992" class="fnanchor">[992]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the district of Aquapendente three boys were watching
+cattle, and one of them said: ‘Let us find out the way how
+people are hung.’ While one was sitting on the shoulders of
+the other, and the third, after fastening the rope round the
+neck of the first, was tying it to an oak, a wolf came, and the
+two who were free ran away and left the other hanging.
+Afterwards they found him dead, and buried him. On the
+Sunday his father came to bring him bread, and one of the
+two confessed what had happened, and showed him the grave.
+The old man then killed him with a knife, cut him up, brought
+away the liver, and entertained the boy’s father with it at
+home. After dinner, he told him whose liver it was. Hereupon
+began a series of reciprocal murders between the two
+families, and within a month thirty-six persons were killed,
+women as well as men.</p>
+
+<p>And such ‘vendette,’ handed down from father to son, and
+extending to friends and distant relations, were not limited to
+the lower classes, but reached to the highest. The chronicles
+and novels of the period are full of such instances, especially of
+vengeance taken for the violation of women. The classic land
+for these feuds was Romagna, where the ‘vendetta’ was interwoven
+with intrigues and party divisions of every conceivable
+sort. The popular legends present an awful picture of the
+savagery into which this brave and energetic people had relapsed.
+We are told, for instance, of a nobleman at Ravenna,
+who had got all his enemies together in a tower, and might
+have burned them; instead of which he let them out, embraced<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_438" id="page_438"></a>{438}</span>
+them, and entertained them sumptuously; whereupon shame
+drove them mad, and they conspired against him.<a name="FNanchor_993_993" id="FNanchor_993_993"></a><a href="#Footnote_993_993" class="fnanchor">[993]</a> Pious and
+saintly monks exhorted unceasingly to reconciliation, but they
+can scarcely have done more than restrain to a certain extent
+the feuds already established; their influence hardly prevented
+the growth of new ones. The novelists sometimes describe to
+us this effect of religion&mdash;how sentiments of generosity and
+forgiveness were suddenly awakened, and then again paralysed
+by the force of what had once been done and could never be
+undone. The Pope himself was not always lucky as a peacemaker.
+‘Pope Paul II. desired that the quarrel between
+Antonio Caffarello and the family of Alberino should cease,
+and ordered Giovanni Alberino and Antonio Caffarello to come
+before him, and bade them kiss one another, and promised
+them a fine of 2,000 ducats in case they renewed this strife,
+and two days after Antonio was stabbed by the same Giacomo
+Alberino, son of Giovanni, who had wounded him once before;
+and the Pope was full of anger, and confiscated the goods of
+Alberino, and destroyed his houses, and banished father and
+son from Rome.’<a name="FNanchor_994_994" id="FNanchor_994_994"></a><a href="#Footnote_994_994" class="fnanchor">[994]</a> The oaths and ceremonies by which reconciled
+enemies attempted to guard themselves against a relapse,
+are sometimes utterly horrible. When the parties of the
+‘Nove’ and the ‘Popolari’ met and kissed one another by
+twos in the cathedral at Siena on Christmas Eve, 1494,<a name="FNanchor_995_995" id="FNanchor_995_995"></a><a href="#Footnote_995_995" class="fnanchor">[995]</a> an
+oath was read by which all salvation in time and eternity was
+denied to the future violator of the treaty&mdash;‘an oath more
+astonishing and dreadful than had ever yet been heard.’ The
+last consolations of religion in the hour of death were to turn
+to the damnation of the man who should break it. It is clear,
+however, that such a ceremony rather represents the despairing
+mood of the mediators than offers any real guarantee of
+peace, inasmuch as the truest reconciliation is just that one
+which has least need of it.</p>
+
+<p>This personal need of vengeance felt by the cultivated and
+highly placed Italian, resting on the solid basis of an analogous<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_439" id="page_439"></a>{439}</span>
+popular custom, naturally displays itself under a thousand different
+aspects, and receives the unqualified approval of public
+opinion, as reflected in the works of the novelists.<a name="FNanchor_996_996" id="FNanchor_996_996"></a><a href="#Footnote_996_996" class="fnanchor">[996]</a> All are at
+one on the point, that, in the case of those injuries and insults
+for which Italian justice offered no redress, and all the more in
+the case of those against which no human law can ever adequately
+provide, each man is free to take the law into his own
+hands. Only there must be art in the vengeance, and the
+satisfaction must be compounded of the material injury and
+moral humiliation of the offender. A mere brutal, clumsy
+triumph of force was held by public opinion to be no satisfaction.
+The whole man with his sense of fame and of scorn,
+not only his fist, must be victorious.</p>
+
+<p>The Italian of that time shrank, it is true, from no dissimulation
+in order to attain his ends, but was wholly free from
+hypocrisy in matters of principle. In these he attempted to
+deceive neither himself nor others. Accordingly, revenge was
+declared with perfect frankness to be a necessity of human
+nature. Cool-headed people declared that it was then most
+worthy of praise, when it was disengaged from passion, and
+worked simply from motives of expedience, ‘in order that
+other men may learn to leave us unharmed.’<a name="FNanchor_997_997" id="FNanchor_997_997"></a><a href="#Footnote_997_997" class="fnanchor">[997]</a> Yet such instances
+must have formed only a small minority in comparison
+with those in which passion sought an outlet. This sort of
+revenge differs clearly from the avenging of blood, which has
+been already spoken of; while the latter keeps more or less
+within the limits of retaliation&mdash;the ‘jus talionis’&mdash;the former
+necessarily goes much farther, not only requiring the sanction
+of the sense of justice, but craving admiration, and even striving
+to get the laugh on its own side.</p>
+
+<p>Here lies the reason why men were willing to wait so long
+for their revenge. A ‘bella vendetta’ demanded as a rule a
+combination of circumstances for which it was necessary to
+wait patiently. The gradual ripening of such opportunities
+is described by the novelists with heartfelt delight.</p>
+
+<p>There is no need to discuss the morality of actions in which<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_440" id="page_440"></a>{440}</span>
+plaintiff and judge are one and the same person. If this Italian
+thirst for vengeance is to be palliated at all, it must be by
+proving the existence of a corresponding national virtue,
+namely gratitude. The same force of imagination which retains
+and magnifies wrong once suffered, might be expected
+also to keep alive the memory of kindness received.<a name="FNanchor_998_998" id="FNanchor_998_998"></a><a href="#Footnote_998_998" class="fnanchor">[998]</a> It is not
+possible, however, to prove this with regard to the nation as a
+whole, though traces of it may be seen in the Italian character
+of to-day. The gratitude shown by the inferior classes for
+kind treatment, and the good memory of the upper for politeness
+in social life, are instances of this.</p>
+
+<p>This connexion between the imagination and the moral
+qualities of the Italian repeats itself continually. If, nevertheless,
+we find more cold calculation in cases where the
+Northerner rather follows his impulses, the reason is that individual
+development in Italy was not only more marked and
+earlier in point of time, but also far more frequent. Where
+this is the case in other countries, the results are also analogous.
+We find, for example, that the early emancipation of the young
+from domestic and paternal authority is common to North
+America with Italy. Later on, in the more generous natures,
+a tie of freer affection grows up between parents and children.</p>
+
+<p>It is in fact a matter of extreme difficulty to judge fairly
+of other nations in the sphere of character and feeling. In
+these respects a people may be developed highly, and yet in a
+manner so strange that a foreigner is utterly unable to understand
+it. Perhaps all the nations of the West are in this point
+equally favoured.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>But where the imagination has exercised the most powerful
+and despotic influence on morals is in the illicit intercourse of
+the two sexes. It is well known that prostitution was freely
+practised in the Middle Ages, before the appearance of syphilis.
+A discussion, however, on these questions does not belong to
+our present work. What seems characteristic of Italy at this<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_441" id="page_441"></a>{441}</span>
+time, is that here marriage and its rights were more often and
+more deliberately trampled under foot than anywhere else.
+The girls of the higher classes were carefully secluded, and of
+them we do not speak. All passion was directed to the married
+women.</p>
+
+<p>Under these circumstances it is remarkable that, so far as
+we know, there was no diminution in the number of marriages,
+and that family life by no means underwent that disorganisation
+which a similar state of things would have produced in
+the North. Men wished to live as they pleased, but by no
+means to renounce the family, even when they were not sure
+that it was all their own. Nor did the race sink, either physically
+or mentally, on this account; for that apparent intellectual
+decline which showed itself towards the middle of the
+sixteenth century may be certainly accounted for by political
+and ecclesiastical causes, even if we are not to assume that the
+circle of achievements possible to the Renaissance had been
+completed. Notwithstanding their profligacy, the Italians continued
+to be, physically and mentally, one of the healthiest
+and best-born populations in Europe,<a name="FNanchor_999_999" id="FNanchor_999_999"></a><a href="#Footnote_999_999" class="fnanchor">[999]</a> and have retained this
+position, with improved morals, down to our own time.</p>
+
+<p>When we come to look more closely at the ethics of love at
+the time of the Renaissance, we are struck by a remarkable
+contrast. The novelists and comic poets give us to understand
+that love consists only in sensual enjoyment, and that to win
+this, all means, tragic or comic, are not only permitted, but are
+interesting in proportion to their audacity and unscrupulousness.
+But if we turn to the best of the lyric poets and writers
+of dialogues, we find in them a deep and spiritual passion of
+the noblest kind, whose last and highest expression is a revival
+of the ancient belief in an original unity of souls in the Divine
+Being. And both modes of feeling were then genuine, and
+could co-exist in the same individual. It is not exactly a
+matter of glory, but it is a fact, that in the cultivated man of
+modern times, this sentiment can be not merely unconsciously
+present in both its highest and lowest stages, but may thus<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_442" id="page_442"></a>{442}</span>
+manifest itself openly, and even artistically. The modern
+man, like the man of antiquity, is in this respect too a microcosm,
+which the mediæval man was not and could not be.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with the morality of the novelists. They treat
+chiefly, as we have said, of married women, and consequently
+of adultery.</p>
+
+<p>The opinion mentioned above (<a href="#page_395">p. 395</a>) of the equality of the
+two sexes is of great importance in relation to this subject.
+The highly developed and cultivated woman disposes of herself
+with a freedom unknown in Northern countries; and her unfaithfulness
+does not break up her life in the same terrible
+manner, so long as no outward consequence follow from it.
+The husband’s claim on her fidelity has not that firm foundation
+which it acquires in the North through the poetry and
+passion of courtship and betrothal. After the briefest acquaintance
+with her future husband, the young wife quits
+the convent or the paternal roof to enter upon a world in
+which her character begins rapidly to develop. The rights of
+the husband are for this reason conditional, and even the man
+who regards them in the light of a ‘jus quaesitum’ thinks only
+of the outward conditions of the contract, not of the affections.
+The beautiful young wife of an old man sends back the
+presents and letters of a youthful lover, in the firm resolve
+to keep her honour (honesta). ‘But she rejoices in the love of
+the youth for the sake of his great excellence; and she perceives
+that a noble woman may love a man of merit without
+loss to her honour.’<a name="FNanchor_1000_1000" id="FNanchor_1000_1000"></a><a href="#Footnote_1000_1000" class="fnanchor">[1000]</a> But the way is short from such a distinction
+to a complete surrender.</p>
+
+<p>The latter seems indeed as good as justified, when there
+is unfaithfulness on the part of the husband. The woman,
+conscious of her own dignity, feels this not only as a pain, but
+also as a humiliation and deceit, and sets to work, often with
+the calmest consciousness of what she is about, to devise the
+vengeance which the husband deserves. Her tact must decide
+as to the measure of punishment which is suited to the particular
+case. The deepest wound, for example, may prepare
+the way for a reconciliation and a peaceful life in the future, if<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_443" id="page_443"></a>{443}</span>
+only it remain secret. The novelists, who themselves undergo
+such experiences or invent them according to the spirit of
+the age, are full of admiration when the vengeance is skilfully
+adapted to the particular case, in fact, when it is a work of
+art. As a matter of course, the husband never at bottom
+recognises this right of retaliation, and only submits to it from
+fear or prudence. Where these motives are absent, where his
+wife’s unfaithfulness exposes him or may expose him to the
+derision of outsiders, the affair becomes tragical, and not seldom
+ends in murder or other vengeance of a violent sort. It is
+characteristic of the real motive from which these deeds arise,
+that not only the husbands, but the brothers<a name="FNanchor_1001_1001" id="FNanchor_1001_1001"></a><a href="#Footnote_1001_1001" class="fnanchor">[1001]</a> and the father
+of the woman feel themselves not only justified in taking
+vengeance, but bound to take it. Jealousy, therefore, has
+nothing to do with the matter, moral reprobation but little;
+the real reason is the wish to spoil the triumph of others.
+‘Nowadays,’ says Bandello,<a name="FNanchor_1002_1002" id="FNanchor_1002_1002"></a><a href="#Footnote_1002_1002" class="fnanchor">[1002]</a> ‘we see a woman poison her
+husband to gratify her lusts, thinking that a widow may do
+whatever she desires. Another, fearing the discovery of an
+illicit amour, has her husband murdered by her lover. And
+though fathers, brothers, and husbands arise to extirpate the
+shame with poison, with the sword, and by every other means,
+women still continue to follow their passions, careless of their
+honour and their lives.’ Another time, in a milder strain, he
+exclaims: ‘Would that we were not daily forced to hear that
+one man has murdered his wife because he suspected her of
+infidelity; that another has killed his daughter, on account of
+a secret marriage; that a third has caused his sister to be
+murdered, because she would not marry as he wished! It is
+great cruelty that we claim the right to do whatever we list,
+and will not suffer women to do the same. If they do anything
+which does not please us, there we are at once with cords<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_444" id="page_444"></a>{444}</span>
+and daggers and poison. What folly it is of men to suppose
+their own and their house’s honour depends on the appetite
+of a woman!’ The tragedy in which such affairs commonly
+ended was so well known that the novelist looked on the
+threatened gallant as a dead man, even while he went about
+alive and merry. The physician and lute-player Antonio
+Bologna<a name="FNanchor_1003_1003" id="FNanchor_1003_1003"></a><a href="#Footnote_1003_1003" class="fnanchor">[1003]</a> had made a secret marriage with the widowed
+Duchess of Amalfi, of the house of Aragon. Soon afterwards
+her brother succeeded in securing both her and her children,
+and murdered them in a castle. Antonio, ignorant of their
+fate, and still cherishing the hope of seeing them again, was
+staying at Milan, closely watched by hired assassins, and one
+day in the society of Ippolita Sforza sang to the lute the story
+of his misfortunes. A friend of the house, Delio, ‘told the
+story up to this point to Scipione Attelano, and added that he
+would make it the subject of a novel, as he was sure that
+Antonio would be murdered.’ The manner in which this took
+place, almost under the eyes of Delio and Attelano, is thrillingly
+described by Bandello (i. 26).</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the novelists habitually show a sympathy for
+all the ingenious, comic, and cunning features which may
+happen to attend adultery. They describe with delight how
+the lover manages to hide himself in the house, all the means
+and devices by which he communicates with his mistress, the
+boxes with cushions and sweetmeats in which he can be hidden
+and carried out of danger. The deceived husband is described
+sometimes as a fool to be laughed at, sometimes as a blood-thirsty
+avenger of his honour; there is no third situation
+except when the woman is painted as wicked and cruel, and
+the husband or lover is the innocent victim. It may be remarked,
+however, that narratives of the latter kind are not
+strictly speaking novels, but rather warning examples taken
+from real life.<a name="FNanchor_1004_1004" id="FNanchor_1004_1004"></a><a href="#Footnote_1004_1004" class="fnanchor">[1004]</a></p>
+
+<p>When in the course of the sixteenth century Italian life fell
+more and more under Spanish influence, the violence of the
+means to which jealousy had recourse perhaps increased.
+But this new phase must be distinguished from the punish<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_445" id="page_445"></a>{445}</span>ment
+of infidelity which existed before, and which was
+founded in the spirit of the Renaissance itself. As the influence
+of Spain declined, these excesses of jealousy declined also,
+till towards the close of the seventeenth century they had
+wholly disappeared, and their place was taken by that indifference
+which regarded the ‘Cicisbeo’ as an indispensable
+figure in every household, and took no offence at one or two
+supernumerary lovers (‘Patiti’).</p>
+
+<p>But who can undertake to compare the vast sum of wickedness
+which all these facts imply, with what happened in other
+countries? Was the marriage-tie, for instance, really more
+sacred in France during the fifteenth century than in Italy?
+The ‘fabliaux’ and farces would lead us to doubt it, and rather
+incline us to think that unfaithfulness was equally common,
+though its tragic consequences were less frequent, because the
+individual was less developed and his claims were less consciously
+felt than in Italy. More evidence, however, in favour
+of the Germanic peoples lies in the fact of the social freedom
+enjoyed among them by girls and women, which impressed
+Italian travellers so pleasantly in England and in the Netherlands
+(<a href="#page_399">p. 399</a>, note 2). And yet we must not attach too much
+importance to this fact. Unfaithfulness was doubtless very
+frequent, and in certain cases led to a sanguinary vengeance.
+We have only to remember how the northern princes of
+that time dealt with their wives on the first suspicion of
+infidelity.</p>
+
+<p>But it was not merely the sensual desire, not merely the
+vulgar appetite of the ordinary man, which trespassed upon
+forbidden ground among the Italians of that day, but also the
+passion of the best and noblest; and this, not only because the
+unmarried girl did not appear in society, but also because the
+man, in proportion to the completeness of his own nature, felt
+himself most strongly attracted by the woman whom marriage
+had developed. These are the men who struck the loftiest
+notes of lyrical poetry, and who have attempted in their
+treatises and dialogues to give us an idealised image of the
+devouring passion&mdash;‘l’amor divino.’ When they complain of
+the cruelty of the winged god, they are not only thinking of
+the coyness or hard-heartedness of the beloved one, but also of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_446" id="page_446"></a>{446}</span>
+the unlawfulness of the passion itself. They seek to raise themselves
+above this painful consciousness by that spiritualisation of
+love which found a support in the Platonic doctrine of the soul,
+and of which Pietro Bembo is the most famous representative.
+His thoughts on this subject are set forth by himself in the
+third book of the ‘Asolani,’ and indirectly by Castiglione, who
+puts in his mouth the splendid speech with which the fourth
+book of the ‘Cortigiano’ concludes; neither of these writers
+was a stoic in his conduct, but at that time it meant something
+to be at once a famous and a good man, and this praise must
+be accorded to both of them; their contemporaries took what
+these men said to be a true expression of their feeling, and we
+have not the right to despise it as affectation. Those who take
+the trouble to study the speech in the ‘Cortigiano’ will see
+how poor an idea of it can be given by an extract. There
+were then living in Italy several distinguished women, who
+owed their celebrity chiefly to relations of this kind, such as
+Giulia Gonzaga, Veronica da Coreggio, and, above all, Vittoria
+Colonna. The land of profligates and scoffers respected these
+women and this sort of love&mdash;and what more can be said in
+their favour? We cannot tell how far vanity had to do with
+the matter, how far Vittoria was flattered to hear around her
+the sublimated utterances of hopeless love from the most
+famous men in Italy. If the thing was here and there a
+fashion, it was still no trifling praise for Vittoria that she, at
+least, never went out of fashion, and in her latest years produced
+the most profound impressions. It was long before other
+countries had anything similar to show.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>In the imagination then, which governed this people more
+than any other, lies one general reason why the course of every
+passion was violent, and why the means used for the gratification
+of passion were often criminal. There is a violence
+which cannot control itself because it is born of weakness;
+but in Italy what we find is the corruption of powerful
+natures. Sometimes this corruption assumes a colossal shape,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_447" id="page_447"></a>{447}</span>
+and crime seems to acquire almost a personal existence of
+its own.</p>
+
+<p>The restraints of which men were conscious were but few.
+Each individual, even among the lowest of the people, felt
+himself inwardly emancipated from the control of the State
+and its police, whose title to respect was illegitimate, and itself
+founded on violence; and no man believed any longer in the
+justice of the law. When a murder was committed, the sympathies
+of the people, before the circumstances of the case were
+known, ranged themselves instinctively on the side of the
+murderer.<a name="FNanchor_1005_1005" id="FNanchor_1005_1005"></a><a href="#Footnote_1005_1005" class="fnanchor">[1005]</a> A proud, manly bearing before and at the execution
+excited such admiration that the narrator often forgets to
+tell us for what offence the criminal was put to death.<a name="FNanchor_1006_1006" id="FNanchor_1006_1006"></a><a href="#Footnote_1006_1006" class="fnanchor">[1006]</a> But
+when we add to this inward contempt of law and to the countless
+grudges and enmities which called for satisfaction, the
+impunity which crime enjoyed during times of political disturbance,
+we can only wonder that the state and society were
+not utterly dissolved. Crises of this kind occurred at Naples
+during the transition from the Aragonese to the French and
+Spanish rule, and at Milan, on the repeated expulsions and
+returns of the Sforzas; at such times those men who have
+never in their hearts recognised the bonds of law and society,
+come forward and give free play to their instincts of murder
+and rapine. Let us take, by way of example, a picture drawn
+from a humbler sphere.</p>
+
+<p>When the Duchy of Milan was suffering from the disorders
+which followed the death of Giangaleazzo Sforza, about the
+year 1480 (pp. 40, 126), all safety came to an end in the
+provincial cities. This was the case in Parma,<a name="FNanchor_1007_1007" id="FNanchor_1007_1007"></a><a href="#Footnote_1007_1007" class="fnanchor">[1007]</a> where the
+Milanese Governor, terrified by threats of murder, and after
+vainly offering rewards for the discovery of the offenders,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_448" id="page_448"></a>{448}</span>
+consented to throw open the gaols and let loose the most
+abandoned criminals. Burglary, the demolition of houses,
+shameless offences against decency, public assassination and
+murders, especially of Jews, were events of everyday occurrence.
+At first the authors of these deeds prowled about
+singly, and masked; soon large gangs of armed men went to
+work every night without disguise. Threatening letters,
+satires, and scandalous jests circulated freely; and a sonnet in
+ridicule of the Government seems to have roused its indignation
+far more than the frightful condition of the city. In
+many churches the sacred vessels with the host were stolen,
+and this fact is characteristic of the temper which prompted
+these outrages. It is impossible to say what would happen
+now in any country of the world, if the government and police
+ceased to act, and yet hindered by their presence the establishment
+of a provisional authority; but what then occurred in
+Italy wears a character of its own, through the great share
+which personal hatred and revenge had in it. The impression,
+indeed, which Italy at this period makes on us is, that even in
+quiet times great crimes were commoner than in other countries.
+We may, it is true, be misled by the fact that we have
+far fuller details on such matters here than elsewhere, and that
+the same force of imagination, which gives a special character
+to crimes actually committed, causes much to be invented
+which never really happened. The amount of violence was
+perhaps as great elsewhere. It is hard to say for certain,
+whether in the year 1500 men were any safer, whether human
+life was after all better protected, in powerful, wealthy Germany,
+with its robber knights, extortionate beggars, and
+daring highwaymen. But one thing is certain, that premeditated
+crimes, committed professionally and for hire by third
+parties, occurred in Italy with great and appalling frequency.</p>
+
+<p>So far as regards brigandage, Italy, especially in the more
+fortunate provinces, such as Tuscany, was certainly not more,
+and probably less, troubled than the countries of the North.
+But the figures which do meet us are characteristic of the
+country. It would be hard, for instance, to find elsewhere the
+case of a priest, gradually driven by passion from one excess
+to another, till at last he came to head a band of robbers. That<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_449" id="page_449"></a>{449}</span>
+age offers us this example among others.<a name="FNanchor_1008_1008" id="FNanchor_1008_1008"></a><a href="#Footnote_1008_1008" class="fnanchor">[1008]</a> On August 12,
+1495, the priest Don Niccolò de’ Pelegati of Figarolo was shut
+up in an iron cage outside the tower of San Giuliano at Ferrara.
+He had twice celebrated his first mass; the first time he had
+the same day committed murder, but afterwards received absolution
+at Rome; he then killed four people and married two
+wives, with whom he travelled about. He afterwards took part
+in many assassinations, violated women, carried others away
+by force, plundered far and wide, and infested the territory of
+Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform, extorting food
+and shelter by every sort of violence. When we think of what
+all this implies, the mass of guilt on the head of this one man
+is something tremendous. The clergy and monks had many
+privileges and little supervision, and among them were doubtless
+plenty of murderers and other malefactors&mdash;but hardly a
+second Pelegati. It is another matter, though by no means
+creditable, when ruined characters sheltered themselves in the
+cowl in order to escape the arm of the law, like the corsair
+whom Massuccio knew in a convent at Naples.<a name="FNanchor_1009_1009" id="FNanchor_1009_1009"></a><a href="#Footnote_1009_1009" class="fnanchor">[1009]</a> What the real
+truth was with regard to Pope John XXIII. in this respect, is
+not known with certainty.<a name="FNanchor_1010_1010" id="FNanchor_1010_1010"></a><a href="#Footnote_1010_1010" class="fnanchor">[1010]</a></p>
+
+<p>The age of the famous brigand chief did not begin till later,
+in the seventeenth century, when the political strife of Guelph
+and Ghibelline, of Frenchman and Spaniard, no longer agitated
+the country. The robber then took the place of the partisan.</p>
+
+<p>In certain districts of Italy, where civilization had made
+little progress, the country people were disposed to murder any
+stranger who fell into their hands. This was especially the
+case in the more remote parts of the Kingdom of Naples, where<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_450" id="page_450"></a>{450}</span>
+the barbarism dated probably from the days of the Roman
+‘latifundia,’ and when the stranger and the enemy (‘hospes’
+and ‘hostis’) were in all good faith held to be one and the same.
+These people were far from being irreligious. A herdsman once
+appeared in great trouble at the confessional, avowing that,
+while making cheese during Lent, a few drops of milk had
+found their way into his mouth. The confessor, skilled in the
+customs of the country, discovered in the course of his examination
+that the penitent and his friends were in the practice of
+robbing and murdering travellers, but that, through the force
+of habit, this usage gave rise to no twinges of conscience within
+them.<a name="FNanchor_1011_1011" id="FNanchor_1011_1011"></a><a href="#Footnote_1011_1011" class="fnanchor">[1011]</a> We have already mentioned (<a href="#page_352">p. 352</a>, note 3) to what a
+degree of barbarism the peasants elsewhere could sink in times
+of political confusion.</p>
+
+<p>A worse symptom than brigandage of the morality of that
+time was the frequency of paid assassination. In that respect
+Naples was admitted to stand at the head of all the cities of
+Italy. ‘Nothing,’ says Pontano,<a name="FNanchor_1012_1012" id="FNanchor_1012_1012"></a><a href="#Footnote_1012_1012" class="fnanchor">[1012]</a> ‘is cheaper here than human
+life.’ But other districts could also show a terrible list of these
+crimes. It is hard, of course, to classify them according to the
+motives by which they were prompted, since political expediency,
+personal hatred, party hostility, fear, and revenge, all
+play into one another. It is no small honour to the Florentines,
+the most highly-developed people of Italy, that offences of this
+kind occurred more rarely among them than anywhere else,<a name="FNanchor_1013_1013" id="FNanchor_1013_1013"></a><a href="#Footnote_1013_1013" class="fnanchor">[1013]</a>
+perhaps because there was a justice at hand for legitimate
+grievances which was recognised by all, or because the higher
+culture of the individual gave him different views as to the
+right of men to interfere with the decrees of fate. In Florence,
+if anywhere, men were able to feel the incalculable con<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_451" id="page_451"></a>{451}</span>sequences
+of a deed of blood, and to understand how insecure
+the author of a so-called profitable crime is of any true and
+lasting gain. After the fall of Florentine liberty, assassination,
+especially by hired agents, seems to have rapidly increased,
+and continued till the government of Cosimo I. had attained
+such strength that the police<a name="FNanchor_1014_1014" id="FNanchor_1014_1014"></a><a href="#Footnote_1014_1014" class="fnanchor">[1014]</a> was at last able to repress it.</p>
+
+<p>Elsewhere in Italy paid crimes were probably more or less
+frequent in proportion to the number of powerful and solvent
+buyers. Impossible as it is to make any statistical estimate of
+their amount, yet if only a fraction of the deaths which public
+report attributed to violence were really murders, the crime
+must have been terribly frequent. The worst example of all
+was set by princes and governments, who without the faintest
+scruple reckoned murder as one of the instruments of their
+power. And this, without being in the same category with
+Cæsar Borgia. The Sforzas, the Aragonese monarchs, the
+Republic of Venice,<a name="FNanchor_1015_1015" id="FNanchor_1015_1015"></a><a href="#Footnote_1015_1015" class="fnanchor">[1015]</a> and later on, the agents of Charles V. resorted
+to it whenever it suited their purpose. The imagination
+of the people at last became so accustomed to facts of this
+kind, that the death of any powerful man was seldom or never
+attributed to natural causes.<a name="FNanchor_1016_1016" id="FNanchor_1016_1016"></a><a href="#Footnote_1016_1016" class="fnanchor">[1016]</a> There were certainly absurd
+notions current with regard to the effect of various poisons.
+There may be some truth in the story of that terrible white
+powder used by the Borgias, which did its work at the end
+of a definite period (<a href="#page_116">p. 116</a>), and it is possible that it was
+really a ‘velenum atterminatum’ which the Prince of Salerno
+handed to the Cardinal of Aragon, with the words: ‘In a few
+days you will die, because your father, King Ferrante, wished to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_452" id="page_452"></a>{452}</span>
+trample upon us all.’<a name="FNanchor_1017_1017" id="FNanchor_1017_1017"></a><a href="#Footnote_1017_1017" class="fnanchor">[1017]</a> But the poisoned letter which Caterina
+Riario sent to Pope Alexander VI.<a name="FNanchor_1018_1018" id="FNanchor_1018_1018"></a><a href="#Footnote_1018_1018" class="fnanchor">[1018]</a> would hardly have caused
+his death even if he had read it; and when Alfonso the Great
+was warned by his physicians not to read in the ‘Livy’ which
+Cosimo de’ Medici had presented to him, he told them with
+justice not to talk like fools.<a name="FNanchor_1019_1019" id="FNanchor_1019_1019"></a><a href="#Footnote_1019_1019" class="fnanchor">[1019]</a> Nor can that poison, with which
+the secretary of Piccinino wished to anoint the sedan-chair of
+Pius II.,<a name="FNanchor_1020_1020" id="FNanchor_1020_1020"></a><a href="#Footnote_1020_1020" class="fnanchor">[1020]</a> have affected any other organ than the imagination.
+The proportion which mineral and vegetable poisons bore to
+one another cannot be ascertained precisely. The poison with
+which the painter Rosso Fiorentino destroyed himself (1541)
+was evidently a powerful acid,<a name="FNanchor_1021_1021" id="FNanchor_1021_1021"></a><a href="#Footnote_1021_1021" class="fnanchor">[1021]</a> which it would have been impossible
+to administer to another person without his knowledge.
+The secret use of weapons, especially of the dagger, in
+the service of powerful individuals, was habitual in Milan,
+Naples, and other cities. Indeed, among the crowds of armed
+retainers who were necessary for the personal safety of the
+great, and who lived in idleness, it was natural that outbreaks
+of this mania for blood should from time to time occur. Many<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_453" id="page_453"></a>{453}</span>
+a deed of horror would never have been committed, had not
+the master known that he needed but to give a sign to one or
+other of his followers.</p>
+
+<p>Among the means used for the secret destruction of others&mdash;so
+far, that is, as the intention goes&mdash;we find magic,<a name="FNanchor_1022_1022" id="FNanchor_1022_1022"></a><a href="#Footnote_1022_1022" class="fnanchor">[1022]</a> practised,
+however, sparingly. Where ‘maleficii,’ ‘malie,’ and so forth,
+are mentioned, they appear rather as a means of heaping up
+additional terror on the head of some hated enemy. At the
+courts of France and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries, magic, practised with a view to the death of an
+opponent, plays a far more important part in Italy.</p>
+
+<p>In this country, finally, where individuality of every sort
+attained its highest development, we find instances of that
+ideal and absolute wickedness which delights in crimes for
+their own sake, and not as means to an end, or at any rate as
+means to ends for which our psychology has no measure.</p>
+
+<p>Among these appalling figures we may first notice certain
+of the ‘Condottieri,’<a name="FNanchor_1023_1023" id="FNanchor_1023_1023"></a><a href="#Footnote_1023_1023" class="fnanchor">[1023]</a> such as Braccio di Montone, Tiberto
+Brandolino, and that Werner von Urslingen whose silver hauberk
+bore the inscription: ‘The enemy of God, of pity and
+of mercy.’ This class of men offers us some of the earliest
+instances of criminals deliberately repudiating every moral
+restraint. Yet we shall be more reserved in our judgment of
+them when we remember that the worst part of their guilt&mdash;in
+the estimate of those who record it&mdash;lay in their defiance of
+spiritual threats and penalties, and that to this fact is due that
+air of horror with which they are represented as surrounded.
+In the case of Braccio, the hatred of the Church went so far
+that he was infuriated at the sight of monks at their psalms,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_454" id="page_454"></a>{454}</span>
+and had thrown them down from the top of a tower;<a name="FNanchor_1024_1024" id="FNanchor_1024_1024"></a><a href="#Footnote_1024_1024" class="fnanchor">[1024]</a> but at
+the same time ‘he was loyal to his soldiers and a great general.’
+As a rule, the crimes of the ‘Condottieri’ were committed for
+the sake of some definite advantage, and must be attributed to
+a position in which men could not fail to be demoralised. Even
+their apparently gratuitous cruelty had commonly a purpose,
+if it were only to strike terror. The barbarities of the House
+of Aragon, as we have seen, were mainly due to fear and to the
+desire for vengeance. The thirst for blood on its own account,
+the devilish delight in destruction, is most clearly exemplified
+in the case of the Spaniard Cæsar Borgia, whose cruelties were
+certainly out of all proportion to the end which he had in view
+(<a href="#page_114">p. 114</a> sqq.). In Sigismondo Malatesta, tyrant of Rimini
+(pp. 32, 228), the same disinterested love of evil may also be
+detected. It is not only the Court of Rome,<a name="FNanchor_1025_1025" id="FNanchor_1025_1025"></a><a href="#Footnote_1025_1025" class="fnanchor">[1025]</a> but the verdict of
+history, which convicts him of murder, rape, adultery, incest,
+sacrilege, perjury and treason, committed not once but often.
+The most shocking crime of all&mdash;the unnatural attempt on his
+own son Roberto, who frustrated it with his drawn dagger,<a name="FNanchor_1026_1026" id="FNanchor_1026_1026"></a><a href="#Footnote_1026_1026" class="fnanchor">[1026]</a>&mdash;may
+have been the result, not merely of moral corruption, but
+perhaps of some magical or astrological superstition. The
+same conjecture has been made to account for the rape of the
+Bishop of Fano<a name="FNanchor_1027_1027" id="FNanchor_1027_1027"></a><a href="#Footnote_1027_1027" class="fnanchor">[1027]</a> by Pierluigi Farnese of Parma, son of Paul
+III.</p>
+
+<p>If we now attempt to sum up the principal features in the
+Italian character of that time, as we know it from a study of
+the life of the upper classes, we shall obtain something like the
+following result. The fundamental vice of this character was
+at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive
+individualism. The individual first inwardly casts off the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_455" id="page_455"></a>{455}</span>
+authority of a state which, as a fact, is in most cases tyrannical
+and illegitimate, and what he thinks and does is, rightly or
+wrongly, now called treason. The sight of victorious egoism
+in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm.
+And, while thinking to restore his inward equilibrium, he falls,
+through the vengeance which he executes, into the hands of
+the powers of darkness. His love, too, turns mostly for satisfaction
+to another individuality equally developed, namely, to
+his neighbour’s wife. In face of all objective facts, of laws
+and restraints of whatever kind, he retains the feeling of his
+own sovereignty, and in each single instance forms his decision
+independently, according as honour or interest, passion or calculation,
+revenge or renunciation, gain the upper hand in his
+own mind.</p>
+
+<p>If therefore egoism in its wider as well as narrower sense is
+the root and fountain of all evil, the more highly developed
+Italian was for this reason more inclined to wickedness than
+the member of other nations of that time.</p>
+
+<p>But this individual development did not come upon him
+through any fault of his own, but rather through an historical
+necessity. It did not come upon him alone, but also, and
+chiefly by means of Italian culture, upon the other nations of
+Europe, and has constituted since then the higher atmosphere
+which they breathe. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but
+necessary; within it has grown up a modern standard of good
+and evil&mdash;a sense of moral responsibility&mdash;which is essentially
+different from that which was familiar to the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>But the Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first
+mighty surging of a new age. Through his gifts and his
+passions, he has become the most characteristic representative
+of all the heights and all the depths of his time. By the side
+of profound corruption appeared human personalities of the
+noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which shed upon
+the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor mediævalism
+either could or would bestow upon it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_456" id="page_456"></a>{456}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-6" id="CHAPTER_II-6"></a>CHAPTER II.<br /><br />
+<small>RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">T<small>HE</small> morality of a people stands in the closest connection with
+its consciousness of God, that is to say, with its firmer or
+weaker faith in the divine government of the world, whether
+this faith looks on the world as destined to happiness or to
+misery and speedy destruction.<a name="FNanchor_1028_1028" id="FNanchor_1028_1028"></a><a href="#Footnote_1028_1028" class="fnanchor">[1028]</a> The infidelity then prevalent
+in Italy is notorious, and whoever takes the trouble to look
+about for proofs, will find them by the hundred. Our present
+task, here as elsewhere, is to separate and discriminate; refraining
+from an absolute and final verdict.</p>
+
+<p>The belief in God at earlier times had its source and chief
+support in Christianity and the outward symbol of Christianity,
+the Church. When the Church became corrupt, men ought
+to have drawn a distinction, and kept their religion in spite
+of all. But this is more easily said than done. It is not every
+people which is calm enough, or dull enough, to tolerate a
+lasting contradiction between a principle and its outward expression.
+But history does not record a heavier responsibility
+than that which rests upon the decaying Church. She set up
+as absolute truth and by the most violent means, a doctrine
+which she had distorted to serve her own aggrandisement.
+Safe in the sense of her inviolability, she abandoned herself to
+the most scandalous profligacy, and, in order to maintain
+herself in this state, she levelled mortal blows against the
+conscience and the intellect of nations, and drove multitudes
+of the noblest spirits, whom she had inwardly estranged, into
+the arms of unbelief and despair.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_457" id="page_457"></a>{457}</span></p>
+
+<p>Here we are met by the question: Why did not Italy, intellectually
+so great, react more energetically against the
+hierarchy; why did she not accomplish a reformation like
+that which occurred in Germany, and accomplish it at an
+earlier date?</p>
+
+<p>A plausible answer has been given to this question. The
+Italian mind, we are told, never went further than the denial
+of the hierarchy, while the origin and the vigour of the German
+Reformation was due to its positive religious doctrines, most
+of all to the doctrines of justification by faith and of the
+inefficacy of good works.</p>
+
+<p>It is certain that these doctrines only worked upon Italy
+through Germany, and this not till the power of Spain was
+sufficiently great to root them out without difficulty, partly
+by itself and partly by means of the Papacy, and its instruments.<a name="FNanchor_1029_1029" id="FNanchor_1029_1029"></a><a href="#Footnote_1029_1029" class="fnanchor">[1029]</a>
+Nevertheless, in the earlier religious movements of
+Italy, from the Mystics of the thirteenth century down to
+Savonarola, there was a large amount of positive religious
+doctrine which, like the very definite Christianity of the
+Huguenots, failed to achieve success only because circumstances
+were against it. Mighty events like the Reformation
+elude, as respects their details, their outbreak and their development,
+the deductions of the philosophers, however clearly the
+necessity of them as a whole may be demonstrated. The
+movements of the human spirit, its sudden flashes, its expansions
+and its pauses, must for ever remain a mystery to our
+eyes, since we can but know this or that of the forces at work
+in it, never all of them together.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The feeling of the upper and middle classes in Italy with
+regard to the Church at the time when the Renaissance
+culminated, was compounded of deep and contemptuous aversion,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_458" id="page_458"></a>{458}</span>
+of acquiescence in the outward ecclesiastical customs
+which entered into daily life, and of a sense of dependence on
+sacraments and ceremonies. The great personal influence of
+religious preachers may be added as a fact characteristic of
+Italy.</p>
+
+<p>That hostility to the hierarchy, which displays itself more
+especially from the time of Dante onwards in Italian literature
+and history, has been fully treated by several writers. We
+have already (<a href="#page_223">p. 223</a>) said something of the attitude of public
+opinion with regard to the Papacy. Those who wish for the
+strongest evidence which the best authorities offer us, can find
+it in the famous passages of Macchiavelli’s ‘Discorsi,’ and in
+the unmutilated edition of Guicciardini. Outside the Roman
+Curia, some respect seems to have been felt for the best men
+among the bishops,<a name="FNanchor_1030_1030" id="FNanchor_1030_1030"></a><a href="#Footnote_1030_1030" class="fnanchor">[1030]</a> and for many of the parochial clergy. On
+the other hand, the mere holders of benefices, the canons, and
+the monks were held in almost universal suspicion, and were
+often the objects of the most scandalous aspersions, extending
+to the whole of their order.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that the monks were made the scapegoats
+for the whole clergy, for the reason that none but they could
+be ridiculed without danger.<a name="FNanchor_1031_1031" id="FNanchor_1031_1031"></a><a href="#Footnote_1031_1031" class="fnanchor">[1031]</a> But this is certainly incorrect.
+They are introduced so frequently in the novels and comedies,
+because these forms of literature need fixed and well-known
+types where the imagination of the reader can easily fill up an
+outline. Besides which, the novelists do not as a fact spare
+the secular clergy.<a name="FNanchor_1032_1032" id="FNanchor_1032_1032"></a><a href="#Footnote_1032_1032" class="fnanchor">[1032]</a> In the third place, we have abundant<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_459" id="page_459"></a>{459}</span>
+proof in the rest of Italian literature that men could speak
+boldly enough about the Papacy and the Court of Rome. In
+works of imagination we cannot expect to find criticism of this
+kind. Fourthly, the monks, when attacked, were sometimes
+able to take a terrible vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>It is nevertheless true that the monks were the most unpopular
+class of all, and that they were reckoned a living proof
+of the worthlessness of conventual life, of the whole ecclesiastical
+organisation, of the system of dogma, and of religion
+altogether, according as men pleased, rightly or wrongly, to
+draw their conclusions. We may also assume that Italy retained
+a clearer recollection of the origin of the two great
+mendicant orders than other countries, and had not forgotten
+that they were the chief agents in the reaction<a name="FNanchor_1033_1033" id="FNanchor_1033_1033"></a><a href="#Footnote_1033_1033" class="fnanchor">[1033]</a> against what
+is called the heresy of the thirteenth century, that is to say,
+against an early and vigorous movement of the modern Italian
+spirit. And that spiritual police which was permanently
+entrusted to the Dominicans certainly never excited any other
+feeling than secret hatred and contempt.</p>
+
+<p>After reading the ‘Decameron’ and the novels of Franco
+Sacchetti, we might imagine that the vocabulary of abuse
+directed at the monks and nuns was exhausted. But towards
+the time of the Reformation this abuse became still fiercer.
+To say nothing of Aretino, who in the ‘Ragionamenti’ uses
+conventual life merely as a pretext for giving free play to his
+own poisonous nature, we may quote one author as typical of
+the rest&mdash;Massuccio, in the first ten of his fifty novels. They
+are written in a tone of the deepest indignation, and with this
+purpose to make the indignation general; and are dedicated
+to men in the highest position, such as King Ferrante and
+Prince Alfonso of Naples. The stories are many of them old,
+and some of them familiar to readers of Boccaccio. But others
+reflect, with a frightful realism, the actual state of things at<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_460" id="page_460"></a>{460}</span>
+Naples. The way in which the priests befool and plunder the
+people by means of spurious miracles, added to their own
+scandalous lives, is enough to drive any thoughtful observer
+to despair. We read of the Minorite friars who travelled to
+collect alms: ‘They cheat, steal, and fornicate, and when they
+are at the end of their resources, they set up as saints and
+work miracles, one displaying the cloak of St. Vincent, another
+the handwriting<a name="FNanchor_1034_1034" id="FNanchor_1034_1034"></a><a href="#Footnote_1034_1034" class="fnanchor">[1034]</a> of St. Bernadino, a third the bridle of Capistrano’s
+donkey.’ Others ‘bring with them confederates who
+pretend to be blind or afflicted with some mortal disease, and
+after touching the hem of the monk’s cowl, or the reliques
+which he carried, are healed before the eyes of the multitude.
+All then shout “Misericordia,” the bells are rung, and the
+miracle is recorded in a solemn protocol.’ Or else a monk in
+the pulpit is denounced as a liar by another who stands below
+among the audience; the accuser is immediately possessed by
+the devil, and then healed by the preacher. The whole thing
+was a pre-arranged comedy, in which, however, the principal
+with his assistant made so much money that he was able to
+buy a bishopric from a Cardinal, on which the two confederates
+lived comfortably to the end of their days. Massuccio makes
+no great distinction between Franciscans and Dominicans,
+finding the one worth as much as the other. ‘And yet the
+foolish people lets itself be drawn into their hatreds and
+divisions, and quarrels about them in public places,<a name="FNanchor_1035_1035" id="FNanchor_1035_1035"></a><a href="#Footnote_1035_1035" class="fnanchor">[1035]</a> and calls
+itself “franceschino” or “domenichino.”&nbsp;’ The nuns are the
+exclusive property of the monks. Those of the former who
+have anything to do with the laity, are prosecuted and put in
+prison, while others are wedded in due form to the monks,
+with the accompaniments of mass, a marriage-contract, and a
+liberal indulgence in food and wine. ‘I myself,’ says the
+author, ‘have been there not once, but several times, and seen
+it all with my own eyes. The nuns afterwards bring forth
+pretty little monks or else use means to hinder that result.
+And if any one charges me with falsehood, let him search the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_461" id="page_461"></a>{461}</span>
+nunneries well, and he will find there as many little bones
+as in Bethlehem at Herod’s time.’<a name="FNanchor_1036_1036" id="FNanchor_1036_1036"></a><a href="#Footnote_1036_1036" class="fnanchor">[1036]</a> These things, and the like,
+are among the secrets of monastic life. The monks are by no
+means too strict with one another in the confessional, and
+impose a Paternoster in cases where they would refuse all
+absolution to a layman as if he were a heretic. ‘Therefore may
+the earth open and swallow up the wretches alive, with those
+who protect them!’ In another place Massuccio, speaking
+of the fact that the influence of the monks depends chiefly
+on the dread of another world, utters the following remarkable
+wish: ‘The best punishment for them would be for God to
+abolish Purgatory; they would then receive no more alms,
+and would be forced to go back to their spades.’</p>
+
+<p>If men were free to write, in the time of Ferrante, and to
+him, in this strain, the reason is perhaps to be found in the
+fact that the king himself had been incensed by a false miracle
+which had been palmed off on him.<a name="FNanchor_1037_1037" id="FNanchor_1037_1037"></a><a href="#Footnote_1037_1037" class="fnanchor">[1037]</a> An attempt had been
+made to urge him to a persecution of the Jews, like that carried
+out in Spain and imitated by the Popes,<a name="FNanchor_1038_1038" id="FNanchor_1038_1038"></a><a href="#Footnote_1038_1038" class="fnanchor">[1038]</a> by producing a tablet
+with an inscription bearing the name of St. Cataldus, said to
+have been buried at Tarentum, and afterwards dug up again.
+When he discovered the fraud, the monks defied him. He
+had also managed to detect and expose a pretended instance
+of fasting, as his father Alfonso had done before him.<a name="FNanchor_1039_1039" id="FNanchor_1039_1039"></a><a href="#Footnote_1039_1039" class="fnanchor">[1039]</a> The
+Court, certainly, was no accomplice in maintaining these blind
+superstitions.<a name="FNanchor_1040_1040" id="FNanchor_1040_1040"></a><a href="#Footnote_1040_1040" class="fnanchor">[1040]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_462" id="page_462"></a>{462}</span></p>
+
+<p>We have been quoting from an author who wrote in earnest,
+and who by no means stands alone in his judgment. All the
+Italian literature of that time is full of ridicule and invective
+aimed at the begging friars.<a name="FNanchor_1041_1041" id="FNanchor_1041_1041"></a><a href="#Footnote_1041_1041" class="fnanchor">[1041]</a> It can hardly have been doubted
+that the Renaissance would soon have destroyed these two
+Orders, had it not been for the German Reformation, and
+the Counter-Reformation which that provoked. Their saints
+and popular preachers could hardly have saved them. It
+would only have been necessary to come to an understanding
+at a favourable moment with a Pope like Leo X., who despised
+the Mendicant Orders. If the spirit of the age found them
+ridiculous or repulsive, they could no longer be anything but
+an embarrassment to the Church. And who can say what fate
+was in store for the Papacy itself, if the Reformation had not
+saved it?</p>
+
+<p>The influence which the Father Inquisitor of a Dominican
+monastery was able habitually to exercise in the city where it
+was situated, was in the latter part of the fifteenth century
+just considerable enough to hamper and irritate cultivated
+people, but not strong enough to extort any lasting fear or
+obedience.<a name="FNanchor_1042_1042" id="FNanchor_1042_1042"></a><a href="#Footnote_1042_1042" class="fnanchor">[1042]</a> It was no longer possible to punish men for their
+thoughts, as it once was (<a href="#page_290">p. 290</a> sqq.), and those whose tongues
+wagged most impudently against the clergy could easily keep
+clear of heretical doctrine. Except when some powerful party
+had an end to serve, as in the case of Savonarola, or when
+there was a question of the use of magical arts, as was often
+the case in the cities of North Italy, we seldom read at this
+time of men being burnt at the stake. The Inquisitors were
+in some instances satisfied with the most superficial retractation,
+in others it even happened that the victim was saved out
+of their hands on the way to the place of execution. In
+Bologna (1452) the priest Niccolò da Verona had been publicly<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_463" id="page_463"></a>{463}</span>
+degraded on a wooden scaffold in front of San Domenico as a
+wizard and profaner of the sacraments, and was about to be
+led away to the stake, when he was set free by a gang of
+armed men, sent by Achille Malvezzi, a noted friend of heretics
+and violator of nuns. The legate, Cardinal Bessarion, was
+only able to catch and hang one of the party; Malvezzi lived
+on in peace.<a name="FNanchor_1043_1043" id="FNanchor_1043_1043"></a><a href="#Footnote_1043_1043" class="fnanchor">[1043]</a></p>
+
+<p>It deserves to be noticed that the higher monastic orders&mdash;the
+Benedictines, with their many branches&mdash;were, notwithstanding
+their great wealth and easy lives, far less disliked
+than the mendicant friars. For ten novels which treat of
+‘frati,’ hardly one can be found in which a ‘monaco’ is the
+subject and the victim. It was no small advantage to this
+order that it was founded earlier, and not as an instrument of
+police, and that it did not interfere with private life. It contained
+men of learning, wit, and piety, but the average has
+been described by a member of it, Firenzuola,<a name="FNanchor_1044_1044" id="FNanchor_1044_1044"></a><a href="#Footnote_1044_1044" class="fnanchor">[1044]</a> who says:
+‘These well-fed gentlemen with the capacious cowls do not
+pass their time in barefooted journeys and in sermons, but sit
+in elegant slippers with their hands crossed over their paunches,
+in charming cells wainscotted with cyprus-wood. And when
+they are obliged to quit the house, they ride comfortably, as if
+for their amusement, on mules and sleek, quiet horses. They
+do not overstrain their minds with the study of many books,
+for fear lest knowledge might put the pride of Lucifer in the
+place of monkish simplicity.’</p>
+
+<p>Those who are familiar with the literature of the time, will
+see that we have only brought forward what is absolutely
+necessary for the understanding of the subject.<a name="FNanchor_1045_1045" id="FNanchor_1045_1045"></a><a href="#Footnote_1045_1045" class="fnanchor">[1045]</a> That the
+reputation attaching to the monks and the secular clergy must<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_464" id="page_464"></a>{464}</span>
+have shattered the faith of multitudes in all that is sacred is,
+of course obvious.</p>
+
+<p>And some of the judgments which we read are terrible; we
+will quote one of them in conclusion, which has been published
+only lately and is but little known. The historian Guicciardini,
+who was for many years in the service of the Medicean Popes
+says (1529) in his ‘Aphorisms’<a name="FNanchor_1046_1046" id="FNanchor_1046_1046"></a><a href="#Footnote_1046_1046" class="fnanchor">[1046]</a>: ‘No man is more disgusted
+than I am with the ambition, the avarice, and the profligacy
+of the priests, not only because each of these vices is hateful in
+itself, but because each and all of them are most unbecoming
+in those who declare themselves to be men in special relations
+with God, and also because they are vices so opposed to one
+another, that they can only co-exist in very singular natures.
+Nevertheless, my position at the Court of several Popes forced
+me to desire their greatness for the sake of my own interest.
+But, had it been for this, I should have loved Martin Luther as
+myself, not in order to free myself from the laws which Christianity,
+as generally understood and explained, lays upon us,
+but in order to see this swarm of scoundrels (‘questa caterva di
+scellerati’) put back into their proper place, so that they may
+be forced to live either without vices or without power.’<a name="FNanchor_1047_1047" id="FNanchor_1047_1047"></a><a href="#Footnote_1047_1047" class="fnanchor">[1047]</a></p>
+
+<p>The same Guicciardini is of opinion that we are in the dark
+as to all that is supernatural, that philosophers and theologians
+have nothing but nonsense to tell us about it, that miracles
+occur in every religion and prove the truth of none in particular,
+and that all of them may be explained as unknown phenomena
+of nature. The faith which moves mountains, then common
+among the followers of Savonarola, is mentioned by Guicciardini
+as a curious fact, but without any bitter remark.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Notwithstanding this hostile public opinion, the clergy and
+the monks had the great advantage that the people was used
+to them, and that their existence was interwoven with the
+everyday existence of all. This is the advantage which every
+old and powerful institution possesses. Everybody had some<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_465" id="page_465"></a>{465}</span>
+cowled or frocked relative, some prospect of assistance or future
+gain from the treasure of the Church; and in the centre of
+Italy stood the Court of Rome, where men sometimes became
+rich in a moment. Yet it must never be forgotten that all
+this did not hinder people from writing and speaking freely.
+The authors of the most scandalous satires were themselves
+mostly monks or beneficed priests. Poggio, who wrote the
+‘Facetiae,’ was a clergyman; Francesco Berni, the satirist,
+held a canonry; Teofilo Folengo, the author of the ‘Orlandino,’
+was a Benedictine, certainly by no means a faithful one;
+Matteo Bandello, who held up his own order to ridicule, was a
+Dominican, and nephew of a general of this order. Were they
+encouraged to write by the sense that they ran no risk? Or
+did they feel an inward need to clear themselves personally
+from the infamy which attached to their order? Or were they
+moved by that selfish pessimism which takes for its maxim, ‘it
+will last our time’? Perhaps all of these motives were more
+or less at work. In the case of Folengo, the unmistakable
+influence of Lutheranism must be added.<a name="FNanchor_1048_1048" id="FNanchor_1048_1048"></a><a href="#Footnote_1048_1048" class="fnanchor">[1048]</a></p>
+
+<p>The sense of dependence on rites and sacraments, which
+we have already touched upon in speaking of the Papacy
+(<a href="#page_103">p. 103</a>), is not surprising among that part of the people which
+still believed in the Church. Among those who were more
+emancipated, it testifies to the strength of youthful impressions,
+and to the magical force of traditional symbols. The universal
+desire of dying men for priestly absolution shows that the last
+remnants of the dread of hell had not, even in the case of one
+like Vitellozzo, been altogether extinguished. It would hardly
+be possible to find a more instructive instance than this. The
+doctrine taught by the Church of the ‘character indelibilis’ of
+the priesthood, independently of the personality of the priest,
+had so far borne fruit that it was possible to loathe the individual
+and still desire his spiritual gifts. It is true, nevertheless,
+that there were defiant natures like Galeotto of Mirandola,<a name="FNanchor_1049_1049" id="FNanchor_1049_1049"></a><a href="#Footnote_1049_1049" class="fnanchor">[1049]</a>
+who died unabsolved in 1499, after living for sixteen years
+under the ban of the Church. All this time the city lay under<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_466" id="page_466"></a>{466}</span>
+an interdict on his account, so that no mass was celebrated and
+no Christian burial took place.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>A splendid contrast to all this is offered by the power
+exercised over the nation by its great Preachers of Repentance.
+Other countries of Europe were from time to time moved by
+the words of saintly monks, but only superficially, in comparison
+with the periodical upheaval of the Italian conscience.
+The only man, in fact, who produced a similar effect in
+Germany during the fifteenth century,<a name="FNanchor_1050_1050" id="FNanchor_1050_1050"></a><a href="#Footnote_1050_1050" class="fnanchor">[1050]</a> was an Italian, born
+in the Abruzzi, named Giovanni Capistrano. Those natures
+which bear within them this religious vocation and this commanding
+earnestness, wore then in Northern countries an intuitive
+and mystical aspect. In the South they were practical
+and expansive, and shared in the national gift of language and
+oratorical skill. The North produced an ‘Imitation of Christ,’
+which worked silently, at first only within the walls of the
+monastery, but worked for the ages; the South produced men
+who made on their fellows a mighty but passing impression.</p>
+
+<p>This impression consisted chiefly in the awakening of the
+conscience. The sermons were moral exhortations, free from
+abstract notions and full of practical application, rendered more
+impressive by the saintly and ascetic character of the preacher,
+and by the miracles which, even against his will, the inflamed
+imagination of the people attributed to him.<a name="FNanchor_1051_1051" id="FNanchor_1051_1051"></a><a href="#Footnote_1051_1051" class="fnanchor">[1051]</a> The most
+powerful argument used was not the threat of Hell and Purgatory,
+but rather the living results of the ‘maledizione,’ the
+temporal ruin wrought on the individual by the curse which
+clings to wrong-doing. The grieving of Christ and the Saints
+has its consequences in this life. And only thus could men,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_467" id="page_467"></a>{467}</span>
+sunk in passion and guilt, be brought to repentance and
+amendment&mdash;which was the chief object of these sermons.</p>
+
+<p>Among these preachers were Bernadino da Siena, and his
+two pupils, Alberto da Sarteano and Jacopo della Marca,
+Giovanni Capistrano, Roberto da Lecce (<a href="#page_413">p. 413</a>), and finally,
+Girolamo Savonarola. No prejudice of the day was stronger
+than that against the mendicant friar, and this they overcame.
+They were criticised and ridiculed by a scornful humanism;<a name="FNanchor_1052_1052" id="FNanchor_1052_1052"></a><a href="#Footnote_1052_1052" class="fnanchor">[1052]</a>
+but when they raised their voices, no one gave heed to the
+humanists. The thing was no novelty, and the scoffing
+Florentines had already in the fourteenth century learned to
+caricature it whenever it appeared in the pulpit.<a name="FNanchor_1053_1053" id="FNanchor_1053_1053"></a><a href="#Footnote_1053_1053" class="fnanchor">[1053]</a> But no
+sooner did Savonarola come forward than he carried the people
+so triumphantly with him, that soon all their beloved art and
+culture melted away in the furnace which he lighted. Even
+the grossest profanation done to the cause by hypocritical
+monks, who got up an effect in the audience by means of confederates
+(<a href="#page_460">p. 460</a>), could not bring the thing itself into discredit.
+Men kept on laughing at the ordinary monkish sermons, with
+their spurious miracles and manufactured reliques;<a name="FNanchor_1054_1054" id="FNanchor_1054_1054"></a><a href="#Footnote_1054_1054" class="fnanchor">[1054]</a> but did
+not cease to honour the great and genuine prophets. These
+are a true Italian specialty of the fifteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>The Order&mdash;generally that of St. Francis, and more particularly
+the so-called Observantines&mdash;sent them out according as
+they were wanted. This was commonly the case when there
+was some important public or private feud in a city, or some
+alarming outbreak of violence, immorality, or disease. When<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_468" id="page_468"></a>{468}</span>
+once the reputation of a preacher was made, the cities were all
+anxious to hear him even without any special occasion. He
+went wherever his superiors sent him. A special form of this
+work was the preaching of a Crusade against the Turks;<a name="FNanchor_1055_1055" id="FNanchor_1055_1055"></a><a href="#Footnote_1055_1055" class="fnanchor">[1055]</a> but
+here we have to speak more particularly of the exhortations to
+repentance.</p>
+
+<p>The order of these, when they were treated methodically,
+seems to have followed the customary list of the deadly sins.
+The more pressing, however, the occasion is, the more directly
+does the preacher make for his main point. He begins perhaps
+in one of the great churches of the Order, or in the cathedral.
+Soon the largest piazza is too small for the crowds which
+throng from every side to hear him, and he himself can hardly
+move without risking his life.<a name="FNanchor_1056_1056" id="FNanchor_1056_1056"></a><a href="#Footnote_1056_1056" class="fnanchor">[1056]</a> The sermon is commonly
+followed by a great procession; but the first magistrates of the
+city, who take him in their midst, can hardly save him from
+the multitude of women who throng to kiss his hands and feet,
+and cut off fragments from his cowl.<a name="FNanchor_1057_1057" id="FNanchor_1057_1057"></a><a href="#Footnote_1057_1057" class="fnanchor">[1057]</a></p>
+
+<p>The most immediate consequences which follow from the
+preacher’s denunciations of usury, luxury, and scandalous
+fashions, are the opening of the gaols&mdash;which meant no more
+than the discharge of the poorer creditors&mdash;and the burning of
+various instruments of luxury and amusement, whether innocent
+or not. Among these are dice, cards, games of all kinds,
+written incantations,<a name="FNanchor_1058_1058" id="FNanchor_1058_1058"></a><a href="#Footnote_1058_1058" class="fnanchor">[1058]</a> masks, musical instruments, song-books,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_469" id="page_469"></a>{469}</span>
+false hair, and so forth. All these would then be gracefully
+arranged on a scaffold (‘talamo’), a figure of the devil
+fastened to the top, and then the whole set on fire (comp.
+p. 372).</p>
+
+<p>Then came the turn of the more hardened consciences. Men
+who had long never been near the confessional, now acknowledged
+their sins. Ill-gotten gains were restored, and insults
+which might have borne fruit in blood retracted. Orators like
+Bernadino of Siena<a name="FNanchor_1059_1059" id="FNanchor_1059_1059"></a><a href="#Footnote_1059_1059" class="fnanchor">[1059]</a> entered diligently into all the details of
+the daily life of men, and the moral laws which are involved
+in it. Few theologians nowadays would feel tempted to give
+a morning sermon ‘on contracts, restitutions, the public debt
+(“monte”), and the portioning of daughters,’ like that which
+he once delivered in the Cathedral at Florence. Imprudent
+speakers easily fell into the mistake of attacking particular
+classes, professions, or offices, with such energy that the enraged
+hearers proceeded to violence against those whom the
+preacher had denounced.<a name="FNanchor_1060_1060" id="FNanchor_1060_1060"></a><a href="#Footnote_1060_1060" class="fnanchor">[1060]</a> A sermon which Bernadino once
+preached in Rome (1424) had another consequence besides a
+bonfire of vanities on the Capitol: ‘after this,’<a name="FNanchor_1061_1061" id="FNanchor_1061_1061"></a><a href="#Footnote_1061_1061" class="fnanchor">[1061]</a> we read, ‘the
+witch Finicella was burnt, because by her diabolical arts she
+had killed many children and bewitched many other persons;
+and all Rome went to see the sight.’</p>
+
+<p>But the most important aim of the preacher was, as has been
+already said, to reconcile enemies and persuade them to give
+up thoughts of vengeance. Probably this end was seldom
+attained till towards the close of a course of sermons, when the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_470" id="page_470"></a>{470}</span>
+tide of penitence flooded the city, and when the air resounded<a name="FNanchor_1062_1062" id="FNanchor_1062_1062"></a><a href="#Footnote_1062_1062" class="fnanchor">[1062]</a>
+with the cry of the whole people: ‘Misericordia!’ Then
+followed those solemn embracings and treaties of peace, which
+even previous bloodshed on both sides could not hinder.
+Banished men were recalled to the city to take part in these
+sacred transactions. It appears that these ‘Paci’ were on the
+whole faithfully observed, even after the mood which prompted
+them was over; and then the memory of the monk was
+blessed from generation to generation. But there were sometimes
+terrible crises like those in the families Della Valle and
+Croce in Rome (1482), where even the great Roberto da Lecce
+raised his voice in vain.<a name="FNanchor_1063_1063" id="FNanchor_1063_1063"></a><a href="#Footnote_1063_1063" class="fnanchor">[1063]</a> Shortly before Holy Week he had
+preached to immense crowds in the square before the Minerva.
+But on the night before Maunday Thursday a terrible combat
+took place in front of the Palazzo della Valle, near the Ghetto.
+In the morning Pope Sixtus gave orders for its destruction, and
+then performed the customary ceremonies of the day. On
+Good Friday Roberto preached again with a crucifix in his
+hand; but he and his hearers could do nothing but weep.</p>
+
+<p>Violent natures, which had fallen into contradiction with
+themselves, often resolved to enter a convent, under the impression
+made by these men. Among such were not only
+brigands and criminals of every sort, but soldiers without
+employment.<a name="FNanchor_1064_1064" id="FNanchor_1064_1064"></a><a href="#Footnote_1064_1064" class="fnanchor">[1064]</a> This resolve was stimulated by their admiration
+of the holy man, and by the desire to copy at least his
+outward position.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_471" id="page_471"></a>{471}</span></p>
+
+<p>The concluding sermon is a general benediction, summed up
+in the words: ‘la pace sia con voi!’ Throngs of hearers
+accompany the preacher to the next city, and there listen for
+a second time to the whole course of sermons.</p>
+
+<p>The enormous influence exercised by these preachers made
+it important, both for the clergy and for the government, at
+least not to have them as opponents; one means to this end was
+to permit only monks<a name="FNanchor_1065_1065" id="FNanchor_1065_1065"></a><a href="#Footnote_1065_1065" class="fnanchor">[1065]</a> or priests who had received at all events
+the lesser consecration, to enter the pulpit, so that the Order
+or Corporation to which they belonged was, to some extent,
+responsible for them. But it was not easy to make the rule
+absolute, since the Church and pulpit had long been used as a
+means of publicity in many ways, judicial, educational, and
+others, and since even sermons were sometimes delivered by
+humanists and other laymen (<a href="#page_234">p. 234</a> sqq.). There existed,
+too, in Italy a dubious class of persons,<a name="FNanchor_1066_1066" id="FNanchor_1066_1066"></a><a href="#Footnote_1066_1066" class="fnanchor">[1066]</a> who were neither
+monks nor priests, and who yet had renounced the world&mdash;that
+is to say, the numerous class of hermits who appeared
+from time to time in the pulpit on their own authority, and
+often carried the people with them. A case of this kind
+occurred at Milan in 1516, after the second French conquest,
+certainly at a time when public order was much disturbed.
+A Tuscan hermit Hieronymus of Siena, possibly an adherent<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_472" id="page_472"></a>{472}</span>
+of Savonarola, maintained his place for months together in the
+pulpit of the Cathedral, denounced the hierarchy with great
+violence, caused a new chandelier and a new altar to be set up
+in the church, worked miracles, and only abandoned the field
+after a long and desperate struggle.<a name="FNanchor_1067_1067" id="FNanchor_1067_1067"></a><a href="#Footnote_1067_1067" class="fnanchor">[1067]</a> During the decades in
+which the fate of Italy was decided, the spirit of prophecy was
+unusually active, and nowhere where it displayed itself was it
+confined to any one particular class. We know with what a
+tone of true prophetic defiance the hermits came forward before
+the sack of Rome (<a href="#page_122">p. 122</a>). In default of any eloquence
+of their own, these men made use of messengers with symbols
+of one kind or another, like the ascetic near Siena (1429), who
+sent a ‘little hermit,’ that is a pupil, into the terrified city with
+a skull upon a pole, to which was attached a paper with a
+threatening text from the Bible.<a name="FNanchor_1068_1068" id="FNanchor_1068_1068"></a><a href="#Footnote_1068_1068" class="fnanchor">[1068]</a></p>
+
+<p>Nor did the monks themselves scruple to attack princes,
+governments, the clergy, or even their own order. A direct
+exhortation to overthrow a despotic house, like that uttered by
+Jacopo Bussolaro at Pavia in the fourteenth century,<a name="FNanchor_1069_1069" id="FNanchor_1069_1069"></a><a href="#Footnote_1069_1069" class="fnanchor">[1069]</a> hardly
+occurs again in the following period; but there is no want of
+courageous reproofs, addressed even to the Pope in his own
+chapel (<a href="#page_239">p. 239</a>, note 1), and of naïve political advice given in
+the presence of rulers who by no means held themselves in
+need of it.<a name="FNanchor_1070_1070" id="FNanchor_1070_1070"></a><a href="#Footnote_1070_1070" class="fnanchor">[1070]</a> In the Piazza del Castello at Milan, a blind
+preacher from the Incoronata&mdash;consequently an Augustinian&mdash;ventured
+in 1494 to exhort Ludovico Moro from the pulpit:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_473" id="page_473"></a>{473}</span>
+‘My lord, beware of showing the French the way, else you
+will repent it.’<a name="FNanchor_1071_1071" id="FNanchor_1071_1071"></a><a href="#Footnote_1071_1071" class="fnanchor">[1071]</a> There were further prophetic monks, who,
+without exactly preaching political sermons, drew such appalling
+pictures of the future that the hearers almost lost their
+senses. After the election of Leo X. in the year 1513, a whole
+association of these men, twelve Franciscan monks in all, journeyed
+through the various districts of Italy, of which one or
+other was assigned to each preacher. The one who appeared
+in Florence,<a name="FNanchor_1072_1072" id="FNanchor_1072_1072"></a><a href="#Footnote_1072_1072" class="fnanchor">[1072]</a> Fra Francesco di Montepulciano, struck terror
+into the whole people. The alarm was not diminished by the
+exaggerated reports of his prophecies which reached those who
+were too far off to hear him. After one of his sermons he suddenly
+died ‘of pain in the chest.’ The people thronged in such
+numbers to kiss the feet of the corpse that it had to be secretly
+buried in the night. But the newly awakened spirit of prophecy,
+which seized upon even women and peasants, could not
+be controlled without great difficulty. ‘In order to restore to
+the people their cheerful humour, the Medici&mdash;Giuliano, Leo’s
+brother, and Lorenzo&mdash;gave on St. John’s Day, 1514, those
+splendid festivals, tournaments, processions, and hunting-parties,
+which were attended by many distinguished persons from
+Rome, and among them, though disguised, by no less than six
+cardinals.’</p>
+
+<p>But the greatest of the prophets and apostles had been
+already burnt in Florence in the year 1498&mdash;Fra Giorolamo
+Savonarola of Ferrara. We must content ourselves with saying
+a few words respecting him.<a name="FNanchor_1073_1073" id="FNanchor_1073_1073"></a><a href="#Footnote_1073_1073" class="fnanchor">[1073]</a></p>
+
+<p>The instrument by means of which he transformed and ruled
+the city of Florence (1494-8) was his eloquence. Of this the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_474" id="page_474"></a>{474}</span>
+meagre reports that are left to us, which were taken down
+mostly on the spot, give us evidently a very imperfect notion.
+It was not that he possessed any striking outward advantages,
+for voice, accent, and rhetorical skill constituted precisely his
+weakest side; and those who required the preacher to be a
+stylist, went to his rival Fra Mariano da Genazzano. The eloquence
+of Savonarola was the expression of a lofty and commanding
+personality, the like of which was not seen again till
+the time of Luther. He himself held his own influence to be
+the result of a divine illumination, and could therefore, without
+presumption, assign a very high place to the office of the
+preacher, who, in the great hierarchy of spirits, occupies the
+next place below the angels.</p>
+
+<p>This man, whose nature seemed made of fire, worked another
+and greater miracle than any of his oratorical triumphs. His
+own Dominican monastery of San Marco, and then all the
+Dominican monasteries of Tuscany, became like-minded with
+himself, and undertook voluntarily the work of inward reform.
+When we reflect what the monasteries then were, and what
+measureless difficulty attends the least change where monks
+are concerned, we are doubly astonished at so complete a revolution.
+While the reform was still in progress large numbers
+of Savonarola’s followers entered the Order, and thereby
+greatly facilitated his plans. Sons of the first houses in
+Florence entered San Marco as novices.</p>
+
+<p>This reform of the Order in a particular province was the
+first step to a national Church, in which, had the reformer
+himself lived longer, it must infallibly have ended. Savonarola,
+indeed, desired the regeneration of the whole Church, and near
+the end of his career sent pressing exhortations to the great
+powers urging them to call together a Council. But in Tuscany
+his Order and party were the only organs of his spirit&mdash;the
+salt of the earth&mdash;while the neighbouring provinces remained
+in their old condition. Fancy and asceticism tended
+more and more to produce in him a state of mind to which
+Florence appeared as the scene of the kingdom of God upon
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>The prophecies, whose partial fulfilment conferred on Savonarola
+a supernatural credit, were the means by which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_475" id="page_475"></a>{475}</span>
+ever-active Italian imagination seized control of the soundest
+and most cautious natures. At first the Franciscans of the
+Osservanza, trusting in the reputation which had been bequeathed
+to them by San Bernadino of Siena, fancied that
+they could compete with the great Dominican. They put one
+of their own men into the Cathedral pulpit, and outbid the
+Jeremiads of Savonarola by still more terrible warnings, till
+Pietro de’Medici, who then still ruled over Florence, forced
+them both to be silent. Soon after, when Charles VIII. came
+into Italy and the Medici were expelled, as Savonarola had
+clearly foretold, he alone was believed in.</p>
+
+<p>It must be frankly confessed that he never judged his
+own premonitions and visions critically, as he did those of
+others. In the funeral oration on Pico della Mirandola, he
+deals somewhat harshly with his dead friend. Since Pico,
+notwithstanding an inner voice which came from God, would
+not enter the Order, he had himself prayed to God to chasten
+him for his disobedience. He certainly had not desired his
+death, and alms and prayers had obtained the favour that Pico’s
+soul was safe in Purgatory. With regard to a comforting
+vision which Pico had upon his sick-bed, in which the Virgin
+appeared and promised him that he should not die, Savonarola
+confessed that he had long regarded it as a deceit of the Devil,
+till it was revealed to him that the Madonna meant the second
+and eternal death.<a name="FNanchor_1074_1074" id="FNanchor_1074_1074"></a><a href="#Footnote_1074_1074" class="fnanchor">[1074]</a> If these things and the like are proofs of
+presumption, it must be admitted that this great soul at all
+events paid a bitter penalty for his fault. In his last days
+Savonarola seems to have recognised the vanity of his visions
+and prophecies. And yet enough inward peace was left him
+to enable him to meet death like a Christian. His partisans
+held to his doctrine and predictions for thirty years longer.</p>
+
+<p>He only undertook the reorganisation of the state for the
+reason that otherwise his enemies would have got the government
+into their own hands. It is unfair to judge him by the
+semi-democratic constitution (<a href="#page_083">p. 83</a>, note 1) of the beginning
+of the year 1495. Nor is it either better or worse than other
+Florentine constitutions.<a name="FNanchor_1075_1075" id="FNanchor_1075_1075"></a><a href="#Footnote_1075_1075" class="fnanchor">[1075]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_476" id="page_476"></a>{476}</span></p>
+
+<p>He was at bottom the most unsuitable man who could be
+found for such a work. His ideal was a theocracy, in which
+all men were to bow in blessed humility before the Unseen,
+and all conflicts of passion were not even to be able to arise.
+His whole mind is written in that inscription on the Palazzo
+della Signoria, the substance of which was his maxim<a name="FNanchor_1076_1076" id="FNanchor_1076_1076"></a><a href="#Footnote_1076_1076" class="fnanchor">[1076]</a> as early
+as 1495, and which was solemnly renewed by his partisans in
+1527: ‘Jesus Christus Rex populi Florentini S. P. Q. decreto
+creatus.’ He stood in no more relation to mundane affairs and
+their actual conditions than any other inhabitant of a monastery.
+Man, according to him, has only to attend to those
+things which make directly for his salvation.</p>
+
+<p>This temper comes out clearly in his opinions on ancient
+literature: ‘The only good thing which we owe to Plato and
+Aristotle, is that they brought forward many arguments which
+we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers
+are now in Hell. An old woman knows more about
+the Faith than Plato. It would be good for religion if many
+books that seem useful were destroyed. When there were not
+so many books and not so many arguments (“ragioni naturali”)
+and disputes, religion grew more quickly than it has done since.’
+He wished to limit the classical instruction of the schools to
+Homer, Virgil, and Cicero, and to supply the rest from Jerome
+and Augustine. Not only Ovid and Catullus, but Terence and
+Tibullus, were to be banished. This may be no more than the
+expression of a nervous morality, but elsewhere in a special
+work he admits that science as a whole is harmful. He holds
+that only a few people should have to do with it, in order that
+the tradition of human knowledge may not perish, and particularly
+that there may be no want of intellectual athletes to
+confute the sophisms of the heretics. For all others, grammar,
+morals, and religious teaching (‘litterae sacrae’) suffice. Culture
+and education would thus return wholly into the charge
+of the monks, and as, in his opinion, the ‘most learned and the
+most pious’ are to rule over the states and empires, these rulers<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_477" id="page_477"></a>{477}</span>
+would also be monks. Whether he really foresaw this conclusion,
+we need not inquire.</p>
+
+<p>A more childish method of reasoning cannot be imagined.
+The simple reflection that the new-born antiquity and the
+boundless enlargement of human thought and knowledge
+which was due to it, might give splendid confirmation to a
+religion able to adapt itself thereto, seems never even to have
+occurred to the good man. He wanted to forbid what he could
+not deal with by any other means. In fact, he was anything
+but liberal, and was ready, for example, to send the astrologers
+to the same stake at which he afterwards himself died.<a name="FNanchor_1077_1077" id="FNanchor_1077_1077"></a><a href="#Footnote_1077_1077" class="fnanchor">[1077]</a></p>
+
+<p>How mighty must have been the soul which dwelt side by
+side with this narrow intellect! And what a flame must have
+glowed within him before he could constrain the Florentines,
+possessed as they were by the passion for culture, to surrender
+themselves to a man who could thus reason!</p>
+
+<p>How much of their heart and their worldliness they were
+ready to sacrifice for his sake is shown by those famous bonfires
+by the side of which all the ‘talami’ of Bernadino da Siena
+and others were certainly of small account.</p>
+
+<p>All this could not, however, be effected without the agency
+of a tyrannical police. He did not shrink from the most vexatious
+interferences with the much-prized freedom of Italian
+private life, using the espionage of servants on their masters
+as a means of carrying out his moral reforms. That transformation
+of public and private life which the iron Calvin was but
+just able to effect at Geneva with the aid of a permanent state
+of siege necessarily proved impossible at Florence, and the attempt
+only served to drive the enemies of Savonarola to a
+more implacable hostility. Among his most unpopular measures
+may be mentioned those organised parties of boys, who
+forced their way into the houses and laid violent hands on any
+objects which seemed suitable for the bonfire. As it happened
+that they were sometimes sent away with a beating, they
+were afterwards attended, in order to keep up the figment of
+a pious ‘rising generation,’ by a body-guard of grown-up
+persons.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_478" id="page_478"></a>{478}</span></p>
+
+<p>On the last day of the Carnival in the year 1497, and on the
+same day the year after, the great ‘Auto da Fé’ took place on
+the Piazza della Signoria. In the centre of it rose a great
+pyramidal flight of stairs like the ‘rogus’ on which the Roman
+Emperors were commonly burned. On the lowest tier were
+arranged false beards, masks, and carnival disguises; above
+came volumes of the Latin and Italian poets, among others
+Boccaccio, the ‘Morgante’ of Pulci, and Petrarch, partly in
+the form of valuable printed parchments and illuminated
+manuscripts; then women’s ornaments and toilette articles,
+scents, mirrors, veils, and false hair; higher up, lutes, harps,
+chess-boards, playing-cards; and finally, on the two uppermost
+tiers, paintings only, especially of female beauties, partly fancy-pictures,
+bearing the classical names of Lucretia, Cleopatra,
+or Faustina, partly portraits of the beautiful Bencina, Lena
+Morella, Bina, and Maria de’Lenzi; all the pictures of Bartolommeo
+della Porta, who brought them of his own accord;
+and, as it seems, some female heads&mdash;masterpieces of ancient
+sculptors. On the first occasion a Venetian merchant who
+happened to be present offered the Signoria 22,000 gold florins
+for the objects on the pyramid; but the only answer he received
+was that his portrait, too, was taken, and burned along
+with the rest. When the pile was lighted, the Signoria appeared
+on the balcony, and the air echoed with song, the sound
+of trumpets, and the pealing of bells. The people then adjourned
+to the Piazza di San Marco, where they danced round
+in three concentric circles. The innermost was composed of
+monks of the monastery, alternating with boys, dressed as
+angels; then came young laymen and ecclesiastics; and on
+the outside old men, citizens, and priests, the latter crowned
+with wreaths of olive.<a name="FNanchor_1078_1078" id="FNanchor_1078_1078"></a><a href="#Footnote_1078_1078" class="fnanchor">[1078]</a></p>
+
+<p>All the ridicule of his victorious enemies, who in truth had
+no lack of justification or of talent for ridicule, was unable to
+discredit the memory of Savonarola. The more tragic the
+fortunes of Italy became, the brighter grew the halo which in
+the recollection of the survivors surrounded the figure of the
+great monk and prophet. Though his predictions may not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_479" id="page_479"></a>{479}</span>
+have been confirmed in detail, the great and general calamity
+which he foretold was fulfilled with appalling truth.</p>
+
+<p>Great, however, as the influence of all these preachers may
+have been, and brilliantly as Savonarola justified the claim of
+the monks to this office,<a name="FNanchor_1079_1079" id="FNanchor_1079_1079"></a><a href="#Footnote_1079_1079" class="fnanchor">[1079]</a> nevertheless the order as a whole
+could not escape the contempt and condemnation of the people.
+Italy showed that she could give her enthusiasm only to
+individuals.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>If, apart from all that concerns the priests and the monks,
+we attempt to measure the strength of the old faith, it will be
+found great or small according to the light in which it is considered.
+We have spoken already of the need felt for the
+Sacraments as something indispensable (pp. 103, 464). Let
+us now glance for a moment at the position of faith and
+worship in daily life. Both were determined partly by the
+habits of the people and partly by the policy and example of
+the rulers.</p>
+
+<p>All that has to do with penitence and the attainment of
+salvation by means of good works was in much the same stage
+of development or corruption as in the North of Europe, both
+among the peasantry and among the poorer inhabitants of the
+cities. The instructed classes were here and there influenced
+by the same motives. Those sides of popular Catholicism
+which had their origin in the old pagan ways of addressing,
+rewarding, and reconciling the gods have fixed themselves
+ineradicably in the consciousness of the people. The eighth
+eclogue of Battista Mantovano,<a name="FNanchor_1080_1080" id="FNanchor_1080_1080"></a><a href="#Footnote_1080_1080" class="fnanchor">[1080]</a> which has been already quoted
+elsewhere, contains the prayer of a peasant to the Madonna, in
+which she is called upon as the special patroness of all rustic
+and agricultural interests. And what conceptions they were
+which the people formed of their protectress in heaven! What
+was in the mind of the Florentine woman<a name="FNanchor_1081_1081" id="FNanchor_1081_1081"></a><a href="#Footnote_1081_1081" class="fnanchor">[1081]</a> who gave ‘ex voto’<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_480" id="page_480"></a>{480}</span>
+a keg of wax to the Annunziata, because her lover, a monk,
+had gradually emptied a barrel of wine without her absent
+husband finding it out! Then, too, as still in our own days,
+different departments of human life were presided over by
+their respective patrons. The attempt has often been made
+to explain a number of the commonest rites of the Catholic
+Church as remnants of pagan ceremonies, and no one doubts
+that many local and popular usages, which are associated with
+religious festivals, are forgotten fragments of the old pre-christian
+faiths of Europe. In Italy, on the contrary, we find
+instances in which the affiliation of the new faith on the old
+seems consciously recognised. So, for example, the custom of
+setting out food for the dead four days before the feast of the
+Chair of St. Peter, that is to say, on February 18, the date of
+the ancient Feralia.<a name="FNanchor_1082_1082" id="FNanchor_1082_1082"></a><a href="#Footnote_1082_1082" class="fnanchor">[1082]</a> Many other practices of this kind may
+then have prevailed and have since then been extirpated.
+Perhaps the paradox is only apparent if we say that the
+popular faith in Italy had a solid foundation just in proportion
+as it was pagan.</p>
+
+<p>The extent to which this form of belief prevailed in the
+upper classes can to a certain point be shown in detail. It had,
+as we have said in speaking of the influence of the clergy, the
+power of custom and early impressions on its side. The love
+for ecclesiastical pomp and display helped to confirm it, and
+now and then there came one of those epidemics of revivalism,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_481" id="page_481"></a>{481}</span>
+which few even among the scoffers and the sceptics were able
+to withstand.</p>
+
+<p>But in questions of this kind it is perilous to grasp too hastily
+at absolute results. We might fancy, for example, that the
+feeling of educated men towards the reliques of the saints
+would be a key by which some chambers of their religious consciousness
+might be opened. And in fact, some difference of
+degree may be demonstrable, though by no means as clearly
+as might be wished. The Government of Venice in the fifteenth
+century seems to have fully shared in the reverence felt
+throughout the rest of Europe for the remains of the bodies
+of the saints (<a href="#page_072">p. 72</a>). Even strangers who lived in Venice
+found it well to adapt themselves to this superstition.<a name="FNanchor_1083_1083" id="FNanchor_1083_1083"></a><a href="#Footnote_1083_1083" class="fnanchor">[1083]</a> If we
+can judge of scholarly Padua from the testimony of its topographer
+Michele Savonarola (<a href="#page_145">p. 145</a>), things must have been
+much the same there. With a mixture of pride and pious awe,
+Michele tells us how in times of great danger the saints were
+heard to sigh at night along the streets of the city, how the
+hair and nails on the corpse of a holy nun in Santa Chiara
+kept on continually growing, and how the same corpse, when
+any disaster was impending, used to make a noise and lift up
+the arms.<a name="FNanchor_1084_1084" id="FNanchor_1084_1084"></a><a href="#Footnote_1084_1084" class="fnanchor">[1084]</a> When he sets to work to describe the chapel of
+St. Anthony in the Santo, the writer loses himself in ejaculations
+and fantastic dreams. In Milan the people at least
+showed a fanatical devotion to relics; and when once, in the
+year 1517, the monks of San Simpliciano were careless enough
+to expose six holy corpses during certain alterations of the
+high altar, which event was followed by heavy floods of rain,
+the people<a name="FNanchor_1085_1085" id="FNanchor_1085_1085"></a><a href="#Footnote_1085_1085" class="fnanchor">[1085]</a> attributed the visitation to this sacrilege, and gave
+the monks a sound beating whenever they met them in the
+street. In other parts of Italy, and even in the case of the
+Popes themselves, the sincerity of this feeling is much more
+dubious, though here, too, a positive conclusion is hardly attainable.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_482" id="page_482"></a>{482}</span>
+It is well known amid what general enthusiasm
+Pius II. solemnly deposited the head of the Apostle Andrew,
+which had been brought from Greece, and then from Santa
+Maura, in the Church of St. Peter (1462); but we gather from
+his own narrative that he only did it from a kind of shame,
+as so many princes were competing for the relic. It was not
+till afterwards that the idea struck him of making Rome the
+common refuge for all the remains of the saints which had
+been driven from their own churches.<a name="FNanchor_1086_1086" id="FNanchor_1086_1086"></a><a href="#Footnote_1086_1086" class="fnanchor">[1086]</a> Under Sixtus IV. the
+population of the city was still more zealous in this cause than
+the Pope himself, and the magistracy (1483) complained bitterly
+that Sixtus had sent to Louis XI., the dying king of France,
+some specimens of the Lateran relics.<a name="FNanchor_1087_1087" id="FNanchor_1087_1087"></a><a href="#Footnote_1087_1087" class="fnanchor">[1087]</a> A courageous voice
+was raised about this time at Bologna, advising the sale of the
+skull of St. Dominic to the king of Spain, and the application
+of the money to some useful public object.<a name="FNanchor_1088_1088" id="FNanchor_1088_1088"></a><a href="#Footnote_1088_1088" class="fnanchor">[1088]</a> But those who
+had the least reverence of all for the relics were the Florentines.
+Between the decision to honour their saint S. Zanobi
+with a new sarcophagus and the final execution of the project
+by Ghiberti nineteen years elapsed (1409-28), and then it only
+happened by chance, because the master had executed a smaller
+order of the same kind with great skill.<a name="FNanchor_1089_1089" id="FNanchor_1089_1089"></a><a href="#Footnote_1089_1089" class="fnanchor">[1089]</a></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps through being tricked by a cunning Neapolitan
+abbess (1352), who sent them a spurious arm of the patroness
+of the Cathedral, Santa Reparata, made of wood and plaster,
+they began to get tired of relics.<a name="FNanchor_1090_1090" id="FNanchor_1090_1090"></a><a href="#Footnote_1090_1090" class="fnanchor">[1090]</a> Or perhaps it would be
+truer to say that their æsthetic sense turned them away in
+disgust from dismembered corpses and mouldy clothes. Or<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_483" id="page_483"></a>{483}</span>
+perhaps their feeling was rather due to that sense for glory
+which thought Dante and Petrarch worthier of a splendid
+grave than all the twelve apostles put together. It is probable
+that throughout Italy, apart from Venice and from Rome, the
+condition of which latter city was exceptional, the worship
+of relics had been long giving way to the adoration of the
+Madonna,<a name="FNanchor_1091_1091" id="FNanchor_1091_1091"></a><a href="#Footnote_1091_1091" class="fnanchor">[1091]</a> at all events to a greater extent than elsewhere in
+Europe; and in this fact lies indirect evidence of an early
+development of the æsthetic sense.</p>
+
+<p>It may be questioned whether in the North, where the
+vastest cathedrals are nearly all dedicated to Our Lady, and
+where an extensive branch of Latin and indigenous poetry
+sang the praises of the Mother of God, a greater devotion to
+her was possible. In Italy, however, the number of miraculous
+pictures of the Virgin was far greater, and the part they played
+in the daily life of the people much more important. Every
+town of any size contained a quantity of them, from the
+ancient, or ostensibly ancient, paintings by St. Luke, down to
+the works of contemporaries, who not seldom lived to see the
+miracles wrought by their own handiwork. The work of art
+was in these cases by no means as harmless as Battista Mantovano<a name="FNanchor_1092_1092" id="FNanchor_1092_1092"></a><a href="#Footnote_1092_1092" class="fnanchor">[1092]</a>
+thinks; sometimes it suddenly acquired a magical virtue.
+The popular craving for the miraculous, especially strong in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_484" id="page_484"></a>{484}</span>
+women, may have been fully satisfied by these pictures, and
+for this reason the relics been less regarded. It cannot be
+said with certainty how far the respect for genuine relics
+suffered from the ridicule which the novelists aimed at the
+spurious.<a name="FNanchor_1093_1093" id="FNanchor_1093_1093"></a><a href="#Footnote_1093_1093" class="fnanchor">[1093]</a></p>
+
+<p>The attitude of the educated classes towards Mariolatry is
+more clearly recognisable than towards the worship of images.
+One cannot but be struck with the fact that in Italian literature
+Dante’s ‘Paradise’<a name="FNanchor_1094_1094" id="FNanchor_1094_1094"></a><a href="#Footnote_1094_1094" class="fnanchor">[1094]</a> is the last poem in honour of the
+Virgin, while among the people hymns in her praise have been
+constantly produced down to our own day. The names of
+Sannazaro and Sabellico<a name="FNanchor_1095_1095" id="FNanchor_1095_1095"></a><a href="#Footnote_1095_1095" class="fnanchor">[1095]</a> and other writers of Latin poems
+prove little on the other side, since the object with which they
+wrote was chiefly literary. The poems written in Italian in
+the fifteenth<a name="FNanchor_1096_1096" id="FNanchor_1096_1096"></a><a href="#Footnote_1096_1096" class="fnanchor">[1096]</a> and at the beginning of the sixteenth centuries,
+in which we meet with genuine religious feeling, such as the
+hymns of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the sonnets of Vittoria
+Colonna and of Michelangelo, might have been just as well
+composed by Protestants. Besides the lyrical expression of
+faith in God, we chiefly notice in them the sense of sin, the
+consciousness of deliverance through the death of Christ, the
+longing for a better world. The intercession of the Mother of
+God is only mentioned by the way.<a name="FNanchor_1097_1097" id="FNanchor_1097_1097"></a><a href="#Footnote_1097_1097" class="fnanchor">[1097]</a> The same phenomenon
+is repeated in the classical literature of the French at the time
+of Louis XIV. Not till the time of the Counter-Reformation<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_485" id="page_485"></a>{485}</span>
+did Mariolatry reappear in the higher Italian poetry. Meanwhile
+the plastic arts had certainly done their utmost to glorify
+the Madonna. It may be added that the worship of the saints
+among the educated classes often took an essentially pagan
+form (<a href="#page_260">p. 260</a>).</p>
+
+<p>We might thus critically examine the various sides of Italian
+Catholicism at this period, and so establish with a certain
+degree of probability the attitude of the instructed classes
+toward popular faith. Yet an absolute and positive result
+cannot be reached. We meet with contrasts hard to explain.
+While architects, painters, and sculptors were working with
+restless activity in and for the churches, we hear at the beginning
+of the sixteenth century the bitterest complaints of the
+neglect of public worship and of these churches themselves.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Templa ruunt, passim sordent altaria, cultus<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Paulatim divinus abit.<a name="FNanchor_1098_1098" id="FNanchor_1098_1098"></a><a href="#Footnote_1098_1098" class="fnanchor">[1098]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is well known how Luther was scandalised by the irreverence
+with which the priests in Rome said Mass. And at
+the same time the feasts of the Church were celebrated with
+a taste and magnificence of which Northern countries had no
+conception. It looks as if this most imaginative of nations
+was easily tempted to neglect every-day things, and as easily
+captivated by anything extraordinary.</p>
+
+<p>It is to this excess of imagination that we must attribute
+the epidemic religious revivals, upon which we shall again say
+a few words. They must be clearly distinguished from the
+excitement called forth by the great preachers. They were
+rather due to general public calamities, or to the dread of
+such.</p>
+
+<p>In the Middle Ages all Europe was from time to time flooded
+by these great tides, which carried away whole peoples in their
+waves. The Crusades and the Flagellant revival are instances.
+Italy took part in both of these movements. The first great
+companies of Flagellants appeared, immediately after the fall
+of Ezzelino and his house, in the neighbourhood of the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_486" id="page_486"></a>{486}</span>
+Perugia<a name="FNanchor_1099_1099" id="FNanchor_1099_1099"></a><a href="#Footnote_1099_1099" class="fnanchor">[1099]</a> which has been already spoken of (<a href="#page_482">p. 482</a>, note 2), as
+the head-quarters of the revivalist preachers. Then followed
+the Flagellants of 1310 and 1334,<a name="FNanchor_1100_1100" id="FNanchor_1100_1100"></a><a href="#Footnote_1100_1100" class="fnanchor">[1100]</a> and then the great pilgrimage
+without scourging in the year 1399, which Corio has
+recorded.<a name="FNanchor_1101_1101" id="FNanchor_1101_1101"></a><a href="#Footnote_1101_1101" class="fnanchor">[1101]</a> It is not impossible that the Jubilees were founded
+partly in order to regulate and render harmless this sinister
+passion for vagabondage which seized on whole populations at
+times of religious excitement. The great sanctuaries of Italy,
+such as Loreto and others, had meantime become famous, and
+no doubt diverted a certain part of this enthusiasm.<a name="FNanchor_1102_1102" id="FNanchor_1102_1102"></a><a href="#Footnote_1102_1102" class="fnanchor">[1102]</a></p>
+
+<p>But terrible crises had still at a much later time the power
+to reawaken the glow of mediæval penitence, and the conscience-stricken
+people, often still further appalled by signs
+and wonders, sought to move the pity of Heaven by wailings
+and scourgings, by fasts, processions, and moral enactments.
+So it was at Bologna when the plague came in 1457,<a name="FNanchor_1103_1103" id="FNanchor_1103_1103"></a><a href="#Footnote_1103_1103" class="fnanchor">[1103]</a> so in
+1496 at a time of internal discord at Siena,<a name="FNanchor_1104_1104" id="FNanchor_1104_1104"></a><a href="#Footnote_1104_1104" class="fnanchor">[1104]</a> to mention two
+only out of countless instances. No more moving scene can
+be imagined than that we read of at Milan in 1529, when
+famine, plague, and war conspired with Spanish extortion to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_487" id="page_487"></a>{487}</span>
+reduce the city to the lowest depths of despair.<a name="FNanchor_1105_1105" id="FNanchor_1105_1105"></a><a href="#Footnote_1105_1105" class="fnanchor">[1105]</a> It chanced
+that the monk who had the ear of the people, Fra Tommaso
+Nieto, was himself a Spaniard. The Host was borne along in
+a novel fashion, amid barefooted crowds of old and young. It
+was placed on a decorated bier, which rested on the shoulders
+of four priests in linen garments&mdash;an imitation of the Ark of
+the Covenant<a name="FNanchor_1106_1106" id="FNanchor_1106_1106"></a><a href="#Footnote_1106_1106" class="fnanchor">[1106]</a> which the children of Israel once carried round
+the walls of Jericho. Thus did the afflicted people of Milan
+remind their ancient God of His old covenant with man; and
+when the procession again entered the cathedral, and it seemed
+as if the vast building must fall in with the agonised cry of
+‘Misericordia!’ many who stood there may have believed that
+the Almighty would indeed subvert the laws of nature and of
+history, and send down upon them a miraculous deliverance.</p>
+
+<p>There was one government in Italy, that of Duke Ercole I.
+of Ferrara,<a name="FNanchor_1107_1107" id="FNanchor_1107_1107"></a><a href="#Footnote_1107_1107" class="fnanchor">[1107]</a> which assumed the direction of public feeling, and
+compelled the popular revivals to move in regular channels.
+At the time when Savonarola was powerful in Florence, and
+the movement which he began spread far and wide among the
+population of central Italy, the people of Ferrara voluntarily
+entered on a general fast (at the beginning of 1496). A
+Lazarist announced from the pulpit the approach of a season
+of war and famine such as the world had never seen; but the
+Madonna had assured some pious people<a name="FNanchor_1108_1108" id="FNanchor_1108_1108"></a><a href="#Footnote_1108_1108" class="fnanchor">[1108]</a> that these evils might
+be avoided by fasting. Upon this, the court itself had no
+choice but to fast, but it took the conduct of the public devotions
+into its own hands. On Easter Day, the 3rd of April,
+a proclamation on morals and religion was published, forbidding
+blasphemy, prohibited games, sodomy, concubinage, the
+letting of houses to prostitutes or panders, and the opening
+of all shops on feast-days, excepting those of the bakers and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_488" id="page_488"></a>{488}</span>
+greengrocers. The Jews and Moors, who had taken refuge
+from the Spaniards at Ferrara, were now compelled again to
+wear the yellow O upon the breast. Contraveners were
+threatened, not only with the punishments already provided
+by law, but also ‘with such severer penalties as the Duke
+might think good to inflict,’ of which one-fourth in case of
+a pecuniary fine was to be paid to the Duke, and the other
+three-fourths were to go to some public institution. After
+this, the Duke and the court went several days in succession
+to hear sermons in church, and on the 10th of April all the
+Jews in Ferrara were compelled to do the same.<a name="FNanchor_1109_1109" id="FNanchor_1109_1109"></a><a href="#Footnote_1109_1109" class="fnanchor">[1109]</a> On the 3rd
+of May the director of police&mdash;that Zampante who has been
+already referred to (<a href="#page_050">p. 50</a>)&mdash;sent the crier to announce that
+whoever had given money to the police-officers in order not to
+be informed against as a blasphemer, might, if he came forward,
+have it back with a further indemnification. These
+wicked officers, he said, had extorted as much as two or three
+ducats from innocent persons by threatening to lodge an information
+against them. They had then mutually informed
+against one another, and so had all found their way into prison.
+But as the money had been paid precisely in order not to have
+to do with Zampante, it is probable that his proclamation
+induced few people to come forward. In the year 1500, after
+the fall of Ludovico Moro, when a similar outbreak of popular
+feeling took place, Ercole<a name="FNanchor_1110_1110" id="FNanchor_1110_1110"></a><a href="#Footnote_1110_1110" class="fnanchor">[1110]</a> ordered a series of nine processions,
+in which there were 4,000 children dressed in white, bearing
+the standard of Jesus. He himself rode on horseback, as he
+could not walk without difficulty. An edict was afterwards
+published of the same kind as that of 1496. It is well known
+how many churches and monasteries were built by this ruler.
+He even sent for a live saint, the Suor Colomba, shortly before
+he married his son Alfonso to Lucrezia Borgia (1502). A<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_489" id="page_489"></a>{489}</span>
+special messenger<a name="FNanchor_1111_1111" id="FNanchor_1111_1111"></a><a href="#Footnote_1111_1111" class="fnanchor">[1111]</a> fetched the saint with fifteen other nuns
+from Viterbo, and the Duke himself conducted her on her
+arrival at Ferrara into a convent prepared for her reception.
+We shall probably do him no injustice if we attribute all
+these measures very largely to political calculation. To the
+conception of government formed by the House of Este, as
+indicated above (<a href="#page_046">p. 46</a>, sqq.), this employment of religion for
+the ends of statecraft belongs by a kind of logical necessity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_490" id="page_490"></a>{490}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-6" id="CHAPTER_III-6"></a>CHAPTER III.<br /><br />
+<small>RELIGION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">B<small>UT</small> in order to reach a definite conclusion with regard to the
+religious sense of the men of this period, we must adopt a
+different method. From their intellectual attitude in general,
+we can infer their relation both to the Divine idea and to the
+existing religion of their age.</p>
+
+<p>These modern men, the representatives of the culture of
+Italy, were born with the same religious instincts as other
+mediæval Europeans. But their powerful individuality made
+them in religion, as in other matters, altogether subjective,
+and the intense charm which the discovery of the inner and
+outer universe exercised upon them rendered them markedly
+worldly. In the rest of Europe religion remained, till a much
+later period, something given from without, and in practical
+life egoism and sensuality alternated with devotion and repentance.
+The latter had no spiritual competitors, as in Italy, or
+only to a far smaller extent.</p>
+
+<p>Further, the close and frequent relations of Italy with
+Byzantium and the Mohammedan peoples had produced a
+dispassionate tolerance which weakened the ethnographical
+conception of a privileged Christendom. And when classical
+antiquity with its men and institutions became an ideal of life,
+as well as the greatest of historical memories, ancient speculation
+and scepticism obtained in many cases a complete mastery
+over the minds of Italians.</p>
+
+<p>Since, again, the Italians were the first modern people of
+Europe who gave themselves boldly to speculations on freedom
+and necessity, and since they did so under violent and lawless
+political circumstances, in which evil seemed often to win a
+splendid and lasting victory, their belief in God began to
+waver, and their view of the government of the world became<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_491" id="page_491"></a>{491}</span>
+fatalistic. And when their passionate natures refused to rest
+in the sense of uncertainty, they made a shift to help themselves
+out with ancient, oriental, or mediæval superstition.
+They took to astrology and magic.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, these intellectual giants, these representatives of
+the Renaissance, show, in respect to religion, a quality which is
+common in youthful natures. Distinguishing keenly between
+good and evil, they yet are conscious of no sin. Every disturbance
+of their inward harmony they feel themselves able
+to make good out of the plastic resources of their own nature,
+and therefore they feel no repentance. The need of salvation
+thus becomes felt more and more dimly, while the ambitions
+and the intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether
+every thought of a world to come, or else cause it to
+assume a poetic instead of a dogmatic form.</p>
+
+<p>When we look on all this as pervaded and often perverted
+by the all-powerful Italian imagination, we obtain a picture of
+that time which is certainly more in accordance with truth
+than are vague declamations against modern paganism. And
+closer investigation often reveals to us that underneath this
+outward shell much genuine religion could still survive.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The fuller discussion of these points must be limited to a few
+of the most essential explanations.</p>
+
+<p>That religion should again become an affair of the individual
+and of his own personal feeling was inevitable when the
+Church became corrupt in doctrine and tyrannous in practice,
+and is a proof that the European mind was still alive. It is
+true that this showed itself in many different ways. While
+the mystical and ascetical sects of the North lost no time in
+creating new outward forms for their new modes of thought
+and feeling, each individual in Italy went his own way, and
+thousands wandered on the sea of life without any religious
+guidance whatever. All the more must we admire those who
+attained and held fast to a personal religion. They were not
+to blame for being unable to have any part or lot in the old
+Church, as she then was; nor would it be reasonable to expect<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_492" id="page_492"></a>{492}</span>
+that they should all of them go through that mighty spiritual
+labour which was appointed to the German reformers. The
+form and aim of this personal faith, as it showed itself in the
+better minds, will be set forth at the close of our work.</p>
+
+<p>The worldliness, through which the Renaissance seems to
+offer so striking a contrast to the Middle Ages, owed its first
+origin to the flood of new thoughts, purposes, and views, which
+transformed the mediæval conception of nature and man.
+This spirit is not in itself more hostile to religion than that
+‘culture’ which now holds its place, but which can give us
+only a feeble notion of the universal ferment which the discovery
+of a new world of greatness then called forth. This
+worldliness was not frivolous, but earnest, and was ennobled by
+art and poetry. It is a lofty necessity of the modern spirit
+that this attitude, once gained, can never again be lost, that an
+irresistible impulse forces us to the investigation of men and
+things, and that we must hold this enquiry to be our proper
+end and work.<a name="FNanchor_1112_1112" id="FNanchor_1112_1112"></a><a href="#Footnote_1112_1112" class="fnanchor">[1112]</a> How soon and by what paths this search will
+lead us back to God, and in what ways the religious temper
+of the individual will be affected by it, are questions which
+cannot be met by any general answer. The Middle Ages,
+which spared themselves the trouble of induction and free
+enquiry, can have no right to impose upon us their dogmatical
+verdict in a matter of such vast importance.</p>
+
+<p>To the study of man, among many other causes, was due
+the tolerance and indifference with which the Mohammedan
+religion was regarded. The knowledge and admiration of the
+remarkable civilisation which Islam, particularly before the
+Mongol inundation, had attained, was peculiar to Italy from
+the time of the Crusades. This sympathy was fostered by
+the half-Mohammedan government of some Italian princes,
+by dislike and even contempt for the existing Church, and
+by constant commercial intercourse with the harbours of the
+Eastern and Southern Mediterranean.<a name="FNanchor_1113_1113" id="FNanchor_1113_1113"></a><a href="#Footnote_1113_1113" class="fnanchor">[1113]</a> It can be shown that
+in the thirteenth century the Italians recognised a Moham<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_493" id="page_493"></a>{493}</span>medan
+ideal of nobleness, dignity, and pride, which they loved
+to connect with the person of a Sultan. A Mameluke Sultan
+is commonly meant; if any name is mentioned, it is the
+name of Saladin.<a name="FNanchor_1114_1114" id="FNanchor_1114_1114"></a><a href="#Footnote_1114_1114" class="fnanchor">[1114]</a> Even the Osmanli Turks, whose destructive
+tendencies were no secret, gave the Italians, as we have
+shown above (<a href="#page_092">p. 92</a>, sqq.), only half a fright, and a peaceable
+accord with them was looked upon as no impossibility. Along
+with this tolerance, however, appeared the bitterest religious
+opposition to Mohammedanism; the clergy, says Filelfo, should
+come forward against it, since it prevailed over a great part of
+the world and was more dangerous to Christendom than
+Judaism was;<a name="FNanchor_1115_1115" id="FNanchor_1115_1115"></a><a href="#Footnote_1115_1115" class="fnanchor">[1115]</a> along with the readiness to compromise with
+the Turks, appeared the passionate desire for a war against
+them which possessed Pius II. during the whole of his pontificate,
+and which many of the humanists expressed in high-flown
+declamations.</p>
+
+<p>The truest and most characteristic expression of this religious
+indifference is the famous story of the Three Rings, which
+Lessing has put into the mouth of his Nathan, after it had
+been already told centuries earlier, though with some reserve,
+in the ‘Hundred Old Novels’ (nov. 72 or 73), and more boldly
+in Boccaccio.<a name="FNanchor_1116_1116" id="FNanchor_1116_1116"></a><a href="#Footnote_1116_1116" class="fnanchor">[1116]</a> In what language and in what corner of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_494" id="page_494"></a>{494}</span>
+Mediterranean it was first told, can never be known; most
+likely the original was much more plain-spoken than the two
+Italian adaptations. The religious postulate on which it rests,
+namely Deism, will be discussed later on in its wider significance
+for this period. The same idea is repeated, though
+in a clumsy caricature, in the famous proverb of the ‘three
+who have deceived the world, that is, Moses, Christ, and
+Mohammed.’<a name="FNanchor_1117_1117" id="FNanchor_1117_1117"></a><a href="#Footnote_1117_1117" class="fnanchor">[1117]</a> If the Emperor Frederick II., in whom this
+saying is said to have originated, really thought so, he probably
+expressed himself with more wit. Ideas of the same
+kind were also current in Islam.</p>
+
+<p>At the height of the Renaissance, towards the close of the
+fifteenth century, Luigi Pulci offers us an example of the same
+mode of thought in the ‘Morgante Maggiore.’ The imaginary
+world of which his story treats is divided, as in all heroic
+poems of romance, into a Christian and a Mohammedan camp.
+In accordance with the mediæval temper, the victory of the
+Christian and the final reconciliation among the combatants
+was attended by the baptism of the defeated Islamites, and the
+Improvisatori, who preceded Pulci in the treatment of these
+subjects, must have made free use of this stock incident. It
+was Pulci’s object to parody his predecessors, particularly the
+worst among them, and this he does by those appeals to God,
+Christ, and the Madonna, with which each canto begins; and
+still more clearly by the sudden conversions and baptisms, the
+utter senselessness of which must have struck every reader or
+hearer. This ridicule leads him further to the confession of his
+faith in the relative goodness of all religions,<a name="FNanchor_1118_1118" id="FNanchor_1118_1118"></a><a href="#Footnote_1118_1118" class="fnanchor">[1118]</a> which faith,
+notwithstanding his professions of orthodoxy,<a name="FNanchor_1119_1119" id="FNanchor_1119_1119"></a><a href="#Footnote_1119_1119" class="fnanchor">[1119]</a> rests on an
+essentially theistic basis. In another point too he departs
+widely from mediæval conceptions. The alternatives in past
+centuries were: Christian, or else Pagan and Mohammedan;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_495" id="page_495"></a>{495}</span>
+orthodox believer or heretic. Pulci draws a picture of the
+Giant Margutte<a name="FNanchor_1120_1120" id="FNanchor_1120_1120"></a><a href="#Footnote_1120_1120" class="fnanchor">[1120]</a> who, disregarding each and every religion,
+jovially confesses to every form of vice and sensuality, and
+only reserves to himself the merit of having never broken
+faith. Perhaps the poet intended to make something of this&mdash;in
+his way&mdash;honest monster, possibly to have led him into
+virtuous paths by Morgante, but he soon got tired of his own
+creation, and in the next canto brought him to a comic end.<a name="FNanchor_1121_1121" id="FNanchor_1121_1121"></a><a href="#Footnote_1121_1121" class="fnanchor">[1121]</a>
+Margutte has been brought forward as a proof of Pulci’s frivolity;
+but he is needed to complete the picture of the poetry
+of the fifteenth century. It was natural that it should somewhere
+present in grotesque proportions the figure of an untamed
+egoism, insensible to all established rule, and yet with a remnant
+of honourable feeling left. In other poems sentiments
+are put into the mouths of giants, fiends, infidels, and Mohammedans
+which no Christian knight would venture to utter.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Antiquity exercised an influence of another kind than that
+of Islam, and this not through its religion, which was but
+too much like the Catholicism of this period, but through its
+philosophy. Ancient literature, now worshipped as something
+incomparable, is full of the victory of philosophy over religious
+tradition. An endless number of systems and fragments of
+systems were suddenly presented to the Italian mind, not as
+curiosities or even as heresies, but almost with the authority
+of dogmas, which had now to be reconciled rather than discriminated.
+In nearly all these various opinions and doctrines
+a certain kind of belief in God was implied; but taken altogether
+they formed a marked contrast to the Christian faith
+in a Divine government of the world. And there was one
+central question, which mediæval theology had striven in vain
+to solve, and which now urgently demanded an answer from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_496" id="page_496"></a>{496}</span>
+the wisdom of the ancients, namely, the relation of Providence
+to the freedom or necessity of the human will. To write the
+history of this question even superficially from the fourteenth
+century onwards, would require a whole volume. A few hints
+must here suffice.</p>
+
+<p>If we take Dante and his contemporaries as evidence, we
+shall find that ancient philosophy first came into contact with
+Italian life in the form which offered the most marked contrast
+to Christianity, that is to say, Epicureanism. The writings of
+Epicurus were no longer preserved, and even at the close of the
+classical age a more or less one-sided conception had been
+formed of his philosophy. Nevertheless, that phase of Epicureanism
+which can be studied in Lucretius, and especially
+in Cicero, is quite sufficient to make men familiar with a godless
+universe. To what extent his teaching was actually understood,
+and whether the name of the problematic Greek sage
+was not rather a catchword for the multitude, it is hard to say.
+It is probable that the Dominican Inquisition used it against
+men who could not be reached by a more definite accusation.
+In the case of sceptics born before the time was ripe, whom
+it was yet hard to convict of positive heretical utterances, a
+moderate degree of luxurious living may have sufficed to
+provoke the charge. The word is used in this conventional
+sense by Giovanni Villani,<a name="FNanchor_1122_1122" id="FNanchor_1122_1122"></a><a href="#Footnote_1122_1122" class="fnanchor">[1122]</a> when he explains the Florentine
+fires of 1115 and 1117 as a Divine judgment on heresies, among
+others, ‘on the luxurious and gluttonous sect of Epicureans.’
+The same writer says of Manfred, ‘His life was Epicurean,
+since he believed neither in God, nor in the Saints, but only in
+bodily pleasure.’</p>
+
+<p>Dante speaks still more clearly in the ninth and tenth cantos
+of the ‘Inferno.’ That terrible fiery field covered with half-opened
+tombs, from which issued cries of hopeless agony, was
+peopled by the two great classes of those whom the Church
+had vanquished or expelled in the thirteenth century. The
+one were heretics who opposed the Church by deliberately<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_497" id="page_497"></a>{497}</span>
+spreading false doctrine; the other were Epicureans, and their
+sin against the Church lay in their general disposition, which
+was summed up in the belief that the soul dies with the body.<a name="FNanchor_1123_1123" id="FNanchor_1123_1123"></a><a href="#Footnote_1123_1123" class="fnanchor">[1123]</a>
+The Church was well aware that this one doctrine, if it gained
+ground, must be more ruinous to her authority than all the
+teachings of the Manichaeans and Paterini, since it took away
+all reason for her interference in the affairs of men after death.
+That the means which she used in her struggles were precisely
+what had driven the most gifted natures to unbelief and
+despair was what she naturally would not herself admit.</p>
+
+<p>Dante’s loathing of Epicurus, or of what he took to be his
+doctrine, was certainly sincere. The poet of the life to come
+could not but detest the denier of immortality; and a world
+neither made nor ruled by God, no less than the vulgar
+objects of earthly life which the system appeared to countenance,
+could not but be intensely repugnant to a nature like
+his. But if we look closer, we find that certain doctrines of
+the ancients made even on him an impression which forced
+the biblical doctrine of the Divine government into the background,
+unless, indeed, it was his own reflection, the influence
+of opinions then prevalent, or loathing for the injustice that
+seemed to rule this world, which made him give up the belief
+in a special Providence.<a name="FNanchor_1124_1124" id="FNanchor_1124_1124"></a><a href="#Footnote_1124_1124" class="fnanchor">[1124]</a> His God leaves all the details of the
+world’s government to a deputy, Fortune, whose sole work it
+is to change and change again all earthly things, and who can
+disregard the wailings of men in unalterable beatitude. Nevertheless,
+Dante does not for a moment loose his hold on the
+moral responsibility of man; he believes in free will.</p>
+
+<p>The belief in the freedom of the will, in the popular sense
+of the words, has always prevailed in Western countries. At
+all times men have been held responsible for their actions,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_498" id="page_498"></a>{498}</span>
+as though this freedom were a matter of course. The case is
+otherwise with the religious and philosophical doctrine, which
+labours under the difficulty of harmonising the nature of the
+will with the laws of the universe at large. We have here to
+do with a question of more or less, which every moral estimate
+must take into account. Dante is not wholly free from those
+astrological superstitions which illumined the horizon of his
+time with deceptive light, but they do not hinder him from
+rising to a worthy conception of human nature. ‘The stars,’
+he makes his Marco Lombardo say,<a name="FNanchor_1125_1125" id="FNanchor_1125_1125"></a><a href="#Footnote_1125_1125" class="fnanchor">[1125]</a> ‘the stars give the first
+impulse to your actions,’ but</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Light has been given you for good and evil<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And free volition; which, if some fatigue<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the first battles with the heavens it suffers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Afterwards conquers all, if well ‘tis nurtured.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Others might seek the necessity which annulled human freedom
+in another power than the stars, but the question was
+henceforth an open and inevitable one. So far as it was a
+question for the schools or the pursuit of isolated thinkers, its
+treatment belongs to the historian of philosophy. But inasmuch
+as it entered into the consciousness of a wider public, it
+is necessary for us to say a few words respecting it.</p>
+
+<p>The fourteenth century was chiefly stimulated by the writings
+of Cicero, who, though in fact an eclectic, yet, by his
+habit of setting forth the opinions of different schools, without
+coming to a decision between them, exercised the influence
+of a sceptic. Next in importance came Seneca, and the few
+works of Aristotle which had been translated into Latin. The
+immediate fruit of these studies was the capacity to reflect on
+great subjects, if not in direct opposition to the authority of the
+Church, at all events independently of it.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of the fifteenth century the works of antiquity
+were discovered and diffused with extraordinary rapidity. All
+the writings of the Greek philosophers which we ourselves
+possess were now, at least in the form of Latin translations, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_499" id="page_499"></a>{499}</span>
+everybody’s hands. It is a curious fact that some of the most
+zealous apostles of this new culture were men of the strictest
+piety, or even ascetics (<a href="#page_273">p. 273</a>). Fra Ambrogio Camaldolese,
+as a spiritual dignitary chiefly occupied with ecclesiastical
+affairs, and as a literary man with the translation of the Greek
+Fathers of the Church, could not repress the humanistic impulse,
+and at the request of Cosimo de’Medici, undertook to
+translate Diogenes Laertius into Latin.<a name="FNanchor_1126_1126" id="FNanchor_1126_1126"></a><a href="#Footnote_1126_1126" class="fnanchor">[1126]</a> His contemporaries,
+Niccolò Niccoli, Griannozzo Manetti, Donato Acciajuoli, and
+Pope Nicholas V.,<a name="FNanchor_1127_1127" id="FNanchor_1127_1127"></a><a href="#Footnote_1127_1127" class="fnanchor">[1127]</a> united to a many-sided humanism profound
+biblical scholarship and deep piety. In Vittorino da Feltre
+the same temper has been already noticed (<a href="#page_213">p. 213</a> sqq.). The
+same Matthew Vegio, who added a thirteenth book to the
+‘Æneid,’ had an enthusiasm for the memory of St. Augustine
+and his mother Monica which cannot have been without a
+deeper influence upon him. The result of all these tendencies
+was that the Platonic Academy at Florence deliberately chose
+for its object the reconciliation of the spirit of antiquity with
+that of Christianity. It was a remarkable oasis in the humanism
+of the period.<a name="FNanchor_1128_1128" id="FNanchor_1128_1128"></a><a href="#Footnote_1128_1128" class="fnanchor">[1128]</a></p>
+
+<p>This humanism was in fact pagan, and became more and
+more so as its sphere widened in the fifteenth century. Its
+representatives, whom we have already described as the
+advanced guard of an unbridled individualism, display as a
+rule such a character that even their religion, which is sometimes
+professed very definitely, becomes a matter of indifference
+to us. They easily got the name of atheists, if they
+showed themselves indifferent to religion, and spoke freely
+against the Church; but not one of them ever professed, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_500" id="page_500"></a>{500}</span>
+dared to profess, a formal, philosophical atheism.<a name="FNanchor_1129_1129" id="FNanchor_1129_1129"></a><a href="#Footnote_1129_1129" class="fnanchor">[1129]</a> If they
+sought for any leading principle, it must have been a kind of
+superficial rationalism&mdash;a careless inference from the many and
+contradictory opinions of antiquity with which they busied
+themselves, and from the discredit into which the Church and
+her doctrines had fallen. This was the sort of reasoning
+which was near bringing Galeottus Martius<a name="FNanchor_1130_1130" id="FNanchor_1130_1130"></a><a href="#Footnote_1130_1130" class="fnanchor">[1130]</a> to the stake, had
+not his former pupil, Pope Sixtus IV., perhaps at the request
+of Lorenzo de’Medici, saved him from the hands of the Inquisition.
+Galeotto had ventured to write that the man who
+walked uprightly, and acted according to the natural law born
+within him, would go to heaven, whatever nation he belonged to.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take, by way of example, the religious attitude of one
+of the smaller men in the great army. Codrus Urceus<a name="FNanchor_1131_1131" id="FNanchor_1131_1131"></a><a href="#Footnote_1131_1131" class="fnanchor">[1131]</a> was
+first the tutor of the last Ordelaffo, Prince of Forlì, and afterwards
+for many years professor at Bologna. Against the
+Church and the monks his language is as abusive as that of
+the rest. His tone in general is reckless to the last degree, and
+he constantly introduces himself in all his local history and
+gossip. But he knows how to speak to edification of the
+true God-Man, Jesus Christ, and to commend himself by letter
+to the prayers of a saintly priest.<a name="FNanchor_1132_1132" id="FNanchor_1132_1132"></a><a href="#Footnote_1132_1132" class="fnanchor">[1132]</a> On one occasion, after
+enumerating the follies of the pagan religions, he thus goes
+on: ‘Our theologians, too, fight and quarrel “de lana caprina,”
+about the Immaculate Conception, Antichrist, Sacraments,
+Predestination, and other things, which were better let
+alone than talked of publicly.’ Once, when he was not at<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_501" id="page_501"></a>{501}</span>
+home, his room and manuscripts were burnt. When he heard
+the news he stood opposite a figure of the Madonna in the
+street, and cried to it: ‘Listen to what I tell you; I am not
+mad, I am saying what I mean. If I ever call upon you in
+the hour of my death, you need not hear me or take me among
+your own, for I will go and spend eternity with the devil.’<a name="FNanchor_1133_1133" id="FNanchor_1133_1133"></a><a href="#Footnote_1133_1133" class="fnanchor">[1133]</a>
+After which speech he found it desirable to spend six months
+in retirement at the house of a wood-cutter. With all this, he
+was so superstitious that prodigies and omens gave him incessant
+frights, leaving him no belief to spare for the immortality
+of the soul. When his hearers questioned him on the
+matter, he answered that no one knew what became of a man,
+of his soul or his body, after death, and the talk about another
+life was only fit to frighten old women. But when he came
+to die, he commended in his will his soul or his spirit<a name="FNanchor_1134_1134" id="FNanchor_1134_1134"></a><a href="#Footnote_1134_1134" class="fnanchor">[1134]</a> to
+Almighty God, exhorted his weeping pupils to fear the Lord,
+and especially to believe in immortality and future retribution,
+and received the Sacrament with much fervour. We have no
+guarantee that more famous men in the same calling, however
+significant their opinions may be, were in practical life any
+more consistent. It is probable that most of them wavered
+inwardly between incredulity and a remnant of the faith in
+which they were brought up, and outwardly held for prudential
+reasons to the Church.</p>
+
+<p>Through the connexion of rationalism with the newly born
+science of historical investigation, some timid attempts at
+biblical criticism may here and there have been made. A
+saying of Pius II.<a name="FNanchor_1135_1135" id="FNanchor_1135_1135"></a><a href="#Footnote_1135_1135" class="fnanchor">[1135]</a> has been recorded, which seems intended
+to prepare the way for such criticism: ‘Even if Christianity
+were not confirmed by miracles, it ought still to be accepted
+on account of its morality.’ When Lorenzo Valla calls Moses<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_502" id="page_502"></a>{502}</span>
+and the Evangelists historians, he does not seek to diminish
+their dignity and reputation; but is nevertheless conscious
+that in these words lies as decided a contradiction to the
+traditional view taken by the Church, as in the denial that the
+Apostles’ Creed was the work of all the Apostles, or that the
+letter of Abgarus to Christ was genuine.<a name="FNanchor_1136_1136" id="FNanchor_1136_1136"></a><a href="#Footnote_1136_1136" class="fnanchor">[1136]</a> The legends of the
+Church, in so far as they contained arbitrary versions of the
+biblical miracles, were freely ridiculed,<a name="FNanchor_1137_1137" id="FNanchor_1137_1137"></a><a href="#Footnote_1137_1137" class="fnanchor">[1137]</a> and this reacted on the
+religious sense of the people. Where Judaising heretics are
+mentioned, we must understand chiefly those who denied the
+Divinity of Christ, which was probably the offence for which
+Giorgio da Novara was burnt at Bologna about the year 1500.<a name="FNanchor_1138_1138" id="FNanchor_1138_1138"></a><a href="#Footnote_1138_1138" class="fnanchor">[1138]</a>
+But again at Bologna in the year 1497 the Dominican Inquisitor
+was forced to let the physician Gabrielle da Salò, who
+had powerful patrons, escape with a simple expression of penitence,<a name="FNanchor_1139_1139" id="FNanchor_1139_1139"></a><a href="#Footnote_1139_1139" class="fnanchor">[1139]</a>
+although he was in the habit of maintaining that Christ
+was not God, but son of Joseph and Mary, and conceived in
+the usual way; that by his cunning he had deceived the world
+to its ruin; that he may have died on the cross on account of
+crimes which he had committed; that his religion would soon
+come to an end; that his body was not really contained in the
+sacrament, and that he performed his miracles, not through
+any divine power, but through the influence of the heavenly
+bodies. This latter statement is most characteristic of the
+time, Faith is gone, but magic still holds its ground.<a name="FNanchor_1140_1140" id="FNanchor_1140_1140"></a><a href="#Footnote_1140_1140" class="fnanchor">[1140]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_503" id="page_503"></a>{503}</span></p>
+
+<p>A worse fate befell a Canon of Bergamo, Zanino de Solcia, a
+few years earlier (1459), who had asserted that Christ did not
+suffer from love to man, but under the influence of the stars,
+and who advanced other curious scientific and moral ideas. He
+was forced to abjure his errors, and paid for them by perpetual
+imprisonment.<a name="FNanchor_1141_1141" id="FNanchor_1141_1141"></a><a href="#Footnote_1141_1141" class="fnanchor">[1141]</a></p>
+
+<p>With respect to the moral government of the world, the
+humanists seldom get beyond a cold and resigned consideration
+of the prevalent violence and misrule. In this mood the many
+works ‘On Fate,’ or whatever name they bear, are written.
+They tell of the turning of the wheel of Fortune, and of the
+instability of earthly, especially political, things. Providence
+is only brought in because the writers would still be ashamed
+of undisguised fatalism, of the avowal of their ignorance, or of
+useless complaints. Gioviano Pontano<a name="FNanchor_1142_1142" id="FNanchor_1142_1142"></a><a href="#Footnote_1142_1142" class="fnanchor">[1142]</a> ingeniously illustrates
+the nature of that mysterious something which men call
+Fortune by a hundred incidents, most of which belonged to his
+own experience. The subject is treated more humorously by
+Æneas Sylvius, in the form of a vision seen in a dream.<a name="FNanchor_1143_1143" id="FNanchor_1143_1143"></a><a href="#Footnote_1143_1143" class="fnanchor">[1143]</a> The
+aim of Poggio, on the other hand, in a work written in his old
+age,<a name="FNanchor_1144_1144" id="FNanchor_1144_1144"></a><a href="#Footnote_1144_1144" class="fnanchor">[1144]</a> is to represent the world as a vale of tears, and to fix the
+happiness of various classes as low as possible. This tone
+became in future the prevalent one. Distinguished men drew
+up a debit and credit of the happiness and unhappiness of their
+lives, and generally found that the latter outweighed the
+former. The fate of Italy and the Italians, so far as it could be
+told in the year 1510, has been described with dignity and an
+almost elegiac pathos by Tristano Caracciolo.<a name="FNanchor_1145_1145" id="FNanchor_1145_1145"></a><a href="#Footnote_1145_1145" class="fnanchor">[1145]</a> Applying this<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_504" id="page_504"></a>{504}</span>
+general tone of feeling to the humanists themselves, Pierio
+Valeriano afterwards composed his famous treatise (pp. 276-279).
+Some of these themes, such as the fortunes of Leo, were most
+suggestive. All the good that can be said of him politically
+has been briefly and admirably summed up by Francesco
+Vettori; the picture of Leo’s pleasures is given by Paolo
+Giovio and in the anonymous biography;<a name="FNanchor_1146_1146" id="FNanchor_1146_1146"></a><a href="#Footnote_1146_1146" class="fnanchor">[1146]</a> and the shadows
+which attended his prosperity are drawn with inexorable truth
+by the same Pierio Valeriano.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot, on the other hand, read without a kind of awe
+how men sometimes boasted of their fortune in public inscriptions.
+Giovanni II. Bentivoglio, ruler of Bologna, ventured to
+carve in stone on the newly built tower by his palace, that his
+merit and his fortune had given him richly of all that could
+be desired<a name="FNanchor_1147_1147" id="FNanchor_1147_1147"></a><a href="#Footnote_1147_1147" class="fnanchor">[1147]</a>&mdash;and this a few years before his expulsion. The
+ancients, when they spoke in this tone, had nevertheless a
+sense of the envy of the gods. In Italy it was probably the
+Condottieri (<a href="#page_022">p. 22</a>) who first ventured to boast so loudly of
+their fortune.</p>
+
+<p>But the way in which resuscitated antiquity affected religion
+most powerfully, was not through any doctrines or philosophical
+system, but through a general tendency which it fostered.
+The men, and in some respects the institutions of antiquity
+were preferred to those of the Middle Ages, and in the eager
+attempt to imitate and reproduce them, religion was left to
+take care of itself. All was absorbed in the admiration for
+historical greatness (part ii. chap. iii., and above, <i>passim</i>).
+To this the philologians added many special follies of their
+own, by which they became the mark for general attention.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_505" id="page_505"></a>{505}</span>
+How far Paul II. was justified in calling his Abbreviators and
+their friends to account for their paganism, is certainly a
+matter of great doubt, as his biographer and chief victim,
+Platina, (pp. 231, 331) has shown a masterly skill in explaining
+his vindictiveness on other grounds, and especially
+in making him play a ludicrous figure. The charges of
+infidelity, paganism,<a name="FNanchor_1148_1148" id="FNanchor_1148_1148"></a><a href="#Footnote_1148_1148" class="fnanchor">[1148]</a> denial of immortality, and so forth, were
+not made against the accused till the charge of high treason
+had broken down. Paul, indeed, if we are correctly informed
+about him, was by no means the man to judge of intellectual
+things. He knew little Latin, and spoke Italian at Consistories
+and in diplomatic negotiations. It was he who exhorted
+the Romans to teach their children nothing beyond reading
+and writing. His priestly narrowness of view reminds us of
+Savonarola (<a href="#page_476">p. 476</a>), with the difference that Paul might fairly
+have been told that he and his like were in great part to blame
+if culture made men hostile to religion. It cannot, nevertheless,
+be doubted that he felt a real anxiety about the pagan
+tendencies which surrounded him. And what, in truth, may
+not the humanists have allowed themselves at the court of the
+profligate pagan, Sigismondo Malatesta? How far these men,
+destitute for the most part of fixed principle, ventured to go,
+depended assuredly on the sort of influences they were exposed
+to. Nor could they treat of Christianity without paganising it
+(part iii. chap. x.). It is curious, for instance, to notice how far
+Gioviano Pontano carried this confusion. He speaks of a saint
+not only as ‘divus,’ but as ‘deus;’ the angels he holds to be
+identical with the genii of antiquity;<a name="FNanchor_1149_1149" id="FNanchor_1149_1149"></a><a href="#Footnote_1149_1149" class="fnanchor">[1149]</a> and his notion of immortality
+reminds us of the old kingdom of the shades. This<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_506" id="page_506"></a>{506}</span>
+spirit occasionally appears in the most extravagant shapes. In
+1526, when Siena was attacked by the exiled party,<a name="FNanchor_1150_1150" id="FNanchor_1150_1150"></a><a href="#Footnote_1150_1150" class="fnanchor">[1150]</a> the
+worthy canon Tizio, who tells us the story himself, rose from
+his bed on the 22nd July, called to mind what is written in
+the third book of Macrobius,’<a name="FNanchor_1151_1151" id="FNanchor_1151_1151"></a><a href="#Footnote_1151_1151" class="fnanchor">[1151]</a> celebrated mass, and then pronounced
+against the enemy the curse with which his author
+had supplied him, only altering ‘Tellus mater teque Juppiter
+obtestor’ into ‘Tellus teque Christe Deus obtestor.’ After he
+had done this for three days, the enemy retreated. On the one
+side, these things strike us an affair of mere style and fashion;
+on the other, as a symptom of religious decadence.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_507" id="page_507"></a>{507}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-6" id="CHAPTER_IV-6"></a>CHAPTER IV.<br /><br />
+<small>MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITION.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">B<small>UT</small> in another way, and that dogmatically, antiquity exercised
+a perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own
+forms of superstition. Some fragments of this had survived in
+Italy all through the Middle Ages, and the resuscitation of the
+whole was thereby made so much the more easy. The part
+played by the imagination in the process need not be dwelt
+upon. This only could have silenced the critical intellect of
+the Italians.</p>
+
+<p>The belief in a Divine government of the world was in
+many minds destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice
+and misery. Others, like Dante, surrendered at all events this
+life to the caprices of chance, and if they nevertheless retained
+a sturdy faith, it was because they held that the higher
+destiny of man would be accomplished in the life to come.
+But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then
+Fatalism got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came
+first and had the former as its consequence.</p>
+
+<p>The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the
+astrology of antiquity, or even of the Arabians. From the
+relations of the planets among themselves and to the signs of
+the zodiac, future events and the course of whole lives were
+inferred, and the most weighty decisions were taken in consequence.
+In many cases the line of action thus adopted at
+the suggestion of the stars may not have been more immoral
+than that which would otherwise have been followed. But
+too often the decision must have been made at the cost of
+honour and conscience. It is profoundly instructive to observe
+how powerless culture and enlightenment were against this
+delusion; since the latter had its support in the ardent imagi<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_508" id="page_508"></a>{508}</span>nation
+of the people, in the passionate wish to penetrate and
+determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side of
+astrology.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of the thirteenth century this superstition
+suddenly appeared in the foreground of Italian life. The
+Emperor Frederick II. always travelled with his astrologer
+Theodorus; and Ezzelino da Romano<a name="FNanchor_1152_1152" id="FNanchor_1152_1152"></a><a href="#Footnote_1152_1152" class="fnanchor">[1152]</a> with a large, well-paid
+court of such people, among them the famous Guido Bonatto
+and the long-bearded Saracen, Paul of Bagdad. In all important
+undertakings they fixed for him the day and the hour,
+and the gigantic atrocities of which he was guilty may have
+been in part practical inferences from their prophecies. Soon
+all scruples about consulting the stars ceased. Not only
+princes, but free cities<a name="FNanchor_1153_1153" id="FNanchor_1153_1153"></a><a href="#Footnote_1153_1153" class="fnanchor">[1153]</a> had their regular astrologers, and at
+the universities,<a name="FNanchor_1154_1154" id="FNanchor_1154_1154"></a><a href="#Footnote_1154_1154" class="fnanchor">[1154]</a> from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century,
+professors of this pseudo-science were appointed, and lectured
+side by side with the astronomers. It was well known that
+Augustine and other Fathers of the Church had combated
+astrology, but their old-fashioned notions were dismissed with
+easy contempt.<a name="FNanchor_1155_1155" id="FNanchor_1155_1155"></a><a href="#Footnote_1155_1155" class="fnanchor">[1155]</a> The Popes<a name="FNanchor_1156_1156" id="FNanchor_1156_1156"></a><a href="#Footnote_1156_1156" class="fnanchor">[1156]</a> commonly made no secret of
+their star-gazing, though Pius II., who also despised magic,
+omens, and the interpretation of dreams, is an honourable exception.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_509" id="page_509"></a>{509}</span><a name="FNanchor_1157_1157" id="FNanchor_1157_1157"></a><a href="#Footnote_1157_1157" class="fnanchor">[1157]</a>
+Julius II., on the other hand, had the day for his
+coronation and the day for his return from Bologna calculated
+by the astrologers.<a name="FNanchor_1158_1158" id="FNanchor_1158_1158"></a><a href="#Footnote_1158_1158" class="fnanchor">[1158]</a> Even Leo X. seems to have thought the
+flourishing condition of astrology a credit to his pontificate,<a name="FNanchor_1159_1159" id="FNanchor_1159_1159"></a><a href="#Footnote_1159_1159" class="fnanchor">[1159]</a>
+and Paul III. never held a Consistory till the star-gazers had
+fixed the hour.<a name="FNanchor_1160_1160" id="FNanchor_1160_1160"></a><a href="#Footnote_1160_1160" class="fnanchor">[1160]</a></p>
+
+<p>It may fairly be assumed that the better natures did not
+allow their actions to be determined by the stars beyond a
+certain point, and that there was a limit where conscience and
+religion made them pause. In fact, not only did pious and
+excellent people share the delusion, but they actually came
+forward to profess it publicly. One of these was Maestro
+Pagolo of Florence,<a name="FNanchor_1161_1161" id="FNanchor_1161_1161"></a><a href="#Footnote_1161_1161" class="fnanchor">[1161]</a> in whom we can detect the same desire
+to turn astrology to moral account which meets us in the late
+Roman Firmicus Maternus.<a name="FNanchor_1162_1162" id="FNanchor_1162_1162"></a><a href="#Footnote_1162_1162" class="fnanchor">[1162]</a> His life was that of a saintly
+ascetic. He ate almost nothing, despised all temporal goods,
+and only collected books. A skilled physician, he only practised
+among his friends, and made it a condition of his treatment
+that they should confess their sins. He frequented the small
+but famous circle which assembled in the Monastery of the
+Angeli around Fra Ambrogio Camaldolese (<a href="#page_463">p. 463</a>). He also saw
+much of Cosimo the Elder, especially in his last years; for
+Cosimo accepted and used astrology, though probably only for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_510" id="page_510"></a>{510}</span>
+objects of lesser importance. As a rule, however, Pagolo only
+interpreted the stars to his most confidential friends. But even
+without this severity of morals, the astrologers might be highly
+respected and show themselves everywhere. There were also
+far more of them in Italy than in other European countries,
+where they only appeared at the great courts, and there not
+always. All the great householders in Italy, when the fashion
+was once established, kept an astrologer, who, it must be
+added, was not always sure of his dinner.<a name="FNanchor_1163_1163" id="FNanchor_1163_1163"></a><a href="#Footnote_1163_1163" class="fnanchor">[1163]</a> Through the
+literature of this science, which was widely diffused even
+before the invention of printing, a dilettantism also grew up
+which as far as possible followed in the steps of the masters.
+The worst class of astrologers were those who used the stars
+either as an aid or a cloak to magical arts.</p>
+
+<p>Yet apart from the latter, astrology is a miserable feature in
+the life of that time. What a figure do all these highly gifted,
+many-sided, original characters play, when the blind passion
+for knowing and determining the future dethrones their powerful
+will and resolution! Now and then, when the stars send
+them too cruel a message, they manage to brace themselves
+up, act for themselves, and say boldly: ‘Vir sapiens dominabitur
+astris’&mdash;the wise man is master of the stars,<a name="FNanchor_1164_1164" id="FNanchor_1164_1164"></a><a href="#Footnote_1164_1164" class="fnanchor">[1164]</a> and then
+again relapse into the old delusion.</p>
+
+<p>In all the better families the horoscope of the children was
+drawn as a matter of course, and it sometimes happened that
+for half a lifetime men were haunted by the idle expectation
+of events which never occurred. The stars<a name="FNanchor_1165_1165" id="FNanchor_1165_1165"></a><a href="#Footnote_1165_1165" class="fnanchor">[1165]</a> were questioned<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_511" id="page_511"></a>{511}</span>
+whenever a great man had to come to any important decision,
+and even consulted as to the hour at which any undertaking
+was to be begun. The journeys of princes, the reception of
+foreign ambassadors,<a name="FNanchor_1166_1166" id="FNanchor_1166_1166"></a><a href="#Footnote_1166_1166" class="fnanchor">[1166]</a> the laying of the foundation-stone of
+public buildings, depended on the answer. A striking instance
+of the latter occurs in the life of the aforenamed Guido Bonatto,
+who by his personal activity and by his great systematic work
+on the subject<a name="FNanchor_1167_1167" id="FNanchor_1167_1167"></a><a href="#Footnote_1167_1167" class="fnanchor">[1167]</a> deserves to be called the restorer of astrology
+in the thirteenth century. In order to put an end to the
+struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines at Forli, he persuaded
+the inhabitants to rebuild the city walls and to begin the
+works under a constellation indicated by himself. If then two
+men, one from each party, at the same moment put a stone
+into the foundation, there would henceforth and for ever be no
+more party divisions in Forli. A Guelph and a Ghibelline
+were selected for this office; the solemn moment arrived, each
+held the stone in his hands, the workmen stood ready with
+their implements, Bonatto gave the signal and the Ghibelline
+threw down his stone on to the foundation. But the Guelph
+hesitated, and at last refused to do anything at all, on the
+ground that Bonatto himself had the reputation of a Ghibelline<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_512" id="page_512"></a>{512}</span>
+and might be devising some mysterious mischief against the
+Guelphs. Upon which the astrologer addressed him: ‘God
+damn thee and the Guelph party, with your distrustful malice!
+This constellation will not appear above our city for 500 years
+to come.’ In fact God soon afterwards did destroy the Guelphs
+of Forli, but now, writes the chronicler about 1480, the two
+parties are thoroughly reconciled, and their very names are
+heard no longer.<a name="FNanchor_1168_1168" id="FNanchor_1168_1168"></a><a href="#Footnote_1168_1168" class="fnanchor">[1168]</a></p>
+
+<p>Nothing that depended upon the stars was more important
+than decisions in time of war. The same Bonatto procured
+for the great Ghibelline leader Guido da Montefeltro a series
+of victories, by telling him the propitious hour for marching.<a name="FNanchor_1169_1169" id="FNanchor_1169_1169"></a><a href="#Footnote_1169_1169" class="fnanchor">[1169]</a>
+When Montefeltro was no longer accompanied by him<a name="FNanchor_1170_1170" id="FNanchor_1170_1170"></a><a href="#Footnote_1170_1170" class="fnanchor">[1170]</a> he
+lost the courage to maintain his despotism, and entered a Minorite
+monastery, where he lived as a monk for many years till
+his death. In the war with Pisa in 1362, the Florentines commissioned
+their astrologer to fix the hour for the march,<a name="FNanchor_1171_1171" id="FNanchor_1171_1171"></a><a href="#Footnote_1171_1171" class="fnanchor">[1171]</a> and
+almost came too late through suddenly receiving orders to take
+a circuitous route through the city. On former occasions they
+had marched out by the Via di Borgo S. Apostolo, and the
+campaign had been unsuccessful. It was clear that there was
+some bad omen connected with the exit through this street
+against Pisa, and consequently the army was now led out by
+the Porta Rossa. But as the tents stretched out there to dry<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_513" id="page_513"></a>{513}</span>
+had not been taken away, the flags&mdash;another bad omen&mdash;had
+to be lowered. The influence of astrology in war was confirmed
+by the fact that nearly all the Condottieri believed in
+it. Jacopo Caldora was cheerful in the most serious illness,
+knowing that he was fated to fall in battle, which in fact happened.<a name="FNanchor_1172_1172" id="FNanchor_1172_1172"></a><a href="#Footnote_1172_1172" class="fnanchor">[1172]</a>
+Bartolommeo Alviano was convinced that his wounds
+in the head were as much a gift of the stars as his military
+command.<a name="FNanchor_1173_1173" id="FNanchor_1173_1173"></a><a href="#Footnote_1173_1173" class="fnanchor">[1173]</a> Niccolò Orsini Pitigliano asked the physicist and
+astrologer Alessandro Benedetto<a name="FNanchor_1174_1174" id="FNanchor_1174_1174"></a><a href="#Footnote_1174_1174" class="fnanchor">[1174]</a> to fix a favourable hour for
+the conclusion of his bargain with Venice (1495). When the
+Florentines on June 1, 1498, solemnly invested their new Condottiere
+Paolo Vitelli with his office, the Marshal’s staff which
+they handed him was, at his own wish, decorated with pictures
+of the constellations.<a name="FNanchor_1175_1175" id="FNanchor_1175_1175"></a><a href="#Footnote_1175_1175" class="fnanchor">[1175]</a> There were nevertheless generals
+like Alphonso the Great of Naples who did not allow their
+march to be settled by the prophets.<a name="FNanchor_1176_1176" id="FNanchor_1176_1176"></a><a href="#Footnote_1176_1176" class="fnanchor">[1176]</a></p>
+
+<p>Sometimes it is not easy to make out whether in important
+political events the stars were questioned beforehand, or whether
+the astrologers were simply impelled afterwards by curiosity to
+find out the constellation which decided the result. When
+Giangaleazzo Visconti (<a href="#page_012">p. 12</a>) by a master-stroke of policy
+took prisoners his uncle Bernabò, with the latter’s family
+(1385), we are told by a contemporary, that Jupiter, Saturn,
+and Mars stood in the house of the Twins,<a name="FNanchor_1177_1177" id="FNanchor_1177_1177"></a><a href="#Footnote_1177_1177" class="fnanchor">[1177]</a> but we cannot say
+if the deed was resolved on in consequence. It is also probable
+that the advice of the astrologers was often determined by
+political calculation not less than by the course of the planets.<a name="FNanchor_1178_1178" id="FNanchor_1178_1178"></a><a href="#Footnote_1178_1178" class="fnanchor">[1178]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_514" id="page_514"></a>{514}</span></p>
+
+<p>All Europe, through the latter part of the Middle Ages, had
+allowed itself to be terrified by predictions of plagues, wars,
+floods, and earthquakes, and in this respect Italy was by no
+means behind other countries. The unlucky year 1494, which
+for ever opened the gates of Italy to the stranger, was undeniably
+ushered in by many prophecies of misfortune<a name="FNanchor_1179_1179" id="FNanchor_1179_1179"></a><a href="#Footnote_1179_1179" class="fnanchor">[1179]</a>&mdash;only we
+cannot say whether such prophecies were not ready for each
+and every year.</p>
+
+<p>This mode of thought was extended with thorough consistency
+into regions where we should hardly expect to meet with
+it. If the whole outward and spiritual life of the individual is
+determined by the facts of his birth, the same law also governs
+groups of individuals and historical products&mdash;that is to say,
+nations and religions; and as the constellation of these things
+changes, so do the things themselves. The idea that each
+religion has its day, first came into Italian culture in connexion
+with these astrological beliefs, chiefly from Jewish and Arabian
+sources.<a name="FNanchor_1180_1180" id="FNanchor_1180_1180"></a><a href="#Footnote_1180_1180" class="fnanchor">[1180]</a> The conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn brought
+forth, we are told,<a name="FNanchor_1181_1181" id="FNanchor_1181_1181"></a><a href="#Footnote_1181_1181" class="fnanchor">[1181]</a> the faith of Israel; that of Jupiter and
+Mars, the Chaldean; with the Sun, the Egyptian; with Venus,
+the Mohammedan; with Mercury, the Christian; and the conjunction
+of Jupiter with the Moon will one day bring forth
+the religion of Antichrist. Checco d’Ascoli had already blasphemously
+calculated the nativity of Christ, and deduced from
+it his death upon the cross. For this he was burnt at the stake
+in 1327, at Florence.<a name="FNanchor_1182_1182" id="FNanchor_1182_1182"></a><a href="#Footnote_1182_1182" class="fnanchor">[1182]</a> Doctrines of this sort ended by simply
+darkening men’s whole perceptions of spiritual things.</p>
+
+<p>So much more worthy then of recognition is the warfare<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_515" id="page_515"></a>{515}</span>
+which the clear Italian spirit waged against this army of delusions.
+Notwithstanding the great monumental glorification of
+astrology, as in the frescos in the Salone at Padua,<a name="FNanchor_1183_1183" id="FNanchor_1183_1183"></a><a href="#Footnote_1183_1183" class="fnanchor">[1183]</a> and those
+in Borso’s summer palace (Schifanoja), at Ferrara, notwithstanding
+the shameless praises of even such a man as the elder
+Beroaldus,<a name="FNanchor_1184_1184" id="FNanchor_1184_1184"></a><a href="#Footnote_1184_1184" class="fnanchor">[1184]</a> there was no want of thoughtful and independent
+minds to protest against it. Here, too, the way had been prepared
+by antiquity, but it was their own common sense and
+observation which taught them what to say. Petrarch’s attitude
+towards the astrologers, whom he knew by personal
+intercourse, is one of bitter contempt;<a name="FNanchor_1185_1185" id="FNanchor_1185_1185"></a><a href="#Footnote_1185_1185" class="fnanchor">[1185]</a> and no one saw through
+their system of lies more clearly than he. The novels, from
+the time when they first began to appear&mdash;from the time of
+the ‘Cento novelle antiche,’ are almost always hostile to the
+astrologers.<a name="FNanchor_1186_1186" id="FNanchor_1186_1186"></a><a href="#Footnote_1186_1186" class="fnanchor">[1186]</a> The Florentine chroniclers bravely keep themselves
+free from the delusions which, as part of historical
+tradition, they are compelled to record. Giovanni Villani says
+more than once,<a name="FNanchor_1187_1187" id="FNanchor_1187_1187"></a><a href="#Footnote_1187_1187" class="fnanchor">[1187]</a> ‘No constellation can subjugate either the
+free will of man, or the counsels of God.’ Matteo Villani<a name="FNanchor_1188_1188" id="FNanchor_1188_1188"></a><a href="#Footnote_1188_1188" class="fnanchor">[1188]</a> declares
+astrology to be a vice which the Florentines had inherited,
+along with other superstitions, from their pagan
+ancestors, the Romans. The question, however, did not remain
+one for mere literary discussion, but the parties for and against
+disputed publicly. After the terrible floods of 1333, and again
+in 1345, astrologers and theologians discussed with great
+minuteness the influence of the stars, the will of God, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_516" id="page_516"></a>{516}</span>
+justice of his punishments.<a name="FNanchor_1189_1189" id="FNanchor_1189_1189"></a><a href="#Footnote_1189_1189" class="fnanchor">[1189]</a> These struggles never ceased
+throughout the whole time of the Renaissance,<a name="FNanchor_1190_1190" id="FNanchor_1190_1190"></a><a href="#Footnote_1190_1190" class="fnanchor">[1190]</a> and we may
+conclude that the protestors were in earnest, since it was easier
+for them to recommend themselves to the great by defending,
+than by opposing astrology.</p>
+
+<p>In the circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent, among his most
+distinguished Platonists, opinions were divided on this question.
+That Marsilio Ficino defended astrology, and drew the
+horoscope of the children of the house, promising the little
+Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., that he would one day be Pope,<a name="FNanchor_1191_1191" id="FNanchor_1191_1191"></a><a href="#Footnote_1191_1191" class="fnanchor">[1191]</a>
+as Giovio would have us believe, is an invention&mdash;but other
+academicians accepted astrology. Pico della Mirandola,<a name="FNanchor_1192_1192" id="FNanchor_1192_1192"></a><a href="#Footnote_1192_1192" class="fnanchor">[1192]</a> on
+the other hand, made an epoch in the subject by his famous
+refutation. He detects in this belief the root of all impiety
+and immorality. If the astrologer, he maintains, believes in
+anything at all, he must worship not God, but the planets,
+from which all good and evil are derived. All other superstitions
+find a ready instrument in astrology, which serves as
+handmaid to geomancy, chiromancy, and magic of every kind.
+As to morality, he maintains that nothing can more foster evil
+than the opinion that heaven itself is the cause of it, in which
+case the faith in eternal happiness and punishment must also
+disappear. Pico even took the trouble to check off the astrologers
+inductively, and found that in the course of a month
+three-fourths of their weather prophecies turned out false.
+But his main achievement was to set forth, in the Fourth
+Book&mdash;a positive Christian doctrine of the freedom of the will
+and the government of the universe, which seems to have made
+a greater impression on the educated classes throughout Italy
+than all the revivalist preachers put together. The latter, in
+fact, often failed to reach these classes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_517" id="page_517"></a>{517}</span></p>
+
+<p>The first result of his book was that the astrologers ceased
+to publish their doctrines,<a name="FNanchor_1193_1193" id="FNanchor_1193_1193"></a><a href="#Footnote_1193_1193" class="fnanchor">[1193]</a> and those who had already printed
+them were more or less ashamed of what they had done.
+Gioviano Pontano, for example, in his book on Fate (<a href="#page_503">p. 503</a>),
+had recognised the science, and in a great work of his own,<a name="FNanchor_1194_1194" id="FNanchor_1194_1194"></a><a href="#Footnote_1194_1194" class="fnanchor">[1194]</a>
+the several parts of which were dedicated to his highly-placed
+friends and fellow-believers, Aldo Manucci, P. Bembo, and
+Sandazaro, had expounded the whole theory of it in the style
+of the old Firmicus, ascribing to the stars the growth of every
+bodily and spiritual quality. He now in his dialogue ‘Ægidius,’
+surrendered, if not astrology, at least certain astrologers,
+and sounded the praises of free will, by which man is
+enabled to know God.<a name="FNanchor_1195_1195" id="FNanchor_1195_1195"></a><a href="#Footnote_1195_1195" class="fnanchor">[1195]</a> Astrology remained more or less in
+fashion, but seems not to have governed human life in the way
+it formerly had done. The art of painting, which in the fifteenth
+century had done its best to foster the delusion, now
+expressed the altered tone of thought. Raphael, in the cupola
+of the Cappella Chigi,<a name="FNanchor_1196_1196" id="FNanchor_1196_1196"></a><a href="#Footnote_1196_1196" class="fnanchor">[1196]</a> represents the gods of the different
+planets and the starry firmament, watched, however, and
+guided by beautiful angel-figures, and receiving from above
+the blessing of the Eternal Father. There was also another
+cause which now began to tell against astrology in Italy. The
+Spaniards took no interest in it, not even the generals, and
+those who wished to gain their favour<a name="FNanchor_1197_1197" id="FNanchor_1197_1197"></a><a href="#Footnote_1197_1197" class="fnanchor">[1197]</a> declared open war<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_518" id="page_518"></a>{518}</span>
+against the half-heretical, half-Mohammedan science. It is
+true that Guicciardini<a name="FNanchor_1198_1198" id="FNanchor_1198_1198"></a><a href="#Footnote_1198_1198" class="fnanchor">[1198]</a> writes in the year 1529: ‘How happy
+are the astrologers, who are believed if they tell one truth to a
+hundred lies, while other people lose all credit if they tell one
+lie to a hundred truths.’ But the contempt for astrology did
+not necessarily lead to a return to the belief in Providence. It
+could as easily lead to an indefinite Fatalism.</p>
+
+<p>In this respect, as in others, Italy was unable to make its
+own way healthily through the ferment of the Renaissance,
+because the foreign invasion and the Counter-Reformation
+came upon it in the middle. Without such interfering causes
+its own strength would have enabled it thoroughly to get rid
+of these fantastic illusions. Those who hold that the onslaught
+of the strangers and the Catholic reactions were necessities for
+which the Italian people was itself solely responsible, will look
+on the spiritual bankruptcy which they produced as a just retribution.
+But it is a pity that the rest of Europe had indirectly
+to pay so large a part of the penalty.</p>
+
+<p>The beliefs in omens seems a much more innocent matter
+than astrology. The Middle Ages had everywhere inherited
+them in abundance from the various pagan religions; and Italy
+did not differ in this respect from other countries. What is
+characteristic of Italy is the support lent by humanism to the
+popular superstition. The pagan inheritance was here backed
+up by a pagan literary development.</p>
+
+<p>The popular superstition of the Italians rested largely on
+premonitions and inferences drawn from ominous occurrences,<a name="FNanchor_1199_1199" id="FNanchor_1199_1199"></a><a href="#Footnote_1199_1199" class="fnanchor">[1199]</a>
+with which a good deal of magic, mostly of an innocent sort,
+was connected. There was, however, no lack of learned
+humanists who boldly ridiculed these delusions, and to whose
+attacks we partly owe the knowledge of them. Gioviano
+Pontano; the author of the great astrological work already<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_519" id="page_519"></a>{519}</span>
+mentioned (<a href="#page_280">p. 280</a>), enumerates with pity in his ‘Charon,’
+a long string of Neapolitan superstitions&mdash;the grief of the
+women when a fowl or a goose caught the pip; the deep
+anxiety of the nobility if a hunting falcon did not come home,
+or if a horse sprained his foot; the magical formulæ of the
+Apulian peasants, recited on three Saturday evenings, when
+mad dogs were at large. The animal kingdom, as in antiquity,
+was regarded as specially significant in this respect, and the
+behaviour of the lions, leopards, and other beasts kept by
+the State (<a href="#page_293">p. 293</a> sqq.) gave the people all the more food for
+reflection, because they had come to be considered as living
+symbols of the State. During the siege of Florence, in 1529,
+an eagle which had been shot at fled into the city, and the
+Signoria gave the bearer four ducats, because the omen was
+good.<a name="FNanchor_1200_1200" id="FNanchor_1200_1200"></a><a href="#Footnote_1200_1200" class="fnanchor">[1200]</a> Certain times and places were favourable or unfavourable,
+or even decisive one way or the other, for certain actions.
+The Florentines, so Varchi tells us, held Saturday to be the
+fateful day on which all important events, good as well as bad,
+commonly happened. Their prejudice against marching out
+to war through a particular street has been already mentioned
+(<a href="#page_512">p. 512</a>). At Perugia one of the gates, the ‘Porta eburnea,’
+was thought lucky, and the Baglioni always went out to fight
+through it.<a name="FNanchor_1201_1201" id="FNanchor_1201_1201"></a><a href="#Footnote_1201_1201" class="fnanchor">[1201]</a> Meteors and the appearance of the heavens were
+as significant in Italy as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, and the
+popular imagination saw warring armies in an unusual formation
+of clouds, and heard the clash of their collision high in the
+air.<a name="FNanchor_1202_1202" id="FNanchor_1202_1202"></a><a href="#Footnote_1202_1202" class="fnanchor">[1202]</a> The superstition became a more serious matter when it
+attached itself to sacred things, when figures of the Virgin
+wept or moved the eyes,<a name="FNanchor_1203_1203" id="FNanchor_1203_1203"></a><a href="#Footnote_1203_1203" class="fnanchor">[1203]</a> or when public calamities were
+associated with some alleged act of impiety, for which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_520" id="page_520"></a>{520}</span>
+people demanded expiation. In 1478, when Piacenza was
+visited with a violent and prolonged rainfall, it was said that
+there would be no dry weather till a certain usurer, who had
+been lately buried at San Francesco, had ceased to rest in
+consecrated earth. As the bishop was not obliging enough to
+have the corpse dug up, the young fellows of the town took it
+by force, dragged it round the streets amid frightful confusion,
+offered it to be insulted and maltreated by former creditors,
+and at last threw it into the Po.<a name="FNanchor_1204_1204" id="FNanchor_1204_1204"></a><a href="#Footnote_1204_1204" class="fnanchor">[1204]</a> Even Politian accepted this
+point of view in speaking of Giacomo Pazzi, one of the chief
+of the conspiracy of 1478, in Florence, which is called after
+his name. When he was put to death, he devoted his soul
+to Satan with fearful words. Here, too, rain followed and
+threatened to ruin the harvest; here, too, a party of men,
+mostly peasants, dug up the body in the church, and immediately
+the clouds departed and the sun shone&mdash;‘so gracious
+was fortune to the opinion of the people,’ adds the great
+scholar.<a name="FNanchor_1205_1205" id="FNanchor_1205_1205"></a><a href="#Footnote_1205_1205" class="fnanchor">[1205]</a> The corpse was first cast into unhallowed ground,
+the next day again dug up, and after a horrible procession
+through the city, thrown into the Arno.</p>
+
+<p>These facts and the like bear a popular character, and might
+have occurred in the tenth, just as well as in the sixteenth
+century. But now comes the literary influence of antiquity.
+We know positively that the humanists were peculiarly accessible
+to prodigies and auguries, and instances of this have been
+already quoted. If further evidence were needed, it would be
+found in Poggio. The same radical thinker who denied the
+rights of noble birth and the inequality of men (<a href="#page_361">p. 361</a> sqq.),
+not only believed in all the mediæval stories of ghosts and
+devils (fol. 167, 179), but also in prodigies after the ancient
+pattern, like those said to have occurred on the last visit of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_521" id="page_521"></a>{521}</span>
+Eugenius IV. to Florence.<a name="FNanchor_1206_1206" id="FNanchor_1206_1206"></a><a href="#Footnote_1206_1206" class="fnanchor">[1206]</a> ‘Near Como there was seen one
+evening 4,000 dogs, who took the road to Germany; these were
+followed by a great herd of cattle, and these by an army on
+foot and horseback, some with no heads and some with almost
+invisible heads, and then a gigantic horseman with another
+herd of cattle behind him.’ Poggio also believes in a battle
+of magpies and jackdaws (fol. 180). He even relates, perhaps
+without being aware of it, a well-preserved piece of ancient
+mythology. On the Dalmatian coast a Triton had appeared,
+bearded and horned, a genuine sea-satyr, ending in fins and
+a tail; he carried away women and children from the shore,
+till five stout-hearted washer-women killed him with sticks
+and stones.<a name="FNanchor_1207_1207" id="FNanchor_1207_1207"></a><a href="#Footnote_1207_1207" class="fnanchor">[1207]</a> A wooden model of the monster, which was exhibited
+at Ferrara, makes the whole story credible to Poggio.
+Though there were no more oracles, and it was no longer
+possible to take counsel of the gods, yet it became again the
+fashion to open Virgil at hazard, and take the passage hit upon
+as an omen<a name="FNanchor_1208_1208" id="FNanchor_1208_1208"></a><a href="#Footnote_1208_1208" class="fnanchor">[1208]</a> (‘Sortes Virgilianae’). Nor can the belief in
+dæmons current in the later period of antiquity have been
+without influence on the Renaissance. The work of Jamblichus
+or Abammon on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, which
+may have contributed to this result, was printed in a Latin
+translation at the end of the fifteenth century. The Platonic
+Academy at Florence was not free from these and other neo-platonic
+dreams of the Roman decadence. A few words must
+here be given to the belief in dæmons and to the magic which
+was connected with this belief.</p>
+
+<p>The popular faith in what is called the spirit-world was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_522" id="page_522"></a>{522}</span>
+nearly the same in Italy as elsewhere in Europe.<a name="FNanchor_1209_1209" id="FNanchor_1209_1209"></a><a href="#Footnote_1209_1209" class="fnanchor">[1209]</a> In Italy as
+elsewhere there were ghosts, that is, reappearances of deceased
+persons; and if the view taken of them differed in any respect
+from that which prevailed in the North, the difference betrayed
+itself only in the ancient name ‘ombra.’ Nowadays if such a
+shade presents itself, a couple of masses are said for its repose.
+That the spirits of bad men appear in a dreadful shape, is a
+matter of course, but along with this we find the notion that
+the ghosts of the departed are universally malicious. The
+dead, says the priest in Bandello,<a name="FNanchor_1210_1210" id="FNanchor_1210_1210"></a><a href="#Footnote_1210_1210" class="fnanchor">[1210]</a> kill the little children. It
+seems as if a certain shade was here thought of as separate
+from the soul, since the latter suffers in Purgatory, and when
+it appears, does nothing but wail and pray. To lay the ghost,
+the tomb was opened, the corpse pulled to pieces, the heart
+burned and the ashes scattered to the four winds.<a name="FNanchor_1211_1211" id="FNanchor_1211_1211"></a><a href="#Footnote_1211_1211" class="fnanchor">[1211]</a> At other
+times what appears is not the ghost of a man, but of an event&mdash;of
+a past condition of things. So the neighbours explained
+the diabolical appearances in the old palace of the Visconti
+near San Giovanni in Conca, at Milan, since here it was that
+Bernabò Visconti had caused countless victims of his tyranny
+to be tortured and strangled, and no wonder if there were
+strange things to be seen.<a name="FNanchor_1212_1212" id="FNanchor_1212_1212"></a><a href="#Footnote_1212_1212" class="fnanchor">[1212]</a> One evening a swarm of poor
+people with candles in their hands appeared to a dishonest
+guardian of the poor at Perugia, and danced round about him;
+a great figure spoke in threatening tones on their behalf&mdash;it<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_523" id="page_523"></a>{523}</span>
+was St. Alò, the patron saint of the poor-house.<a name="FNanchor_1213_1213" id="FNanchor_1213_1213"></a><a href="#Footnote_1213_1213" class="fnanchor">[1213]</a> These modes
+of belief were so much a matter of course that the poets could
+make use of them as something which every reader would
+understand. The appearance of the slain Ludovico Pico under
+the walls of the besieged Mirandola is finely represented by
+Castiglione.<a name="FNanchor_1214_1214" id="FNanchor_1214_1214"></a><a href="#Footnote_1214_1214" class="fnanchor">[1214]</a> It is true that poetry made the freest use of
+these conceptions when the poet himself had outgrown them.</p>
+
+<p>Italy, too, shared the belief in dæmons with the other
+nations of the Middle Ages. Men were convinced that God
+sometimes allowed bad spirits of every class to exercise a
+destructive influence on parts of the world and of human life.
+The only reservation made was that the man to whom the
+Evil One came as tempter, could use his free will to resist.<a name="FNanchor_1215_1215" id="FNanchor_1215_1215"></a><a href="#Footnote_1215_1215" class="fnanchor">[1215]</a> In
+Italy the dæmonic influence, especially as shown in natural
+events, easily assumed a character of poetical greatness. In
+the night before the great inundation of the Val d’Arno in
+1333, a pious hermit above Vallombrosa heard a diabolical
+tumult in his cell, crossed himself, stepped to the door, and
+saw a crowd of black and terrible knights gallop by in armour.
+When conjured to stand, one of them said: ‘We go to drown
+the city of Florence on account of its sins, if God will let us.’<a name="FNanchor_1216_1216" id="FNanchor_1216_1216"></a><a href="#Footnote_1216_1216" class="fnanchor">[1216]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_524" id="page_524"></a>{524}</span>
+With this, the nearly contemporary vision at Venice (1340)
+may be compared, out of which a great master of the Venetian
+school, probably Giorgione, made the marvellous picture of a
+galley full of dæmons, which speeds with the swiftness of a
+bird over the stormy lagune to destroy the sinful island-city,
+till the three saints, who have stepped unobserved into a poor
+boatman’s skiff, exorcised the fiends and sent them and their
+vessel to the bottom of the waters.<a name="FNanchor_1217_1217" id="FNanchor_1217_1217"></a><a href="#Footnote_1217_1217" class="fnanchor">[1217]</a></p>
+
+<p>To this belief the illusion was now added that by means of
+magical arts it was possible to enter into relations with the
+evil ones, and use their help to further the purposes of greed,
+ambition, and sensuality. Many persons were probably accused
+of doing so before the time when it was actually attempted by
+many; but when the so-called magicians and witches began to
+be burned, the deliberate practice of the black art became more
+frequent. With the smoke of the fires in which the suspected
+victims were sacrificed, were spread the narcotic fumes by
+which numbers of ruined characters were drugged into magic;
+and with them many calculating impostors became associated.</p>
+
+<p>The primitive and popular form in which the superstition
+had probably lived on uninterruptedly from the time of the
+Romans,<a name="FNanchor_1218_1218" id="FNanchor_1218_1218"></a><a href="#Footnote_1218_1218" class="fnanchor">[1218]</a> was the art of the witch (Strega). The witch, so
+long as she limited herself to mere divination,<a name="FNanchor_1219_1219" id="FNanchor_1219_1219"></a><a href="#Footnote_1219_1219" class="fnanchor">[1219]</a> might be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_525" id="page_525"></a>{525}</span>
+innocent enough, were it not that the transition from prophecy
+to active help could easily, though often imperceptibly, be a
+fatal downward step. She was credited in such a case not
+only with the power of exciting love or hatred between man
+and woman, but also with purely destructive and malignant
+arts, and was especially charged with the sickness of little
+children, even when the malady obviously came from the
+neglect and stupidity of the parents. It is still questionable
+how far she was supposed to act by mere magical ceremonies
+and formulæ, or by a conscious alliance with the fiends, apart
+from the poisons and drugs which she administered with a full
+knowledge of their effect.</p>
+
+<p>The more innocent form of the superstition, in which the
+mendicant friar could venture to appear as the competitor of
+the witch, is shown in the case of the witch of Gaeta whom
+we read of in Pontano.<a name="FNanchor_1220_1220" id="FNanchor_1220_1220"></a><a href="#Footnote_1220_1220" class="fnanchor">[1220]</a> His traveller Suppatius reaches her
+dwelling while she is giving audience to a girl and a servant-maid,
+who come to her with a black hen, nine eggs laid on a
+Friday, a duck, and some white thread&mdash;for it is the third day
+since the new moon. They are then sent away, and bidden to
+come again at twilight. It is to be hoped that nothing worse
+than divination is intended. The mistress of the servant-maid
+is pregnant by a monk; the girl’s lover has proved untrue and
+has gone into a monastery. The witch complains: ‘Since my
+husband’s death I support myself in this way, and should make
+a good thing of it, since the Gaetan women have plenty of faith,
+were it not that the monks baulk me of my gains by explaining
+dreams, appeasing the anger of the saints for money, promising
+husbands to the girls, men-children to the pregnant women,
+offspring to the barren, and besides all this visiting the women
+at night when their husbands are away fishing, in accordance
+with the assignations made in day-time at church.’ Suppatius
+warns her against the envy of the monastery, but she has
+no fear, since the guardian of it is an old acquaintance of hers.<a name="FNanchor_1221_1221" id="FNanchor_1221_1221"></a><a href="#Footnote_1221_1221" class="fnanchor">[1221]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_526" id="page_526"></a>{526}</span></p>
+
+<p>But the superstition further gave rise to a worse sort of
+witches, namely those who deprived men of their health and
+life. In these cases the mischief, when not sufficiently accounted
+for by the evil eye and the like, was naturally attributed
+to the aid of powerful spirits. The punishment, as we
+have seen in the case of Finicella (<a href="#page_469">p. 469</a>), was the stake; and
+yet a compromise with fanaticism was sometimes practicable.
+According to the laws of Perugia, for example, a witch could
+settle the affair by paying down 400 pounds.<a name="FNanchor_1222_1222" id="FNanchor_1222_1222"></a><a href="#Footnote_1222_1222" class="fnanchor">[1222]</a> The matter
+was not then treated with the seriousness and consistency
+of later times. In the territories of the Church, at Norcia
+(Nursia), the home of St. Benedict, in the upper Apennines,
+there was a perfect nest of witches and sorcerers, and no
+secret was made of it. It is spoken of in one of the most
+remarkable letters of Æneas Sylvius,<a name="FNanchor_1223_1223" id="FNanchor_1223_1223"></a><a href="#Footnote_1223_1223" class="fnanchor">[1223]</a> belonging to his earlier
+period. He writes to his brother: ‘The bearer of this came
+to me to ask if I knew of a Mount of Venus in Italy, for in
+such a place magical arts were taught, and his master, a Saxon
+and a great astronomer,<a name="FNanchor_1224_1224" id="FNanchor_1224_1224"></a><a href="#Footnote_1224_1224" class="fnanchor">[1224]</a> was anxious to learn them. I told
+him that I knew of a Porto Venere not far from Carrara, on
+the rocky coast of Liguria, where I spent three nights on the
+way to Basel; I also found that there was a mountain called
+Eryx in Sicily, which was dedicated to Venus, but I did not
+know whether magic was taught there. But it came into my
+mind while talking that in Umbria, in the old Duchy (Spoleto),
+near the town of Nursia, there is a cave beneath a steep rock,
+in which water flows. There, as I remember to have heard,
+are witches (striges), dæmons, and nightly shades, and he that
+has the courage can see and speak to ghosts (spiritus), and
+learn magical arts.<a name="FNanchor_1225_1225" id="FNanchor_1225_1225"></a><a href="#Footnote_1225_1225" class="fnanchor">[1225]</a> I have not seen it, nor taken any trouble<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_527" id="page_527"></a>{527}</span>
+about it, for that which is learned with sin is better not
+learned at all.’ He nevertheless names his informant, and
+begs his brother to take the bearer of the letter to him, should
+he be still alive. Æneas goes far enough here in his politeness
+to a man of position, but personally he was not only freer from
+superstition than his contemporaries (pp. 481, 508), but he also
+stood a test on the subject which not every educated man
+of our own day could endure. At the time of the Council of
+Basel, when he lay sick of the fever for seventy-five days at
+Milan, he could never be persuaded to listen to the magic
+doctors, though a man was brought to his bedside who a short
+time before had marvellously cured 2,000 soldiers of fever in
+the camp of Piccinino. While still an invalid, Æneas rode
+over the mountains to Basel, and got well on the journey.<a name="FNanchor_1226_1226" id="FNanchor_1226_1226"></a><a href="#Footnote_1226_1226" class="fnanchor">[1226]</a></p>
+
+<p>We learn something more about the neighbourhood of
+Norcia through the necromancer who tried to get Benvenuto
+Cellini into his power. A new book of magic was to be consecrated,<a name="FNanchor_1227_1227" id="FNanchor_1227_1227"></a><a href="#Footnote_1227_1227" class="fnanchor">[1227]</a>
+and the best place for the ceremony was among
+the mountains in that district. The master of the magician
+had once, it is true, done the same thing near the Abbey of
+Farfa, but had there found difficulties which did not present
+themselves at Norcia; further, the peasants in the latter neighbourhood
+were trustworthy people who had practice in the
+matter, and who could afford considerable help in case of
+need. The expedition did not take place, else Benvenuto
+would probably have been able to tell us something of the
+impostor’s assistants. The whole neighbourhood was then
+proverbial. Aretino says somewhere of an enchanted well,
+‘there dwell the sisters of the sibyl of Norcia and the aunt
+of the Fata Morgana.’ And about the same time Trissino
+could still celebrate the place in his great epic<a name="FNanchor_1228_1228" id="FNanchor_1228_1228"></a><a href="#Footnote_1228_1228" class="fnanchor">[1228]</a> with all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_528" id="page_528"></a>{528}</span>
+resources of poetry and allegory as the home of authentic
+prophecy.</p>
+
+<p>After the famous Bull of Innocent VIII. (1484),<a name="FNanchor_1229_1229" id="FNanchor_1229_1229"></a><a href="#Footnote_1229_1229" class="fnanchor">[1229]</a> witchcraft
+and the persecution of witches grew into a great and revolting
+system. The chief representatives of this system of persecution
+were German Dominicans; and Germany and, curiously
+enough, those parts of Italy nearest Germany were the
+countries most afflicted by this plague. The bulls and injunctions
+of the Popes themselves<a name="FNanchor_1230_1230" id="FNanchor_1230_1230"></a><a href="#Footnote_1230_1230" class="fnanchor">[1230]</a> refer, for example, to the
+Dominican Province of Lombardy, to Cremona, to the dioceses
+of Brescia and Bergamo. We learn from Sprenger’s famous
+theoretico-practical guide, the ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ that
+forty-one witches were burnt at Como in the first year after
+the publication of the bull; crowds of Italian women took
+refuge in the territory of the Archduke Sigismund, where
+they believed themselves to be still safe. Witchcraft ended
+by taking firm root in a few unlucky Alpine valleys, especially
+in the Val Camonica;<a name="FNanchor_1231_1231" id="FNanchor_1231_1231"></a><a href="#Footnote_1231_1231" class="fnanchor">[1231]</a> the system of persecution had succeeded
+in permanently infecting with the delusion those
+populations which were in any way predisposed for it. This
+essentially German form of witchcraft is what we should think
+of when reading the stories and novels of Milan or Bologna.<a name="FNanchor_1232_1232" id="FNanchor_1232_1232"></a><a href="#Footnote_1232_1232" class="fnanchor">[1232]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_529" id="page_529"></a>{529}</span>
+That it did not make further progress in Italy is probably due
+to the fact that elsewhere a highly developed ‘Stregheria’
+was already in existence, resting on a different set of ideas.
+The Italian witch practised a trade, and needed for it money
+and, above all, sense. We find nothing about her of the
+hysterical dreams of the Northern witch, of marvellous journeys
+through the air, of Incubus and Succubus; the business
+of the ‘Strega’ was to provide for other people’s pleasure. If
+she was credited with the power of assuming different shapes,
+or of transporting herself suddenly to distant places, she was
+so far content to accept this reputation, as her influence was
+thereby increased; on the other hand, it was perilous for her
+when the fear of her malice and vengeance, and especially of
+her power for enchanting children, cattle, and crops, became
+general. Inquisitors and magistrates were then thoroughly in
+accord with popular wishes if they burnt her.</p>
+
+<p>By far the most important field for the activity of the
+‘Strega’ lay, as has been said, in love-affairs, and included the
+stirring up of love and of hatred, the producing of abortion,
+the pretended murder of the unfaithful man or woman by
+magical arts, and even the manufacture of poisons.<a name="FNanchor_1233_1233" id="FNanchor_1233_1233"></a><a href="#Footnote_1233_1233" class="fnanchor">[1233]</a> Owing
+to the unwillingness of many persons to have to do with these
+women, a class of occasional practitioners arose who secretly
+learned from them some one or other of their arts, and then
+used this knowledge on their own account. The Roman prostitutes,
+for example, tried to enhance their personal attractions
+by charms of another description in the style of Horatian
+Canidia. Aretino<a name="FNanchor_1234_1234" id="FNanchor_1234_1234"></a><a href="#Footnote_1234_1234" class="fnanchor">[1234]</a> may not only have known, but have also
+told the truth about them in this particular. He gives a list
+of the loathsome messes which were to be found in their boxes<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_530" id="page_530"></a>{530}</span>&mdash;hair, skulls, ribs, teeth, dead men’s eyes, human skin, the
+navels of little children, the soles of shoes and pieces of clothing
+from tombs. They even went themselves to the graveyard
+and fetched bits of rotten flesh, which they slily gave their
+lovers to eat&mdash;with more that is still worse. Pieces of the hair
+and nails of the lover were boiled in oil stolen from the ever-burning
+lamps in the church. The most innocuous of their
+charms was to make a heart of glowing ashes, and then to
+pierce it while singing&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Prima che’l fuoco spenghi,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fa ch’a mia porta venghi;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tal ti punga mio amore<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Quale io fo questo cuore.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>There were other charms practised by moonshine, with
+drawings on the ground, and figures of wax or bronze, which
+doubtless represented the lover, and were treated according to
+circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>These things were so customary that a woman who, without
+youth and beauty, nevertheless exercised a powerful charm on
+men, naturally became suspected of witchcraft. The mother of
+Sanga,<a name="FNanchor_1235_1235" id="FNanchor_1235_1235"></a><a href="#Footnote_1235_1235" class="fnanchor">[1235]</a> secretary to Clement VII., poisoned her son’s mistress,
+who was a woman of this kind. Unfortunately the son died
+too, as well as a party of friends who had eaten of the poisoned
+salad.</p>
+
+<p>Next come, not as helper, but as competitor to the witch, the
+magician or enchanter&mdash;‘incantatore’&mdash;who was still more
+familiar with the most perilous business of the craft. Sometimes
+he was as much or more of an astrologer than of a
+magician; he probably often gave himself out as an astrologer
+in order not to be prosecuted as a magician, and a certain
+astrology was essential in order to find out the favourable
+hour for a magical process.<a name="FNanchor_1236_1236" id="FNanchor_1236_1236"></a><a href="#Footnote_1236_1236" class="fnanchor">[1236]</a> But since many spirits are good<a name="FNanchor_1237_1237" id="FNanchor_1237_1237"></a><a href="#Footnote_1237_1237" class="fnanchor">[1237]</a>
+or indifferent, the magician could sometimes maintain a very
+tolerable reputation, and Sixtus IV. in the year 1474, had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_531" id="page_531"></a>{531}</span>
+to proceed expressly against some Bolognese Carmelites,<a name="FNanchor_1238_1238" id="FNanchor_1238_1238"></a><a href="#Footnote_1238_1238" class="fnanchor">[1238]</a> who
+asserted in the pulpit that there was no harm in seeking information
+from the dæmons. Very many people believed in the
+possibility of the thing itself; an indirect proof of this lies in
+the fact that the most pious men believed that by prayer they
+could obtain visions of good spirits. Savonarola’s mind was
+filled with these things; the Florentine Platonists speak of a
+mystic union with God; and Marcellus Palingenius (<a href="#page_264">p. 264</a>),
+gives us to understand clearly enough that he had to do with
+consecrated spirits.<a name="FNanchor_1239_1239" id="FNanchor_1239_1239"></a><a href="#Footnote_1239_1239" class="fnanchor">[1239]</a> The same writer is convinced of the
+existence of a whole hierarchy of bad dæmons, who have their
+seat from the moon downwards, and are ever on the watch to
+do some mischief to nature and human life.<a name="FNanchor_1240_1240" id="FNanchor_1240_1240"></a><a href="#Footnote_1240_1240" class="fnanchor">[1240]</a> He even tells of
+his own personal acquaintance with some of them, and as the
+scope of the present work does not allow of a systematic exposition
+of the then prevalent belief in spirits, the narrative of
+Palingenius may be given as one instance out of many.<a name="FNanchor_1241_1241" id="FNanchor_1241_1241"></a><a href="#Footnote_1241_1241" class="fnanchor">[1241]</a></p>
+
+<p>At S. Silvestro, on Soracte, he had been receiving instruction
+from a pious hermit on the nothingness of earthly things and
+the worthlessness of human life; and when the night drew
+near he set out on his way back to Rome. On the road, in the
+full light of the moon, he was joined by three men, one of
+whom called him by name, and asked him whence he came.
+Palingenius made answer: ‘From the wise man on the mountain.’
+‘O fool,’ replied the stranger, ‘dost thou in truth believe
+that anyone on earth is wise? Only higher beings (Divi) have
+wisdom, and such are we three, although we wear the shapes
+of men. I am named Saracil, and these two Sathiel and Jana.
+Our kingdom lies near the moon, where dwell that multitude
+of intermediate beings who have sway over earth and sea.’
+Palingenius then asked, not without an inward tremor, what
+they were going to do at Rome. The answer was: ‘One of our
+comrades, Ammon, is kept in servitude by the magic arts of a
+youth from Narni, one of the attendants of Cardinal Orsini;
+for mark it, O men, there is proof of your own immortality<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_532" id="page_532"></a>{532}</span>
+therein, that you can control one of us; I myself, shut up in
+crystal, was once forced to serve a German, till a bearded monk
+set me free. This is the service which we wish to render at
+Rome to our friend, and we shall also take the opportunity of
+sending one or two distinguished Romans to the nether world.’
+At these words a light breeze arose, and Sathiel said: ‘Listen,
+our messenger is coming back from Rome, and this wind
+announces him.’ And then another being appeared, whom
+they greeted joyfully and then asked about Rome. His utterances
+are strongly anti-papal: Clement VII. was again allied
+with the Spaniards and hoped to root out Luther’s doctrines,
+not with arguments, but by the Spanish sword. This is wholly
+in the interest of the dæmons, whom the impending bloodshed
+would enable to carry away the souls of thousands into hell.
+At the close of this conversation, in which Rome with all its
+guilt is represented as wholly given over to the Evil One, the
+apparitions vanish, and leave the poet sorrowfully to pursue his
+way alone.<a name="FNanchor_1242_1242" id="FNanchor_1242_1242"></a><a href="#Footnote_1242_1242" class="fnanchor">[1242]</a></p>
+
+<p>Those who would form a conception of the extent of the
+belief in those relations to the dæmons which could be openly
+avowed in spite of the penalties attaching to witchcraft, may
+be referred to the much read work of Agrippa of Nettesheim
+on ‘Secret Philosophy.’ He seems originally to have written
+it before he was in Italy,<a name="FNanchor_1243_1243" id="FNanchor_1243_1243"></a><a href="#Footnote_1243_1243" class="fnanchor">[1243]</a> but in the dedication to Trithemius
+he mentions Italian authorities among others, if only by way
+of disparagement. In the case of equivocal persons like
+Agrippa, or of the knaves and fools into whom the majority of
+the rest may be divided, there is little that is interesting in the
+system they profess, with its formulæ, fumigations, ointments,
+and the rest of it.<a name="FNanchor_1244_1244" id="FNanchor_1244_1244"></a><a href="#Footnote_1244_1244" class="fnanchor">[1244]</a> But this system was filled with quotations<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_533" id="page_533"></a>{533}</span>
+from the superstitions of antiquity, the influence of which on
+the life and the passions of Italians is at times most remarkable
+and fruitful. We might think that a great mind must be
+thoroughly ruined, before it surrendered itself to such influences;
+but the violence of hope and desire led even vigorous
+and original men of all classes to have recourse to the magician,
+and the belief that the thing was feasible at all weakened to
+some extent the faith, even of those who kept at a distance, in
+the moral order of the world. At the cost of a little money
+and danger it seemed possible to defy with impunity the universal
+reason and morality of mankind, and to spare oneself
+the intermediate steps which otherwise lie between a man and
+his lawful or unlawful ends.</p>
+
+<p>Let us here glance for a moment at an older and now decaying
+form of superstition. From the darkest period of the
+Middle Ages, or even from the days of antiquity, many cities
+of Italy had kept the remembrance of the connexion of their
+fate with certain buildings, statues, or other material objects.
+The ancients had left records of consecrating priests or Telestæ,
+who were present at the solemn foundation of cities, and magically
+guaranteed their prosperity by erecting certain monuments
+or by burying certain objects (Telesmata). Traditions
+of this sort were more likely than anything else to live on in
+the form of popular, unwritten legend; but in the course of
+centuries the priest naturally became transformed into the
+magician, since the religious side of his function was no longer
+understood. In some of his Virgilian miracles at Naples,<a name="FNanchor_1245_1245" id="FNanchor_1245_1245"></a><a href="#Footnote_1245_1245" class="fnanchor">[1245]</a> the
+ancient remembrance of one of these Telestæ is clearly preserved,
+his name being in course of time supplanted by that
+of Virgil. The enclosing of the mysterious picture of the
+city in a vessel is neither more nor less than a genuine, ancient
+Telesma; and Virgil the founder of Naples is only the officiating
+priest, who took part in the ceremony, presented in another
+dress. The popular imagination went on working at these<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_534" id="page_534"></a>{534}</span>
+themes, till Virgil became also responsible for the brazen horse,
+for the heads at the Nolan gate, for the brazen fly over another
+gate, and even for the Grotto of Posilippo&mdash;all of them things
+which in one respect or other served to put a magical constraint
+upon fate, and the first two of which seemed to determine
+the whole fortune of the city. Mediæval Rome also preserved
+confused recollections of the same kind. At the church of S.
+Ambrogio at Milan, there was an ancient marble Hercules; so
+long, it was said, as this stood in its place, so long would the
+Empire last. That of the Germans is probably meant, as
+the coronation of their Emperors at Milan took place in this
+church.<a name="FNanchor_1246_1246" id="FNanchor_1246_1246"></a><a href="#Footnote_1246_1246" class="fnanchor">[1246]</a> The Florentines<a name="FNanchor_1247_1247" id="FNanchor_1247_1247"></a><a href="#Footnote_1247_1247" class="fnanchor">[1247]</a> were convinced that the temple of
+Mars, afterwards transformed into the Baptistry, would stand
+to the end of time, according to the constellation under which
+it had been built; they had, as Christians, removed from it
+the marble equestrian statue; but since the destruction of the
+latter would have brought some great calamity on the city&mdash;also
+according to a constellation&mdash;they set it upon a tower by
+the Arno. When Totila conquered Florence, the statue fell into
+the river, and was not fished out again till Charles the Great
+refounded the city. It was then placed on a pillar at the entrance
+to the Ponte Vecchio, and on this spot Buondelmente
+was slain in 1215. The origin of the great feud between Guelph
+and Ghibelline was thus associated with the dreaded idol.
+During the inundation of 1333 the statue vanished forever.<a name="FNanchor_1248_1248" id="FNanchor_1248_1248"></a><a href="#Footnote_1248_1248" class="fnanchor">[1248]</a></p>
+
+<p>But the same Telesma reappears elsewhere. Guido Bonatto,
+already mentioned, was not satisfied, at the refounding of the
+walls of Forli, with requiring certain symbolic acts of reconciliation
+from the two parties (<a href="#page_511">p. 511</a>). By burying a bronze
+or stone equestrian statue,<a name="FNanchor_1249_1249" id="FNanchor_1249_1249"></a><a href="#Footnote_1249_1249" class="fnanchor">[1249]</a> which he had produced by astro<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_535" id="page_535"></a>{535}</span>
+logical or magical arts, he believed that he had defended the
+city from ruin, and even from capture and plunder. When
+Cardinal Albornoz (<a href="#page_102">p. 102</a>) was governor of Romagna some
+sixty years later, the statue was accidentally dug up and then
+shown to the people, probably by the order of the Cardinal,
+that it might be known by what means the cruel Montefeltro
+had defended himself against the Roman Church. And again,
+half a century later, when an attempt to surprise Forli had
+failed, men began to talk afresh of the virtue of the statue,
+which had perhaps been saved and reburied. It was the last
+time that they could do so; for a year later Forli was really
+taken. The foundation of buildings all through the fifteenth
+century was associated not only with astrology (<a href="#page_511">p. 511</a>) but
+also with magic. The large number of gold and silver medals
+which Paul II. buried in the foundations of his buildings<a name="FNanchor_1250_1250" id="FNanchor_1250_1250"></a><a href="#Footnote_1250_1250" class="fnanchor">[1250]</a> was
+noticed, and Platina was by no means displeased to recognise
+an old pagan Telesma in the fact. Neither Paul nor his biographer
+were in any way conscious of the mediæval religious
+significance of such an offering.<a name="FNanchor_1251_1251" id="FNanchor_1251_1251"></a><a href="#Footnote_1251_1251" class="fnanchor">[1251]</a></p>
+
+<p>But this official magic, which in many cases only rests on
+hearsay, was comparatively unimportant by the side of the
+secret arts practised for personal ends.</p>
+
+<p>The form which these most often took in daily life is shown
+by Ariosto in his comedy of the necromancers.<a name="FNanchor_1252_1252" id="FNanchor_1252_1252"></a><a href="#Footnote_1252_1252" class="fnanchor">[1252]</a> His hero is
+one of the many Jewish exiles from Spain, although he also
+gives himself out for a Greek, an Egyptian, and an African,
+and is constantly changing his name and costume. He pretends
+that his incantations can darken the day and lighten the
+darkness, that he can move the earth, make himself invisible,
+and change men into beasts; but these vaunts are only an
+advertisement. His true object is to make his account out
+of unhappy and troubled marriages, and the traces which he
+leaves behind him in his course are like the slime of a snail,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_536" id="page_536"></a>{536}</span>
+or often like the ruin wrought by a hail-storm. To attain his
+ends he can persuade people that the box in which a lover is
+hidden is full of ghosts, or that he can make a corpse talk.
+It is at all events a good sign that poets and novelists could
+reckon on popular applause in holding up this class of men to
+ridicule. Bandello not only treats the sorcery of a Lombard
+monk as a miserable, and in its consequences terrible, piece of
+knavery,<a name="FNanchor_1253_1253" id="FNanchor_1253_1253"></a><a href="#Footnote_1253_1253" class="fnanchor">[1253]</a> but he also describes with unaffected indignation<a name="FNanchor_1254_1254" id="FNanchor_1254_1254"></a><a href="#Footnote_1254_1254" class="fnanchor">[1254]</a>
+the disasters which never cease to pursue the credulous fool.
+‘A man hopes with “Solomon’s Key” and other magical
+books to find the treasures hidden in the bosom of the earth,
+to force his lady to do his will, to find out the secrets of princes,
+and to transport himself in the twinkling of an eye from Milan
+to Rome. The more often he is deceived, the more steadfastly
+he believes.... Do you remember the time, Signor Carlo,
+when a friend of ours, in order to win the favour of his beloved,
+filled his room with skulls and bones like a churchyard?’
+The most loathsome tasks were prescribed&mdash;to draw three
+teeth from a corpse or a nail from its finger, and the like; and
+while the hocus-pocus of the incantation was going on, the
+unhappy participants sometimes died of terror.</p>
+
+<p>Benvenuto Cellini did not die during the well-known incantation
+(1532) in the Coliseum at Rome,<a name="FNanchor_1255_1255" id="FNanchor_1255_1255"></a><a href="#Footnote_1255_1255" class="fnanchor">[1255]</a> although both he and
+his companions witnessed no ordinary horrors; the Sicilian
+priest, who probably expected to find him a useful coadjutor
+in the future, paid him the compliment as they went home
+of saying that he had never met a man of so sturdy a courage.
+Every reader will make his own reflections on the proceedings
+themselves. The narcotic fumes and the fact that the imaginations
+of the spectators were predisposed for all possible terrors,
+are the chief points to be noticed, and explain why the lad
+who formed one of the party, and on whom they made most<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_537" id="page_537"></a>{537}</span>
+impression, saw much more than the others. But it may be
+inferred that Benvenuto himself was the one whom it was
+wished to impress, since the dangerous beginning of the incantation
+can have had no other aim than to arouse curiosity.
+For Benvenuto had to think before the fair Angelica occurred
+to him; and the magician told him afterwards that love-making
+was folly compared with the finding of treasures. Further, it
+must not be forgotten that it flattered his vanity to be able to
+say, ‘The dæmons have kept their word, and Angelica came
+into my hands, as they promised, just a month later’ (cap. 68).
+Even on the supposition that Benvenuto gradually lied himself
+into believing the whole story, it would still be permanently
+valuable as evidence of the mode of thought then prevalent.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, however, the Italian artists, even ‘the odd,
+capricious, and eccentric’ among them, had little to do with
+magic. One of them, in his anatomical studies, may have cut
+himself a jacket out of the skin of a corpse, but at the advice
+of his confessor he put it again into the grave.<a name="FNanchor_1256_1256" id="FNanchor_1256_1256"></a><a href="#Footnote_1256_1256" class="fnanchor">[1256]</a> Indeed the
+frequent study of anatomy probably did more than anything
+else to destroy the belief in the magical influence of various
+parts of the body, while at the same time the incessant observation
+and representation of the human form made the artist
+familiar with a magic of a wholly different sort.</p>
+
+<p>In general, notwithstanding the instances which have been
+quoted, magic seems to have been markedly on the decline at
+the beginning of the sixteenth century,&mdash;that is to say, at
+a time when it first began to flourish vigorously out of Italy;
+and thus the tours of Italian sorcerers and astrologers in the
+North seem not to have begun till their credit at home was
+thoroughly impaired. In the fourteenth century it was
+thought necessary carefully to watch the lake on Mount
+Pilatus, near Scariotto, to hinder the magicians from there consecrating
+their books.<a name="FNanchor_1257_1257" id="FNanchor_1257_1257"></a><a href="#Footnote_1257_1257" class="fnanchor">[1257]</a> In the fifteenth century we find, for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_538" id="page_538"></a>{538}</span>
+example, that the offer was made to produce a storm of rain, in
+order to frighten away a besieged army; and even then the
+commander of the besieged town&mdash;Nicolò Vitelli in Città di
+Castello&mdash;had the good sense to dismiss the sorcerers as godless
+persons.<a name="FNanchor_1258_1258" id="FNanchor_1258_1258"></a><a href="#Footnote_1258_1258" class="fnanchor">[1258]</a> In the sixteenth century no more instances of this
+official kind appear, although in private life the magicians
+were still active. To this time belongs the classic figure of
+German sorcery, Dr. Johann Faust; the Italian ideal, on the
+other hand, Guido Bonatto, dates back to the thirteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>It must nevertheless be added that the decrease of the belief
+in magic was not necessarily accompanied by an increase of
+the belief in a moral order, but that in many cases, like the
+decaying faith in astrology, the delusion left behind it nothing
+but a stupid fatalism.</p>
+
+<p>One or two minor forms of this superstition, pyromancy,
+chiromancy<a name="FNanchor_1259_1259" id="FNanchor_1259_1259"></a><a href="#Footnote_1259_1259" class="fnanchor">[1259]</a> and others, which obtained some credit as the
+belief in sorcery and astrology were declining, may be here
+passed over, and even the pseudo-science of physiognomy has
+by no means the interest which the name might lead us to
+expect. For it did not appear as the sister and ally of art
+and psychology, but as a new form of fatalistic superstition,
+and, what it may have been among the Arabians, as the rival
+of astrology. The author of a physiognomical treatise, Bartolommeo
+Cocle, who styled himself a ‘metoposcopist,’<a name="FNanchor_1260_1260" id="FNanchor_1260_1260"></a><a href="#Footnote_1260_1260" class="fnanchor">[1260]</a> and
+whose science, according to Giovio, seemed like one of the
+most respectable of the free arts, was not content with the
+prophecies which he made to the many clever people who daily
+consulted him, but wrote also a most serious ‘catalogue of such<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_539" id="page_539"></a>{539}</span>
+whom great dangers to life were awaiting.’ Giovio, although
+grown old in the free thought of Rome&mdash;‘in hac luce romana’&mdash;is
+of opinion that the predictions contained therein had only
+too much truth in them.<a name="FNanchor_1261_1261" id="FNanchor_1261_1261"></a><a href="#Footnote_1261_1261" class="fnanchor">[1261]</a> We learn from the same source how
+the people aimed at in these and similar prophecies took vengeance
+on the seer. Giovanni Bentivoglio caused Lucas
+Gauricus to be five times swung to and fro against the wall,
+on a rope hanging from a lofty winding staircase, because
+Lucas had foretold to him the loss of his authority.<a name="FNanchor_1262_1262" id="FNanchor_1262_1262"></a><a href="#Footnote_1262_1262" class="fnanchor">[1262]</a> Ermes
+Bentivoglio sent an assassin after Cocle, because the unlucky
+metoposcopist had unwillingly prophesied to him that he would
+die an exile in battle. The murderer seems to have derided
+the dying man in his last moments, saying that the prophet
+had foretold to him that he would shortly commit an infamous
+murder. The reviver of chiromancy, Antioco Tiberto of
+Cesena,<a name="FNanchor_1263_1263" id="FNanchor_1263_1263"></a><a href="#Footnote_1263_1263" class="fnanchor">[1263]</a> came by an equally miserable end at the hands of
+Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, to whom he had prophesied the
+worst that a tyrant can imagine, namely, death in exile and
+in the most grievous poverty. Tiberto was a man of intelligence,
+who was supposed to give his answers less according
+to any methodical chiromancy than by means of his shrewd
+knowledge of mankind; and his high culture won for him the
+respect of those scholars who thought little of his divination.<a name="FNanchor_1264_1264" id="FNanchor_1264_1264"></a><a href="#Footnote_1264_1264" class="fnanchor">[1264]</a></p>
+
+<p>Alchemy, in conclusion, which is not mentioned in antiquity
+till quite late under Diocletian, played only a very subordinate
+part at the best period of the Renaissance.<a name="FNanchor_1265_1265" id="FNanchor_1265_1265"></a><a href="#Footnote_1265_1265" class="fnanchor">[1265]</a> Italy went
+through the disease earlier, when Petrarch in the fourteenth
+century confessed, in his polemic against it, that gold-making
+was a general practice.<a name="FNanchor_1266_1266" id="FNanchor_1266_1266"></a><a href="#Footnote_1266_1266" class="fnanchor">[1266]</a> Since then that particular kind of
+faith, devotion, and isolation which the practice of alchemy<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_540" id="page_540"></a>{540}</span>
+required became more and more rare in Italy, just when Italian
+and other adepts began to make their full profit out of the
+great lords in the North.<a name="FNanchor_1267_1267" id="FNanchor_1267_1267"></a><a href="#Footnote_1267_1267" class="fnanchor">[1267]</a> Under Leo X. the few Italians who
+busied themselves with it were called ‘ingenia curiosa,’<a name="FNanchor_1268_1268" id="FNanchor_1268_1268"></a><a href="#Footnote_1268_1268" class="fnanchor">[1268]</a> and
+Aurelio Augurelli, who dedicated to Leo X., the great despiser
+of gold, his didactic poem on the making of the metal, is said
+to have received in return a beautiful but empty purse. The
+mystic science which besides gold sought for the omnipotent
+philosopher’s stone, is a late northern growth, which had its
+rise in the theories of Paracelsus and others.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_541" id="page_541"></a>{541}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-6" id="CHAPTER_V-6"></a>CHAPTER V.<br /><br />
+<small>GENERAL DISINTEGRATION OF BELIEF.</small></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">W<small>ITH</small> these superstitions, as with ancient modes of thought
+generally, the decline in the belief of immortality stands in the
+closest connection.<a name="FNanchor_1269_1269" id="FNanchor_1269_1269"></a><a href="#Footnote_1269_1269" class="fnanchor">[1269]</a> This question has the widest and deepest
+relations with the whole development of the modern spirit.</p>
+
+<p>One great source of doubt in immortality was the inward
+wish to be under no obligations to the hated Church. We
+have seen that the Church branded those who thus felt as
+Epicureans (<a href="#page_496">p. 496</a> sqq.). In the hour of death many doubtless
+called for the sacraments, but multitudes during their whole
+lives, and especially during their most vigorous years, lived
+and acted on the negative supposition. That unbelief on this
+particular point must often have led to a general scepticism, is
+evident of itself, and is attested by abundant historical proof.
+These are the men of whom Ariosto says: ‘Their faith goes
+no higher than the roof.’<a name="FNanchor_1270_1270" id="FNanchor_1270_1270"></a><a href="#Footnote_1270_1270" class="fnanchor">[1270]</a> In Italy, and especially in Florence,
+it was possible to live as an open and notorious unbeliever, if
+a man only refrained from direct acts of hostility against the
+Church.<a name="FNanchor_1271_1271" id="FNanchor_1271_1271"></a><a href="#Footnote_1271_1271" class="fnanchor">[1271]</a> The confessor, for instance, who was sent to prepare
+a political offender for death, began by inquiring whether the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_542" id="page_542"></a>{542}</span>
+prisoner was a believer, ‘for there was a false report that he
+had no belief at all.’<a name="FNanchor_1272_1272" id="FNanchor_1272_1272"></a><a href="#Footnote_1272_1272" class="fnanchor">[1272]</a></p>
+
+<p>The unhappy transgressor here referred to&mdash;the same Pierpaolo
+Boscoli who has been already mentioned (<a href="#page_059">p. 59</a>)&mdash;who
+in 1513 took part in an attempt against the newly restored
+family of the Medici, is a faithful mirror of the religious confusion
+then prevalent. Beginning as a partisan of Savonarola,
+he became afterwards possessed with an enthusiasm for
+the ancient ideals of liberty, and for paganism in general; but
+when he was in prison his early friends regained the control of
+his mind, and secured for him what they considered a pious
+ending. The tender witness and narrator of his last hours is
+one of the artistic family of the Delia Robbia, the learned
+philologist Luca. ‘Ah,’ sighs Boscoli, ‘get Brutus out of my
+head for me, that I may go my way as a Christian.’ ‘If you
+will,’ answers Luca, ‘the thing is not difficult; for you know
+that these deeds of the Romans are not handed down to us as
+they were, but idealised (con arte accresciute).’ The penitent
+now forces his understanding to believe, and bewails his inability
+to believe voluntarily. If he could only live for a month with
+pious monks, he would truly become spiritually minded. It
+comes out that these partisans of Savonarola knew their Bible
+very imperfectly; Boscoli can only say the Paternoster and
+Avemaria, and earnestly begs Luca to exhort his friends to
+study the sacred writings, for only what a man has learned in
+life does he possess in death. Luca then reads and explains to
+him the story of the Passion according to the Gospel of St.
+Matthew; the poor listener, strange to say, can perceive clearly
+the Godhead of Christ, but is perplexed at his manhood; he
+wishes to get as firm a hold of it ‘as if Christ came to meet
+him out of a wood.’ His friend thereupon exhorts him to be
+humble, since this was only a doubt sent him by the Devil.
+Soon after it occurs to the penitent that he has not fulfilled a
+vow made in his youth to go on pilgrimage to the Impruneta;
+his friend promises to do it in his stead. Meantime the confessor&mdash;a
+monk, as was desired, from Savonarola’s monastery&mdash;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_543" id="page_543"></a>{543}</span>arrives,
+and after giving him the explanation quoted above of
+the opinion of St. Thomas Aquinas on tyrannicide, exhorts him
+to bear death manfully. Boscoli makes answer: ‘Father,
+waste no time on this; the philosophers have taught it me
+already; help me to bear death out of love to Christ.’ What
+follows&mdash;the communion, the leave-taking and the execution&mdash;is
+very touchingly described, one point deserves special mention.
+When Boscoli laid his head on the block, he begged the
+executioner to delay the stroke for a moment: ‘During the
+whole time since the announcement of the sentence he had
+been striving after a close union with God, without attaining
+it as he wished, and now in this supreme moment he thought
+that by a strong effort he could give himself wholly to God.’
+It is clearly some half-understood expression of Savonarola
+which was troubling him.</p>
+
+<p>If we had more confessions of this character the spiritual
+picture of the time would be the richer by many important
+features which no poem or treatise has preserved for us. We
+should see more clearly how strong the inborn religious instinct
+was, how subjective and how variable the relation of the individual
+to religion, and what powerful enemies and competitors
+religion had. That men whose inward condition is of this
+nature, are not the men to found a new church, is evident; but
+the history of the Western spirit would be imperfect without
+a view of that fermenting period among the Italians, while
+other nations, who have had no share in the evolution of
+thought, may be passed over without loss. But we must return
+to the question of immortality.</p>
+
+<p>If unbelief in this respect made such progress among the more
+highly cultivated natures, the reason lay partly in the fact that
+the great earthly task of discovering the world and representing
+it in word and form, absorbed most of the higher spiritual
+faculties. We have already spoken (<a href="#page_490">p. 490</a>) of the inevitable
+worldliness of the Renaissance. But this investigation and
+this art were necessarily accompanied by a general spirit of
+doubt and inquiry. If this spirit shows itself but little in
+literature, if we find, for example, only isolated instances of the
+beginnings of biblical criticism (<a href="#page_465">p. 465</a>), we are not therefore to
+infer that it had no existence. The sound of it was only <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_544" id="page_544"></a>{544}</span>over-powered by the need of representation and creation in all departments&mdash;that
+is, by the artistic instinct; and it was further
+checked, whenever it tried to express itself theoretically, by
+the already existing despotism of the Church. This spirit of
+doubt must, for reasons too obvious to need discussion, have
+inevitably and chiefly busied itself with the question of the
+state of man after death.</p>
+
+<p>And here came in the influence of antiquity, and worked in
+a twofold fashion on the argument. In the first place men set
+themselves to master the psychology of the ancients, and tortured
+the letter of Aristotle for a decisive answer. In one of
+the Lucianic dialogues of the time<a name="FNanchor_1273_1273" id="FNanchor_1273_1273"></a><a href="#Footnote_1273_1273" class="fnanchor">[1273]</a> Charon tells Mercury how
+he questioned Aristotle on his belief in immortality, when
+the philosopher crossed in the Stygian boat; but the prudent
+sage, although dead in the body and nevertheless living on,
+declined to compromise himself by a definite answer&mdash;and centuries
+later how was it likely to fare with the interpretation
+of his writings? All the more eagerly did men dispute about
+his opinion and that of others on the true nature of the soul, its
+origin, its pre-existence, its unity in all men, its absolute eternity,
+even its transformations; and there were men who treated
+of these things in the pulpit.<a name="FNanchor_1274_1274" id="FNanchor_1274_1274"></a><a href="#Footnote_1274_1274" class="fnanchor">[1274]</a> The dispute was warmly carried
+on even in the fifteenth century; some proved that Aristotle
+taught the doctrine of an immortal soul;<a name="FNanchor_1275_1275" id="FNanchor_1275_1275"></a><a href="#Footnote_1275_1275" class="fnanchor">[1275]</a> others complained
+of the hardness of men’s hearts, who would not believe
+that there was a soul at all, till they saw it sitting down on a
+chair before them;<a name="FNanchor_1276_1276" id="FNanchor_1276_1276"></a><a href="#Footnote_1276_1276" class="fnanchor">[1276]</a> Filelfo in his funeral oration on Francesco
+Sforza brings forward a long list of opinions of ancient and
+even of Arabian philosophers in favour of immortality, and
+closes the mixture, which covers a folio page and a half of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_545" id="page_545"></a>{545}</span>
+print,<a name="FNanchor_1277_1277" id="FNanchor_1277_1277"></a><a href="#Footnote_1277_1277" class="fnanchor">[1277]</a> with the words, ‘Besides all this we have the Old and
+New Testaments, which are above all truth.’ Then came the
+Florentine Platonists with their master’s doctrine of the soul,
+supplemented at times, as in the case of Pico, by Christian
+teaching. But the opposite opinion prevailed in the instructed
+world. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the stumbling-block
+which it put in the way of the Church was so serious
+that Leo X. set forth a Constitution<a name="FNanchor_1278_1278" id="FNanchor_1278_1278"></a><a href="#Footnote_1278_1278" class="fnanchor">[1278]</a> at the Lateran Council
+in 1513, in defence of the immortality and individuality of
+the soul, the latter against those who asserted that there was
+but one soul in all men. A few years later appeared the work
+of Pomponazzo, in which the impossibility of a philosophical
+proof of immortality is maintained; and the contest was now
+waged incessantly with replies and apologies, till it was
+silenced by the Catholic reaction. The pre-existence of the
+soul in God, conceived more or less in accordance with Plato’s
+theory of ideas, long remained a common belief, and proved of
+service even to the poets.<a name="FNanchor_1279_1279" id="FNanchor_1279_1279"></a><a href="#Footnote_1279_1279" class="fnanchor">[1279]</a> The consequences which followed
+from it as to the mode of the soul’s continued existence after
+death, were not more closely considered.</p>
+
+<p>There was a second way in which the influence of antiquity
+made itself felt, chiefly by means of that remarkable fragment
+of the sixth book of Cicero’s ‘Republic’ known by the name
+of Scipio’s Dream. Without the commentary of Macrobius it
+would probably have perished like the rest of the second part
+of the work; it was now diffused in countless manuscript
+copies,<a name="FNanchor_1280_1280" id="FNanchor_1280_1280"></a><a href="#Footnote_1280_1280" class="fnanchor">[1280]</a> and, after the discovery of typography, in a printed
+form, and edited afresh by various commentators. It is the
+description of a transfigured hereafter for great men, pervaded
+by the harmony of the spheres. This pagan heaven, for which
+many other testimonies were gradually extracted from the
+writings of the ancients, came step by step to supplant the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_546" id="page_546"></a>{546}</span>
+Christian heaven in proportion as the ideal of fame and historical
+greatness threw into the shade the ideal of the Christian
+life, without, nevertheless, the public feeling being thereby
+offended as it was by the doctrine of personal annihilation
+after death. Even Petrarch founds his hope chiefly on this
+Dream of Scipio, on the declarations found in other Ciceronian
+works, and on Plato’s ‘Phædo,’ without making any mention
+of the Bible.<a name="FNanchor_1281_1281" id="FNanchor_1281_1281"></a><a href="#Footnote_1281_1281" class="fnanchor">[1281]</a> ‘Why,’ he asks elsewhere, ‘should not I as a
+Catholic share a hope which was demonstrably cherished by
+the heathen?’ Soon afterwards Coluccio Salutati wrote his
+‘Labours of Hercules’ (still existing in manuscript), in which
+it is proved at the end that the valorous man, who has well
+endured the great labours of earthly life, is justly entitled to
+a dwelling among the stars.<a name="FNanchor_1282_1282" id="FNanchor_1282_1282"></a><a href="#Footnote_1282_1282" class="fnanchor">[1282]</a> If Dante still firmly maintained
+that the great pagans, whom he would have gladly welcomed
+in Paradise, nevertheless must not come beyond the Limbo at
+the entrance to Hell,<a name="FNanchor_1283_1283" id="FNanchor_1283_1283"></a><a href="#Footnote_1283_1283" class="fnanchor">[1283]</a> the poetry of a later time accepted joyfully
+the new liberal ideas of a future life. Cosimo the Elder,
+according to Bernardo Pulci’s poem on his death, was received
+in heaven by Cicero, who had also been called the ‘Father of
+his country,’ by the Fabii, by Curius, Fabricius and many
+others; with them he would adorn the choir where only blameless
+spirits sing.<a name="FNanchor_1284_1284" id="FNanchor_1284_1284"></a><a href="#Footnote_1284_1284" class="fnanchor">[1284]</a></p>
+
+<p>But in the old writers there was another and less pleasing
+picture of the world to come&mdash;the shadowy realms of Homer
+and of those poets who had not sweetened and humanised the
+conception. This made an impression on certain temperaments.
+Gioviano Pontano somewhere attributes to Sannazaro
+the story of a vision, which he beheld one morning early while
+half awake.<a name="FNanchor_1285_1285" id="FNanchor_1285_1285"></a><a href="#Footnote_1285_1285" class="fnanchor">[1285]</a> He seemed to see a departed friend, Ferrandus<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_547" id="page_547"></a>{547}</span>
+Januarius, with whom he had often discoursed on the immortality
+of the soul, and whom he now asked whether it was
+true that the pains of Hell were really dreadful and eternal.
+The shadow gave an answer like that of Achilles when Odysseus
+questioned him. ‘So much I tell and aver to thee, that we
+who are parted from earthly life have the strongest desire
+to return to it again.’ He then saluted his friend and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>It cannot but be recognised that such views of the state of
+man after death partly presuppose and partly promote the
+dissolution of the most essential dogmas of Christianity. The
+notion of sin and of salvation must have almost entirely
+evaporated. We must not be misled by the effects of the
+great preachers of repentance or by the epidemic revivals
+which have been described above (part vi. cap. 2). For even
+granting that the individually developed classes had shared in
+them like the rest, the cause of their participation was rather
+the need of emotional excitement, the rebound of passionate
+natures, the horror felt at great national calamities, the cry to
+heaven for help. The awakening of the conscience had by no
+means necessarily the sense of sin and the felt need of salvation
+as its consequence, and even a very severe outward penance
+did not perforce involve any repentance in the Christian meaning
+of the word. When the powerful natures of the Renaissance
+tell us that their principle is to repent of nothing,<a name="FNanchor_1286_1286" id="FNanchor_1286_1286"></a><a href="#Footnote_1286_1286" class="fnanchor">[1286]</a> they
+may have in their minds only matters that are morally indifferent,
+faults of unreason or imprudence; but in the nature
+of the case this contempt for repentance must extend to the
+sphere of morals, because its origin, namely the consciousness
+of individual force, is common to both sides of human nature.
+The passive and contemplative form of Christianity, with its
+constant reference to a higher world beyond the grave, could
+no longer control these men. Macchiavelli ventured still
+farther, and maintained that it could not be serviceable to the
+state and to the maintenance of public freedom.<a name="FNanchor_1287_1287" id="FNanchor_1287_1287"></a><a href="#Footnote_1287_1287" class="fnanchor">[1287]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_548" id="page_548"></a>{548}</span></p>
+
+<p>The form assumed by the strong religious instinct which,
+notwithstanding all, survived in many natures, was Theism or
+Deism, as we may please to call it. The latter name may be
+applied to that mode of thought which simply wiped away
+the Christian element out of religion, without either seeking
+or finding any other substitute for the feelings to rest upon.
+Theism may be considered that definite heightened devotion
+to the one Supreme Being which the Middle Ages were not
+acquainted with. This mode of faith does not exclude Christianity,
+and can either ally itself with the Christian doctrines
+of sin, redemption, and immortality, or else exist and flourish
+without them.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes this belief presents itself with childish naïveté
+and even with a half-pagan air, God appearing as the almighty
+fulfiller of human wishes. Agnolo Pandolfini<a name="FNanchor_1288_1288" id="FNanchor_1288_1288"></a><a href="#Footnote_1288_1288" class="fnanchor">[1288]</a> tells us how,
+after his wedding, he shut himself in with his wife, and knelt
+down before the family altar with the picture of the Madonna,
+and prayed, not to her, but to God that he would vouchsafe to
+them the right use of their property, a long life in joy and
+unity with one another, and many male descendants: ‘for myself
+I prayed for wealth, honour, and friends, for her blamelessness,
+honesty, and that she might be a good housekeeper.’
+When the language used has a strong antique flavour, it is not
+always easy to keep apart the pagan style and the theistic
+belief.<a name="FNanchor_1289_1289" id="FNanchor_1289_1289"></a><a href="#Footnote_1289_1289" class="fnanchor">[1289]</a></p>
+
+<p>This temper sometimes manifests itself in times of misfortune<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_549" id="page_549"></a>{549}</span>
+with a striking sincerity. Some addresses to God are left us
+from the latter period of Firenzuola, when for years he lay ill
+of fever, in which, though he expressly declares himself a
+believing Christian, he shows that his religious consciousness is
+essentially theistic.<a name="FNanchor_1290_1290" id="FNanchor_1290_1290"></a><a href="#Footnote_1290_1290" class="fnanchor">[1290]</a> His sufferings seem to him neither as the
+punishment of sin, nor as preparation for a higher world; they
+are an affair between him and God only, who has put the
+strong love of life between man and his despair. ‘I curse, but
+only curse Nature, since thy greatness forbids me to utter thy
+name.... Give me death, Lord, I beseech thee, give it
+me now!’</p>
+
+<p>In these utterances and the like, it would be vain to look for
+a conscious and consistent Theism; the speakers partly believed
+themselves to be still Christians, and for various other reasons
+respected the existing doctrines of the Church. But at the
+time of the Reformation, when men were driven to come to a
+distinct conclusion on such points, this mode of thought was
+accepted with a fuller consciousness; a number of the Italian
+Protestants came forward as Anti-Trinitarians and Socinians,
+and even as exiles in distant countries made the memorable
+attempt to found a church on these principles. From the foregoing
+exposition it will be clear that, apart from humanistic
+rationalism, other spirits were at work in this field.</p>
+
+<p>One chief centre of theistic modes of thought lay in the
+Platonic Academy at Florence, and especially in Lorenzo
+Magnifico himself. The theoretical works and even the letters
+of these men show us only half their nature. It is true that
+Lorenzo, from his youth till he died, expressed himself dogmatically
+as a Christian,<a name="FNanchor_1291_1291" id="FNanchor_1291_1291"></a><a href="#Footnote_1291_1291" class="fnanchor">[1291]</a> and that Pico was drawn by Savonarola’s
+influence to accept the point of view of a monkish ascetic.<a name="FNanchor_1292_1292" id="FNanchor_1292_1292"></a><a href="#Footnote_1292_1292" class="fnanchor">[1292]</a>
+But in the hymns of Lorenzo,<a name="FNanchor_1293_1293" id="FNanchor_1293_1293"></a><a href="#Footnote_1293_1293" class="fnanchor">[1293]</a> which we are tempted to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_550" id="page_550"></a>{550}</span>
+regard as the highest product of the spirit of this school, an
+unreserved Theism is set forth&mdash;a Theism which strives to
+treat the world as a great moral and physical Cosmos. While
+the men of the Middle Ages look on the world as a vale of
+tears, which Pope and Emperor are set to guard against the
+coming of Antichrist; while the fatalists of the Renaissance
+oscillate between seasons of overflowing energy and seasons of
+superstition or of stupid resignation, here, in this circle of
+chosen spirits,<a name="FNanchor_1294_1294" id="FNanchor_1294_1294"></a><a href="#Footnote_1294_1294" class="fnanchor">[1294]</a> the doctrine is upheld that the visible world
+was created by God in love, that it is the copy of a pattern
+pre-existing in Him, and that He will ever remain its eternal
+mover and restorer. The soul of man can by recognising God
+draw Him into its narrow boundaries, but also by love to Him
+itself expand into the Infinite&mdash;and this is blessedness on earth.</p>
+
+<p>Echoes of mediæval mysticism here flow into one current
+with Platonic doctrines, and with a characteristically modern
+spirit. One of the most precious fruits of the knowledge of the
+world and of man here comes to maturity, on whose account
+alone the Italian Renaissance must be called the leader of
+modern ages.</p>
+
+<p class="c">THE END.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_551" id="page_551"></a>{551}</span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX.</h3>
+
+<p class="c"><a href="#A">A</a>,
+<a href="#B">B</a>,
+<a href="#C">C</a>,
+<a href="#D">D</a>,
+<a href="#E">E</a>,
+<a href="#F">F</a>,
+<a href="#G">G</a>,
+<a href="#H">H</a>,
+<a href="#I-i">I</a>,
+<a href="#J">J</a>,
+<a href="#K">K</a>,
+<a href="#L">L</a>,
+<a href="#M">M</a>,
+<a href="#N">N</a>,
+<a href="#O">O</a>,
+<a href="#P">P</a>,
+<a href="#R">R</a>,
+<a href="#S">S</a>,
+<a href="#T">T</a>,
+<a href="#U">U</a>,
+<a href="#V-i">V</a>,
+<a href="#W">W</a>,
+<a href="#Z">Z</a></p>
+
+<p class="nind">
+<a name="A" id="A"></a><span class="lettre">A</span>.<br />
+
+Academies, educational, <a href="#page_281">281</a>.<br />
+
+Adrian VI., Pope, <a href="#page_121">121</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">satires against, <a href="#page_162">162-164</a>.</span><br />
+
+‘<i>Africa</i>,’ the, of Petrarch, <a href="#page_258">258</a>.<br />
+
+Aguello of Pisa, <a href="#page_011">11</a>.<br />
+
+Alberto da Sarteano, <a href="#page_467">467</a>.<br />
+
+Alberti, Leon Battista, <a href="#page_136">136-138</a>.<br />
+
+Albertinus, Musattus, fame of, <a href="#page_140">140-141</a>.<br />
+
+Alboronoz, <a href="#page_102">102</a>.<br />
+
+Alchemy, <a href="#page_539">539</a>, <a href="#page_540">540</a>.<br />
+
+Alexander VI., Pope, <a href="#page_109">109-117</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of, <a href="#page_117">117</a>.</span><br />
+
+Alfonso I., <a href="#page_049">49</a>.<br />
+
+Alfonso of Ferrara, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.<br />
+
+Alfonso the Great of Naples, <a href="#page_035">35</a>, <a href="#page_095">95</a>, <a href="#page_459">459-461</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">contempt for astrology, <a href="#page_513">513</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">enthusiasm for antiquity, <a href="#page_225">225-227</a>, <a href="#page_228">228</a>.</span><br />
+
+Alighieri Dante.&mdash;<i>See Dante.</i><br />
+
+Allegorical representations, <a href="#page_415">415</a>.<br />
+
+Allegory, age of, <a href="#page_408">408-410</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">superiority of Italian, <a href="#page_410">410-411</a>.</span><br />
+
+Amiens, treaty of, <a href="#page_123">123</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Amorosá Visione</i>,’ the, of Boccaccio, <a href="#page_324">324</a>.<br />
+
+Antiquity, importance of, Dante on, <a href="#page_204">204-205</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reproduction of, <a href="#page_230">230-242</a>.</span><br />
+
+Anti-Trinitarians, <a href="#page_549">549</a>.<br />
+
+Apollo Belvedere, discovery of the, <a href="#page_184">184</a>.<br />
+
+Aquinas, St. Thomas, <a href="#page_006">6</a>, <a href="#page_007">7</a>, <a href="#page_060">60</a>.<br />
+
+Arabic, study of, <a href="#page_200">200-202</a>.<br />
+
+Aragonese Dynasty, <a href="#page_016">16</a>, <a href="#page_035">35</a>.<br />
+
+Aretino, Pietro, the railer, <a href="#page_164">164-168</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">father of modern journalism, <a href="#page_165">165</a>.</span><br />
+
+Ariosto, <a href="#page_134">134</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the Humanists, <a href="#page_273">273</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his artistic aim in epic, <a href="#page_326">326</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his picture of Roman society, <a href="#page_185">185</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">‘<i>Orlando Furioso</i>,’ the, of, <a href="#page_325">325</a>, <a href="#page_326">326</a>, <a href="#page_327">327</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">position as a Dramatist, <a href="#page_320">320</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">style, <a href="#page_306">306</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">satire on sorcery, <a href="#page_535">535-536</a>.</span><br />
+
+Arlotto (jester), <a href="#page_156">156</a>.<br />
+
+Army list, Venetian, <a href="#page_067">67</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Asolani</i>,’ the, of Bembo, <a href="#page_243">243</a>.<br />
+
+Assassination, paid, <a href="#page_450">450</a>, <a href="#page_457">457</a>.<br />
+
+Assassins in Rome, <a href="#page_109">109</a>.<br />
+
+Astrology, belief in, <a href="#page_507">507-518</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">protest against, <a href="#page_515">515</a>.</span><br />
+
+Auguries, belief in, <a href="#page_520">520</a>, <a href="#page_521">521</a>.<br />
+
+Authors, the old, <a href="#page_187">187-202</a>.<br />
+
+Autobiography in Italy, <a href="#page_332">332</a>, <a href="#page_333">333</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="B" id="B"></a><span class="lettre">B</span>.<br />
+
+Bacchus and Ariadne, song of, by Lorenzo de Medici, <a href="#page_427">427-428</a>.<br />
+
+Baglioni of Perugia, the, <a href="#page_028">28</a>, <a href="#page_029">29</a>, <a href="#page_030">30</a>, <a href="#page_031">31</a>, <a href="#page_032">32</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the Oddi, disputes between, <a href="#page_029">29</a>.</span><br />
+
+Bandello, as novelist, <a href="#page_306">306</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on infidelity, <a href="#page_443">443-444</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">style of writing, <a href="#page_382">382</a>.</span><br />
+
+Baraballe, comic procession of, <a href="#page_158">158</a>.<br />
+
+Bassano, Jacopo, rustic paintings of, <a href="#page_354">354</a>.<br />
+
+Belief, general disintegration of, <a href="#page_541">541-550</a>.<br />
+
+Bembo, Pietro, <a href="#page_231">231</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">epigrams of, <a href="#page_267">267</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his ‘<i>Historia rerum Venetarum</i>,’ <a href="#page_248">248</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letters of, <a href="#page_233">233</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the ‘<i>Sacra</i>’ of, <a href="#page_259">259</a>.</span><br />
+
+Benedictines, the, <a href="#page_463">463</a>.<br />
+
+Bernabö, boar hounds of, <a href="#page_013">13</a>.<br />
+
+Bernadino da Siena, <a href="#page_235">235</a>, <a href="#page_467">467</a>, <a href="#page_469">469</a>.<br />
+
+Bessarion, Cardinal, his collection of Greek MSS., <a href="#page_189">189</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_552" id="page_552"></a>{552}</span><br />
+
+Biblical criticism, <a href="#page_501">501</a>.<br />
+
+Biographies, Collective, <a href="#page_330">330</a> sqq.<br />
+
+Biography, <a href="#page_328">328-337</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">comparative, art of, <a href="#page_329">329</a>.</span><br />
+
+Blondus of Forli, historical writings of, <a href="#page_245">245</a>, <a href="#page_246">246</a>.<br />
+
+Boar-hounds of Bernabö, <a href="#page_013">13</a>.<br />
+
+Boccaccio, <a href="#page_151">151</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">life of Dante, <a href="#page_329">329</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">master of personal description, <a href="#page_344">344</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on ‘tyranny,’ <a href="#page_056">56</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">representative of antiquity, <a href="#page_205">205</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sonnets of, <a href="#page_314">314</a>.</span><br />
+
+Bojardo, as epic poet, <a href="#page_325">325</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">inventiveness of, <a href="#page_324">324</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">style of, <a href="#page_306">306</a>.</span><br />
+
+Borgias, the crimes of the, <a href="#page_109">109-117</a>.<br />
+
+Borgia, Cæsar, <a href="#page_109">109-117</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of, <a href="#page_117">117</a>.</span><br />
+
+Borso of Este, <a href="#page_049">49</a>, <a href="#page_050">50</a>, <a href="#page_051">51</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">created duke of Modena and Reggio, <a href="#page_019">19</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">welcome of, to Reggio, <a href="#page_417">417</a>, <a href="#page_418">418</a>.</span><br />
+
+Boscoli, Pierpaolo, death of, <a href="#page_542">542-543</a>.<br />
+
+Botanical Gardens, <a href="#page_292">292</a>.<br />
+
+Brigandage, <a href="#page_449">449-450</a>.<br />
+
+Burchiello as Comedian, <a href="#page_320">320</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="C" id="C"></a><span class="lettre">C</span>.<br />
+
+Calumny at Papal Court, <a href="#page_161">161</a>.<br />
+
+Calvi Fabio, of Ravenna, <a href="#page_278">278-279</a>.<br />
+
+Cambray, League of, <a href="#page_068">68</a>, <a href="#page_089">89</a>.<br />
+
+Can Grande della Scala, Court of, <a href="#page_009">9</a>.<br />
+
+Canzone, the, <a href="#page_310">310</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Canzone Zingaresca</i>,’ of Politian, <a href="#page_354">354</a>.<br />
+
+Capistrano, Giovanni, <a href="#page_467">467</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Capitolo</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_162">162-163</a>.<br />
+
+Cardano, Girolamo, of Milan, autobiography of, <a href="#page_334">334</a>.<br />
+
+Caricaturists, <a href="#page_159">159</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Carmina Burana</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_173">173</a>.<br />
+
+Carnival, the, <a href="#page_407">407</a>, <a href="#page_425">425-427</a>.<br />
+
+Castiglione, <a href="#page_388">388</a>.<br />
+
+Catalogues of Libraries, <a href="#page_190">190</a>, <a href="#page_191">191</a>.<br />
+
+Cathedral, Milan, founding of, <a href="#page_014">14</a>.<br />
+
+Catilinarians, the, <a href="#page_105">105</a>.<br />
+
+Catullus, as model, <a href="#page_264">264-265</a>.<br />
+
+Cellini, Benvenuto, autobiography of, <a href="#page_333">333-334</a>.<br />
+
+Celso, Caterina di San, <a href="#page_400">400</a>.<br />
+
+Certosa, Convent of, founding of, <a href="#page_013">13</a>.<br />
+
+Charles V., Emperor, action of, <a href="#page_123">123</a>, <a href="#page_124">124</a>.<br />
+
+Charles IV., Emperor, <a href="#page_017">17</a>, <a href="#page_018">18</a>.<br />
+
+Charles VIII. in Italy, <a href="#page_089">89</a>, <a href="#page_090">90</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">entry into Italy, <a href="#page_413">413</a>.</span><br />
+
+Children, naming of, <a href="#page_250">250-251</a>.<br />
+
+Chroniclers, Italian, <a href="#page_245">245</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Florentine, condemn astrology, <a href="#page_515">515</a>.</span><br />
+
+Church dignities, not bestowed according to pedigree, <a href="#page_360">360</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the corruption of, <a href="#page_456">456</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">held in contempt, <a href="#page_457">457-458</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">regeneration of, <a href="#page_125">125</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">secularization of, proposed by Emperor Charles V., <a href="#page_123">123</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">spirit of reform in, <a href="#page_123">123</a>.</span><br />
+
+Cicero, taken as model for style, <a href="#page_253">253-54</a>.<br />
+
+Ciceronianism and revival of Vitruvius, analogy between, <a href="#page_256">256</a>.<br />
+
+Ciriaco of Ancona, an antiquarian, <a href="#page_181">181</a>.<br />
+
+Class distinction ignored, <a href="#page_359">359-368</a>.<br />
+
+Clement VII., Pope, detested, <a href="#page_122">122</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">flight of, <a href="#page_123">123</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">temperament of, <a href="#page_309">309</a>.</span><br />
+
+Cleopatra, the discovery of, <a href="#page_184">184</a>.<br />
+
+Clubs, political, <a href="#page_387">387</a>.<br />
+
+Colonna, Giovanne, <a href="#page_177">177-178</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Giulia Gonzaga, <a href="#page_385">385</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vittoria, <a href="#page_386">386</a>, <a href="#page_446">446</a>.</span><br />
+
+‘<i>Commedia dell’Arte</i>,’ <a href="#page_320">320</a>, <a href="#page_321">321</a>.<br />
+
+<i>Commentaries</i>, the, of Pius II., <a href="#page_333">333</a>.<br />
+
+Composition, Latin, history of, <a href="#page_252">252-253</a>.<br />
+
+Condottieri, the, despotisms founded by, <a href="#page_022">22</a>, <a href="#page_023">23</a>, <a href="#page_024">24</a>.<br />
+
+Convent of Certosa of Pavia, founding of, <a href="#page_013">13</a>.<br />
+
+Cornaro, Luigi, Autobiography of, <a href="#page_335">335-337</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Vita Sobria</i> of, <a href="#page_244">244</a>.</span><br />
+
+Corpse of girl, discovery of, <a href="#page_183">183</a>.<br />
+
+Corpus Christi, feast of, celebration of, <a href="#page_414">414</a>.<br />
+
+Corruption in Papacy, <a href="#page_106">106</a>, <a href="#page_107">107</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Cortigiano</i>,’ the, by Castiglione, <a href="#page_381">381</a>, <a href="#page_388">388</a>, <a href="#page_446">446</a>.<br />
+
+Cosmetics, use of, <a href="#page_373">373-374</a>.<br />
+
+Council of Ten, <a href="#page_066">66</a>.<br />
+
+Country life, descriptions of, <a href="#page_306">306</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">love of, <a href="#page_404">404-405</a>.</span><br />
+
+Crime, for its own sake, <a href="#page_453">453-454</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prevalence of, among priests, <a href="#page_448">448-449</a>.</span><br />
+
+Criticism, Biblical, <a href="#page_501">501</a>.<br />
+
+Crusades, the, <a href="#page_485">485-486</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, <a href="#page_285">285</a>.</span><br />
+
+Culture, general Latinization of, <a href="#page_249">249-256</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_553" id="page_553"></a>{553}</span><br />
+
+‘<i>Curiale</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_378">378</a>.<br />
+
+Cybò, Franceschetto, <a href="#page_108">108-109</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as gambler, <a href="#page_436">436</a>.</span><br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="D" id="D"></a><span class="lettre">D</span>.<br />
+
+Daemons, belief in, <a href="#page_521">521-524</a>, <a href="#page_531">531</a>.<br />
+
+Dagger, use of the, <a href="#page_452">452</a>.<br />
+
+Dante, Alighieri, <a href="#page_075">75</a>, <a href="#page_076">76</a>, <a href="#page_083">83</a>, <a href="#page_130">130</a>, <a href="#page_133">133</a>, <a href="#page_135">135</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as advocate of antiquity, <a href="#page_204">204-205</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">satirist, <a href="#page_155">155</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">belief in freedom of the will, <a href="#page_498">498</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">burial place of, <a href="#page_143">143</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">desire for fame, his, <a href="#page_139">139</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, <a href="#page_324">324</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of nature shown in works, <a href="#page_299">299</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">life of, by Boccaccio, <a href="#page_329">329</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Epicureanism, <a href="#page_496">496-497</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Italian language, <a href="#page_378">378-379</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">nobility, <a href="#page_360">360-361</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">view of the sonnet, <a href="#page_312">312</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">‘<i>Vita Nuova</i>’ of, <a href="#page_333">333</a>.</span><br />
+
+Decadence of oratory, <a href="#page_241">241</a>, <a href="#page_242">242</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Decades</i>,’ the, of Sabellico, <a href="#page_248">248</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Decameron</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_459">459</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>De Genealogia Deorum</i>,’ <a href="#page_205">205-207</a>.<br />
+
+Demeanour of individuals, <a href="#page_369">369</a>.<br />
+
+Descriptions of life in movement, <a href="#page_348">348-355</a>.<br />
+
+Description of nations and cities, <a href="#page_338">338-342</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">outward man, <a href="#page_343">343-347</a>.</span><br />
+
+Difference of birth, loss of significance of, <a href="#page_354">354</a>.<br />
+
+Dignities, Church, not bestowed according to pedigree, <a href="#page_360">360</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Discorsi</i>,’ the, of Macchiavelli, <a href="#page_458">458</a>.<br />
+
+Domestic comfort, <a href="#page_376">376-377</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">economy, <a href="#page_132">132</a>, <a href="#page_402">402-405</a>.</span><br />
+
+Dress, importance attached to, <a href="#page_369">369-370</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">regulations relating to, <a href="#page_370">370-371</a>.</span><br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="E" id="E"></a><span class="lettre">E</span>.<br />
+
+Ecloques of Battista Mantovano, <a href="#page_352">352</a>, <a href="#page_479">479</a>.<br />
+
+Economy, domestic, <a href="#page_132">132</a>, <a href="#page_402">402-405</a>.<br />
+
+Education, equal, of sexes, <a href="#page_396">396</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">private, <a href="#page_135">135</a>.</span><br />
+
+Emperor Charles IV., <a href="#page_017">17</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">submission to the Pope, <a href="#page_018">18</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Frederick II., <a href="#page_005">5-7</a>, <a href="#page_069">69</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">III., <a href="#page_019">19</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sigismund, <a href="#page_018">18</a>, <a href="#page_019">19</a>.</span><br />
+
+Epicureanism, <a href="#page_496">496</a>.<br />
+
+Epigram, <a href="#page_264">264</a>, <a href="#page_267">267</a>, <a href="#page_268">268</a>, <a href="#page_269">269</a>, <a href="#page_270">270</a>.<br />
+
+Epigraph, the, <a href="#page_268">268</a>, <a href="#page_269">269</a>.<br />
+
+Equalization of classes, <a href="#page_359">359-368</a>.<br />
+
+Erasmus, <a href="#page_254">254</a>.<br />
+
+Ercole I., Duke of Ferrara, <a href="#page_487">487-489</a>.<br />
+
+Este, House of, government of the, <a href="#page_046">46</a>, <a href="#page_048">48</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Isabella of, <a href="#page_043">43</a>, <a href="#page_044">44</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">novels relating to, <a href="#page_051">51</a>, <a href="#page_052">52</a>, <a href="#page_053">53</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">popular feeling towards, <a href="#page_049">49</a>, <a href="#page_050">50</a>.</span><br />
+
+Van Eyck, Hubert, <a href="#page_302">302</a>, <a href="#page_303">303</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Johann, <a href="#page_302">302</a>, <a href="#page_303">303</a>.</span><br />
+
+Ezzelino da Romano, <a href="#page_006">6</a>, <a href="#page_007">7</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="F" id="F"></a><span class="lettre">F</span>.<br />
+
+Fame, modern idea of, <a href="#page_139">139-153</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">thirst for, evils of, <a href="#page_152">152-153</a>.</span><br />
+
+Federigo of Urbino, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.<br />
+
+Feltre, Vittorino da, <a href="#page_213">213-214</a>.<br />
+
+Female beauty, Firenzuola on, <a href="#page_345">345-347</a>.<br />
+
+Ferrante of Naples, <a href="#page_036">36</a>, <a href="#page_037">37</a>, <a href="#page_459">459-461</a>.<br />
+
+Ferrara, flourishing state of, <a href="#page_047">47</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sale of public offices at, <a href="#page_047">47</a>, <a href="#page_048">48</a>.</span><br />
+
+Festivals, <a href="#page_406">406-428</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">full development of, <a href="#page_407">407</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">higher phase in life of people, <a href="#page_406">406</a>.</span><br />
+
+Fire-arms, adoption of, <a href="#page_098">98-99</a>.<br />
+
+Firenzuola on female beauty, <a href="#page_345">345-347</a>.<br />
+
+Flagellants, the, <a href="#page_485">485-486</a>.<br />
+
+Flogging, <a href="#page_403">403</a>.<br />
+
+Florence, <a href="#page_061">61-87</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">general statistics of, <a href="#page_076">76</a>, <a href="#page_077">77</a>, <a href="#page_078">78</a>, <a href="#page_079">79</a>, <a href="#page_080">80</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">home of scandal-mongers, <a href="#page_161">161</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">life more secure in, <a href="#page_440">440-451</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Venice, birthplaces of science of statistics, <a href="#page_069">69-72</a>.</span><br />
+
+Florentines, the, as perfectors of festivals, <a href="#page_408">408</a>.<br />
+
+Foscari, Francesco, torture of, <a href="#page_066">66</a>.<br />
+
+France, changed attitude of, <a href="#page_091">91</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>.<br />
+
+Frederick II., Emperor, <a href="#page_005">5-7</a>, <a href="#page_069">69</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">III., <a href="#page_019">19</a>.</span><br />
+
+Frederick of Urbino, learning of, <a href="#page_227">227</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">oratory of, <a href="#page_237">237</a>.</span><br />
+
+Freedom of will, belief in, <a href="#page_497">497</a>.<br />
+
+Friars, mendicant, <a href="#page_462">462</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="G" id="G"></a><span class="lettre">G</span>.<br />
+
+Gallerana, Cecilia, <a href="#page_386">386</a>.<br />
+
+Gamblers, professional, <a href="#page_436">436</a>.<br />
+
+Gambling on large scale, <a href="#page_436">436</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_554" id="page_554"></a>{554}</span><br />
+
+Gaston de Foix, <a href="#page_309">309</a>.<br />
+
+Genoa, <a href="#page_086">86-87</a>.<br />
+
+Germano-Spanish army, advance of, <a href="#page_122">122</a>.<br />
+
+Ghibellines and Guelphs, political sonnets of, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+
+Ghosts, <a href="#page_521">521-523</a>.<br />
+
+Giangaleazzo, <a href="#page_013">13-14</a>.<br />
+
+Girls, in society, absence of, <a href="#page_399">399</a>.<br />
+
+Girolamo Savonarola (see Savonarola).<br />
+
+Godfrey of Strasburg, <a href="#page_309">309</a>.<br />
+
+Golden Spur, order of the, <a href="#page_053">53</a>.<br />
+
+Gonnella (jester), <a href="#page_157">157</a>.<br />
+
+Gonzaga, House of, of Mantua, <a href="#page_043">43</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Francesco, <a href="#page_043">43</a>, <a href="#page_044">44</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Giovan Francesco, <a href="#page_213">213-214</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Isabella, <a href="#page_385">385</a>.</span><br />
+
+Government, divine, belief in, destroyed, <a href="#page_507">507</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Gran Consilio</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_066">66</a>.<br />
+
+Gratitude as an Italian virtue, <a href="#page_440">440</a>.<br />
+
+Greater dynasties, <a href="#page_035">35-54</a>.<br />
+
+Greek, the study of, <a href="#page_195">195-197</a>.<br />
+
+Guarino of Verono, <a href="#page_215">215</a>.<br />
+
+Guelphs and Ghibellines, political sonnets of, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+
+Guicciardini, his opinion of the priesthood, <a href="#page_464">464</a>.<br />
+
+Gymnastics first taught as an art, <a href="#page_389">389</a>.<br />
+
+Gyraldus, historian of the humanists, <a href="#page_276">276</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="H" id="H"></a><span class="lettre">H</span>.<br />
+
+Hair, false, <a href="#page_372">372</a>.<br />
+
+Hermits, <a href="#page_471">471</a>.<br />
+
+Hierarchy, hostility to the, <a href="#page_458">458</a>.<br />
+
+Hieronymus of Siena, <a href="#page_471">471-472</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Historia rerum Venetarum</i>,’ the, of Bembo, <a href="#page_248">248</a>.<br />
+
+History, treated of in poetry, <a href="#page_261">261</a>.<br />
+
+Honour, the sentiment of, <a href="#page_433">433-435</a>.<br />
+
+Horses, breeding of, <a href="#page_295">295-296</a>.<br />
+
+Humanism in the Fourteenth Century, <a href="#page_203">203</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">furtherers of, <a href="#page_217">217-229</a>.</span><br />
+
+Humanists, fall of, in 16th century, <a href="#page_272">272-281</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">faults of, <a href="#page_276">276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">historian of, <a href="#page_276">276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">temptations of, <a href="#page_275">275-276</a>.</span><br />
+
+Human Nature, study of intellectual side of, <a href="#page_308">308-309</a>.<br />
+
+Husband, rights of, <a href="#page_442">442</a>.<br />
+
+Hypocrisy, freedom of Italians from, <a href="#page_439">439</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="I-i" id="I-i"></a><span class="lettre">I</span>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Il Galateo</i>’ of G. della Casa, <a href="#page_375">375-376</a>.<br />
+
+Illegitimacy, indifference to, <a href="#page_021">21</a>, <a href="#page_022">22</a>.<br />
+
+Immorality, prevalent at beginning of 16th century, <a href="#page_432">432</a>.<br />
+
+Immortality, decline of belief in, <a href="#page_541">541</a>.<br />
+
+Individual, the, assertion of, <a href="#page_129">129</a>, <a href="#page_130">130</a>, <a href="#page_131">131</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the, and the Italian State, <a href="#page_129">129-138</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the perfecting of, <a href="#page_134">134-138</a>.</span><br />
+
+Individuality, keen perception of Italians for, <a href="#page_329">329</a>.<br />
+
+Infidelity in marriage, <a href="#page_440">440-441</a>, <a href="#page_456">456</a>.<br />
+
+Inn-keepers, German, <a href="#page_375">375</a>.<br />
+
+Innocent VIII., Pope, election of, <a href="#page_107">107</a>.<br />
+
+Inquisitors and Science, <a href="#page_291">291</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">detrimental to development of drama, <a href="#page_317">317</a>.</span><br />
+
+Instruments, musical, collections of <a href="#page_393">393</a>.<br />
+
+Intolerance, religious, <a href="#page_006">6</a>.<br />
+
+Isabella of Este, <a href="#page_043">43</a>, <a href="#page_044">44</a>.<br />
+
+Italians, cleanliness of, <a href="#page_374">374</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">discoverers of the Middle Ages, <a href="#page_286">286</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">journeys of, <a href="#page_285">285-288</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">judges as to personal beauty, <a href="#page_342">342</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">supremacy of, in literary world, <a href="#page_151">151</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">writing of, <a href="#page_193">193</a>.</span><br />
+
+Italy, a school for scandal, <a href="#page_160">160</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">subject to Spain, <a href="#page_094">94</a>.</span><br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="J" id="J"></a><span class="lettre">J</span>.<br />
+
+Jacopo della Marca, <a href="#page_467">467</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Jerusalem delivered</i>’ of Tasso, delineation of character in, <a href="#page_327">327</a>.<br />
+
+Jesting, a profession, <a href="#page_156">156</a>.<br />
+
+Jews, literary activity of the, <a href="#page_199">199-201</a>.<br />
+
+Journeys of the Italians, <a href="#page_285">285-288</a>.<br />
+
+Julius II., Pope, character of, <a href="#page_118">118</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">election of, <a href="#page_117">117</a>.</span><br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="K" id="K"></a><span class="lettre">K</span>.<br />
+
+Knighthood, passion for, <a href="#page_364">364</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_555" id="page_555"></a>{555}</span><br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="L" id="L"></a><span class="lettre">L</span>.<br />
+
+Laetus Pomponus, life of, <a href="#page_279">279-281</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>L’amor, diveno</i>,’ <a href="#page_445">445</a>, <a href="#page_446">446</a>.<br />
+
+Language as basis of social intercourse, <a href="#page_378">378-383</a>.<br />
+
+Laöcoon, the, discovery of, <a href="#page_148">148</a>.<br />
+
+Latin composition, history of, <a href="#page_252">252-253</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">treatises, and History, <a href="#page_243">243-248</a>.</span><br />
+
+Latini, Brunetto, originator of new epoch in poetry, <a href="#page_310">310</a>.<br />
+
+Laurel wreath, the, coronation of poets with, <a href="#page_207">207-209</a>.<br />
+
+Law, absence of belief in, <a href="#page_447">447</a>.<br />
+
+League of Cambray, <a href="#page_068">68</a>, <a href="#page_089">89</a>.<br />
+
+Leo X., Pope, buffoonery of, <a href="#page_157">157-158</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence on humanism, <a href="#page_224">224-225</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">love of jesters, <a href="#page_157">157</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">policy of, <a href="#page_119">119</a>, <a href="#page_120">120</a>, <a href="#page_121">121</a>.</span><br />
+
+Letter-writing, object of, <a href="#page_232">232</a>.<br />
+
+Library Catalogues, <a href="#page_190">190</a>, <a href="#page_191">191</a>.<br />
+
+Life, outward refinement of, <a href="#page_369">369-377</a>.<br />
+
+Lionardo da Vinci, <a href="#page_114">114</a>.<br />
+
+Lorenzo the Magnificent, <a href="#page_090">90</a>, <a href="#page_095">95</a>, <a href="#page_108">108</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as describer of country life, <a href="#page_350">350</a>, <a href="#page_353">353</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">parody of ‘<i>Inferno</i>’ by, <a href="#page_159">159</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">song of Bacchus and Ariadne, <a href="#page_427">427-428</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tact of, <a href="#page_386">386-387</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">theistic belief of, <a href="#page_549">549-550</a>.</span><br />
+
+Ludovico Casella, death of, <a href="#page_057">57</a>.<br />
+
+Ludovico il Moro, <a href="#page_041">41</a>, <a href="#page_042">42</a>, <a href="#page_064">64</a>, <a href="#page_093">93</a>.<br />
+
+Lutherans, danger from the, <a href="#page_121">121</a>.<br />
+
+Luther, Martin, <a href="#page_121">121</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="M" id="M"></a><span class="lettre">M</span>.<br />
+
+Macchiavelli, <a href="#page_081">81</a>, <a href="#page_082">82</a>, <a href="#page_084">84-86</a>, <a href="#page_096">96</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as comedian, <a href="#page_320">320</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">‘<i>Discorsi il</i>’ of, <a href="#page_458">458</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">metrical history by, <a href="#page_263">263</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Italian immorality, <a href="#page_432">432</a>.</span><br />
+
+Madonna, the worship of, <a href="#page_483">483-485</a>.<br />
+
+Magicians, <a href="#page_530">530-533</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">burning of, <a href="#page_524">524</a>.</span><br />
+
+Magic, decline of, <a href="#page_537">537</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">official, <a href="#page_533">533-535</a>, <a href="#page_538">538</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">practice of, <a href="#page_453">453</a>.</span><br />
+
+Malatesta, Pandolfo, <a href="#page_027">27</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Robert, <a href="#page_023">23</a>, <a href="#page_026">26</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sigismondo, <a href="#page_033">33</a>, <a href="#page_228">228-229</a>.</span><br />
+
+Man, the discovery of, <a href="#page_308">308-327</a>.<br />
+
+Manetti, Giannozzo, <a href="#page_197">197</a>, <a href="#page_225">225</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">high character of, <a href="#page_218">218-220</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">eloquence of, <a href="#page_240">240</a>.</span><br />
+
+Mantovano, Battista, eclogues of, <a href="#page_352">352</a>, <a href="#page_479">479</a>.<br />
+
+Manucci, Aldo, <a href="#page_197">197</a>.<br />
+
+Mayia, Galeazzo, of Milan, <a href="#page_040">40</a>, <a href="#page_041">41</a>, <a href="#page_106">106</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Filippo, of Milan, <a href="#page_038">38-39</a>.</span><br />
+
+Mariolatry, <a href="#page_484">484-485</a>.<br />
+
+Massuccio, novels of, <a href="#page_459">459-460</a>.<br />
+
+Maximilian I., commencement of new Imperial policy under, <a href="#page_020">20</a>.<br />
+
+Medici, House of, charm over Florence, <a href="#page_220">220-221</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">passion for tournaments, <a href="#page_366">366-367</a>.</span><br />
+
+Medici Giovanni, <a href="#page_119">119-121</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lorenzo, on ‘nobility,’ <a href="#page_361">361</a>, <a href="#page_362">362</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the younger, <a href="#page_085">85</a>.</span><br />
+
+Menageries, <a href="#page_296">296</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">human, <a href="#page_293">293-295</a>.</span><br />
+
+‘<i>Meneghino</i>,’ the, Mask of Milan, <a href="#page_321">321</a>.<br />
+
+Mercenary troops, introduction of, <a href="#page_098">98</a>.<br />
+
+Middle Ages, works on, by humanists, <a href="#page_246">246</a>, <a href="#page_247">247</a>.<br />
+
+Milano-Venetian War, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.<br />
+
+Mirandola, Pico della, <a href="#page_198">198-199</a>, <a href="#page_202">202</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of, <a href="#page_465">465</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on dignity of man, <a href="#page_354">354-355</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">free will, <a href="#page_516">516</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">refutation of astrology, <a href="#page_516">516</a>.</span><br />
+
+Mohammedanism, opposition to, <a href="#page_493">493</a>.<br />
+
+Monks, abuse of, in ‘<i>Decameron</i>,’ <a href="#page_459">459</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as satirists, <a href="#page_465">465</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scandalous lives of, <a href="#page_460">460-461</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">unpopularity of, <a href="#page_459">459</a>.</span><br />
+
+Montefeltro, House of, of Urbino, <a href="#page_043">43</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Federigo, <a href="#page_044">44-46</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Guido, in relation to astrology, <a href="#page_512">512</a>.</span><br />
+
+Montepulciano, Fra Francesco di, <a href="#page_473">473</a>.<br />
+
+Morality, <a href="#page_431">431-455</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Morgante Maggiore</i>,’ the, of Luigi Pulci, <a href="#page_323">323-324</a>, <a href="#page_494">494-495</a>.<br />
+
+Murder, public sympathy on side of, <a href="#page_447">447</a>.<br />
+
+Music, <a href="#page_390">390-394</a>.<br />
+
+Mystery plays, <a href="#page_406">406-407</a>, <a href="#page_411">411-413</a>, <a href="#page_416">416</a>.<br />
+
+Mythological representations, <a href="#page_415">415</a>, <a href="#page_416">416</a>.<br />
+
+Myths, new, <a href="#page_259">259</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="N" id="N"></a><span class="lettre">N</span>.<br />
+
+Naming of children, <a href="#page_250">250-251</a>.<br />
+
+Natural Science in Italy, <a href="#page_289">289-297</a>.<br />
+
+Nature, beauty in, discovery of, <a href="#page_298">298-307</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_556" id="page_556"></a>{556}</span><br />
+
+Navagero, style of, <a href="#page_265">265</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Nencia</i>,’ the, of Politian, <a href="#page_354">354</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Nipoti</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_106">106</a>, <a href="#page_107">107</a>.<br />
+
+Niccoli, Niccolo, <a href="#page_188">188-189</a>, <a href="#page_217">217</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on ‘nobility,’ <a href="#page_361">361-362</a>.</span><br />
+
+Nicholas V., Pope, faith in higher learning of, <a href="#page_223">223</a>.<br />
+
+Novels of Bandello, <a href="#page_306">306</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Massuccio, <a href="#page_459">459</a>, <a href="#page_460">460</a>.</span><br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="O" id="O"></a><span class="lettre">O</span>.<br />
+
+Oddi, the, and the Baglioni of Perugia, disputes between, <a href="#page_029">29</a>.<br />
+
+Old writers, influence of, on Italian mind, <a href="#page_187">187</a>.<br />
+
+Omens, belief in, <a href="#page_518">518-521</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>On the infelicity of the Scholar</i>,’ by Piero Valeriano, <a href="#page_276">276-277</a>.<br />
+
+Orator, the, important position of, <a href="#page_233">233</a>, <a href="#page_234">234-238</a>.<br />
+
+Oratory, Pulpit, <a href="#page_238">238</a>.<br />
+
+Oriental Studies, revival of, <a href="#page_197">197</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Orlando Furioso</i>,’ the, of Ariosto, <a href="#page_325">325</a>, <a href="#page_326">326</a>, <a href="#page_327">327</a>.<br />
+
+Outward refinement of life, <a href="#page_369">369-377</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="P" id="P"></a><span class="lettre">P</span>.<br />
+
+Palingenius, Marcellus, ‘<i>Zodiac of Life</i>,’ of, <a href="#page_264">264</a>.<br />
+
+Painting, rustic, of Jacopo Bassano, <a href="#page_354">354</a>.<br />
+
+Pandolfini, Agnolo, <a href="#page_132">132</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on home management, <a href="#page_402">402-404</a>.</span><br />
+
+Pantomime, the, <a href="#page_407">407</a>, <a href="#page_416">416</a>, <a href="#page_417">417</a>.<br />
+
+Papacy, the, and its dangers, <a href="#page_102">102-125</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">corruption in, <a href="#page_106">106</a>, <a href="#page_107">107</a>, <a href="#page_109">109</a>.</span><br />
+
+Papal Court, calumny rife at, <a href="#page_161">161</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">State, spirit of reform in, <a href="#page_123">123</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">subjection of, <a href="#page_110">110</a>.</span><br />
+
+Pardons, sale of, <a href="#page_108">108</a>.<br />
+
+Parody, beginnings of, <a href="#page_263">263</a>.<br />
+
+Peasant life, poetical treatment of, <a href="#page_351">351-352</a>.<br />
+
+Perfect man of society, the, <a href="#page_388">388-394</a>.<br />
+
+Personal faith, <a href="#page_491">491-492</a>.<br />
+
+Petrarch and Laura, <a href="#page_151">151</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ascent of Mount Ventoux by, <a href="#page_301">301-302</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as geographer, <a href="#page_300">300</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">contempt of astrologers, his, <a href="#page_515">515</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fixer of form of sonnet, <a href="#page_310">310</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ideal prince of, <a href="#page_009">9-10</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of nature on, <a href="#page_300">300</a>, <a href="#page_301">301</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Rome, <a href="#page_177">177-178</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">life of, <a href="#page_313">313-314</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">objection to fame, his, <a href="#page_141">141-142</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on tournaments, <a href="#page_365">365</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">representative of antiquity, the, <a href="#page_205">205</a>.</span><br />
+
+Petty tyrannies, <a href="#page_028">28-34</a>.<br />
+
+Piacenza, devastation of, <a href="#page_101">101</a>.<br />
+
+Piccinino, Giacomo, <a href="#page_025">25</a>, <a href="#page_026">26</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jacopo, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.</span><br />
+
+Plautus, plays of, representations of, <a href="#page_255">255</a>, <a href="#page_317">317-319</a>.<br />
+
+Poems, didactic, <a href="#page_264">264</a>.<br />
+
+Poetry, elegiac, <a href="#page_264">264</a>, <a href="#page_266">266</a>, <a href="#page_267">267</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">epic, <a href="#page_321">321-323</a>, <a href="#page_325">325</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Italian, second great age of, <a href="#page_305">305-306</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Latin modern, <a href="#page_257">257-271</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lyric, <a href="#page_306">306</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Maccaronic, <a href="#page_270">270</a>, <a href="#page_271">271</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">precursor of plastic arts, the, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.</span><br />
+
+Poggio, on ‘<i>Knighthood</i>,’ <a href="#page_365">365</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on ‘<i>Nobility</i>,’ <a href="#page_361">361-362</a>.</span><br />
+
+Policy, Foreign, of Italian states, <a href="#page_088">88-97</a>.<br />
+
+Politeness, Manual of, by G. della Casa, <a href="#page_375">375-376</a>.<br />
+
+Politics, Florentine, <a href="#page_073">73-74</a>.<br />
+
+Politian, as letter writer, <a href="#page_233">233</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">‘<i>Canzone Zingaresca</i>’ of, <a href="#page_354">354</a>.</span><br />
+
+Pope Adrian VI., satires against, <a href="#page_162">162-164</a>.<br />
+
+Pope Alexander VI., <a href="#page_109">109-117</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death of, <a href="#page_117">117</a>.</span><br />
+
+Pope Clement VII., deliverance of, <a href="#page_123">123</a>.<br />
+
+Pope Innocent VIII., election of, <a href="#page_107">107</a>.<br />
+
+Pope Nicholas V., <a href="#page_188">188</a>.<br />
+
+Pope Paul II., <a href="#page_105">105</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">attempts as peacemaker, <a href="#page_438">438</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">personal head of republic of letters, <a href="#page_223">223</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">priestly narrowness of, <a href="#page_505">505</a>.</span><br />
+
+Pope Paul III., <a href="#page_123">123</a>.<br />
+
+Pope Pius II., <a href="#page_105">105</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as antiquarian, <a href="#page_180">180-181</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as descriptive writer, <a href="#page_349">349</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">believer in witches, <a href="#page_526">526-527</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">celebration of feast of Corpus Christi by, <a href="#page_414">414</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">contempt for astrology and magic, <a href="#page_508">508</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">eloquence of, <a href="#page_235">235</a>, <a href="#page_240">240</a>;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_557" id="page_557"></a>{557}</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">love of nature, <a href="#page_303">303-305</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">views on miracles, <a href="#page_501">501</a>.</span><br />
+
+Pope Sixtus IV., <a href="#page_105">105</a>, <a href="#page_106">106</a>, <a href="#page_107">107</a>.<br />
+
+Porcaro, Stefano, conspiracy of, <a href="#page_104">104</a>.<br />
+
+Porcello, Gian, Antonio dei Pandori, <a href="#page_099">99</a>, <a href="#page_100">100</a>.<br />
+
+Poggio, walks through Rome of, <a href="#page_176">176</a>.<br />
+
+Preachers of repentance, <a href="#page_466">466-479</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">personal influence of, <a href="#page_458">458</a>.</span><br />
+
+Printing, discovery of, reception of, <a href="#page_194">194</a>.<br />
+
+Processions, <a href="#page_406">406-407</a>, <a href="#page_418">418-425</a>.<br />
+
+Prodigies, belief in, <a href="#page_520">520-521</a>.<br />
+
+Prophets, honour accorded to genuine, <a href="#page_467">467</a>.<br />
+
+Public worship, neglect of, <a href="#page_485">485</a>.<br />
+
+Pulci, epic poet, <a href="#page_323">323-325</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Pulcinell</i>,’ the mask of Naples, <a href="#page_321">321</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="R" id="R"></a><span class="lettre">R</span>.<br />
+
+Rambaldoni, Vittore dai, <a href="#page_213">213-214</a>.<br />
+
+Rangona, Bianca, <a href="#page_336">336</a>.<br />
+
+Raphael, <a href="#page_030">30</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">appeal of, for restoration of ancient Rome, <a href="#page_184">184</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">original subject of his picture, ‘<i>Deposition</i>,’ <a href="#page_032">32</a>.</span><br />
+
+Rationalism, <a href="#page_500">500</a>, <a href="#page_501">501</a>.<br />
+
+Reformation, German, <a href="#page_122">122</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effects on Papacy, <a href="#page_124">124</a>.</span><br />
+
+Regattas, Venetian, <a href="#page_390">390</a>.<br />
+
+Relics, pride taken in, <a href="#page_142">142-145</a>.<br />
+
+Religion in daily life, <a href="#page_456">456-489</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">spirit of the Renaissance, and, <a href="#page_491">491-506</a>.</span><br />
+
+Religious tolerance, <a href="#page_490">490</a>, <a href="#page_492">492</a>, <a href="#page_493">493</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">revivals, epidemics of, <a href="#page_485">485</a>.</span><br />
+
+Renaissance, the, a new birth, <a href="#page_175">175</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the spirit of religion, <a href="#page_491">491-506</a>.</span><br />
+
+Repentance, preachers of, <a href="#page_466">466-479</a>.<br />
+
+Reproduction of antiquity: Latin correspondence and orations, <a href="#page_230">230-242</a>.<br />
+
+Republics, the, <a href="#page_061">61-87</a>.<br />
+
+Revivals, epidemics of religious, <a href="#page_485">485</a>.<br />
+
+Riario, Girolamo, <a href="#page_107">107</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pietro, Cardinal, <a href="#page_106">106</a>.</span><br />
+
+Rienzi, Cola di, <a href="#page_015">15</a>, <a href="#page_176">176</a>.<br />
+
+Rimini, House of, the, <a href="#page_029">29</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fall of, <a href="#page_033">33</a>.</span><br />
+
+Rites, Church, sense of dependence on, <a href="#page_465">465</a>.<br />
+
+Roberto da Lecce, <a href="#page_467">467</a>, <a href="#page_470">470</a>.<br />
+
+Rome, assassins in, <a href="#page_109">109</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">city of ruins, <a href="#page_177">177-186</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first topographical study of, <a href="#page_179">179</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Poggio’s walks through, <a href="#page_176">176</a>.</span><br />
+
+Ruins in landscape gardening result of Christian legend, <a href="#page_186">186</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="S" id="S"></a><span class="lettre">S</span>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Sacra</i>,’ the, of Pietro Bembo, <a href="#page_259">259</a>.<br />
+
+Sadoleto, Jacopo, <a href="#page_231">231</a>.<br />
+
+Saints, reverence for relics of, <a href="#page_481">481-482</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">worship of, <a href="#page_485">485</a>.</span><br />
+
+Salò, Gabriella da, belief of, <a href="#page_502">502</a>.<br />
+
+Sannazaro, <a href="#page_151">151</a>, <a href="#page_260">260</a>, <a href="#page_265">265-267</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fame of, <a href="#page_261">261</a>, <a href="#page_268">268</a>.</span><br />
+
+Sanctuaries of Italy, <a href="#page_486">486</a>.<br />
+
+Sansecondo, Giovan Maria, <a href="#page_392">392</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jacopo, <a href="#page_392">392</a>.</span><br />
+
+Satires, Monks the authors of, <a href="#page_465">465</a>.<br />
+
+Savonarola, Girolamo, <a href="#page_467">467</a>, <a href="#page_473">473-479</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">belief in dæmons, <a href="#page_531">531</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">eloquence of, <a href="#page_474">474</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">funeral oration on, <a href="#page_475">475</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reform of Dominican monasteries due to, <a href="#page_474">474</a>.</span><br />
+
+Scaliger, <a href="#page_254">254</a>.<br />
+
+Scarampa, Camilla, <a href="#page_386">386</a>.<br />
+
+Science, national sympathy with, <a href="#page_289">289-292</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">natural, in Italy, <a href="#page_289">289-297</a>.</span><br />
+
+‘<i>Scrittori</i>’ (copyists), <a href="#page_192">192-193</a>.<br />
+
+Secretaries, papal, important position of, <a href="#page_231">231</a>.<br />
+
+Sforza, house of, <a href="#page_024">24</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Alessandro, <a href="#page_028">28</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Francesco, <a href="#page_024">24</a>, <a href="#page_025">25</a>, <a href="#page_026">26</a>, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_040">40</a>, <a href="#page_099">99</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Galeazzo Maria, assassination of, <a href="#page_057">57-58</a>.</span><br />
+
+Sforza, Ippolita, <a href="#page_385">385</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jacopo, <a href="#page_024">24</a>, <a href="#page_025">25</a>.</span><br />
+
+Shakespeare, William, <a href="#page_316">316</a>.<br />
+
+Siena, <a href="#page_086">86</a>.<br />
+
+Sigismund, Emperor, <a href="#page_018">18</a>, <a href="#page_019">19</a>.<br />
+
+Sixtus IV., Pope, <a href="#page_105">105</a>, <a href="#page_106">106</a>, <a href="#page_107">107</a>.<br />
+
+Slavery in Italy, <a href="#page_296">296</a>.<br />
+
+Society, higher forms of, <a href="#page_384">384-387</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ideal man of, <a href="#page_388">388-394</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in, Italian models to other countries, <a href="#page_389">389</a>.</span><br />
+
+Sociniaris, <a href="#page_549">549</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_558" id="page_558"></a>{558}</span><br />
+
+Sonnet, the, <a href="#page_310">310-311</a>, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+
+Sonnets of Boccaccio, <a href="#page_314">314</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Dante, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.</span><br />
+
+Spain, changed attitude of, <a href="#page_091">91</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>.<br />
+
+Spaniards, detrimental to development of drama, <a href="#page_317">317</a>.<br />
+
+Spanish-Germano Army, advance of, <a href="#page_122">122</a>.<br />
+
+Spanish influence, jealousy under, <a href="#page_445">445</a>.<br />
+
+Speeches, subject of public, <a href="#page_239">239-241</a>.<br />
+
+Spur, golden, order of, <a href="#page_053">53</a>.<br />
+
+Spiritual description in poetry, <a href="#page_308">308-327</a>.<br />
+
+Statistics, science of, birthplace of, <a href="#page_069">69-72</a>.<br />
+
+St. Peter’s at Rome, reconstruction of., <a href="#page_119">119</a>.<br />
+
+Stentorello, the mask of Florence, <a href="#page_321">321</a>.<br />
+
+Superstition, mixture of ancient and modern, <a href="#page_507">507-540</a>.<br />
+
+Sylvius Æneas, see Pope Pius II.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="T" id="T"></a><span class="lettre">T</span>.<br />
+
+Taxation, <a href="#page_005">5</a>, <a href="#page_008">8</a>, <a href="#page_013">13</a>, <a href="#page_035">35</a>, <a href="#page_036">36</a>, <a href="#page_047">47</a>.<br />
+
+Teano, Cardinal, <a href="#page_255">255</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Telesma</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_533">533-535</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Telestae</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_533">533-535</a>.<br />
+
+Terence, plays of, representation of, <a href="#page_255">255</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Teseide</i>,’ the, of Boccaccio, <a href="#page_259">259</a>.<br />
+
+Tiburzio, <a href="#page_105">105</a>.<br />
+
+Tolerance, religious, <a href="#page_490">490</a>, <a href="#page_492">492</a>, <a href="#page_493">493</a>.<br />
+
+Torso, the, discovery of, <a href="#page_184">184</a>.<br />
+
+Tragedy in time of Renaissance, <a href="#page_315">315-316</a>, <a href="#page_317">317</a>.<br />
+
+Treatise, the, <a href="#page_243">243</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Trionfo</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_407">407</a>, <a href="#page_419">419</a>, <a href="#page_420">420</a>, <a href="#page_423">423</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Beatrice, <a href="#page_419">419-420</a>.</span><br />
+
+‘<i>Trionfi</i>,’ the, of Petrarch, <a href="#page_324">324</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Trovatori</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_310">310</a>.<br />
+
+<i>Trovatori della transizione</i>, the, <a href="#page_311">311</a>.<br />
+
+Turks, conspiracies with the, <a href="#page_092">92</a>, <a href="#page_093">93</a>.<br />
+
+Tuscan dialect basis of new national speech, <a href="#page_379">379</a>.<br />
+
+Tyranny, opponents of, <a href="#page_055">55-60</a>.<br />
+
+Tyrannies, petty, <a href="#page_028">28-34</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="U" id="U"></a><span class="lettre">U</span>.<br />
+
+Uberti, Fazio degli, vision of, <a href="#page_178">178</a>.<br />
+
+Universities and Schools, <a href="#page_210">210-216</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="V-i" id="V-i"></a><span class="lettre">V</span>.<br />
+
+Valeriano, P., on the infelicity of the scholar, <a href="#page_276">276-277</a>.<br />
+
+Vatican, Library of, founding of, <a href="#page_188">188</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Vendetta</i>,’ the, <a href="#page_437">437-440</a>.<br />
+
+Vengeance, Italian, <a href="#page_436">436-400</a>.<br />
+
+Venetian-Milano war, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.<br />
+
+Venice, <a href="#page_061">61-87</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Florence, birthplace of science of statistics, <a href="#page_069">69-72</a>.</span><br />
+
+Venice, processions in, <a href="#page_073">73</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">public institutions in, <a href="#page_063">63</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">relation of, to literature, <a href="#page_070">70</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">stability of, cause of, <a href="#page_065">65-66</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">statistics, general of, <a href="#page_069">69</a>, <a href="#page_070">70</a>, <a href="#page_071">71</a>, <a href="#page_078">78</a>.</span><br />
+
+Villani, Giovanni, <a href="#page_073">73</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Matteo, <a href="#page_076">76</a>.</span><br />
+
+Vinci, Lionardo da, <a href="#page_138">138</a>.<br />
+
+Violin, the, <a href="#page_392">392</a>.<br />
+
+Visconti, the, <a href="#page_010">10</a>, <a href="#page_015">15</a>, <a href="#page_018">18</a>, <a href="#page_022">22</a>, <a href="#page_038">38</a>, <a href="#page_040">40</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Giangaleazzo, <a href="#page_513">513</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Giovan Maria, assassination of, <a href="#page_057">57</a>, <a href="#page_058">58</a>.</span><br />
+
+‘<i>Vita Nuova</i>,’ the, of Dante, <a href="#page_333">333</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Vita Sobria</i>,’ the, of Luigi Cornaro, <a href="#page_244">244</a>.<br />
+
+Vitelli, Paolo, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.<br />
+
+Vitruvius, revival of, and Ciceronianism, analogy between, <a href="#page_156">156</a>.<br />
+
+Venus of the Vatican, discovery of, <a href="#page_184">184</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Versi Sciolti</i>,’ the, origin of, <a href="#page_310">310</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="W" id="W"></a><span class="lettre">W</span>.<br />
+
+War as a work of art, <a href="#page_098">98-101</a>.<br />
+
+Wit, analysis of, <a href="#page_159">159-160</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first appearance of, in literature, <a href="#page_154">154</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">modern, and satire, <a href="#page_154">154-168</a>.</span><br />
+
+Witch of Gaeta, the, <a href="#page_525">525</a>.<br />
+
+Witchcraft, <a href="#page_524">524-530</a>.<br />
+
+Witches, <a href="#page_524">524</a>, <a href="#page_525">525</a>, <a href="#page_526">526</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">burning of, <a href="#page_524">524</a>, <a href="#page_526">526</a>, <a href="#page_528">528</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_559" id="page_559"></a>{559}</span></span><br />
+
+Women, Ariosto on, <a href="#page_395">395</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">equality of, with men, <a href="#page_395">395</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">function of, <a href="#page_398">398</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">heroism of, <a href="#page_398">398</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ideal for, <a href="#page_398">398</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">position of, <a href="#page_395">395-401</a>.</span><br />
+
+Worship, public, neglect of, <a href="#page_485">485</a>.<br />
+
+<br />
+<a name="Z" id="Z"></a><span class="lettre">Z</span>.<br />
+
+Zampante of Lucca, director of police, <a href="#page_050">50</a>.<br />
+
+‘<i>Zodiac of Life</i>,’ of Marcellus Palingenius, <a href="#page_264">264</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_560" id="page_560"></a>{560}</span></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+GEORGE ALLEN &amp; UNWIN LTD.<br />
+<span class="smcap">London: 40 Museum Street, W.C. 1</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Cape Town: 73 St. George’s Street</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Sydney, N.S.W.: 218-222 Clarence Street</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Wellington, N.Z.: 110-112 Lambton Quay</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_561" id="page_561"></a>{561}</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h2><a name="FOOTNOTES" id="FOOTNOTES"></a>FOOTNOTES:</h2>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>History of Architecture</i>, by Franz Kugler. (The first half of the
+fourth volume, containing the ‘Architecture and Decoration of the Italian
+Renaissance,’ is by the Author.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Macchiavelli, <i>Discorsi</i>, 1. i. c. 12. ‘E la cagione, che la Italia non sia
+in quel medesimo termine, ne habbia anch’ ella ò una republica ò un
+prencipe che la governi, è solamente la Chiesa; perchè havendovi habitato
+e tenuto imperio temporale non è stata si potente ne di tal virtè, che
+l’habbia potuto occupare il restante d’Italia e farsene prencipe.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> The rulers and their dependents were together called ‘lo stato,’ and
+this name afterwards acquired the meaning of the collective existence of
+a territory.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> C. Winckelmann, <i>De Regni Siculi Administratione qualis fuerit
+regnante Friderico II.</i>, Berlin. 1859. A. del Vecchio, <i>La legislazione di
+Federico II. imperatore</i>. Turin, 1874. Frederick II. has been fully and
+thoroughly discussed by Winckelmann and Schirrmacher.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Baumann, <i>Staatslehre des Thomas von Aquino</i>. Leipzig, 1873, esp.
+pp. 136 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Cento Novelle Antiche</i>, ed. 1525. For Frederick, Nov. 2, 21, 22, 23, 24,
+30, 53, 59, 90, 100; for Ezzelino, Nov. 31, and esp. 84.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Scardeonius, <i>De Urbis Patav. Antiqu. in Grævius</i>, Thesaurus, vi. iii.
+p. 259.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Sismondi, <i>Hist. de Rép. Italiennes</i>, iv. p. 420; viii. pp. 1 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, <i>Novelle</i> (61, 62).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Dante, it is true, is said to have lost the favour of this prince, which
+impostors knew how to keep. See the important account in Petrarch, <i>De
+Rerum Memorandarum</i>, lib. ii. 3, 46.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Petrarca, <i>Epistolæ Seniles</i>, lib. xiv. 1, to Francesco di Carrara (Nov.
+28, 1373). The letter is sometimes printed separately with the title, ‘De
+Republica optime administranda,’ e.g. Bern, 1602.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> It is not till a hundred years later that the princess is spoken of as
+the mother of the people. Comp. Hieron. Crivelli’s funeral oration
+on Bianca Maria Visconti, in Muratori, <i>Scriptores Rerum Italicarum</i>,
+xxv. col. 429. It was by way of parody of this phrase that a sister of
+Sixtus IV. is called in Jac Volateranus (Murat., xxiii. col. 109) ‘mater
+ecclesiæ.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> With the parenthetical request, in reference to a previous conversation,
+that the prince would again forbid the keeping of pigs in the streets
+of Padua, as the sight of them was unpleasing, especially for strangers,
+and apt to frighten the horses.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Petrarca, <i>Rerum Memorandar.</i>, lib. iii. 2, 66.&mdash;Matteo I. Visconti and
+Guido della Torre, then ruling in Milan, are the persons referred to.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Matteo Villani, v. 81: the secret murder of Matteo II. (Maffiolo) Visconti
+by his brother.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> Filippo Villani, <i>Istorie</i>, xi. 101. Petrarch speaks in the same tone of
+the tyrants dressed out ‘like altars at a festival.’&mdash;The triumphal procession
+of Castracane at Lucca is described minutely in his life by Tegrimo,
+in Murat., xi., col, 1340.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>De Vulgari Eloqui</i>, i. c. 12: ... ‘qui non heroico more, sed plebeo
+sequuntur superbiam.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> This we find first in the fifteenth century, but their representations
+are certainly based on the beliefs of earlier times: L. B. Alberti, <i>De re
+ædif.</i>, v. 3.&mdash;Franc. di Giorgio, ‘Trattato,’ in Della Valle, Lettere Sanesi,
+iii. 121.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 61.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> Matteo Villani, vi. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> The Paduan passport office about the middle of the fourteenth century
+is referred to by Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 117, in the words, ‘quelli delle
+bullete.’ In the last ten years of the reign of Frederick II., when the
+strictest control was exercised on the personal conduct of his subjects,
+this system must have been very highly developed.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> Corio, <i>Storia di Milano</i>, fol. 247 sqq. Recent Italian writers have
+observed that the Visconti have still to find a historian who, keeping the
+just mean between the exaggerated praises of contemporaries (<i>e.g.</i>
+Petrarch) and the violent denunciations of later political (Guelph)
+opponents, will pronounce a final judgment upon them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> E.g. of Paolo Giovio: <i>Elogia Virorum bellicâ virtute illustrium</i>,
+Basel, 1575, p. 85, in the life of Bernabò. Giangal. (<i>Vita</i>, pp. 86 sqq.) is
+for Giovio ‘post Theodoricum omnium præstantissimus.’ Comp. also
+Jovius, <i>Vitæ xii. Vicecomitum Mediolani principum</i>, Paris, 1549. pp.
+165 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> Corio, fol. 272, 285.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Cagnola, in the <i>Archiv. Stor.</i>, iii. p. 23.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> So Corio, fol. 286, and Poggio, <i>Hist. Florent.</i> iv. in Murat. xx. col
+290.&mdash;Cagnola (loc. cit.) speaks of his designs on the imperial crown. See
+too the sonnet in Trucchi, <i>Poesie Ital. ined.</i>, ii. p. 118:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Stan le città lombarde con le chiave<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In man per darle a voi ... etc.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Roma vi chiamo: Cesar mio novello<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Io sono ignuda, e l’anima pur vive:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or mi coprite col vostro mantello,” etc.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> Corio, fol. 301 and sqq. Comp. Ammian. Marcellin., xxix. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> So Paul. Jovius, <i>Elogia</i>, pp. 88-92, Jo. Maria Philippus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> De Gingins, <i>Dépêches des Ambassadeurs Milanais</i>, Paris and Geneva
+1858, ii. pp. 200 sqq. (N. 213). Comp. ii. 3 (N. 144) and ii. 212 sqq. (N. 218).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Paul. Jovius, <i>Elogia</i>, pp. 156 sqq. Carolus, Burg. dux.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> This compound of force and intellect is called by Macchiavelli <i>Virtù</i>,
+and is quite compatible with <i>scelleratezza</i>. E.g. <i>Discorsi</i>, i. 10. in speaking
+of Sep. Severus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> On this point Franc. Vettori, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> vi. p. 29. 3 sqq.: ‘The
+investiture at the hands of a man who lives in Germany, and has nothing
+of the Roman Emperor about him but the empty name, cannot turn a
+scoundrel into the real lord of a city.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> M. Villani, iv. 38, 39, 44, 56, 74, 76, 92; v. 1, 2, 14-16, 21, 22, 36, 51, 54.
+It is only fair to consider that dislike of the Visconti may have led to
+worse representations than the facts justified. Charles IV. is once (iv. 74)
+highly praised by Villani.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> It was an Italian, Fazio degli Uberti (<i>Dittamondo</i>, l. vi. cap. 5&mdash;about
+1360) who recommended to Charles IV. a crusade to the Holy Land. The
+passage is one of the best in this poem, and in other respects characteristic.
+The poet is dismissed from the Holy Sepulchre by an insolent
+Turk:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Con passi lunghi e con la testa bassa<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oltre passai e dissi: ecco vergogna<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Del cristian che’l saracin qui lassa!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Poscia al Pastor (the Pope) mi volsi far rampogna<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">E tu ti stai, che sei vicar di Cristo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Co’ frati tuoi a ingrassar la carogna?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Similimente dissi a quel sofisto (Charles IV.)<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Che sta in Buemme (Bohemia) a piantar vigne e fichi<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">E che non cura di si caro acquisto:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Che fai? Perchè non segui i primi antichi<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Cesari de’ Romani, e che non segui,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dico, gli Otti, i Corradi, i Federichi?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">E che pur tieni questo imperio in tregui?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">E se non hai lo cuor d’esser Augusto,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Che non rifiuti? o che non ti dilegui?’ etc.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Some eight years earlier, about 1352, Petrarch had written (to Charles
+IV., <i>Epist. Fam.</i>, lib. xii. ep. 1, ed. Fracassetti, vol. ii. p. 160): ‘Simpliciter
+igitur et aperte ... pro maturando negotio terræ sanctæ ... oro
+tuo egentem auxilio quam primum invisere velis Ausoniam.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> See for details Vespasiano Fiorent. ed. Mai, <i>Specilegium Romanum</i>,
+vol. i. p. 54. Comp. 150 and Panormita, <i>De Dictis et Factis Alfonsi</i>, lib.
+iv. nro. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 217 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> ‘Haveria voluto scortigare la brigata.’ Giov. Maria Filelfo, then
+staying at Bergamo, wrote a violent satire ‘in vulgus equitum auro notatorum.’
+See his biography in Favre, <i>Mélanges d’Histoire littéraire</i>, 1856,
+i. p. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> <i>Annales Estenses</i>, in Murat. xx. col. 41.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> Poggii, <i>Hist. Florent. pop.</i> l. vii. in Murat. col. 381. This view is in
+accordance with the anti-monarchical sentiments of many of the humanists
+of that day. Comp. the evidence given by Bezold, ‘Lehre von der
+Volkssouverainität während des Mittelalters,’ <i>Hist. Ztschr.</i> bd. 36, s. 365.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> Some years later the Venetian Lionardo Giustiniani blames the
+word ‘imperator’ as unclassical and therefore unbecoming the German
+emperor, and calls the Germans barbarians, on account of their ignorance
+of the language and manners of antiquity. The cause of the Germans
+was defended by the humanist H. Bebel. See L. Geiger, in the <i>Allgem.
+Deutsche Biogr.</i> ii. 196.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> Senarega, <i>De reb. Genuens</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 575.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Enumerated in the <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 203. Comp.
+Pic. ii. <i>Comment.</i> ii. p. 102, ed. Rome, 1584.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Marin Sanudo, <i>Vita de’ Duchi di Venezia</i>, in Murat. xxii. col. 1113.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> Varchi, <i>Stor. Fiorent.</i> i. p. 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> Soriano, <i>Relazione di Roma</i>, 1533, in Tommaso Gar. <i>Relaz. della Corte
+di Roma</i>, (in Alberi, <i>Relaz. degli ambasc. Veneti</i>, ii. ser. iii.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> For what follows, see Canestrini, in the Introduction to vol. xv. of the
+<i>Archiv. Stor.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> For him, see Shepherd-Tonelli, <i>Vita di Piggio</i>, App. pp. viii.-xvi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> Cagnola, <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> iii. p. 28: ‘Et (Filippo Maria) da lei (Beatr.)
+ebbe molto tesoro e dinari, e tutte le giente d’arme del dicto Facino, che
+obedivano a lei.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> Inpressura, in Eccard, <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. col. 1911. For the alternatives
+which Macchiavelli puts before the victorious Condottiere, see <i>Discorsi</i>, i.
+30. After the victory he is either to hand over the army to his employer
+and wait quietly for his reward, or else to win the soldiers to his own side
+to occupy the fortresses and to punish the prince ‘di quella ingratitudine
+che esso gli userebbe.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> Comp. Barth. Facius, <i>De Viv. Ill.</i> p. 64, who tells us that C. commanded
+an army of 60,000 men. It is uncertain whether the Venetians
+did not poison Alviano in 1516, because he, as Prato says in <i>Arch. Stor.</i>
+iii. p. 348, aided the French too zealously in the battle of S. Donato. The
+Republic made itself Colleoni’s heir, and after his death in 1475 formally
+confiscated his property. Comp. Malipiero, <i>Annali Veneti</i>, in <i>Arch. Stor.</i>
+vii. i. 244. It was liked when the Condottieri invested their money in
+Venice, ibid. p. 351.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> Cagnola, in <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. pp. 121 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> At all events in Paul Jovius, <i>Vita Magni Sfortiæ</i>, Rom. 1539,
+(dedicated to the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza), one of the most attractive of
+his biographies.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> Æn. Sylv. <i>Comment. de Dictis et Factis Alfonsi</i>, Opera, ed. 1538,
+p. 251: Novitate gaudens Italia nihil habet stabile, nullum in eâ vetus
+regnum, facile hic ex servis reges videmus.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> Pii, ii. <i>Comment.</i> i. 46; comp. 69.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> Sismondi, x. 258; Corio. fol. 412, where Sforza is accused of complicity,
+as he feared danger to his own son from P.’s popularity. <i>Storia Bresciana</i>,
+in Murat. xxi. col. 209. How the Venetian Condottiere Colleoni was
+tempted in 1466, is told by Malipiero <i>Annali Veneti, Arch. Stor.</i> vii. i. p.
+210. The Florentine exiles offered to make him Duke of Milan if he
+would expel from Florence their enemy, Piero de’ Medici.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> Allegretti, <i>Diari Sanesi</i>, in Murat. xxiii. p. 811.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> <i>Orationes Philelphi</i>, ed. Venet. 1492, fol. 9, in the funeral oration on
+Francesco.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> Marin Sanudo, <i>Vita del Duchi di Venezia</i>, in Murat. xxii. col. 1241.
+See Reumont, <i>Lorenzo von Medici</i> (Lpz. 1874), ii. pp. 324-7, and the
+authorities there quoted.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> Malipiero, <i>Ann. Venet., Arch. Stor.</i> vii. i. p. 407.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> <i>Chron. Eugubinum</i>, in Murat. xxi. col. 972.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> <i>Vespas. Fiorent.</i> p. 148.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> xvi., parte i. et ii., ed. Bonaini, Fabretti, Polidori.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> Julius II. conquered Perugia with ease in 1506, and compelled Gianpaolo
+Baglione to submit. The latter, as Macchiavelli (<i>Discorsi</i>, i. c. 27)
+tells us, missed the chance of immortality by not murdering the Pope.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> Varelin <i>Stor. Fiorent.</i> i. pp. 242 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> Comp. (inter. al.) Jovian. Pontan. <i>De Immanitate</i>, cap. 17.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> Malipiero, <i>Ann. Venet., Archiv. Stor.</i> vii. i. pp. 498 sqq. After vainly
+searching for his beloved, whose father had shut her up in a monastery
+he threatened the father, burnt the monastery and other buildings, and
+committed many acts of violence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> Lil. Greg. Giraldus, <i>De Sepulchris ac vario Sepeliendi Ritu</i>. <i>Opera</i>
+ed. Bas. 1580, i. pp. 640 sqq. Later edition by J. Faes, Helmstädt, 1676
+Dedication and postscript of Gir. ‘ad Carolum Miltz Germanum,’ in these
+editions without date; neither contains the passage given in the text.&mdash;In
+1470 a catastrophe in miniature had already occurred in the same
+family (Galeotto had had his brother Antonio Maria thrown into prison).
+Comp. <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 225.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. Opp. ed. Basileæ, 1538, t. i. <i>De Liberalitate</i>, cap. 19, 29,
+and <i>De Obedientia</i>, l. 4. Comp. Sismondi, x. p. 78, and Panormita, <i>De
+Dictis et Factis Alphonsi</i>, lib. i. nro. 61, iv. nro. 42.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> Tristano Caracciolo. ‘De Fernando qui postea rex Aragonum fuit,
+ejusque posteris,’ in Muratori XXII.; Jovian Pontanus, <i>De Prudentia</i>, l. iv.;
+<i>De Magnanimitate</i>, l. i.; <i>De Liberalitate</i>, cap. 29, 36; <i>De Immanitate</i>,
+cap. 8. Cam. Porzio, <i>Congiura dei Baroni del Regno de Napoli contro il
+re Ferdinando I.</i>, Pisa, 1818, cap. 29, 36, new edition, Naples, 1859,
+<i>passim</i>; Comines, Charles VIII., with the general characteristics of the
+Arragonese. See for further information as to Ferrante’s works for his
+people, the <i>Regis Ferdinandi primi Instructionum liber</i>, 1486-87, edited
+by Scipione Vopicella, which would dispose us to moderate to some
+extent the harsh judgment which has been passed upon him.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> Paul. Jovius. <i>Histor.</i> i. p. 14. in the speech of a Milanese ambassador;
+<i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 294.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> He lived in the closest intimacy with Jews, e.g. Isaac Abranavel, who
+fled with him to Messina. Comp. Zunz, <i>Zur. Gesch. und Lit.</i> (Berlin,
+1845) s. 529.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> Petri Candidi Decembrii Vita Phil. Mariæ Vicecomitis, in Murat. xx.,
+of which however Jovius (<i>Vitæ xii. Vicecomitum</i> p. 186) says not without
+reason: ‘Quum omissis laudibus quæ in Philippo celebrandæ fuerant,
+vitia, notaret.’ Guarino praises this prince highly. Rosmino Guarini,
+ii. p. 75. Jovius, in the above-mentioned work (<a href="#page_186">p. 186</a>), and Jov. Pontanus,
+<i>De Liberalitate</i>, ii. cap. 28 and 31, take special notice of his generous
+conduct to the captive Alfonso.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> Were the fourteen marble statues of the saints in the Citadel of Milan
+executed by him? See <i>History of the Frundsbergs</i>, fol. 27.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> It troubled him: <i>quod aliquando ‘non esse’ necesse esset</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> Corio, fol. 400; Cagnola, in <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> iii. p. 125.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> iii. p. 130. Comp. ii. 87. 106. Another and rather
+darker estimate of Sforza’s fortune is given by Caracciolo, <i>De Varietate
+Fortunæ</i>, in Murat. xxii. col. 74. See for the opposite view the praises
+of Sforza’s luck in the <i>Oratio parentalis de divi Francesci Sphortiæ felicitate</i>,
+by Filelfo (the ready eulogist of any master who paid him), who
+sung, without publishing, the exploits of Francesco in the Sforziad.
+Even Decembrio, the moral and literary opponent of Filelfo, celebrates
+Sforza’s fortune in his biography (<i>Vita Franc. Sphortiæ</i>, in Murat. xx.).
+The astrologers said: ‘Francesco Sforza’s star brings good luck to a man,
+but ruin to his descendants.’ Arluni, <i>De Bello Veneto</i>, libri vi. in
+Grævius, <i>Thes. Antiqu. et Hist. Italicæ</i>, v. pars iii. Comp. also Barth.
+Facius, <i>De Vir. III.</i> p. 67.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> Malipiero, <i>Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor.</i> vii. i. pp. 216 sqq. 221-4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> Important documents as to the murder of Galeazzo Maria Sforza are
+published by G. D’Adda in the <i>Archivio Storico Lombardo Giornale della
+Società Lombarda</i>, vol. ii. (1875), pp. 284-94. 1. A Latin epitaph on the
+murderer Lampugnano, who lost his life in the attempt, and whom the
+writer represents as saying: ‘Hic lubens quiesco, æternum inquam
+facinus monumentumque ducibus, principibus, regibus, qui modo sunt
+quique mox futura trahantur ne quid adversus justitiam faciant dicantve;
+2. A Latin letter of Domenico de’ Belli, who, when eleven years old, was
+present at the murder; 3. The ‘lamento’ of Galeazzo Maria, in which,
+after calling upon the Virgin Mary and relating the outrage committed
+upon him, he summons his wife and children, his servants and the Italian
+cities which obeyed him, to bewail his fate, and sends forth his entreaty
+to all the nations of the earth, to the nine muses and the gods of antiquity,
+to set up a universal cry of grief.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> <i>Chron. Venetum</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 65.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> Malipiero, <i>Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor.</i> vii. i. p. 492. Comp. 482, 562.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> His last words to the same man, Bernardino da Corte, are to be
+found, certainty with oratorical decorations, but perhaps agreeing in
+the main with the thoughts of the Moor, in Senarega, Murat. xxiv.
+col. 567.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 336, 367, 369. The people
+believed he was forming a treasure.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> Corio, fol. 448. The after effects of this state of things are clearly
+recognisable in those of the novels and introductions of Bandello which
+relate to Milan.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> Amoretti, <i>Memorie Storiche sulla Vita Ecc. di Lionardo da Vinci</i>, pp.
+35 sqq., pp. 83 sqq. Here we may also mention the Moor’s efforts for the
+improvement of the university of Pavia.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> See his sonnets in Trucchi, <i>Poesie inedite</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> Prato, in the <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. 298. Comp. 302.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> Born 1466, betrothed to Isabella, herself six years of age, in 1480, suc.
+1484; m. 1490, d. 1519. Isabella’s death, 1539. Her sons, Federigo (1519-1540),
+made Duke in 1530, and the famous Ferrante Gonzaga. What
+follows is taken from the correspondence of Isabella, with Appendices,
+<i>Archiv. Stor.</i>, append., tom. ii. communicated by d’Arco. See the same
+writer, <i>Delle Arti e degli Artifici di Mantova</i>, Mant. 1857-59, 2 vols. The
+catalogue of the collection has been repeatedly printed. Portrait and
+biography of Isabella in Didot, <i>Alde Manuce</i>, Paris, 1875, pp. lxi-lxviii.
+See also below, part ii. chapter 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Franc. Vettori, in the <i>Arch. Stor.</i> Append., tom. vi. p. 321. For
+Federigo, see <i>Vespas. Fiorent.</i> pp. 132 sqq. and Prendilacqua, <i>Vita di
+Vittorino da Feltre</i>, pp. 48-52. V. endeavoured to calm the ambitious
+youth Federigo, then his scholar, with the words: ‘Tu quoque Cæsar
+eris.’ There is much literary information respecting him in, e.g., Favre,
+<i>Mélanges d’Hist. Lit.</i> i. p. 125, note 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> See below, part iii. chapter 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> Castiglione, <i>Cortigiano</i>, l. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> Petr. Bembus, <i>De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio deque Elizabetha Gonzaga
+Urbini ducibus</i>, Venetis, 1530. Also in Bembo’s Works, Basel, 1566, i. pp.
+529-624. In the form of a dialogue; contains among other things, the
+letter of Frid. Fregosus and the speech of Odaxius on Guido’s life and
+death.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> What follows is chiefly taken from the <i>Annales Estenses</i>, in Murat. xx.
+and the <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, Murat. xxiv</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> See Bandello, i. nov. 32.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> <i>Diario Ferrar.</i> l. c. col. 347.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Vita Alfonsi ducis</i>, ed. Flor. 1550, also an Italian by
+Giovanbattista Gelli, Flor. 1553.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> Paulus Jovius, l. c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> The journey of Leo X. when Cardinal, may be also mentioned here.
+Comp. Paul. Jov. <i>Vita Leonis X.</i> lib. i. His purpose was less serious, and
+directed rather to amusement and knowledge of the world; but the spirit
+is wholly modern. No Northerner then travelled with such objects.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a> <i>Diar. Ferr.</i> in Murat. xxiv. col. 232 and 240.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. <i>De Liberalitate</i>, cap. 28.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> Giraldi, <i>Hecatomithi</i>, vi. nov. 1 (ed. 1565, fol. 223 <i>a</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a> Vasari, xii. 166, <i>Vita di Michelangelo</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> As early as 1446 the members of the House of Gonzaga followed the
+corpse of Vittorino da Feltre.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> Capitolo 19, and in the <i>Opere Minore</i>, ed. Lemonnier, vol. i. p. 425,
+entitled Elegia 17. Doubtless the cause of this death (above, p. 46) was
+unknown to the young poet, then 19 years old.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> The novels in the <i>Hecatomithi</i> of Giraldi relating to the House of
+Este are to be found, with one exception (i. nov. 8), in the 6th book, dedicated
+to Francesco of Este, Marchese della Massa, at the beginning of
+the second part of the whole work, which is inscribed to Alfonso II. ‘the
+fifth Duke of Ferrara.’ The 10th book, too, is specially dedicated to
+him, but none of the novels refer to him personally, and only one to his
+predecessor Hercules I.; the rest to Hercules I. ‘the second Duke,’ and
+Alfonso I. ‘the third Duke of Ferrara.’ But the stories told of these
+princes are for the most part not love tales. One of them (i. nov. 8) tells
+of the failure of an attempt made by the King of Naples to induce Hercules
+of Este to deprive Borso of the government of Ferrara; another
+(vi. nov. 10) describes Ercole’s high-spirited treatment of conspirators.
+The two novels that treat of Alfonso I. (vi. nov. 2, 4), in the latter of
+which he only plays a subordinate part, are also, as the title of the book
+shows and as the dedication to the above-named Francesco explains
+more fully, accounts of ‘atti di cortesía’ towards knights and prisoners,
+but not towards women, and only the two remaining tales are love-stories.
+They are of such a kind as can be told during the lifetime of the
+prince; they set forth his nobleness and generosity, his virtue and self-restraint.
+Only one of them (vi. nov. 1) refers to Hercules I., who was dead
+long before the novels were compiled, and only one to the Hercules II.
+then alive (b. 1508, d. 1568) son of Lucrezia Borgia, husband of Renata,
+of whom the poet says: ‘Il giovane, che non meno ha benigno l’animo,
+che cortese l’aspetto, come già il vedemmo in Roma, nel tempo, ch’egli,
+in vece del padre, venne à Papa Hadriano.’ The tale about him is briefly
+as follows:&mdash;Lucilla, the beautiful daughter of a poor but noble widow,
+loves Nicandro, but cannot marry him, as the lover’s father forbids him to
+wed a portionless maiden. Hercules, who sees the girl and is captivated
+by her beauty, finds his way, through the connivance of her mother, into
+her bedchamber, but is so touched by her beseeching appeal that he
+respects her innocence, and, giving her a dowry, enables her to marry
+Nicandro.
+</p><p>
+In Bandello, ii. nov. 8 and 9 refer to Alessandro Medici, 26 to Mary
+of Aragon, iii. 26, iv. 13 to Galeazzo Sforza, iii. 36, 37 to Henry VIII. of
+England, ii. 27 to the German Emperor Maximilian. The emperor,
+‘whose natural goodness and more than imperial generosity are praised
+by all writers,’ while chasing a stag is separated from his followers, loses
+his way, and at last emerging from the wood, enquires the way from a
+countryman. The latter, busied with lading wood, begs the emperor,
+whom he does not know, to help him, and receives willing assistance.
+While still at work, Maximilian is rejoined, and, in spite of his signs
+to the contrary, respectfully saluted by his followers, and thus recognised
+by the peasant, who implores forgiveness for the freedom he has
+unwittingly taken. The emperor raises the kneeling suppliant, gives
+him presents, appoints him as his attendant, and confers upon him distinguished
+privileges. The narrator concludes: ‘Dimostrò Cesare nello
+smontar da cavallo e con allegra ciera aiutar il bisognoso contadino, una
+indicibile e degna d’ogni lode humanità, e in sollevarlo con danari e privilegii
+dalla sua faticosa vita, aperse il suo veramente animo Cesareo’ (ii.
+415). A story in the <i>Hecatomithi</i> (viii. nov. 5) also treats of Maximilian.
+It is the same tale which has acquired a world-wide celebrity through
+Shakespeare’s <i>Measure for Measure</i> (for its diffusion see Kirchhof’s
+<i>Wendunmuth</i>, ed. Oesterley, bd. v. s. 152 sqq.), and the scene of which
+is transferred by Giraldi to Innsbruck. Maximilian is the hero, and here
+too receives the highest eulogies. After being first called ‘Massimiliano
+il Grande,’ he is designated as one ‘che fu raro esempio di cortesia, di
+magnanimità, e di singolare giustizia.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> In the <i>Deliciæ Poet. Italorum</i> (1608), ii. pp. 455 sqq.: ad Alfonsum
+ducem Calabriæ. (Yet I do not believe that the above remark fairly
+applies to this poem, which clearly expresses the joys which Alfonso has
+with Drusula, and describes the sensations of the happy lover, who in his
+transports thinks that the gods themselves must envy him.&mdash;L.G.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> Mentioned as early as 1367, in the <i>Polistore</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 848,
+in reference to Niccolò the Elder, who makes twelve persons knights in
+honour of the twelve Apostles.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> Burigozzo, in the <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> iii. p. 432.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a> <i>Discorsi</i>, i. 17, on Milan after the death of Filippo Visconti.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> <i>De Incert. et Vanitate Scientiar.</i> cap. 55.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a> Prato, <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> iii. p. 241.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> <i>De Casibus Virorum Illustrium</i>, l. ii. cap. 15.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> <i>Discorsi</i>, iii. 6; comp. <i>Storie Fiorent.</i> l. viii. The description of conspiracies
+has been a favourite theme of Italian writers from a very remote
+period. Luitprand (of Cremona, <i>Mon. Germ.</i>, ss. iii. 264-363) gives us a
+few, which are more circumstantial than those of any other contemporary
+writer of the tenth century; in the eleventh the deliverance of Messina
+from the Saracens, accomplished by calling in Norman Roger (Baluz.
+<i>Miscell.</i> i. p. 184), gives occasion to a characteristic narrative of this kind
+(1060); we need hardly speak of the dramatic colouring given to the
+stories of the Sicilian Vespers (1282). The same tendency is well known
+in the Greek writers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a> Corio, fol. 333. For what follows, ibid. fol. 305, 422 sqq. 440.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> So in the quotations from Gallus, in Sismondi, xi. 93. For the whole
+subject see Reumont, <i>Lorenzo dei Medici</i>, pp. 387-97, especially 396.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> Corio, fol. 422. Allegretto, <i>Diari Sanesi</i>, in Murat. xxiii. col. 777.
+See above, p. 41.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> The enthusiasm with which the Florentine Alamanno Rinuccini
+(b. 1419) speaks in his <i>Ricordi</i> (ed. by G. Aiazzi, Florence, 1840) of murderers
+and their deeds is very remarkable. For a contemporary, though
+not Italian, apology for tyrannicide, see Kervyn de Lettenhove, <i>Jean sans
+Peur et l’Apologie du Tyrannicide</i>, in the <i>Bulletin de l’Académie de
+Bruxelles</i>, xi. (1861), pp. 558-71. A century later opinion in Italy had
+changed altogether. See the condemnation of Lampugnani’s deed in
+Egnatius, <i>De Exemplis Ill. Vir.</i>, Ven. fol. 99 <i>b</i>; comp. also 318 <i>b</i>.
+</p><p>
+Petr. Crinitus, also (<i>De honestâ disciplinâ</i>, Paris, 1510, fol. 134 <i>b</i>), writes
+a poem <i>De virtute Jo. Andr. Lamponiani tyrannicidæ</i>, in which Lampugnani’s
+deed is highly praised, and he himself is represented as a
+worthy companion of Brutus.
+</p><p>
+Comp. also the Latin poem: <i>Bonini Mombritii poetæ Mediol. trenodiæ
+in funere illustrissimi D. Gal. Marie Sfor</i> (2 Books&mdash;Milan, 1504),
+edited by Ascalon Vallis (<i>sic</i>), who in his dedication to the jurist Jac.
+Balsamus praises the poet and names other poems equally worthy to be
+printed. In this work, in which Megæra and Mars, Calliope and the
+poet, appear as interlocutors, the assassin&mdash;not Lampugnano, but a man
+from a humble family of artisans&mdash;is severely blamed, and he with his
+fellow conspirators are treated as ordinary criminals; they are charged
+with high treason on account of a projected alliance with Charles of Burgundy.
+No less than ten prognostics of the death of Duke Galeazzo are
+enumerated. The murder of the Prince, and the punishment of the
+assassin are vividly described; the close consists of pious consolations
+addressed to the widowed Princess, and of religious meditations.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> ‘Con studiare el Catalinario,’ says Allegretto. Comp. (in Corio) a
+sentence like the following in the desposition of Olgiati: ‘Quisque nostrum
+magis socios potissime et infinitos alios sollicitare, infestare, alter
+alteri benevolos se facere cœpit. Aliquid aliquibus parum donare: simul
+magis noctu edere, bibere, vigilare, nostra omnia bona polliceri,’ etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a> Vasari, iii. 251, note to <i>V. di Donatello</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> It now has been removed to a newly constructed building.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a> <i>Inferno</i>, xxxiv. 64.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> Related by a hearer, Luca della Robbia, <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> i. 273. Comp.
+Paul. Jovius, <i>Vita Leonis X.</i> iii. in the <i>Viri Illustres</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> First printed in 1723, as appendix to Varchi’s History, then in Roscoe,
+<i>Vita di Lorenzo de’ Medici</i>, vol. iv. app. 12, and often besides. Comp.
+Reumont, <i>Gesch. Toscana’s seit dem Ende des Florent. Freistaates</i>, Gotha,
+1876, i. p. 67, note. See also the report in the <i>Lettere de’ Principi</i> (ed.
+Venez. 1577), iii. fol. 162 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> On the latter point see Jac. Nardi, <i>Vita di Ant. Giacomini</i>, Lucca
+(1818), p. 18.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> ‘Genethliacum Venetæ urbis,’ in the <i>Carmina</i> of Ant. Sabellicus.
+The 25th of March was chosen ‘essendo il cielo in singolar disposizione,
+si come da gli astronomi è stato calcolato più volte.’ Comp. Sansovino,
+<i>Venezia città nobilissima e singolare, descritta in 14 libri</i>, Venezia, 1581,
+fol. 203. For the whole chapter see <i>Johannis Baptistæ Egnatii viri doctissimi
+de exemplis Illustrium Virorum Venetæ civitatis atque aliarum
+gentium</i>, Paris, 1554. The eldest Venetian chronicler, Joh. Diaconi,
+<i>Chron. Venetum</i> in Pertz, <i>Monum.</i> S.S. vii. pp. 5, 6, places the occupation
+of the islands in the time of the Lombards and the foundation of the
+Rialto later.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a> ‘De Venetæ urbis apparatu panagiricum carmen quod oraculum
+inscribitur.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a> The whole quarter was altered in the reconstructions of the sixteenth
+century.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a> Benedictus <i>Carol. VIII.</i> in Eccard, <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. col. 1597, 1601, 1621.
+In the <i>Chron. Venetum</i>, Murat. xxiv. col. 26, the political virtues of the
+Venetians are enumerated: ‘bontà, innocenza, zelo di carità, pietà, misericordia.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> Many of the nobles cropped their hair. See <i>Erasmi Colloquia</i>, ed.
+Tiguri, a. 1553: miles et carthusianus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a> <i>Epistolæ</i>, lib. v. fol. 28.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> Malipiero, <i>Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor.</i> vii. i. pp. 377, 431, 481, 493, 530;
+ii. pp. 661, 668, 679. <i>Chron. Venetum</i>, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 57. <i>Diario
+Ferrarese</i>, ib. col. 240. See also <i>Dispacci di Antonio Giustiniani</i> (Flor.
+1876), i. p. 392.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> Malipiero, in the <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> vii. ii. p. 691. Comp. 694, 713, and i.
+535.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> Marin Sanudo, <i>Vite dei Duchi</i>, Murat. xxii. col. 1194.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> <i>Chron. Venetum</i>, Murat. xxiv. col. 105.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a> <i>Chron. Venetum</i>, Murat. xxiv. col. 123 sqq. and Malipiero, l. c. vii. i.
+pp. 175, 187 sqq. relate the significant fall of the Admiral Antonio Grimani,
+who, when accused on account of his refusal to surrender the command
+in chief to another, himself put irons on his feet before his arrival
+at Venice, and presented himself in this condition to the Senate. For
+him and his future lot, see Egnatius, fol. 183 <i>a</i> sqq., 198 <i>b</i> sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a> <i>Chron. Ven.</i> l. c. col. 166.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a> Malipiero, l. c. vii. i. 349. For other lists of the same kind see Marin
+Sanudo, <i>Vite dei Duchi</i>, Murat. xxii. col. 990 (year 1426), col. 1088 (year
+1440), in Corio, fol. 435-438 (1483), in Guazzo <i>Historie</i>, fol. 151 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_137_137" id="Footnote_137_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_137_137"><span class="label">[137]</span></a> Guicciardini (<i>Ricordi</i>, n. 150) is one of the first to remark that the
+passion for vengeance can drown the clearest voice of self-interest.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_138_138" id="Footnote_138_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_138_138"><span class="label">[138]</span></a> Malipiero, l. c. vii. i., p. 328.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_139_139" id="Footnote_139_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_139_139"><span class="label">[139]</span></a> The statistical view of Milan, in the ‘Manipulus Florum’ (in Murat.
+xi. 711 sqq.) for the year 1288, is important, though not extensive. It
+includes house-doors, population, men of military age, ‘loggie’ of the
+nobles, wells, bakeries, wine-shops, butchers’-shops, fishmongers, the consumption
+of corn, dogs, birds of chase, the price of salt, wood, hay, and
+wines; also the judges, notaries, doctors, schoolmasters, copying clerks,
+armourers, smiths, hospitals, monasteries, endowments, and religious
+corporations. A list perhaps still older is found in the ‘Liber de magnalibus
+Mediolani,’ in <i>Heinr. de Hervordia</i>, ed. Potthast, p. 165. See also the
+statistical account of Asti about the year 1250 in Ogerius Alpherius
+(Alfieri), <i>De Gestis Astensium, Histor. patr. Monumenta, Scriptorum</i>,
+tom. iii. col. 684. sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_140_140" id="Footnote_140_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_140_140"><span class="label">[140]</span></a> Especially Marin Sanudo, in the <i>Vite dei Duchi di Venezia</i>, Murat. xxii.
+<i>passim</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_141_141" id="Footnote_141_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_141_141"><span class="label">[141]</span></a> See for the marked difference between Venice and Florence, an important
+pamphlet addressed 1472 to Lorenzo de’ Medici by certain Venetians,
+and the answer to it by Benedetto Dei, in Paganini, <i>Della Decima</i>,
+Florence, 1763, iii. pp. 135 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_142_142" id="Footnote_142_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_142_142"><span class="label">[142]</span></a> In Sanudo, l. c. col. 958. What relates to trade is extracted in Scherer,
+<i>Allgem. Gesch. des Welthandels</i>, i. 326, note.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_143_143" id="Footnote_143_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_143_143"><span class="label">[143]</span></a> Here all the houses, not merely those owned by the state, are meant.
+The latter, however, sometimes yielded enormous rents. See Vasari, xiii.
+83. V. d. Jac. Sansovino.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_144_144" id="Footnote_144_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_144_144"><span class="label">[144]</span></a> See Sanudo, col. 963. In the same place a list of the incomes of the
+other Italian and European powers is given. An estimate for 1490 is to
+be found, col. 1245 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_145_145" id="Footnote_145_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_145_145"><span class="label">[145]</span></a> This dislike seems to have amounted to positive hatred in Paul II.
+who called the humanists one and all heretics. Platina, <i>Vita Pauli</i>, ii.
+p. 323. See also for the subject in general, Voigt, <i>Wiederbelebung des
+classischen Alterthums</i>, Berlin, 1859, pp. 207-213. The neglect of the
+sciences is given as a reason for the flourishing condition of Venice by
+Lil. Greg. Giraldus, <i>Opera</i>, ii. p. 439.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146_146" id="Footnote_146_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_146_146"><span class="label">[146]</span></a> Sanudo, l. c. col. 1167.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_147_147" id="Footnote_147_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_147_147"><span class="label">[147]</span></a> Sansovina, <i>Venezia</i>, lib. xiii. It contains the biographies of the
+Doges in chronological order, and, following these lives one by one
+(regularly from the year 1312, under the heading <i>Scrittori Veneti</i>), short
+notices of contemporary writers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_148_148" id="Footnote_148_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_148_148"><span class="label">[148]</span></a> Venice was then one of the chief seats of the Petrarchists. See G.
+Crespan, <i>Del Petrarchismo</i>, in <i>Petrarca e Venezia</i>, 1874, pp. 187-253.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_149_149" id="Footnote_149_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_149_149"><span class="label">[149]</span></a> See Heinric. de Hervordia ad a. 1293, p. 213, ed. Potthast, who says:
+‘The Venetians wished to obtain the body of Jacob of Forli from the inhabitants
+of that place, as many miracles were wrought by it. They
+promised many things in return, among others to bear all the expense of
+canonising the defunct, but without obtaining their request.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_150_150" id="Footnote_150_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_150_150"><span class="label">[150]</span></a> Sanudo, l. c. col. 1158, 1171, 1177. When the body of St. Luke was
+brought from Bosnia, a dispute arose with the Benedictines of S. Giustina
+at Padua, who claimed to possess it already, and the Pope had to decide
+between the two parties. Comp. Guicciardini, <i>Ricordi</i>, n. 401.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_151_151" id="Footnote_151_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_151_151"><span class="label">[151]</span></a> Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, lib. xii. ‘dell’andate publiche del principe.’
+Egnatius, fol. 50<i>a</i>. For the dread felt at the papal interdict see Egnatius,
+fol. 12 <i>a</i> sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_152_152" id="Footnote_152_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_152_152"><span class="label">[152]</span></a> G. Villani, viii. 36. The year 1300 is also a fixed date in the <i>Divine
+Comedy</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_153_153" id="Footnote_153_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor_153_153"><span class="label">[153]</span></a> Stated about 1470 in <i>Vespas. Fiorent.</i> p. 554.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_154_154" id="Footnote_154_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor_154_154"><span class="label">[154]</span></a> The passage which followed in former editions referring to the <i>Chronicle
+of Dino Compagni</i> is here omitted, since the genuineness of the
+<i>Chronicle</i> has been disproved by Paul Scheffer-Boichhorst (<i>Florentiner
+Studien</i>, Leipzig, 1874, pp. 45-210), and the disproof maintained (<i>Die
+Chronik des D. C.</i>, Leipzig, 1875) against a distinguished authority
+(C. Hegel, <i>Die Chronik des D. C., Versuch einer Rettung</i>, Leipzig, 1875).
+Scheffer’s view is generally received in Germany (see W. Bernhardi, <i>Der
+Stand der Dino-Frage, Hist. Zeitschr. N.F.</i>, 1877, bd. i.), and even Hegel
+assumes that the text as we have it is a later manipulation of an unfinished
+work of Dino. Even in Italy, though the majority of scholars have
+wished to ignore this critical onslaught, as they have done other earlier
+ones of the same kind, some voices have been raised to recognise the
+spuriousness of the document. (See especially P. Fanfani in his periodical
+<i>Il Borghini</i>, and in the book <i>Dino Campagni Vendicato</i>, Milano,
+1875). On the earliest Florentine histories in general see Hartwig, <i>Forschungen</i>,
+Marburg, 1876, and C. Hegel in H. von Sybel’s <i>Historischer Zeitschrift</i>,
+b. xxxv. Since then Isidore del Lungo, who with remarkable
+decision asserts its genuineness, has completed his great edition of Dino,
+and furnished it with a detailed introduction: <i>Dino Campagni e la sua
+cronaca</i>, 2 vols. Firenze, 1879-80. A manuscript of the history, dating
+back to the beginning of the fifteenth century, and consequently earlier
+than all the hitherto known references and editions, has been lately found.
+In consequence of the discovery of this MS. and of the researches undertaken
+by C. Hegel, and especially of the evidence that the style of the
+work does not differ from that of the fourteenth century, the prevailing
+view of the subject is essentially this, that the Chronicle contains an important
+kernel, which is genuine, which, however, perhaps even in the
+fourteenth century, was remodelled on the ground-plan of Villani’s
+Chronicle. Comp. Gaspary, <i>Geschichte der italienischen Literatur</i>. Berlin,
+1885, i. pp. 361-9, 531 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_155_155" id="Footnote_155_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor_155_155"><span class="label">[155]</span></a> <i>Purgatorio</i>, vi. at the end.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_156_156" id="Footnote_156_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor_156_156"><span class="label">[156]</span></a> <i>De Monarchia</i>, i. 1. (New critical edition by Witte, Halle, 1863, 71;
+German translation by O. Hubatsch, Berlin, 1872).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_157_157" id="Footnote_157_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor_157_157"><span class="label">[157]</span></a> <i>Dantis Alligherii Epistolæ</i>, cum notis C. Witte, Padua, 1827. He
+wished to keep the Pope as well as the Emperor always in Italy. See
+his letter, p. 35, during the conclave of Carpentras, 1314. On the first
+letter see <i>Vitæ Nuova</i>, cap. 31, and <i>Epist.</i> p. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_158_158" id="Footnote_158_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor_158_158"><span class="label">[158]</span></a> Giov. Villani, xi. 20. Comp. Matt. Villani, ix. 93, who says that John
+XXII. ‘astuto in tutte sue cose e massime in fare il danaio,’ left behind
+him 18 million florins in cash and 6 millions in jewels.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_159_159" id="Footnote_159_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor_159_159"><span class="label">[159]</span></a> See for this and similar facts Giov. Villani, xi. 87, xii. 54. He lost
+his own money in the crash and was imprisoned for debt. See also Kervyn
+de Lettenhove, <i>L’Europe au Siècle de Philippe le Bel, Les Argentiers
+Florentins</i> in <i>Bulletin de l’Académie de Bruxelles</i> (1861), vol. xii.
+pp. 123 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_160_160" id="Footnote_160_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor_160_160"><span class="label">[160]</span></a> Giov. Villani, xi. 92, 93. In Macchiavelli, <i>Stor. Fiorent.</i> lib. ii. cap.
+42, we read that 96,000 persons died of the plague in 1348.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_161_161" id="Footnote_161_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor_161_161"><span class="label">[161]</span></a> The priest put aside a black bean for every boy and a white one for
+every girl. This was the only means of registration.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_162_162" id="Footnote_162_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor_162_162"><span class="label">[162]</span></a> There was already a permanent fire brigade in Florence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_163_163" id="Footnote_163_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor_163_163"><span class="label">[163]</span></a> Matteo Villani, iii. 106.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_164_164" id="Footnote_164_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor_164_164"><span class="label">[164]</span></a> Matteo Villani, i. 2-7, comp. 58. The best authority for the plague
+itself is the famous description by Boccaccio at the beginning of the
+<i>Decameron</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_165_165" id="Footnote_165_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor_165_165"><span class="label">[165]</span></a> Giov. Villani, x. 164.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_166_166" id="Footnote_166_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor_166_166"><span class="label">[166]</span></a> <i>Ex Annalibus Ceretani</i>, in Fabroni, <i>Magni Cormi Vita</i>, Adnot. 34.
+vol. ii. p. 63.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_167_167" id="Footnote_167_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor_167_167"><span class="label">[167]</span></a> <i>Ricordi</i> of Lorenzo, in Fabroni. <i>Laur. Med. Magnifici Vita</i>, Adnot.
+2 and 25. Paul. Jovius, <i>Elogia</i>, pp. 131 sqq. Cosmus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_168_168" id="Footnote_168_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor_168_168"><span class="label">[168]</span></a> Given by Benedetto Dei, in the passage quoted above (<a href="#page_070">p. 70</a>, note 1).
+It must be remembered that the account was intended to serve as a warning
+to assailants. For the whole subject see Reumont, <i>Lor. dei Medici</i>,
+ii. p. 419. The financial project of a certain Ludovico Ghetti, with important
+facts, is given in Roscoe, <i>Vita di Lor. Med.</i> ii. Append, i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_169_169" id="Footnote_169_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor_169_169"><span class="label">[169]</span></a> E. g. in the <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iv.(?) See as a contrast the very simple ledger
+of Ott. Nuland, 1455-1462 (Stuttg. 1843), and for a rather later period
+the day-book of Lukas Rem, 1494-1541, ed. by B. Greiff, Augsb., 1861.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_170_170" id="Footnote_170_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor_170_170"><span class="label">[170]</span></a> Libri, <i>Histoire des Sciences Mathématiques</i>, ii. 163 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_171_171" id="Footnote_171_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor_171_171"><span class="label">[171]</span></a> Varchi, <i>Stor. Fiorent.</i> iii. p. 56 and sqq. up to the end of the 9th book.
+Some obviously erroneous figures are probably no more than clerical or
+typographical blunders.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_172_172" id="Footnote_172_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor_172_172"><span class="label">[172]</span></a> In respect of prices and of wealth in Italy, I am only able, in default
+of further means of investigation, to bring together some scattered facts,
+which I have picked up here and there. Obvious exaggerations must be
+put aside. The gold coins which are worth referring to are the ducat,
+the sequin, the ‘fiorino d’oro,’ and the ‘scudo d’oro.’ The value of all is
+nearly the same, 11 to 12 francs of our money.
+</p><p>
+In Venice, for example, the Doge Andrea Vendramin (1476) with 170,000
+ducats passed for an exceedingly rich man (Malipiero, l. c. vii. ii. p. 666.
+The confiscated fortune of Colleoni amounted to 216,000 florins, l. c. p. 244.
+</p><p>
+About 1460 the Patriarch of Aquileia, Ludovico Patavino, with 200,000
+ducats, was called ‘perhaps the richest of all Italians.’ (Gasp. Veroneus
+<i>Vita Pauli II.</i>, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1027.) Elsewhere fabulous statements.
+</p><p>
+Antonio Grimani paid 30,000 ducats for his son’s election as Cardinal.
+His ready money alone was put at 100,000 ducats. (<i>Chron. Venetum</i>,
+Murat. xxiv. col. 125.)
+</p><p>
+For notices as to the grain in commerce and on the market at Venice,
+see in particular Malipiero, l. c. vii. ii. p. 709 sqq. Date 1498.
+</p><p>
+In 1522 it is no longer Venice, but Genoa, next to Rome, which ranks
+as the richest city in Italy (only credible on the authority of Francesco.
+Vettori. See his history in the <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> Append. tom. vi. p. 343).
+Bandello, <i>parte</i> ii. <i>novello</i> 34 and 42, names as the richest Genoese merchant
+of his time Ansaldo Grimaldi.
+</p><p>
+Between 1400 and 1580 Franc. Sansovino assumes a depreciation of 50
+per cent. in the value of money. (<i>Venezia</i>, fol. 151 bis.)
+</p><p>
+In Lombardy it is believed that the relation between the price of corn
+about the middle of the fifteenth and that at the middle of the present
+century is as 3 to 8. (Sacco di Piacenza, in <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> Append. tom. v.
+Note of editor Scarabelli.)
+</p><p>
+At Ferrara there were people at the time of Duke Borso with 50,000
+to 60,000 ducats (<i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, Murat. xxiv. col. 207, 214, 218; an
+extravagant statement, col. 187). In Florence the data are exceptional
+and do not justify a conclusion as to averages. Of this kind are the
+loans to foreign princes, in which the names of one or two houses only
+appear, but which were in fact the work of great companies. So too the
+enormous fines levied on defeated parties; we read, e.g. that from 1430 to
+1453 seventy-seven families paid 4,875,000 gold florins (Varchi, iii. p. 115
+sqq.), and that Giannozzo Mannetti alone, of whom we shall have occasion
+to speak hereafter, was forced to pay a sum of 135,000 gold florins, and
+was reduced thereby to beggary (Reumont, i. 157).
+</p><p>
+The fortune of Giovanni Medici amounted at his death (1428) to 179,221
+gold florins, but the latter alone of his two sons Cosimo and Lorenzo left
+at his death (1440) as much as 235,137 (Fabroni, <i>Laur. Med.</i> Adnot. 2).
+Cosimo’s son Piero left (1469) 237,982 scudi (Reumont, <i>Lorenzo de’ Medici</i>,
+i. 286).
+</p><p>
+It is a proof of the general activity of trade that the forty-four goldsmiths
+on the Ponte Vecchio paid in the fourteenth century a rent of 800
+florins to the Government (Vasari, ii. 114, <i>Vita di Taddeo Gaddi</i>). The
+diary of Buonaccorso Pitti (in Delécluze, <i>Florence et ses Vicissitudes</i>,
+vol. ii.) is full of figures, which, however, only prove in general the high
+price of commodities and the low value of money.
+</p><p>
+For Rome, the income of the Curia, which was derived from all Europe,
+gives us no criterion; nor are statements about papal treasures and the
+fortunes of cardinals very trustworthy. The well-known banker Agostino
+Chigi left (1520) a fortune of in all 800,000 ducats (<i>Lettere Pittoriche</i>, i.
+Append. 48).
+</p><p>
+During the high prices of the year 1505 the value of the <i>staro
+ferrarrese del grano</i>, which commonly weighed from 68 to 70 pounds
+(German), rose to 1⅓ ducats. The <i>semola</i> or <i>remolo</i> was sold at <i>venti
+soldi lo staro</i>; in the following fruitful years the <i>staro</i> fetched six <i>soldi</i>.
+Bonaventura Pistofilo, p. 494. At Ferrara the rent of a house yearly in
+1455 was 25 <i>Lire</i>; comp. <i>Atti e memorie</i>, Parma, vi. 250; see 265 sqq. for
+a documentary statement of the prices which were paid to artists and
+amanuenses.
+</p><p>
+From the inventory of the Medici (extracts in Muntz, <i>Prècurseurs</i>, 158
+sqq.) it appears that the jewels were valued at 12,205 ducats; the rings at
+1,792; the pearls (apparently distinguished from other jewels, S.G.C.M.) at
+3,512; the medallions, cameos and mosaics at 2,579; the vases at 4,850;
+the reliquaries and the like at 3,600; the library at 2,700; the silver
+at 7,000. Giov. Rucellai reckons that in 1473(?) he has paid 60,000
+gold florins in taxes, 10,000 for the dowries of his five daughters, 2,000 for
+the improvement of the church of Santa Maria Novella. In 1474 he lost
+20,000 gold florins through the intrigues of an enemy. (<i>Autografo dallo
+Tibaldone di G.R.</i>, Florence, 1872). The marriage of Barnardo Rucellai
+with Nannina, the sister of Lorenzo de’ Medici, cost 3,686 florins (Muntz,
+<i>Précurseurs</i>, 244, i).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_173_173" id="Footnote_173_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor_173_173"><span class="label">[173]</span></a> So far as Cosimo (1433-1465) and his grandson Lorenzo Magnifico
+(d. 1492) are concerned, the author refrains from any criticism on their
+internal policy. The exaltation of both, particularly of Lorenzo, by
+William Roscoe (<i>Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, called the Magnificent</i>, 1st ed.
+Liverpool, 1795; 10th ed. London, 1851), seems to have been a principal
+cause of the reaction of feeling against them. This reaction appeared
+first in Sismondi (<i>Hist. des Rép. Italiennes</i>, xi.), in reply to whose
+strictures, sometimes unreasonably severe, Roscoe again came forward
+(<i>Illustrations, Historical and Critical, of the Life of Lor. d. Med.</i>,
+London, 1822); later in Gino Capponi (<i>Archiv. Stor. Ital.</i> i. (1842), pp. 315
+sqq.), who afterwards (<i>Storia della Rep. di Firenze</i>, 2 vols. Florence,
+1875) gave further proofs and explanations of his judgment. See also the
+work of Von Reumont (<i>Lor. d. Med. il Magn.</i>), 2 vols. Leipzig, 1874,
+distinguished no less by the judicial calmness of its views than by the
+mastery it displays of the extensive materials used. See also A. Castelman:
+<i>Les Medicis</i>, 2 vols. Paris, 1879. The subject here is only casually
+touched upon. Comp. two works of B. Buser (Leipzig, 1879) devoted to
+the home and foreign policy of the Medici. (1) <i>Die Beziehungen der
+Medicus zu Frankreich.</i> 1434-1494, &amp;c. (2) <i>Lorenzo de’ Medici als
+italienischen Staatsman</i>, &amp;c., 2nd ed., 1883.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_174_174" id="Footnote_174_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor_174_174"><span class="label">[174]</span></a> Franc. Burlamacchi, father of the head of the Lucchese Protestants,
+Michele B. See <i>Arch. Stor. Ital.</i> ser. i. tom. x., pp. 435-599; Documenti,
+pp. 146 sqq.; further Carlo Minutoli, <i>Storia di Fr. B.</i>, Lucca, 1844, and
+the important additions of Leone del Prete in the <i>Giornale Storico degli
+Archiv. Toscani</i>, iv. (1860), pp. 309 sqq. It is well known how Milan, by
+its hard treatment of the neighbouring cities from the eleventh to the
+thirteenth century, prepared the way for the foundation of a great
+despotic state. Even at the time of the extinction of the Visconti in 1447,
+Milan frustrated the deliverance of Upper Italy, principally through not
+accepting the plan of a confederation of equal cities. Comp. Corio, fol.
+358 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_175_175" id="Footnote_175_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor_175_175"><span class="label">[175]</span></a> On the third Sunday in Advent, 1494, Savonarola preached as follows
+on the method of bringing about a new constitution: The sixteen
+companies of the city were each to work out a plan, the Gonfalonieri to
+choose the four best of these, and the Signory to name the best of all on
+the reduced list. Things, however, took a different turn, under the
+influence indeed of the preacher himself. See P. Villari, <i>Savonarola</i>.
+Besides this sermon, S. had written a remarkable <i>Trattato circa il regimento
+di Ferenze</i> (reprinted at Lucca, 1817).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_176_176" id="Footnote_176_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor_176_176"><span class="label">[176]</span></a> The latter first in 1527, after the expulsion of the Medici. See Varchi,
+i. 121, &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_177_177" id="Footnote_177_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor_177_177"><span class="label">[177]</span></a> Macchiavelli, <i>Storie Fior.</i> l. iii. cap. 1: ‘Un Savio dator di leggi,’
+could save Florence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_178_178" id="Footnote_178_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor_178_178"><span class="label">[178]</span></a> Varchi, <i>Stor. Fior.</i> i. p. 210.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_179_179" id="Footnote_179_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor_179_179"><span class="label">[179]</span></a> ‘Discorso sopra il riformar lo Stato di Firenze,’ in the <i>Opere Minori</i>,
+p. 207.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_180_180" id="Footnote_180_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor_180_180"><span class="label">[180]</span></a> The same view, doubtless borrowed from here, occurs in Montesquieu.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_181_181" id="Footnote_181_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor_181_181"><span class="label">[181]</span></a> Belonging to a rather later period (1532?). Compare the opinion of
+Guicciardini, terrible in its frankness, on the condition and inevitable
+organisation of the Medicean party. <i>Lettere di Principi</i>, iii. fol. 124,
+(ediz. Venez. 1577).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_182_182" id="Footnote_182_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor_182_182"><span class="label">[182]</span></a> Æn. Sylvii, <i>Apologia ad Martinum Mayer</i>, p. 701. To the same effect
+Macchiavelli, <i>Discorsi</i>, i. 55, and elsewhere.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_183_183" id="Footnote_183_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor_183_183"><span class="label">[183]</span></a> How strangely modern half-culture affected political life is shown by
+the party struggles of 1535. Della Valle, <i>Lettere Sanesi</i>, iii. p. 317. A
+number of small shopkeepers, excited by the study of Livy and of Macchiavelli’s
+<i>Discorsi</i>, call in all seriousness for tribunes of the people and
+other Roman magistrates against the misgovernment of the nobles and
+the official classes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_184_184" id="Footnote_184_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor_184_184"><span class="label">[184]</span></a> Piero Valeriano, <i>De Infelicitate Literator.</i>, speaking of Bartolommeo
+della Rovere. (The work of P. V. written 1527 is quoted according to the
+edition by Menken, <i>Analecta de Calamitate Literatorum</i>, Leipz. 1707.)
+The passage here meant can only be that at p. 384, from which we cannot
+infer what is stated in the text, but in which we read that B. d. R. wished
+to make his son abandon a taste for study which he had conceived and
+put him into business.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_185_185" id="Footnote_185_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor_185_185"><span class="label">[185]</span></a> Senarega, <i>De reb. Genuens</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 548. For the insecurity
+of the time see esp. col. 519, 525, 528, &amp;c. For the frank language
+of the envoy on the occasion of the surrender of the state to Francesco
+Sforza (1464), when the envoy told him that Genoa surrendered in the
+hope of now living safely and comfortably, see Cagnola, <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> iii.
+p. 165 sqq. The figures of the Archbishop, Doge, Corsair, and (later)
+Cardinal Paolo Fregoso form a notable contrast to the general picture of
+the condition of Italy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_186_186" id="Footnote_186_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor_186_186"><span class="label">[186]</span></a> So Varchi, at a much later time. <i>Stor. Fiorent.</i> i. 57.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_187_187" id="Footnote_187_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor_187_187"><span class="label">[187]</span></a> Galeazzo Maria Sforza, indeed, declared the contrary (1467) to the
+Venetian agent, namely, that Venetian subjects had offered to join him in
+making war on Venice; but this is only vapouring. Comp. Malipiero,
+<i>Annali Veneti, Archiv. Stor.</i> vii. i. p. 216 sqq. On every occasion cities
+and villages voluntarily surrendered to Venice, chiefly, it is true, those
+that escaped from the hands of some despot, while Florence had to keep
+down the neighbouring republics, which were used to independence, by
+force of arms, as Guicciardini (<i>Ricordi</i>, n. 29) observes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_188_188" id="Footnote_188_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor_188_188"><span class="label">[188]</span></a> Most strongly, perhaps, in an instruction to the ambassadors going to
+Charles VII. in the year 1452. (See Fabroni, <i>Cosmus</i>, Adnot. 107, fol. ii.
+pp. 200 sqq.) The Florentine envoys were instructed to remind the king
+of the centuries of friendly relations which had subsisted between France
+and their native city, and to recall to him that Charles the Great had
+delivered Florence and Italy from the barbarians (Lombards), and that
+Charles I. and the Romish Church were ‘fondatori della parte Guelfa.
+Il qual fundamento fa cagione della ruina della contraria parte e introdusse
+lo stato di felicità, in che noi siamo.’ When the young Lorenzo
+visited the Duke of Anjou, then staying at Florence, he put on a French
+dress. Fabroni, ii. p. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_189_189" id="Footnote_189_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor_189_189"><span class="label">[189]</span></a> Comines, <i>Charles VIII.</i> chap. x. The French were considered
+‘comme saints.’ Comp. chap. 17; <i>Chron. Venetum</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col.
+5, 10, 14, 15; Matarazzo, <i>Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. ii. p. 23,
+not to speak of countless other proofs. See especially the documents in
+Desjardins, op. cit. p. 127, note 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_190_190" id="Footnote_190_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor_190_190"><span class="label">[190]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Commentarii</i>, x. p. 492.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_191_191" id="Footnote_191_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor_191_191"><span class="label">[191]</span></a> Gingins, <i>Dépêches des Ambassadeurs Milanais</i>, <i>etc.</i> i. pp. 26, 153,
+279, 283, 285, 327, 331, 345, 359; ii. pp. 29, 37, 101, 217, 306. Charles
+once spoke of giving Milan to the young Duke of Orleans.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_192_192" id="Footnote_192_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor_192_192"><span class="label">[192]</span></a> Niccolò Valori, <i>Vita di Lorenzo</i>, Flor. 1568. Italian translation
+of the Latin original, first printed in 1749 (later in Galletti, <i>Phil. Villani,
+Liber de Civit. Flor. famosis Civibus</i>, Florence, 1847, pp. 161-183; passage
+here referred to p. 171). It must not, however, be forgotten that this earliest
+biography, written soon after the death of Lorenzo, is a flattering rather
+than a faithful portrait, and that the words here attributed to Lorenzo are
+not mentioned by the French reporter, and can, in fact, hardly have been
+uttered. Comines, who was commissioned by Louis XI. to go to Rome
+and Florence, says (<i>Mémoires</i>, l. vi. chap. 5): ‘I could not offer him an
+army, and had nothing with me but my suite.’ (Comp. Reumont, <i>Lorenzo</i>,
+i. p. 197, 429; ii. 598). In a letter from Florence to Louis XI. we read
+(Aug. 23, 1478: ‘Omnis spes nostra reposita est in favoribus suæ majestatis.’
+A. Desjardins, <i>Négociations Diplomatiques de la France avec la
+Toscane</i> (Paris, 1859), i. p. 173. Similarly Lorenzo himself in Kervyn de
+Lettenhove, <i>Lettres et Négotiations de Philippe de Comines</i>, i. p. 190.
+Lorenzo, we see, is in fact the one who humbly begs for help, not who
+proudly declines it.
+</p><p>
+Dr. Geiger in his appendix maintains that Dr. Burchhardt’s view as to
+Lorenzo’s national Italian policy is not borne out by evidence. Into this
+discussion the translator cannot enter. It would need strong proof to convince
+him that the masterly historical perception of Dr. Burchhardt was
+in error as to a subject which he has studied with minute care. In an
+age when diplomatic lying and political treachery were matters of course,
+documentary evidence loses much of its weight, and cannot be taken without
+qualification as representing the real feelings of the persons concerned,
+who fenced, turned about, and lied, first on one side and then on another,
+with an agility surprising to those accustomed to live among truth-telling
+people (S.G.C.M.)
+</p><p>
+Authorities quoted by Dr. Geiger are: Reumont, <i>Lorenzo</i>, 2nd ed., i.
+310; ii. 450. Desjardins: <i>Négociations Diplomatiques de la France avec
+la Toscane</i> (Paris, 1859), i. 173. Kervyn de Lettenhove, <i>Lettres et Négociations
+de Philippe de Comines</i>, i. 180.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_193_193" id="Footnote_193_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor_193_193"><span class="label">[193]</span></a> Fabroni, <i>Laurentius Magnificus</i>, Adnot. 205 sqq. In one of his Briefs
+it was said literally, ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo;’
+but it is to be hoped that he did not allude to the Turks. (Villari, <i>Storia
+di Savonarola</i>, ii. p. 48 of the ‘Documenti.’)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_194_194" id="Footnote_194_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor_194_194"><span class="label">[194]</span></a> E.g. Jovian. Pontan. in his <i>Charon</i>. In the dialogue between Æcus,
+Minos, and Mercurius (<i>Op.</i> ed. Bas. ii. p. 1167) the first says: ‘Vel quod
+haud multis post sæculis futurum auguror, ut Italia, cujus intestina te
+odia male habent Minos, in unius redacta ditionem resumat imperii majestatem.’
+And in reply to Mercury’s warning against the Turks, Æcus
+answers: ‘Quamquam timenda hæc sunt, tamen si vetera respicimus, non
+ab Asia aut Græcia, verum a Gallis Germanisque timendum Italiæ semper
+fuit.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_195_195" id="Footnote_195_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor_195_195"><span class="label">[195]</span></a> Comines, <i>Charles VIII.</i>, chap. 7. How Alfonso once tried in time
+of war to seize his opponents at a conference, is told by Nantiporto, in
+Murat. iii. ii. col. 1073. He was a genuine predecessor of Cæsar Borgia.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_196_196" id="Footnote_196_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor_196_196"><span class="label">[196]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Commentarii</i>, x. p. 492. See a letter of Malatesta in which
+he recommends to Mohammed II. a portrait-painter, Matteo Passo of Verona,
+and announces the despatch of a book on the art of war, probably
+in the year 1463, in Baluz. <i>Miscell.</i> iii. 113. What Galeazzo Maria of
+Milan told in 1467 to a Venetian envoy, namely, that he and his allies
+would join with the Turks to destroy Venice, was said merely by way of
+threat. Comp. Malipiero, <i>Ann. Veneti, Archiv. Stor.</i> vii. i. p. 222. For
+Boccalino, see page 36.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_197_197" id="Footnote_197_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor_197_197"><span class="label">[197]</span></a> Porzio, <i>Congiura dei Baroni</i>, l. i. p. 5. That Lorenzo, as Porzio
+hints, really had a hand in it, is not credible. On the other hand, it
+seems only too certain that Venice prompted the Sultan to the deed.
+See Romanin, <i>Storia Documentata di Venezia</i>, lib. xi. cap. 3. After
+Otranto was taken, Vespasiano Bisticci uttered his ‘Lamento d’Italia,
+<i>Archiv. Stor. Ital.</i> iv. pp. 452 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_198_198" id="Footnote_198_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor_198_198"><span class="label">[198]</span></a> <i>Chron. Venet.</i> in Murat. xxiv. col. 14 and 76.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_199_199" id="Footnote_199_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor_199_199"><span class="label">[199]</span></a> Malipiero, l. c. p. 565, 568.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_200_200" id="Footnote_200_200"></a><a href="#FNanchor_200_200"><span class="label">[200]</span></a> Trithem. <i>Annales Hirsaug</i>, ad. a. 1490, tom. ii. pp. 535 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_201_201" id="Footnote_201_201"></a><a href="#FNanchor_201_201"><span class="label">[201]</span></a> Malipiero, l. c. 161; comp. p. 152. For the surrender of Djem to
+Charles VIII. see p. 145, from which it is clear that a connection of the
+most shameful kind existed between Alexander and Bajazet, even if the
+documents in Burcardus be spurious. See on the subject Ranke, <i>Zur
+Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber</i>, 2 Auflage, Leipzig, 1874, p. 99, and
+Gregorovius, bd. vii. 353, note 1. <i>Ibid.</i> p. 353, note 2, a declaration of
+the Pope that he was not allied with the Turks.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_202_202" id="Footnote_202_202"></a><a href="#FNanchor_202_202"><span class="label">[202]</span></a> Bapt. Mantuanus, <i>De Calamitatibus Temporum</i>, at the end of the
+second book, in the song of the Nereid Doris to the Turkish fleet.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_203_203" id="Footnote_203_203"></a><a href="#FNanchor_203_203"><span class="label">[203]</span></a> Tommaso Gar, <i>Relaz. della Corte di Roma</i>, i. p. 55.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_204_204" id="Footnote_204_204"></a><a href="#FNanchor_204_204"><span class="label">[204]</span></a> Ranke, <i>Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker</i>. The
+opinion of Michelet (<i>Reforme</i>, p. 467), that the Turks would have adopted
+Western civilisation in Italy, does not satisfy me. This mission of Spain
+is hinted at, perhaps for the first time, in the speech delivered by Fedra
+Inghirami in 1510 before Julius II., at the celebration of the capture of
+Bugia by the fleet of Ferdinand the Catholic. See <i>Anecdota Litteraria</i>,
+ii. p. 419.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_205_205" id="Footnote_205_205"></a><a href="#FNanchor_205_205"><span class="label">[205]</span></a> Among others Corio, fol. 333. Jov. Pontanus, in his treatise, <i>De
+Liberalitate</i>, cap. 28, considers the free dismissal of Alfonso as a proof
+of the ‘liberalitas’ of Filippo Maria. (See above, p. 38, note 1.) Compare
+the line of conduct adopted with regard to Sforza, fol. 329.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_206_206" id="Footnote_206_206"></a><a href="#FNanchor_206_206"><span class="label">[206]</span></a> Nic. Valori, <i>Vita di Lorenzo</i>; Paul Jovius, <i>Vita Leonis X.</i> l. i.
+The latter certainly upon good authority, though not without rhetorical
+embellishment. Comp. Reumont, i. 487, and the passage there quoted.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_207_207" id="Footnote_207_207"></a><a href="#FNanchor_207_207"><span class="label">[207]</span></a> If Comines on this and many other occasions observes and judges
+as objectively as any Italian, his intercourse with Italians, particularly
+with Angelo Catto, must be taken into account.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_208_208" id="Footnote_208_208"></a><a href="#FNanchor_208_208"><span class="label">[208]</span></a> Comp. e.g. Malipiero, pp. 216, 221, 236, 237, 468, &amp;c., and above
+pp. 88, note 2, and 93, note 1. Comp. Egnatius, fol. 321 <i>a</i>. The Pope curses
+an ambassador; a Venetian envoy insults the Pope; another, to win over
+his hearers, tells a fable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_209_209" id="Footnote_209_209"></a><a href="#FNanchor_209_209"><span class="label">[209]</span></a> In Villari, <i>Storia di Savonarola</i>, vol. ii. p. xliii. of the ‘Documenti,’
+among which are to be found other important political letters. Other
+documents, particularly of the end of the fifteenth century in Baluzius,
+<i>Miscellanea</i>, ed. Mansi, vol. i. See especially the collected despatches of
+Florentine and Venetian ambassadors at the end of the fifteenth and
+beginning of sixteenth centuries in Desjardins, <i>Négotiations diplomatiques
+de la France avec la Toscane</i>. vols. i. ii. Paris. 1859, 1861.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_210_210" id="Footnote_210_210"></a><a href="#FNanchor_210_210"><span class="label">[210]</span></a> The subject has been lately treated more fully by Max Jähns, <i>Die
+Kriegskunst als Kunst</i>, Leipzig, 1874.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_211_211" id="Footnote_211_211"></a><a href="#FNanchor_211_211"><span class="label">[211]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> iv. p. 190, ad. a. 1459.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_212_212" id="Footnote_212_212"></a><a href="#FNanchor_212_212"><span class="label">[212]</span></a> The Cremonese prided themselves on their skill in this department.
+See <i>Cronaca di Cremona</i> in the <i>Bibliotheca Historica Italica</i>, vol. i. Milan,
+1876, p. 214, and note. The Venetians did the same, Egnatius, fol. 300 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_213_213" id="Footnote_213_213"></a><a href="#FNanchor_213_213"><span class="label">[213]</span></a> To this effect Paul Jovius (<i>Elogia</i>, p. 184) who adds: ‘Nondum enim
+invecto externarum gentium cruento more, Italia milites sanguinarii et
+multæ cædis avidi esse didicerant.’ We are reminded of Frederick of
+Urbino, who would have been ‘ashamed’ to tolerate a printed book in his
+library. See <i>Vespas. Fiorent.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_214_214" id="Footnote_214_214"></a><a href="#FNanchor_214_214"><span class="label">[214]</span></a> <i>Porcellii Commentaria Jac. Picinini</i>, in Murat. xx. A continuation
+for the war of 1453, <i>ibid.</i> xxv. Paul Cortesius (<i>De Hominibus Doctis</i>,
+p. 33, Florence, 1734) criticises the book severely on account of the
+wretched hexameters.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_215_215" id="Footnote_215_215"></a><a href="#FNanchor_215_215"><span class="label">[215]</span></a> Porcello calls Scipio Æmilianus by mistake, meaning Africanus
+Major.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_216_216" id="Footnote_216_216"></a><a href="#FNanchor_216_216"><span class="label">[216]</span></a> Simonetta, <i>Hist. Fr. Sfortiæ</i>, in Murat. xxi. col. 630.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_217_217" id="Footnote_217_217"></a><a href="#FNanchor_217_217"><span class="label">[217]</span></a> So he was considered. Comp. Bandello, parte i. nov. 40.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_218_218" id="Footnote_218_218"></a><a href="#FNanchor_218_218"><span class="label">[218]</span></a> Comp. e.g. <i>De Obsidione Tiphernatium</i>, in vol. 2, of the <i>Rer. Italic.
+Scriptores excodd. Florent.</i> col. 690. The duel of Marshal Boucicault
+with Galeazzo Gonzaga (1406) in Cagnola, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. p. 25. Infessura
+tells us of the honour paid by Sixtus IV. to the duellists among his
+guards. His successors issued bulls against duelling.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_219_219" id="Footnote_219_219"></a><a href="#FNanchor_219_219"><span class="label">[219]</span></a> We may here notice parenthetically (see Jähns, pp. 26, sqq.) the less
+favourable side of the tactics of the Condottieri. The combat was often
+a mere sham-fight, in which the enemy was forced to withdraw by
+harmless manœuvres. The object of the combatants was to avoid bloodshed,
+at the worst to make prisoners with a view to the ransom. According
+to Macchiavelli, the Florentines lost in a great battle in the year 1440
+one man only.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_220_220" id="Footnote_220_220"></a><a href="#FNanchor_220_220"><span class="label">[220]</span></a> For details, see <i>Arch. Stor.</i> Append. tom. v.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_221_221" id="Footnote_221_221"></a><a href="#FNanchor_221_221"><span class="label">[221]</span></a> Here once for all we refer our readers to Ranke’s <i>Popes</i>, vol. i., and to
+Sugenheim, <i>Geschichte der Entstehung und Ausbildung des Kirchenstaates</i>.
+The still later works of Gregorovius and Reumont have also been made
+use of, and when they offer new facts or views, are quoted. See also
+<i>Geschichte der römischen Papstthums</i>, W. Wattenbach, Berlin, 1876.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_222_222" id="Footnote_222_222"></a><a href="#FNanchor_222_222"><span class="label">[222]</span></a> For the impression made by the blessing of Eugenius IV. in Florence,
+see <i>Vespasiano Fiorent</i>, p. 18. See also the passage quoted in Reumont,
+<i>Lorenzo</i>, i. 171. For the impressive offices of Nicholas V., see Infessura
+(Eccard, ii. col. 1883 sqq.) and J. Manetti, <i>Vita Nicolai V.</i> (Murat. iii. ii.
+col. 923). For the homage given to Pius II., see <i>Diario Ferrarese</i> (Murat.
+xxiv. col. 205), and <i>Pii II. Commentarii</i>, <i>passim</i>, esp. iv. 201, 204, and xi.
+562. For Florence, see <i>Delizie degli Eruditi</i>, xx. 368. Even professional
+murderers respect the person of the Pope.
+</p><p>
+The great offices in church were treated as matters of much importance
+by the pomp-loving Paul II. (Platina, l. c. 321) and by Sixtus IV., who, in
+spite of the gout, conducted mass at Easter in a sitting posture. (<i>Jac.
+Volaterran. Diarium</i>, Murat. xxiii. col. 131.) It is curious to notice how
+the people distinguished between the magical efficacy of the blessing and
+the unworthiness of the man who gave it; when he was unable to give
+the benediction on Ascension Day, 1481, the populace murmured and
+cursed him. (<i>Ibid.</i> col. 133.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_223_223" id="Footnote_223_223"></a><a href="#FNanchor_223_223"><span class="label">[223]</span></a> Macchiavelli, <i>Scritti Minori</i>, p. 142, in the well-known essay on the
+catastrophe of Sinigaglia. It is true that the French and Spanish soldiers
+were still more zealous than the Italians. Comp. in Paul. Jov. <i>Vita
+Leonis X.</i> (l. ii.) the scene before the battle of Ravenna, in which the
+Legate, weeping for joy, was surrounded by the Spanish troops, and
+besought for absolution. See further (<i>ibid.</i>) the statements respecting the
+French in Milan.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_224_224" id="Footnote_224_224"></a><a href="#FNanchor_224_224"><span class="label">[224]</span></a> In the case of the heretics of Poli, in the Campagna, who held the
+doctrine that a genuine Pope must show the poverty of Christ as the mark
+of his calling, we have simply a kind of Waldensian doctrine. Their
+imprisonment under Paul II. is related by Infessura (Eccard, ii. col.
+1893), Platina, p. 317, &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_225_225" id="Footnote_225_225"></a><a href="#FNanchor_225_225"><span class="label">[225]</span></a> As an illustration of this feeling see the poem addressed to the Pope,
+quoted in Gregorovius, vii. 136.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_226_226" id="Footnote_226_226"></a><a href="#FNanchor_226_226"><span class="label">[226]</span></a> <i>Dialogus de Conjuratione Stephani de Porcariis</i>, by his contemporary
+Petrus Godes de Vicenza, quoted and used by Gregorovius, viii.
+130. L. B. Alberti, <i>De Porcaria Conjuratione</i>, in Murat. xxv. col. 309.
+Porcari was desirous ‘omnem pontificiam turbam funditus exstinguere.’
+The author concludes: ‘Video sane, quo stent loco res Italiæ; intelligo
+qui sint, quibus hic perturbata esse omnia conducat....’ He names
+them ‘Extrinsecus impulsores,’ and is of opinion that Porcari will find
+successors in his misdeeds. The dreams of Porcari certainly bore some
+resemblance to those of Cola Rienzi. He also referred to himself the poem
+‘Spirto Gentil,’ addressed by Petrarch to Rienzi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_227_227" id="Footnote_227_227"></a><a href="#FNanchor_227_227"><span class="label">[227]</span></a> ‘Ut Papa tantum vicarius Christi sit et non etiam Cæsaris.... Tunc
+Papa et dicetur et erit pater sanctus, pater omnium, pater ecclesiæ,’ &amp;c.
+Valla’s work was written rather earlier, and was aimed at Eugenius IV.
+See Vahlen, <i>Lor. Valla</i> (Berlin, 1870), pp. 25 sqq., esp. 32. Nicholas V.,
+on the other hand, is praised by Valla, Gregorovius, vii. 136.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_228_228" id="Footnote_228_228"></a><a href="#FNanchor_228_228"><span class="label">[228]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> iv. pp. 208 sqq. Voigt, <i>Enea Silvio</i>, iii. pp. 151 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_229_229" id="Footnote_229_229"></a><a href="#FNanchor_229_229"><span class="label">[229]</span></a> Platina, <i>Vita Pauli II.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_230_230" id="Footnote_230_230"></a><a href="#FNanchor_230_230"><span class="label">[230]</span></a> Battista Mantovano, <i>De Calamitatibus Temporum</i>, l. iii. The
+Arabian sells incense, the Tyrian purple, the Indian ivory: ‘Venalia
+nobis templa, sacerdotes, altaria sacra, coronæ, ignes, thura, preces,
+cælum est venale Deusque.’ <i>Opera</i>, ed. Paris, 1507, fol. 302 <i>b</i>. Then
+follows an exhortation to Pope Sixtus, whose previous efforts are praised,
+to put an end to these evils.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_231_231" id="Footnote_231_231"></a><a href="#FNanchor_231_231"><span class="label">[231]</span></a> See e.g. the <i>Annales Placentini</i>, in Murat. xx. col. 943.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_232_232" id="Footnote_232_232"></a><a href="#FNanchor_232_232"><span class="label">[232]</span></a> Corio, <i>Storia di Milano</i>, fol. 416-420. Pietro had already helped
+at the election of Sixtus. See Infessura, in Eccard, <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. col.
+1895. It is curious that in 1469 it had been prophesied that deliverance
+would come from Savona (home of Sixtus, elected in 1471) within three
+years. See the letter and date in Baluz. <i>Miscell.</i> iii. p. 181. According to
+Macchiavelli, <i>Storie Fiorent.</i> l. vii. the Venetians poisoned the cardinal.
+Certainly they were not without motives to do so.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_233_233" id="Footnote_233_233"></a><a href="#FNanchor_233_233"><span class="label">[233]</span></a> Honorius II. wished, after the death of William I. (1127), to annex
+Apulia, as a feof reverted to St. Peter.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_234_234" id="Footnote_234_234"></a><a href="#FNanchor_234_234"><span class="label">[234]</span></a> Fabroni, <i>Laurentius Mag.</i> Adnot. 130. An informer, Vespucci, sends
+word of both, ‘Hanno in ogni elezione a mettere a sacco questa corte, e
+sono i maggior ribaldi del mondo.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_235_235" id="Footnote_235_235"></a><a href="#FNanchor_235_235"><span class="label">[235]</span></a> Corio, fol. 450. Details, partly from unpublished documents, of these
+acts of bribery in Gregorovius, vii. 310 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_236_236" id="Footnote_236_236"></a><a href="#FNanchor_236_236"><span class="label">[236]</span></a> A most characteristic letter of exhortation by Lorenzo in Fabroni,
+<i>Laurentius Magn.</i> Adnot. 217, and extracts in Ranke, <i>Popes</i>, i. p. 45, and
+in Reumont, <i>Lorenzo</i>, ii. pp. 482 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_237_237" id="Footnote_237_237"></a><a href="#FNanchor_237_237"><span class="label">[237]</span></a> And perhaps of certain Neapolitan feofs, for the sake of which
+Innocent called in the Angevins afresh against the immovable Ferrante.
+The conduct of the Pope in this affair and his participation in the second
+conspiracy of the barons, were equally foolish and dishonest. For his
+method of treating with foreign powers, see above p. 127, note 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_238_238" id="Footnote_238_238"></a><a href="#FNanchor_238_238"><span class="label">[238]</span></a> Comp. in particular Infessura, in Eccard. <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. <i>passim</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_239_239" id="Footnote_239_239"></a><a href="#FNanchor_239_239"><span class="label">[239]</span></a> According to the <i>Dispacci di Antonio Giustiniani</i>, i. p. 60, and iii. p.
+309, Seb. Pinzon was a native of Cremona.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_240_240" id="Footnote_240_240"></a><a href="#FNanchor_240_240"><span class="label">[240]</span></a> Recently by Gregorovius, <i>Lucrezia Borgia</i>, 2 Bände 3 Aufl., Stuttgart,
+1875.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_241_241" id="Footnote_241_241"></a><a href="#FNanchor_241_241"><span class="label">[241]</span></a> Except the Bentivoglio at Bologna, and the House of Este at
+Ferrara. The latter was compelled to form a family relationship, Lucrezia
+marrying Prince Alfonso.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_242_242" id="Footnote_242_242"></a><a href="#FNanchor_242_242"><span class="label">[242]</span></a> According to Corio (fol. 479) Charles had thoughts of a Council, of
+deposing the Pope, and even of carrying him away to France, this
+upon his return from Naples. According to Benedictus, <i>Carolus VIII.</i> (in
+Eccard, <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. col. 1584), Charles, while in Naples, when Pope
+and cardinals refused to recognise his new crown, had certainly entertained
+the thought ‘de Italiæ imperio deque pontificis statu mutando,’ but soon
+after made up his mind to be satisfied with the personal humiliation
+of Alexander. The Pope, nevertheless, escaped him. Particulars in
+Pilorgerie, <i>Campagne et Bulletins de la Grande Armée d’Italie</i>, 1494,
+1495 (Paris, 1866, 8vo.), where the degree of Alexander’s danger at different
+moments is discussed (pp. 111, 117, &amp;c.). In a letter, there printed,
+of the Archbishop of St. Malo to Queen Anne, it is expressly stated:
+‘Si nostre roy eust voulu obtemperer à la plupart des Messeigneurs les
+Cardinaulx, ilz eussent fait ung autre pappe en intention de refformer
+l’église ainsi qu’ilz disaient. Le roy désire bien la reformacion, mais il ne
+veult point entreprandre de sa depposicion.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_243_243" id="Footnote_243_243"></a><a href="#FNanchor_243_243"><span class="label">[243]</span></a> Corio, fol. 450. Malipiero, <i>Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor.</i> vii. i. p. 318.
+The rapacity of the whole family can be seen in Malipiero, among
+other authorities, l. c. p. 565. A ‘nipote’ was splendidly entertained in
+Venice as papal legate, and made an enormous sum of money by selling
+dispensations; his servants, when they went away, stole whatever they
+could lay their hands on, including a piece of embroidered cloth from the
+high altar of a church at Murano.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_244_244" id="Footnote_244_244"></a><a href="#FNanchor_244_244"><span class="label">[244]</span></a> This in Panvinio alone among contemporary historians (Contin.
+Platinæ, p. 339), ‘insidiis Cæsaris fratris interfectus ... connivente ...
+ad scelus patre,’ and to the same effect Jovius, <i>Elog. Vir. Ill.</i> p. 302. The
+profound emotion of Alexander looks like a sign of complicity. After the
+corpse was drawn out of the Tiber, Sannazaro wrote (<i>Opera Omnia Latine
+Scripta</i> 1535, fol. 41 <i>a</i>):
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Piscatorem hominum ne te non, Sixte, putemus<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Piscaris natum retibus, ecce, tuum.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Besides the epigram quoted there are others (fol. 36 <i>b</i>, 42 <i>b</i>, 47 <i>b</i>, 51 <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>&mdash;in
+the last passage 5) in Sannazaro on, i.e. against, Alexander. Among
+them is a famous one, referred to in Gregorovius i. 314, on Lucrezia
+Borgia:
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ergo te semper cupiet Lucretia Sextus?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O fatum diri nominis: hic pater est?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">
+Others execrate his cruelty and celebrate his death as the beginning of an
+era of peace. On the Jubilee (see below, p. 108, note 1), there is another
+epigram, fol. 43 <i>b</i>. There are others no less severe (fol. 34 <i>b</i>, 35 <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, 42 <i>b</i>,
+43 <i>a</i>) against Cæsar Borgia, among which we find in one of the strongest:
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Aut nihil aut Cæsar vult dici Borgia; quidni?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Cum simul et Cæsar possit, et esse nihil.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">
+(made use of by Bandello, iv. nov. 11). On the murder of the Duke of
+Gandia, see especially the admirable collection of the most original sources
+of evidence in Gregorovius, vii. 399-407, according to which Cæsar’s guilt
+is clear, but it seems very doubtful whether Alexander knew, or approved,
+of the intended assassination.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_245_245" id="Footnote_245_245"></a><a href="#FNanchor_245_245"><span class="label">[245]</span></a> Macchiavelli, <i>Opere</i>, ed. Milan, vol. v. pp. 387, 393, 395, in the <i>Legazione
+al Duca Valentino</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_246_246" id="Footnote_246_246"></a><a href="#FNanchor_246_246"><span class="label">[246]</span></a> Tommaso Gar, <i>Relazioni della Corte di Roma</i>, i. p. 12, in the <i>Rel. of
+P. Capello</i>. Literally: ‘The Pope has more respect for Venice than for
+any other power in the world.’ ‘E però desidera, che ella (Signoria di
+Venezia) protegga il figliuolo, e dice voler fare tale ordine, che il papato
+o sia suo, ovvero della signoria nostra.’ The word ‘suo’ can only refer
+to Cæsar. An instance of the uncertainty caused by this usage is found
+in the still lively controversy respecting the words used by Vasari in the
+<i>Vita di Raffaello</i>: ‘A Bindo Altoviti fece il ritratto suo, &amp;c.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_247_247" id="Footnote_247_247"></a><a href="#FNanchor_247_247"><span class="label">[247]</span></a> <i>Strozzii Poetae</i>, p. 19, in the ‘Venatio’ of Ercole Strozza: ’ ... cui
+triplicem fata invidere coronam.’ And in the Elegy on Cæsar’s death,
+p. 31 sqq.: ‘Speraretque olim solii decora alta paterni.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_248_248" id="Footnote_248_248"></a><a href="#FNanchor_248_248"><span class="label">[248]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> Jupiter had once promised
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Affore Alexandri sobolem, quæ poneret olim<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Italiæ leges, atque aurea sæcla referret,’ etc.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_249_249" id="Footnote_249_249"></a><a href="#FNanchor_249_249"><span class="label">[249]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i>
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Sacrumque decus majora parantem deposuisse.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_250_250" id="Footnote_250_250"></a><a href="#FNanchor_250_250"><span class="label">[250]</span></a> He was married, as is well known, to a French princess of the family
+of Albret, and had a daughter by her; in some way or other he would
+have attempted to found a dynasty. It is not known that he took steps
+to regain the cardinal’s hat, although (acc. to Macchiavelli, l. c. p. 285) he
+must have counted on the speedy death of his father.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_251_251" id="Footnote_251_251"></a><a href="#FNanchor_251_251"><span class="label">[251]</span></a> Macchiavelli, l. c. p. 334. Designs on Siena and eventually on all
+Tuscany certainly existed, but were not yet ripe; the consent of France
+was indispensable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_252_252" id="Footnote_252_252"></a><a href="#FNanchor_252_252"><span class="label">[252]</span></a> Macchiavelli, l. c. pp. 326, 351, 414; Matarazzo, <i>Cronaca di Perugia,
+Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. ii. pp. 157 and 221. He wished his soldiers to quarter
+themselves where they pleased, so that they gained more in time of peace
+than of war. Petrus Alcyonius, <i>De Exilio</i> (1522), ed. Mencken, p. 19, says
+of the style of conducting war: ‘Ea scelera et flagitia a nostris militibus
+patrata sunt quæ ne Scythæ quidem aut Turcæ, aut Pœni in Italia commisissent.’
+The same writer (<a href="#page_065">p. 65</a>) blames Alexander as a Spaniard:
+‘Hispani generis hominem, cujus proprium est, rationibus et commodis
+Hispanorum consultum velle, non Italorum.’ See above, p. 109.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_253_253" id="Footnote_253_253"></a><a href="#FNanchor_253_253"><span class="label">[253]</span></a> To this effect Pierio Valeriano, <i>De Infelicitate Literat.</i> ed. Mencken,
+p. 282, in speaking of Giovanni Regio: ‘In arcano proscriptorum albo
+positus.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_254_254" id="Footnote_254_254"></a><a href="#FNanchor_254_254"><span class="label">[254]</span></a> Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 11. From May 22, 1502, onwards the <i>Despatches
+of Giustiniani</i>, 3 vols. Florence, 1876, edited by Pasquale Villari, offer
+valuable information.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_255_255" id="Footnote_255_255"></a><a href="#FNanchor_255_255"><span class="label">[255]</span></a> Paulus Jovius, <i>Elogia</i>, Cæsar Borgia. In the <i>Commentarii Urbani</i> of
+Ralph. Volaterianus, lib. xxii. there is a description of Alexander VI.,
+composed under Julius II., and still written very guardedly. We here
+read: ‘Roma ... nobilis jam carneficina facta erat.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_256_256" id="Footnote_256_256"></a><a href="#FNanchor_256_256"><span class="label">[256]</span></a> <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 362.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_257_257" id="Footnote_257_257"></a><a href="#FNanchor_257_257"><span class="label">[257]</span></a> Paul. Jovius, <i>Histor.</i> ii. fol. 47.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_258_258" id="Footnote_258_258"></a><a href="#FNanchor_258_258"><span class="label">[258]</span></a> See the passages in Ranke, <i>Röm. Päpste</i>; Sämmtl. Werke, Bd. xxxvii.
+35, and xxxix. Anh. Abschn. 1, Nro. 4, and Gregorovius, vii. 497, sqq.
+Giustiniani does not believe in the Pope’s being poisoned. See his <i>Dispacci</i>,
+vol. ii. pp. 107 sqq.; Villari’s Note, pp. 120 sqq., and App. pp.
+458 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_259_259" id="Footnote_259_259"></a><a href="#FNanchor_259_259"><span class="label">[259]</span></a> Panvinius, <i>Epitome Pontificum</i>, p. 359. For the attempt to poison
+Alexander’s successor, Julius II., see p. 363. According to Sismondi, xiii.
+p. 246, it was in this way that Lopez, Cardinal of Capua, for years the
+partner of all the Pope’s secrets, came by his end; according to Sanuto
+(in Ranke, <i>Popes</i>, i. p. 52, note), the Cardinal of Verona also. When
+Cardinal Orsini died, the Pope obtained a certificate of natural death from
+a college of physicians.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_260_260" id="Footnote_260_260"></a><a href="#FNanchor_260_260"><span class="label">[260]</span></a> Prato, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. p. 254; comp. Attilio Alessio, in Baluz. <i>Miscell.</i>,
+iv. p. 518 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_261_261" id="Footnote_261_261"></a><a href="#FNanchor_261_261"><span class="label">[261]</span></a> And turned to the most profitable account by the Pope. Comp.
+<i>Chron. Venetum</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 133, given only as a report: ‘E si
+giudiceva, che il Pontefice dovesse cavare assai danari di questo Giubileo,
+che gli tornerà molto a proposito.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_262_262" id="Footnote_262_262"></a><a href="#FNanchor_262_262"><span class="label">[262]</span></a> Anshelm, <i>Berner Chronik</i>, iii. pp. 146-156. Trithem. <i>Annales
+Hirsaug.</i> tom. ii. pp. 579, 584, 586.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_263_263" id="Footnote_263_263"></a><a href="#FNanchor_263_263"><span class="label">[263]</span></a> Panvin. <i>Contin. Platinae</i>, p. 341.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_264_264" id="Footnote_264_264"></a><a href="#FNanchor_264_264"><span class="label">[264]</span></a> Hence the splendour of the tombs of the prelates erected during their
+lifetime. A part of the plunder was in this way saved from the hands of
+the Popes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_265_265" id="Footnote_265_265"></a><a href="#FNanchor_265_265"><span class="label">[265]</span></a> Whether Julius really hoped that Ferdinand the Catholic would be
+induced to restore to the throne of Naples the expelled Aragonese dynasty,
+remains, in spite of Giovio’s declaration (<i>Vita Alfonsi Ducis</i>), very
+doubtful.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_266_266" id="Footnote_266_266"></a><a href="#FNanchor_266_266"><span class="label">[266]</span></a> Both poems in Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, iv. 257 and 297. Of his
+death the <i>Cronaca di Cremona</i> says: ‘quale fu grande danno per la Italia,
+perchè era homo che non voleva tramontani in Italia, ed haveva cazato
+Francesi, e l’animo era de cazar le altri.’ <i>Bibl. Hist. Ital.</i> (1876) i. 217. It
+is true that when Julius, in August, 1511, lay one day for hours in a
+fainting fit, and was thought to be dead, the more restless members of the
+noblest families&mdash;Pompeo Colonna and Antimo Savelli&mdash;ventured to call
+‘the people’ to the Capitol, and to urge them to throw off the Papal yoke&mdash;‘a
+vendicarsi in libertà ... a publica ribellione,’ as Guicciardini tells
+us in his tenth book. See, too, Paul. Jov. in the <i>Vita Pompeji Columnae</i>,
+and Gregorovius, viii. 71-75.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_267_267" id="Footnote_267_267"></a><a href="#FNanchor_267_267"><span class="label">[267]</span></a> <i>Septimo decretal.</i> l. i. tit. 3, cap. 1-3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_268_268" id="Footnote_268_268"></a><a href="#FNanchor_268_268"><span class="label">[268]</span></a> Franc. Vettori, in the <i>Arch. Stor.</i> vi. 297.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_269_269" id="Footnote_269_269"></a><a href="#FNanchor_269_269"><span class="label">[269]</span></a> Besides which it is said (Paul. Lang. <i>Chronicon Cilicense</i>) to have
+produced not less than 500,000 gold florins; the order of the Franciscans
+alone, whose general was made a cardinal, paid 30,000. For a notice of
+the various sums paid, see Sanuto, xxiv. fol. 227; for the whole subject see
+Gregorovius, viii. 214 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_270_270" id="Footnote_270_270"></a><a href="#FNanchor_270_270"><span class="label">[270]</span></a> Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 301. <i>Arch. Stor.</i> Append. i. p. 293 sqq. Roscoe,
+<i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, vi. p. 232 sqq. Tommaso Gar, l. c. p. 42.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_271_271" id="Footnote_271_271"></a><a href="#FNanchor_271_271"><span class="label">[271]</span></a> Ariosto, Sat. vi. v. 106. ‘Tutti morrete, ed è fatal che muoja Leone
+appresso.’ Sat. 3 and 7 ridicule the hangers on at Leo’s Court.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_272_272" id="Footnote_272_272"></a><a href="#FNanchor_272_272"><span class="label">[272]</span></a> One of several instances of such combinations is given in the <i>Lettere
+dei Principi</i>, i. 65, in a despatch of the Cardinal Bibbiena from Paris of
+the year 1518.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_273_273" id="Footnote_273_273"></a><a href="#FNanchor_273_273"><span class="label">[273]</span></a> Franc. Vettori, l.c. p. 333.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_274_274" id="Footnote_274_274"></a><a href="#FNanchor_274_274"><span class="label">[274]</span></a> At the time of the Lateran Council, in 1512, Pico wrote an address:
+<i>J. E. P. Oratio ad Leonem X. et Concilium Lateranense de Reformandis
+Ecclesiæ Moribus</i> (ed. Hagenau, 1512, frequently printed in editions of
+his works). The address was dedicated to Pirckheimer and was again
+sent to him in 1517. Comp. <i>Vir. Doct. Epist. ad Pirck.</i>, ed. Freytag,
+Leipz. 1838, p. 8. Pico fears that under Leo evil may definitely triumph
+over good, ‘et in te bellum a nostræ religionis hostibus ante audias geri
+quam pariri.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_275_275" id="Footnote_275_275"></a><a href="#FNanchor_275_275"><span class="label">[275]</span></a> <i>Lettere dei Principi</i>, i. (Rome. 17th March, 1523): ‘This city stands
+on a needle’s point, and God grant that we are not soon driven to Avignon
+or to the end of the Ocean. I foresee the early fall of this spiritual monarchy....
+Unless God helps us we are lost.’ Whether Adrian were
+really poisoned or not, cannot be gathered with certainty from Blas Ortiz,
+<i>Itinerar. Hadriani</i> (Baluz. <i>Miscell.</i> ed. Mansi, i. p. 386 sqq.); the worst of
+it was that everybody believed it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_276_276" id="Footnote_276_276"></a><a href="#FNanchor_276_276"><span class="label">[276]</span></a> Negro, l.c. on Oct. 24 (should be Sept.) and Nov. 9, 1526, April 11, 1527.
+It is true that he found admirers and flatterers. The dialogue of Petrus
+Alcyonus ‘De Exilio’ was written in his praise, shortly before he became
+Pope.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_277_277" id="Footnote_277_277"></a><a href="#FNanchor_277_277"><span class="label">[277]</span></a> Varchi, <i>Stor. Fiorent.</i> i. 43, 46 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_278_278" id="Footnote_278_278"></a><a href="#FNanchor_278_278"><span class="label">[278]</span></a> Paul. Jov., <i>Vita Pomp. Columnae</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_279_279" id="Footnote_279_279"></a><a href="#FNanchor_279_279"><span class="label">[279]</span></a> Ranke, <i>Deutsche Geschichte</i> (4 Aufl.) ii. 262 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_280_280" id="Footnote_280_280"></a><a href="#FNanchor_280_280"><span class="label">[280]</span></a> Varchi, <i>Stor. Fiorent.</i> ii. 43 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_281_281" id="Footnote_281_281"></a><a href="#FNanchor_281_281"><span class="label">[281]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> and Ranke, <i>Deutsche Gesch.</i> ii. 278, note, and iii. 6 sqq. It was
+thought that Charles would transfer his seat of government to Rome.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_282_282" id="Footnote_282_282"></a><a href="#FNanchor_282_282"><span class="label">[282]</span></a> See his letter to the Pope, dated Carpentras, Sept. 1, 1527, in the
+<i>Anecdota litt.</i> iv. p. 335.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_283_283" id="Footnote_283_283"></a><a href="#FNanchor_283_283"><span class="label">[283]</span></a> <i>Lettere dei Principi</i>, i. 72. Castiglione to the Pope, Burgos, Dec. 10,
+1527.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_284_284" id="Footnote_284_284"></a><a href="#FNanchor_284_284"><span class="label">[284]</span></a> Tommaso Gar, <i>Relaz. della Corte di Roma</i>, i. 299.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_285_285" id="Footnote_285_285"></a><a href="#FNanchor_285_285"><span class="label">[285]</span></a> The Farnese succeeded in something of the kind, the Caraffa were
+ruined.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_286_286" id="Footnote_286_286"></a><a href="#FNanchor_286_286"><span class="label">[286]</span></a> Petrarca, <i>Epist. Fam.</i> i. 3. p. 574, when he thanks God that he was
+born an Italian. And again in the <i>Apologia contra cujusdam anonymi
+Galli Calumnias</i> of the year 1367 (<i>Opp.</i> ed. Bas. 1581) p. 1068 sqq. See
+L. Geiger, <i>Petrarca</i>, 129-145.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_287_287" id="Footnote_287_287"></a><a href="#FNanchor_287_287"><span class="label">[287]</span></a> Particularly those in vol. i. of Schardius, <i>Scriptores rerum Germanicarum</i>,
+Basel, 1574. For an earlier period, Felix Faber, <i>Historia Suevorum</i>,
+libri duo (in Goldast, <i>Script. rer. Suev.</i> 1605); for a later, Irenicus,
+<i>Exegesis Germaniæ</i>, Hagenau, 1518. On the latter work and the patriotic
+histories of that time, see various studies of A. Horawitz, <i>Hist. Zeitschrift</i>,
+bd. xxxiii. 118, anm. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_288_288" id="Footnote_288_288"></a><a href="#FNanchor_288_288"><span class="label">[288]</span></a> One instance out of many: <i>The Answers of the Doge of Venice to a
+Florentine Agent respecting Pisa</i>, 1496, in Malipiero, <i>Ann. Veneti. Arch.
+Stor.</i> vii. i. p. 427.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_289_289" id="Footnote_289_289"></a><a href="#FNanchor_289_289"><span class="label">[289]</span></a> Observe the expressions ‘uomo singolare’ and ‘uomo unico’ for the
+higher and highest stages of individual development.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_290_290" id="Footnote_290_290"></a><a href="#FNanchor_290_290"><span class="label">[290]</span></a> By the year 1390 there was no longer any prevailing fashion of dress
+for men at Florence, each preferring to clothe himself in his own way.
+See the <i>Canzone</i> of Franco Sacchetti: ‘Contro alle nuove foggie’ in the
+<i>Rime</i>, publ. dal Poggiali, p. 52.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_291_291" id="Footnote_291_291"></a><a href="#FNanchor_291_291"><span class="label">[291]</span></a> At the close of the sixteenth century Montaigne draws the following
+parallel (<i>Essais</i>, l. iii. chap. 5, vol. iii. p. 367 of the Paris ed. 1816): ‘Ils
+(les Italiens) ont plus communement des belles femmes et moins de laides
+que nous; mais des rares et excellentes beautés j’estime que nous allons
+à pair. Et j’en juge autant des esprits; de ceux de la commune façon, ils
+en ont beaucoup plus et evidemment; la brutalité y est sans comparaison
+plus rare; d’ames singulières et du plus hault estage, nous ne leur en
+debvons rien.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_292_292" id="Footnote_292_292"></a><a href="#FNanchor_292_292"><span class="label">[292]</span></a> And also of their wives, as is seen in the family of Sforza and among
+other North Italian rulers. Comp. in the work of Jacobus Phil. Bergomensis,
+<i>De Plurimis Claris Selectisque Mulieribus</i>, Ferrara, 1497, the
+lives of Battista Malatesta, Paola Gonzaga, Bona Lombarda, Riccarda of
+Este, and the chief women of the House of Sforza, Beatrice and others.
+Among them are more than one genuine virago, and in several cases
+natural gifts are supplemented by great humanistic culture. (See below,
+chap. 3 and part v.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_293_293" id="Footnote_293_293"></a><a href="#FNanchor_293_293"><span class="label">[293]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, in his ‘Capitolo’ (<i>Rime</i>, publ. dal Poggiali, p. 56),
+enumerates about 1390 the names of over a hundred distinguished people
+in the ruling parties who had died within his memory. However many
+mediocrities there may have been among them, the list is still remarkable
+as evidence of the awakening of individuality. On the ‘Vite’ of Filippo
+Villani, see below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_294_294" id="Footnote_294_294"></a><a href="#FNanchor_294_294"><span class="label">[294]</span></a> <i>Trattato del Governo della Famiglia</i> forms a part of the work:
+<i>La Cura della Famiglia</i> (<i>Opere Volg. di Leon Batt. Alberti</i>, publ. da
+Anicio Bonucci, Flor. 1844, vol. ii.). See there vol. i. pp. xxx.-xl., vol. ii.
+pp. xxxv. sqq. and vol. v. pp. 1-127. Formerly the work was generally, as
+in the text, attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446; see on him <i>Vesp.
+Fiorent.</i>, pp. 291 and 379); the recent investigations of Fr. Palermo
+(Florence 1871), have shown Alberti to be the author. The work is
+quoted from the ed. Torino, Pomba, 1828.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_295_295" id="Footnote_295_295"></a><a href="#FNanchor_295_295"><span class="label">[295]</span></a> Trattato, p. 65 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_296_296" id="Footnote_296_296"></a><a href="#FNanchor_296_296"><span class="label">[296]</span></a> Jov. Pontanus, <i>De Fortitudine</i>, l. ii. cap. 4, ‘De tolerando Exilio,’
+Seventy years later, Cardanus (<i>De Vitâ Propriâ</i>, cap. 32) could ask
+bitterly: ‘Quid est patria nisi consensus tyrannorum minutorum ad
+opprimendos imbelles timidos et qui plerumque sunt innoxii?’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_297_297" id="Footnote_297_297"></a><a href="#FNanchor_297_297"><span class="label">[297]</span></a> <i>De Vulgari Eloquio</i>, lib. i. cap. 6. On the ideal Italian language, cap.
+17. The spiritual unity of cultivated men, cap. 18. On home-sickness,
+comp. the famous passages, <i>Purg.</i> viii. 1 sqq., and <i>Parad.</i> xxv. 1 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_298_298" id="Footnote_298_298"></a><a href="#FNanchor_298_298"><span class="label">[298]</span></a> <i>Dantis Alligherii Epistolae</i>, ed. Carolus Witte, p. 65.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_299_299" id="Footnote_299_299"></a><a href="#FNanchor_299_299"><span class="label">[299]</span></a> Ghiberti, <i>Secondo Commentario</i>, cap. xv. (Vasari ed Lemonnier, i. p.
+xxix.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_300_300" id="Footnote_300_300"></a><a href="#FNanchor_300_300"><span class="label">[300]</span></a> <i>Codri Urcei Vita</i>, at the end of his works, first pub. Bologna 1502.
+This certainly comes near the old saying: ‘ubi bene, ibi patria.’ C. U.
+was not called after the place of his birth, but after Forli, where he lived
+long; see Malagola, <i>Codro Urceo</i>, Bologna, 1877, cap. v. and app. xi.
+The abundance of neutral intellectual pleasure, which is independent of
+local circumstances, and of which the educated Italians became more and
+more capable, rendered exile more tolerable to them. Cosmopolitanism is
+further a sign of an epoch in which new worlds are discovered, and men
+feel no longer at home in the old. We see it among the Greeks after the
+Peloponnesian war; Plato, as Niebuhr says, was not a good citizen, and
+Xenophon was a bad one; Diogenes went so far as to proclaim homelessness
+a pleasure, and calls himself, Laertius tells us, <span title="Greek: apolis">ἁπολις</span>. Here another
+remarkable work may be mentioned. Petrus Alcyonius in his book:
+<i>Medices Legatus de Exilio lib. duo</i>, Ven. 1522 (printed in Mencken,
+<i>Analecta de Calam. Literatorum</i>, Leipzig, 1707, pp. 1-250) devotes to the
+subject of exile a long and prolix discussion. He tries logically and
+historically to refute the three reasons for which banishment is held to
+be an evil, viz. 1. Because the exile must live away from his fatherland.
+2. Because he loses the honours given him at home. 3. Because he must
+do without his friends and relatives; and comes finally to the conclusion
+that banishment is not an evil. His dissertation culminates in the words,
+‘Sapientissimus quisque omnem orbem terrarum unam urbem esse ducit.
+Atque etiam illam veram sibi esse patriam arbitratur quæ se perigrinantem
+exciperit, quæ pudorem, probitatem, virtutem colit, quæ optima studia,
+liberales disciplinas amplectitur, quæ etiam facit ut peregrini omnes honesto
+otio teneant statum et famam dignitatis suæ.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_301_301" id="Footnote_301_301"></a><a href="#FNanchor_301_301"><span class="label">[301]</span></a> This awakening of personality is also shown in the great stress laid
+on the independent growth of character, in the claim to shape the spiritual
+life for oneself, apart from parents and ancestors. Boccaccio (<i>De Cas.
+Vir. Ill.</i> Paris, s. a. fol. xxix. <i>b</i>) points out that Socrates came of uneducated,
+Euripides and Demosthenes of unknown, parents, and exclaims: ‘Quasi
+animos a gignentibus habeamus!’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_302_302" id="Footnote_302_302"></a><a href="#FNanchor_302_302"><span class="label">[302]</span></a> Boccaccio, <i>Vita di Dante</i>, p. 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_303_303" id="Footnote_303_303"></a><a href="#FNanchor_303_303"><span class="label">[303]</span></a> The angels which he drew on tablets at the anniversary of the death
+of Beatrice (<i>Vita Nuova</i>, p. 61) may have been more than the work of a
+dilettante. Lion. Aretino says he drew ‘egregiamente,’ and was a great
+lover of music.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_304_304" id="Footnote_304_304"></a><a href="#FNanchor_304_304"><span class="label">[304]</span></a> For this and what follows, see esp. <i>Vespasiano Fiorentino</i>, an authority
+of the first order for Florentine culture in the fifteenth century
+Comp. pp. 359, 379, 401, etc. See, also, the charming and instructive <i>Vita
+Jannoctii Manetti</i> (b. 1396), by Naldus Naldius, in Murat. xx. pp. 529-608.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_305_305" id="Footnote_305_305"></a><a href="#FNanchor_305_305"><span class="label">[305]</span></a> What follows is taken, e.g., from Perticari’s account of Pandolfo
+Collenuccio, in Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi iii. pp. 197 sqq., and from the
+<i>Opere del Conte Perticari</i>, Mil. 1823, vol. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_306_306" id="Footnote_306_306"></a><a href="#FNanchor_306_306"><span class="label">[306]</span></a> For what follows compare Burckhardt, <i>Geschichte der Renaissance in
+Italien</i>, Stuttg. 1868, esp. p. 41 sqq., and A. Springer, <i>Abhandlungen zur
+neueren Kunstgeschichte</i>, Bonn, 1867, pp. 69-102. A new biography of
+Alberti is in course of preparation by Hub. Janitschek.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_307_307" id="Footnote_307_307"></a><a href="#FNanchor_307_307"><span class="label">[307]</span></a> In Murat. xxv. col. 295 sqq., with the Italian translation in the <i>Opere
+Volgari di L. B. Alberti</i>, vol. i. pp. lxxxix-cix, where the conjecture is
+made and shown to be probable that this ‘Vita’ is by Alberti himself.
+See, further, Vasari, iv. 52 sqq. Mariano Socini, if we can believe what
+we read of him in Æn. Sylvius (<i>Opera</i>, p. 622, <i>Epist.</i> 112) was a universal
+dilettante, and at the same time a master in several subjects.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_308_308" id="Footnote_308_308"></a><a href="#FNanchor_308_308"><span class="label">[308]</span></a> Similar attempts, especially an attempt at a flying-machine, had been
+made about 880 by the Andalusian Abul Abbas Kasim ibn Firnas. Comp.
+Gyangos, <i>The History of the Muhammedan Dynasties in Spain</i> (London,
+1840), i. 148 sqq. and 425-7; extracts in Hammer, <i>Literaturgesch. der
+Araber</i>, i. Introd. p. li.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_309_309" id="Footnote_309_309"></a><a href="#FNanchor_309_309"><span class="label">[309]</span></a> Quidquid ingenio esset hominum cum quadam effectum elegantia, id
+prope divinum ducebat.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_310_310" id="Footnote_310_310"></a><a href="#FNanchor_310_310"><span class="label">[310]</span></a> This is the book (comp. p. 185, note 2) of which one part, often printed
+alone, long passed for a work of Pandolfini.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_311_311" id="Footnote_311_311"></a><a href="#FNanchor_311_311"><span class="label">[311]</span></a> In his work, <i>De Re Ædificatoria</i>, l. viii. cap. i., there is a definition
+of a beautiful road: ‘Si modo mare, modo montes, modo lacum fluentem
+fontesve, modo aridam rupem aut planitiem, modo nemus vallemque
+exhibebit.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_312_312" id="Footnote_312_312"></a><a href="#FNanchor_312_312"><span class="label">[312]</span></a> One writer among many: Blondus, <i>Roma Triumphans</i>, l. v. pp. 117
+sqq., where the definitions of glory are collected from the ancients, and
+the desire of it is expressly allowed to the Christian. Cicero’s work, <i>De
+Gloria</i>, which Petrarch claimed to own, was stolen from him by his
+teacher Convenevole, and has never since been seen. Alberti, in a youthful
+composition when he was only twenty years of age, praises the desire
+of fame. <i>Opere</i>, vol. i. pp. cxxvii-clxvi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_313_313" id="Footnote_313_313"></a><a href="#FNanchor_313_313"><span class="label">[313]</span></a> <i>Paradiso</i>, xxv. at the beginning: ‘Se mai continga,’ &amp;c. See above,
+p. 133, note 2. Comp. Boccaccio, <i>Vita di Dante</i>, p. 49. ‘Vaghissimo fu e
+d’onore e di pompa, e per avventura più che alla sua inclita virtù non si
+sarebbe richiesto.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_314_314" id="Footnote_314_314"></a><a href="#FNanchor_314_314"><span class="label">[314]</span></a> <i>De Vulgari Eloquio</i>, l. i. cap. i. and esp. <i>De Monarchia</i>, l. i. cap. i.,
+where he wishes to set forth the idea of monarchy not only in order to be
+useful to the world but also ‘ut palmam tanti bravii primus in meam gloriam
+adipiscar.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_315_315" id="Footnote_315_315"></a><a href="#FNanchor_315_315"><span class="label">[315]</span></a> <i>Convito</i>, ed. Venezia, 1529, fol. 5 and 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_316_316" id="Footnote_316_316"></a><a href="#FNanchor_316_316"><span class="label">[316]</span></a> <i>Paradiso</i>, vi. 112 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_317_317" id="Footnote_317_317"></a><a href="#FNanchor_317_317"><span class="label">[317]</span></a> E.g. <i>Inferno</i>, vi. 89; xiii. 53; xvi. 85; xxxi. 127.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_318_318" id="Footnote_318_318"></a><a href="#FNanchor_318_318"><span class="label">[318]</span></a> <i>Purgatorio</i>, v. 70, 87, 133; vi. 26; viii. 71; xi. 31; xiii. 147.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_319_319" id="Footnote_319_319"></a><a href="#FNanchor_319_319"><span class="label">[319]</span></a> <i>Purgatorio</i>, xi. 85-117. Besides ‘gloria’ we here find close together
+‘grido, fama, rumore, nominanza, onore’ all different names for the same
+thing. Boccaccio wrote, as he admits in his letter to Joh. Pizinga (<i>Op.
+Volg.</i> xvi. 30 sqq.) ‘perpetuandi nominis desiderio’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_320_320" id="Footnote_320_320"></a><a href="#FNanchor_320_320"><span class="label">[320]</span></a> Scardeonius, <i>De Urb. Patav. Antiqu.</i> (Græv. <i>Thesaur.</i> vi. iii. col. 260).
+Whether ‘cereis’ or ‘certis muneribus’ should be the reading, cannot be
+said. The somewhat solemn nature of Mussatus can be recognised in the
+tone of his history of Henry VII.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_321_321" id="Footnote_321_321"></a><a href="#FNanchor_321_321"><span class="label">[321]</span></a> Franc. Petrarca, <i>Posteritati</i>, or <i>Ad Posteros</i>, at the beginning of the
+editions of his works, or the only letter of Book xviii. of the <i>Epp. Seniles</i>;
+also in Fracassetti, <i>Petr. Epistolæ Familiares</i>, 1859, i. 1-11. Some modern
+critics of Petrarch’s vanity would hardly have shown as much kindness
+and frankness had they been in his place.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_322_322" id="Footnote_322_322"></a><a href="#FNanchor_322_322"><span class="label">[322]</span></a> <i>Opera</i>, ed. 1581, p. 177: ‘De celebritate nominis importuna.’ Fame
+among the mass of people was specially offensive to him. <i>Epp. Fam.</i> i.
+337, 340. In Petrarch, as in many humanists of the older generation, we
+can observe the conflict between the desire for glory and the claims of
+Christian humility.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_323_323" id="Footnote_323_323"></a><a href="#FNanchor_323_323"><span class="label">[323]</span></a> ‘De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ’ in the editions of the works. Often
+printed separately, e.g. Bern, 1600. Compare Petrarch’s famous dialogue,
+‘De Contemptu Mundi’ or ‘De Conflictu Curarum Suarum,’ in which
+the interlocutor Augustinus blames the love of fame as a damnable fault.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_324_324" id="Footnote_324_324"></a><a href="#FNanchor_324_324"><span class="label">[324]</span></a> <i>Epp. Fam.</i> lib. xviii. (ed. Fracassetti) 2. A measure of Petrarch’s
+fame is given a hundred years later by the assertion of Blondus (<i>Italia
+Illustrata</i>, p. 416) that hardly even a learned man would know anything
+of Robert the Good if Petrarch had not spoken of him so often and so
+kindly.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_325_325" id="Footnote_325_325"></a><a href="#FNanchor_325_325"><span class="label">[325]</span></a> It is to be noted that even Charles IV., perhaps influenced by Petrarch,
+speaks in a letter to the historian Marignola of fame as the object of every
+striving man. H. Friedjung, <i>Kaiser Karl IV. und sein Antheil am
+geistigen Leben seiner Zeit</i>, Vienna, 1876, p. 221.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_326_326" id="Footnote_326_326"></a><a href="#FNanchor_326_326"><span class="label">[326]</span></a> <i>Epist. Seniles</i>, xiii. 3, to Giovanni Aretino, Sept. 9, 1370.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_327_327" id="Footnote_327_327"></a><a href="#FNanchor_327_327"><span class="label">[327]</span></a> Filippo Villani, <i>Vite</i>, p. 19</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_328_328" id="Footnote_328_328"></a><a href="#FNanchor_328_328"><span class="label">[328]</span></a> Both together in the epitaph on Boccaccio: ‘Nacqui in Firenze al
+Pozzo Toscanelli; Di fuor sepolto a Certaldo giaccio,’ &amp;c. Comp. <i>Op.
+Volg. di Boccaccio</i>, xvi. 44.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_329_329" id="Footnote_329_329"></a><a href="#FNanchor_329_329"><span class="label">[329]</span></a> Mich. Savonarola, <i>De Laudibus Patavii</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1157.
+Arquà remained from thenceforth the object of special veneration (comp.
+Ettore Conte Macola, <i>I Codici di Arquà</i>, Padua, 1874), and was the scene
+of great solemnities at the fifth centenary of Petrarch’s death. His dwelling
+is said to have been lately given to the city of Padua by the last
+owner, Cardinal Silvestri.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_330_330" id="Footnote_330_330"></a><a href="#FNanchor_330_330"><span class="label">[330]</span></a> The decree of 1396 and its grounds in Gaye, <i>Carteggio</i>, i. 123.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_331_331" id="Footnote_331_331"></a><a href="#FNanchor_331_331"><span class="label">[331]</span></a> Reumont, <i>Lorenzo de’ Medici</i>, ii. 180.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_332_332" id="Footnote_332_332"></a><a href="#FNanchor_332_332"><span class="label">[332]</span></a> Boccaccio, <i>Vita di Dante</i>, p. 39.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_333_333" id="Footnote_333_333"></a><a href="#FNanchor_333_333"><span class="label">[333]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, nov. 121.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_334_334" id="Footnote_334_334"></a><a href="#FNanchor_334_334"><span class="label">[334]</span></a> The former in the well-known sarcophagus near San Lorenzo, the
+latter over a door in the Palazzo della Ragione. For details as to their
+discovery in 1413, see Misson, <i>Voyage en Italie</i>, vol. i., and Michele
+Savonarola, col. 1157.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_335_335" id="Footnote_335_335"></a><a href="#FNanchor_335_335"><span class="label">[335]</span></a> <i>Vita di Dante</i>, l. c. How came the body of Cassius from Philippi
+back to Parma?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_336_336" id="Footnote_336_336"></a><a href="#FNanchor_336_336"><span class="label">[336]</span></a> ‘Nobilitatis fastu’ and ‘sub obtentu religionis,’ says Pius II. (<i>Comment.</i>
+x. p. 473). The new sort of fame must have been inconvenient to
+those who were accustomed to the old.
+</p><p>
+That Carlo Malatesta caused the statue of Virgil to be pulled down and
+thrown into the Mincio, and this, as he alleged, from anger at the veneration
+paid to it by the people of Mantua, is a well-authenticated fact,
+specially attested by an invective written in 1397 by P. P. Vergerio against
+C. M., <i>De dirutâ Statuâ Virgilii P. P. V. eloquentissimi Oratoris Epistola
+ex Tugurio Blondi sub Apolline</i>, ed. by Marco Mantova Benavides (publ.
+certainly before 1560 at Padua). From this work it is clear that till then
+the statue had not been set up again. Did this happen in consequence of
+the invective? Bartholomæus Facius (<i>De Vir. Ill.</i> p. 9 sqq. in the Life of
+P. P. V. 1456) says it did, ‘Carolum Malatestam invectus Virgilii statua,
+quam ille Mantuæ in foro everterat, quoniam gentilis fuerat, ut ibidem
+restitueretur, effecit;’ but his evidence stands alone. It is true that, so
+far as we know, there are no contemporary chronicles for the history of
+Mantua at that period (Platina, <i>Hist. Mant.</i> in Murat. xx. contains
+nothing about the matter), but later historians are agreed that the statue
+was not restored. See for evidence, Prendilacqua, <i>Vita di Vitt. da Feltre</i>,
+written soon after 1446 (ed. 1871, p. 78), where the destruction but not the
+restoration of the statue is spoken of, and the work of Ant. Possevini,
+jun. (<i>Gonzaga</i>, Mantua, 1628), where, p. 486, the pulling down of the
+statue, the murmurings and violent opposition of the people, and the
+promise given in consequence by the prince that he <i>would</i> restore it, are
+all mentioned, with the addition: ‘Nec tamen restitutus est Virgilius.’
+Further, on March 17, 1499, Jacopo d’Hatry writes to Isabella of Este, that
+he has spoken with Pontano about a plan of the princess to raise a statue
+to Virgil at Mantua, and that Pontano cried out with delight that Vergerio,
+if he were alive, would be even more pleased ‘che non se attristò
+quando el Conte Carola Malatesta persuase abuttare la statua di Virgilio
+nel flume.’ The writer then goes on to speak of the manner of setting it
+up, of the inscription ‘P. Virgilius Mantuanus’ and ‘Isabella Marchionissa
+Mantuæ restituit,’ and suggests that Andrea Mantegna would
+be the right man to be charged with the work. Mantegna did in fact
+make the drawings for it. (The drawing and the letter in question are
+given in Baschet, <i>Recherches de documents d’art et d’histoire dans les
+Archives de Mantoue; documents inédits concernant la personne et les
+œuvres d’Andrea Mantegna</i>, in the <i>Gazette des Beaux-Arts</i>, xx. (1866)
+478-492, esp. 486 sqq.) It is clear from this letter that Carlo Malatesta did
+not have the statue restored. In Comparetti’s work on Virgil in the
+Middle Ages, the story is told after Burckhardt, but without authorities.
+Dr. Geiger, on the authority of Professor Paul of Berlin, distinguishes
+between C. Cassius Longinus and Cassius Parmensis, the poet, both among
+the assassins of Cæsar.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_337_337" id="Footnote_337_337"></a><a href="#FNanchor_337_337"><span class="label">[337]</span></a> Comp. Keyssler’s <i>Neueste Reisen</i>, p. 1016.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_338_338" id="Footnote_338_338"></a><a href="#FNanchor_338_338"><span class="label">[338]</span></a> The elder was notoriously a native of Verona.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_339_339" id="Footnote_339_339"></a><a href="#FNanchor_339_339"><span class="label">[339]</span></a> This is the tone of the remarkable work, <i>De Laudibus Papiæ</i>, in
+Murat. xx., dating from the fourteenth century&mdash;much municipal pride,
+but no idea of personal fame.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_340_340" id="Footnote_340_340"></a><a href="#FNanchor_340_340"><span class="label">[340]</span></a> <i>De Laudibus Patavii</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1138 sqq. Only three cities,
+in his opinion&mdash;could be compared with Padua&mdash;Florence, Venice and
+Rome.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_341_341" id="Footnote_341_341"></a><a href="#FNanchor_341_341"><span class="label">[341]</span></a> ‘Nam et veteres nostri tales aut divos aut æternâ memoriâ dignos
+non immerito prædicabant, quum virtus summa sanctitatis sit consocia
+et pari ematur pretio.’ What follows is most characteristic: ‘Hos itaque
+meo facili judicio æternos facio.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_342_342" id="Footnote_342_342"></a><a href="#FNanchor_342_342"><span class="label">[342]</span></a> Similar ideas occur in many contemporary writers. Codrus Urceus,
+<i>Sermo</i> xiii. (<i>Opp.</i> 1506, fol. xxxviii. <i>b</i>), speaking of Galeazzo Bentivoglio,
+who was both a scholar and a warrior, ‘Cognoscens artem militarem esse
+quidem excellentem, sed literas multo certe excellentiores.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_343_343" id="Footnote_343_343"></a><a href="#FNanchor_343_343"><span class="label">[343]</span></a> What follows immediately is not, as the editor remarks (Murat. xxiv
+col. 1059, note), from the pen of Mich. Savonarola.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_344_344" id="Footnote_344_344"></a><a href="#FNanchor_344_344"><span class="label">[344]</span></a> Petrarch, in the ‘Triumph’ here quoted, only dwells on characters of
+antiquity, and in his collection, <i>De Rebus Memorandis</i>, has little to say of
+contemporaries. In the <i>Casus Virorum Illustrium</i> of Boccaccio (among
+the men a number of women, besides Philippa Catinensis treated of at the
+end, are included, and even the goddess Juno is described), only the close
+of the eighth book and the last book&mdash;the ninth&mdash;deal with non-classical
+times. Boccaccio’s remarkable work, <i>De Claris Mulieribus</i>, treats also
+almost exclusively of antiquity. It begins with Eve, speaks then of ninety-seven
+women of antiquity, and seven of the Middle ages, beginning with
+Pope Joan and ending with Queen Johanna of Naples. And so at a much
+later time in the <i>Commentarii Urbani</i> of Ralph. Volaterranus. In the work
+<i>De Claris Mulieribus</i> of the Augustinian Jacobus Bergomensis (printed
+1497, but probably published earlier) antiquity and legend hold the chief
+place, but there are still some valuable biographies of Italian women.
+There are one or two lives of contemporary women by Vespasiano da
+Bisticci (<i>Arch. Stor. Ital.</i> iv. i. pp. 430 sqq.). In Scardeonius (<i>De Urb.
+Patav. Antiqu. Græv. Thesaur.</i> vi. iii. col. 405 sqq.,) only famous Paduan
+women are mentioned. First comes a legend or tradition from the time
+of the fall of the empire, then tragical stories of the party struggles of the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; then notices of several heroic women;
+then the foundress of nunneries, the political woman, the female doctor,
+the mother of many and distinguished sons, the learned woman, the
+peasant girl who dies defending her chastity; then the cultivated beauty
+of the sixteenth century, on whom everybody writes sonnets; and lastly,
+the female novelist and poet at Padua. A century later the woman-professor
+would have been added to these. For the famous woman of
+the House of Este, see Ariosto, <i>Orl.</i> xiii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_345_345" id="Footnote_345_345"></a><a href="#FNanchor_345_345"><span class="label">[345]</span></a> Bartolommeo Facio and Paolo Cortese. B. F. <i>De Viris Illustribus
+Liber</i>, was first published by L. Mehus (Florence, 1745). The book was
+begun by the author (known by other historical works, and resident at the
+court of Alfonso of Naples) after he had finished the history of that king
+(1455), and ended, as references to the struggles of Hungary and the
+writer’s ignorance of the elevation of Æneas Silvius to the cardinalate
+show, in 1456. (See, nevertheless, Wahlen, <i>Laurentii Vallæ Opuscula
+Tria</i>, Vienna, 1869, p. 67, note 1.) It is never quoted by contemporaries,
+and seldom by later writers. The author wishes in this book to describe
+the famous men, ‘ætatis memoriæque nostræ,’ and consequently only
+mentions such as were born in the last quarter of the fourteenth century,
+and were still living in, or had died shortly before, the middle of the fifteenth.
+He chiefly limits himself to Italians, except in the case of artists
+or princes, among the latter of whom he includes the Emperor Sigismund
+and Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg; and in arranging the various biographies
+he neither follows chronological order nor the distinction which
+the subject of each attained, but puts them down ‘ut quisque mihi occurrerit,’
+intending to treat in a second part of those whom he might have
+left out in the first. He divides the famous men into nine classes, nearly
+all of them prefaced by remarks on their distinctive qualities: 1. Poets;
+2. Orators; 3. Jurists; 4. Physicians (with a few philosophers and theologians,
+as an appendix); 5. Painters; 6. Sculptors; 7. Eminent citizens;
+8. Generals; 9. Princes and kings. Among the latter he treats with
+special fulness and care of Pope Nicholas V. and King Alfonso of Naples.
+In general he gives only short and mostly eulogistic biographies, confined
+in the case of princes and soldiers to the list of their deeds, and of
+artists and writers to the enumeration of their works. No attempt is
+made at a detailed description or criticism of these; only with regard to
+a few works of art which he had himself seen he writes more fully. Nor
+is any attempt made at an estimate of individuals; his heroes either
+receive a few general words of praise, or must be satisfied with the mere
+mention of their names. Of himself the author says next to nothing.
+He states only that Guarino was his teacher, that Manetti wrote a book
+on a subject which he himself had treated, that Bracellius was his countryman,
+and that the painter Pisano of Verona was known to him (pp. 17,
+18, 19, 48; but says nothing in speaking of Laurentius Valla of his
+own violent quarrels with this scholar. On the other hand, he does not
+fail to express his piety and his hatred to the Turks (<a href="#page_064">p. 64</a>), to relieve his
+Italian patriotism by calling the Swiss barbarians (<a href="#page_060">p. 60</a>), and to say
+of P. P. Vergerius, ‘dignus qui totam in Italia vitam scribens exegisset’
+(<a href="#page_009">p. 9</a>).
+</p><p>
+Of all celebrities he evidently sets most store by the scholars, and
+among these by the ‘oratores,’ to whom he devotes nearly a third of
+his book. He nevertheless has great respect for the jurists, and shows a
+special fondness for the physicians, among whom he well distinguishes
+the theoretical from the practical, relating the successful diagnoses and
+operations of the latter. That he treats of theologians and philosophers
+in connection with the physicians, is as curious as that he should put the
+painters immediately after the physicians, although, as he says, they are
+most allied to the poets. In spite of his reverence for learning, which
+shows itself in the praise given to the princes who patronised it, he is too
+much of a courtier not to register the tokens of princely favour received
+by the scholars he speaks of, and to characterise the princes in the introduction
+to the chapters devoted to them as those who ‘veluti corpus
+membra, ita omnia genera quæ supra memoravimus, regunt ac tuentur.’
+</p><p>
+The style of the book is simple and unadorned, and the matter of it
+full of instruction, notwithstanding its brevity. It is a pity that Facius did
+not enter more fully into the personal relations and circumstances of the
+men whom he described, and did not add to the list of their writings
+some notice of the contents and the value of them.
+</p><p>
+The work of Paolo Cortese (b. 1645, d. 1510), <i>De Hominibus Doctis
+Dialogus</i> (first ed. Florence, 1734), is much more limited in its character.
+This work, written about 1490, since it mentions Antonius Geraldinus as
+dead, who died in 1488, and was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, who
+died in 1492, is distinguished from that of Facius, written a generation
+earlier, not only by the exclusion of all who are not learned men, but by
+various inward and outward characteristics. First by the form, which is
+that of a dialogue between the author and his two companions, Alexander
+Farnese and Antonius, and by the digressions and unequal treatment of
+the various characters caused thereby; and secondly by the manner of
+the treatment itself. While Facius only speaks of the men of his own
+time, Cortese treats only of the dead, and in part of those long dead, by
+which he enlarges his circle more than he narrows it by exclusion of the
+living; while Facius merely chronicles works and deeds, as if they were
+unknown, Cortese criticises the literary activity of his heroes as if the
+reader were already familiar with it. This criticism is shaped by the
+humanistic estimate of eloquence, according to which no man could be
+considered of importance unless he had achieved something remarkable
+in eloquence, <i>i.e.</i> in the classical, Ciceronian treatment of the Latin
+language. On this principle Dante and Petrarch are only moderately
+praised, and are blamed for having diverted so much of their powers
+from Latin to Italian; Guarino is described as one who had beheld
+perfect eloquence at least through a cloud; Lionardo Aretino as one who
+had offered his contemporaries ‘aliquid splendidius;’ and Enea Silvio
+as he ‘in quo primum apparuit mutati sæculi signum.’ This point of
+view prevailed over all others; never perhaps was it held so one-sidedly
+as by Cortese. To get a notion of his way of thinking we have only to
+hear his remarks on a predecessor, also the compiler of a great biographical
+collection, Sicco Polentone: ‘Ejus sunt viginti ad filium libri
+scripti de claris scriptoribus, utiles admodum qui jam fere ab omnibus legi
+sent desiti. Est enim in judicando parum acer, nec servit aurium
+voluptati quum tractat res ab aliis ante tractatas; sed hoc ferendum.
+Illud certe molestum est, dum alienis verbis sententiisque scripta infarcit
+et explet sua; ex quo nascitur maxime vitiosum scribendi genus, quum
+modo lenis et candidus, modo durus et asper apparcat, et sic in toto
+genere tanquam in unum agrum plura inter se inimicissima sparsa
+semina.’
+</p><p>
+All are not treated with so much detail; most are disposed of in a
+few brief sentences; some are merely named without a word being added.
+Much is nevertheless to be learned from his judgments, though we may
+not be able always to agree with them. We cannot here discuss him more
+fully, especially as many of his most characteristic remarks have been
+already made use of; on the whole, they give us a clear picture of the
+way in which a later time, outwardly more developed, looked down with
+critical scorn upon an earlier age, inwardly perhaps richer, but externally
+less perfect.
+</p><p>
+Facius, the author of the first-mentioned biographical work, is spoken
+of, but not his book. Like Facius, Cortese is the humble courtier, looking
+on Lorenzo de’ Medici as Facius looked on Alfonso of Naples; like
+him, he is a patriot who only praises foreign excellence unwillingly and
+because he must; adding the assurance that he does not wish to oppose
+his own country (<a href="#page_048">p. 48</a>, speaking of Janus Pannonius).
+</p><p>
+Information as to Cortese has been collected by Bernardus Paperinius,
+the editor of his work; we may add that his Latin translation of the
+novel of L. B. Alberti, <i>Hippolytus and Dejanira</i>, is printed for the first
+time in the <i>Opere di L. B. A.</i> vol. iii. pp. 439-463.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_346_346" id="Footnote_346_346"></a><a href="#FNanchor_346_346"><span class="label">[346]</span></a> How great the fame of the humanists was is shown by the fact that
+impostors attempted to make capital out of the use of their names. There
+thus appeared at Verona a man strangely clad and using strange gestures,
+who, when brought before the mayor, recited with great energy passages
+of Latin verse and prose, taken from the works of Panormita, answered
+in reply to the questions put to him that he was himself Panormita, and
+was able to give so many small and commonly unknown details about
+the life of this scholar, that his statement obtained general credit. He
+was then treated with great honour by the authorities and the learned
+men of the city, and played his assumed part successfully for a considerable
+time, until Guarino and others who knew Panormita personally discovered
+the fraud. Comp. Rosmini, <i>Vita di Guarino</i>, ii. 44 sqq., 171 sqq.
+Few of the humanists were free from the habit of boasting. Codrus
+Urceus (<i>Vita</i>, at the end of the <i>Opera</i>, 1506, fol. lxx.), when asked for
+his opinion about this or that famous man, used to answer: ‘Sibi scire
+videntur.’ Barth. Facius, <i>De Vir. Ill.</i> p. 31, tells of the jurist Antonius
+Butriensis: ‘Id unum in eo viro notandum est, quod neminem unquam,
+adeo excellere homines in eo studio volebat, ut doctoratu dignum in
+examine comprobavit.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_347_347" id="Footnote_347_347"></a><a href="#FNanchor_347_347"><span class="label">[347]</span></a> A Latin poet of the twelfth century, one of the wandering scholars who
+barters his song for a coat, uses this as a threat. <i>Carmina Burana</i>, p. 76.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_348_348" id="Footnote_348_348"></a><a href="#FNanchor_348_348"><span class="label">[348]</span></a> Sonnet cli: Lasso ch’i ardo.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_349_349" id="Footnote_349_349"></a><a href="#FNanchor_349_349"><span class="label">[349]</span></a> Boccaccio, <i>Opere Volgari</i>, vol. xvi. in Sonnet 13: Pallido, vinto, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_350_350" id="Footnote_350_350"></a><a href="#FNanchor_350_350"><span class="label">[350]</span></a> Elsewhere, and in Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, iv. 203.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_351_351" id="Footnote_351_351"></a><a href="#FNanchor_351_351"><span class="label">[351]</span></a> <i>Angeli Politiani Epp.</i> lib. x.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_352_352" id="Footnote_352_352"></a><a href="#FNanchor_352_352"><span class="label">[352]</span></a> Quatuor navigationes, etc. Deodatum (<i>St. Dié</i>), 1507. Comp. O.
+Peschel, <i>Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen</i>, 1859, ed. 2, 1876.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_353_353" id="Footnote_353_353"></a><a href="#FNanchor_353_353"><span class="label">[353]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>De Romanis Piscibus</i>, Præfatio (1825). The first decade of
+his histories would soon be published, ‘non sine aliqua spe immortalitatis.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_354_354" id="Footnote_354_354"></a><a href="#FNanchor_354_354"><span class="label">[354]</span></a> Comp. <i>Discorsi</i>, i. 27. ‘Tristizia’ (crime) can have ‘grandezza’ and
+be ‘in alcuna parte generosa’; ‘grandezza’ can take away ‘infamia’ from
+a deed; a man can be ‘onorevolmente tristo’ in contrast to one who is
+‘perfettamente buono.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_355_355" id="Footnote_355_355"></a><a href="#FNanchor_355_355"><span class="label">[355]</span></a> <i>Storie Fiorentine</i>, l. vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_356_356" id="Footnote_356_356"></a><a href="#FNanchor_356_356"><span class="label">[356]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Elog. Vir. Lit. Ill.</i> p. 192, speaking of Marius Molsa.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_357_357" id="Footnote_357_357"></a><a href="#FNanchor_357_357"><span class="label">[357]</span></a> Mere railing is found very early, in Benzo of Alba, in the eleventh
+century (<i>Mon. Germ.</i> ss. xi. 591-681).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_358_358" id="Footnote_358_358"></a><a href="#FNanchor_358_358"><span class="label">[358]</span></a> The Middle Ages are further rich in so-called satirical poems; but the
+satire is not individual, but aimed at classes, categories, and whole populations,
+and easily passes into the didactic tone. The whole spirit of this
+literature is best represented by <i>Reineke Fuchs</i>, in all its forms among
+the different nations of the West. For this branch of French literature
+see a new and admirable work by Lenient, <i>La Satire en France au
+Moyen-âge</i>, Paris, 1860, and the equally excellent continuation, <i>La Satire
+en France, ou la littérature militante, au XVI<sup>e</sup> Siècle</i>, Paris, 1866.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_359_359" id="Footnote_359_359"></a><a href="#FNanchor_359_359"><span class="label">[359]</span></a> See above, p. 7 note 2. Occasionally we find an insolent joke,
+nov. 37.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_360_360" id="Footnote_360_360"></a><a href="#FNanchor_360_360"><span class="label">[360]</span></a> <i>Inferno</i>, xxi. xxii. The only possible parallel is with Aristophanes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_361_361" id="Footnote_361_361"></a><a href="#FNanchor_361_361"><span class="label">[361]</span></a> A modest beginning <i>Opera</i>, p. 421, sqq., in <i>Rerum Memorandarum
+Libri IV.</i> Again, in <i>Epp. Seniles</i>, x. 2. Comp. <i>Epp. Fam.</i> ed. Fracass. i.
+68 sqq., 70, 240, 245. The puns have a flavour of their mediæval home,
+the monasteries. Petrarch’s invectives ‘contra Gallum,’ ‘contra medicum
+objurgantem,’ and his work, <i>De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia</i>;
+perhaps also his <i>Epistolæ sine Titulo</i>,’ may be quoted as early examples
+of satirical writing.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_362_362" id="Footnote_362_362"></a><a href="#FNanchor_362_362"><span class="label">[362]</span></a> Nov. 40, 41; Ridolfo da Camerino is the man.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_363_363" id="Footnote_363_363"></a><a href="#FNanchor_363_363"><span class="label">[363]</span></a> The well-known jest of Brunellesco and the fat wood-carver, Manetto
+Ammanatini, who is said to have fled into Hungary before the ridicule he
+encountered, is clever but cruel.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_364_364" id="Footnote_364_364"></a><a href="#FNanchor_364_364"><span class="label">[364]</span></a> The ‘Araldo’ of the Florentine Signoria. One instance among many,
+<i>Commissioni di Rinaldo degli Albizzi</i>, iii. 651, 669. The fool as necessary
+to enliven the company after dinner; Alcyonius, <i>De Exilio</i>, ed. Mencken,
+p. 129.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_365_365" id="Footnote_365_365"></a><a href="#FNanchor_365_365"><span class="label">[365]</span></a> Sacchetti, nov. 48. And yet, according to nov. 67, there was an impression
+that a Romagnole was superior to the worst Florentine.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_366_366" id="Footnote_366_366"></a><a href="#FNanchor_366_366"><span class="label">[366]</span></a> L. B. Alberti, <i>Del Governo della Famiglia, Opere</i>, ed. Bonucci, v. 171.
+Comp. above, p. 132, note 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_367_367" id="Footnote_367_367"></a><a href="#FNanchor_367_367"><span class="label">[367]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, nov. 156; comp. 24 for Dolcibene and the Jews.
+(For Charles IV. and the fools, <i>Friedjung</i>, o.c. p. 109.) The <i>Facetiæ</i> of
+Poggio resemble Sacchetti’s in substance&mdash;practical jokes, impertinences,
+refined indecency misunderstood by simple folk; the philologist is betrayed
+by the large number of verbal jokes. On L. A. Alberti, see
+pp. 136, sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_368_368" id="Footnote_368_368"></a><a href="#FNanchor_368_368"><span class="label">[368]</span></a> And consequently in those novels of the Italians whose subject is
+taken from them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_369_369" id="Footnote_369_369"></a><a href="#FNanchor_369_369"><span class="label">[369]</span></a> According to Bandello, iv. nov. 2, Gonnella could twist his features
+into the likeness of other people, and mimic all the dialects of Italy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_370_370" id="Footnote_370_370"></a><a href="#FNanchor_370_370"><span class="label">[370]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Vita Leonis X.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_371_371" id="Footnote_371_371"></a><a href="#FNanchor_371_371"><span class="label">[371]</span></a> ‘Erat enim Bibiena mirus artifex hominibus ætate vel professione
+gravibus ad insaniam impellendis.’ We are here reminded of the jests of
+Christine of Sweden with her philologists. Comp. the remarkable passage
+of Jovian. Pontanus, <i>De Sermone</i>, lib. ii. cap. 9: ‘Ferdinandus Alfonsi
+filius, Neapolitanorum rex magnus et ipse fuit artifex et vultus componendi
+et orationes in quem ipse usus vellet. Nam ætatis nostri Pontifices
+maximi fingendis vultibus ac verbis vel histriones ipsos anteveniunt.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_372_372" id="Footnote_372_372"></a><a href="#FNanchor_372_372"><span class="label">[372]</span></a> The eye-glass I not only infer from Rafael’s portrait, where it can be
+explained as a magnifier for looking at the miniatures in the prayer-book,
+but from a statement of Pellicanus, according to which Leo views an
+advancing procession of monks through a ‘specillum’ (comp. <i>Züricher
+Taschenbuch</i> for 1858, p. 177), and from the ‘cristallus concava,’ which,
+according to Giovio, he used when hunting. (Comp. ‘Leonis X. vita
+auctore anon, conscripta’ in the Appendix to Roscoe.) In Attilius Alessius
+(Baluz. <i>Miscell.</i> iv. 518) we read, ‘Oculari ex gemina (gemma?) utebatur
+quam manu gestans, signando aliquid videndum esset, oculis admovebat.’
+The shortsightedness in the family of the Medici was hereditary. Lorenzo
+was shortsighted, and replied to the Sienese Bartolommeo Soccini, who
+said that the air of Florence was bad for the eyes: ‘E quella di Siena al
+cervello.’ The bad sight of Leo X. was proverbial. After his election,
+the Roman wits explained the number MCCCCXL. engraved in the Vatican
+as follows: ‘Multi cæci Cardinales creaverunt cæcum decimum Leonem.’
+Comp. Shepherd-Tonelli, <i>Vita del Poggio</i>, ii. 23, sqq., and the passages
+there quoted.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_373_373" id="Footnote_373_373"></a><a href="#FNanchor_373_373"><span class="label">[373]</span></a> We find it also in plastic art, e.g., in the famous plate parodying the
+group of the Laöcoon as three monkeys. But here parody seldom went
+beyond sketches and the like, though much, it is true, may have been
+destroyed. Caricature, again, is something different. Lionardo, in the
+grotesque faces in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, represents what is hideous
+when and because it is comical, and exaggerates the ludicrous element at
+pleasure.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_374_374" id="Footnote_374_374"></a><a href="#FNanchor_374_374"><span class="label">[374]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. <i>De Sermone</i>, libri v. He attributes a special gift of
+wit to the Sienese and Peruginese, as well as to the Florentines, adding
+the Spanish court as a matter of politeness.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_375_375" id="Footnote_375_375"></a><a href="#FNanchor_375_375"><span class="label">[375]</span></a> <i>Il Cortigiano</i>, lib. ii. cap. 4 sqq., ed. Baude di Vesme, Florence, 1854,
+pp. 124 sqq. For the explanation of wit as the effect of contrast, though
+not clearly put, see <i>ibid.</i> cap. lxxiii. p. 136.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_376_376" id="Footnote_376_376"></a><a href="#FNanchor_376_376"><span class="label">[376]</span></a> Pontanus, <i>De Sermone</i>, lib. iv. cap. 3, also advises people to abstain
+from using ‘ridicula’ either against the miserable or the strong.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_377_377" id="Footnote_377_377"></a><a href="#FNanchor_377_377"><span class="label">[377]</span></a> <i>Galateo del Casa</i>, ed. Venez. 1789, p. 26 sqq. 48.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_378_378" id="Footnote_378_378"></a><a href="#FNanchor_378_378"><span class="label">[378]</span></a> <i>Lettere Pittoriche</i>, i. p. 71, in a letter of Vinc. Borghini, 1577.
+Macchiavelli (<i>Stor. Fior.</i> vii. cap. 28) says of the young gentlemen in
+Florence soon after the middle of the fifteenth century: ‘Gli studî loro
+erano apparire col vestire splendidi, e col parlare sagaci ed astuti, e
+quello che più destramente mordeva gli altri, era più savio e da più
+stimato.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_379_379" id="Footnote_379_379"></a><a href="#FNanchor_379_379"><span class="label">[379]</span></a> Comp. Fedra Inghirami’s funeral oration on Ludovico Podocataro
+(d. Aug. 25, 1504) in the <i>Anecd. Litt.</i> i. p. 319. The scandal-monger
+Massaino is mentioned in Paul. Jov. <i>Dialogues de Viris Litt. Illustr.</i>
+(Tiraboschi, tom. vii. parte iv. p. 1631).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_380_380" id="Footnote_380_380"></a><a href="#FNanchor_380_380"><span class="label">[380]</span></a> This was the plan followed by Leo X., and his calculations were not
+disappointed. Fearfully as his reputation was mangled after his death
+by the satirists, they were unable to modify the general estimate formed
+of him.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_381_381" id="Footnote_381_381"></a><a href="#FNanchor_381_381"><span class="label">[381]</span></a> This was probably the case with Cardinal Ardicino della Porta,
+who in 1491 wished to resign his dignity and take refuge in a monastery.
+See Infessura, in Eccard. ii. col. 2000.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_382_382" id="Footnote_382_382"></a><a href="#FNanchor_382_382"><span class="label">[382]</span></a> See his funeral oration in the <i>Anecd. Litt.</i> iv. p. 315. He assembled
+an army of peasants in the March of Aneona, which was only hindered
+from acting by the treason of the Duke of Urbino. For his graceful and
+hopeless love-poems, see Trucchi, <i>Poesie Inedite</i>, iii. 123.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_383_383" id="Footnote_383_383"></a><a href="#FNanchor_383_383"><span class="label">[383]</span></a> How he used his tongue at the table of Clement VII. is told in
+Giraldi, <i>Hecatomithi</i>, vii. nov. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_384_384" id="Footnote_384_384"></a><a href="#FNanchor_384_384"><span class="label">[384]</span></a> The charge of taking into consideration the proposal to drown
+Pasquino (in Paul. Jov. <i>Vita Hadriani</i>), is transferred from Sixtus IV. to
+Hadrian. Comp. <i>Lettere dei Principi</i>, i. 114 sqq., letter of Negro, dated
+April 7, 1523. On St. Mark’s Day Pasquino had a special celebration,
+which the Pope forbade.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_385_385" id="Footnote_385_385"></a><a href="#FNanchor_385_385"><span class="label">[385]</span></a> In the passages collected in Gregorovius, viii. 380 note, 381 sqq.
+393 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_386_386" id="Footnote_386_386"></a><a href="#FNanchor_386_386"><span class="label">[386]</span></a> Comp. Pier. Valer. <i>De Infel. Lit.</i> ed. Mencken, p. 178. ‘Pestilentia
+quæ cum Adriano VI. invecta Romam invasit.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_387_387" id="Footnote_387_387"></a><a href="#FNanchor_387_387"><span class="label">[387]</span></a> E.g. Firenzuola, <i>Opera</i> (Milano 1802), vol. i. p. 116, in the <i>Discorsi
+degli Animali</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_388_388" id="Footnote_388_388"></a><a href="#FNanchor_388_388"><span class="label">[388]</span></a> Comp. the names in Höfler, <i>Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Academie</i>
+(1876), vol. 82, p. 435.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_389_389" id="Footnote_389_389"></a><a href="#FNanchor_389_389"><span class="label">[389]</span></a> The words of Pier. Valerian, <i>De Infel. Lit.</i> ed. Mencken, p. 382, are
+most characteristic of the public feeling at Rome: ‘Ecce adest Musarum
+et eloquentiæ totiusque nitoris hostis acerrimis, qui literatis omnibus
+inimicitias minitaretur, quoniam, ut ipse dictitabat, Terentiani essent,
+quos quum odisse atque etiam persequi cœpisset voluntarium alii exilium,
+alias atque alias alii latebras quærentes tam diu latuere quoad Deo
+beneficio altero imperii anno decessit, qui si aliquanto diutius vixisset,
+Gothica illa tempora adversus bonas literas videbatur suscitaturus.’ The
+general hatred of Adrian was also due partly to the fact that in the great
+pecuniary difficulties in which he found himself he adopted the expedient
+of a direct tax. Ranke, <i>Päpste</i>, i. 411. It may here be mentioned that
+there were, nevertheless, poets to be found who praised Adrian. Comp.
+various passages in the <i>Coryciana</i> (ed. Rome, 1524), esp. J. J. 2<i>b</i> sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_390_390" id="Footnote_390_390"></a><a href="#FNanchor_390_390"><span class="label">[390]</span></a> To the Duke of Ferrara, January 1, 1536 (<i>Lettere</i>, ed. 1539, fol. 39):
+‘You will now journey from Rome to Naples,’ ‘ricreando la vista avvilita
+nel mirar le miserie pontificali con la contemplazione delle eccellenze
+imperiali.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_391_391" id="Footnote_391_391"></a><a href="#FNanchor_391_391"><span class="label">[391]</span></a> The fear which he caused to men of mark, especially artists, by these
+means, cannot be here described. The publicistic weapon of the German
+Reformation was chiefly the pamphlet dealing with events as they occurred;
+Aretino is a journalist in the sense that he has within himself a perpetual
+occasion for writing.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_392_392" id="Footnote_392_392"></a><a href="#FNanchor_392_392"><span class="label">[392]</span></a> E.g. in the <i>Capitolo</i> on Albicante, a bad poet; unfortunately the
+passages are unfit for quotation.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_393_393" id="Footnote_393_393"></a><a href="#FNanchor_393_393"><span class="label">[393]</span></a> <i>Lettere</i>, ed. Venez. 1539, fol. 12, dated May 31, 1527.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_394_394" id="Footnote_394_394"></a><a href="#FNanchor_394_394"><span class="label">[394]</span></a> In the first <i>Capitolo</i> to Cosimo.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_395_395" id="Footnote_395_395"></a><a href="#FNanchor_395_395"><span class="label">[395]</span></a> Gaye, <i>Carteggio</i>, ii. 332.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_396_396" id="Footnote_396_396"></a><a href="#FNanchor_396_396"><span class="label">[396]</span></a> See the insolent letter of 1536 in the <i>Lettere Pittor.</i> i. Append. 34.
+See above, p. 142, for the house where Petrarch was born in Arezzo.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_397_397" id="Footnote_397_397"></a><a href="#FNanchor_397_397"><span class="label">[397]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">L’Aretin, per Deo grazia, è vivo e sano,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ma’l mostaccio ha fregiato nobilmente,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">E più colpi ha, che dita in una mano.’<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">(Mauro, ‘<i>Capitolo in lode delle bugie.</i>’)<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_398_398" id="Footnote_398_398"></a><a href="#FNanchor_398_398"><span class="label">[398]</span></a> See e.g. the letter to the Cardinal of Lorraine, <i>Lettere</i>, ed. Venez. fol.
+29, dated Nov. 21, 1534, and the letters to Charles V., in which he says
+that no man stands nearer to God than Charles.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_399_399" id="Footnote_399_399"></a><a href="#FNanchor_399_399"><span class="label">[399]</span></a> For what follows, see Gaye, <i>Carteggio</i>, ii. 336, 337, 345.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_400_400" id="Footnote_400_400"></a><a href="#FNanchor_400_400"><span class="label">[400]</span></a> <i>Lettere</i>, ed. Venez. 1539, fol. 15, dated June 16, 1529. Comp. another
+remarkable letter to M. A., dated April 15, 1528, fol. 212.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_401_401" id="Footnote_401_401"></a><a href="#FNanchor_401_401"><span class="label">[401]</span></a> He may have done so either in the hope of obtaining the red hat or
+from fear of the new activity of the Inquisition, which he had ventured to
+attack bitterly in 1535 (l. c. fol. 37), but which, after the reorganisation of
+the institution in 1542, suddenly took a fresh start, and soon silenced
+every opposing voice.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_402_402" id="Footnote_402_402"></a><a href="#FNanchor_402_402"><span class="label">[402]</span></a> [Carmina Burana, in the <i>Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins in
+Stuttgart</i>, vol. xvi. (Stuttg. 1847). The stay in Pavia (<a href="#page_068">p. 68</a> <i>bis</i>), the
+Italian local references in general, the scene with the ‘pastorella’ under
+the olive-tree (<a href="#page_146">p. 146</a>), the mention of the ‘pinus’ as a shady field tree
+(<a href="#page_156">p. 156</a>), the frequent use of the word ‘bravium’ (pp. 137, 144), and particularly
+the form Madii for Maji (<a href="#page_141">p. 141</a>), all speak in favour of our
+assumption.]
+</p><p>
+The conjecture of Dr. Burckhardt that the best pieces of the <i>Carmina
+Burana</i> were written by an Italian, is not tenable. The grounds brought
+forward in its support have little weight (e.g. the mention of Pavia:
+‘Quis Paviæ demorans castus habeatur?’ which can be explained as a
+proverbial expression, or referred to a short stay of the writer at Pavia),
+cannot, further, hold their own against the reasons on the other side, and
+finally lose all their force in view of the probable identification of the
+author. The arguments of O. Hubatsch <i>Die lateinischen Vagantenlieder
+des Mittelalters</i>, Görlitz, 1870, p. 87) against the Italian origin of these
+poems are, among others, the attacks on the Italian and praise of the
+German clergy, the rebukes of the southerners as a ‘gens proterva,’ and
+the reference to the poet as ‘transmontanus.’ Who he actually was,
+however, is not clearly made out. That he bore the name of Walther
+throws no light upon his origin. He was formerly identified with
+Gualterus de Mapes, a canon of Salisbury and chaplain to the English
+kings at the end of the twelfth century; since, by Giesebrecht (<i>Die Vaganten
+oder Goliarden und ihre Lieder, Allgemeine Monatschrift</i>, 1855), with
+Walther of Lille or Chatillon, who passed from France into England and
+Germany, and thence possibly with the Archbishop Reinhold of Köln
+(1164 and 75) to Italy (Pavia, &amp;c.). If this hypothesis, against which
+Hubatsch (l. c.) has brought forward certain objections, must be abandoned,
+it remains beyond a doubt that the origin of nearly all these songs
+is to be looked for in France, from whence they were diffused through the
+regular school which here existed for them over Germany, and there
+expanded and mixed with German phrases; while Italy, as Giesebrecht
+has shown, remained almost unaffected by this class of poetry. The Italian
+translator of Dr. Burckhardt’s work, Prof. D. Valbusa, in a note to this
+passage (i. 235), also contests the Italian origin of the poem. [L. G.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_403_403" id="Footnote_403_403"></a><a href="#FNanchor_403_403"><span class="label">[403]</span></a> <i>Carm. Bur.</i> p. 155, only a fragment: the whole in Wright, <i>Walter
+Mapes</i> (1841), p. 258. Comp. Hubatsch, p. 27 sqq., who points to the fact
+that a story often treated of in France is at the foundation. Æst. Inter.
+<i>Carm. Bur.</i> p. 67; Dum Dianæ, <i>Carm. Bur.</i> p. 124. Additional instances:
+‘Cor patet Jovi;’ classical names for the loved one; once, when he calls
+her Blanciflor, he adds, as if to make up for it, the name of Helena.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_404_404" id="Footnote_404_404"></a><a href="#FNanchor_404_404"><span class="label">[404]</span></a> In what way antiquity could serve as guide and teacher in all the
+higher regions of life, is briefly sketched by Æneas Sylvius (<i>Opera</i>, p. 603,
+in the <i>Epist.</i> 105, to the Archduke Sigismund).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_405_405" id="Footnote_405_405"></a><a href="#FNanchor_405_405"><span class="label">[405]</span></a> For particulars we must refer the reader to Roscoe, <i>Lorenzo Mag.</i>
+and <i>Leo X.</i>, as well as to Voigt, <i>Enea Silvio</i> (Berlin, 1856-63); to the
+works of Reumont and to Gregorovius, <i>Geschichte der Stadt Rom im
+Mittelalter</i>.
+</p><p>
+To form a conception of the extent which studies at the beginning of
+the sixteenth century had reached, we cannot do better than turn to the
+<i>Commentarii Urbani</i> of Raphael Volatterranus (ed. Basil, 1544, fol. 16,
+&amp;c.). Here we see how antiquity formed the introduction and the chief
+matter of study in every branch of knowledge, from geography and local
+history, the lives of great and famous men, popular philosophy, morals
+and the special sciences, down to the analysis of the whole of Aristotle
+with which the work closes. To understand its significance as an
+authority for the history of culture, we must compare it with all the
+earlier encyclopædias. A complete and circumstantial account of the
+matter is given in Voigt’s admirable work, <i>Die Wiederbelebung des classischen
+Alterthums</i> oder <i>Das erste Jahrhundert der Humanismus</i>, Berlin,
+1859.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_406_406" id="Footnote_406_406"></a><a href="#FNanchor_406_406"><span class="label">[406]</span></a> In William of Malmesbury, <i>Gesta Regum Anglor</i>. l. ii. § 169, 170, 205,
+206 (ed. Lond. 1840, vol. i. p. 277 sqq. and p. 354 sqq.), we meet with the
+dreams of treasure-hunters, Venus as ghostly love, and the discovery of
+the gigantic body of Pallas, son of Evander, about the middle of the
+eleventh century. Comp. Jac. ab Aquis <i>Imago Mundi</i> (<i>Hist. Patr.
+Monum. Script.</i> t. iii. col. 1603), on the origin of the House of Colonna,
+with reference to the discovery of hidden treasure. Besides the tales of
+the treasure-seekers, William of Malmesbury mentions the elegy of
+Hildebert of Mans, Bishop of Tours, one of the most singular examples
+of humanistic enthusiasm in the first half of the twelfth century.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_407_407" id="Footnote_407_407"></a><a href="#FNanchor_407_407"><span class="label">[407]</span></a> Dante, <i>Convito</i>, tratt. iv. cap. v.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_408_408" id="Footnote_408_408"></a><a href="#FNanchor_408_408"><span class="label">[408]</span></a> <i>Epp. Familiares</i>, vi. 2; references to Rome before he had seen it, and
+expressions of his longing for the city, <i>Epp. Fam.</i> ed. Fracass. vol. i. pp.
+125, 213; vol. ii. pp. 336 sqq. See also the collected references in L. Geiger,
+<i>Petrarca</i>, p. 272, note 3. In Petrarch we already find complaints of the
+many ruined and neglected buildings, which he enumerates one by one
+(<i>De Rem. Utriusque Fort.</i> lib. i. dial. 118), adding the remark that many
+statues were left from antiquity, but no paintings (l. c. 41).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_409_409" id="Footnote_409_409"></a><a href="#FNanchor_409_409"><span class="label">[409]</span></a> <i>Dittamondo</i>, ii. cap. 3. The procession reminds one at times of the
+three kings and their suite in the old pictures. The description of the
+city (ii. cap. 31) is not without archæological value (Gregorovius, vi. 697,
+note 1). According to Polistoro (Murat. xxiv. col. 845), Niccolò and Ugo
+of Este journeyed in 1366 to Rome, ‘per vedere quelle magnificenze antiche,
+che al presente sipossono vedere in Roma.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_410_410" id="Footnote_410_410"></a><a href="#FNanchor_410_410"><span class="label">[410]</span></a> Gregorovius, v. 316 sqq. Parenthetically we may quote foreign
+evidence that Rome in the Middle Ages was looked upon as a quarry.
+The famous Abbot Sugerius, who about 1140 was in search of lofty pillars
+for the rebuilding of St. Denis, thought at first of nothing less then getting
+hold of the granite monoliths of the Baths of Diocletian, but afterwards
+changed his mind. See ‘Sugerii Libellus Alter,’ in Duchesne, <i>Hist. Franc.
+Scriptores</i>, iv. p. 352.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_411_411" id="Footnote_411_411"></a><a href="#FNanchor_411_411"><span class="label">[411]</span></a> <i>Poggii Opera</i>, fol. 50 sqq. ‘Ruinarum Urbis Romæ Descriptio,’
+written about 1430, shortly before the death of Martin V. The Baths of
+Caracalla and Diocletian had then their pillars and coating of marble.
+See Gregorovius, vi. 700-705.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_412_412" id="Footnote_412_412"></a><a href="#FNanchor_412_412"><span class="label">[412]</span></a> Poggio appears as one of the earliest collectors of inscriptions, in his
+letter in the <i>Vita Poggii</i>, Muratori, xx. col. 177, and as collector of busts,
+(col. 183, and letter in Shepherd-Tonelli, i. 258). See also <i>Ambros.
+Traversarii Epistolæ</i>, xxv. 42. A little book which Poggio wrote on
+inscriptions seems to have been lost. Shepherd, <i>Life of Poggio</i>, trad.
+Tonelli, i. 154 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_413_413" id="Footnote_413_413"></a><a href="#FNanchor_413_413"><span class="label">[413]</span></a> Fabroni, <i>Cosmus</i>, Adnot. 86. From a letter of Alberto degli Alberti
+to Giovanni Medici. See also Gregorovius, vii. 557. For the condition of
+Rome under Martin V., see Platina, p. 227; and during the absence of
+Eugenius IV., see Vespasiano Fiorent., p. 21.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_414_414" id="Footnote_414_414"></a><a href="#FNanchor_414_414"><span class="label">[414]</span></a> <i>Roma Instaurata</i>, written in 1447, and dedicated to the Pope; first
+printed, Rome, 1474.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_415_415" id="Footnote_415_415"></a><a href="#FNanchor_415_415"><span class="label">[415]</span></a> See, nevertheless, his distichs in Voigt, <i>Wiederbelebung des Alterthums</i>,
+p. 275, note 2. He was the first Pope who published a Bull for
+the protection of old monuments (4 Kal. Maj. 1462), with penalties in
+case of disobedience. But these measures were ineffective. Comp.
+Gregorovius, vii. pp. 558 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_416_416" id="Footnote_416_416"></a><a href="#FNanchor_416_416"><span class="label">[416]</span></a> What follows is from Jo. Ant. Campanus, <i>Vita Pii II.</i>, in Muratori,
+iii. ii. col. 980 sqq. <i>Pii II. Commentarii</i>, pp. 48, 72 sqq., 206, 248 sqq., 501,
+and elsewhere.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_417_417" id="Footnote_417_417"></a><a href="#FNanchor_417_417"><span class="label">[417]</span></a> First dated edition, Brixen, 1482.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_418_418" id="Footnote_418_418"></a><a href="#FNanchor_418_418"><span class="label">[418]</span></a> Boccaccio, <i>Fiammetta</i>, cap. 5. <i>Opere</i>, ed. Montier, vi. 91.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_419_419" id="Footnote_419_419"></a><a href="#FNanchor_419_419"><span class="label">[419]</span></a> His work, <i>Cyriaci Anconitani Itinerarium</i>, ed. Mehus, Florence,
+1742. Comp. Leandro Alberti, <i>Descriz. di tutta l’Italia</i>, fol. 285.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_420_420" id="Footnote_420_420"></a><a href="#FNanchor_420_420"><span class="label">[420]</span></a> Two instances out of many: the fabulous origin of Milan in Manipulus
+(Murat. xl. col. 552), and that of Florence in Gio. Villani (who here,
+as elsewhere, enlarges on the forged chronicle of Ricardo Malespini),
+according to which Florence, being loyally Roman in its sentiments, is
+always in the right against the anti-Roman rebellious Fiesole (i. 9, 38, 41;
+ii. 2). Dante, <i>Inf.</i> xv. 76.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_421_421" id="Footnote_421_421"></a><a href="#FNanchor_421_421"><span class="label">[421]</span></a> <i>Commentarii</i>, p. 206, in the fourth book.
+</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_421A_421A" id="Footnote_421A_421A"></a><a href="#FNanchor_421A_421A"><span class="label">[421A]</span></a> Mich. Cannesius, <i>Vita Pauli II.</i>, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 993. Towards
+even Nero, son of Domitius Ahenobarbus, the author will not be impolite,
+on account of his connection with the Pope. He only says of him, ‘De
+quo verum Scriptores multa ac diversa commemorant.’ The family of
+Plato in Milan went still farther, and nattered itself on its descent from
+the great Athenian. Filelfo in a wedding speech, and in an encomium on
+the jurist Teodoro Plato, ventured to make this assertion; and a Giovanantonio
+Plato put the inscription on a portrait in relief carved by him in
+1478 (in the court of the Pal. Magenta at Milan): ‘Platonem suum, a quo
+originem et ingenium refert.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_422_422" id="Footnote_422_422"></a><a href="#FNanchor_422_422"><span class="label">[422]</span></a> See on this point, Nangiporto, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1094; Infessura,
+in Eccard, <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. col. 1951; Matarazzo, in the <i>Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. ii.
+p. 180. Nangiporto, however, admits that it was no longer possible to
+decide whether the corpse was male or female.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_423_423" id="Footnote_423_423"></a><a href="#FNanchor_423_423"><span class="label">[423]</span></a> As early as Julius II. excavations were made in the hope of finding
+statues. Vasari, xi. p. 302, <i>V. di Gio. da Udine</i>. Comp. Gregorovius,
+viii. 186.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_424_424" id="Footnote_424_424"></a><a href="#FNanchor_424_424"><span class="label">[424]</span></a> The letter was first attributed to Castiglione, <i>Lettere di Negozi del
+Conte Bald. Castiglione</i>, Padua, 1736 and 1769, but proved to be from the
+hand of Raphael by Daniele Francesconi in 1799. It is printed from a
+Munich MS. in Passavant, <i>Leben Raphael’s</i>, iii. p. 44. Comp. Gruyer
+<i>Raphael et l’Antiquité</i>, 1864, i. 435-457.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_425_425" id="Footnote_425_425"></a><a href="#FNanchor_425_425"><span class="label">[425]</span></a> <i>Lettere Pittoriche</i>, ii. 1, Tolomei to Landi, 14 Nov., 1542.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_426_426" id="Footnote_426_426"></a><a href="#FNanchor_426_426"><span class="label">[426]</span></a> He tried ‘curis animique doloribus quacunque ratione aditum intercludere;’
+music and lively conversation charmed him, and he hoped by
+their means to live longer. <i>Leonis X. Vita Anonyma</i>, in Roscoe, ed. Bossi,
+xii. p. 169.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_427_427" id="Footnote_427_427"></a><a href="#FNanchor_427_427"><span class="label">[427]</span></a> This point is referred to in the <i>Satires</i> of Ariosto. See the first
+(‘Perc’ ho molto,’ &amp;c.), and the fourth ‘Poiche, Annibale’).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_428_428" id="Footnote_428_428"></a><a href="#FNanchor_428_428"><span class="label">[428]</span></a> Ranke, <i>Päpste</i>, i. 408 sqq. ‘<i>Lettere dei Principi</i>, p. 107. Letter of
+Negri, September 1, 1522 ... ‘tutti questi cortigiani esausti da Papa
+Leone e falliti.’ They avenged themselves after the death of Leo by
+satirical verses and inscriptions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_429_429" id="Footnote_429_429"></a><a href="#FNanchor_429_429"><span class="label">[429]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Commentarii</i>, p. 251 in the 5th book. Comp. Sannazaro’s
+elegy, ‘Ad Ruinas Cumarum urbis vetustissimæ’ (<i>Opera</i>, fol. 236 sqq.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_430_430" id="Footnote_430_430"></a><a href="#FNanchor_430_430"><span class="label">[430]</span></a> Polifilo (i.e. Franciscus Columna) ‘Hypnerotomachia, ubi humana
+omnia non nisi somnum esse docet atque obiter plurima scita sane quam
+digna commemorat,’ Venice, Aldus Manutius, 1499. Comp. on this
+remarkable book and others, A. Didot, <i>Alde Manuce</i>, Paris, 1875, pp.
+132-142; and Gruyer, <i>Raphael et l’Antiquité</i>, i. pp. 191 sqq.; J. Burckhardt,
+<i>Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien</i>, pp. 43 sqq., and the work of
+A. Ilg, Vienna, 1872.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_431_431" id="Footnote_431_431"></a><a href="#FNanchor_431_431"><span class="label">[431]</span></a> While all the Fathers of the Church and all the pilgrims speak only
+of a cave. The poets, too, do without the palace. Comp. Sannazaro,
+<i>De Partu Virginis</i>, l. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_432_432" id="Footnote_432_432"></a><a href="#FNanchor_432_432"><span class="label">[432]</span></a> Chiefly from Vespasiano Fiorentine, in the first vol. of the <i>Spicileg.
+Romanum</i>, by Mai, from which edition the quotations in this book are
+made. New edition by Bartoli, Florence, 1859. The author was a
+Florentine bookseller and copying agent, about and after the middle of
+the fifteenth century.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_433_433" id="Footnote_433_433"></a><a href="#FNanchor_433_433"><span class="label">[433]</span></a> Comp. Petr. <i>Epist. Fam.</i> ed. Fracass. l. xviii. 2, xxiv. 12, var. 25,
+with the notes of Fracassetti in the Italian translation, vol. iv. 92-101,
+v. 196 sqq., where the fragment of a translation of Homer before the
+time of Pilato is also given.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_434_434" id="Footnote_434_434"></a><a href="#FNanchor_434_434"><span class="label">[434]</span></a> Forgeries, by which the passion for antiquity was turned to the profit
+or amusement of rogues, are well known to have been not uncommon.
+See the articles in the literary histories on Annius of Viterbo.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_435_435" id="Footnote_435_435"></a><a href="#FNanchor_435_435"><span class="label">[435]</span></a> Vespas. Fiorent. p. 31. ‘Tommaso da Serezana usava dire, che dua
+cosa farebbe, se egli potesse mai spendere, ch’era in libri e murare. E
+l’una e l’altra fece nel suo pontificato.’ With respect to his translation,
+see Æen. Sylvius, <i>De Europa</i>, cap. 58, p. 459, and Papencordt, <i>Ges. der
+Stadt Rom.</i> p. 502. See esp. Voigt, op. cit. book v.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_436_436" id="Footnote_436_436"></a><a href="#FNanchor_436_436"><span class="label">[436]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. pp. 48 and 658, 665. Comp. J. Manetti, <i>Vita Nicolai V.</i>,
+in Murat. iii. ii. col. 925 sqq. On the question whether and how Calixtus
+III. partly dispersed the library again, see Vespas. Fiorent. p. 284, with
+Mai’s note.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_437_437" id="Footnote_437_437"></a><a href="#FNanchor_437_437"><span class="label">[437]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. pp. 617 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_438_438" id="Footnote_438_438"></a><a href="#FNanchor_438_438"><span class="label">[438]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. pp. 457 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_439_439" id="Footnote_439_439"></a><a href="#FNanchor_439_439"><span class="label">[439]</span></a> Vespas. Fiorent, p. 193. Comp. Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col.
+1185 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_440_440" id="Footnote_440_440"></a><a href="#FNanchor_440_440"><span class="label">[440]</span></a> How the matter was provisionally treated is related in Malipiero,
+<i>Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor.</i> vii. ii. pp. 653, 655.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_441_441" id="Footnote_441_441"></a><a href="#FNanchor_441_441"><span class="label">[441]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. pp. 124 sqq., and ‘Inventario della Libreria Urbinata
+compilata nel Secolo XV. da Federigo Veterano, bibliotecario di Federigo
+I. da Montefeltro Duca d’Urbino,’ given by C. Guasti in tbe <i>Giornale
+Storico degli Archivi Toscani</i>, vi. (1862), 127-147 and vii. (1863) 46-55,
+130-154. For contemporary opinions on the library, see Favre, <i>Mélanges
+d’Hist. Lit.</i> i. 127, note 6. The following is the substance of Dr. Geiger’s
+remarks on the subject of the old authors:&mdash;
+</p><p>
+For the Medicean Library comp. <i>Delle condicioni e delle vicende della
+libreria medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508 ricerche di Enea Piccolomini</i>,
+Arch. stor. ital., 265 sqq., 3 serie, vol. xix. pp. 101-129,254-281, xx. 51-94, xxi.
+102-112, 282-296. Dr. Geiger does not undertake an estimate of the relative
+values of the various rare and almost unknown works contained in the
+library, nor is he able to state where they are now to be found. He remarks
+that information as to Greece is much fuller than as to Italy,
+which is a characteristic mark of the time. The catalogue contains editions
+of the Bible, of single books of it, with text and annotations, also
+Greek and Roman works in their then most complete forms, together with
+some Hebrew books&mdash;<i>tractatus quidam rabbinorum hebr.</i>&mdash;with much
+modern work, chiefly in Latin, and with not a little in Italian.
+</p><p>
+Dr. Geiger doubts the absolute accuracy of Vespasiano Fiorentino’s
+catalogue of the library at Urbino. See the German edition, i. 313, 314.
+[S.G.C.M.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_442_442" id="Footnote_442_442"></a><a href="#FNanchor_442_442"><span class="label">[442]</span></a> Perhaps at the capture of Urbino by the troops of Cæsar Borgia.
+The existence of the manuscript has been doubted; but I cannot believe
+that Vespasiano would have spoken of the gnomic extracts from
+Menander, which do not amount to more than a couple of hundred verses,
+as ‘tutte le opere,’ nor have mentioned them in the list of comprehensive
+manuscripts, even though he had before him only our present Pindar and
+Sophocles. It is not inconceivable that this Menander may some day
+come to light.
+</p><p>
+[The catalogue of the library at Urbino (see foregoing note), which
+dates back to the fifteenth century, is not perfectly in accordance with
+Vespasiano’s report, and with the remarks of Dr. Burckhardt upon it.
+As an official document, it deserves greater credit than Vespasiano’s description,
+which, like most of his descriptions, cannot be acquitted of a
+certain inaccuracy in detail and tendency to over-colouring. In this
+catalogue no mention is made of the manuscript of Menander. Mai’s
+doubt as to its existence is therefore justified. Instead of ‘all the works
+of Pindar,’ we here find: ‘Pindaris Olimpia et Pithia.’ The catalogue
+makes no distinction between ancient and modern books, contains the
+works of Dante (among others, <i>Comœdiæ Thusco Carmine</i>), and Boccaccio,
+in a very imperfect form; those of Petrarch, however, in all completeness.
+It may be added that this catalogue mentions many humanistic
+writings which have hitherto remained unknown and unprinted, that
+it contains collections of the privileges of the princes of Montefeltro,
+and carefully enumerates the dedications offered by translators or original
+writers to Federigo of Urbino.&mdash;L. G.]
+</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_443_443" id="Footnote_443_443"></a><a href="#FNanchor_443_443"><span class="label">[443]</span></a> For what follows and in part for what has gone before, see W.
+Wattenbach, <i>Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter</i>, 2nd. ed. Leipzig, 1875, pp.
+392 sqq., 405 sqq., 505. Comp. also the poem, <i>De Officio Scribæ</i>, of Phil.
+Beroaldus, who, however, is rather speaking of the public scrivener.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_444_444" id="Footnote_444_444"></a><a href="#FNanchor_444_444"><span class="label">[444]</span></a> When Piero de’ Medici, at the death of Matthias Corvinus, the book-loving
+King of Hungary, declared that the ‘scrittori’ must now lower
+their charges, since they would otherwise find no further employment
+(Scil. except in Italy), he can only have meant the Greek copyists, as the
+caligraphists, to whom one might be tempted to refer his words, continued
+to be numerous throughout all Italy. Fabroni, <i>Laurent. Magn.</i> Adnot.
+156 Comp. Adnot. 154.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_445_445" id="Footnote_445_445"></a><a href="#FNanchor_445_445"><span class="label">[445]</span></a> Gaye, <i>Carteggio</i>, i. p. 164. A letter of the year 1455 under Calixtus
+III. The famous miniature Bible of Urbino is written by a Frenchman,
+a workman of Vespasiano’s. See D’Agincourt, <i>La Peinture</i>, tab. 78. On
+German copyists in Italy, see further G. Campori, <i>Artisti Italiani e Stranieri
+negli Stati Estensi</i>, Modena, 1855, p. 277, and <i>Giornale di Erudizione
+Artistica</i>, vol. ii. pp. 360 sqq. Wattenbach, <i>Schriftwesen</i>, 411, note
+5. For German printers, see below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_446_446" id="Footnote_446_446"></a><a href="#FNanchor_446_446"><span class="label">[446]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. p. 335.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_447_447" id="Footnote_447_447"></a><a href="#FNanchor_447_447"><span class="label">[447]</span></a> Ambr. Trav. <i>Epist.</i> i. p. 63. The Pope was equally serviceable to
+the libraries of Urbino and Pesaro (that of Aless. Sforza, p. 38). Comp.
+Arch. Stor. ital. xxi. 103-106. The Bible and Commentaries on it; the
+Fathers of the Church; Aristotle, with his commentators, including Averroes
+and Avicenna; Moses Maimonides; Latin translations of Greek
+philosophers; the Latin prose writers; of the poets only Virgil, Statius,
+Ovid, and Lucan are mentioned.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_448_448" id="Footnote_448_448"></a><a href="#FNanchor_448_448"><span class="label">[448]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. p. 129.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_449_449" id="Footnote_449_449"></a><a href="#FNanchor_449_449"><span class="label">[449]</span></a> ‘Artes&mdash;Quis Labor est fessis demptus ab Articulis’ in a poem by
+Robertus Ursus about 1470, <i>Rerum Ital. Script, ex Codd. Fiorent.</i> tom, ii.
+col. 693. He rejoices rather too hastily over the rapid spread of classical
+literature which was hoped for. Comp. Libri, <i>Hist. des Sciences Mathématiques</i>,
+ii. 278 sqq. (See also the eulogy of Lor. Valla, <i>Hist. Zeitschr.</i>
+xxxii. 62.) For the printers at Rome (the first were Germans: Hahn, Pannartz,
+Schweinheim), see Gaspar. Veron. <i>Vita Pauli II.</i> in Murat. iii. ii.
+col. 1046; and Laire, <i>Spec. Hist. Typographiæ Romanae, xv. sec.</i> Romæ,
+1778; Gregorovius, vii. 525-33. For the first Privilegium in Venice, see
+Marin Sanudo, in Muratori, xxii. col. 1189.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_450_450" id="Footnote_450_450"></a><a href="#FNanchor_450_450"><span class="label">[450]</span></a> Something of the sort had already existed in the age of manuscripts.
+See Vespas. Fior. p. 656, on the <i>Cronaco del Mondo</i> of Zembino of Pistoia.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_451_451" id="Footnote_451_451"></a><a href="#FNanchor_451_451"><span class="label">[451]</span></a> Fabroni, <i>Laurent. Magn.</i> Adnot. 212. It happened in the case of the
+libel. <i>De Exilio</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_452_452" id="Footnote_452_452"></a><a href="#FNanchor_452_452"><span class="label">[452]</span></a> Even in Petrarch the consciousness of this superiority of Italians over
+Greeks is often to be noticed: <i>Epp. Fam.</i> lib. i. ep. 3; <i>Epp. Sen.</i> lib. xii.
+ep. 2; he praises the Greeks reluctantly: <i>Carmina</i>, lib. iii. 30 (ed. Rossetti,
+vol. ii. p. 342). A century later, Æneas Sylvius writes (Comm. to Panormita,
+‘De Dictis et Factis Alfonsi,’ Append.): ‘Alfonsus tanto est Socrate
+major quanto gravior Romanus homo quam Græcus putatur.’ In accordance
+with this feeling the study of Greek was thought little of. From a
+document made use of below, written about 1460, it appears that Porcellio
+and Tomaso Seneca tried to resist the rising influence of Greek. Similarly,
+Paolo Cortese (1490) was averse to Greek, lest the hitherto exclusive
+authority of Latin should be impaired, <i>De Hominibus Doctis</i>, p. 20. For
+Greek studies in Italy, see esp. the learned work of Favre, <i>Mélanges d’Hist.
+Liter.</i> i. <i>passim</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_453_453" id="Footnote_453_453"></a><a href="#FNanchor_453_453"><span class="label">[453]</span></a> See above p. 187, and comp. C. Voigt, <i>Wiederbelebung</i>, 323 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_454_454" id="Footnote_454_454"></a><a href="#FNanchor_454_454"><span class="label">[454]</span></a> The dying out of these Greeks is mentioned by Pierius Valerian, <i>De
+Infelicitate Literat.</i> in speaking of Lascaris. And Paulus Jovius, at the
+end of his <i>Elogia Literaria</i>, says of the Germans, ‘Quum literæ non latinæ
+modo cum pudore nostro, sed græcæ et hebraicæ in eorum terras fatali
+commigratione transierint’ (about 1450). Similarly, sixty years before
+(1482), Joh. Argyropulos had exclaimed, when he heard young Reuchlin
+translate Thucydides in his lecture-room at Rome, ‘Græcia nostra exilio
+transvolavit Alpes.’ Geiger, <i>Reuchlin</i> (Lpzg. 1871), pp. 26 sqq. Burchhardt,
+273. A remarkable passage is to be found in Jov. Pontanus, <i>Antonius</i>, opp. iv. p. 203: ‘In Græcia magis nunc Turcaicum discas quam
+Græcum. Quicquid enim doctorum habent Græcæ disciplinæ, in Italia
+nobiscum victitat.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_455_455" id="Footnote_455_455"></a><a href="#FNanchor_455_455"><span class="label">[455]</span></a> Ranke, <i>Päpste</i>, i. 486 sqq. Comp. the end of this part of our work.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_456_456" id="Footnote_456_456"></a><a href="#FNanchor_456_456"><span class="label">[456]</span></a> Tommaso Gar, <i>Relazioni della Corte di Roma</i>, i. pp. 338, 379.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_457_457" id="Footnote_457_457"></a><a href="#FNanchor_457_457"><span class="label">[457]</span></a> George of Trebizond, teacher of rhetoric at Venice, with a salary of
+150 ducats a year (see Malipiero, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> vii. ii. p. 653). For the
+Greek chair at Perugia, see <i>Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. ii. p. 19 of the Introduction.
+In the case of Rimini, there is some doubt whether Greek was taught
+or not. Comp. <i>Anecd. Litt.</i> ii. p. 300. At Bologna, the centre of juristic
+studies, Aurispa had but little success. Details on the subject in
+Malagola.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_458_458" id="Footnote_458_458"></a><a href="#FNanchor_458_458"><span class="label">[458]</span></a> Exhaustive information on the subject in the admirable work of A.
+F. Didot, <i>Alde Manuce et l’Héllenisme à Venise</i>, Paris, 1875.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_459_459" id="Footnote_459_459"></a><a href="#FNanchor_459_459"><span class="label">[459]</span></a> For what follows see A. de Gubernatis, <i>Matériaux pour servir à
+l’Histoire des Études Orientales en Italie</i>, Paris, Florence, &amp;c., 1876.
+Additions by Soave in the <i>Bolletino Italiano degli Studi Orientali</i>, i. 178
+sqq. More precise details below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_460_460" id="Footnote_460_460"></a><a href="#FNanchor_460_460"><span class="label">[460]</span></a> See below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_461_461" id="Footnote_461_461"></a><a href="#FNanchor_461_461"><span class="label">[461]</span></a> See <i>Commentario della Vita di Messer Gianozzo Manetti, scritto da
+Vespasiano Bisticci</i>, Torino, 1862, esp. pp. 11, 44, 91 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_462_462" id="Footnote_462_462"></a><a href="#FNanchor_462_462"><span class="label">[462]</span></a> Vesp. Fior. p. 320. A. Trav. <i>Epist.</i> lib. xi. 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_463_463" id="Footnote_463_463"></a><a href="#FNanchor_463_463"><span class="label">[463]</span></a> Platina, <i>Vita Sixti IV.</i> p. 332.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_464_464" id="Footnote_464_464"></a><a href="#FNanchor_464_464"><span class="label">[464]</span></a> Benedictus Faleus, <i>De Origine Hebraicarum Græcarum Latinarumque
+Literarum</i>, Naples, 1520.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_465_465" id="Footnote_465_465"></a><a href="#FNanchor_465_465"><span class="label">[465]</span></a> For Dante, see Wegele, <i>Dante</i>, 2nd ed. p. 268, and Lasinio, <i>Dante e le
+Lingue semitiche</i> in the <i>Rivista Orientale</i> (Flor. 1867-8). On Poggio,
+<i>Opera</i>, p. 297; Lion. Bruni, <i>Epist.</i> lib. ix. 12, comp. Gregorovius, vii. 555,
+and Shepherd-Tonelli, <i>Vita di Poggio</i>, i. 65. The letter of Poggio to Niccoli,
+in which he treats of Hebrew, has been lately published in French and
+Latin under the title, <i>Les Bains de Bade par Pogge</i>, by Antony Méray,
+Paris, 1876. Poggio desired to know on what principles Jerome translated
+the Bible, while Bruni maintained that, now that Jerome’s translation was
+in existence, distrust was shown to it by learning Hebrew. For Manetti as
+a collector of Hebrew MSS. see Steinschneider, in the work quoted below.
+In the library at Urbino there were in all sixty-one Hebrew manuscripts.
+Among them a Bible ‘opus mirabile et integrum, cum glossis mirabiliter
+scriptus in modo avium, arborum et animalium in maximo volumine, ut
+vix a tribus hominibus feratur.’ These, as appears from Assemanni’s list,
+are now mostly in the Vatican. On the first printing in Hebrew, see
+Steinschneider and Cassel, <i>Jud. Typographic in Esch. u. Gruber, Realencyclop.</i>
+sect. ii. bd. 28, p. 34, and <i>Catal. Bodl.</i> by Steinschneider, 1852-60,
+pp. 2821-2866. It is characteristic that of the two first printers one belonged
+to Mantua, the other to Reggio in Calabria, so that the printing of
+Hebrew books began almost contemporaneously at the two extremities of
+Italy. In Mantua the printer was a Jewish physician, who was helped
+by his wife. It may be mentioned as a curiosity that in the <i>Hypnerotomachia</i>
+of Polifilo, written 1467, printed 1499, fol. 68 <i>a</i>, there is a short
+passage in Hebrew; otherwise no Hebrew occurs in the Aldine editions
+before 1501. The Hebrew scholars in Italy are given by De Gubernatis
+(<a href="#page_080">p. 80</a>), but authorities are not quoted for them singly. (Marco Lippomanno
+is omitted; comp. Steinschneider in the book given below.) Paolo
+de Canale is mentioned as a learned Hebraist by Pier. Valerian. <i>De Infel.
+Literat.</i> ed. Mencken, p. 296; in 1488 Professor in Bologna, <i>Mag. Vicentius</i>;
+comp. <i>Costituzione, discipline e riforme dell’antico studio Bolognese.
+Memoria del Prof. Luciano Scarabelli</i>, Piacenza, 1876; in 1514 Professor
+in Rome, Agarius Guidacerius, acc. to Gregorovius, viii. 292, and the
+passages there quoted. On Guid. see Steinschneider, <i>Bibliogr. Handbuch</i>,
+Leipzig, 1859, pp. 56, 157-161.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_466_466" id="Footnote_466_466"></a><a href="#FNanchor_466_466"><span class="label">[466]</span></a> The literary activity of the Jews in Italy is too great and of too wide
+an influence to be passed over altogether in silence. The following paragraphs,
+which, not to overload the text, I have relegated to the notes, are
+wholly the substance of communications made me by Dr. M. Steinschneider,
+of Berlin, to whom I [Dr. Ludwig Geiger] here take the opportunity of
+expressing my thanks for his constant and friendly help. He has given
+exhaustive evidence on the subject in his profound and instructive treatise,
+‘Letteratura Italiana dei Giudei,’ in the review <i>Il Buonarotti</i>, vols. vi.
+viii. xi. xii.; Rome, 1871-77 (also printed separately); to which, once for
+all, I refer the reader.
+</p><p>
+There were many Jews living in Rome at the time of the Second
+Temple. They had so thoroughly adopted the language and civilisation
+prevailing in Italy, that even on their tombs they used not Hebrew,
+but Latin and Greek inscriptions (communicated by Garucci, see Steinschneider,
+<i>Hebr. Bibliogr.</i> vi. p. 102, 1863). In Lower Italy, especially,
+Greek learning survived during the Middle Ages among the inhabitants
+generally, and particularly among the Jews, of whom some are said to
+have taught at the University of Salerno, and to have rivalled the
+Christians in literary productiveness (comp. Steinschneider, ‘Donnolo,’ in
+Virchow’s <i>Archiv</i>, bd. 39, 40). This supremacy of Greek culture lasted till
+the Saracens conquered Lower Italy. But before this conquest the Jews
+of Middle Italy had been striving to equal or surpass their bretheren of
+the South. Jewish learning centred in Rome, and from there spread, as
+early as the sixteenth century, to Cordova, Kairowan, and South Germany.
+By means of these emigrants, Italian Judaism became the teacher of the
+whole race. Through its works, especially through the work <i>Aruch</i> of
+Nathan ben Jechiel (1101), a great dictionary to the Talmud, the Midraschim,
+and the Thargum, ‘which, though not informed by a genuine
+scientific spirit, offers so rich a store of matter and rests on such early
+authorities, that its treasures have even now not been wholly exhausted,’
+it exercised indirectly a great influence (Abraham Geiger, <i>Das Judenthum
+und seine Geschichte</i>, Breslau, bd. ii. 1865, p. 170; and the same author’s
+<i>Nachgelassene Schriften</i>, bd. ii. Berlin, 1875, pp. 129 and 154). A little
+later, in the thirteenth century, the Jewish literature in Italy brought
+Jews and Christians into contact, and received through Frederick II., and
+still more perhaps through his son Manfred, a kind of official sanction.
+Of this contact we have evidence in the fact that an Italian, Niccolò di
+Giovinazzo, studied with a Jew, Moses ben Salomo, the Latin translation
+of the famous work of Maimonides, <i>More Nebuchim</i>; of this sanction, in
+the fact that the Emperor, who was distinguished for his freethinking as
+much as for his fondness for Oriental studies, probably was the cause of
+this Latin translation being made, and summoned the famous Anatoli
+from Provence into Italy, to translate works of Averroes into Hebrew
+(comp. Steinschneider, <i>Hebr. Bibliogr.</i> xv. 86, and Renan, <i>L’Averroes et
+l’Averroisme</i>, third edition, Paris, 1866, p. 290). These measures prove
+the acquaintance of early Jews with Latin, which rendered intercourse
+possible between them and Christians&mdash;an intercourse which bore sometimes
+a friendly and sometimes a polemical character. Still more than
+Anatoli, Hillel b. Samuel, in the latter half of the thirteenth century,
+devoted himself to Latin literature; he studied in Spain, returned to
+Italy, and here made many translations from Latin into Hebrew; among
+them of writings of Hippocrates in a Latin version. (This was printed
+1647 by Gaiotius, and passed for his own.) In this translation he introduced
+a few Italian words by way of explanation, and thus perhaps, or by
+his whole literary procedure, laid himself open to the reproach of despising
+Jewish doctrines.
+</p><p>
+But the Jews went further than this. At the end of the thirteenth
+and in the fourteenth centuries, they drew so near to Christian science
+and to the representatives of the culture of the Renaissance, that one of
+them, Giuda Romano, in a series of hitherto unprinted writings, laboured
+zealously at the scholastic philosophy, and in one treatise used Italian
+words to explain Hebrew expressions. He is one of the first to do so
+(Steinschneider, <i>Giuda Romano</i>, Rome, 1870). Another, Giuda’s cousin
+Manoello, a friend of Dante, wrote in imitation of him a sort of Divine
+Comedy in Hebrew, in which he extols Dante, whose death he also
+bewailed in an Italian sonnet (Abraham Geiger, <i>Jüd. Zeitsch.</i> v. 286-331,
+Breslau, 1867). A third, Mose Riete, born towards the end of the century,
+wrote works in Italian (a specimen in the Catalogue of Hebrew MSS.,
+Leyden, 1858). In the fifteenth century we can clearly recognise the influence
+of the Renaissance in Messer Leon, a Jewish writer, who, in his
+<i>Rhetoric</i>, uses Quintilian and Cicero, as well as Jewish authorities. One
+of the most famous Jewish writers in Italy in the fifteenth century was
+Eliah del Medigo, a philosopher who taught publicly as a Jew in Padua
+and Florence, and was once chosen by the Venetian Senate as arbitrator
+in a philosophical dispute (Abr. Geiger, <i>Nachgelassene Schriften</i>, Berlin,
+1876, bd. iii. 3). Eliah del Medigo was the teacher of Pico della Mirandola;
+besides him, Jochanan Alemanno (comp. Steinschneider, <i>Polem. u.
+Apolog. Lit.</i> Lpzg. 1877, anh. 7, § 25). The list of learned Jews in Italy
+may be closed by Kalonymos ben David and Abraham de Balmes (d. 1523),
+to whom the greater part of the translations of Averroes from Hebrew
+into Latin is due, which were still publicly read at Padua in the seventeenth
+century. To this scholar may be added the Jewish Aldus, Gerson
+Soncino, who not only made his press the centre of Jewish printing, but,
+by publishing Greek works, trespassed on the ground of the great Aldus
+himself (Steinschneider, <i>Gerson Soncino und Aldus Manutius</i>, Berlin,
+1858).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_467_467" id="Footnote_467_467"></a><a href="#FNanchor_467_467"><span class="label">[467]</span></a> Pierius Valerian. <i>De Infelic. Lit.</i> ed. Mencken, 301, speaking of
+Mongajo. Gubernatis, p. 184, identifies him with Andrea Alpago, of
+Bellemo, said to have also studied Arabian literature, and to have
+travelled in the East. On Arabic studies generally, Gubernatis, pp. 173
+sqq. For a translation made 1341 from Arabic into Italian, comp.
+Narducci, <i>Intorno ad una tradizione italiana di una composizione astronomica
+di Alfonso X. rè di Castiglia</i>, Roma 1865. On Ramusio, see
+Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, fol. 250.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_468_468" id="Footnote_468_468"></a><a href="#FNanchor_468_468"><span class="label">[468]</span></a> Gubernatis, p. 188. The first book contains Christian prayers in
+Arabic; the first Italian translations of the Koran appeared in 1547. In
+1499 we meet with a few not very successful Arabic types in the work of
+Polifilo, b. 7 <i>a</i>. For the beginnings of Egyptian studies, see Gregorovius,
+viii. p. 304.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_469_469" id="Footnote_469_469"></a><a href="#FNanchor_469_469"><span class="label">[469]</span></a> Especially in the important letter of the year 1485 to Ermolao Barbaro,
+in <i>Ang. Politian. Epistolæ</i>, l. ix. Comp. Jo. Pici, <i>Oratio de Hominis Dignitate</i>.
+For this discourse, see the end of part iv.; on Pico himself more
+will be given in part vi. chap. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_470_470" id="Footnote_470_470"></a><a href="#FNanchor_470_470"><span class="label">[470]</span></a> Their estimate of themselves is indicated by Poggio (<i>De Avaritia</i>,
+fol. 2), according to whom only such persons could say that they had
+lived (<i>se vixisse</i>) who had written learned and eloquent books in Latin
+or translated Greek into Latin.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_471_471" id="Footnote_471_471"></a><a href="#FNanchor_471_471"><span class="label">[471]</span></a> Esp. Libri, <i>Histoires des Sciences Mathém.</i> ii. 159 sqq., 258 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_472_472" id="Footnote_472_472"></a><a href="#FNanchor_472_472"><span class="label">[472]</span></a> <i>Purgatorio</i>, xviii. contains striking instances. Mary hastens over the
+mountains, Cæsar to Spain; Mary is poor and Fabricius disinterested. We
+may here remark on the chronological introduction of the Sibyls into the
+profane history of antiquity as attempted by Uberti in his <i>Dittamondo</i> (i.
+cap. 14, 15), about 1360.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_473_473" id="Footnote_473_473"></a><a href="#FNanchor_473_473"><span class="label">[473]</span></a> The first German translation of the <i>Decameron</i>, by H. Steinhovel, was
+printed in 1472, and soon became popular. The translations of the whole
+<i>Decameron</i> were almost everywhere preceded by those of the story of
+Griselda, written in Latin by Petrarch.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_474_474" id="Footnote_474_474"></a><a href="#FNanchor_474_474"><span class="label">[474]</span></a> These Latin writings of Boccaccio have been admirably discussed
+recently by Schück, <i>Zur Characteristik des ital. Hum. im 14 und 15 Jahrh.</i>
+Breslau, 1865; and in an article in Fleckeisen and Masius, <i>Jahrbücher fur
+Phil. und Pädag.</i> bd. xx. (1874).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_475_475" id="Footnote_475_475"></a><a href="#FNanchor_475_475"><span class="label">[475]</span></a> ‘Poeta,’ even in Dante (<i>Vita Nuova</i>, p. 47), means only the writer of
+Latin verses, while for Italian the expressions ‘Rimatore, Dicitore per
+rima,’ are used. It is true that the names and ideas became mixed in
+course of time.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_476_476" id="Footnote_476_476"></a><a href="#FNanchor_476_476"><span class="label">[476]</span></a> Petrarch, too, at the height of his fame complained in moments of
+melancholy that his evil star decreed him to pass his last years among
+scoundrels (<i>extremi fures</i>). In the imaginary letter to Livy, <i>Epp. Fam.</i>
+ed. Fracass. lib. xxiv. ep. 8. That Petrarch defended poetry, and how, is
+well known (comp. Geiger, <i>Petr.</i> 113-117). Besides the enemies who beset
+him in common with Boccaccio, he had to face the doctors (comp. <i>Invectivæ
+in Medicum Objurgantem</i>, lib. i. and ii.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_477_477" id="Footnote_477_477"></a><a href="#FNanchor_477_477"><span class="label">[477]</span></a> Boccaccio, in a later letter to Jacobus Pizinga (<i>Opere Volgari</i>, vol. xvi.),
+confines himself more strictly to poetry properly so called. And yet he
+only recognises as poetry that which treated of antiquity, and ignores the
+Troubadours.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_478_478" id="Footnote_478_478"></a><a href="#FNanchor_478_478"><span class="label">[478]</span></a> Petr. <i>Epp. Senil.</i> lib. i. ep. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_479_479" id="Footnote_479_479"></a><a href="#FNanchor_479_479"><span class="label">[479]</span></a> Boccaccio (<i>Vita di Dante</i>, p. 50): ‘La quale (laurea) non scienza accresce
+ma è dell’acquistata certissimo testimonio e ornamento.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_480_480" id="Footnote_480_480"></a><a href="#FNanchor_480_480"><span class="label">[480]</span></a> <i>Paradiso</i>, xxv. 1 sqq. Boccaccio, <i>Vita di Dante</i>, p. 50. ‘Sopra le fonti
+di San Giovanni si era disporto di coronare.’ Comp. <i>Paradiso</i>, i. 25.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_481_481" id="Footnote_481_481"></a><a href="#FNanchor_481_481"><span class="label">[481]</span></a> See Boccaccio’s letter to him in the <i>Opere Volgari</i>, vol. xvi. p. 36: ‘Si
+præstet Deus, concedente senatu Romuleo.’ ...</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_482_482" id="Footnote_482_482"></a><a href="#FNanchor_482_482"><span class="label">[482]</span></a> Matt. Villani, v. 26. There was a solemn procession on horseback
+round the city, when the followers of the Emperor, his ‘baroni,’ accompanied
+the poet. Boccaccio, l. c. Petrarch: <i>Invectivæ contra Med. Præf.</i>
+See also <i>Epp. Fam. Volgarizzate da Fracassetti</i>, iii. 128. For the speech
+of Zanobi at the coronation, Friedjung, l. c. 308 sqq. Fazio degli Uberti
+was also crowned, but it is not known where or by whom.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_483_483" id="Footnote_483_483"></a><a href="#FNanchor_483_483"><span class="label">[483]</span></a> Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 185.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_484_484" id="Footnote_484_484"></a><a href="#FNanchor_484_484"><span class="label">[484]</span></a> Vespas. Fiorent. pp. 575, 589. <i>Vita Jan. Manetti</i>, in Murat. xx. col. 543.
+The celebrity of Lionardo Aretino was in his lifetime so great that people
+came from all parts merely to see him; a Spaniard fell on his knees before
+him.&mdash;Vesp. p. 568. For the monument of Guarino, the magistrate of
+Ferrara allowed, in 1461, the then considerable sum of 100 ducats. On
+the coronation of poets in Italy there is a good summary of notices in
+Favre, <i>Mélanges d’Hist. Lit.</i> (1856) i. 65 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_485_485" id="Footnote_485_485"></a><a href="#FNanchor_485_485"><span class="label">[485]</span></a> Comp. Libri, <i>Histoire des Sciences Mathém.</i> ii. p. 92 sqq. Bologna, as
+is well known, was older. Pisa flourished in the fourteenth century, fell
+through the wars with Florence, and was afterwards restored by Lorenzo
+Magnifico, ‘ad solatium veteris amissæ libertatis,’ as Giovio says, <i>Vita
+Leonis X.</i> l. i. The university of Florence (comp. Gaye, <i>Carteggio</i>, i. p.
+461 to 560 <i>passim</i>; <i>Matteo Villani</i>, i. 8; vii. 90), which existed as early as
+1321, with compulsory attendance for the natives of the city, was founded
+afresh after the Black Death in 1848, and endowed with an income of
+2,500 gold florins, fell again into decay, and was refounded in 1357. The
+chair for the explanation of Dante, established in 1373 at the request of
+many citizens, was afterwards commonly united with the professorship of
+philology and rhetoric, as when Filelfo held it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_486_486" id="Footnote_486_486"></a><a href="#FNanchor_486_486"><span class="label">[486]</span></a> This should be noticed in the lists of professors, as in that of the
+University of Pavia in 1400 (Corio, <i>Storia di Milano</i>, fol. 290), where
+(among others) no less than twenty jurists appear.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_487_487" id="Footnote_487_487"></a><a href="#FNanchor_487_487"><span class="label">[487]</span></a> Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col. 990.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_488_488" id="Footnote_488_488"></a><a href="#FNanchor_488_488"><span class="label">[488]</span></a> Fabroni, <i>Laurent. Magn.</i> Adnot. 52, in the year 1491.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_489_489" id="Footnote_489_489"></a><a href="#FNanchor_489_489"><span class="label">[489]</span></a> Allegretto, <i>Diari Sanesi</i>, in Murat. xiii. col. 824.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_490_490" id="Footnote_490_490"></a><a href="#FNanchor_490_490"><span class="label">[490]</span></a> Filelfo, when called to the newly founded University of Pisa, demanded
+at least 500 gold florins. Comp. Fabroni, <i>Laur. Magn.</i> ii. 75 sqq.
+The negotiations were broken off, not only on account of the high salary
+asked for.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_491_491" id="Footnote_491_491"></a><a href="#FNanchor_491_491"><span class="label">[491]</span></a> Comp. Vespasian. Fiorent. pp. 271, 572, 582, 625. <i>Vita. Jan. Manetti</i>,
+in Murat. xx. col. 531 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_492_492" id="Footnote_492_492"></a><a href="#FNanchor_492_492"><span class="label">[492]</span></a> Vespas. Fiorent. p. 1460. Prendilacqua (a pupil of Vitt.), <i>Intorno alla
+Vita di V. da F.</i>, first ed. by Natale dalle Laste, 1774, translated by
+Giuseppe Brambilla, Como, 1871. C. Rosmini, <i>Idea dell’ottimo Precettore
+nella Vita e Disciplina di Vittorino da Feltre e de’ suoi Discepoli</i>, Bassano,
+1801. Later works by Racheli (Milan, 1832), and Venoit (Paris, 1853).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_493_493" id="Footnote_493_493"></a><a href="#FNanchor_493_493"><span class="label">[493]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. p. 646, of which, however, C. Rosmini, <i>Vita e Disciplina
+di Guarino Veronese e de’ suoi Discepoli</i>, Brescia, 1856 (3 vols.), says that
+it is (ii. 56), ‘formicolante di errori di fatto.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_494_494" id="Footnote_494_494"></a><a href="#FNanchor_494_494"><span class="label">[494]</span></a> For these and for Guarino generally, see Facius, <i>De Vir. Illustribus</i>,
+p. 17 sqq.; and Cortesius, <i>De Hom. Doctis</i>, p. 13. Both agree that the
+scholars of the following generation prided themselves on having been
+pupils of Guarino; but while Fazio praises his works, Cortese thinks that
+he would have cared better for his fame if he had written nothing.
+Guarino and Vittorino were friends and helped one another in their
+studies. Their contemporaries were fond of comparing them, and in this
+comparison Guarino commonly held the first place (Sabellico, <i>Dial. de
+Lingu. Lat. Reparata</i>, in Rosmini, ii. 112). Guarino’s attitude with regard
+to the ‘Ermafrodito’ is remarkable; see Rosmini, ii. 46 sqq. In both
+these teachers an unusual moderation in food and drink was observed;
+they never drank undiluted wine: in both the principles of education were
+alike; they neither used corporal punishment; the hardest penalty which
+Vittorino inflicted was to make the boy kneel and lie upon the ground in
+the presence of his fellow-pupils.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_495_495" id="Footnote_495_495"></a><a href="#FNanchor_495_495"><span class="label">[495]</span></a> To the Archduke Sigismond, <i>Epist.</i> 105, p. 600, and to King Ladislaus
+Postumus, p. 695; the latter as <i>Tractatus de Liberorum Educatione</i>
+(1450).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_496_496" id="Footnote_496_496"></a><a href="#FNanchor_496_496"><span class="label">[496]</span></a> P. 625. On Niccoli, see further a speech of Poggio, <i>Opera</i>, ed. 1513,
+fol. 102 sqq.; and a life by Manetti in his book, <i>De Illustribus Longaevis</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_497_497" id="Footnote_497_497"></a><a href="#FNanchor_497_497"><span class="label">[497]</span></a> The following words of Vespasiano are untranslatable: ‘A vederlo in
+tavola cosi antico come era, era una gentilezza.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_498_498" id="Footnote_498_498"></a><a href="#FNanchor_498_498"><span class="label">[498]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> p. 495.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_499_499" id="Footnote_499_499"></a><a href="#FNanchor_499_499"><span class="label">[499]</span></a> According to Vespas. p. 271, learned men were in the habit of meeting
+here for discussion.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_500_500" id="Footnote_500_500"></a><a href="#FNanchor_500_500"><span class="label">[500]</span></a> Of Niccoli it may be further remarked that, like Vittorino, he wrote
+nothing, being convinced that he could not treat of anything in as perfect
+a form as he desired; that his senses were so delicately poised that he
+‘neque rudentem asinum, neque secantem serram, neque muscipulam
+vagientem sentire audireve poterat.’ But the less favourable sides of
+Niccoli’s character must not be forgotten. He robbed his brother of his
+sweetheart Benvenuta, roused the indignation of Lionardo Aretino by this
+act, and was embittered by the girl against many of his friends. He took
+ill the refusal to lend him books, and had a violent quarrel with Guarino
+on this account. He was not free from a petty jealousy, under the influence
+of which he tried to drive Chrysoloras, Poggio, and Filelfo away
+from Florence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_501_501" id="Footnote_501_501"></a><a href="#FNanchor_501_501"><span class="label">[501]</span></a> See his <i>Vita</i>, by Naldus Naldi, in Murat. xx. col. 532 sqq. See further
+Vespasiano Bisticci, <i>Commentario della Vita di Messer Giannozzo Manetti</i>,
+first published by P. Fanfani in <i>Collezione di Opere inedite o rare</i>, vol. ii.
+Torino, 1862. This ‘Commentario’ must be distinguished from the short
+‘Vita’ of Manetti by the same author, in which frequent reference is
+made to the former. Vespasiano was on intimate terms with Giannozzo
+Manetti, and in the biography tried to draw an ideal picture of a statesman
+for the degenerate Florence. Vesp. is Naldi’s authority. Comp. also
+the fragment in Galetti, <i>Phil. Vill. Liber Flor.</i> 1847, pp. 129-138. Half
+a century after his death Manetti was nearly forgotten. Comp. Paolo
+Cortese, p. 21.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_502_502" id="Footnote_502_502"></a><a href="#FNanchor_502_502"><span class="label">[502]</span></a> The title of the work, in Latin and Italian, is given in Bisticci, <i>Commentario</i>,
+pp. 109, 112.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_503_503" id="Footnote_503_503"></a><a href="#FNanchor_503_503"><span class="label">[503]</span></a> What was known of Plato before can only have been fragmentary. A
+strange discussion on the antagonism of Plato and Aristotle took place at
+Ferrara in 1438, between Ugo of Siena and the Greeks who came to the
+Council. Comp. Æneas Sylvius, <i>De Europa</i>, cap. 52 (<i>Opera</i>, p. 450).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_504_504" id="Footnote_504_504"></a><a href="#FNanchor_504_504"><span class="label">[504]</span></a> In Niccolò Valori, <i>Life of Lorenzo the Magnificent</i>. Comp. Vespas.
+Fiorent. p. 426. The first supporters of Argyropulos were the Acciajuoli.
+<i>Ib.</i> 192: Cardinal Bessarion and his parallels between Plato and Aristotle.
+<i>Ib.</i> 223: Cusanus as Platonist. <i>Ib.</i> 308: The Catalonian Narciso and his
+disputes with Argyropulos. <i>Ib.</i> 571: Single Dialogues of Plato, translated
+by Lionardo Aretino. <i>Ib.</i> 298: The rising influence of Neoplatonism.
+On Marsilio Ficino, see Reumont, <i>Lorenzo de’ Medici</i>, ii. 27 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_505_505" id="Footnote_505_505"></a><a href="#FNanchor_505_505"><span class="label">[505]</span></a> Varchi, <i>Stor. Fior.</i> p. 321. An admirable sketch of character.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_506_506" id="Footnote_506_506"></a><a href="#FNanchor_506_506"><span class="label">[506]</span></a> The lives of Guarino and Vittorino by Rosmini mentioned above
+(<a href="#page_213">p. 213</a>, note 1; and 215, note 1), as well as the life of Poggio by Shepherd,
+especially in the enlarged Italian translation of Tonelli (2 vols. Florence,
+1825); the Correspondence of Poggio, edited by the same writer (2 vols.
+Flor. 1832); and the letters of Poggio in Mai’s <i>Spicilegium</i>, tom. x. Rome,
+1844, pp. 221-272, all contain much on this subject.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_507_507" id="Footnote_507_507"></a><a href="#FNanchor_507_507"><span class="label">[507]</span></a> <i>Epist. 39</i>; <i>Opera</i>, p. 526, to Mariano Socino.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_508_508" id="Footnote_508_508"></a><a href="#FNanchor_508_508"><span class="label">[508]</span></a> We must not be misled by the fact that along with all this complaints
+were frequently heard of the inadequacy of princely patronage and of the
+indifference of many princes to their fame. See e.g. Bapt. Mantan, Eclog.
+v. as early as the fifteenth century; and Ambrogio Traversari, <i>De Infelicitate
+Principum</i>. It was impossible to satisfy all.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_509_509" id="Footnote_509_509"></a><a href="#FNanchor_509_509"><span class="label">[509]</span></a> For the literary and scientific patronage of the popes down to the end
+of the fifteenth century, see Gregorovius, vols. vii. and viii. For Pius II.,
+see Voigt, <i>En. Silvio als Papst Pius II.</i> bd. iii. (Berlin, 1863), pp. 406-440.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_510_510" id="Footnote_510_510"></a><a href="#FNanchor_510_510"><span class="label">[510]</span></a> Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, <i>De Poetis Nostri Temporis</i>, speaking of the <i>Sphaerulus</i>
+of Camerino. The worthy man did not finish it in time, and his work
+lay for forty years in his desk. For the scanty payments made by Sixtus
+IV., comp. Pierio Valer. <i>De Infelic. Lit.</i> on Theodoras Gaza. He received for
+a translation and commentary of a work of Aristotle fifty gold florins, ‘ab
+eo a quo se totum inauratum iri speraverat.’ On the deliberate exclusion
+of the humanists from the cardinalate by the popes before Leo, comp. Lor.
+Grana’s funeral oration on Cardinal Egidio, <i>Anecdot. Litt.</i> iv. p. 307.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_511_511" id="Footnote_511_511"></a><a href="#FNanchor_511_511"><span class="label">[511]</span></a> The best are to be found in the <i>Deliciae Poetarum Italorum</i>, and in
+the Appendices to the various editions of Roscoe, <i>Leo X.</i> Several poets
+and writers, like Alcyonius, <i>De Exilio</i>, ed. Menken, p. 10, say frankly that
+they praise Leo in order themselves to become immortal.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_512_512" id="Footnote_512_512"></a><a href="#FNanchor_512_512"><span class="label">[512]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i> speaking of Guido Posthumus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_513_513" id="Footnote_513_513"></a><a href="#FNanchor_513_513"><span class="label">[513]</span></a> Pierio Valeriano in his <i>Simia</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_514_514" id="Footnote_514_514"></a><a href="#FNanchor_514_514"><span class="label">[514]</span></a> See the elegy of Joh. Aurelius Mutius in the <i>Deliciae Poetarum
+Italorum</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_515_515" id="Footnote_515_515"></a><a href="#FNanchor_515_515"><span class="label">[515]</span></a> The well-known story of the purple velvet purse filled with packets
+of gold of various sizes, in which Leo used to thrust his hand blindly, is
+in Giraldi <i>Hecatommithi</i>, vi. nov. 8. On the other hand, the Latin ‘improvisatori,’
+when their verses were too faulty, were whipped. Lil. Greg.
+Gyraldus, <i>De Poetis Nostri Temp. Opp.</i> ii. 398 (Basil, 1580).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_516_516" id="Footnote_516_516"></a><a href="#FNanchor_516_516"><span class="label">[516]</span></a> Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi. iv. 181.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_517_517" id="Footnote_517_517"></a><a href="#FNanchor_517_517"><span class="label">[517]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. p. 68 sqq. For the translations from Greek made by
+Alfonso’s orders, see p. 93; <i>Vita Jan. Manetti</i>, in Murat. xx. col. 541 sqq.,
+450 sqq., 495. Panormita, <i>Dicta et Facta Alfonsi</i>, with the notes by Æneas
+Sylvius, ed. by Jacob Spiegel, Basel, 1538.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_518_518" id="Footnote_518_518"></a><a href="#FNanchor_518_518"><span class="label">[518]</span></a> Even Alfonso was not able to please everybody&mdash;Poggio, for example.
+See Shepherd-Tonelli, <i>Poggio</i> ii. 108 sqq. and Poggio’s letter to Facius in
+<i>Fac. de Vir. Ill.</i> ed. Mehus, p. 88, where he writes of Alfonso: ‘Ad ostentationem
+quædam facit quibus videatur doctis viris favere;’ and Poggio’s
+letter in Mai, <i>Spicil.</i> tom. x. p. 241.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_519_519" id="Footnote_519_519"></a><a href="#FNanchor_519_519"><span class="label">[519]</span></a> Ovid. <i>Amores</i>, iii. 11, vs. ii.; Jovian. Pontan. <i>De Principe</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_520_520" id="Footnote_520_520"></a><a href="#FNanchor_520_520"><span class="label">[520]</span></a> <i>Giorn. Napolet.</i> in Murat. xxi. col. 1127.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_521_521" id="Footnote_521_521"></a><a href="#FNanchor_521_521"><span class="label">[521]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. pp. 3, 119 sqq. ‘Volle aver piena notizia d’ogni cosa,
+cosi sacra come gentile.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_522_522" id="Footnote_522_522"></a><a href="#FNanchor_522_522"><span class="label">[522]</span></a> The last Visconti divided his interest between Livy, the French chivalrous
+romances, Dante, and Petrarch. The humanists who presented themselves
+to him with the promise ‘to make him famous,’ were generally sent
+away after a few days. Comp. <i>Decembrio</i>, in Murat. xx. col. 1114.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_523_523" id="Footnote_523_523"></a><a href="#FNanchor_523_523"><span class="label">[523]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Vita Alfonsi Ducis</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_524_524" id="Footnote_524_524"></a><a href="#FNanchor_524_524"><span class="label">[524]</span></a> On Collenuccio at the court of Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro (son of Alessandro,
+p. 28), who finally, in 1508, put him to death, see p. 135, note 4.
+At the time of the last Ordelaffi at Forli, the place was occupied by Codrus
+Urceus (1477-80); death-bed complaint of C. U. <i>Opp.</i> Ven. 1506, fol. liv.;
+for his stay in Forli, <i>Sermo</i>, vi. Comp. Carlo Malagola, <i>Della Vita di C.
+U.</i> Bologna, 1877, Ap. iv. Among the instructed despots, we may mention
+Galeotto Manfreddi of Faenza, murdered in 1488 by his wife, and some of
+the Bentivoglio family at Bologna.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_525_525" id="Footnote_525_525"></a><a href="#FNanchor_525_525"><span class="label">[525]</span></a> <i>Anecdota Literar.</i> ii. pp. 305 sqq., 405. Basinius of Parma ridicules
+Porcellio and Tommaso Seneca; they are needy parasites, and must play
+the soldier in their old age, while he himself was enjoying an ‘ager’ and
+a ‘villa.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_526_526" id="Footnote_526_526"></a><a href="#FNanchor_526_526"><span class="label">[526]</span></a> For details respecting these graves, see Keyssler, <i>Neueste Reisen</i>, s. 924.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_527_527" id="Footnote_527_527"></a><a href="#FNanchor_527_527"><span class="label">[527]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. ii. p. 92. By history he means all that has to do
+with antiquity. Cortesius also praises him highly, p. 34 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_528_528" id="Footnote_528_528"></a><a href="#FNanchor_528_528"><span class="label">[528]</span></a> Fabroni, <i>Costnus</i>, Adnot. 118. Vespasian. Fior. <i>passim</i>. An important
+passage respecting the demands made by the Florentines on their
+secretaries (‘quod honor apud Florentinos magnus habetur,’ says B.
+Facius, speaking of Poggio’s appointment to the secretaryship, <i>De Vir. Ill.</i>
+p. 17), is to be found in Æneas Sylvius, <i>De Europâ</i>, cap. 54 (<i>Opera</i>, p. 454).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_529_529" id="Footnote_529_529"></a><a href="#FNanchor_529_529"><span class="label">[529]</span></a> See Voigt, <i>En. Silvio als Papst Pius II.</i> bd. iii. 488 sqq., for the often-discussed
+and often-misunderstood change which Pius II. made with respect
+to the Abbreviators.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_530_530" id="Footnote_530_530"></a><a href="#FNanchor_530_530"><span class="label">[530]</span></a> Comp. the statement of Jacob Spiegel (1521) given in the reports of
+the Vienna Academy, lxxviii. 333.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_531_531" id="Footnote_531_531"></a><a href="#FNanchor_531_531"><span class="label">[531]</span></a> <i>Anecdota Lit.</i> i. p. 119 sqq. A plea (‘Actio ad Cardinales Deputatos’)
+of Jacobus Volaterranus in the name of the Secretaries, no doubt of the
+time of Sixtus IV. (Voigt, l. c. 552, note). The humanistic claims of the
+‘advocati consistoriales’ rested on their oratory, as that of the Secretaries
+on their correspondence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_532_532" id="Footnote_532_532"></a><a href="#FNanchor_532_532"><span class="label">[532]</span></a> The Imperial chancery under Frederick III. was best known to Æneas
+Sylvius. Comp. <i>Epp.</i> 23 and 105; <i>Opera</i>, pp. 516 and 607.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_533_533" id="Footnote_533_533"></a><a href="#FNanchor_533_533"><span class="label">[533]</span></a> The letters of Bembo and Sadoleto have been often printed; those
+of the former, e.g. in the <i>Opera</i>, Basel, 1556, vol. ii., where the letters
+written in the name of Leo X. are distinguished from private letters;
+those of the latter most fully, 5 vols. Rome, 1760. Some additions to both
+have been given by Carlo Malagola in the review <i>Il Baretti</i>, Turin, 1875.
+Bembo’s <i>Asolani</i> will be spoken of below; Sadoleto’s significance for Latin
+style has been judged as follows by a contemporary, Petrus Alcyonius,
+<i>De Exilio</i>, ed. Menken, p. 119: ‘Solus autem nostrorum temporum aut
+certe cum paucis animadvertit elocutionem emendatam et latinam esse
+fundamentum oratoris; ad eamque obtinendam necesse esse latinam
+linguam expurgare quam inquinarunt nonnulli exquisitarum literarum
+omnino rudes et nullius judicii homines, qui partim a circumpadanis
+municipiis, partim ex transalpinis provinciis, in hanc urbem confluxerunt.
+Emendavit igitur ‘eruditissimus hic vir corruptam et vitiosam linguæ
+latinæ consuetudinem, pura ac integra loquendi ratione.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_534_534" id="Footnote_534_534"></a><a href="#FNanchor_534_534"><span class="label">[534]</span></a> Corio, <i>Storia di Milano</i>, fol. 449, for the letter of Isabella of Aragon
+to her father, Alfonso of Naples; fols. 451, 464, two letters of the Moor to
+Charles VIII. Compare the story in the <i>Lettere Pittoriche</i>, iii. 86 (Sebastiano
+del Piombo to Aretino), how Clement VII., during the sack of Rome,
+called his learned men round him, and made each of them separately write
+a letter to Charles V.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_535_535" id="Footnote_535_535"></a><a href="#FNanchor_535_535"><span class="label">[535]</span></a> For the correspondence of the period in general, see Voigt, <i>Wiederbelebung</i>,
+414-427.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_536_536" id="Footnote_536_536"></a><a href="#FNanchor_536_536"><span class="label">[536]</span></a> Bembo thought it necessary to excuse himself for writing in Italian:
+‘Ad Sempronium,’ <i>Bembi Opera</i>, Bas. 1556, vol. iii. 156 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_537_537" id="Footnote_537_537"></a><a href="#FNanchor_537_537"><span class="label">[537]</span></a> On the collection of the letters of Aretino, see above, pp. 164 sqq.,
+and the note. Collections of Latin letters had been printed even in the
+fifteenth century.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_538_538" id="Footnote_538_538"></a><a href="#FNanchor_538_538"><span class="label">[538]</span></a> Comp. the speeches in the <i>Opera</i> of Philelphus, Sabellicus, Beroaldus,
+&amp;c.; and the writings and lives of Giann. Manetti, Æneas Sylvius, and
+others.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_539_539" id="Footnote_539_539"></a><a href="#FNanchor_539_539"><span class="label">[539]</span></a> B. F. <i>De Viris Illustribus</i>, ed. Mehus, p. 7. Manetti, as Vesp. Bisticci,
+<i>Commentario</i>, p. 51, states, delivered many speeches in Italian, and then
+afterwards wrote them out in Latin. The scholars of the fifteenth century,
+e.g. Paolo Cortese, judge the achievements of the past solely from the
+point of view of ‘Eloquentia.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_540_540" id="Footnote_540_540"></a><a href="#FNanchor_540_540"><span class="label">[540]</span></a> <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 198, 205.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_541_541" id="Footnote_541_541"></a><a href="#FNanchor_541_541"><span class="label">[541]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. i. p. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_542_542" id="Footnote_542_542"></a><a href="#FNanchor_542_542"><span class="label">[542]</span></a> The success of the fortunate orator was great, and the humiliation of
+the speaker who broke down before distinguished audiences no less great.
+Examples of the latter in Petrus Crinitus, <i>De Honestâ Disciplinâ</i>, v. cap.
+3. Comp. Vespas. Fior. pp. 319, 430.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_543_543" id="Footnote_543_543"></a><a href="#FNanchor_543_543"><span class="label">[543]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. iv. p. 205. There were some Romans, too, who
+awaited him at Viterbo. ‘Singuli per se verba facere, ne alius alio melior
+videretur, cum essent eloquentiâ ferme pares.’ The fact that the Bishop
+of Arezzo was not allowed to speak in the name of the general embassy of
+the Italian states to the newly chosen Alexander VI., is seriously placed
+by Guicciardini (at the beginning of book i.) among the causes which
+helped to produce the disaster of 1494.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_544_544" id="Footnote_544_544"></a><a href="#FNanchor_544_544"><span class="label">[544]</span></a> Told by Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col. 1160.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_545_545" id="Footnote_545_545"></a><a href="#FNanchor_545_545"><span class="label">[545]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. ii. p. 107. Comp. p. 87. Another oratorical
+princess, Madonna Battista Montefeltro, married to a Malatesta,
+harangued Sigismund and Martin. Comp. <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iv. i. p. 442,
+note.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_546_546" id="Footnote_546_546"></a><a href="#FNanchor_546_546"><span class="label">[546]</span></a> <i>De Expeditione in Turcas</i>, in Murat. xxiii. col. 68. ‘Nihil enim Pii
+concionantis majestate sublimius.’ Not to speak of the naïve pleasure
+with which Pius describes his own triumphs, see Campanus, <i>Vita Pii II.</i>,
+in Murat. iii. ii. <i>passim</i>. At a later period these speeches were judged
+less admiringly. Comp. Voigt, <i>Enea Silvio</i>, ii. 275 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_547_547" id="Footnote_547_547"></a><a href="#FNanchor_547_547"><span class="label">[547]</span></a> Charles V., when unable on one occasion to follow the flourishes of
+a Latin orator at Genoa, replied in the ear of Giovio: ‘Ah, my tutor
+Adrian was right, when he told me I should be chastened for my childish
+idleness in learning Latin.’ Paul. Jov. <i>Vita Hadriani VI.</i> Princes
+replied to these speeches through their official orators; Frederick III.
+through Enea Silvio, in answer to Giannozzo Manetti. Vesp. Bist. <i>Comment.</i>
+p. 64.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_548_548" id="Footnote_548_548"></a><a href="#FNanchor_548_548"><span class="label">[548]</span></a> Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, <i>De poetis Nostri Temp.</i> speaking of Collenuccio.
+Filelfo, a married layman, delivered an introductory speech in the Cathedral
+at Como for the Bishop Scarampi, in 1460. Rosmini, <i>Filelfo</i>, ii. 122,
+iii. 147.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_549_549" id="Footnote_549_549"></a><a href="#FNanchor_549_549"><span class="label">[549]</span></a> Fabroni, <i>Cosmus</i>, Adnot. 52.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_550_550" id="Footnote_550_550"></a><a href="#FNanchor_550_550"><span class="label">[550]</span></a> Which, nevertheless, gave some offence to Jac. Volaterranus (in
+Murat. xxiii. col. 171) at the service in memory of Platina.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_551_551" id="Footnote_551_551"></a><a href="#FNanchor_551_551"><span class="label">[551]</span></a> <i>Anecdota Lit.</i> i. p. 299, in Fedra’s funeral oration on Lod. Podacataro,
+whom Guarino commonly employed on these occasions. Guarino himself
+delivered over fifty speeches at festivals and funerals, which are enumerated
+in Rosmini, <i>Guarino</i>, ii. 139-146. Burckhardt, 332. Dr. Geiger here
+remarks that Venice also had its professional orators. Comp. G. Voigt,
+ii. 425.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_552_552" id="Footnote_552_552"></a><a href="#FNanchor_552_552"><span class="label">[552]</span></a> Many of these opening lectures have been preserved in the works of
+Sabellicus, Beroaldus Major, Codrus Urceus, &amp;c. In the works of the
+latter there are also some poems which he recited ‘in principio studii.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_553_553" id="Footnote_553_553"></a><a href="#FNanchor_553_553"><span class="label">[553]</span></a> The fame of Pomponazzo’s delivery is preserved in Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia
+Vir. Doct.</i> p. 134. In general, it seems that the speeches, the form of
+which was required to be perfect, were learnt by heart. In the case of
+Giannozzo Manetti we know positively that it was so on one occasion
+(<i>Commentario</i>, 39). See, however, the account p. 64, with the concluding
+statement that Manetti spoke better <i>impromptu</i> than Aretino with preparation.
+We are told of Codrus Urceus, whose memory was weak, that
+he read his orations (<i>Vita</i>, at the end of his works. Ven. 1506, fol. lxx.).
+The following passage will illustrate the exaggerated value set on oratory:
+‘Ausim affirmare perfectum oratorem (si quisquam modo sit perfectus
+orator) ita facile posse nitorem, lætitiam, lumina et umbras rebus dare
+quas oratione exponendas suscipit, ut pictorem suis coloribus et pigmentis
+facere videmus.’ (Petr. Alcyonius, <i>De Exilio</i>, ed. Menken, p. 136.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_554_554" id="Footnote_554_554"></a><a href="#FNanchor_554_554"><span class="label">[554]</span></a> Vespas. Fior. p. 103. Comp. p. 598, where he describes how Giannozzo
+Manetti came to him in the camp.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_555_555" id="Footnote_555_555"></a><a href="#FNanchor_555_555"><span class="label">[555]</span></a> <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> xv. pp. 113, 121. Canestrini’s Introduction, p. 32 sqq.
+Reports of two such speeches to soldiers; the first, by Alamanni, is
+wonderfully fine and worthy of the occasion (1528).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_556_556" id="Footnote_556_556"></a><a href="#FNanchor_556_556"><span class="label">[556]</span></a> On this point see Faustinus Terdoceus, in his satire <i>De Triumpho
+Stultitiae</i>, lib. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_557_557" id="Footnote_557_557"></a><a href="#FNanchor_557_557"><span class="label">[557]</span></a> Both of these extraordinary cases occur in Sabellicus, <i>Opera</i>, fol.
+61-82. <i>De Origine et Auctu Religionis</i>, delivered at Verona from the
+pulpit before the barefoot friars; and <i>De Sacerdotii Laudibus</i>, delivered
+at Venice.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_558_558" id="Footnote_558_558"></a><a href="#FNanchor_558_558"><span class="label">[558]</span></a> Jac. Volaterrani. <i>Diar. Roman.</i> in Murat. xxiii. <i>passim</i>. In col. 173
+a remarkable sermon before the court, though in the absence of Sixtus IV.,
+is mentioned. Pater Paolo Toscanella thundered against the Pope, his
+family, and the cardinals. When Sixtus heard of it, he smiled.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_559_559" id="Footnote_559_559"></a><a href="#FNanchor_559_559"><span class="label">[559]</span></a> Fil. Villani, <i>Vitae</i>, ed. Galetti, p. 30.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_560_560" id="Footnote_560_560"></a><a href="#FNanchor_560_560"><span class="label">[560]</span></a> See above, p. 237, note 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_561_561" id="Footnote_561_561"></a><a href="#FNanchor_561_561"><span class="label">[561]</span></a> Georg. Trapezunt, <i>Rhetorica</i>, the first complete system of instruction.
+Æn. Sylvius, <i>Artis Rhetoricae Praecepta</i>, in the <i>Opera</i>, p. 992. treats purposely
+only of the construction of sentences and the position of words. It
+is characteristic as an instance of the routine which was followed. He
+names several other theoretical writers who are some of them no longer
+known. Comp. C. Voigt, ii. 262 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_562_562" id="Footnote_562_562"></a><a href="#FNanchor_562_562"><span class="label">[562]</span></a> His life in Murat. xx. is full of the triumphs of his eloquence. Comp.
+Vespas. Fior. 592 sqq., and <i>Commentario</i>, p. 30. On us these speeches
+make no great impression, e.g. that at the coronation of Frederick III.
+in Freher-Struve, <i>Script. Rer. Germ.</i> iii. 4-19. Of Manetti’s oration at
+the burial of Lion. Aretino, Shepherd-Tonelli says (<i>Poggio</i>, ii. 67 sqq.):
+‘L’orazione ch’ei compose, è ben la cosa la più meschina che potesse udirsi,
+piena di puerilità volgare nello stile, irrelevante negli argomenti e d’una
+prolissità insopportabile.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_563_563" id="Footnote_563_563"></a><a href="#FNanchor_563_563"><span class="label">[563]</span></a> <i>Annales Placentini</i>, in Murat. xx. col. 918.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_564_564" id="Footnote_564_564"></a><a href="#FNanchor_564_564"><span class="label">[564]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> Manetti. Comp. Vesp. <i>Commentario</i>, p. 30; so, too, Savonarola
+Comp. Perrens, <i>Vie de Savonarole</i>, i. p. 163. The shorthand writers, however,
+could not always follow him, or, indeed, any rapid ‘Improvisatori.’
+Savonarola preached in Italian. See Pasq. Villari: <i>Vita di Savonarola</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_565_565" id="Footnote_565_565"></a><a href="#FNanchor_565_565"><span class="label">[565]</span></a> It was by no means one of the best (<i>Opuscula Beroaldi</i>, Basel, 1509,
+fol. xviii.-xxi). The most remarkable thing in it is the flourish at the
+end: ‘Esto tibi ipsi archetypon et exemplar, teipsum imitare,’ etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_566_566" id="Footnote_566_566"></a><a href="#FNanchor_566_566"><span class="label">[566]</span></a> Letters and speeches of this kind were written by Alberto di Ripalta;
+comp. the <i>Annales Placentini</i>, written by his father Antonius and continued
+by himself, in Murat. xx. col. 914 sqq., where the pedant gives an
+instructive account of his own literary career.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_567_567" id="Footnote_567_567"></a><a href="#FNanchor_567_567"><span class="label">[567]</span></a> <i>Pauli Jovii Dialogus de Viris Litteris Illustribus</i>, in Tiraboschi, tom.
+vii. parte iv. Yet he says some ten years later, at the close of the <i>Elogia
+Litteraria</i>: ‘Tenemus adhuc (after the leadership in philology had passed
+to the Germans) sincerae et constantis eloquentiae munitam arcem,’ etc.
+The whole passage, given in German in Gregorovius, viii. 217 sqq. is important,
+as showing the view taken of Germany by an Italian, and is
+again quoted below in this connection.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_568_568" id="Footnote_568_568"></a><a href="#FNanchor_568_568"><span class="label">[568]</span></a> A special class is formed by the semi-satirical dialogues, which Collenuccio,
+and still more Pontano, copied from Lucian. Their example
+stimulated Erasmus and Hutten. For the treatises properly so-called
+parts of the ethical writings of Plutarch may have served as models.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_569_569" id="Footnote_569_569"></a><a href="#FNanchor_569_569"><span class="label">[569]</span></a> See below, part iv. chap. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_570_570" id="Footnote_570_570"></a><a href="#FNanchor_570_570"><span class="label">[570]</span></a> Comp. the epigram of Sannazaro:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Dum patriam laudat, damnat dum Poggius hostem,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Nec malus est civis, nec bonus historicus.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_571_571" id="Footnote_571_571"></a><a href="#FNanchor_571_571"><span class="label">[571]</span></a> Benedictus: <i>Caroli VIII. Hist.</i> in Eccard, Scriptt. vi. col. 1577.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_572_572" id="Footnote_572_572"></a><a href="#FNanchor_572_572"><span class="label">[572]</span></a> Petrus Crinitus deplores this contempt, <i>De honesta disciplina</i>, l. xviii.
+cap. 9. The humanists here resemble the writers in the decline of antiquity,
+who also severed themselves from their own age. Comp. Burckhardt, <i>Die Zeit Constantin’s des Grossen</i>. See for the other side several
+declarations of Poggio in Voigt, <i>Wiederbelebung</i>, p. 443 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_573_573" id="Footnote_573_573"></a><a href="#FNanchor_573_573"><span class="label">[573]</span></a> Lorenzo Valla, in the preface to the <i>Historia Ferdinandi Regis Arag.</i>;
+in opposition to him, Giacomo Zeno in the <i>Vita Caroli Zeni</i>, Murat. xix.
+p. 204. See, too, Guarino, in Rosmini, ii. 62 sqq., 177 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_574_574" id="Footnote_574_574"></a><a href="#FNanchor_574_574"><span class="label">[574]</span></a> In the letter to Pizinga, <i>Opere Volgari</i>, vol. xvi. p. 38. With Raph.
+Volaterranus, l. xxi. the intellectual world begins in the fourteenth century.
+He is the same writer whose early books contain so many notices&mdash;excellent
+for his time&mdash;of the history of all countries.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_575_575" id="Footnote_575_575"></a><a href="#FNanchor_575_575"><span class="label">[575]</span></a> Here, too, Petrarch cleared the way. See especially his critical investigation
+of the Austrian Charter, claiming to descend from Cæsar. <i>Epp.
+Sen.</i> xvi. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_576_576" id="Footnote_576_576"></a><a href="#FNanchor_576_576"><span class="label">[576]</span></a> Like that of Giannozzo Manetti in the presence of Nicholas V., of the
+whole Papal court, and of a great concourse of strangers from all parts.
+Comp. Vespas. Fior. p. 591, and more fully in the <i>Commentario</i>, pp. 37-40.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_577_577" id="Footnote_577_577"></a><a href="#FNanchor_577_577"><span class="label">[577]</span></a> In fact, it was already said that Homer alone contained the whole of
+the arts and sciences&mdash;that he was an encyclopædia. Comp. <i>Codri Urcei
+Opera</i>, Sermo xiii. at the end. It is true that we met with a similar
+opinion in several ancient writers. The words of C. U. (Sermo xiii.,
+habitus in laudem liberalium artium; <i>Opera</i>, ed. Ven. 1506, fol. xxxviii. <i>b</i>)
+are as follows: ‘Eia ergo bono animo esto; ego graecas litteras tibi exponam;
+et praecipue divinum Homerum, a quo ceu fonte perenni, ut scribit
+Naso, vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis. Ab Homero grammaticum dicere
+poteris, ab Homero rhetoricam, ab Homero medicinam, ab Homero astrologiam,
+ab Homero fabulas, ab Homero historias, ab Homero mores, ab
+Homero philosophorum dogmata, ab Homero artem militarem, ab Homero
+coquinariam, ab Homero architecturam, ab Homero regendarum urbium
+modum percipies; et in summa, quidquid boni quidquid honesti animus
+hominis discendi cupidus optare potest, in Homero facile poteris invenire.’
+To the same effect ‘Sermo’ vii. and viii. <i>Opera</i>, fol. xxvi. sqq., which
+treat of Homer only.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_578_578" id="Footnote_578_578"></a><a href="#FNanchor_578_578"><span class="label">[578]</span></a> A cardinal under Paul II. had his cooks instructed in the Ethics of
+Aristotle. Comp. Gaspar. Veron. <i>Vita Pauli II.</i> in Muratori, iii. ii. col. 1034.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_579_579" id="Footnote_579_579"></a><a href="#FNanchor_579_579"><span class="label">[579]</span></a> For the study of Aristotle in general, a speech of Hermolaus Barbarus
+is specially instructive.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_580_580" id="Footnote_580_580"></a><a href="#FNanchor_580_580"><span class="label">[580]</span></a> Bursellis, <i>Ann. Bonon.</i> in Murat. xxiii. col. 898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_581_581" id="Footnote_581_581"></a><a href="#FNanchor_581_581"><span class="label">[581]</span></a> Vasari, xi. pp. 189, 257. <i>Vite di Sodoma e di Garofalo.</i> It is not
+surprising that the profligate women at Rome took the most harmonious
+ancient names&mdash;Julia, Lucretia, Cassandra, Portia, Virginia, Penthesilea,
+under which they appear in Aretino. It was, perhaps, then that the Jews
+took the names of the great Semitic enemies of the Romans&mdash;Hannibal,
+Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, which even now they commonly bear in Rome.
+[This last assertion cannot be maintained. Neither Zunz, <i>Namen der
+Juden</i>, Leipzig, 1837, reprinted in Zunz <i>Gesammelte Schriften</i>, Berlin,
+1876, nor Steinschneider in his collection in <i>Il Buonarotti</i>, ser. ii. vol. vi.
+1871, pp. 196-199, speaks of any Jew of that period who bore these names,
+and even now, according to the enquiries of Prince Buoncompagni from
+Signer Tagliacapo, in charge of the Jewish archives in Rome, there are
+only a few who are named Asdrubale, and none Amilcare or Annibale.
+L. G.] Burckhardt, 352. A careful choice of names is recommended by
+L. B. Alberti, <i>Della familia</i>, opp. ii. p. 171. Maffeo Vegio (<i>De educatione
+liberorum.</i> lib. i. c. x.) warns his readers against the use of <i>nomina
+indecora barbara aut nova, aut quae gentilium deorum sunt</i>. Names
+like ‘Nero’ disgrace the bearer; while others such as Cicero, Brutus,
+Naso, Maro, can be used <i>qualiter per se parum venusta propter tamen
+eximiam illorum virtutem</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_582_582" id="Footnote_582_582"></a><a href="#FNanchor_582_582"><span class="label">[582]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Quasi che ‘l nome i buon giudici inganni,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">E che quel meglio t’ abbia a far poeta,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Che non farà lo studio di molt’ anni!’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+So jests Ariosto, to whom fortune had certainly given a harmonious name,
+in the <i>Seventh Satire</i>, vs. 64.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_583_583" id="Footnote_583_583"></a><a href="#FNanchor_583_583"><span class="label">[583]</span></a> Or after those of Bojardo, which are in part the same as his.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_584_584" id="Footnote_584_584"></a><a href="#FNanchor_584_584"><span class="label">[584]</span></a> The soldiers of the French army in 1512 were ‘omnibus diris ad
+inferos devocati!’ The honest canon, Tizio, who, in all seriousness, pronounced
+a curse from Macrobius against foreign troops, will be spoken of
+further on.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_585_585" id="Footnote_585_585"></a><a href="#FNanchor_585_585"><span class="label">[585]</span></a> <i>De infelicitate principum</i>, in Poggii <i>Opera</i>, fol. 152: ‘Cujus (Dantis)
+exstat poema praeclarum, neque, si literis Latinis constaret, ullâ ex parte
+poetis superioribus (the ancients) postponendum.’ According to Boccaccio,
+<i>Vita di Dante</i>, p. 74, ‘Many wise men’ even then discussed the question
+why Dante had not written in Latin. Cortesius (<i>De hominibus doctis</i>, p.
+7) complains: ‘Utinam tam bene cogitationes suas Latinus litteris mandare
+potuisset, quam bene patrium sermonem illustravit!’ He makes the same
+complaint in speaking of Petrarch and Boccaccio.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_586_586" id="Footnote_586_586"></a><a href="#FNanchor_586_586"><span class="label">[586]</span></a> His work <i>De vulgari eloquio</i> was for long almost unknown, and,
+valuable as it is to us, could never have exercised the influence of the
+<i>Divina Commedia</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_587_587" id="Footnote_587_587"></a><a href="#FNanchor_587_587"><span class="label">[587]</span></a> To know how far this fanaticism went, we have only to refer to Lil.
+Greg. Gyraldus, <i>De poetis nostri temporis</i>, <i>passim</i>. Vespasiano Bisticci
+is one of the few Latin writers of that time who openly confessed that
+they knew little of Latin (<i>Commentario della vita di G. Manetti</i>, p. 2),
+but he knew enough to introduce Latin sentences here and there in his
+writings, and to read Latin letters (<i>ibid.</i> 96, 165). In reference to this
+exclusive regard for Latin, the following passage may be quoted from
+Petr. Alcyonius, <i>De exilio</i>, ed. Menken, p. 213. He says that if Cicero
+could rise up and behold Rome, ‘Omnium maxime illum credo perturbarent ineptiae quorumdam qui, amisso studio veteris linguae quae eadem
+hujus urbis et universae Italiae propria erat, dies noctesque incumbunt in
+linguam Geticam aut Dacicam discendam eandemque omni ratione
+ampliendam, cum Goti, Visigothi et Vandali (qui erant olim Getae et
+Daci) eam in Italos invexerant, ut artes et linguam et nomen Romanum
+delerent.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_588_588" id="Footnote_588_588"></a><a href="#FNanchor_588_588"><span class="label">[588]</span></a> There were regular stylistic exercises, as in the <i>Orationes</i> of the elder
+Beroaldus, where there are two tales of Boccaccio, and even a ‘Canzone’
+of Petrarch translated into Latin.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_589_589" id="Footnote_589_589"></a><a href="#FNanchor_589_589"><span class="label">[589]</span></a> Comp. Petrarch’s letter from the earth to illustrious shades below.
+<i>Opera</i>, p. 704 sqq. See also p. 372 in the work <i>De rep. optime administranda</i>:
+‘Sic esse doleo, sed sic est.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_590_590" id="Footnote_590_590"></a><a href="#FNanchor_590_590"><span class="label">[590]</span></a> A burlesque picture of the fanatical purism prevalent in Rome is
+given by Jovian. Pontanus in his <i>Antonius</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_591_591" id="Footnote_591_591"></a><a href="#FNanchor_591_591"><span class="label">[591]</span></a> <i>Hadriani (Cornetani) Card. S. Chrysogoni de sermone latino liber</i>,
+especially the introduction. He finds in Cicero and his contemporaries
+Latinity in its absolute form (<i>an sich</i>). The same Codrus Urceus, who
+found in Homer the sum of all science (see above, p. 249, note 1) says
+(<i>Opp.</i> ed. 1506, fol. lxv.): ‘Quidquid temporibus meis aut vidi aut studui
+libens omne illud Cicero mihi felici dedit omine,’ and goes so far as to say
+in another poem (<i>ibid.</i>): ‘Non habet huic similem doctrinae Graecia
+mater.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_592_592" id="Footnote_592_592"></a><a href="#FNanchor_592_592"><span class="label">[592]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia doct. vir.</i> p. 187 sqq., speaking of Bapt. Pius.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_593_593" id="Footnote_593_593"></a><a href="#FNanchor_593_593"><span class="label">[593]</span></a> Paul Jov. <i>Elogia</i>, on Naugerius. Their ideal, he says, was: ‘Aliquid
+in stylo proprium, quod peculiarem ex certâ notâ mentis effigiem referret,
+ex naturae genio effinxisse.’ Politian, when in a hurry, objected to write
+his letters in Latin. Comp. Raph. Volat. <i>Comment. urban.</i> l. xxi. Politian
+to Cortesius (<i>Epist.</i> lib. viii. ep. 16): ‘Mihi vero longe honestior tauri
+facies, aut item leonis, quam simiae videtur;’ to which Cortesius replied:
+‘Ego malo esse assecla et simia Ciceronis quam alumnus.’ For Pico’s
+opinion on the Latin language, see the letter quoted above, p. 202.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_594_594" id="Footnote_594_594"></a><a href="#FNanchor_594_594"><span class="label">[594]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Dialogus de viris literis illustribus</i>, in Tiraboschi, ed.
+Venez. 1766, tom. vii. p. iv. It is well known that Giovio was long
+anxious to undertake the great work which Vasari accomplished. In the
+dialogue mentioned above it is foreseen and deplored that Latin would
+now altogether lose its supremacy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_595_595" id="Footnote_595_595"></a><a href="#FNanchor_595_595"><span class="label">[595]</span></a> In the ‘Breve’ of 1517 to Franc. de’ Rosi, composed by Sadoleto, in
+Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, vi. p. 172.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_596_596" id="Footnote_596_596"></a><a href="#FNanchor_596_596"><span class="label">[596]</span></a> Gasp. Veronens. <i>Vita Pauli II.</i> in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1031. The plays
+of Seneca and Latin translations of Greek dramas were also performed.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_597_597" id="Footnote_597_597"></a><a href="#FNanchor_597_597"><span class="label">[597]</span></a> At Ferrara, Plautus was played chiefly in the Italian adaptations of
+Collenuccio, the younger Guarino, and others, and principally for the sake
+of the plots. Isabella Gonzaga took the liberty of finding him dull. For
+Latin comedy in general, see R. Peiper in Fleckeisen and Masius, <i>Neue
+Jahrb. für Phil. u. Pädag.</i>, Lpzg. 1874, xx. 131-138, and <i>Archiv für
+Literaturgesch</i>. v. 541 sqq. On Pomp. Laetus, see <i>Sabellici Opera</i>, Epist.
+l. xi. fol. 56 sqq., and below, at the close of Part III.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_598_598" id="Footnote_598_598"></a><a href="#FNanchor_598_598"><span class="label">[598]</span></a> Comp. Burckhardt. <i>Gesch. der Renaissance in Italien</i>, 38-41.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_599_599" id="Footnote_599_599"></a><a href="#FNanchor_599_599"><span class="label">[599]</span></a> For what follows see <i>Deliciae poetarum Italorum</i>; Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i>;
+Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, <i>De poetis nostri temporis</i>; and the Appendices to
+Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_600_600" id="Footnote_600_600"></a><a href="#FNanchor_600_600"><span class="label">[600]</span></a> There are two new editions of the poem, that of Pingaud (Paris, 1872),
+and that of Corradini (Padua, 1874). In 1874 two Italian translations
+also appeared by G. B. Gaudo and A. Palesa. On the <i>Africa</i>, compare L.
+Geiger: <i>Petrarca</i>, pp. 122 sqq., and p. 270, note 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_601_601" id="Footnote_601_601"></a><a href="#FNanchor_601_601"><span class="label">[601]</span></a> Filippo Villani, <i>Vite</i>, ed. Galetti, p. 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_602_602" id="Footnote_602_602"></a><a href="#FNanchor_602_602"><span class="label">[602]</span></a> <i>Franc. Aleardi Oratio in laudem Franc. Sfortiae</i>, in Marat. xxv. col.
+384. In comparing Scipio with Caesar, Guarino and Cyriacus Anconitanus
+held the latter, Poggio (<i>Opera</i>, epp. fol. 125, 134 sqq.) the former, to be the
+greater. For Scipio and Hannibal in the miniatures of Attavante, see
+Vasari, iv. 41. <i>Vita di Fiesole</i>. The names of both used for Picinino and
+Sforza. See p. 99. There were great disputes as to the relative greatness
+of the two. Shepherd-Tonelli, i. 262 sqq. and Rosmini: Guarino, ii. 97-111.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_603_603" id="Footnote_603_603"></a><a href="#FNanchor_603_603"><span class="label">[603]</span></a> The brilliant exceptions, where rural life is treated realistically, will
+also be mentioned below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_604_604" id="Footnote_604_604"></a><a href="#FNanchor_604_604"><span class="label">[604]</span></a> Printed in Mai, <i>Spicilegium Romanum</i>, vol. viii. pp. 488-504; about
+500 hexameter verses. Pierio Valeriano followed out the myth in his
+poetry. See his <i>Carpio</i>, in the <i>Deliciae poetarum Italorum</i>. The frescoes
+of Brusasorci in the Pal. Murari at Verona represent the subject of the
+<i>Sarca</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_605_605" id="Footnote_605_605"></a><a href="#FNanchor_605_605"><span class="label">[605]</span></a> Newly edited and translated by Th. A. Fassnacht in <i>Drei Perlen
+der neulateinischen Poesie</i>. Leutkirch and Leipzig, 1875. See further,
+Goethe’s <i>Werke</i> (Hempel’sche Ausgabe), vol. xxxii. pp. 157 and 411.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_606_606" id="Footnote_606_606"></a><a href="#FNanchor_606_606"><span class="label">[606]</span></a> <i>De sacris diebus.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_607_607" id="Footnote_607_607"></a><a href="#FNanchor_607_607"><span class="label">[607]</span></a> E.g. in his eighth eclogue.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_608_608" id="Footnote_608_608"></a><a href="#FNanchor_608_608"><span class="label">[608]</span></a> There are two unfinished and unprinted Sforziads, one by the elder,
+the other by the younger Filelfo. On the latter, see Favre, <i>Mélanges
+d’Hist. Lit.</i> i. 156; on the former, see Rosmini, <i>Filelfo</i>, ii. 157-175. It is
+said to be 12,800 lines long, and contains the passage: ‘The sun falls in
+love with Bianca.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_609_609" id="Footnote_609_609"></a><a href="#FNanchor_609_609"><span class="label">[609]</span></a> Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, viii. 184. A poem in a similar style, xii.
+130. The poem of Angilbert on the Court of Charles the Great curiously
+reminds us of the Renaissance. Comp. Pertz. <i>Monum.</i> ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_610_610" id="Footnote_610_610"></a><a href="#FNanchor_610_610"><span class="label">[610]</span></a> Strozzi, <i>Poetae</i>, p. 31 sqq. ‘Caesaris Borgiae ducis epicedium.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_611_611" id="Footnote_611_611"></a><a href="#FNanchor_611_611"><span class="label">[611]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Pontificem addiderat, flammis lustralibus omneis<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Corporis ablutum labes, Dis Juppiter ipsis,’ etc.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_612_612" id="Footnote_612_612"></a><a href="#FNanchor_612_612"><span class="label">[612]</span></a> This was Ercole II. of Ferrara, b. April 4, 1508, probably either shortly
+before or shortly after the composition of this poem. ‘Nascere, magne
+puer, matri expectate patrique,’ is said near the end.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_613_613" id="Footnote_613_613"></a><a href="#FNanchor_613_613"><span class="label">[613]</span></a> Comp. the collections of the <i>Scriptores</i> by Schardius, Freher, &amp;c., and
+see above p. 126, note 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_614_614" id="Footnote_614_614"></a><a href="#FNanchor_614_614"><span class="label">[614]</span></a> Uzzano, see <i>Archiv.</i> iv. i. 296. Macchiavelli, <i>i Decennali</i>. The life of
+Savonarola, under the title <i>Cedrus Libani</i>, by Fra Benedetto. <i>Assedio di
+Piombino</i>, Murat. xxv. We may quote as a parallel the <i>Teuerdank</i> and
+other northern works in rhyme (new ed. of that by Haltaus, Quedlinb.
+and Leipzig, 1836). The popular historical songs of the Germans, which
+were produced in great abundance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
+may be compared with these Italian poems.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_615_615" id="Footnote_615_615"></a><a href="#FNanchor_615_615"><span class="label">[615]</span></a> We may remark of the <i>Coltivazione</i> of L. Alamanni, written in Italian
+‘versi sciolti,’ that all the really poetical and enjoyable passages are
+directly or indirectly borrowed from the ancients (an old ed., Paris, 1540;
+new ed. of the works of A., 2 vols., Florence, 1867).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_616_616" id="Footnote_616_616"></a><a href="#FNanchor_616_616"><span class="label">[616]</span></a> E.g. by C. G. Weise, Leipzig, 1832. The work, divided into twelve
+books, named after the twelve constellations, is dedicated to Hercules II.
+of Ferrara. In the dedication occur the remarkable words: ‘Nam quem
+alium patronum in totâ Italiâ invenire possum, cui musae cordisunt, qui
+carmen sibi oblatum aut intelligat, aut examine recto expendere sciat?’
+Palingenius uses ‘Juppiter’ and ‘Deus’ indiscriminately.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_617_617" id="Footnote_617_617"></a><a href="#FNanchor_617_617"><span class="label">[617]</span></a> L. B. Alberti’s first comic poem, which purported to be by an author
+Lepidus, was long considered as a work of antiquity.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_618_618" id="Footnote_618_618"></a><a href="#FNanchor_618_618"><span class="label">[618]</span></a> In this case (see below, p. 266, note 2) of the introduction to Lucretius,
+and of Horace, <i>Od.</i> iv. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_619_619" id="Footnote_619_619"></a><a href="#FNanchor_619_619"><span class="label">[619]</span></a> The invocation of a patron saint is an essentially pagan undertaking,
+as has been noticed at p. 57. On a more serious occasion, comp. Sannazaro’s
+Elegy: ‘In festo die divi Nazarii martyris.’ Sann. <i>Elegiae</i>, 1535,
+fol. 166 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_620_620" id="Footnote_620_620"></a><a href="#FNanchor_620_620"><span class="label">[620]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Si satis ventos tolerasse et imbres<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ac minas fatorum hominumque fraudes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Da Pater tecto salientem avito<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Cernere fumum!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_621_621" id="Footnote_621_621"></a><a href="#FNanchor_621_621"><span class="label">[621]</span></a> <i>Andr. Naugerii, Orationes duae carminaque aliquot</i>, Venet. 1530, 4^o.
+The few ‘Carmina’ are to be found partly or wholly in the <i>Deliciae</i>. On
+N. and his death, see Pier. Val. <i>De inf. lit.</i> ed. Menken, 326 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_622_622" id="Footnote_622_622"></a><a href="#FNanchor_622_622"><span class="label">[622]</span></a> Compare Petrarch’s greeting to Italy, written more than a century
+earlier (1353) in <i>Petr. Carmina Minora</i>, ed. Rossetti, ii. pp. 266 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_623_623" id="Footnote_623_623"></a><a href="#FNanchor_623_623"><span class="label">[623]</span></a> To form a notion of what Leo X. could swallow, see the prayer of
+Guido Postumo Silvestri to Christ, the Virgin, and all the Saints, that
+they would long spare this ‘numen’ to earth, since heaven had enough of
+such already. Printed in Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, v. 337.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_624_624" id="Footnote_624_624"></a><a href="#FNanchor_624_624"><span class="label">[624]</span></a> Molza’s <i>Poesie volgari e Latine</i>, ed. by Pierantonio Serassi, Bergamo
+1747.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_625_625" id="Footnote_625_625"></a><a href="#FNanchor_625_625"><span class="label">[625]</span></a> Boccaccio, <i>Vita di Dante</i>, p. 36.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_626_626" id="Footnote_626_626"></a><a href="#FNanchor_626_626"><span class="label">[626]</span></a> Sannazaro ridicules a man who importuned him with such forgeries:
+‘Sint vetera haec aliis, mî nova semper erunt.’ (Ad Rufum, <i>Opera</i>, 1535,
+fol. 41 <i>a</i>.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_627_627" id="Footnote_627_627"></a><a href="#FNanchor_627_627"><span class="label">[627]</span></a> ‘De mirabili urbe Venetiis’ (<i>Opera</i>, fol. 38 b):
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Viderat Adriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stare urbem et toto ponere jura mari:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nunc mihi Tarpejas quantum vis Juppiter arceis<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Objice et illa tui mœnia Martis ait,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Si pelago Tybrim praefers, urbem aspice utramque<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse deos.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_628_628" id="Footnote_628_628"></a><a href="#FNanchor_628_628"><span class="label">[628]</span></a> <i>Lettere de’principi</i>, i. 88, 98.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_629_629" id="Footnote_629_629"></a><a href="#FNanchor_629_629"><span class="label">[629]</span></a> Malipiero, <i>Ann. Veneti, Arch. Stor.</i> vii. i. p. 508. At the end we read,
+in reference to the bull as the arms of the Borgia:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Merge, Tyber, vitulos animosas ultor in undas;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Bos cadat inferno victima magna Jovi!’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_630_630" id="Footnote_630_630"></a><a href="#FNanchor_630_630"><span class="label">[630]</span></a> On the whole affair, see Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i>, ed. Bossi, vii. 211, viii.
+214 sqq. The printed collection, now rare, of these <i>Coryciana</i> of the year
+1524 contains only the Latin poems; Vasari saw another book in the possession
+of the Augustinians in which were sonnets. So contagious was
+the habit of affixing poems, that the group had to be protected by a railing,
+and even hidden altogether. The change of Goritz into ‘Corycius
+senex’ is suggested by Virgil, <i>Georg.</i> iv. 127. For the miserable end of
+the man at the sack of Rome, see Pierio Valeriano, <i>De infelic. literat.</i> ed.
+Menken, p. 369.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_631_631" id="Footnote_631_631"></a><a href="#FNanchor_631_631"><span class="label">[631]</span></a> The work appeared first in the <i>Coryciana</i>, with introductions by
+Silvanus and Corycius himself; also reprinted in the Appendices to
+Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, and in the <i>Deliciae</i>. Comp. Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i>,
+speaking of Arsillus. Further, for the great number of the epigrammatists,
+see Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, l. c. One of the most biting pens was
+Marcantonio Casanova. Among the less known, Jo. Thomas Muscanius
+(see <i>Deliciae</i>) deserves mention. On Casanova, see Pier. Valer. <i>De infel.
+lit.</i> ed. Menken, p. 376 sqq.; and Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i>, p. 142 sqq., who says
+of him: ‘Nemo autem eo simplicitate ac innocentiâ vitae melior;’ Arsillus
+(l. c.) speaks of his ‘placidos sales.’ Some few of his poems in the <i>Coryciana</i>,
+J. 3 <i>a</i> sqq. L. 1 <i>a</i>, L. 4 <i>b</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_632_632" id="Footnote_632_632"></a><a href="#FNanchor_632_632"><span class="label">[632]</span></a> Marin Sanudo, in the <i>Vite de’duchi di Venezia</i>, Murat. xii. quotes
+them regularly.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_633_633" id="Footnote_633_633"></a><a href="#FNanchor_633_633"><span class="label">[633]</span></a> Scardeonius, <i>De urb. Patav. antiq.</i> (Graev. thes. vi. 11, col. 270), names
+as the inventor a certain Odaxius of Padua, living about the middle of the
+fifteenth century. Mixed verses of Latin and the language of the country
+are found much earlier in many parts of Europe.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_634_634" id="Footnote_634_634"></a><a href="#FNanchor_634_634"><span class="label">[634]</span></a> It must not be forgotten that they were very soon printed with both
+the old Scholia and modern commentaries.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_635_635" id="Footnote_635_635"></a><a href="#FNanchor_635_635"><span class="label">[635]</span></a> Ariosto, <i>Satira</i>, vii. Date 1531.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_636_636" id="Footnote_636_636"></a><a href="#FNanchor_636_636"><span class="label">[636]</span></a> Of such children we meet with several, yet I cannot give an instance
+in which they were demonstrably so treated. The youthful prodigy
+Giulio Campagnola was not one of those who were forced with an ambitious
+object. Comp. Scardeonius, <i>De urb. Patav. antiq.</i> in Graev. thes.
+vi. 3, col. 276. For the similar case of Cecchino Bracci, d. 1445 in his
+fifteenth year, comp. Trucchi, <i>Poesie Ital. inedite</i>, iii. p. 229. The father
+of Cardano tried ‘memoriam artificialem instillare,’ and taught him, when
+still a child, the astrology of the Arabians. See Cardanus, <i>De propria vita</i>
+cap. 34. Manoello may be added to the list, unless we are to take his
+expression, ‘At the age of six years I am as good as at eighty,’ as a meaningless
+phrase. Comp. <i>Litbl. des Orients</i>, 1843, p. 21.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_637_637" id="Footnote_637_637"></a><a href="#FNanchor_637_637"><span class="label">[637]</span></a> Bapt. Mantuan. <i>De calamitatibus temporum</i>, l. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_638_638" id="Footnote_638_638"></a><a href="#FNanchor_638_638"><span class="label">[638]</span></a> Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, <i>Progymnasma adversus literas et literatos</i>. <i>Opp.</i>
+ed. Basil. 1580, ii. 422-445. Dedications 1540-1541; the work itself addressed
+to Giov. Franc. Pico, and therefore finished before 1533.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_639_639" id="Footnote_639_639"></a><a href="#FNanchor_639_639"><span class="label">[639]</span></a> Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, <i>Hercules</i>. The dedication is a striking evidence
+of the first threatening movements of the Inquisition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_640_640" id="Footnote_640_640"></a><a href="#FNanchor_640_640"><span class="label">[640]</span></a> He passed, as we have seen, for the last protector of the scholars.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_641_641" id="Footnote_641_641"></a><a href="#FNanchor_641_641"><span class="label">[641]</span></a> <i>De infelicitate literatorum.</i> On the editions, see above, p. 86, note 4.
+Pier. Val., after leaving Rome, lived long in a good position as professor
+at Padua. At the end of his work he expresses the hope that Charles V.
+and Clement VII. would bring about a better time for the scholars.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_642_642" id="Footnote_642_642"></a><a href="#FNanchor_642_642"><span class="label">[642]</span></a> Comp. Dante, <i>Inferno</i>, xiii. 58 sqq., especially 93 sqq., where Petrus de
+Vineis speaks of his own suicide.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_643_643" id="Footnote_643_643"></a><a href="#FNanchor_643_643"><span class="label">[643]</span></a> Pier. Valer. pp. 397 sqq., 402. He was the uncle of the writer.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_644_644" id="Footnote_644_644"></a><a href="#FNanchor_644_644"><span class="label">[644]</span></a> Cœlii Calcagnini, <i>Opera</i>, ed. Basil. 1544, p. 101, in the Seventh Book
+of the Epistles, No. 27, letter to Jacob Ziegler. Comp. Pierio Val. <i>De inf.
+lit.</i> ed. Menken, p. 369 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_645_645" id="Footnote_645_645"></a><a href="#FNanchor_645_645"><span class="label">[645]</span></a> <i>M. Ant. Sabellici Opera</i>, Epist. l. xi. fol. 56. See, too, the biography
+in the <i>Elogia</i> of Paolo Giovio, p. 76 sqq. The former appeared separately
+at Strasburg in 1510, under the title Sabellicus: <i>Vita Pomponii Laeti</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_646_646" id="Footnote_646_646"></a><a href="#FNanchor_646_646"><span class="label">[646]</span></a> Jac. Volaterran. <i>Diar. Rom.</i> in Muratori. xxiii. col. 161, 171, 185.
+<i>Anecdota literaria</i>, ii. pp. 168 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_647_647" id="Footnote_647_647"></a><a href="#FNanchor_647_647"><span class="label">[647]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>De Romanis piscibus</i>, cap. 17 and 34.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_648_648" id="Footnote_648_648"></a><a href="#FNanchor_648_648"><span class="label">[648]</span></a> Sadoleti, Epist. 106, of the year 1529.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_649_649" id="Footnote_649_649"></a><a href="#FNanchor_649_649"><span class="label">[649]</span></a> Anton. Galatei, Epist. 10 and 12, in Mai, <i>Spicileg. Rom.</i> vol. viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_650_650" id="Footnote_650_650"></a><a href="#FNanchor_650_650"><span class="label">[650]</span></a> This was the case even before the middle of the century. Comp. Lil.
+Greg. Gyraldus, <i>De poetis nostri temp.</i> ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_651_651" id="Footnote_651_651"></a><a href="#FNanchor_651_651"><span class="label">[651]</span></a> Luigi Bossi, <i>Vita di Cristoforo Colombo</i>, in which there is a sketch of
+earlier Italian journeys and discoveries, p. 91 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_652_652" id="Footnote_652_652"></a><a href="#FNanchor_652_652"><span class="label">[652]</span></a> See on this subject a treatise by Pertz. An inadequate account is to
+be found in Æneas Sylvius, <i>Europae status sub Frederico III. Imp.</i> cap.
+44 (in Freher’s <i>Scriptores</i>, ed. 1624, vol. ii. p. 87). On Æn. S. see Peschel
+o.c. 217 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_653_653" id="Footnote_653_653"></a><a href="#FNanchor_653_653"><span class="label">[653]</span></a> Comp. O. Peschel, <i>Geschichte der Erdkunde</i>, 2nd edit., by Sophus
+Ruge, Munich, 1877, p. 209 sqq. <i>et passim</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_654_654" id="Footnote_654_654"></a><a href="#FNanchor_654_654"><span class="label">[654]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. i. p. 14. That he did not always observe correctly,
+and sometimes filled up the picture from his fancy, is clearly shown, e.g.,
+by his description of Basel. Yet his merit on the whole is nevertheless
+great. On the description of Basel see G. Voigt; Enea Silvio, i. 228; on
+E. S. as Geographer, ii. 302-309. Comp. i. 91 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_655_655" id="Footnote_655_655"></a><a href="#FNanchor_655_655"><span class="label">[655]</span></a> In the sixteenth century, Italy continued to be the home of geographical
+literature, at a time when the discoverers themselves belonged
+almost exclusively to the countries on the shores of the Atlantic. Native
+geography produced in the middle of the century the great and remarkable
+work of Leandro Alberti, <i>Descrizione di tutta l’Italia</i>, 1582. In the
+first half of the sixteenth century, the maps in Italy were in advance of
+those of other countries. See Wieser: <i>Der Portulan des Infanten Philipp
+II. von Spanien</i> in <i>Sitzungsberichte der Wien. Acad. Phil. Hist. Kl.</i> Bd.
+82 (1876), pp. 541 sqq. For the different Italian maps and voyages of discovery,
+see the excellent work of Oscar Peschel: <i>Abhandl. zur Erd-und
+Völkerkunde</i> (Leipzig, 1878). Comp. also, <i>inter alia</i>: Berchet, <i>Il planisfero
+di Giovanni Leandro del’anno 1452 fa-simil nella grandezza del’
+original Nota illustrativa</i>, 16 S. 4^o. Venezia, 1879. Comp. Voigt, ii. 516;
+and G. B. de Rossi, <i>Piante iconogrofiche di Roma anteriori al secolo
+XVI.</i> Rome, 1879. For Petrarch’s attempt to draw out a map of Italy,
+comp. Flavio Biondo: <i>Italia illustrata</i> (ed. Basil.), p. 352 sqq.; also <i>Petr.
+Epist. var. LXI.</i> ed. Fracass. iii. 476. A remarkable attempt at a map
+of Europe, Asia and Africa is to be found on the obverse of a medal of
+Charles IV. of Anjou, executed by Francesco da Laurana in 1462.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_656_656" id="Footnote_656_656"></a><a href="#FNanchor_656_656"><span class="label">[656]</span></a> Libri, <i>Histoire des Sciences Mathématiques en Italie</i>. 4 vols. Paris,
+1838.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_657_657" id="Footnote_657_657"></a><a href="#FNanchor_657_657"><span class="label">[657]</span></a> To pronounce a conclusive judgment on this point, the growth of the
+habit of collecting observations, in other than the mathematical sciences,
+would need to be illustrated in detail. But this lies outside the limits of
+our task.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_658_658" id="Footnote_658_658"></a><a href="#FNanchor_658_658"><span class="label">[658]</span></a> Libri, op. cit. ii. p. 174 sqq. See also Dante’s treatise, <i>De aqua et
+terra</i>; and W. Schmidt, <i>Dante’s Stellung in der Geschichte der Cosmographie</i>,
+Graz, 1876. The passages bearing on geography and natural
+science from the <i>Tesoro</i> of Brunetto Latini are published separately: <i>Il
+trattato della Sfera di S. Br. L.</i>, by Bart. Sorio (Milan, 1858), who has
+added B. L.’s system of historical chronology.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_659_659" id="Footnote_659_659"></a><a href="#FNanchor_659_659"><span class="label">[659]</span></a> Scardeonius, <i>De urb. Patav. antiq.</i> in <i>Graevii Thesaur. ant. Ital.</i> tom.
+vi. pars iii. col. 227. A. died in 1312 during the investigation; his statue
+was burnt. On Giov. Sang. see op. cit. col. 228 sqq. Comp. on him,
+Fabricius, <i>Bibl. Lat.</i> s. v. Petrus de Apono. Sprenger in <i>Esch. u. Gruber</i>,
+i. 33. He translated (a. 1292-1293) astrological works of Abraham ibn
+Esra, printed 1506.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_660_660" id="Footnote_660_660"></a><a href="#FNanchor_660_660"><span class="label">[660]</span></a> See below, part vi. chapter 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_661_661" id="Footnote_661_661"></a><a href="#FNanchor_661_661"><span class="label">[661]</span></a> See the exaggerated complaints of Libri, op. cit. ii. p. 258 sqq. Regrettable
+as it may be that a people so highly gifted did not devote more
+of its strength to the natural sciences, we nevertheless believe that it
+pursued, and in part attained, still more important ends.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_662_662" id="Footnote_662_662"></a><a href="#FNanchor_662_662"><span class="label">[662]</span></a> On the studies of the latter in Italy, comp. the thorough investigation
+by C. Malagola in his work on Codro Urceo (Bologna, 1878, cap. vii.
+360-366).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_663_663" id="Footnote_663_663"></a><a href="#FNanchor_663_663"><span class="label">[663]</span></a> Italians also laid out botanical gardens in foreign countries, e.g.
+Angelo, of Florence, a contemporary of Petrarch, in Prag. Friedjung:
+<i>Carl IV.</i> p. 311, note 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_664_664" id="Footnote_664_664"></a><a href="#FNanchor_664_664"><span class="label">[664]</span></a> <i>Alexandri Braccii descriptio horti Laurentii Med.</i>, printed as
+Appendix No. 58 to Roscoe’s <i>Life of Lorenzo</i>. Also to be found in the
+Appendices to Fabroni’s <i>Laurentius</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_665_665" id="Footnote_665_665"></a><a href="#FNanchor_665_665"><span class="label">[665]</span></a> <i>Mondanarii Villa</i>, printed in the <i>Poemata aliquot insignia illustr.
+poetar. recent.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_666_666" id="Footnote_666_666"></a><a href="#FNanchor_666_666"><span class="label">[666]</span></a> On the zoological garden at Palermo under Henry VI., see Otto de S.
+Blasio ad a. 1194. That of Henry I. of England in the park of Woodstock
+(Guliel. Malmes. p. 638) contained lions, leopards, camels, and a porcupine,
+all gifts of foreign princes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_667_667" id="Footnote_667_667"></a><a href="#FNanchor_667_667"><span class="label">[667]</span></a> As such he was called, whether painted or carved in stone, ‘Marzocco.’
+At Pisa eagles were kept. See the commentators on Dante, <i>Inf.</i> xxxiii.
+22. The falcon in Boccaccio, <i>Decam.</i> v. 9. See for the whole subject:
+<i>Due trattati del governo e delle infermità degli uccelli, testi di lingua
+inediti</i>. Rome, 1864. They are works of the fourteenth century, possibly
+translated from the Persian.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_668_668" id="Footnote_668_668"></a><a href="#FNanchor_668_668"><span class="label">[668]</span></a> See the extract from Ægid. Viterb. in Papencordt, <i>Gesch. der Stadt
+Rom im Mittelalter</i>, p. 367, note, with an incident of the year 1328.
+Combats of wild animals among themselves and with dogs served to
+amuse the people on great occasions. At the reception of Pius II. and of
+Galeazzo Maria Sforza at Florence, in 1459, in an enclosed space on the
+Piazza della Signoria, bulls, horses, boars, dogs, lions, and a giraffe were
+turned out together, but the lions lay down and refused to attack the
+other animals. Comp. <i>Ricordi di Firenze, Rer. Ital. script. ex Florent.
+codd.</i> tom. ii. col. 741. A different account in <i>Vita Pii II.</i> Murat. iii. ii.
+col. 976. A second giraffe was presented to Lorenzo the Magnificent by
+the Mameluke Sultan Kaytbey. Comp. Paul. Jov. <i>Vita Leonis X.</i> l. i.
+In Lorenzo’s menagerie one magnificent lion was especially famous, and
+his destruction by the other lions was reckoned a presage of the death of
+his owner.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_669_669" id="Footnote_669_669"></a><a href="#FNanchor_669_669"><span class="label">[669]</span></a> Gio. Villani, x. 185, xi. 66. Matteo Villani, iii. 90, v. 68. It was a bad
+omen if the lions fought, and worse still if they killed one another. Com.
+Varchi, <i>Stor. fiorent.</i> iii. p. 143. Matt. V. devotes the first of the two
+chapters quoted to prove (1) that lions were born in Italy, and (2) that
+they came into the world alive.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_670_670" id="Footnote_670_670"></a><a href="#FNanchor_670_670"><span class="label">[670]</span></a> <i>Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. ii. p. 77, year 1497. A pair of lions
+once escaped from Perugia; <i>ibid.</i> xvi. i. p. 382, year 1434. Florence, for
+example, sent to King Wladislaw of Poland (May, 1406), a pair of lions
+<i>ut utriusque sexus animalia ad procreandos catulos haberetis</i>. The
+accompanying statement is amusing in a diplomatic document: ‘Sunt
+equidem hi leones Florentini, et satis quantum natura promittere potuit
+mansueti, depositâ feritate, quam insitam habent, hique in Gætulorum
+regionibus nascuntur et Indorum, in quibus multitudo dictorum animalium
+evalescit, sicuti prohibent naturales. Et cum leonum complexio
+sit frigoribus inimica, quod natura sagax ostendit, natura in regionibus
+aestu ferventibus generantur, necessarium est, quod vostra serenitas, si
+dictorum animalium vitam et sobolis propagationem, ut remur, desiderat,
+faciat provideri, quod in locis calidis educentur et maneant. Conveniunt
+nempe cum regia majestate leones quoniam leo græce latine rex dicitur.
+Sicut enim rex dignitate potentia, magnanimitate ceteros homines antecellit,
+sic leonis generositas et vigor imperterritus animalia cuncta praesit.
+Et sicut rex, sic leo adversus imbecilles et timidos clementissimum se
+ostendit, et adversus inquietos et tumidos terribilem se offert animadversione
+justissima.’ (<i>Cod. epistolaris sæculi. Mon. med. ævi hist. res
+gestas Poloniæ illustr.</i> Krakau, 1876, p. 25.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_671_671" id="Footnote_671_671"></a><a href="#FNanchor_671_671"><span class="label">[671]</span></a> Gage, <i>Carteggio</i>, i. p. 422, year 1291. The Visconti used trained
+leopards for hunting hares, which were started by little dogs. See v.
+Kobel, <i>Wildanger</i>, p. 247, where later instances of hunting with leopards
+are mentioned.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_672_672" id="Footnote_672_672"></a><a href="#FNanchor_672_672"><span class="label">[672]</span></a> <i>Strozzii poetae</i>, p. 146: <i>De leone Borsii Ducis</i>. The lion spares the
+hare and the small dog, imitating (so says the poet) his master. Comp.
+the words fol. 188, ‘et inclusis condita septa feris,’ and fol. 193, an epigram
+of fourteen lines, ‘in leporarii ingressu quam maximi;’ see <i>ibid.</i> for the
+hunting-park.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_673_673" id="Footnote_673_673"></a><a href="#FNanchor_673_673"><span class="label">[673]</span></a> <i>Cron. di Perugia</i>, l. c. xvi. ii. p. 199. Something of the same kind is
+to be found in Petrarch, <i>De remed. utriusque fortunae</i>, but less clearly expressed.
+Here Gaudium, in the conversation with Ratio, boasts of owning
+monkeys and ‘ludicra animalia.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_674_674" id="Footnote_674_674"></a><a href="#FNanchor_674_674"><span class="label">[674]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. <i>De magnificentia.</i> In the zoological garden of the
+Cardinal of Aquileja, at Albano, there were, in 1463, peacocks and Indian
+fowls and Syrian goats with long ears. <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. xi. p. 562 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_675_675" id="Footnote_675_675"></a><a href="#FNanchor_675_675"><span class="label">[675]</span></a> <i>Decembrio</i>, ap. Muratori, xx. col. 1012.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_676_676" id="Footnote_676_676"></a><a href="#FNanchor_676_676"><span class="label">[676]</span></a> Brunetti Latini, <i>Tesor.</i> (ed. Chabaille, Paris, 1863), lib. i. In Petrarch’s
+time there were no elephants in Italy. ‘Itaque et in Italia avorum
+memoria unum Frederico Romanorum principi fuisse et nunc Egyptio
+tyranno nonnisi unicum esse fama est.’ <i>De rem. utr. fort.</i> i. 60.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_677_677" id="Footnote_677_677"></a><a href="#FNanchor_677_677"><span class="label">[677]</span></a> The details which are most amusing, in Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i>, on Tristanus
+Acunius. On the porcupines and ostriches in the Pal. Strozzi, see Rabelais,
+<i>Pantagruel</i>, iv. chap. 11. Lorenzo the Magnificent received a giraffe from
+Egypt through some merchants, Baluz. <i>Miscell.</i> iv. 416. The elephant sent
+to Leo was greatly bewailed by the people when it died, its portrait was
+painted, and verses on it were written by the younger Beroaldus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_678_678" id="Footnote_678_678"></a><a href="#FNanchor_678_678"><span class="label">[678]</span></a> Comp. Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i>, p. 234, speaking of Francesco Gonzaga. For
+the luxury at Milan in this respect, see Bandello, Parte II. Nov. 3 and 8.
+In the narrative poems we also sometimes hear the opinion of a judge of
+horses. Comp. Pulci, <i>Morgante</i>, xv. 105 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_679_679" id="Footnote_679_679"></a><a href="#FNanchor_679_679"><span class="label">[679]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i>, speaking of Hipp. Medices.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_680_680" id="Footnote_680_680"></a><a href="#FNanchor_680_680"><span class="label">[680]</span></a> At this point a few notices on slavery in Italy at the
+time of the Renaissance will not be out of place. A short, but
+important, passage in Jovian. Pontan. <i>De obedientia</i>, l. iii. cap. i.:
+‘An homo, cum liber natura sit, domino parere debeat?’ In North Italy
+there were no slaves. Elsewhere, even Christians, as well as Circassians
+and Bulgarians, were bought from the Turks, and made to serve till they
+had earned their ransom. The negroes, on the contrary, remained slaves;
+but it was not permitted, at least in the kingdom of Naples, to
+emasculate them. The word ‘moro’ signifies any dark-skinned man; the
+negro was called ‘moro nero.’&mdash;Fabroni, <i>Cosmos</i>, Adn. 110: Document on
+the sale of a female Circassian slave (1427); Adn. 141: List of the
+female slaves of Cosimo.&mdash;Nantiporto, Murat. iii. ii. col. 1106:
+Innocent VIII. received 100 Moors as a present from Ferdinand the
+Catholic, and gave them to cardinals and other great men
+(1488).&mdash;Marsuccio, <i>Novelle</i>, 14: sale of slaves; do. 24 and 25: negro
+slaves who also (for the benefit of their owner?) work as ‘facchini,’
+and gain the love of the women; do. 48 Moors from Tunis caught by
+Catalans and sold at Pisa.&mdash;Gaye, <i>Carteggio</i>, i. 360: manumission and
+reward of a negro slave in a Florentine will (1490).&mdash;Paul. Jov.
+<i>Elogia</i>, sub Franc. Sfortia; Porzio, <i>Congiura</i>, iii. 195; and Comines,
+<i>Charles VIII.</i> chap. 18: negroes as gaolers and executioners of the
+House of Aragon in Naples.&mdash;Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i>, sub Galeatio: negroes
+as followers of the prince on his excursions.&mdash;Æneæ Sylvii, <i>Opera</i>, p.
+456: a negro slave as a musician.&mdash;Paul. Jov. <i>De piscibus</i>, cap 3: a
+(free?) negro as diver and swimming-master at Genoa.&mdash;Alex. Benedictus,
+<i>De Carolo VIII.</i> in Eccard, <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. col. 1608: a negro
+(Æthiops) as superior officer at Venice, according to which we are
+justified in thinking of Othello as a negro.&mdash;Bandello, Parte III. Nov.
+21: when a slave at Genoa deserved punishment he was sold away to Iviza,
+one of the Balearic isles, to carry salt.
+</p><p>
+The foregoing remarks, although they make no claim to completeness, may
+be allowed to stand as they are in the new edition, on account of the
+excellent selection of instances they contain, and because they have not
+met with sufficient notice in the works upon the subject. Latterly a
+good deal has been written on the slave-trade in Italy. The very curious
+book of Filippo Zamboni: <i>Gli Ezzelini, Dante e gli Schiavi, ossia Roma
+e la Schiavitù personale domestica. Con documenti inediti. Seconda
+edizione aumentata</i> (Vienna, 1870), does not contain what the title
+promises, but gives, p. 241 sqq., valuable information on the
+slave-trade; p. 270, a remarkable document on the buying and selling of
+a female slave; p. 282, a list of various slaves (with the place were
+they were bought and sold, their home, age, and price) in the thirteenth
+and three following centuries. A treatise by Wattenbach: <i>Sklavenhandel
+im Mittelalter</i> (<i>Anzeiger für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit</i>, 1874, pp.
+37-40) refers only in part to Italy: Clement V. decides in 1309 that the
+Venetian prisoners should be made slaves of; in 1501, after the capture
+of Capua, many Capuan women were sold at Rome for a low price. In the
+<i>Monum. historica Slavorum meridionalium</i>, ed. Vinc. Macusceo, tom. i.
+Warsaw, 1874, we read at p. 199 a decision (Ancona, 1458) that the
+‘Greci, Turci, Tartari, Sarraceni, Bossinenses, Burgari vel Albanenses,’
+should be and always remain slaves, unless their masters freed them by a
+legal document. Egnatius, <i>Exempl. ill. vir.</i> Ven. fol. 246 <i>a</i>, praises
+Venice on the ground that ‘servorum Venetis ipsis nullum unquam usum
+extitisse;’ but, on the other hand, comp. Zamboni, p. 223, and
+especially Vincenzo Lazari: ‘Del traffico e delle condizioni degli
+schiavi, in Venezia nel tempo di mezzo,’ in <i>Miscellanea di Stor. Ital.</i>
+Torino, 1862, vol. i. 463-501.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_681_681" id="Footnote_681_681"></a><a href="#FNanchor_681_681"><span class="label">[681]</span></a> It is hardly necessary to refer the reader to the famous chapters on
+this subject in Humboldt’s <i>Kosmos</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_682_682" id="Footnote_682_682"></a><a href="#FNanchor_682_682"><span class="label">[682]</span></a> See on this subject the observations of Wilhelm Grimm, quoted by
+Humboldt in the work referred to.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_683_683" id="Footnote_683_683"></a><a href="#FNanchor_683_683"><span class="label">[683]</span></a> Carmina Burana, p. 162, <i>De Phyllide et Flora</i>, str. 66.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_684_684" id="Footnote_684_684"></a><a href="#FNanchor_684_684"><span class="label">[684]</span></a> It would be hard to say what else he had to do at the top of the
+Bismantova in the province of Reggio, <i>Purgat.</i> iv. 26. The precision
+with which he brings before us all the parts of his supernatural world
+shows a remarkable sense of form and space. That there was a belief
+in the existence of hidden treasures on the tops of mountains, and that
+such spots were regarded with superstitious terror, may be clearly inferred
+from the <i>Chron. Novaliciense</i>, ii. 5, in Pertz, <i>Script.</i> vii., and <i>Monum.
+hist. patriae, Script.</i> iii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_685_685" id="Footnote_685_685"></a><a href="#FNanchor_685_685"><span class="label">[685]</span></a> Besides the description of Baiæ in the <i>Fiammetta</i>, of the grove in
+the Ameto, etc., a passage in the <i>De genealogia deorum</i>, xiv. 11, is of
+importance, where he enumerates a number of rural beauties&mdash;trees,
+meadows, brooks, flocks and herds, cottages, etc.&mdash;and adds that these
+things ‘animum mulcent;’ their effect is ‘mentem in se colligere.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_686_686" id="Footnote_686_686"></a><a href="#FNanchor_686_686"><span class="label">[686]</span></a> Flavio Biondo, <i>Italia Illustrata</i> (ed. Basil), p. 352 sqq. Comp. <i>Epist.
+Var.</i> ed. Fracass. (lat.) iii. 476. On Petrarch’s plan of writing a great
+geographical work, see the proofs given by Attilio Hortis, <i>Accenni alle
+Scienze Naturali nelle Opere di G. Boccacci</i>, Trieste, 1877, p. 45 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_687_687" id="Footnote_687_687"></a><a href="#FNanchor_687_687"><span class="label">[687]</span></a> Although he is fond of referring to them: e.g. <i>De vita solitaria</i>
+(<i>Opera</i>, ed. Basil, 1581), esp. p. 241, where he quotes the description of a
+vine-arbour from St. Augustine.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_688_688" id="Footnote_688_688"></a><a href="#FNanchor_688_688"><span class="label">[688]</span></a> <i>Epist. famil.</i> vii. 4. ‘Interea utinam scire posses, quanta, cum
+voluptate solivagus et liber, inter montes et nemora, inter fontes et
+flumina, inter libros et maximorum hominum ingenia respiro, quamque
+me in ea, quae ante sunt, cum Apostolo extendens et praeterita oblivisci
+nitor et praesentia non videre.’ Comp. vi. 3, o. c. 316 sqq. esp. 334 sqq.
+Comp. L. Geiger: <i>Petrarca</i>, p. 75, note 5, and p. 269.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_689_689" id="Footnote_689_689"></a><a href="#FNanchor_689_689"><span class="label">[689]</span></a> ‘Jacuit sine carmine sacro.’ Comp. <i>Itinerar. Syriacum, Opp.</i> p. 558.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_690_690" id="Footnote_690_690"></a><a href="#FNanchor_690_690"><span class="label">[690]</span></a> He distinguishes in the <i>Itinerar. Syr.</i> p. 357, on the Riviera di
+Levante: ‘colles asperitate gratissima et mira fertilitate conspicuos.’
+On the port of Gaeta, see his <i>De remediis utriusque fortunae</i>, i. 54.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_691_691" id="Footnote_691_691"></a><a href="#FNanchor_691_691"><span class="label">[691]</span></a> <i>Letter to Posterity</i>: ‘Subito loco specie percussus.’ Descriptions of
+great natural events: A Storm at Naples, 1343: <i>Epp. fam.</i> i. 263 sqq.;
+An Earthquake at Basel, 1355, <i>Epp. seniles</i>, lib. x. 2, and <i>De rem. utr.
+fort.</i> ii. 91.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_692_692" id="Footnote_692_692"></a><a href="#FNanchor_692_692"><span class="label">[692]</span></a> <i>Epist. fam.</i> ed. Fracassetti, i. 193 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_693_693" id="Footnote_693_693"></a><a href="#FNanchor_693_693"><span class="label">[693]</span></a> <i>Il Dittamondo</i>, iii. cap. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_694_694" id="Footnote_694_694"></a><a href="#FNanchor_694_694"><span class="label">[694]</span></a> <i>Dittamondo</i>, iii. cap. 21, iv. cap. 4. Papencordt, <i>Gesch. der Stadt
+Rom</i>, says that the Emperor Charles IV. had a strong taste for beautiful
+scenery, and quotes on this point Pelzel, <i>Carl IV.</i> p. 456. (The two other
+passages, which he quotes, do not say the same.) It is possible that the
+Emperor took this fancy from intercourse with the humanists (see above,
+pp. 141-2). For the interest taken by Charles in natural science see H.
+Friedjung, op. cit. p. 224, note 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_695_695" id="Footnote_695_695"></a><a href="#FNanchor_695_695"><span class="label">[695]</span></a> We may also compare Platina, <i>Vitae Pontiff.</i> p. 310: ‘Homo fuit
+(Pius II.) verus, integer, apertus; nil habuit ficti, nil simulati’&mdash;an enemy
+of hypocrisy and superstition, courageous and consistent. See Voigt, ii.
+261 sqq. and iii. 724. He does not, however, give an analysis of the
+character of Pius.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_696_696" id="Footnote_696_696"></a><a href="#FNanchor_696_696"><span class="label">[696]</span></a> The most important passages are the following: <i>Pii II. P. M. Commentarii</i>,
+l. iv. p. 183; spring in his native country; l. v. p. 251;
+summer residence at Tivoli; l. vi. p. 306: the meal at the spring of
+Vicovaro; l. viii. p. 378: the neighbourhood of Viterbo; p. 387: the
+mountain monastery of St. Martin; p. 388: the Lake of Bolsena; l. ix.
+p. 396: a splendid description of Monte Amiata; l. x. p. 483: the situation
+of Monte Oliveto; p. 497: the view from Todi; l. xi. p. 554: Ostia
+and Porto; p. 562: description of the Alban Hills; l. xii. p. 609: Frascati
+and Grottaferrata; comp. 568-571.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_697_697" id="Footnote_697_697"></a><a href="#FNanchor_697_697"><span class="label">[697]</span></a> So we must suppose it to have been written, not Sicily.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_698_698" id="Footnote_698_698"></a><a href="#FNanchor_698_698"><span class="label">[698]</span></a> He calls himself, with an allusion to his name: ‘Silvarum amator et
+varia videndi cupidus.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_699_699" id="Footnote_699_699"></a><a href="#FNanchor_699_699"><span class="label">[699]</span></a> On Leonbattista Alberti’s feeling for landscapes see above, p. 136 sqq.
+Alberti, a younger contemporary of Æneas Silvius (<i>Trattato del Governo
+della Famiglia</i>, p. 90; see above, p. 132, note 1), is delighted when in the
+country with ‘the bushy hills,’ ‘the fair plains and rushing waters.’
+Mention may here be made of a little work <i>Ætna</i>, by P. Bembus, first
+published at Venice, 1495, and often printed since, in which, among
+much that is rambling and prolix, there are remarkable geographical
+descriptions and notices of landscapes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_700_700" id="Footnote_700_700"></a><a href="#FNanchor_700_700"><span class="label">[700]</span></a> A most elaborate picture of this kind in Ariosto; his sixth canto is all
+foreground.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_701_701" id="Footnote_701_701"></a><a href="#FNanchor_701_701"><span class="label">[701]</span></a> He deals differently with his architectural framework, and in this
+modern decorative art can learn something from him even now.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_702_702" id="Footnote_702_702"></a><a href="#FNanchor_702_702"><span class="label">[702]</span></a> <i>Lettere Pittoriche</i>, iii. 36, to Titian, May, 1544.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_703_703" id="Footnote_703_703"></a><a href="#FNanchor_703_703"><span class="label">[703]</span></a> <i>Strozzii Poetae</i>, in the <i>Erotica</i>, l. vi. fol. 183; in the poem: ‘Hortatur
+se ipse, ut ad amicam properet.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_704_704" id="Footnote_704_704"></a><a href="#FNanchor_704_704"><span class="label">[704]</span></a> Comp. Thausing: <i>Dürer</i>, Leipzig, 1876, p. 166.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_705_705" id="Footnote_705_705"></a><a href="#FNanchor_705_705"><span class="label">[705]</span></a> These striking expressions are taken from the seventh volume of
+Michelet’s <i>Histoire de France</i> (Introd.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_706_706" id="Footnote_706_706"></a><a href="#FNanchor_706_706"><span class="label">[706]</span></a> Tomm. Gar, <i>Relaz. della Corte di Roma</i>, i. pp. 278 and 279. In the Rel.
+of Soriano, year 1533.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_707_707" id="Footnote_707_707"></a><a href="#FNanchor_707_707"><span class="label">[707]</span></a> Prato, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. p. 295 sqq. The word ‘saturnico’ means ‘unhappy’
+as well as ‘bringing misfortune.’ For the influence of the planets
+on human character in general, see Corn. Agrippa, <i>De occulta philosophia</i>,
+c. 52.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_708_708" id="Footnote_708_708"></a><a href="#FNanchor_708_708"><span class="label">[708]</span></a> See Trucchi, <i>Poesie Italiane inedite</i>, i. p 165 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_709_709" id="Footnote_709_709"></a><a href="#FNanchor_709_709"><span class="label">[709]</span></a> Blank verse became at a later time the usual form for dramatic compositions.
+Trissino, in the dedication of his <i>Sofonisba</i> to Leo X., expressed
+the hope that the Pope would recognise this style for what it was&mdash;as
+better, nobler, and <i>less easy</i> than it looked. Roscoe, <i>Leone</i> X., ed. Bossi,
+viii. 174.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_710_710" id="Footnote_710_710"></a><a href="#FNanchor_710_710"><span class="label">[710]</span></a> Comp. e.g. the striking forms adopted by Dante, <i>Vita Nuova</i>, ed.
+Witte, p. 13 sqq., 16 sqq. Each has twenty irregular lines; in the first,
+one rhyme occurs eight times.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_711_711" id="Footnote_711_711"></a><a href="#FNanchor_711_711"><span class="label">[711]</span></a> Trucchi, op. cit. i. 181 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_712_712" id="Footnote_712_712"></a><a href="#FNanchor_712_712"><span class="label">[712]</span></a> These were the ‘Canzoni’ and Sonnets which every blacksmith and
+donkey-driver sang and parodied&mdash;which made Dante not a little angry.
+(Comp. Franco Sachetti, Nov. 114, 115.) So quickly did these poems find
+their way among the people.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_713_713" id="Footnote_713_713"></a><a href="#FNanchor_713_713"><span class="label">[713]</span></a> <i>Vita Nuova</i>, ed. Witte, pp. 81, 82 sqq. ‘Deh peregrini,’ <i>ibid.</i> 116.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_714_714" id="Footnote_714_714"></a><a href="#FNanchor_714_714"><span class="label">[714]</span></a> For Dante’s psychology, the beginning of <i>Purg.</i> iv. is one of the most
+important passages. See also the parts of the <i>Convito</i> bearing on the
+subject.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_715_715" id="Footnote_715_715"></a><a href="#FNanchor_715_715"><span class="label">[715]</span></a> The portraits of the school of Van Eyck would prove the contrary for
+the North. They remained for a long period far in advance of all descriptions
+in words.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_716_716" id="Footnote_716_716"></a><a href="#FNanchor_716_716"><span class="label">[716]</span></a> Printed in the sixteenth volume of his <i>Opere Volgari</i>. See M.
+Landau, <i>Giov. Boccaccio</i> (Stuttg. 1877), pp. 36-40; he lays special stress
+on B.’s dependence on Dante and Petrarch.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_717_717" id="Footnote_717_717"></a><a href="#FNanchor_717_717"><span class="label">[717]</span></a> In the song of the shepherd Teogape, after the feast of Venus, <i>Opp.</i> ed.
+Montier, vol. xv. 2. p. 67 sqq. Comp. Landau, 58-64; on the <i>Fiammetta</i>,
+see Landau, 96-105.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_718_718" id="Footnote_718_718"></a><a href="#FNanchor_718_718"><span class="label">[718]</span></a> The famous Lionardo Aretino, the leader of the humanists at the
+beginning of the fifteenth century, admits, ‘Che gli antichi Greci d’umanita e di gentilezza di cuore abbino avanzanto di gran lunga i nostri
+Italiani;’ but he says it at the beginning of a novel which contains the
+sentimental story of the invalid Prince Antiochus and his step-mother
+Stratonice&mdash;a document of an ambiguous and half-Asiatic character.
+(Printed as an Appendix to the <i>Cento Novelle Antiche</i>.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_719_719" id="Footnote_719_719"></a><a href="#FNanchor_719_719"><span class="label">[719]</span></a> No doubt the court and prince received flattery enough from their
+occasional poets and dramatists.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_720_720" id="Footnote_720_720"></a><a href="#FNanchor_720_720"><span class="label">[720]</span></a> Comp. the contrary view taken by Gregorovius, <i>Gesch. Roms</i>, vii. 619.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_721_721" id="Footnote_721_721"></a><a href="#FNanchor_721_721"><span class="label">[721]</span></a> Paul. Jovius, <i>Dialog. de viris lit. illustr.</i>, in Tiraboschi, tom. vii. iv.
+Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, <i>De poetis nostri temp.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_722_722" id="Footnote_722_722"></a><a href="#FNanchor_722_722"><span class="label">[722]</span></a> Isabella Gonzaga to her husband, Feb. 3, 1502, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> Append. ii.
+p. 306 sqq. Comp. Gregorovius, <i>Lucrezia Borgia</i>, i. 256-266, ed. 3. In
+the French <i>Mystères</i> the actors themselves first marched before the
+audience in procession, which was called the ‘montre.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_723_723" id="Footnote_723_723"></a><a href="#FNanchor_723_723"><span class="label">[723]</span></a> <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 404. Other passages referring
+to the stage in that city, cols. 278, 279, 282 to 285, 361, 380, 381, 393, 397,
+from which it appears that Plautus was the dramatist most popular on
+these occasions, that the performances sometimes lasted till three o’clock
+in the morning, and were even given in the open air. The ballets were
+without any meaning or reference to the persons present and the occasion
+solemnized. Isabella Gonzaga, who was certainly at the time longing for
+her husband and child, and was dissatisfied with the union of her brother
+with Lucrezia, spoke of the ‘coldness and frostiness’ of the marriage and
+the festivities which attended it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_724_724" id="Footnote_724_724"></a><a href="#FNanchor_724_724"><span class="label">[724]</span></a> <i>Strozzii Poetæ</i>, fol. 232, in the fourth book of the <i>Æolosticha</i> of Tito
+Strozza. The lines run:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Ecce superveniens rerum argumenta retexit<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Mimus, et ad populum verba diserta refert.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tum similes habitu formaque et voce Menæchmi<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Dulcibus oblectant lumina nostra modis.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+The <i>Menæchmi</i> was also given at Ferrara in 1486, at the cost of more
+than 1,000 ducats. Murat. xxiv. 278.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_725_725" id="Footnote_725_725"></a><a href="#FNanchor_725_725"><span class="label">[725]</span></a> Franc. Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, fol. 169. The passage in the original is
+as follows: ‘Si sono anco spesso recitate delle tragedie con grandi
+apparecchi, comporte da poeti antichi o da moderni. Alle quali per la fama
+degli apparati concorrevano le genti estere e circonvicine per vederle e
+udirle. Ma hoggi le feste da particolari si fanno fra i parenti et essendosi
+la città regolata per se medesima da certi anni in quà, si passano i tempi
+del Carnovale in comedie e in altri più lieti e honorati diletti.’ The
+passage is not thoroughly clear.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_726_726" id="Footnote_726_726"></a><a href="#FNanchor_726_726"><span class="label">[726]</span></a> This must be the meaning of Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, fol. 168, when he
+complains that the ‘recitanti’ ruined the comedies ‘con invenzioni o
+personaggi troppo ridicoli.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_727_727" id="Footnote_727_727"></a><a href="#FNanchor_727_727"><span class="label">[727]</span></a> Sansovino, l. c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_728_728" id="Footnote_728_728"></a><a href="#FNanchor_728_728"><span class="label">[728]</span></a> Scardeonius, <i>De urb. Patav. antiq.</i>, in Graevius, Thes. vi. iii. col. 288
+sqq. An important passage for the literature of the dialects generally.
+One of the passages is as follows: ‘Hinc ad recitandas comœdias socii
+scenici et gregales et æmuli fuere nobiles juvenes Patavini, Marcus
+Aurelius Alvarotus quem in comœdiis suis Menatum appellitabat, et
+Hieronymus Zanetus quem Vezzam, et Castegnola quem Billoram vocitabat,
+et alii quidam qui sermonem agrestium imitando præ ceteris callebant.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_729_729" id="Footnote_729_729"></a><a href="#FNanchor_729_729"><span class="label">[729]</span></a> That the latter existed as early as the fifteenth century may be inferred
+from the <i>Diario Ferrerese</i>, Feb. 2nd, 1501: ‘Il duca Hercole fece
+una festa di Menechino secondo il suo uso.’ Murat. xxiv. col. 393. There
+cannot be a confusion with the Menæchmi of Plautus, which is correctly
+written, l. c. col. 278. See above, p. 318, note 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_730_730" id="Footnote_730_730"></a><a href="#FNanchor_730_730"><span class="label">[730]</span></a> Pulci mischievously invents a solemn old-world legend for his story
+of the giant Margutte (<i>Morgante</i>, canto xix. str. 153 sqq.). The critical
+introduction of Limerno Pitocco is still droller (<i>Orlandino</i>, cap. i. str.
+12-22).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_731_731" id="Footnote_731_731"></a><a href="#FNanchor_731_731"><span class="label">[731]</span></a> The <i>Morgante</i> was written in 1460 and the following years, and first
+printed at Venice in 1481. Last ed. by P. Sermolli, Florence, 1872. For
+the tournaments, see part v. chap. i. See, for what follows, Ranke: <i>Zur
+Geschichte der italienischen Poesie</i>, Berlin, 1837.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_732_732" id="Footnote_732_732"></a><a href="#FNanchor_732_732"><span class="label">[732]</span></a> The <i>Orlando inamorato</i> was first printed in 1496.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_733_733" id="Footnote_733_733"></a><a href="#FNanchor_733_733"><span class="label">[733]</span></a> <i>L’Italia liberata da Goti</i>, Rome, 1547.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_734_734" id="Footnote_734_734"></a><a href="#FNanchor_734_734"><span class="label">[734]</span></a> See above, p. 319, and Landau’s <i>Boccaccio</i>, 64-69. It must, nevertheless,
+be observed that the work of Boccaccio here mentioned was
+written before 1344, while that of Petrarch was written after Laura’s
+death, that is, after 1348.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_735_735" id="Footnote_735_735"></a><a href="#FNanchor_735_735"><span class="label">[735]</span></a> Vasari, viii. 71, in the Commentary to the <i>Vita di Rafaelle</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_736_736" id="Footnote_736_736"></a><a href="#FNanchor_736_736"><span class="label">[736]</span></a> Much of this kind our present taste could dispense with in the <i>Iliad</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_737_737" id="Footnote_737_737"></a><a href="#FNanchor_737_737"><span class="label">[737]</span></a> First edition, 1516.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_738_738" id="Footnote_738_738"></a><a href="#FNanchor_738_738"><span class="label">[738]</span></a> The speeches inserted are themselves narratives.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_739_739" id="Footnote_739_739"></a><a href="#FNanchor_739_739"><span class="label">[739]</span></a> As was the case with Pulci, <i>Morgante</i>, canto xix. str. 20 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_740_740" id="Footnote_740_740"></a><a href="#FNanchor_740_740"><span class="label">[740]</span></a> The <i>Orlandino</i>, first edition, 1526.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_741_741" id="Footnote_741_741"></a><a href="#FNanchor_741_741"><span class="label">[741]</span></a> Radevicus, <i>De gestis Friderici imp.</i>, especially ii. 76. The admirable
+<i>Vita Henrici IV.</i> contains very little personal description, as is also the
+case with the <i>Vita Chuonradi imp.</i> by Wipo.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_742_742" id="Footnote_742_742"></a><a href="#FNanchor_742_742"><span class="label">[742]</span></a> The librarian Anastasius (middle of ninth century) is here meant.
+The whole collection of the lives of the Popes (<i>Liber Pontificalis</i>) was
+formerly ascribed to him, but erroneously. Comp. Wattenbach, <i>Deutschland’s
+Geschichtsquellen</i>, i. 223 sqq. 3rd ed.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_743_743" id="Footnote_743_743"></a><a href="#FNanchor_743_743"><span class="label">[743]</span></a> Lived about the same time as Anastasius; author of a history of the
+bishopric of Ravenna. Wattenbach, l. c. 227.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_744_744" id="Footnote_744_744"></a><a href="#FNanchor_744_744"><span class="label">[744]</span></a> How early Philostratus was used in the same way, I am unable to
+say. Suetonius was no doubt taken as a model in times still earlier.
+Besides the life of Charles the Great, written by Eginhard, examples
+from the twelfth century are offered by William of Malmesbury in his
+descriptions of William the Conqueror (<a href="#page_446">p. 446</a> sqq., 452 sqq.), of William
+II. (pp. 494, 504), and of Henry I. (p. 640).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_745_745" id="Footnote_745_745"></a><a href="#FNanchor_745_745"><span class="label">[745]</span></a> See the admirable criticism in Landau, <i>Boccaccio</i>, 180-182.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_746_746" id="Footnote_746_746"></a><a href="#FNanchor_746_746"><span class="label">[746]</span></a> See above, p. 131. The original (Latin) was first published in 1847
+at Florence, by Galletti, with the title, <i>Philippi Villani Liber de civitatis
+Florentiae famosis civibus</i>; an old Italian translation has been
+often printed since 1747, last at Trieste, 1858. The first book, which
+treats of the earliest history of Florence and Rome, has never been
+printed. The chapter in Villani, <i>De semipoetis</i>, i.e. those who wrote in
+prose as well as in verse, or those who wrote poems besides following
+some other profession, is specially interesting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_747_747" id="Footnote_747_747"></a><a href="#FNanchor_747_747"><span class="label">[747]</span></a> Here we refer the reader to the biography of L. B. Alberti, from
+which extracts are given above (<a href="#page_136">p. 136</a>), and to the numerous Florentine
+biographies in Muratori, in the <i>Archivio Storico</i>, and elsewhere.
+The life of Alberti is probably an autobiography, l. c. note 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_748_748" id="Footnote_748_748"></a><a href="#FNanchor_748_748"><span class="label">[748]</span></a> <i>Storia Fiorentina</i>, ed. F. L. Polidori, Florence, 1838.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_749_749" id="Footnote_749_749"></a><a href="#FNanchor_749_749"><span class="label">[749]</span></a> <i>De viris illustribus</i>, in the publications of the <i>Stuttgarter liter.
+Vereins</i>, No. i. Stuttg. 1839. Comp. C. Voigt, ii. 324. Of the sixty-five
+biographies, twenty-one are lost.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_750_750" id="Footnote_750_750"></a><a href="#FNanchor_750_750"><span class="label">[750]</span></a> His <i>Diarium Romanum</i> from 1472 to 1484, in Murat. xiii. 81-202.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_751_751" id="Footnote_751_751"></a><a href="#FNanchor_751_751"><span class="label">[751]</span></a> <i>Ugolini Verini poetae Florentini</i> (a contemporary of Lorenzo, a
+pupil of Landinus, fol. 13, and teacher of Petrus Crinitus, fol. 14), <i>De
+illustratione urbis Florentinae libri tres</i>, Paris, 1583, deserves mention,
+esp. lib. 2. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio are spoken of and characterised
+without a word of blame. For several women, see fol. 11.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_752_752" id="Footnote_752_752"></a><a href="#FNanchor_752_752"><span class="label">[752]</span></a> <i>Petri Candidi Decembrii Vita Philippi Mariae Vicecomitis</i>, in
+Murat. xx. Comp above, p. 38.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_753_753" id="Footnote_753_753"></a><a href="#FNanchor_753_753"><span class="label">[753]</span></a> See above, p. 225.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_754_754" id="Footnote_754_754"></a><a href="#FNanchor_754_754"><span class="label">[754]</span></a> On Comines, see above, p. 96, note 1. While Comines, as is there
+indicated, partly owes his power of objective criticism to intercourse with
+Italians, the German humanists and statesmen, notwithstanding the prolonged
+residence of some of them in Italy, and their diligent and often
+most successful study of the classical world, acquired little or nothing of
+the gift of biographical representation or of the analysis of character.
+The travels, biographies, and historical sketches of the German humanists
+in the fifteenth, and often in the early part of the sixteenth centuries, are
+mostly either dry catalogues or empty, rhetorical declamations.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_755_755" id="Footnote_755_755"></a><a href="#FNanchor_755_755"><span class="label">[755]</span></a> See above, p. 96.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_756_756" id="Footnote_756_756"></a><a href="#FNanchor_756_756"><span class="label">[756]</span></a> Here and there we find exceptions. Letters of Hutten, containing
+autobiographical notices, bits of the chronicle of Barth. Sastrow, and the
+<i>Sabbata</i> of Joh. Kessler, introduce us to the inward conflicts of the
+writers, mostly, however, bearing the specifically religious character of
+the Reformation.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_757_757" id="Footnote_757_757"></a><a href="#FNanchor_757_757"><span class="label">[757]</span></a> Among northern autobiographies we might, perhaps, select for comparison
+that of Agrippa d’Aubigné (though belonging to a later period) as
+a living and speaking picture of human individuality.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_758_758" id="Footnote_758_758"></a><a href="#FNanchor_758_758"><span class="label">[758]</span></a> Written in his old age, about 1576. On Cardano as an investigator
+and discoverer, see Libri, <i>Hist. des Sciences Mathém.</i> iii. p. 167 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_759_759" id="Footnote_759_759"></a><a href="#FNanchor_759_759"><span class="label">[759]</span></a> E.g. the execution of his eldest son, who had taken vengeance for his
+wife’s infidelity by poisoning her (cap. 27, 50).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_760_760" id="Footnote_760_760"></a><a href="#FNanchor_760_760"><span class="label">[760]</span></a> <i>Discorsi della Vita Sobria</i>, consisting of the ‘trattato,’ of a ‘compendio,’
+of an ‘esortazione,’ and of a ‘lettera’ to Daniel Barbaro. The
+book has been often reprinted.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_761_761" id="Footnote_761_761"></a><a href="#FNanchor_761_761"><span class="label">[761]</span></a> Was this the villa of Codevico mentioned above, p. 321?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_762_762" id="Footnote_762_762"></a><a href="#FNanchor_762_762"><span class="label">[762]</span></a> In some cases very early; in the Lombard cities as early as the twelfth
+century. Comp. Landulfus senior, <i>Ricobaldus</i>, and (in Murat. x.) the
+remarkable anonymous work, <i>De laudibus Papiae</i>, of the fourteenth
+century. Also (in Murat. i.) <i>Liber de Situ urbis Mediol.</i> Some notices
+on Italian local history in O. Lorenzo, <i>Deutschland’s Geschichtsquellen im
+Mittelalter seit dem 13ten Jahr</i>. Berlin, 1877; but the author expressly
+refrains from an original treatment of the subject.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_763_763" id="Footnote_763_763"></a><a href="#FNanchor_763_763"><span class="label">[763]</span></a> <i>Li Tresors</i>, ed. Chabaille, Paris, 1863, pp. 179-180. Comp. <i>ibid.</i> p. 577
+(lib. iii. p. ii. c. 1).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_764_764" id="Footnote_764_764"></a><a href="#FNanchor_764_764"><span class="label">[764]</span></a> On Paris, which was a much more important place to the mediæval
+Italian than to his successor a hundred years later, see <i>Dittamondo</i>, iv.
+cap. 18. The contrast between France and Italy is accentuated by Petrarch
+in his <i>Invectivae contra Gallum</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_765_765" id="Footnote_765_765"></a><a href="#FNanchor_765_765"><span class="label">[765]</span></a> Savonarola, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1186 (above, p. 145). On Venice, see
+above, p. 62 sqq. The oldest description of Rome, by Signorili (MS.),
+was written in the pontificate of Martin V. (1417); see Gregorovius,
+vii. 569; the oldest by a German is that of H. Muffel (middle of fifteenth
+century), ed. by Voigt, Tübingen, 1876.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_766_766" id="Footnote_766_766"></a><a href="#FNanchor_766_766"><span class="label">[766]</span></a> The character of the restless and energetic Bergamasque, full of
+curiosity and suspicion, is charmingly described in Bandello, parte i.
+nov. 34.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_767_767" id="Footnote_767_767"></a><a href="#FNanchor_767_767"><span class="label">[767]</span></a> E.g. Varchi, in the ninth book of the <i>Storie Fiorentine</i> (vol. iii. p.
+56 sqq.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_768_768" id="Footnote_768_768"></a><a href="#FNanchor_768_768"><span class="label">[768]</span></a> Vasari, xii. p. 158. <i>V. di Michelangelo</i>, at the beginning. At other
+times mother nature is praised loudly enough, as in the sonnet of Alfons
+de’ Pazzi to the non-Tuscan Annibal Caro (in Trucchi, l. c. iii. p. 187):
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Misero il Varchi! e più infelici noi,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Se a vostri virtudi accidentali<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Aggiunto fosse ‘l natural, ch’è in noi!’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_769_769" id="Footnote_769_769"></a><a href="#FNanchor_769_769"><span class="label">[769]</span></a> <i>Forcianae Quaestiones, in quibus varia Italorum ingenia explicantur
+multaque alia scitu non indigna.</i> Autore Philalette Polytopiensi cive.
+Among them, <i>Mauritii Scaevae Carmen</i>.
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Quos hominum mores varios quas denique mentes<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Diverso profert Itala terra solo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Quisve vinis animus, mulierum et strenua virtus<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Pulchre hoc exili codice lector habes.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+Neapoli excudebat Martinus de Ragusia, Anno <span class="smcap">MDXXXVI</span>. This little work,
+made use of by Ranke, <i>Päpste</i>, i. 385, passes as being from the hand of
+Ortensio Landi (comp. Tiraboschi, vii. 800 to 812), although in the work
+itself no hint is given of the author. The title is explained by the circumstance
+that conversations are reported which were held at Forcium, a bath
+near Lucca, by a large company of men and women, on the question whence
+it comes that there are such great differences among mankind. The question
+receives no answer, but many of the differences among the Italians of
+that day are noticed&mdash;in studies, trade, warlike skill (the point quoted by
+Ranke), the manufacture of warlike implements, modes of life, distinctions
+in costume, in language, in intellect, in loving and hating, in the way of
+winning affection, in the manner of receiving guests, and in eating. At
+the close, come some reflections on the differences among philosophical
+systems. A large part of the work is devoted to women&mdash;their differences
+in general, the power of their beauty, and especially the question whether
+women are equal or inferior to men. The work has been made use of in
+various passages below. The following extract may serve as an example
+(fol. 7 <i>b</i> sqq.):&mdash;‘Aperiam nunc quæ sint in consilio aut dando aut accipiendo
+dissimilitudo. Præstant consilio Mediolanenses, sed aliorum gratia potius
+quam sua. Sunt nullo consilio Genuenses. Rumor est Venetos abundare.
+Sunt perutili consilio Lucenses, idque aperte indicarunt, cum in tanto
+totius Italiæ ardore, tot hostibus circumsepti suam libertatem, ad quam
+nati videntur semper tutati sint, nulla, quidem, aut capitis aut fortunarum
+ratione habita. Quis porro non vehementer admiretur? Quis callida consilia
+non stupeat? Equidem quotiescunque cogito, quanta prudentia ingruentes
+procellas evitarint, quanta solertia impendentia pericula effugerint,
+adducor in stuporem. Lucanis vero summum est studium, eos deludere qui
+consilii captandi gratia adeunt, ipsi vero omnia inconsulte ac temere faciunt.
+Brutii optimo sunt consilio, sed ut incommodent, aut perniciem afferant,
+in rebus quæ magnæ deliberationis dictu mirum quam stupidi sint, eisdem
+plane dotibus instructi sunt Volsci quod ad cædes et furta paulo propensiores
+sint. Pisani bono quidem sunt consilio, sed parum constanti, si quis
+diversum ab eis senserit, mox acquiescunt, rursus si aliter suadeas, mutabunt
+consilium, illud in caussa fuit quod tam duram ac diutinam obsidionem
+ad extremum usque non pertulerint. Placentini utrisque abundant consiliis,
+scilicet salutaribus ac pernitiosis, non facile tamen ab iis impetres
+pestilens consilium, apud Regienses neque consilii copiam invenies. Si
+sequare Mutinensium consilia, raro cedet infeliciter, sunt enim peracutissimo
+consilio, et voluntate plane bona. Providi sunt Florentini (si
+unumquemque seorsum accipias) si vero simul conjuncti sint, non admodum
+mihi consilia eorum probabuntur; feliciter cedunt Senensium consilia,
+subita sunt Perusinorum; salutaria Ferrariensium, fideli sunt consilio
+Veronenses, semper ambigui sunt in consiliis aut dandis aut accipiendis
+Patavini. Sunt pertinaces in eo quod cœperint consilio Bergomates, respuunt
+omnium consilia Neapolitani, sunt consultissimi Bononienses.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_770_770" id="Footnote_770_770"></a><a href="#FNanchor_770_770"><span class="label">[770]</span></a> <i>Commentario delle più notabili e mostruose cose d’Italia et altri
+luoghi, di Lingua Aramea in Italiana tradotta. Con un breve Catalogo
+degli inventori delle cose che si mangiano et beveno, novamente ritrovato.</i>
+In Venetia 1553 (first printed 1548, based on a journey taken by Ortensio
+Landi through Italy in 1543 and 1544). That Landi was really the author
+of this <i>Commentario</i> is clear from the concluding remarks of Nicolo Morra
+(fol. 46 <i>a</i>): ‘Il presente commentario nato del constantissimo cervello di
+M. O. L.;’ and from the signature of the whole (fol. 70 <i>a</i>): SVISNETROH
+SVDNAL, ROTUA TSE, ‘Hortensius Landus autor est.’ After a declaration
+as to Italy from the mouth of a mysterious grey-haired sage, a journey
+is described from Sicily through Italy to the East. All the cities of Italy
+are more or less fully discussed: that Lucca should receive special praise is
+intelligible from the writer’s way of thinking. Venice, where he claims to
+have been much with Pietro Aretino (<a href="#page_166">p. 166</a>), and Milan are described in
+detail, and in connexion with the latter the maddest stories are told (fol. 25
+sqq.). There is no want of such elsewhere&mdash;of roses which flower all the
+year round, stars which shine at midday, birds which are changed into men,
+and men with bulls’ heads on their shoulders, mermen, and men who spit
+fire from their mouths. Among all these there are often authentic bits of
+information, some of which will be used in the proper place; short mention
+is made of the Lutherans (fol. 32 <i>a</i>, 38 <i>a</i>), and frequent complaints are
+heard of the wretched times and unhappy state of Italy. We there read
+(fol. 22 <i>a</i>): ‘Son questi quelli Italiani li quali in un fatto d’armi uccisero
+ducento mila Francesi? sono finalmente quelli che di tutto il mondo s’impadronirono?
+Hai quanto (per quel che io vego) degenerati sono. Hai
+quanto dissimili mi paiono dalli antichi padri loro, liquali et singolar virtu
+di cuore e disciplina militare ugualmente monstrarno havere.’ On the
+catalogue of eatables which is added, see below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_771_771" id="Footnote_771_771"></a><a href="#FNanchor_771_771"><span class="label">[771]</span></a> <i>Descrizione di tutta l’Italia.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_772_772" id="Footnote_772_772"></a><a href="#FNanchor_772_772"><span class="label">[772]</span></a> Satirical lists of cities are frequently met with later, e.g. Macaroneide,
+<i>Phantas.</i> ii. For France, Rabelais, who knew the Macaroneide, is the
+chief source of all the jests and malicious allusions of this local sort.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_773_773" id="Footnote_773_773"></a><a href="#FNanchor_773_773"><span class="label">[773]</span></a> It is true that many decaying literatures are full of painfully minute
+descriptions. See e.g. in Sidonius Apollinaris the descriptions of a Visigoth
+king (<i>Epist.</i> i. 2), of a personal enemy (<i>Epist.</i> iii. 13), and in his
+poems the types of the different German tribes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_774_774" id="Footnote_774_774"></a><a href="#FNanchor_774_774"><span class="label">[774]</span></a> On Filippo Villani, see p. 330.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_775_775" id="Footnote_775_775"></a><a href="#FNanchor_775_775"><span class="label">[775]</span></a> <i>Parnasso teatrale</i>, Lipsia, 1829. Introd. p. vii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_776_776" id="Footnote_776_776"></a><a href="#FNanchor_776_776"><span class="label">[776]</span></a> The reading is here evidently corrupt. The passage is as follows
+(<i>Ameto</i>, Venezia, 1856, p. 54): ‘Del mezo de’ quali non camuso naso in
+linea diretta discende, quanto ad aquilineo non essere dimanda il dovere.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_777_777" id="Footnote_777_777"></a><a href="#FNanchor_777_777"><span class="label">[777]</span></a> ‘Due occhi ladri nel loro movimento.’ The whole work is rich in
+such descriptions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_778_778" id="Footnote_778_778"></a><a href="#FNanchor_778_778"><span class="label">[778]</span></a> The charming book of songs by Giusto dei Conti, <i>La bella Mano</i>
+(best ed. Florence, 1715), does not tell us as many details of this famous
+hand of his beloved as Boccaccio in a dozen passages of the <i>Ameto</i> of the
+hands of his nymphs.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_779_779" id="Footnote_779_779"></a><a href="#FNanchor_779_779"><span class="label">[779]</span></a> ‘Della bellezza delle donne,’ in the first vol. of the <i>Opere di Firenzuola</i>,
+Milano, 1802. For his view of bodily beauty as a sign of beauty
+of soul, comp. vol. ii. pp. 48 to 52, in the ‘ragionamenti’ prefixed to his
+novels. Among the many who maintain this doctrine, partly in the style
+of the ancients, we may quote one, Castiglione, <i>Il Cortigiana</i>, l. iv. fol. 176.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_780_780" id="Footnote_780_780"></a><a href="#FNanchor_780_780"><span class="label">[780]</span></a> This was a universal opinion, not only the professional opinion of
+painters. See below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_781_781" id="Footnote_781_781"></a><a href="#FNanchor_781_781"><span class="label">[781]</span></a> This may be an opportunity for a word on the eyes of Lucrezia
+Borgia, taken from the distichs of a Ferrarese court-poet, Ercole Strozza
+(<i>Strozzii Poetae</i>, fol. 85-88). The power of her glance is described in a
+manner only explicable in an artistic age, and which would not now be
+permitted. Sometimes it turns the beholder to fire, sometimes to stone.
+He who looks long at the sun, becomes blind; he who beheld Medusa,
+became a stone; but he who looks at the countenance of Lucrezia
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Fit primo intuitu cæcus et inde lapis.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+Even the marble Cupid sleeping in her halls is said to have been petrified
+by her gaze:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Lumine Borgiado saxificatur Amor.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+Critics may dispute, if they please, whether the so-called Eros of Praxiteles
+or that of Michelangelo is meant, since she was the possessor of both.
+</p><p>
+And the same glance appeared to another poet, Marcello Filosseno, only
+mild and lofty, ‘mansueto e altero’ (Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, vii. p. 306).
+</p><p>
+Comparisons with ideal figures of antiquity occur (<a href="#page_030">p. 30</a>). Of a boy ten
+years old we read in the <i>Orlandino</i> (ii. str. 47), ‘ed ha capo romano.’
+Referring to the fact that the appearance of the temples can be
+altogether changed by the arrangement of the hair, Firenzuola makes a
+comical attack on the overcrowding of the hair with flowers, which causes
+the head to ‘look like a pot of pinks or a quarter of goat on the spit.’
+He is, as a rule, thoroughly at home in caricature.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_782_782" id="Footnote_782_782"></a><a href="#FNanchor_782_782"><span class="label">[782]</span></a> For the ideal of the ‘Minnesänger,’ see Falke, <i>Die deutsche Trachten-
+und Modenwelt</i>, i. pp. 85 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_783_783" id="Footnote_783_783"></a><a href="#FNanchor_783_783"><span class="label">[783]</span></a> On the accuracy of his sense of form, p. 290.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_784_784" id="Footnote_784_784"></a><a href="#FNanchor_784_784"><span class="label">[784]</span></a> <i>Inferno</i>, xxi. 7; <i>Purgat.</i> xiii. 61.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_785_785" id="Footnote_785_785"></a><a href="#FNanchor_785_785"><span class="label">[785]</span></a> We must not take it too seriously, if we read (in Platina, <i>Vitae
+Pontiff.</i> p. 310) that he kept at his court a sort of buffoon, the Florentine
+Greco, ‘hominem certe cujusvis mores, naturam, linguam cum maximo
+omnium qui audiebant risu facile exprimentem.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_786_786" id="Footnote_786_786"></a><a href="#FNanchor_786_786"><span class="label">[786]</span></a> <i>Pii. II. Comment.</i> viii. p. 391.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_787_787" id="Footnote_787_787"></a><a href="#FNanchor_787_787"><span class="label">[787]</span></a> Two tournaments must be distinguished, Lorenzo’s in 1468 and
+Guiliano’s in 1475 (a third in 1481?). See Reumont, <i>L. M.</i> i. 264 sqq.
+361, 267, note 1; ii. 55, 67, and the works there quoted, which settle the
+old dispute on these points. The first tournament is treated in the poem
+of Luca Pulci, ed. <i>Ciriffo Calvaneo di Luca Pulci Gentilhuomo Fiorentino,
+con la Giostra del Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici</i>. Florence, 1572, pp. 75,
+91; the second in an unfinished poem of Ang. Poliziano, best ed. Carducci,
+<i>Le Stanze, l’Orfeo e le Rime di M. A. P.</i> Florence, 1863. The
+description of Politian breaks off at the setting out of Guiliano for the
+tournament. Pulci gives a detailed account of the combatants and the
+manner of fighting. The description of Lorenzo is particularly good
+(<a href="#page_082">p. 82</a>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_788_788" id="Footnote_788_788"></a><a href="#FNanchor_788_788"><span class="label">[788]</span></a> This so-called ‘Caccia’ is printed in the Commentary to Castiglione’s
+<i>Eclogue</i> from a Roman MS. <i>Lettere del conte B. Castiglione</i>, ed. Pierantonio
+Lerassi (Padua, 1771), ii. p. 269.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_789_789" id="Footnote_789_789"></a><a href="#FNanchor_789_789"><span class="label">[789]</span></a> See the <i>Serventese</i> of Giannozzo of Florence, in Trucchi, <i>Poesie
+italiane inedite</i>, ii. p. 99. The words are many of them quite unintelligible,
+borrowed really or apparently from the languages of the foreign
+mercenaries. Macchiavelli’s description of Florence during the plague of
+1527 belongs, to certain extent, to this class of works. It is a series of
+living, speaking pictures of a frightful calamity.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_790_790" id="Footnote_790_790"></a><a href="#FNanchor_790_790"><span class="label">[790]</span></a> According to Boccaccio (<i>Vita di Dante</i>, p. 77), Dante was the author
+of two eclogues, probably written in Latin. They are addressed to Joh.
+de Virgiliis. Comp. Fraticelli, <i>Opp. min. di Dante</i>, i. 417. Petrarch’s
+bucolic poem in <i>P. Carmina minora</i>, ed. Bossetti, i. Comp. L. Geiger,
+<i>Petr.</i> 120-122 and 270, note 6, especially A. Hortis, <i>Scritti inediti di F. P.</i>
+Triest, 1874.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_791_791" id="Footnote_791_791"></a><a href="#FNanchor_791_791"><span class="label">[791]</span></a> Boccaccio gives in his <i>Ameto</i> (above, p. 344) a kind of mythical
+Decameron, and sometimes fails ludicrously to keep up the character.
+One of his nymphs is a good Catholic, and prelates shoot glances of
+unholy love at her in Rome. Another marries. In the <i>Ninfale fiesolano</i>
+the nymph Mensola, who finds herself pregnant, takes counsel of an ‘old
+and wise nymph.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_792_792" id="Footnote_792_792"></a><a href="#FNanchor_792_792"><span class="label">[792]</span></a> In general the prosperity of the Italian peasants was greater then
+than that of the peasantry anywhere else in Europe. Comp. Sacchetti,
+nov. 88 and 222; L. Pulci in the <i>Beca da Dicamano</i> (Villari, <i>Macchiavelli</i>,
+i. 198, note 2).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_793_793" id="Footnote_793_793"></a><a href="#FNanchor_793_793"><span class="label">[793]</span></a> ‘Nullum est hominum genus aptius urbi,’ says Battista Mantovano
+(<i>Ecl.</i> viii.) of the inhabitants of the Monte Baldo and the Val. Cassina,
+who could turn their hands to anything. Some country populations, as
+is well known, have even now privileges with regard to certain occupations
+in the great cities.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_794_794" id="Footnote_794_794"></a><a href="#FNanchor_794_794"><span class="label">[794]</span></a> Perhaps one of the strongest passages, <i>Orlandino</i>, cap. v. str. 54-58.
+The tranquil and unlearned Vesp. Bisticci says (<i>Comm. sulla vita di Giov.
+Manetti</i>, p. 96): ‘Sono due ispezie di uomini difficili a supportare per la
+loro ignoranza; l’una sono i servi, la seconda i contadini.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_795_795" id="Footnote_795_795"></a><a href="#FNanchor_795_795"><span class="label">[795]</span></a> In Lombardy, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the nobles
+did not shrink from dancing, wrestling, leaping, and racing with the
+peasants. <i>Il Cortigiano</i>, l. ii. fol. 54. A. Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti) in the
+<i>Trattato del governo della famiglia</i>, p. 86, is an instance of a land-owner
+who consoles himself for the greed and fraud of his peasant tenantry with
+the reflection that he is thereby taught to bear and deal with his fellow-creatures.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_796_796" id="Footnote_796_796"></a><a href="#FNanchor_796_796"><span class="label">[796]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. <i>De fortitudine</i>, lib. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_797_797" id="Footnote_797_797"></a><a href="#FNanchor_797_797"><span class="label">[797]</span></a> The famous peasant-woman of the Valtellina&mdash;Bona Lombarda, wife
+of the Condottiere Pietro Brunoro&mdash;is known to us from Jacobus Bergomensis
+and from Porcellius, in Murat. xxv. col. 43.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_798_798" id="Footnote_798_798"></a><a href="#FNanchor_798_798"><span class="label">[798]</span></a> On the condition of the Italian peasantry in general, and especially
+of the details of that condition in several provinces, we are unable to particularise
+more fully. The proportions between freehold and leasehold
+property, and the burdens laid on each in comparison with those borne
+at the present time, must be gathered from special works which we have
+not had the opportunity of consulting. In stormy times the country
+people were apt to have appalling relapses into savagery (<i>Arch. Stor.</i>
+xvi. i. pp. 451 sqq., ad. a. 1440; Corio, fol. 259; <i>Annales Foroliv.</i> in Murat.
+xxii. col. 227, though nothing in the shape of a general peasants’ war
+occurred. The rising near Piacenza in 1462 was of some importance and
+interest. Comp. Corio, <i>Storia di Milano</i>, fol. 409; <i>Annales Placent.</i> in
+Murat. xx. col. 907; Sismondi, x. p. 138. See below, part vi. cap. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_799_799" id="Footnote_799_799"></a><a href="#FNanchor_799_799"><span class="label">[799]</span></a> <i>F. Bapt. Mantuani Bucolica seu Adolescentia in decem Eclogas
+divisa</i>; often printed, e.g. Strasburg, 1504. The date of composition is
+indicated by the preface, written in 1498, from which it also appears that
+the ninth and tenth eclogues were added later. In the heading to the
+tenth are the words, ‘post religionis ingressum;’ in that of the seventh,
+‘cum jam autor ad religionem aspiraret.’ The eclogues by no means deal
+exclusively with peasant life; in fact, only two of them do so&mdash;the sixth,
+‘disceptatione rusticorum et civium,’ in which the writer sides with the
+rustics; and the eighth, ‘de rusticorum religione.’ The others speak of
+love, of the relations between poets and wealthy men, of conversion to
+religion, and of the manners of the Roman court.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_800_800" id="Footnote_800_800"></a><a href="#FNanchor_800_800"><span class="label">[800]</span></a> <i>Poesie di Lorenzo Magnifico</i>, i. p. 37 sqq. The remarkable poems
+belonging to the period of the German ‘Minnesänger,’ which bear the
+name of Neithard von Reuenthal, only depict peasant life in so far as the
+knight chooses to mix with it for his amusement. The peasants reply to
+the ridicule of Reuenthal in songs of their own. Comp. Karl Schroder,
+<i>Die höfische Dorfpoesie des deutschen Mittelalters</i> in Rich. Gosche, <i>Jahrb.
+für Literaturgesch.</i> 1 vol. Berlin, 1875, pp. 45-98, esp. 75 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_801_801" id="Footnote_801_801"></a><a href="#FNanchor_801_801"><span class="label">[801]</span></a> <i>Poesie di Lor. Magn.</i> ii. 149.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_802_802" id="Footnote_802_802"></a><a href="#FNanchor_802_802"><span class="label">[802]</span></a> In the <i>Deliciae poetar. ital.</i>, and in the works of Politian. First separate
+ed. Florence, 1493. The didactic poem of Rucellai, <i>Le Api</i>, first
+printed 1519, and <i>La coltivazione</i>, Paris, 1546, contain something of the
+same kind.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_803_803" id="Footnote_803_803"></a><a href="#FNanchor_803_803"><span class="label">[803]</span></a> <i>Poesie di Lor. Magnifico</i>, ii. 75.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_804_804" id="Footnote_804_804"></a><a href="#FNanchor_804_804"><span class="label">[804]</span></a> The imitation of different dialects and of the manners of different
+districts spring from the same tendency. Comp. p. 155.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_805_805" id="Footnote_805_805"></a><a href="#FNanchor_805_805"><span class="label">[805]</span></a> <i>Jo. Pici oratio de hominis dignitate.</i> The passage is as follows:
+‘Statuit tandem optimus opifex ut cui dari nihil proprium poterat commune
+esset quidquid privatum singulis fuerat. Igitur hominem accepit
+indiscretae opus imaginis atque in mundi posito meditullio sic est allocutus;
+Nec certam sedem, nec propriam faciem, nec munus ullum peculiare
+tibi dedimus, O Adam, ut quam sedem, quam faciem, quae munera
+tute optaveris, ea pro voto pro tua sententia habeas et possideas. Definita
+caeteris natura inter praescriptas a nobis leges coercetur, tu nullis
+augustiis coercitus pro tuo arbitrio, in cujus manus te posui, tibi illam
+praefinies. Medium te mundi posui ut circumspiceres inde commodius
+quidquid est in mundo. Nec te caelestem neque terrenum, neque mortalem
+neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque
+plastes et fictor in quam malueris tute formam effingas. Poteris
+in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare, poteris in superiora quae sunt
+divina ex tui animi sententia regenerari. O summam dei patris liberalitatem,
+summam et admirandam hominis felicitatem. Cui datum id
+habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta simulatque nascuntur id
+secum afferunt, ut ait Lucilius, e bulga matris quod possessura sunt;
+supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt quod sunt futuri
+in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae
+vitæ germina indidit pater; quæ quisque excoluerit illa adolescent et
+fructus suos ferent in illo. Si vegetalia, planta fiet, si sensualia, obbrutescet,
+si rationalia, coeleste evadet animal, si intellectualia, angelus erit
+et dei filius, et si nulla creaturarum sorte contentus in unitatis centrum
+suae se receperit, unus cum deo spiritus factus in solitaria patris caligine
+qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus antestabit.’
+</p><p>
+The speech first appears in the <i>commentationes</i> of Jo. Picus without
+any special title; the heading ‘de hominis dignitate’ was added later.
+It is not altogether suitable, since a great part of the discourse is devoted
+to the defence of the peculiar philosophy of Pico, and the praise of,
+the Jewish Cabbalah. On Pico, see above, p. 202 sqq.; and below;
+part. vi. chap. 4. More than two hundred years before, Brunetto Latini
+(<i>Tesoro</i>, lib. i. cap. 13, ed. Chabaille, p. 20) had said: ‘Toutes choses
+dou ciel en aval sont faites pour l’ome; mais li hom at faiz pour lui
+meisme.’ The words seemed to a contemporary to have too much
+human pride in them, and he added: ‘e por Dieu amer et servir et por
+avoir la joie pardurable.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_806_806" id="Footnote_806_806"></a><a href="#FNanchor_806_806"><span class="label">[806]</span></a> An allusion to the fall of Lucifer and his followers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_807_807" id="Footnote_807_807"></a><a href="#FNanchor_807_807"><span class="label">[807]</span></a> The habit among the Piedmontese nobility of living in their castles
+in the country struck the other Italians as exceptional. Bandello, parte
+ii. nov. 7 (?).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_808_808" id="Footnote_808_808"></a><a href="#FNanchor_808_808"><span class="label">[808]</span></a> This was the case long before printing. A large number of manuscripts,
+and among them the best, belonged to Florentine artisans. If it
+had not been for Savonarola’s great bonfire, many more of them would
+be left.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_809_809" id="Footnote_809_809"></a><a href="#FNanchor_809_809"><span class="label">[809]</span></a> Dante, <i>De monarchia</i>, l. ii. cap. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_810_810" id="Footnote_810_810"></a><a href="#FNanchor_810_810"><span class="label">[810]</span></a> <i>Paradiso</i>, xvi. at the beginning.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_811_811" id="Footnote_811_811"></a><a href="#FNanchor_811_811"><span class="label">[811]</span></a> Dante, <i>Convito</i>, nearly the whole <i>Trattato</i>, iv., and elsewhere.
+Brunetto Latini says (<i>Il tesoro</i>, lib. i. p. ii. cap. 50, ed. Chabaille, p. 343):
+‘De ce (la vertu) nasqui premierement la nobleté de gentil gent, non pas
+de ses ancêtres;’ and he warns men (lib. ii. p. ii. cap. 196, p. 440) that
+they may lose true nobility by bad actions. Similarly Petrarch, <i>de rem.
+utr. fort.</i> lib. i. dial. xvii.: ‘Verus nobilis non nascitur, sed fit.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_812_812" id="Footnote_812_812"></a><a href="#FNanchor_812_812"><span class="label">[812]</span></a> <i>Poggi Opera, Dial. de nobilitate.</i> Aristotle’s view is expressly combatted
+by B. Platina, <i>De vera nobilitate</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_813_813" id="Footnote_813_813"></a><a href="#FNanchor_813_813"><span class="label">[813]</span></a> This contempt of noble birth is common among the humanists.
+See the severe passages in Æn. Sylvius, <i>Opera</i>, pp. 84 (<i>Hist. bohem.</i> cap.
+2) and 640. (<i>Stories of Lucretia and Euryalus.</i>)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_814_814" id="Footnote_814_814"></a><a href="#FNanchor_814_814"><span class="label">[814]</span></a> This is the case in the capital itself. See Bandello, parte ii. nov. 7;
+<i>Joviani Pontani Antonius</i>, where the decline of energy in the nobility is
+dated from the coming of the Aragonese dynasty.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_815_815" id="Footnote_815_815"></a><a href="#FNanchor_815_815"><span class="label">[815]</span></a> Throughout Italy it was universal that the owner of large landed
+property stood on an equality with the nobles. It is only flattery when
+J. A. Campanus adds to the statement of Pius II. (<i>Commentarii</i>, p. 1),
+that as a boy he had helped his poor parents in their rustic labours, the
+further assertion that he only did so for his amusement, and that this was
+the custom of the young nobles (Voigt, ii. 339).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_816_816" id="Footnote_816_816"></a><a href="#FNanchor_816_816"><span class="label">[816]</span></a> For an estimate of the nobility in North Italy, Bandello, with his
+repeated rebukes of <i>mésalliances</i>, is of importance (parte i. nov. 4, 26;
+parte iii. nov. 60). For the participation of the nobles in the games of the
+peasants, see above.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_817_817" id="Footnote_817_817"></a><a href="#FNanchor_817_817"><span class="label">[817]</span></a> The severe judgment of Macchiavelli, <i>Discorsi</i>, i. 55, refers only to
+those of the nobility who still retained feudal rights, and who were
+thoroughly idle and politically mischievous. Agrippa of Nettesheim, who
+owes his most remarkable ideas chiefly to his life in Italy, has a chapter
+on the nobility and princes (<i>De Incert. et Vanit. Scient.</i> cap, 80), the bitterness
+of which exceeds anything to be met with elsewhere, and is due to
+the social ferment then prevailing in the North. A passage at p. 213 is
+as follows: ‘Si ... nobilitatis primordia requiramus, comperiemus
+hanc nefaria perfidia et crudelitate partam, si ingressum spectemus,
+reperiemus hanc mercenaria militia et latrociniis auctam. Nobilitas
+revera nihil aliud est quam robusta improbitas atque dignitas non nisi
+scelere quaesita benedictio et hereditas pessimorom quorumcunque
+filiorum.’ In giving the history of the nobility he makes a passing reference
+to Italy (<a href="#page_227">p. 227</a>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_818_818" id="Footnote_818_818"></a><a href="#FNanchor_818_818"><span class="label">[818]</span></a> Massuccio, nov. 19 (ed. Settembrini, Nap. 1874, p. 220). The first
+ed. of the novels appeared in 1476.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_819_819" id="Footnote_819_819"></a><a href="#FNanchor_819_819"><span class="label">[819]</span></a> Jacopo Pitti to Cosimo I., <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> iv. ii. p. 99. In North
+Italy the Spanish rule brought about the same results. Bandello, parte
+ii. nov. 40, dates from this period.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_820_820" id="Footnote_820_820"></a><a href="#FNanchor_820_820"><span class="label">[820]</span></a> When, in the fifteenth century, Vespasiano Fiorentino (pp. 518, 632)
+implies that the rich should not try to increase their inherited fortune, but
+should spend their whole annual income, this can only, in the mouth of a
+Florentine, refer to the great landowners.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_821_821" id="Footnote_821_821"></a><a href="#FNanchor_821_821"><span class="label">[821]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, nov. 153. Comp. nov. 82 and 150.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_822_822" id="Footnote_822_822"></a><a href="#FNanchor_822_822"><span class="label">[822]</span></a> ‘Che la cavalleria è morta.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_823_823" id="Footnote_823_823"></a><a href="#FNanchor_823_823"><span class="label">[823]</span></a> Poggius, <i>De Nobilitate</i>, fol. 27. See above, p. 19. Ænea Silvio
+(<i>Hist. Fried. III.</i> ed. Kollar, p. 294) finds fault with the readiness with
+which Frederick conferred knighthood in Italy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_824_824" id="Footnote_824_824"></a><a href="#FNanchor_824_824"><span class="label">[824]</span></a> Vasari, iii. 49, and note. <i>Vita di Dello.</i> The city of Florence claimed
+the right of conferring knighthood. On the ceremonies of this kind in
+1378 and 1389, see Reumont, <i>Lorenzo</i>, ii. 444 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_825_825" id="Footnote_825_825"></a><a href="#FNanchor_825_825"><span class="label">[825]</span></a> Senarega, <i>De Reb. Gen.</i> in Murat. xxiv. col. 525. At a wedding of
+Joh. Adurnus with Leonora di Sanseverino, ‘certamina equestria in
+Sarzano edita sunt ... proposita et data victoribus praemia. Ludi
+multiformes in palatio celebrati a quibus tanquam a re nova pendebat
+plebs et integros dies illis spectantibus impendebat.’ Politian writes to
+Joh. Picus of the cavalry exercise of his pupils (<i>Aug. Pol. Epist.</i> lib. xii.
+ep. 6): ‘Tu tamen a me solos fieri poetas aut oratores putas, at ego non
+minus facio bellatores.’ Ortensio Landi in the <i>Commentario</i>, fol. 180,
+tells of a duel between two soldiers at Correggio with a fatal result,
+reminding one of the old gladiatorial combats. The writer, whose
+imagination is generally active, gives us here the impression of truthfulness.
+The passages quoted show that knighthood was not absolutely
+necessary for these public contests.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_826_826" id="Footnote_826_826"></a><a href="#FNanchor_826_826"><span class="label">[826]</span></a> Petrarch, <i>Epist. Senil.</i> xi. 13, to Ugo of Este. Another passage in
+the <i>Epist. Famil.</i> lib. v. ep. 6, Dec. 1st, 1343, describes the disgust he
+felt at seeing a knight fall at a tournament in Naples. For legal prescriptions as to the tournament at Naples, see Fracassetti’s Italian translation
+of Petrarch’s letters, Florence, 1864, ii. p. 34. L. B. Alberti also
+points out the danger, uselessness, and expense of tournaments. <i>Della
+Famiglia, Op. Volg.</i> ii. 229.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_827_827" id="Footnote_827_827"></a><a href="#FNanchor_827_827"><span class="label">[827]</span></a> Nov. 64. With reference to this practice, it is said expressly in the
+<i>Orlandino</i> (ii. str. 7), of a tournament under Charlemagne: ‘Here they
+were no cooks and scullions, but kings, dukes, and marquises, who fought.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_828_828" id="Footnote_828_828"></a><a href="#FNanchor_828_828"><span class="label">[828]</span></a> This is one of the oldest parodies of the tournament. Sixty years
+passed before Jacques Cœur, the burgher-minister of finance under
+Charles VII., gave a tournament of donkeys in the courtyard of his palace
+at Bourges (about 1450). The most brilliant of all these parodies&mdash;the
+second canto of the <i>Orlandino</i> just quoted&mdash;was not published till 1526.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_829_829" id="Footnote_829_829"></a><a href="#FNanchor_829_829"><span class="label">[829]</span></a> Comp. the poetry, already quoted, of Politian and Luca Pulci (<a href="#page_349">p. 349</a>,
+note 3). Further, Paul. Jov., <i>Vita Leonis X.</i> l. i.; Macchiavelli, <i>Storie
+Fiorent.</i>, l. vii.; Paul. Jov. <i>Elog.</i>, speaking of Pietro de’ Medici, who
+neglected his public duties for these amusements, and of Franc. Borbonius,
+who lost his life in them; Vasari, ix. 219, <i>Vita di Granacci</i>. In
+the <i>Morgante</i> of Pulci, written under the eyes of Lorenzo, the knights
+are comical in their language and actions, but their blows are sturdy and
+scientific. Bojardo, too, writes for those who understand the tournament
+and the art of war. Comp. p. 323. In earlier Florentine history we read
+of a tournament in honour of the king of France, c. 1380, in Leon. Aret.,
+<i>Hist. Flor.</i> lib. xi. ed. Argent, p. 222. The tournaments at Ferrara in
+1464 are mentioned in the <i>Diario Ferrar.</i> in Murat. xxiv. col. 208; at
+Venice, see Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, fol. 153 sqq.; at Bologna in 1470 and
+after, see Bursellis, <i>Annal. Bonon.</i> Muratori xxiii. col. 898, 903, 906, 908,
+911, where it is curious to note the odd mixture of sentimentalism attaching
+to the celebration of Roman triumphs; ‘ut antiquitas Romana renovata videretur,’ we read in one place. Frederick of Urbino (<a href="#page_044">p. 44</a> sqq.)
+lost his right eye at a tournament ‘ab ictu lanceae.’ On the tournament
+as held at that time in northern countries, see Olivier de la Marche,
+<i>Mémoires</i>, <i>passim</i>, and especially cap. 8, 9, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_830_830" id="Footnote_830_830"></a><a href="#FNanchor_830_830"><span class="label">[830]</span></a> Bald. Castiglione. <i>Il Cortigiano</i>, l. i. fol. 18.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_831_831" id="Footnote_831_831"></a><a href="#FNanchor_831_831"><span class="label">[831]</span></a> Paul. Jovii, <i>Elogia</i>, sub tit. Petrus Gravina, Alex. Achillinus, Balth.
+Castellio, &amp;c. pp. 138 sqq. 112 sqq. 143 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_832_832" id="Footnote_832_832"></a><a href="#FNanchor_832_832"><span class="label">[832]</span></a> Casa, <i>Il Galateo</i>, p. 78.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_833_833" id="Footnote_833_833"></a><a href="#FNanchor_833_833"><span class="label">[833]</span></a> See on this point the Venetian books of fashions, and Sansovino,
+<i>Venezia</i>, fol. 150 sqq. The bridal dress at the betrothal&mdash;white, with the
+hair falling freely on the shoulders&mdash;is that of Titian’s Flora. The ‘Proveditori
+alle pompe’ at Venice established 1514. Extracts from their
+decisions in Armand Baschet, <i>Souvenirs d’une Mission</i>, Paris, 1857. Prohibition
+of gold-embroidered garments in Venice, 1481, which had formerly
+been worn even by the bakers’ wives; they were now to be decorated
+‘gemmis unionibus,’ so that ‘frugalissimus ornatus’ cost 4,000 gold
+florins. M. Ant. Sabellici, <i>Epist.</i> lib. iii. (to M. Anto. Barbavarus).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_834_834" id="Footnote_834_834"></a><a href="#FNanchor_834_834"><span class="label">[834]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. <i>De Principe</i>: ‘Utinam autem non eo impudentiae
+perventum esset, ut inter mercatorem et patricium nullum sit in vestitu
+ceteroque ornatu discrimen. Sed haec tanta licentia reprehendi potest,
+coerceri non potest, quanquam mutari vestes sic quotidie videamus, ut
+quas quarto ante mense in deliciis habebamus, nunc repudiemus et tanquam
+veteramenta abjiciamus. Quodque tolerari vix potest, nullum fere
+vestimenti genus probatur, quod e Galliis non fuerit adductum, in quibus
+levia pleraque in pretio sunt, tametsi nostri persaepe homines modum illis
+et quasi formulam quandam praescribant.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_835_835" id="Footnote_835_835"></a><a href="#FNanchor_835_835"><span class="label">[835]</span></a> See e.g. the <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 297, 320, 376, sqq.,
+in which the last German fashions are spoken of; the chronicler says,
+‘Che pareno buffoni tali portatori.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_836_836" id="Footnote_836_836"></a><a href="#FNanchor_836_836"><span class="label">[836]</span></a> This interesting passage from a very rare work may be here quoted.
+See above, p. 83 note 1. The historical event referred to is the conquest
+of Milan by Antonio Leiva, the general of Charles V., in 1522. ‘Olim
+splendidissime vestiebant Mediolanenses. Sed postquam Carolus Cæsar
+in eam urbem tetram et monstruosam Bestiam immisit, it a consumpti et
+exhausti sunt, ut vestimentorum splendorem omnium maxime oderint, et
+quemadmodum ante illa durissima Antoniana tempora nihil aliud fere
+cogitabant quam de mutandis vestibus, nunc alia cogitant ac in mente
+versant. Non potuit tamen illa Leviana rabies tantum perdere, neque
+illa in exhausta depraedandi libidine tantum expilare, quin a re familiari
+adhuc belle parati fiant atque ita vestiant quemadmodum decere existimant.
+Et certe nisi illa Antonii Levae studia egregios quosdam imitatores
+invenisset, meo quidem judicio, nulli cederent. Neapolitani nimium exercent
+in vestitu sumptus. Genuensium vestitum perelegantem judico
+neque sagati sunt neque togati. Ferme oblitus eram Venetorum. Ii
+togati omnes. Decet quidem ille habitus adulta aetate homines, juvenes
+vero (si quid ego judico) minime utuntur panno quem ipsi vulgo Venetum
+appellant, ita probe confecto ut perpetuo durare existimes, saepissime vero
+eas vestes gestant nepotes, quas olim tritavi gestarunt. Noctu autem dum
+scortantur ac potant, Hispanicis palliolis utuntur. Ferrarienses ac Mantuani
+nihil tam diligenter curant, quam ut pileos habeant aureis quibusdam
+frustillis adornatos, atque nutanti capite incedunt seque quovis honore
+dignos existimant, Lucenses neque superbo, neque abjecto vestitu. Florentinorum
+habitus mihi quidem ridiculus videtur. Reliquos omitto, ne
+nimius sim.’ Ugolinus Verinus, ‘de illustratione urbis Florentiae’ says
+of the simplicity of the good old time:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">‘Non externis advecta Britannis<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lana erat in pretio, non concha aut coccus in usu.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_837_837" id="Footnote_837_837"></a><a href="#FNanchor_837_837"><span class="label">[837]</span></a> Comp. the passages on the same subject in Falke, <i>Die deutsche
+Trachten- und Modenwelt</i>, Leipzig, 1858.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_838_838" id="Footnote_838_838"></a><a href="#FNanchor_838_838"><span class="label">[838]</span></a> On the Florentine women, see the chief references in Giov. Villani,
+x. 10 and 150 (Regulations as to dress and their repeal); Matteo Villani,
+i. 4 (Extravagant living in consequence of the plague). In the celebrated
+edict on fashions of the year 1330, embroidered figures only were allowed
+on the dresses of women, to the exclusion of those which were painted
+(dipinto). What was the nature of these decorations appears doubtful.
+There is a list of the arts of the toilette practised by women in Boccaccio,
+<i>De Cas. Vir. Ill.</i> lib. i. cap. 18, ‘in mulieres.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_839_839" id="Footnote_839_839"></a><a href="#FNanchor_839_839"><span class="label">[839]</span></a> Those of real hair were called ‘capelli morti.’ Wigs were also worn
+by men, as by Giannozzo Manetti, <i>Vesp. Bist. Commentario</i>, p. 103; so
+at least we explain this somewhat obscure passage. For an instance of
+false teeth made of ivory, and worn, though only for the sake of clear
+articulation, by an Italian prelate, see Anshelm, <i>Berner Chronik</i>, iv. p. 30
+(1508). Ivory teeth in Boccaccio, l. c.: ‘Dentes casu sublatos reformare
+ebore fuscatos pigmentis gemmisque in albedinem revocare pristinam.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_840_840" id="Footnote_840_840"></a><a href="#FNanchor_840_840"><span class="label">[840]</span></a> Infessura, in Eccard, <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. col. 1874: Allegretto, in Murat.
+xxiii. col. 823. For the writers on Savonarola, see below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_841_841" id="Footnote_841_841"></a><a href="#FNanchor_841_841"><span class="label">[841]</span></a> Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, fol. 152: ‘Capelli biondissimi per forza di sole.’
+Comp. p. 89, and the rare works quoted by Yriarte, ‘<i>Vie d’un Patricien
+de Venise</i>’ (1874), p. 56.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_842_842" id="Footnote_842_842"></a><a href="#FNanchor_842_842"><span class="label">[842]</span></a> As was the case in Germany too. <i>Poesie satiriche</i>, p. 119. From the
+satire of Bern. Giambullari, ‘Per prendere moglie’ (pp. 107-126), we can
+form a conception of the chemistry of the toilette, which was founded
+largely on superstition and magic.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_843_843" id="Footnote_843_843"></a><a href="#FNanchor_843_843"><span class="label">[843]</span></a> The poets spared no pains to show the ugliness, danger, and absurdity
+of these practices. Comp. Ariosto, <i>Sat.</i> iii. 202 sqq.; Aretino, <i>Il Marescalco</i>,
+atto ii. scena 5; and several passages in the <i>Ragionamenti</i>; Giambullari,
+l. c. Phil. Beroald. sen. <i>Garmina</i>. Also Filelfo in his Satires (Venice,
+1502, iv. 2-5 sqq.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_844_844" id="Footnote_844_844"></a><a href="#FNanchor_844_844"><span class="label">[844]</span></a> Cennino Cennini, <i>Trattato della Pittura</i>, gives in cap. 161 a recipe
+for painting the face, evidently for the purpose of mysteries or masquerades,
+since, in cap. 162, he solemnly warns his readers against the general
+use of cosmetics and the like, which was peculiarly common, as he tells
+us (<a href="#page_146">p. 146</a> sqq.), in Tuscany.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_845_845" id="Footnote_845_845"></a><a href="#FNanchor_845_845"><span class="label">[845]</span></a> Comp. <i>La Nencia di Barberino</i>, str. 20 and 40. The lover promises
+to bring his beloved cosmetics from the town (see on this poem of Lorenzo
+dei Medici, above, p. 101).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_846_846" id="Footnote_846_846"></a><a href="#FNanchor_846_846"><span class="label">[846]</span></a> Agnolo Pandolfini, <i>Trattato della Governo della Famiglia</i>, p. 118.
+He condemns this practice most energetically.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_847_847" id="Footnote_847_847"></a><a href="#FNanchor_847_847"><span class="label">[847]</span></a> Tristan. Caracciolo, in Murat. xxii. col. 87. Bandello, parte ii.
+nov. 47.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_848_848" id="Footnote_848_848"></a><a href="#FNanchor_848_848"><span class="label">[848]</span></a> Cap. i. to Cosimo: “Quei cento scudi nuovi e profumati che l’altro
+di mi mandaste a donare.” Some objects which date from that period
+have not yet lost their odour.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_849_849" id="Footnote_849_849"></a><a href="#FNanchor_849_849"><span class="label">[849]</span></a> Vespasiano Fiorent. p. 453, in the life of Donato Acciajuoli, and p.
+625, in the life of Niccoli. See above, vol. i. p. 303 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_850_850" id="Footnote_850_850"></a><a href="#FNanchor_850_850"><span class="label">[850]</span></a> Giraldi, <i>Hecatommithi</i>, Introduz. nov. 6. A few notices on the
+Germans in Italy may not here be out of place. On the fear of German
+invasion, see p. 91, note 2; on Germans as copyists and printers, p. 193
+sqq. and the notes; on the ridicule of Hadrian VI. as a German, p. 227
+and notes. The Italians were in general ill-disposed to the Germans,
+and showed their ill-will by ridicule. Boccaccio (<i>Decam.</i> viii. 1) says:
+‘Un Tedesco in soldo prò della persona è assai leale a coloro ne’ cui
+servigi si mattea; il che rade volte suole de’ Tedeschi avenire.’ The
+tale is given as an instance of German cunning. The Italian humanists
+are full of attacks on the German barbarians, and especially those who,
+like Poggio, had seen Germany. Comp. Voigt, <i>Wiederbelebung</i>, 374 sqq.;
+Geiger, <i>Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Italien Zeit des Humanismus</i>
+in <i>Zeitschrift für deutsche Culturgeschichte</i>, 1875, pp. 104-124;
+see also Janssen, <i>Gesch. der deutschen Volkes</i>, i. 262. One of the chief
+opponents of the Germans was Joh. Ant. Campanus. See his works, ed.
+Mencken, who delivered a discourse ‘De Campani odio in Germanos.’
+The hatred of the Germans was strengthened by the conduct of Hadrian
+VI., and still more by the conduct of the troops at the sack of Rome
+(Gregorovius, viii. 548, note). Bandello III. nov. 30, chooses the German
+as the type of the dirty and foolish man (see iii. 51, for another German).
+When an Italian wishes to praise a German he says, as Petrus Alcyonius
+in the dedication to his dialogue <i>De Exilio</i>, to Nicolaus Schomberg, p. 9:
+‘Itaque etsi in Misnensi clarissima Germaniæ provincia illustribus
+natalibus ortus es, tamen in Italiae luce cognosceris.’ Unqualified praise
+is rare, e.g. of German women at the time of Marius, <i>Cortigiano</i>, iii.
+cap. 33.
+</p><p>
+It must be added that the Italians of the Renaissance, like the Greeks
+of antiquity, were filled with aversion for all barbarians. Boccaccio, <i>De
+claris Mulieribus</i>, in the article ‘Carmenta,’ speaks of ‘German barbarism,
+French savagery, English craft, and Spanish coarseness.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_851_851" id="Footnote_851_851"></a><a href="#FNanchor_851_851"><span class="label">[851]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i>, p. 289, who, however, makes no mention of the
+German education. Maximilian could not be induced, even by celebrated
+women, to change his underclothing.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_852_852" id="Footnote_852_852"></a><a href="#FNanchor_852_852"><span class="label">[852]</span></a> Æneas Sylvius (<i>Vitae Paparum</i>, ap. Murat. iii. ii. col. 880) says, in
+speaking of Baccano: ‘Pauca sunt mapalia, eaque hospitia faciunt Theutonici;
+hoc hominum genus totam fere Italiam hospitalem facit; ubi non
+repereris hos, neque diversorium quaeras.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_853_853" id="Footnote_853_853"></a><a href="#FNanchor_853_853"><span class="label">[853]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, Nov. 21. Padua, about the year 1450, boasted of
+a great inn&mdash;the ‘Ox’&mdash;like a palace, containing stabling for two hundred
+horses. Michele Savonarola, in Mur. xxiv. col. 1175. At Florence, outside
+the Porta San Gallo, there was one of the largest and most splendid
+inns then known, but which served, it seems, only as a place of amusement
+for the people of the city. Varchi, <i>Stor. Fior.</i> iii. p. 86. At the
+time of Alexander VI. the best inn at Rome was kept by a German. See
+the remarkable notices taken from the MS. of Burcardus in Gregorovius,
+vii. 361, note 2. Comp. <i>ibid.</i> p. 93, notes 2 and 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_854_854" id="Footnote_854_854"></a><a href="#FNanchor_854_854"><span class="label">[854]</span></a> Comp. e.g. the passages in Sebastian Brant’s <i>Narrenschiff</i>, in the
+Colloquies of Erasmus, in the Latin poem of Grobianus, &amp;c., and poems
+on behaviour at table, where, besides descriptions of bad habits, rules
+are given for good behaviour. For one of these, see C. Weller, <i>Deutsche
+Gedichte der Jahrhunderts</i>, Tübingen, 1875.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_855_855" id="Footnote_855_855"></a><a href="#FNanchor_855_855"><span class="label">[855]</span></a> The diminution of the ‘burla’ is evident from the instances in the
+<i>Cortigiano</i>, l. ii. fol. 96. The Florence practical jokes kept their ground
+tenaciously. See, for evidence, the tales of Lasca (Ant. Franc. Grazini, b.
+1503, d. 1582), which appeared at Florence in 1750.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_856_856" id="Footnote_856_856"></a><a href="#FNanchor_856_856"><span class="label">[856]</span></a> For Milan, see Bandello, parte i. nov. 9. There were more than sixty
+carriages with four, and numberless others with two, horses, many of
+them carved and richly gilt and with silken tops. Comp. <i>ibid.</i> nov. 4.
+Ariosto, <i>Sat.</i> iii. 127.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_857_857" id="Footnote_857_857"></a><a href="#FNanchor_857_857"><span class="label">[857]</span></a> Bandello, parte i. nov. 3, iii. 42, iv. 25.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_858_858" id="Footnote_858_858"></a><a href="#FNanchor_858_858"><span class="label">[858]</span></a> <i>De Vulgari Eloquio</i>, ed. Corbinelli, Parisiis, 1577. According to
+Boccaccio, <i>Vita di Dante</i>, p. 77, it was written shortly before his death.
+He mentions in the <i>Convito</i> the rapid and striking changes which took
+place during his lifetime in the Italian language.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_859_859" id="Footnote_859_859"></a><a href="#FNanchor_859_859"><span class="label">[859]</span></a> See on this subject the investigations of Lionardo Aretino (<i>Epist.</i> ed.
+Mehus. ii. 62 sqq. lib. vi. 10) and Poggio (<i>Historiae disceptativae convivales
+tres</i>, in the <i>Opp.</i> fol. 14 sqq.), whether in earlier times the language
+of the people and of scholars was the same. Lionardo maintains the negative;
+Poggio expressly maintains the affirmative against his predecessor.
+See also the detailed argument of L. B. Alberti in the introduction to
+<i>Della Famiglia</i>, book iii., on the necessity of Italian for social intercourse.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_860_860" id="Footnote_860_860"></a><a href="#FNanchor_860_860"><span class="label">[860]</span></a> The gradual progress which this dialect made in literature and social
+intercourse could be tabulated without difficulty by a native scholar. It
+could be shown to what extent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
+the various dialects kept their places, wholly or partly, in correspondence,
+in official documents, in historical works, and in literature generally.
+The relations between the dialects and a more or less impure Latin,
+which served as the official language, would also be discussed. The
+modes of speech and pronunciation in the different cities of Italy are
+noticed in Landi, <i>Forcianae Quaestiones</i>, fol. 7 <i>a.</i> Of the former he says:
+‘Hetrusci vero quanquam caeteris excellant, effugere tamen non possunt,
+quin et ipsi ridiculi sint, aut saltem quin se mutuo lacerent;’ as regards
+pronunciation, the Sienese, Lucchese, and Florentines are specially
+praised; but of the Florentines it is said: ‘Plus (jucunditatis) haberet si
+voces non ingurgitaret aut non ita palato lingua jungeretur.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_861_861" id="Footnote_861_861"></a><a href="#FNanchor_861_861"><span class="label">[861]</span></a> It is so felt to be by Dante, <i>De Vulgari Eloquio</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_862_862" id="Footnote_862_862"></a><a href="#FNanchor_862_862"><span class="label">[862]</span></a> Tuscan, it is true, was read and written long before this in Piedmont&mdash;but
+very little reading and writing was done at all.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_863_863" id="Footnote_863_863"></a><a href="#FNanchor_863_863"><span class="label">[863]</span></a> The place, too, of the dialect in the usage of daily life was clearly
+understood. Gioviano Pontano ventured especially to warn the prince
+of Naples against the use of it (Jov. Pontan. <i>De Principe</i>). The last
+Bourbons were notoriously less scrupulous in this respect. For the way
+in which a Milanese Cardinal, who wished to retain his native dialect in
+Rome was ridiculed, see Bandello, parte ii. nov. 31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_864_864" id="Footnote_864_864"></a><a href="#FNanchor_864_864"><span class="label">[864]</span></a> Bald. Castiglione, <i>Il Cortigiano</i>, l. i. fol. 27 sqq. Throughout the
+dialogue we are able to gather the personal opinion of the writer. The
+opposition to Petrarch and Boccaccio is very curious (Dante is not once
+mentioned). We read that Politian, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and others were
+also Tuscans, and as worthy of imitation as they, ‘e forse di non minor
+dottrina e guidizio.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_865_865" id="Footnote_865_865"></a><a href="#FNanchor_865_865"><span class="label">[865]</span></a> There was a limit, however, to this. The satirists introduce bits of
+Spanish, and Folengo (under the pseudonym Limerno Pitocco, in his
+<i>Orlandino</i>) of French, but only by way of ridicule. It is an exceptional
+fact that a street in Milan, which at the time of the French (1500 to 1512,
+1515 to 1522) was called Rue Belle, now bears the name Rugabella. The
+long Spanish rule has left almost no traces on the language, and but
+rarely the name of some governor in streets and public buildings. It
+was not till the eighteenth century that, together with French modes of
+thought, many French words and phrases found their way into Italian.
+The purism of our century is still busy in removing them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_866_866" id="Footnote_866_866"></a><a href="#FNanchor_866_866"><span class="label">[866]</span></a> Firenzuola, <i>Opera</i>, i. in the preface to the discourse on female beauty,
+and ii. in the <i>Ragionamenti</i> which precede the novels.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_867_867" id="Footnote_867_867"></a><a href="#FNanchor_867_867"><span class="label">[867]</span></a> Bandello, parte i. <i>Proemio</i>, and nov. 1 and 2. Another Lombard, the
+before-mentioned Teofilo Folengo in his <i>Orlandino</i>, treats the whole
+matter with ridicule.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_868_868" id="Footnote_868_868"></a><a href="#FNanchor_868_868"><span class="label">[868]</span></a> Such a congress appears to have been held at Bologna at the end of
+1531 under the presidency of Bembo. See the letter of Claud. Tolomai, in
+Firenzuola, <i>Opere</i>, vol. ii. append. p. 231 sqq. But this was not so much
+a matter of purism, but rather the old quarrel between Lombards and
+Tuscans.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_869_869" id="Footnote_869_869"></a><a href="#FNanchor_869_869"><span class="label">[869]</span></a> Luigi Cornaro complains about 1550 (at the beginning of his <i>Trattato
+della Vita Sobria</i>) that latterly Spanish ceremonies and compliments,
+Lutheranism and gluttony had been gaining ground in Italy. With
+moderation in respect to the entertainment offered to guests, the freedom
+and ease of social intercourse disappeared.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_870_870" id="Footnote_870_870"></a><a href="#FNanchor_870_870"><span class="label">[870]</span></a> Vasari, xii. p. 9 and 11, <i>Vita di Rustici</i>. For the School for Scandal
+of needy artists, see xi. 216 sqq., <i>Vita d’Aristotile</i>. Macchiavelli’s <i>Capitoli</i>
+for a circle of pleasure-seekers (<i>Opere minori</i>, p. 407) are a ludicrous
+caricature of these social statutes. The well-known description of the
+evening meeting of artists in Rome in Benvenuto Cellini, i. cap. 30 is
+incomparable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_871_871" id="Footnote_871_871"></a><a href="#FNanchor_871_871"><span class="label">[871]</span></a> Which must have been taken about 10 or 11 o’clock. See Bandello,
+parte ii. nov. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_872_872" id="Footnote_872_872"></a><a href="#FNanchor_872_872"><span class="label">[872]</span></a> Prato, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. p. 309, calls the ladies ‘alquante ministre di
+Venere.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_873_873" id="Footnote_873_873"></a><a href="#FNanchor_873_873"><span class="label">[873]</span></a> Biographical information and some of her letters in A. v. Reumont’s
+<i>Briefe heiliger und gottesfürchtiger Italiener</i>. Freiburg (1877) p. 22 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_874_874" id="Footnote_874_874"></a><a href="#FNanchor_874_874"><span class="label">[874]</span></a> Important passages: parte i. nov. 1, 3, 21, 30, 44; ii. 10, 34, 55;
+iii. 17, &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_875_875" id="Footnote_875_875"></a><a href="#FNanchor_875_875"><span class="label">[875]</span></a> Comp. <i>Lorenzo Magn. dei Med., Poesie</i>, i. 204 (the Symposium); 291
+(the Hawking-Party). Roscoe, <i>Vita di Lorenzo</i>, iii. p. 140, and append.
+17 to 19.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_876_876" id="Footnote_876_876"></a><a href="#FNanchor_876_876"><span class="label">[876]</span></a> The title ‘Simposio’ is inaccurate; it should be called, ‘The return
+from the Vintage.’ Lorenzo, in a parody of Dante’s Hell, gives an amusing
+account of his meeting in the Via Faenza all his good friends coming
+back from the country more or less tipsy. There is a most comical picture
+in the eighth chapter of Piovanno Arlotto, who sets out in search of his
+lost thirst, armed with dry meat, a herring, a piece of cheese, a sausage,
+and four sardines, ‘e tutte si cocevan nel sudore.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_877_877" id="Footnote_877_877"></a><a href="#FNanchor_877_877"><span class="label">[877]</span></a> On Cosimo Ruccellai as centre of this circle at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century, see Macchiavelli, <i>Arte della Guerra</i>, l. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_878_878" id="Footnote_878_878"></a><a href="#FNanchor_878_878"><span class="label">[878]</span></a> <i>Il Cortigiano</i>, l. ii. fol. 53. See above pp. 121, 139.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_879_879" id="Footnote_879_879"></a><a href="#FNanchor_879_879"><span class="label">[879]</span></a> Caelius Calcagninus (<i>Opere</i>, p. 514) describes the education of a
+young Italian of position about the year 1506, in the funeral speech on
+Antonio Costabili: first, ‘artes liberales et ingenuae disciplinae; tum
+adolescentia in iis exercitationibus acta, quæ ad rem militarem corpus et
+animum praemuniunt. Nunc gymnastae (i.e. the teachers of gymnastics)
+operam dare, luctari, excurrere, natare, equitare, venari, aucupari, ad
+palum et apud lanistam ictus inferre aut declinare, caesim punctimve
+hostem ferire, hastam vibrare, sub armis hyemen juxta et aestatem
+traducere, lanceis occursare, veri ac communis Martis simulacra imitari.’
+Cardanus (<i>De prop. Vita</i>, c. 7) names among his gymnastic exercises the
+springing on to a wooden horse. Comp. Rabelais, <i>Gargantua</i>, i. 23, 24,
+for education in general, and 35 for gymnastic art. Even for the philologists, Marsilius Ficinus (<i>Epist.</i> iv. 171 Galeotto) requires gymnastics,
+and Maffeo Vegio (<i>De Puerorum Educatione</i>, lib. iii. c. 5) for boys.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_880_880" id="Footnote_880_880"></a><a href="#FNanchor_880_880"><span class="label">[880]</span></a> Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, fol. 172 sqq. They are said to have arisen through
+the rowing out to the Lido, where the practice with the crossbow took
+place. The great regatta on the feast of St. Paul was prescribed by law
+from 1315 onwards. In early times there was much riding in Venice,
+before the streets were paved and the level wooden bridges turned into
+arched stone ones. Petrarch (<i>Epist. Seniles</i>, iv. 4) describes a brilliant
+tournament held in 1364 on the square of St. Mark, and the Doge Steno,
+about the year 1400, had as fine a stable as any prince in Italy. But riding
+in the neighbourhood of the square was prohibited as a rule after the
+year 1291. At a later time the Venetians naturally had the name of bad
+riders. See Ariosto, <i>Sat.</i> v. 208.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_881_881" id="Footnote_881_881"></a><a href="#FNanchor_881_881"><span class="label">[881]</span></a> See on this subject: <i>Ueber den Einfluss der Renaissance auf die
+Entwickelung der Musik</i>, by Bernhard Loos, Basel, 1875, which, however,
+hardly offers for this period more than is given here. On Dante’s position
+with regard to music, and on the music to Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s
+poems, see Trucchi, <i>Poesie Ital. inedite</i>, ii. p. 139. See also <i>Poesie Musicali
+dei Secoli XIV., XV. e XVI. tratte da vari codici per cura di Antonio
+Cappelli</i>, Bologna, 1868. For the theorists of the fourteenth century,
+Filippo Villani, <i>Vite</i>, p. 46, and Scardeonius, <i>De urb. Pativ. antiq.</i> in
+Graev. Thesaur, vi. iii. col. 297. A full account of the music at the court
+of Frederick of Urbino, is to be found in <i>Vespes. Fior.</i> p. 122. For the
+children’s chapel (ten children 6 to 8 years old whom F. had educated in
+his house, and who were taught singing), at the court of Hercules I., see
+<i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 359. Out of Italy it was still hardly
+allowable for persons of consequence to be musicians; at the Flemish
+court of the young Charles V. a serious dispute took place on the subject.
+See Hubert. Leod. <i>De Vita Frid. II. Palat.</i> l. iii. Henry VIII. of
+England is an exception, and also the German Emperor Maximilian, who
+favoured music as well as all other arts. Joh. Cuspinian, in his life of the
+Emperor, calls him ‘Musices singularis amator’ and adds, ‘Quod vel
+hinc maxime patet, quod nostra aetate musicorum principes omnes, in
+omni genere musices omnibusque instrumentis in ejus curia, veluti in
+fertilissimo agro succreverant. Scriberem catalogum musicorum quos
+novi, nisi magnitudinem operis vererer.’ In consequence of this, music
+was much cultivated at the University of Vienna. The presence of the
+musical young Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan contributed to this result.
+See Aschbach, <i>Gesch. der Wiener Universität</i> (1877), vol. ii. 79 sqq.
+</p><p>
+A remarkable and comprehensive passage on music is to be found,
+where we should not expect it, in the Maccaroneide, Phant. xx. It is a
+comic description of a quartette, from which we see that Spanish and
+French songs were often sung, that music already had its enemies (1520),
+and that the chapel of Leo X. and the still earlier composer, Josquin des
+Près, whose principal works are mentioned, were the chief subjects of
+enthusiasm in the musical world of that time. The same writer (Folengo)
+displays in his <i>Orlandino</i> (iii. 23 &amp;c.), published under the name Limerno
+Pitocco, a musical fanaticism of a thoroughly modern sort.
+</p><p>
+Barth. Facius, <i>De Vir. Ill.</i> p. 12, praises Leonardus Justinianus as a
+composer, who produced love-songs in his youth, and religious pieces in
+his old age. J. A. Campanus (<i>Epist.</i> i. 4, ed. Mencken) extols the
+musician Zacarus at Teramo and says of him, ‘Inventa pro oraculis
+habentur.’ Thomas of Forli ‘musicien du pape’ in <i>Burchardi Diarium</i>,
+ed. Leibnitz, pp. 62 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_882_882" id="Footnote_882_882"></a><a href="#FNanchor_882_882"><span class="label">[882]</span></a> <i>Leonis Vita anonyma</i>, in Roscoe, ed. Bossi, xii. p. 171. May he not
+be the violinist in the Palazzo Sciarra? A certain Giovan Maria da
+Corneto is praised in the <i>Orlandino</i> (Milan, 1584, iii. 27).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_883_883" id="Footnote_883_883"></a><a href="#FNanchor_883_883"><span class="label">[883]</span></a> Lomazzo, <i>Trattato dell’Arte della Pittura</i>, &amp;c. p. 347. The text,
+however, does not bear out the last statement, which perhaps rests on a
+misunderstanding of the final sentence, ‘Et insieme vi si possono gratiosamente
+rappresentar convitti et simili abbellimenti, che il pittore
+leggendo i poeti e gli historici può trovare copiosamente et anco essendo
+ingenioso et ricco d’invenzione può per se stesso imaginare?’ Speaking
+of the lyre, he mentions Lionardo da Vinci and Alfonso (Duke?) of
+Ferrara. The author includes in his work all the celebrities of the age,
+among them several Jews. The most complete list of the famous
+musicians of the sixteenth century, divided into an earlier and a later
+generation, is to be found in Rabelais, in the ‘New Prologue’ to the
+fourth book. A virtuoso, the blind Francesco of Florence (d. 1390), was
+crowned at Venice with a wreath of laurel by the King of Cyprus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_884_884" id="Footnote_884_884"></a><a href="#FNanchor_884_884"><span class="label">[884]</span></a> Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, fol. 138. The same people naturally collected
+books of music. Sansovino’s words are, ‘è vera cosa che la musica ha la
+sua propria sede in questa città.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_885_885" id="Footnote_885_885"></a><a href="#FNanchor_885_885"><span class="label">[885]</span></a> The ‘Academia de’ Filarmonici’ at Verona is mentioned by Vasari, xi.
+133, in the life of Sanmichele. Lorenzo Magnifico was in 1480 already
+the centre of a School of Harmony consisting of fifteen members, among
+them the famous organist and organ-builder Squarcialupi. See Delecluze,
+<i>Florence et ses Vicissitudes</i>, vol. ii. p. 256, and Reumont, <i>L. d. M.</i> i. 177
+sqq., ii. 471-473. Marsilio Ficino took part in these exercises and gives in
+his letters (<i>Epist.</i> i. 73, iii. 52, v. 15) remarkable rules as to music.
+Lorenzo seems to have transmitted his passion for music to his son Leo X.
+His eldest son Pietro was also musical.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_886_886" id="Footnote_886_886"></a><a href="#FNanchor_886_886"><span class="label">[886]</span></a> <i>Il Cortigiano</i>, fol. 56, comp. fol. 41.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_887_887" id="Footnote_887_887"></a><a href="#FNanchor_887_887"><span class="label">[887]</span></a> Quatro viole da arco’&mdash;a high and, except in Italy, rare achievement
+for amateurs.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_888_888" id="Footnote_888_888"></a><a href="#FNanchor_888_888"><span class="label">[888]</span></a> Bandello, parte i. nov. 26. The song of Antonio Bologna in the House
+of Ippolita Bentivoglio. Comp. iii. 26. In these delicate days, this would
+be called a profanation of the holiest feelings. (Comp. the last song of
+Britannicus, Tacit. <i>Annal.</i> xiii. 15.) Recitations accompanied by the lute
+or ‘viola’ are not easy to distinguish, in the accounts left us, from singing
+properly so-called.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_889_889" id="Footnote_889_889"></a><a href="#FNanchor_889_889"><span class="label">[889]</span></a> Scardeonius, l. c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_890_890" id="Footnote_890_890"></a><a href="#FNanchor_890_890"><span class="label">[890]</span></a> For biographies of women, see above, p. 147 and note 1. Comp. the
+excellent work of Attilio Hortis: <i>Le Donne Famose, descritte da Giovanni
+Boccacci</i>. Trieste, 1877.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_891_891" id="Footnote_891_891"></a><a href="#FNanchor_891_891"><span class="label">[891]</span></a> E.g. in Castiglione, <i>Il Cortigiano</i>. In the same strain Francesco
+Barbaro, <i>De Re Uxoria</i>; Poggio, <i>An Seni sit Uxor ducenda</i>, in which
+much evil is said of women; the ridicule of Codro Urceo, especially his
+remarkable discourse, <i>An Uxor sit ducenda</i> (<i>Opera</i>, 1506, fol. xviii.-xxi.),
+and the sarcasms of many of the epigrammatists. Marcellus Palingenius,
+(vol. i. 304) recommends celibacy in various passages, lib. iv. 275 sqq., v.
+466-585; as a means of subduing disobedient wives he recommends to
+married people,
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">‘Tu verbera misce<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tergaque nunc duro resonent pulsata bacillo.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+Italian writers on the woman’s side are Benedetto da Cesena, <i>De Honore
+Mulierum</i>, Venice, 1500, Dardano, <i>La defesa della Donna</i>, Ven. 1554, <i>Per
+Donne Romane</i>. ed. Manfredi, Bol. 1575. The defence of, or attack on,
+women, supported by instances of famous or infamous women down to
+the time of the writer, was also treated by the Jews, partly in Italian and
+partly in Hebrew; and in connection with an earlier Jewish literature
+dating from the thirteenth century, we may mention Abr. Sarteano and
+Eliah Gennazzano, the latter of whom defended the former against the
+attacks of Abigdor (for their MS. poems about year 1500, comp. Steinschneider,
+<i>Hebr. Bibliogr.</i> vi. 48).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_892_892" id="Footnote_892_892"></a><a href="#FNanchor_892_892"><span class="label">[892]</span></a> Addressed to Annibale Maleguccio, sometimes numbered as the 5th or
+the 6th.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_893_893" id="Footnote_893_893"></a><a href="#FNanchor_893_893"><span class="label">[893]</span></a> When the Hungarian Queen Beatrice, a Neapolitan princess, came to
+Vienna in 1485, she was addressed in Latin, and ‘arrexit diligentissime
+aures domina regina saepe, cum placide audierat, subridendo.’ Aschbach,
+o. c. vol. ii. 10 note.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_894_894" id="Footnote_894_894"></a><a href="#FNanchor_894_894"><span class="label">[894]</span></a> The share taken by women in the plastic arts was insignificant.
+The learned Isotta Nogarola deserves a word of mention. On her intercourse
+with Guarino, see Rosmini, ii. 67 sqq.; with Pius II. see Voigt, iii.
+515 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_895_895" id="Footnote_895_895"></a><a href="#FNanchor_895_895"><span class="label">[895]</span></a> It is from this point of view that we must judge of the life of Allessandra
+de’ Bardi in Vespasiano Fiorentino (Mai, <i>Spicileg.</i> rom. i. p. 593
+sqq.) The author, by the way, is a great ‘laudator temporis acti,’ and it
+must not be forgotten that nearly a hundred years before what he calls
+the good old time, Boccaccio wrote the <i>Decameron</i>. On the culture and
+education of the Italian women of that day, comp. the numerous facts
+quoted in Gregorovius, <i>Lucrezia Borgia</i>. There is a catalogue of the
+books possessed by Lucrezia in 1502 and 3 (Gregorovius, ed. 3, i. 310, ii.
+167), which may be considered characteristic of the Italian women of the
+period. We there find a Breviary; a little book with the seven psalms
+and some prayers; a parchment book with gold miniature, called <i>De
+Coppelle alla Spagnola</i>; the printed letters of Catherine of Siena; the
+printed epistles and gospels in Italian; a religious book in Spanish; a
+MS. collection of Spanish odes, with the proverbs of Domenico Lopez; a
+printed book, called <i>Aquila Volante</i>; the <i>Mirror of Faith</i> printed in
+Italian; an Italian printed book called <i>The Supplement of Chronicles</i>; a
+printed Dante, with commentary; an Italian book on philosophy; the
+legends of the saints in Italian; an old book <i>De Ventura</i>; a Donatus; a
+Life of Christ in Spanish; a MS. Petrarch, on duodecimo parchment. A
+second catalogue of the year 1516 contains no secular books whatever.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_896_896" id="Footnote_896_896"></a><a href="#FNanchor_896_896"><span class="label">[896]</span></a> Ant. Galateo, <i>Epist. 3</i>, to the young Bona Sforza, the future wife of
+Sigismund of Poland: ‘Incipe aliquid de viro sapere, quoniam ad imperandum
+viris nata es.... Ita fac, ut sapientibus viris placeas, ut te
+prudentes et graves viri admirentur, et vulgi et muliercularum studia et
+judicia despicias,’ &amp;c. A remarkable letter in other respects also (Mai.
+<i>Spicileg. Rom.</i> viii. p. 532).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_897_897" id="Footnote_897_897"></a><a href="#FNanchor_897_897"><span class="label">[897]</span></a> She is so called in the <i>Chron. Venetum</i>, in Muratori, xxiv. col. 121 sqq.
+(in the account of her heroic defence, <i>ibid.</i> col. 121 she is called a virago).
+Comp. Infessura in Eccard, <i>Scriptt.</i> ii. col. 1981, and <i>Arch. Stor.</i> append.
+ii. p. 250, and Gregorovius, vii. 437 note 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_898_898" id="Footnote_898_898"></a><a href="#FNanchor_898_898"><span class="label">[898]</span></a> Contemporary historians speak of her more than womanly intellect
+and eloquence. Comp. Ranke’s <i>Filippo Strozzi</i>, in <i>Historisch-biographische
+Studien</i>, p. 371 note 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_899_899" id="Footnote_899_899"></a><a href="#FNanchor_899_899"><span class="label">[899]</span></a> And rightly so, sometimes. How ladies should behave while such
+tales are telling, we learn from <i>Cortigiano</i>, l. iii. fol. 107. That the ladies
+who were present at his dialogues must have known how to conduct
+themselves in case of need, is shown by the strong passage, l. ii. fol. 100.
+What is said of the ‘Donna di Palazzo’&mdash;the counterpart of the Cortigiano&mdash;that
+she should neither avoid frivolous company nor use unbecoming
+language, is not decisive, since she was far more the servant of
+the princess than the Cortigiano of the prince. See Bandello, i. nov. 44.
+Bianca d’Este tells the terrible love-story of her ancestor, Niccolò of
+Ferrara, and Parisina. The tales put into the mouths of the women in
+the <i>Decameron</i> may also serve as instances of this indelicacy. For Bandello,
+see above, p. 145; and Landau, <i>Beitr. z. Gesch. der Ital. Nov.</i> Vienna,
+1875, p. 102. note 32.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_900_900" id="Footnote_900_900"></a><a href="#FNanchor_900_900"><span class="label">[900]</span></a> Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, fol. 152 sqq. How highly the travelled Italians
+valued the freer intercourse with girls in England and the Netherlands is
+shown by Bandello, ii. nov. 44, and iv. nov. 27. For the Venetian women
+and the Italian women generally, see the work of Yriarte, pp. 50 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_901_901" id="Footnote_901_901"></a><a href="#FNanchor_901_901"><span class="label">[901]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>De Rom. Piscibus</i>, cap. 5; Bandello, parte iii. nov. 42.
+Aretino, in the <i>Ragionamento del Zoppino</i>, p. 327, says of a courtesan:
+‘She knows by heart all Petrarch and Boccaccio, and many beautiful
+verses of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and a thousand other authors.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_902_902" id="Footnote_902_902"></a><a href="#FNanchor_902_902"><span class="label">[902]</span></a> Bandello, ii. 51, iv. 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_903_903" id="Footnote_903_903"></a><a href="#FNanchor_903_903"><span class="label">[903]</span></a> Bandello, iv. 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_904_904" id="Footnote_904_904"></a><a href="#FNanchor_904_904"><span class="label">[904]</span></a> For a characteristic instance of this, see Giraldi, <i>Hecatomithi</i>, vi
+nov. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_905_905" id="Footnote_905_905"></a><a href="#FNanchor_905_905"><span class="label">[905]</span></a> Infessura, in Eccard, <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. col. 1997. The public women
+only, not the kept women, are meant. The number, compared with the
+population of Rome, is certainly enormous, perhaps owing to some clerical
+error. According to Giraldi, vi. 7, Venice was exceptionally rich ‘di quella
+sorte di donne che cortigiane son dette;’ see also the epigram of Pasquinus
+(Gregor. viii. 279, note 2); but Rome did not stand behind Venice
+(Giraldi, <i>Introduz.</i> nov. 2). Comp. the notice of the ‘meretrices’ in Rome
+(1480) who met in a church and were robbed of their jewels and ornaments,
+Murat. xxii. 342 sqq., and the account in <i>Burchardi, Diarium</i>,
+ed. Leibnitz, pp. 75-77, &amp;c. Landi (<i>Commentario</i>, fol. 76) mentions Rome,
+Naples, and Venice as the chief seats of the ‘cortigiane;’ <i>ibid.</i> 286, the
+fame of the women of Chiavenna is to be understood ironically. The
+<i>Quaestiones Forcianae</i>, fol. 9, of the same author give most interesting
+information on love and love’s delights, and the style and position of
+women in the different cities of Italy. On the other hand, Egnatius (<i>De
+Exemp. III. Vir.</i> Ven. fol. 212 <i>b</i> sqq.) praises the chastity of the Venetian
+women, and says that the prostitutes come every year from Germany.
+Corn. Agr. <i>de van. Scientiae</i>, cap. 63 (<i>Opp.</i> ed. Lugd. ii. 158) says: ‘Vidi
+ego nuper atque legi sub titulo “Cortosanæ” Italica lingua editum et
+Venetiis typis excusum de arte meretricia dialogum, utriusque Veneris
+omnium flagitiosissimum et dignissimum, qui ipse cum autore suo ardeat.’
+Ambr. Traversari (<i>Epist.</i> viii. 2 sqq.) calls the beloved of Niccolò Niccoli
+‘foemina fidelissima.’ In the <i>Lettere dei Principi</i>, i. 108 (report of Negro,
+Sept. 1, 1522) the ‘donne Greche’ are described as ‘fonte di ogni cortesia
+et amorevolezza.’ A great authority, esp. for Siena, is the <i>Hermaphroditus</i>
+of Panormitanus. The enumeration of the ‘lenae lupaeque’ in
+Florence (ii. 37) is hardly fictitious; the line there occurs:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Annaque <i>Theutonico</i> tibi si dabit obvia cantu.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_906_906" id="Footnote_906_906"></a><a href="#FNanchor_906_906"><span class="label">[906]</span></a> Were these wandering knights really married?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_907_907" id="Footnote_907_907"></a><a href="#FNanchor_907_907"><span class="label">[907]</span></a> <i>Trattato del Governo della Famiglia.</i> See above, p. 132, note 1.
+Pandolfini died in 1446, L. B. Alberti, by whom the work was really
+written, in 1472.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_908_908" id="Footnote_908_908"></a><a href="#FNanchor_908_908"><span class="label">[908]</span></a> A thorough history of ‘flogging’ among the Germanic and Latin
+races treated with some psychological power, would be worth volumes of
+dispatches and negotiations. (A modest beginning has been made by
+Lichtenberg, <i>Vermischte Schriften</i>, v. 276-283.) When, and through
+what influence, did flogging become a daily practice in the German household?
+Not till after Walther sang: ‘Nieman kan mit gerten kindes zuht
+beherten.’
+</p><p>
+In Italy beating ceased early; Maffeo Vegio (d. 1458) recommends (<i>De
+Educ. Liber.</i> lib. i. c. 19) moderation in flogging, but adds: ‘Caedendos
+magis esse filios quam pestilentissmis blanditiis laetandos.’ At a later
+time a child of seven was no longer beaten. The little Roland (<i>Orlandino</i>,
+cap. vii. str. 42) lays down the principle:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Sol gli asini si ponno bastonare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Se una tal bestia fussi, patirei.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+The German humanists of the Renaissance, like Rudolf Agricola and
+Erasmus, speak decisively against flogging, which the elder schoolmasters
+regarded as an indispensable means of education. In the biographies of
+the <i>Fahrenden Schüler</i> at the close of the fifteenth century (<i>Platter’s
+Lebensbeschriebung</i>, ed. Fechter, Basel, 1840; <i>Butzbach’s Wanderbuch</i>,
+ed. Becher, Regensburg, 1869) there are gross examples of the corporal
+punishment of the time.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_909_909" id="Footnote_909_909"></a><a href="#FNanchor_909_909"><span class="label">[909]</span></a> But the taste was not universal. J. A. Campanus (<i>Epist.</i> iv. 4) writes
+vigorously against country life. He admits: ‘Ego si rusticus natus non
+essem, facile tangerer voluptate;’ but since he was born a peasant, ‘quod
+tibi deliciae, mihi satietas est.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_910_910" id="Footnote_910_910"></a><a href="#FNanchor_910_910"><span class="label">[910]</span></a> Giovanni Villani, xi. 93, our principal authority for the building of
+villas before the middle of the fourteenth century. The villas were more
+beautiful than the town houses, and great exertions were made by the
+Florentines to have them so, ‘onde erano tenuti matti.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_911_911" id="Footnote_911_911"></a><a href="#FNanchor_911_911"><span class="label">[911]</span></a> <i>Trattato del Governo della Famiglia</i> (Torino, 1829), pp. 84, 88.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_912_912" id="Footnote_912_912"></a><a href="#FNanchor_912_912"><span class="label">[912]</span></a> See above, part iv. chap. 2. Petrarch was called ‘Silvanus,’ on the
+ground of his dislike of the town and love of the country. <i>Epp. Fam.</i>
+ed. Fracass. ii. 87 sqq. Guarino’s description of a villa to Gianbattista
+Candrata, in Rosmini, ii. 13 sqq., 157 sqq. Poggio, in a letter to Facius
+(<i>De Vir. Ill.</i> p. 106): ‘Sum enim deditior senectutis gratia rei rusticæ
+quam antea.’ See also Poggio, <i>Opp.</i> (1513), p 112 sqq.; and Shepherd-Tonelli,
+i. 255 and 261. Similarly Maffeo Vegio (<i>De Lib. Educ.</i> vi. 4), and
+B. Platina at the beginning of his dialogue, ‘De Vera Nobilitate.’ Politian’s
+descriptions of the country-houses of the Medici in Reumont,
+<i>Lorenzo</i>, ii. 73, 87. For the Farnesina, see Gregorovius, viii. 114.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_913_913" id="Footnote_913_913"></a><a href="#FNanchor_913_913"><span class="label">[913]</span></a> Comp. J. Burckhardt, <i>Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien</i> (Stuttg.
+1868), pp. 320-332.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_914_914" id="Footnote_914_914"></a><a href="#FNanchor_914_914"><span class="label">[914]</span></a> Compare pp. 47 sqq., where the magnificence of the festivals is shown
+to have been a hindrance to the higher development of the drama.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_915_915" id="Footnote_915_915"></a><a href="#FNanchor_915_915"><span class="label">[915]</span></a> In comparison with the cities of the North.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_916_916" id="Footnote_916_916"></a><a href="#FNanchor_916_916"><span class="label">[916]</span></a> The procession at the feast of Corpus Christi was not established at
+Venice until 1407; Cecchetti, <i>Venezia e la Corte di Roma</i>, i. 108.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_917_917" id="Footnote_917_917"></a><a href="#FNanchor_917_917"><span class="label">[917]</span></a> The festivities which took place when Visconti was made Duke of
+Milan, 1395 (Corio, fol. 274), had, with all their splendour, something of
+mediæval coarseness about them, and the dramatic element was wholly
+wanting. Notice, too, the relative insignificance of the processions in
+Pavia during the fourteenth century (<i>Anonymus de Laudibus Papiae</i>, in
+Murat. xi. col. 34 sqq.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_918_918" id="Footnote_918_918"></a><a href="#FNanchor_918_918"><span class="label">[918]</span></a> Gio. Villani, viii. 70.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_919_919" id="Footnote_919_919"></a><a href="#FNanchor_919_919"><span class="label">[919]</span></a> See e.g. Infessura, in Eccard, <i>Scrippt.</i> ii. col. 1896; Corio, fols. 417,
+421.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_920_920" id="Footnote_920_920"></a><a href="#FNanchor_920_920"><span class="label">[920]</span></a> The dialogue in the Mysteries was chiefly in octaves, the monologue
+in ‘terzine.’ For the Mysteries, see J. L. Klein, <i>Geschichte der Ital.
+Dramas</i>, i. 153 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_921_921" id="Footnote_921_921"></a><a href="#FNanchor_921_921"><span class="label">[921]</span></a> We have no need to refer to the realism of the schoolmen for proof
+of this. About the year 970 Bishop Wibold of Cambray recommended
+to his clergy, instead of dice, a sort of spiritual bézique, with fifty-six
+abstract names represented by as many combinations of cards. ‘Gesta
+Episcopori Cameracens.’ in <i>Mon. Germ.</i> SS. vii. p. 433.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_922_922" id="Footnote_922_922"></a><a href="#FNanchor_922_922"><span class="label">[922]</span></a> E.g. when he found pictures on metaphors. At the gate of Purgatory
+the central broken step signifies contrition of heart (<i>Purg.</i> ix. 97),
+though the slab through being broken loses its value as a step. And
+again (<i>Purg.</i> xviii. 94), the idle in this world have to show their penitence
+by running in the other, though running could be a symbol of flight.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_923_923" id="Footnote_923_923"></a><a href="#FNanchor_923_923"><span class="label">[923]</span></a> <i>Inferno</i>, ix. 61; <i>Purgat.</i> viii. 19.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_924_924" id="Footnote_924_924"></a><a href="#FNanchor_924_924"><span class="label">[924]</span></a> <i>Poesie Satiriche</i>, ed. Milan, p. 70 sqq. Dating from the end of the
+fourteenth century.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_925_925" id="Footnote_925_925"></a><a href="#FNanchor_925_925"><span class="label">[925]</span></a> The latter e.g. in the <i>Venatio</i> of the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto
+(Strasburg, 1512; often printed). Ascanio Sforza is there supposed to
+find consolation for the fall of his house in the pleasures of the chase.
+See above, p. 261.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_926_926" id="Footnote_926_926"></a><a href="#FNanchor_926_926"><span class="label">[926]</span></a> More properly 1454. See Olivier de la Marche, <i>Mémoires</i>, chap. 29.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_927_927" id="Footnote_927_927"></a><a href="#FNanchor_927_927"><span class="label">[927]</span></a> For other French festivals, see e.g. Juvénal des Ursins (Paris, 1614),
+ad. a. 1389 (entrance of Queen Isabella); John de Troyes, ad. a. 1461)
+(often printed) (entrance of Louis XI.). Here, too, we meet with living
+statues, machines for raising bodies, and so forth; but the whole is confused
+and disconnected, and the allegories are mostly unintelligible. The
+festivals at Lisbon in 1452, held at the departure of the Infanta Eleonora,
+the bride of the Emperor Frederick III., lasted several days and were
+remarkable for their magnificence. See Freher-Struve, <i>Rer. German.
+Script.</i> ii. fol. 51&mdash;the report of Nic. Lauckmann.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_928_928" id="Footnote_928_928"></a><a href="#FNanchor_928_928"><span class="label">[928]</span></a> A great advantage for those poets and artists who knew how to
+use it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_929_929" id="Footnote_929_929"></a><a href="#FNanchor_929_929"><span class="label">[929]</span></a> Comp. Bartol. Gambia, <i>Notizie intorno alle Opere di Feo Belcari</i>,
+Milano, 1808; and especially the introduction to the work, <i>Le Rappresentazioni
+di Feo Belcari ed altre di lui Poesie</i>, Firenze, 1833. As a parallel,
+see the introduction of the bibliophile Jacob to his edition of Pathelin
+(Paris, 1859).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_930_930" id="Footnote_930_930"></a><a href="#FNanchor_930_930"><span class="label">[930]</span></a> It is true that a Mystery at Siena on the subject of the Massacre of
+the Innocents closed with a scene in which the disconsolate mothers
+seized one another by the hair. Della Valle, <i>Lettere Sanesi</i>, iii. p. 53. It
+was one of the chief aims of Feo Belcari (d. 1484), of whom we have
+spoken, to free the Mysteries from these monstrosities.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_931_931" id="Footnote_931_931"></a><a href="#FNanchor_931_931"><span class="label">[931]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, nov. 72.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_932_932" id="Footnote_932_932"></a><a href="#FNanchor_932_932"><span class="label">[932]</span></a> Vasari, iii. 232 sqq.: <i>Vita di Brunellesco</i>; v. 36 sqq.: <i>Vita del Cecca</i>.
+Comp. v. 32, <i>Vita di Don Bartolommeo</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_933_933" id="Footnote_933_933"></a><a href="#FNanchor_933_933"><span class="label">[933]</span></a> <i>Arch. Stor.</i> append. ii. p. 310. The Mystery of the Annunciation
+at Ferrara, on the occasion of the wedding of Alfonso, with fireworks
+and flying apparatus. For an account of the representation of Susanna,
+John the Baptist, and of a legend, at the house of the Cardinal Riario,
+see Corio, fol. 417. For the Mystery of Constantine the Great in the
+Papal Palace at the Carnival, 1484, see Jac. Volaterran. (Murat. xxiii.
+col. 194). The chief actor was a Genoese born and educated at Constantinople.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_934_934" id="Footnote_934_934"></a><a href="#FNanchor_934_934"><span class="label">[934]</span></a> Graziani, <i>Cronaca di Perugia, Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. 1. p. 598. At the
+Crucifixion, a figure was kept ready and put in the place of the actor.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_935_935" id="Footnote_935_935"></a><a href="#FNanchor_935_935"><span class="label">[935]</span></a> For this, see Graziani, l. c. and <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. viii. pp. 383, 386.
+The poetry of the fifteenth century sometimes shows the same coarseness.
+A ‘canzone’ of Andrea da Basso traces in detail the corruption of
+the corpse of a hard-hearted fair one. In a monkish drama of the twelfth
+century King Herod was put on the stage with the worms eating him
+(<i>Carmina Burana</i>, pp. 80 sqq.). Many of the German dramas of the
+seventeenth century offer parallel instances.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_936_936" id="Footnote_936_936"></a><a href="#FNanchor_936_936"><span class="label">[936]</span></a> Allegretto, <i>Diarii Sanesi</i>, in Murat. xxiii. col. 767.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_937_937" id="Footnote_937_937"></a><a href="#FNanchor_937_937"><span class="label">[937]</span></a> Matarazzo, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. ii. p. 36. The monk had previously
+undertaken a voyage to Rome to make the necessary studies for the
+festival.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_938_938" id="Footnote_938_938"></a><a href="#FNanchor_938_938"><span class="label">[938]</span></a> Extracts from the ‘Vergier d’honneur,’ in Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i>, ed. Bossi,
+i. p. 220, and iii. p. 263.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_939_939" id="Footnote_939_939"></a><a href="#FNanchor_939_939"><span class="label">[939]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. viii. pp. 382 sqq. Another gorgeous celebration of
+the ‘Corpus Domini’ is mentioned by Bursellis, <i>Annal. Bonon.</i> in Murat.
+xxiii. col. 911, for the year 1492. The representations were from the Old
+and New Testaments.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_940_940" id="Footnote_940_940"></a><a href="#FNanchor_940_940"><span class="label">[940]</span></a> On such occasions we read, ‘Nulla di muro si potea vedere.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_941_941" id="Footnote_941_941"></a><a href="#FNanchor_941_941"><span class="label">[941]</span></a> The same is true of many such descriptions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_942_942" id="Footnote_942_942"></a><a href="#FNanchor_942_942"><span class="label">[942]</span></a> Five kings with an armed retinue, and a savage who fought with a
+(tamed?) lion; the latter, perhaps, with an allusion to the name of the
+Pope&mdash;Sylvius.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_943_943" id="Footnote_943_943"></a><a href="#FNanchor_943_943"><span class="label">[943]</span></a> Instances under Sixtus IV., Jac. Volaterr. in Murat. xxiii. col. 135
+(bombardorum et sclopulorum crepitus), 139. At the accession of
+Alexander VI. there were great salvos of artillery. Fireworks, a beautiful
+invention due to Italy, belong, like festive decorations generally, rather
+to the history of art than to our present work. So, too, the brilliant
+illuminations we read of in connexion with many festivals, and the hunting-trophies
+and table-ornaments. (See p. 319. The elevation of Julius
+II. to the Papal throne was celebrated at Venice by three days’ illumination.
+Brosch, <i>Julius II.</i> p. 325, note 17.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_944_944" id="Footnote_944_944"></a><a href="#FNanchor_944_944"><span class="label">[944]</span></a> Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 772. See, besides, col. 770, for the
+reception of Pius II. in 1459. A paradise, or choir of angels, was represented,
+out of which came an angel and sang to the Pope, ‘in modo che
+il Papa si commosse a lagrime per gran tenerezza da si dolci parole.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_945_945" id="Footnote_945_945"></a><a href="#FNanchor_945_945"><span class="label">[945]</span></a> See the authorities quoted in Favre, <i>Mélanges d’Hist. Lit.</i> i. 138;
+Corio, fol. 417 sqq. The <i>menu</i> fills almost two closely printed pages.
+‘Among other dishes a mountain was brought in, out of which stepped a
+living man, with signs of astonishment to find himself amid this festive
+splendour; he repeated some verses and then disappeared’ (Gregorovius,
+vii. 241). Infessura, in Eccard, <i>Scriptt.</i> ii. col. 1896; <i>Strozzii Poetae</i>, fol.
+193 sqq. A word or two may here be added on eating and drinking.
+Leon. Aretino (<i>Epist.</i> lib. iii. ep. 18) complains that he had to spend so
+much for his wedding feast, garments, and so forth, that on the same day
+he had concluded a ‘matrimonium’ and squandered a ‘patrimonium.’
+Ermolao Barbaro describes, in a letter to Pietro Cara, the bill of fare at a
+wedding-feast at Trivulzio’s (<i>Angeli Politiani Epist.</i> lib. iii.). The list of
+meats and drinks in the Appendix to Landi’s <i>Commentario</i> (above) is of
+special interest. Landi speaks of the great trouble he had taken over it,
+collecting it from five hundred writers. The passage is too long to be
+quoted (we there read: ‘Li antropofagi furono i primi che mangiassero
+carne humana’). Poggio (<i>Opera</i>, 1513, fol. 14 sqq.) discusses the question’:
+‘Uter alteri gratias debeat pro convivio impenso, isne qui vocatus est ad
+convivium an qui vocavit?’ Platina wrote a treatise ‘De Arte Coquinaria,’
+said to have been printed several times, and quoted under various titles,
+but which, according to his own account (<i>Dissert. Vossiane</i>, i. 253 sqq.),
+contains more warnings against excess than instructions on the art in
+question.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_946_946" id="Footnote_946_946"></a><a href="#FNanchor_946_946"><span class="label">[946]</span></a> Vasari, ix. p. 37, <i>Vita di Puntormo</i>, tells how a child, during such a
+festival at Florence in the year 1513, died from the effects of the exertion&mdash;or
+shall we say, of the gilding? The poor boy had to represent the
+‘golden age’!</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_947_947" id="Footnote_947_947"></a><a href="#FNanchor_947_947"><span class="label">[947]</span></a> Phil. Beroaldi, <i>Nuptiae Bentivolorum</i>, in the <i>Orationes Ph. B.</i> Paris,
+1492, c. 3 sqq. The description of the other festivities at this wedding is
+very remarkable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_948_948" id="Footnote_948_948"></a><a href="#FNanchor_948_948"><span class="label">[948]</span></a> M. Anton. Sabellici, <i>Epist.</i> l. iii. fol. 17.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_949_949" id="Footnote_949_949"></a><a href="#FNanchor_949_949"><span class="label">[949]</span></a> Amoretti, <i>Memorie, &amp;c. su. Lionardo da Vinci</i>, pp. 38 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_950_950" id="Footnote_950_950"></a><a href="#FNanchor_950_950"><span class="label">[950]</span></a> To what extent astrology influenced even the festivals of this century
+is shown by the introduction of the planets (not described with sufficient
+clearness) at the reception of the ducal brides at Ferrara. <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>,
+in Muratori, xxiv. col. 248, ad. a. 1473; col. 282, ad. a. 1491. So,
+too, at Mantua, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> append. ii. p. 233.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_951_951" id="Footnote_951_951"></a><a href="#FNanchor_951_951"><span class="label">[951]</span></a> <i>Annal. Estens.</i> in Murat. xx. col. 468 sqq. The description is unclear
+and printed from an incorrect transcript.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_952_952" id="Footnote_952_952"></a><a href="#FNanchor_952_952"><span class="label">[952]</span></a> We read that the ropes of the machine used for this purpose were
+made to imitate garlands.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_953_953" id="Footnote_953_953"></a><a href="#FNanchor_953_953"><span class="label">[953]</span></a> Strictly the ship of Isis, which entered the water on the 5th of March,
+as a symbol that navigation was reopened. For analogies in the German
+religion, see Jac. Grimm, <i>Deutsche Mythologie</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_954_954" id="Footnote_954_954"></a><a href="#FNanchor_954_954"><span class="label">[954]</span></a> <i>Purgatorio</i>, xxix. 43 to the end, and xxx. at the beginning. According
+to v. 115, the chariot is more splendid than the triumphal chariot of Scipio,
+of Augustus, and even of the Sun-God.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_955_955" id="Footnote_955_955"></a><a href="#FNanchor_955_955"><span class="label">[955]</span></a> Ranke, <i>Gesch. der Roman. und German. Völker</i>, ed. 2, p. 95. P.
+Villari, <i>Savonarola</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_956_956" id="Footnote_956_956"></a><a href="#FNanchor_956_956"><span class="label">[956]</span></a> Fazio degli Uberti, <i>Dittamondo</i> (lib. ii. cap. 3), treats specially ‘del
+modo del triumphare.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_957_957" id="Footnote_957_957"></a><a href="#FNanchor_957_957"><span class="label">[957]</span></a> Corio, fol. 401: ‘dicendo tali cose essere superstitioni de’ Re.’ Comp.
+Cagnola, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. p. 127, who says that the duke declined from
+modesty.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_958_958" id="Footnote_958_958"></a><a href="#FNanchor_958_958"><span class="label">[958]</span></a> See above, vol. i. p. 315 sqq.; comp. i. p. 15, note 1. ‘Triumphus
+Alfonsi,’ as appendix to the <i>Dicta et Facta</i> of Panormita, ed. 1538, pp.
+129-139, 256 sqq. A dislike to excessive display on such occasions was
+shown by the gallant Comneni. Comp. Cinnamus, i. 5, vi. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_959_959" id="Footnote_959_959"></a><a href="#FNanchor_959_959"><span class="label">[959]</span></a> The position assigned to Fortune is characteristic of the naïveté of the
+Renaissance. At the entrance of Massimiliano Sforza into Milan (1512),
+she stood as the chief figure of a triumphal arch <i>above</i> Fama, Speranza,
+Audacia, and Penitenza, all represented by living persons. Comp. Prato,
+<i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. p. 305.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_960_960" id="Footnote_960_960"></a><a href="#FNanchor_960_960"><span class="label">[960]</span></a> The entrance of Borso of Este into Reggio, described above (<a href="#page_417">p. 417</a>),
+shows the impression which Alfonso’s triumph had made in all Italy,.
+On the entrance of Cæsar Borgia into Rome in 1500, see Gregorovius,
+vii. 439.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_961_961" id="Footnote_961_961"></a><a href="#FNanchor_961_961"><span class="label">[961]</span></a> Prato, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. 260 sqq. The author says expressly, ‘le quali
+cose da li triumfanti Romani se soliano anticamente usare.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_962_962" id="Footnote_962_962"></a><a href="#FNanchor_962_962"><span class="label">[962]</span></a> Her three ‘capitoli’ in terzines, <i>Anecd. Litt.</i> iv. 461 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_963_963" id="Footnote_963_963"></a><a href="#FNanchor_963_963"><span class="label">[963]</span></a> Old paintings of similar scenes are by no means rare, and no doubt
+often represent masquerades actually performed. The wealthy classes
+soon became accustomed to drive in chariots at every public solemnity.
+We read that Annibale Bentivoglio, eldest son of the ruler of Bologna,
+returned to the palace after presiding as umpire at the regular military
+exercises, ‘cum triumpho more romano.’ Bursellis, l. c. col. 909. ad. a.
+1490.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_964_964" id="Footnote_964_964"></a><a href="#FNanchor_964_964"><span class="label">[964]</span></a> The remarkable funeral of Malatesta Baglione, poisoned at Bologna
+in 1437 (Graziani, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. i. p. 413), reminds us of the splendour
+of an Etruscan funeral. The knights in mourning, however, and other
+features of the ceremony, were in accordance with the customs of the
+nobility throughout Europe. See e.g. the funeral of Bertrand Duguesclin,
+in Juvénal des Ursins, ad. a. 1389. See also Graziani, l. c. p. 360.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_965_965" id="Footnote_965_965"></a><a href="#FNanchor_965_965"><span class="label">[965]</span></a> Vasari, ix. p. 218, <i>Vita di Granacci</i>. On the triumphs and processions
+in Florence, see Reumont, <i>Lorenzo</i>, ii. 433.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_966_966" id="Footnote_966_966"></a><a href="#FNanchor_966_966"><span class="label">[966]</span></a> Mich. Cannesius, <i>Vita Pauli II.</i> in Murat. iii. ii. col. 118 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_967_967" id="Footnote_967_967"></a><a href="#FNanchor_967_967"><span class="label">[967]</span></a> Tommasi, <i>Vita di Caesare Borgia</i>, p. 251.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_968_968" id="Footnote_968_968"></a><a href="#FNanchor_968_968"><span class="label">[968]</span></a> Vasari ix. p. 34 sqq., <i>Vita di Puntormo</i>. A most important passage
+of its kind.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_969_969" id="Footnote_969_969"></a><a href="#FNanchor_969_969"><span class="label">[969]</span></a> Vasari, viii. p. 264, <i>Vita di Andrea del Sarto</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_970_970" id="Footnote_970_970"></a><a href="#FNanchor_970_970"><span class="label">[970]</span></a> Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 783. It was reckoned a bad omen
+that one of the wheels broke.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_971_971" id="Footnote_971_971"></a><a href="#FNanchor_971_971"><span class="label">[971]</span></a> <i>M. Anton. Sabellici Epist.</i> l. iii. letter to M. Anton. Barbavarus. He
+says: ‘Vetus est mos civitatis in illustrium hospitum adventu eam
+navim auro et purpura insternere.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_972_972" id="Footnote_972_972"></a><a href="#FNanchor_972_972"><span class="label">[972]</span></a> Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i>, fol. 151 sqq. The names of these corporations
+were: Pavoni, Accessi, Eterni, Reali, Sempiterni. The academies probably
+had their origin in these guilds.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_973_973" id="Footnote_973_973"></a><a href="#FNanchor_973_973"><span class="label">[973]</span></a> Probably in 1495. Comp. <i>M. Anton. Sabellici Epist.</i> l. v. fol. 28;
+last letter to M. Ant. Barbavarus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_974_974" id="Footnote_974_974"></a><a href="#FNanchor_974_974"><span class="label">[974]</span></a> ‘Terræ globum socialibus signis circunquaque figuratum,’ and
+‘quinis pegmatibus, quorum singula foederatorum regum, principumque
+suas habuere effigies et cum his ministros signaque in auro affabre
+caelata.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_975_975" id="Footnote_975_975"></a><a href="#FNanchor_975_975"><span class="label">[975]</span></a> Infessura, in Eccard, <i>Scriptt.</i> ii. col. 1093, 2000; Mich. Cannesius,
+<i>Vita Pauli II.</i> in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1012; Platina. <i>Vitae Pontiff.</i> p. 318;
+Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xiii. col. 163, 194; Paul. Jov. <i>Elogia</i>, sub
+Juliano Cæsarino. Elsewhere, too, there were races for women, <i>Diario
+Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 384: comp. Gregorovius, vi. 690 sqq., vii.
+219, 616 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_976_976" id="Footnote_976_976"></a><a href="#FNanchor_976_976"><span class="label">[976]</span></a> Once under Alexander VI. from October till Lent. See Tommasi,
+l. c. p. 322.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_977_977" id="Footnote_977_977"></a><a href="#FNanchor_977_977"><span class="label">[977]</span></a> Baluz. <i>Miscell.</i> iv. 517 (comp. Gregorovius, vii. 288 sqq.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_978_978" id="Footnote_978_978"></a><a href="#FNanchor_978_978"><span class="label">[978]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. iv. p. 211.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_979_979" id="Footnote_979_979"></a><a href="#FNanchor_979_979"><span class="label">[979]</span></a> Nantiporto, in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1080. They wished to thank him
+for a peace which he had concluded, but found the gates of the palace
+closed and troops posted in all the open places.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_980_980" id="Footnote_980_980"></a><a href="#FNanchor_980_980"><span class="label">[980]</span></a> ‘Tutti i trionfi, carri, mascherate, o canti carnascialeschi.’ Cosmopoli,
+1750. Macchiavelli, <i>Opere Minori</i>, p. 505; Vasari, vii. p. 115
+sqq. <i>Vita di Piero di Cosimo</i>, to whom a chief part in the development of
+these festivities is ascribed. Comp. B. Loos (above, p. 154, note 1) p. 12
+sqq. and Reumont, <i>Lorenzo</i>, ii. 443 sqq., where the authorities are collected
+which show that the Carnival was soon restrained. Comp. ibid
+ii. p. 24.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_981_981" id="Footnote_981_981"></a><a href="#FNanchor_981_981"><span class="label">[981]</span></a> <i>Discorsi</i>, l. i. c. 12. Also c. 55: Italy is more corrupt than all other
+countries; then come the French and Spaniards.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_982_982" id="Footnote_982_982"></a><a href="#FNanchor_982_982"><span class="label">[982]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Viri Illustres</i>: Jo. Gal. Vicecomes. Comp. p. 12 sqq. and
+notes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_983_983" id="Footnote_983_983"></a><a href="#FNanchor_983_983"><span class="label">[983]</span></a> On the part filled by the sense of honour in the modern world, see
+Prévost-Paradol, <i>La France Nouvelle</i>, liv. iii. chap. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_984_984" id="Footnote_984_984"></a><a href="#FNanchor_984_984"><span class="label">[984]</span></a> Compare what Mr. Darwin says of blushing in the ‘Expression of
+the Emotions,’ and of the relations between shame and conscience.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_985_985" id="Footnote_985_985"></a><a href="#FNanchor_985_985"><span class="label">[985]</span></a> Franc. Guicciardini, <i>Ricordi Politici e Civili</i>, n. 118 (<i>Opere inedite</i>,
+vol. i.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_986_986" id="Footnote_986_986"></a><a href="#FNanchor_986_986"><span class="label">[986]</span></a> His closest counterpart is Merlinus Coccajus (Teofilo Folengo), whose
+<i>Opus Maccaronicorum</i> Rabelais certainly knew, and quotes more than
+once (<i>Pantagruel</i>, l. ii. ch. 1. and ch. 7, at the end). It is possible that
+Merlinus Coccajus may have given the impulse which resulted in
+Pantagruel and Gargantua.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_987_987" id="Footnote_987_987"></a><a href="#FNanchor_987_987"><span class="label">[987]</span></a> <i>Gargantua</i>, l. i. cap. 57.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_988_988" id="Footnote_988_988"></a><a href="#FNanchor_988_988"><span class="label">[988]</span></a> That is, well-born in the higher sense of the word, since Rabelais, son
+of the innkeeper of Chinon, has here no motive for assigning any special
+privilege to the nobility. The preaching of the Gospel, which is spoken
+of in the inscription at the entrance to the monastery, would fit in badly
+with the rest of the life of the inmates; it must be understood in a negative
+sense, as implying defiance of the Roman Church.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_989_989" id="Footnote_989_989"></a><a href="#FNanchor_989_989"><span class="label">[989]</span></a> See extracts from his diary in Delécluze, <i>Florence et ses Vicissitudes</i>,
+vol. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_990_990" id="Footnote_990_990"></a><a href="#FNanchor_990_990"><span class="label">[990]</span></a> Infessura, ap. Eccard, <i>Scriptt.</i> ii. col. 1992. On F. C. see above,
+p. 108.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_991_991" id="Footnote_991_991"></a><a href="#FNanchor_991_991"><span class="label">[991]</span></a> This opinion of Stendhal (<i>La Chartreuse de Parme</i>, ed. Delahays,
+p. 335) seems to me to rest on profound psychological observation.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_992_992" id="Footnote_992_992"></a><a href="#FNanchor_992_992"><span class="label">[992]</span></a> Graziani, <i>Cronaca di Perugia</i>, for the year 1437 (<i>Arch. Stor.</i> xvi.
+i. p. 415).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_993_993" id="Footnote_993_993"></a><a href="#FNanchor_993_993"><span class="label">[993]</span></a> Giraldi, <i>Hecatommithi</i>, i. nov. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_994_994" id="Footnote_994_994"></a><a href="#FNanchor_994_994"><span class="label">[994]</span></a> Infessura, in Eccard, <i>Scriptt.</i> ii. col. 1892, for the year 1464.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_995_995" id="Footnote_995_995"></a><a href="#FNanchor_995_995"><span class="label">[995]</span></a> Allegretto, <i>Diari Sanisi</i>, in Murat. xxiii. col. 837. Allegretto was
+himself present when the oath was taken, and had no doubt of its efficacy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_996_996" id="Footnote_996_996"></a><a href="#FNanchor_996_996"><span class="label">[996]</span></a> Those who leave vengeance to God are ridiculed by Pulci, <i>Morgante</i>,
+canto xxi. str. 83 sqq., 104 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_997_997" id="Footnote_997_997"></a><a href="#FNanchor_997_997"><span class="label">[997]</span></a> Guicciardini, <i>Ricordi</i>, l. c. n. 74.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_998_998" id="Footnote_998_998"></a><a href="#FNanchor_998_998"><span class="label">[998]</span></a> Thus Cardanus (<i>De Propria Vita</i>, cap. 13) describes himself as very
+revengeful, but also as ‘verax, memor beneficiorum, amans justitiæ.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_999_999" id="Footnote_999_999"></a><a href="#FNanchor_999_999"><span class="label">[999]</span></a> It is true that when the Spanish rule was fully established the
+population fell off to a certain extent. Had this fact been due to the
+demoralisation of the people, it would have appeared much earlier.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1000_1000" id="Footnote_1000_1000"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1000_1000"><span class="label">[1000]</span></a> Giraldi, <i>Hecatommithi</i>, iii. nov. 2. In the same strain, <i>Cortigiano</i>, l.
+iv. fol. 180.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1001_1001" id="Footnote_1001_1001"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1001_1001"><span class="label">[1001]</span></a> A shocking instance of vengeance taken by a brother at Perugia in the
+year 1455, is to be found in the chronicle of Graziani (<i>Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. p.
+629). The brother forces the gallant to tear out the sister’s eyes, and then
+beats him from the place. It is true that the family was a branch of the
+Oddi, and the lover only a cordwainer.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1002_1002" id="Footnote_1002_1002"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1002_1002"><span class="label">[1002]</span></a> Bandello, parte i. nov. 9 and 26. Sometimes the wife’s confessor is
+bribed by the husband and betrays the adultery.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1003_1003" id="Footnote_1003_1003"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1003_1003"><span class="label">[1003]</span></a> See above p. 394, and note 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1004_1004" id="Footnote_1004_1004"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1004_1004"><span class="label">[1004]</span></a> As instance, Bandello, part i. nov. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1005_1005" id="Footnote_1005_1005"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1005_1005"><span class="label">[1005]</span></a> ‘Piaccia al Signore Iddio che non si ritrovi,’ say the women in Giraldi
+(iii. nov. 10), when they are told that the deed may cost the murderer his
+head.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1006_1006" id="Footnote_1006_1006"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1006_1006"><span class="label">[1006]</span></a> This is the case, for example, with Gioviano Pontano (<i>De Fortitudine</i>,
+l. ii.). His heroic Ascolans, who spend their last night in singing and
+dancing, the Abruzzian mother, who cheers up her son on his way to the
+gallows, &amp;c., belong probably to brigand families, but he forgets to say so.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1007_1007" id="Footnote_1007_1007"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1007_1007"><span class="label">[1007]</span></a> <i>Diarium Parmense</i>, in Murat. xxii. col. 330 to 349 <i>passim</i>. The
+sonnet, col. 340.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1008_1008" id="Footnote_1008_1008"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1008_1008"><span class="label">[1008]</span></a> <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 312. We are reminded of the
+gang led by a priest, which for some time before the year 1837 infested
+western Lombardy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1009_1009" id="Footnote_1009_1009"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1009_1009"><span class="label">[1009]</span></a> Massuccio, nov. 29. As a matter of course, the man has luck in his
+amours.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1010_1010" id="Footnote_1010_1010"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1010_1010"><span class="label">[1010]</span></a> If he appeared as a corsair in the war between the two lines of
+Anjou for the possession of Naples, he may have done so as a political
+partisan, and this, according to the notions of the time, implied no dishonour.
+The Archbishop Paolo Fregoso of Genoa, in the second half of
+the fifteenth century probably allowed himself quite as much freedom, or
+more. Contemporaries and later writers, e.g. Aretino and Poggio, record
+much worse things of John. Gregorovius, vi. p. 600.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1011_1011" id="Footnote_1011_1011"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1011_1011"><span class="label">[1011]</span></a> Poggio, <i>Facetiae</i>, fol. 164. Anyone familiar with Naples at the present
+time, may have heard things as comical, though bearing on other
+sides of human life.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1012_1012" id="Footnote_1012_1012"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1012_1012"><span class="label">[1012]</span></a> <i>Jovian. Pontani Antonius</i>: ‘Nec est quod Neapoli quam hominis vita
+minoris vendatur.’ It is true he thinks it was not so under the House of
+Anjou, ‘sicam ab iis (the Aragonese) accepimus.’ The state of things
+about the year 1534 is described by Benvenuto Cellini, i. 70.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1013_1013" id="Footnote_1013_1013"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1013_1013"><span class="label">[1013]</span></a> Absolute proof of this cannot be given, but few murders are recorded,
+and the imagination of the Florentine writers at the best period is not
+filled with the suspicion of them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1014_1014" id="Footnote_1014_1014"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1014_1014"><span class="label">[1014]</span></a> See on this point the report of Fedeli, in Alberi, <i>Relazioni Serie</i>,
+ii.
+vol. i. pp. 353 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1015_1015" id="Footnote_1015_1015"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1015_1015"><span class="label">[1015]</span></a> M. Brosch (<i>Hist. Zeitschr.</i> bd. 27, p. 295 sqq.) has collected from the
+Venetian archives five proposals, approved by the council, to poison the
+Sultan (1471-1504), as well as evidence of the plan to murder Charles
+VIII. (1495) and of the order given to the Proveditor at Faenza to have
+Cæsar Borgia put to death (1504).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1016_1016" id="Footnote_1016_1016"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1016_1016"><span class="label">[1016]</span></a> Dr. Geiger adds several conjectural statements and references on this
+subject. It may be remarked that the suspicion of poisoning, which I
+believe to be now generally unfounded, is often expressed in certain parts
+of Italy with regard to any death not at once to be accounted for.&mdash;[The
+Translator.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1017_1017" id="Footnote_1017_1017"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1017_1017"><span class="label">[1017]</span></a> Infessura, in Eccard, <i>Scriptor.</i> ii. col. 1956.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1018_1018" id="Footnote_1018_1018"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1018_1018"><span class="label">[1018]</span></a> <i>Chron. Venetum</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 131. In northern countries still
+more wonderful things were believed as to the art of poisoning in Italy.
+See <i>Juvénal des Ursins</i>, ad. ann. 1382 (ed. Buchon, p. 336), for the lancet
+of the poisoner, whom Charles of Durazzo took into his service; whoever
+looked at it steadily, died.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1019_1019" id="Footnote_1019_1019"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1019_1019"><span class="label">[1019]</span></a> Petr. Crinitus, <i>De Honesta Disciplina</i>, l. xviii. cap. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1020_1020" id="Footnote_1020_1020"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1020_1020"><span class="label">[1020]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. xi. p. 562. Joh. Ant. Campanus, <i>Vita Pii II.</i> in
+Murat. iii. ii. col. 988.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1021_1021" id="Footnote_1021_1021"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1021_1021"><span class="label">[1021]</span></a> Vasari, ix. 82, <i>Vita di Rosso</i>. In the case of unhappy marriages it
+is hard to say whether there were more real or imaginary instances of
+poisoning. Comp. Bandello, ii. nov. 5 and 54: ii. nov. 40 is more serious.
+In one and the same city of Western Lombardy, the name of which is
+not given, lived two poisoners. A husband, wishing to convince himself
+of the genuineness of his wife’s despair, made her drink what she
+believed to be poison, but which was really coloured water, whereupon
+they were reconciled. In the family of Cardanus alone four cases of
+poisoning occurred (<i>De Propria Vita</i>, cap. 30, 50). Even at a banquet
+given at the coronation of a pope each cardinal brought his own cupbearer
+with him, and his own wine, ‘probably because they knew from
+experience that otherwise they would run the risk of being poisoned.’
+And this usage was general at Rome, and practised ‘sine injuria invitantis!’
+Blas Ortiz, <i>Itinerar. Hadriani VI.</i> ap. Baluz. Miscell. ed. Mansi,
+i. 380.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1022_1022" id="Footnote_1022_1022"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1022_1022"><span class="label">[1022]</span></a> For the magic arts used against Leonello of Ferrara, see <i>Diario
+Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 194, ad a. 1445. When the sentence was
+read in the public square to the author of them, a certain Benato, a man
+in other respects of bad character, a noise was heard in the air and the
+earth shook, so that many people fled away or fell to the ground; this
+happened because Benato ‘havea chiamato e scongiurato il diavolo.’
+What Guicciardini (l. i.) says of the wicked arts practised by Ludovico
+Moro against his nephew Giangaleazzo, rests on his own responsibility.
+On magic, see below, cap. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1023_1023" id="Footnote_1023_1023"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1023_1023"><span class="label">[1023]</span></a> Ezzelino da Romano might be put first, were it not that he rather
+acted under the influence of ambitious motives and astrological delusions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1024_1024" id="Footnote_1024_1024"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1024_1024"><span class="label">[1024]</span></a> <i>Giornali Napoletani</i>, in Murat. xxi. col. 1092 ad a. 1425. According
+to the narrative this deed seems to have been committed out of mere
+pleasure in cruelty. Br., it is true, believed neither in God nor in the
+saints, and despised and neglected all the precepts and ceremonies of
+the Church.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1025_1025" id="Footnote_1025_1025"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1025_1025"><span class="label">[1025]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. vii. p. 338.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1026_1026" id="Footnote_1026_1026"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1026_1026"><span class="label">[1026]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. <i>De Immanitate</i>, cap. 17, where he relates how Malatesta
+got his own daughter with child&mdash;and so forth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1027_1027" id="Footnote_1027_1027"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1027_1027"><span class="label">[1027]</span></a> Varchi, <i>Storie Fiorentine</i>, at the end. (When the work is published
+without expurgations, as in the Milanese edition.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1028_1028" id="Footnote_1028_1028"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1028_1028"><span class="label">[1028]</span></a> On which point feeling differs according to the place and the people.
+The Renaissance prevailed in times and cities where the tendency was to
+enjoy life heartily. The general darkening of the spirits of thoughtful
+men did not begin to show itself till the time of the foreign supremacy
+in the sixteenth century.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1029_1029" id="Footnote_1029_1029"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1029_1029"><span class="label">[1029]</span></a> What is termed the spirit of the Counter-Reformation was developed
+in Spain some time before the Reformation itself, chiefly through the
+sharp surveillance and partial reorganisation of the Church under Ferdinand
+and Isabella. The principal authority on this subject is Gomez,
+<i>Life of Cardinal Ximenes</i>, in Rob. Belus, <i>Rer. Hispan. Scriptores</i>, 3 vols.
+1581.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1030_1030" id="Footnote_1030_1030"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1030_1030"><span class="label">[1030]</span></a> It is to be noticed that the novelists and satirists scarcely ever mention
+the bishops, although they might, under altered names, have attacked
+them like the rest. They do so, however, e.g. in Bandello, ii. nov. 45;
+yet in ii. 40, he describes a virtuous bishop. Gioviano Pontano in the
+<i>Charon</i> introduces the ghost of a luxurious bishop with a ‘duck’s walk.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1031_1031" id="Footnote_1031_1031"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1031_1031"><span class="label">[1031]</span></a> Foscolo, <i>Discorso sul testo del Decamerone</i>, ‘Ma dei preti in dignità
+niuno poteva far motto senza pericolo; onde ogni frate fu l’irco delle
+iniquita d’Israele,’ &amp;c. Timotheus Maffeus dedicates a book against the
+monks to Pope Nicholas V.; Facius, <i>De Vir. Ill.</i> p. 24. There are specially
+strong passages against the monks and clergy in the work of
+Palingenius already mentioned iv. 289, v. 184 sqq., 586 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1032_1032" id="Footnote_1032_1032"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1032_1032"><span class="label">[1032]</span></a> Bandello prefaces ii. nov. i. with the statement that the vice of
+avarice was more discreditable to priests than to any other class of men,
+since they had no families to provide for. On this ground he justifies
+the disgraceful attack made on a parsonage by two soldiers or brigands
+at the orders of a young gentleman, on which occasion a sheep was stolen
+from the stingy and gouty old priest. A single story of this kind illustrates
+the ideas in which men lived and acted better than all the dissertations
+in the world.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1033_1033" id="Footnote_1033_1033"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1033_1033"><span class="label">[1033]</span></a> Giov. Villani, iii. 29, says this clearly a century later.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1034_1034" id="Footnote_1034_1034"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1034_1034"><span class="label">[1034]</span></a> <i>L’Ordine.</i> Probably the tablet with the inscription I. H. S. is meant.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1035_1035" id="Footnote_1035_1035"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1035_1035"><span class="label">[1035]</span></a> He adds, ‘and in the <i>seggi</i>,’ i.e. the clubs into which the Neapolitan
+nobility was divided. The rivalry of the two orders is often ridiculed,
+e.g. Bandello, iii. nov. 14.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1036_1036" id="Footnote_1036_1036"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1036_1036"><span class="label">[1036]</span></a> Nov. 6, ed. Settembrini, p. 83, where it is remarked that in the Index
+of 1564 a book is mentioned, <i>Matrimonio delli Preti e delle Monache</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1037_1037" id="Footnote_1037_1037"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1037_1037"><span class="label">[1037]</span></a> For what follows, see Jovian. Pontan. <i>De Sermone</i>, l. ii. cap. 17, and
+Bandello, parte i. nov. 32. The fury of brother Franciscus, who attempted
+to work upon the king by a vision of St. Cataldus, was so great at his
+failure, and the talk on the subject so universal, ‘ut Italia ferme omnis
+ipse in primis Romanus pontifex de tabulæ hujus fuerit inventione sollicitus
+atque anxius.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1038_1038" id="Footnote_1038_1038"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1038_1038"><span class="label">[1038]</span></a> Alexander VI. and Julius II., whose cruel measures, however, did not
+appear to the Venetian ambassadors Giustiniani and Soderini as anything
+but a means of extorting money. Comp. M. Brosch, <i>Hist. Zeitscher.</i> bd. 37.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1039_1039" id="Footnote_1039_1039"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1039_1039"><span class="label">[1039]</span></a> Panormita, <i>De Dictis et Factis Alphonsi</i>, lib. ii. Æneas Sylvius in
+his commentary to it (<i>Opp.</i> ed. 1651, p. 79) tells of the detection of a
+pretended faster, who was said to have eaten nothing for four years.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1040_1040" id="Footnote_1040_1040"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1040_1040"><span class="label">[1040]</span></a> For which reason they could be openly denounced in the neighbourhood of the court. See Jovian. Pontan. <i>Antonius</i> and <i>Charon</i>. One of
+the stories is the same as in Massuccio, nov. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1041_1041" id="Footnote_1041_1041"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1041_1041"><span class="label">[1041]</span></a> See for one example the eighth canto of the <i>Macaroneide</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1042_1042" id="Footnote_1042_1042"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1042_1042"><span class="label">[1042]</span></a> The story in Vasari, v. p. 120, <i>Vita di Sandro Botticelli</i> shows that
+the Inquisition was sometimes treated jocularly. It is true that the
+‘Vicario’ here mentioned may have been the archbishop’s deputy instead
+of the inquisitor’s.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1043_1043" id="Footnote_1043_1043"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1043_1043"><span class="label">[1043]</span></a> Bursellis, <i>Ann. Bonon.</i> ap. Murat. xxiii. col. 886, cf. 896. Malv. died
+1468; his ‘beneficium’ passed to his nephew.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1044_1044" id="Footnote_1044_1044"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1044_1044"><span class="label">[1044]</span></a> See p. 88 sqq. He was abbot at Vallombrosa. The passage, of which
+we give a free translation, is to be found <i>Opere</i>, vol. ii. p. 209, in the tenth
+novel. See an inviting description of the comfortable life of the Carthusians
+in the <i>Commentario d’Italia</i>, fol. 32 sqq. quoted at p. 84.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1045_1045" id="Footnote_1045_1045"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1045_1045"><span class="label">[1045]</span></a> Pius II. was on principle in favour of the abolition of the celibacy
+of the clergy. One of his favourite sentences was, ‘Sacerdotibus magna
+ratione sublatus nuptias majori restituendas videri.’ Platina, <i>Vitae
+Pontiff.</i> p. 311.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1046_1046" id="Footnote_1046_1046"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1046_1046"><span class="label">[1046]</span></a> Ricordi, n. 28, in the <i>Opere inedite</i>, vol. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1047_1047" id="Footnote_1047_1047"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1047_1047"><span class="label">[1047]</span></a> Ricordi, n. i. 123, 125.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1048_1048" id="Footnote_1048_1048"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1048_1048"><span class="label">[1048]</span></a> See the <i>Orlandino</i>, cap. vi. str. 40 sqq.; cap. vii. str. 57; cap. viii. str.
+3 sqq., especially 75.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1049_1049" id="Footnote_1049_1049"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1049_1049"><span class="label">[1049]</span></a> <i>Diaria Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 362.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1050_1050" id="Footnote_1050_1050"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1050_1050"><span class="label">[1050]</span></a> He had with him a German and a Slavonian interpreter. St. Bernard
+had to use the same means when he preached in the Rhineland.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1051_1051" id="Footnote_1051_1051"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1051_1051"><span class="label">[1051]</span></a> Capistrano, for instance, contented himself with making the sign of
+the cross over the thousands of sick persons brought to him, and with
+blessing them in the name of the Trinity and of his master San Bernadino,
+after which some of them not unnaturally got well. The Brescian
+chronicle puts it in this way, ‘He worked fine miracles, yet not so many
+as were told of him’ (Murat. xxi.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1052_1052" id="Footnote_1052_1052"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1052_1052"><span class="label">[1052]</span></a> So e.g. Poggio, <i>De Avaritia</i>, in the <i>Opera</i>, fol. 2. He says they had
+an easy matter of it, since they said the same thing in every city, and
+sent the people away more stupid than they came. Poggio elsewhere
+(<i>Epist.</i> ed. Tonelli i. 281) speaks of Albert of Sarteano as ‘doctus’ and
+‘perhumanus.’ Filelfo defended Bernadino of Siena and a certain
+Nicolaus, probably out of opposition to Poggio (<i>Sat.</i> ii. 3, vi. 5) rather
+than from liking for the preachers. Filelfo was a correspondent of A. of
+Sarteano. He also praises Roberto da Lecce in some respects, but blames
+him for not using suitable gestures and expressions, for looking miserable
+when he ought to look cheerful, and for weeping too much and thus offending
+the ears and tastes of his audience. Fil. <i>Epist.</i> Venet. 1502, fol. 96 <i>b</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1053_1053" id="Footnote_1053_1053"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1053_1053"><span class="label">[1053]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, nov. 72. Preachers who fail are a constant subject
+of ridicule in all the novels.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1054_1054" id="Footnote_1054_1054"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1054_1054"><span class="label">[1054]</span></a> Compare the well-known story in the <i>Decamerone</i> vi. nov. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1055_1055" id="Footnote_1055_1055"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1055_1055"><span class="label">[1055]</span></a> In which case the sermons took a special colour. See Malipiero, <i>Ann.
+Venet. Archiv. Stor.</i> vii. i. p. 18. <i>Chron. Venet.</i> in Murat. xxiv. col. 114.
+<i>Storia Bresciana</i>, in Murat. xxi. col. 898. Absolution was freely promised
+to those who took part in, or contributed money for the crusade.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1056_1056" id="Footnote_1056_1056"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1056_1056"><span class="label">[1056]</span></a> <i>Storia Bresciana</i>, in Murat. xxiii. col. 865 sqq. On the first day
+10,000 persons were present, 2,000 of them strangers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1057_1057" id="Footnote_1057_1057"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1057_1057"><span class="label">[1057]</span></a> Allegretto, <i>Diari Sanesi</i>, in Murat. xxiii. col. 819 sqq. (July 13 to 18,
+1486); the preacher was Pietro dell’Osservanza di S. Francesco.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1058_1058" id="Footnote_1058_1058"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1058_1058"><span class="label">[1058]</span></a> Infessura (in Eccard, <i>Scriptores</i>, ii. col. 1874) says: ‘Canti, brevi,
+sorti.’ The first may refer to song-books, which actually were burnt by
+Savonarola. But Graziani (<i>Cron. di Perugia, Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. i., p. 314)
+says on a similar occasion, ‘brieve incanti,’ when we must without doubt
+read ‘brevi e incanti,’ and perhaps the same emendation is desirable in
+Infessura, whose ‘sorti’ point to some instrument of superstition, perhaps
+a pack of cards for fortune-telling. Similarly after the introduction of
+printing, collections were made of all the attainable copies of Martial,
+which then were burnt. Bandello, iii. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1059_1059" id="Footnote_1059_1059"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1059_1059"><span class="label">[1059]</span></a> See his remarkable biography in <i>Vespasiano Fiorent.</i> p. 244 sqq., and
+that by Æneas Sylvius, <i>De Viris Illustr.</i> p. 24. In the latter we read:
+‘Is quoque in tabella pictum nomen Jesus deferebat, hominibusque adorandum
+ostendebat multumque suadebat ante ostia domorum hoc nomen
+depingi.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1060_1060" id="Footnote_1060_1060"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1060_1060"><span class="label">[1060]</span></a> Allegretto, l. c. col. 823. A preacher excited the people against the
+judges (if instead of ‘giudici’ we are not to read ‘giudei’), upon which
+they narrowly escaped being burnt in their houses. The opposite party
+threatened the life of the preacher in return.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1061_1061" id="Footnote_1061_1061"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1061_1061"><span class="label">[1061]</span></a> Infessura, l. c. In the date of the witch’s death there seems to be a
+clerical error. How the same saint caused an ill-famed wood near Arezzo
+to be cut down, is told in Vasari, iii. 148, <i>Vita di Parri Spinelli</i>. Often,
+no doubt, the penitential zeal of the hearers went no further than such
+outward sacrifices.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1062_1062" id="Footnote_1062_1062"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1062_1062"><span class="label">[1062]</span></a> ‘Pareva che l’aria si fendesse,’ we read somewhere.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1063_1063" id="Footnote_1063_1063"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1063_1063"><span class="label">[1063]</span></a> Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 166 sqq. It is not expressly said
+that he interfered with this feud, but it can hardly be doubted that he did
+so. Once (1445), when Jacopo della Marca had but just quitted Perugia
+after an extraordinary success, a frightful <i>vendetta</i> broke out in the family
+of the Ranieri. Comp. Graziani, l. c. p. 565 sqq. We may here remark
+that Perugia was visited by these preachers remarkably often, comp. pp.
+597, 626, 631, 637, 647.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1064_1064" id="Footnote_1064_1064"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1064_1064"><span class="label">[1064]</span></a> Capistrano admitted fifty soldiers after one sermon, <i>Stor. Bresciana</i>,
+l. c. Graziani, l. c. p. 565 sqq. Æn. Sylvius (<i>De Viris Illustr.</i> p. 25),
+when a young man, was once so affected by a sermon of San Bernadino
+as to be on the point of joining his Order. We read in Graziani of a
+convert quitting the order; he married, ‘e fu magiore ribaldo, che non
+era prima.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1065_1065" id="Footnote_1065_1065"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1065_1065"><span class="label">[1065]</span></a> That there was no want of disputes between the famous Observantine
+preachers and their Dominican rivals is shown by the quarrel about the
+blood of Christ which was said to have fallen from the cross to the earth
+(1462). See Voigt. <i>Enea Silvio</i> iii. 591 sqq. Fra Jacopo della Marca, who
+would not yield to the Dominican Inquisitor, is criticised by Pius II. in
+his detailed account (<i>Comment.</i> l. xi. p. 511), with delicate irony: ‘Pauperiem
+pati, et famam et sitim et corporis cruciatum et mortem pro
+Christi nomine nonnulli possunt; jacturam nominis vel minimam ferre
+recusant tanquam sua deficiente fama Dei quoque gloria pereat.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1066_1066" id="Footnote_1066_1066"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1066_1066"><span class="label">[1066]</span></a> Their reputation oscillated even then between two extremes. They
+must be distinguished from the hermit-monks. The line was not always
+clearly drawn in this respect. The Spoletans, who travelled about working
+miracles, took St. Anthony and St. Paul as their patrons, the latter
+on account of the snakes which they carried with them. We read of the
+money they got from the peasantry even in the thirteenth century by
+a sort of clerical conjuring. Their horses were trained to kneel down
+at the name of St. Anthony. They pretended to collect for hospitals
+(Massuccio, nov. 18; Bandello iii., nov. 17). Firenzuola in his <i>Asino d’Oro</i>
+makes them play the part of the begging priests in Apulejus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1067_1067" id="Footnote_1067_1067"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1067_1067"><span class="label">[1067]</span></a> Prato, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. p. 357. Burigozzo, <i>ibid.</i> p. 431 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1068_1068" id="Footnote_1068_1068"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1068_1068"><span class="label">[1068]</span></a> Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 856 sqq. The quotation was: ‘Ecce
+venio cito et velociter. Estote parati.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1069_1069" id="Footnote_1069_1069"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1069_1069"><span class="label">[1069]</span></a> Matteo Villani, viii. cap. 2 sqq. He first preached against tyranny
+in general, and then, when the ruling house of the Beccaria tried to
+have him murdered, he began to preach a change of government and
+constitution, and forced the Beccaria to fly from Pavia (1357). See
+Petrarch, <i>Epp. Fam.</i> xix. 18, and A. <i>Hortis, Scritti Inediti di F. P.</i>
+174-181.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1070_1070" id="Footnote_1070_1070"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1070_1070"><span class="label">[1070]</span></a> Sometimes at critical moments the ruling house itself used the services
+of monks to exhort the people to loyalty. For an instance of
+this kind at Ferrara, see Sanudo (Murat. xxii. col. 1218). A preacher
+from Bologna reminded the people of the benefits they had received from
+the House of Este, and of the fate that awaited them at the hands of the
+victorious Venetians.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1071_1071" id="Footnote_1071_1071"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1071_1071"><span class="label">[1071]</span></a> Prato, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. p. 251. Other fanatical anti-French preachers,
+who appeared after the expulsion of the French, are mentioned by Burigozzo,
+<i>ibid.</i> pp. 443, 449, 485; ad a. 1523, 1526, 1529.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1072_1072" id="Footnote_1072_1072"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1072_1072"><span class="label">[1072]</span></a> Jac. Pitti, <i>Storia Fior.</i> l. ii. p. 112.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1073_1073" id="Footnote_1073_1073"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1073_1073"><span class="label">[1073]</span></a> Perrens, <i>Jérôme Savonarole</i>, two vols. Perhaps the most systematic
+and sober of all the many works on the subject. P. Villari, <i>La Storia di
+Girol. Savonarola</i> (two vols. 8vo. Firenze, Lemonnier). The view taken
+by the latter writer differs considerably from that maintained in the text.
+Comp. also Ranke in <i>Historisch-biographische Studien</i>, Lpzg. 1878, pp.
+181-358. On Genaz. see Vill. i. 57 sqq. ii. 343 sqq. Reumont, <i>Lorenzo</i>,
+ii. 522-526, 533 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1074_1074" id="Footnote_1074_1074"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1074_1074"><span class="label">[1074]</span></a> Sermons on Haggai; close of sermon 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1075_1075" id="Footnote_1075_1075"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1075_1075"><span class="label">[1075]</span></a> Savonarola was perhaps the only man who could have made the subject
+cities free and yet kept Tuscany together. But he never seems to
+have thought of doing so. Pisa he hated like a genuine Florentine.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1076_1076" id="Footnote_1076_1076"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1076_1076"><span class="label">[1076]</span></a> A remarkable contrast to the Sienese who in 1483 solemnly dedicated
+their distracted city to the Madonna. Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 815.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1077_1077" id="Footnote_1077_1077"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1077_1077"><span class="label">[1077]</span></a> He says of the ‘impii astrologi’: ‘non è dar disputar (con loro) altrimenti
+che col fuoco.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1078_1078" id="Footnote_1078_1078"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1078_1078"><span class="label">[1078]</span></a> See Villari on this point.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1079_1079" id="Footnote_1079_1079"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1079_1079"><span class="label">[1079]</span></a> See the passage in the fourteenth sermon on Ezechiel, in Perrens, o. c.
+vol. i. 30 note.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1080_1080" id="Footnote_1080_1080"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1080_1080"><span class="label">[1080]</span></a> With the title, <i>De Rusticorum Religione</i>. See above p. 352.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1081_1081" id="Footnote_1081_1081"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1081_1081"><span class="label">[1081]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti, nov. 109, where there is more of the same kind.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1082_1082" id="Footnote_1082_1082"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1082_1082"><span class="label">[1082]</span></a> Bapt. Mantuan. <i>De Sacris Diebus</i>, l. ii. exclaims:&mdash;
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ista superstitio, ducens a Manibus ortum<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tartareis, sancta de religione facessat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Christigenûm! vivis epulas date, sacra sepultis.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+A century earlier, when the army of John XXII. entered the Marches to
+attack the Ghibellines, the pretext was avowedly ‘eresia’ and ‘idolatria.’
+Recanti, which surrendered voluntarily, was nevertheless burnt, ‘because
+idols had been worshipped there,’ in reality, as a revenge for those whom
+the citizens had killed. Giov. Villani, ix. 139, 141. Under Pius II. we
+read of an obstinate sun-worshipper, born at Urbino. Æn. Sylv. <i>Opera</i>,
+p. 289. <i>Hist. Rer. ubique Gestar.</i> c. 12. More wonderful still was what
+happened in the Forum in Rome under Leo X. (more properly in the
+interregnum between Hadrian and Leo. June 1522, Gregorovius, viii.
+388). To stay the plague, a bull was solemnly offered up with pagan rites.
+Paul. Jov. <i>Hist.</i> xxi. 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1083_1083" id="Footnote_1083_1083"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1083_1083"><span class="label">[1083]</span></a> See Sabellico, <i>De Situ Venetae Urbis</i>. He mentions the names of the
+saints, after the manner of many philologists, without the addition of
+‘sanctus’ or ‘divus,’ but speaks frequently of different relics, and in the
+most respectful tone, and even boasts that he kissed several of them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1084_1084" id="Footnote_1084_1084"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1084_1084"><span class="label">[1084]</span></a> <i>De Laudibus Patavii</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 1149 to 1151.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1085_1085" id="Footnote_1085_1085"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1085_1085"><span class="label">[1085]</span></a> Prato, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. pp. 408 sqq. Though he is by no means a freethinker,
+he still protests against the causal nexus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1086_1086" id="Footnote_1086_1086"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1086_1086"><span class="label">[1086]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. viii. pp. 352 sqq. ‘Verebatur Pontifex, ne in
+honore tanti apostoli diminute agere videretur,’ &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1087_1087" id="Footnote_1087_1087"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1087_1087"><span class="label">[1087]</span></a> Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 187. The Pope excused himself
+on the ground of Louis’ great services to the Church, and by the example
+of other Popes, e.g. St. Gregory, who had done the like. Louis was able
+to pay his devotion to the relic, but died after all. The Catacombs were
+at that time forgotten, yet even Savonarola (l. c. col. 1150) says of Rome:
+‘Velut ager Aceldama Sanctorum habita est.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1088_1088" id="Footnote_1088_1088"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1088_1088"><span class="label">[1088]</span></a> Bursellis, <i>Annal. Bonon.</i> in Murat. xxiii. col. 905. It was one of the
+sixteen patricians, Bartol. della Volta, d. 1485 or 1486.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1089_1089" id="Footnote_1089_1089"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1089_1089"><span class="label">[1089]</span></a> Vasari, iii. 111 sqq. note. <i>Vita di Ghiberti.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1090_1090" id="Footnote_1090_1090"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1090_1090"><span class="label">[1090]</span></a> Matteo Villani, iii. 15 and 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1091_1091" id="Footnote_1091_1091"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1091_1091"><span class="label">[1091]</span></a> We must make a further distinction between the Italian cultus of the
+bodies of historical saints of recent date, and the northern practice of collecting
+bones and relics of a sacred antiquity. Such remains were preserved
+in great abundance in the Lateran, which, for that reason, was of
+special importance for pilgrims. But on the tombs of St. Dominic and St.
+Anthony of Padua rested, not only the halo of sanctity, but the splendour
+of historical fame.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1092_1092" id="Footnote_1092_1092"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1092_1092"><span class="label">[1092]</span></a> The remarkable judgment in his <i>De Sacris Diebus</i>, the work of his
+later years, refers both to sacred and profane art (l. i.). Among the Jews,
+he says, there was a good reason for prohibiting all graven images, else
+they would have relapsed into the idolatry or devil-worship of the nations
+around them:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nunc autem, postquam penitus natura Satanum<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cognita, et antiqua sine majestate relicta est,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nulla ferunt nobis statuae discrimina, nullos<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fert pictura dolos; jam sunt innoxia signa;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sunt modo virtutum testes monimentaque laudum<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Marmora, et aeternae decora immortalia famae.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1093_1093" id="Footnote_1093_1093"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1093_1093"><span class="label">[1093]</span></a> Battista Mantovano complains of certain ‘nebulones’ (<i>De Sacris
+Diebus</i>, l. v.) who would not believe in the genuineness of the Sacred
+Blood at Mantua. The same criticism which called in question the
+Donation of Constantine was also, though indirectly, hostile to the belief
+in relics.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1094_1094" id="Footnote_1094_1094"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1094_1094"><span class="label">[1094]</span></a> Especially the famous prayer of St. Bernard, <i>Paradiso</i>, xxxiii. 1,
+‘Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1095_1095" id="Footnote_1095_1095"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1095_1095"><span class="label">[1095]</span></a> Perhaps we may add Pius II., whose elegy on the Virgin is printed in
+the <i>Opera</i>, p. 964, and who from his youth believed himself to be under
+her special protection. Jac. Card. Papiens. ‘De Morte Pii,’ <i>Opp.</i> p. 656.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1096_1096" id="Footnote_1096_1096"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1096_1096"><span class="label">[1096]</span></a> That is, at the time when Sixtus IV. was so zealous for the Immaculate
+Conception. <i>Extravag. Commun.</i> l. iii. tit. xii. He founded, too, the
+Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, and the Feasts of
+St. Anne and St. Joseph. See Trithem. <i>Ann. Hirsaug.</i> ii. p. 518.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1097_1097" id="Footnote_1097_1097"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1097_1097"><span class="label">[1097]</span></a> The few frigid sonnets of Vittoria on the Madonna are most instructive
+in this respect (n. 85 sqq. ed. P. Visconti, Rome, 1840).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1098_1098" id="Footnote_1098_1098"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1098_1098"><span class="label">[1098]</span></a> Bapt. Mantuan. <i>De Sacris Diebus</i>, l. v., and especially the speech of
+the younger Pico, which was intended for the Lateran Council, in Roscoe,
+<i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, viii. p. 115. Comp. p. 121, note 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1099_1099" id="Footnote_1099_1099"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1099_1099"><span class="label">[1099]</span></a> <i>Monach. Paduani Chron.</i> l. iii. at the beginning. We there read of
+this revival: ‘Invasit primitus Perusinos, Romanes postmodum, deinde
+fere Italiæ populos universos.’ Guil. Ventura (<i>Fragmenta de Gestis
+Astensium</i> in <i>Mon. Hist. Patr. SS.</i> tom. iii. col. 701) calls the Flagellant
+pilgrimage ‘admirabilis Lombardorum commotio;’ hermits came forth
+from their cells and summoned the cities to repent.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1100_1100" id="Footnote_1100_1100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1100_1100"><span class="label">[1100]</span></a> G. Villani, viii. 122, xi. 23. The former were not received in Florence,
+the latter were welcomed all the more readily.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1101_1101" id="Footnote_1101_1101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1101_1101"><span class="label">[1101]</span></a> Corio, fol. 281. Leon. Aretinus, <i>Hist. Flor.</i> lib. xii. (at the beginning)
+mentions a sudden revival called forth by the processions of the ‘dealbati’
+from the Alps to Lucca, Florence, and still farther.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1102_1102" id="Footnote_1102_1102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1102_1102"><span class="label">[1102]</span></a> Pilgrimages to distant places had already become very rare. Those
+of the princes of the House of Este to Jerusalem, St. Jago, and Vienne
+are enumerated in Murat. xxiv. col. 182, 187, 190, 279. For that of
+Rinaldo Albizzi to the Holy Land, see Macchiavelli, <i>Stor. Fior.</i> l. v.
+Here, too, the desire of fame is sometimes the motive. The chronicler
+Giov. Cavalcanti (<i>Ist. Fiorentine</i>, ed. Polidori, ii. 478) says of Lionardo
+Fescobaldi, who wanted to go with a companion (about the year 1400) to the
+Holy Sepulchre: ‘Stimarono di eternarsi nella mente degli uomini futuri.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1103_1103" id="Footnote_1103_1103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1103_1103"><span class="label">[1103]</span></a> Bursellis, <i>Annal. Bon.</i> in Murat. xxiii. col. 890.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1104_1104" id="Footnote_1104_1104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1104_1104"><span class="label">[1104]</span></a> Allegretto, in Murat. xxiii. col. 855 sqq. The report had got about
+that it had rained blood outside the gate. All rushed forth, yet ‘gli
+uomini di guidizio non lo credono.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1105_1105" id="Footnote_1105_1105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1105_1105"><span class="label">[1105]</span></a> Burigozzo, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. 486. For the misery which then prevailed
+in Lombardy, Galeazzo Capello (<i>De Rebus nuper in Italia Gestis</i>) is the
+best authority. Milan suffered hardly less than Rome did in the sack of
+1527.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1106_1106" id="Footnote_1106_1106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1106_1106"><span class="label">[1106]</span></a> It was also called ‘l’arca del testimonio,’ and people told how it was
+‘conzado’ (constructed) ‘con gran misterio.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1107_1107" id="Footnote_1107_1107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1107_1107"><span class="label">[1107]</span></a> <i>Diario Ferrarese</i>, in Murat. xxiv. col. 317, 322, 323, 326, 386, 401.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1108_1108" id="Footnote_1108_1108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1108_1108"><span class="label">[1108]</span></a> ‘Ad uno santo homo o santa donna,’ says the chronicle. Married men
+were forbidden to keep concubines.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1109_1109" id="Footnote_1109_1109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1109_1109"><span class="label">[1109]</span></a> The sermon was especially addressed to them; after it a Jew was
+baptised, ‘ma non di quelli’ adds the annalist, ‘che erano stati a udire la
+predica.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1110_1110" id="Footnote_1110_1110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1110_1110"><span class="label">[1110]</span></a> ‘Per buono rispetto a lui noto e perchè sempre è buono a star bene
+con Iddio,’ says the annalist. After describing the arrangements, he adds
+resignedly: ‘La cagione perchè sia fatto et si habbia a fare non s’intende,
+basta che ogni bene è bene.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1111_1111" id="Footnote_1111_1111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1111_1111"><span class="label">[1111]</span></a> He is called ‘Messo del Cancellieri del Duca.’ The whole thing was
+evidently intended to appear the work of the court only, and not of any
+ecclesiastical authority.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1112_1112" id="Footnote_1112_1112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1112_1112"><span class="label">[1112]</span></a> See the quotations from Pico’s <i>Discourse on the Dignity of Man</i>
+above, pp. 354-5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1113_1113" id="Footnote_1113_1113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1113_1113"><span class="label">[1113]</span></a> Not to speak of the fact that a similar tolerance or indifference was
+not uncommon among the Arabians themselves.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1114_1114" id="Footnote_1114_1114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1114_1114"><span class="label">[1114]</span></a> So in the <i>Decameron</i>. Sultans without name in Massuccio nov. 46,
+48, 49; one called ‘Rè di Fes,’ another ‘Rè di Tunisi.’ In <i>Dittamondo</i>,
+ii. 25, we read, ‘il buono Saladin.’ For the Venetian alliance with the
+Sultan of Egypt in the year 1202, see G. Hanotaux in the <i>Revue Historique</i>
+iv. (1877) pp. 74-102. There were naturally also many attacks on
+Mohammedanism. For the Turkish woman baptized first in Venice and
+again in Rome, see Cechetti i. 487.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1115_1115" id="Footnote_1115_1115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1115_1115"><span class="label">[1115]</span></a> <i>Philelphi Epistolae</i>, Venet. 1502 fol. 90 <i>b.</i> sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1116_1116" id="Footnote_1116_1116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1116_1116"><span class="label">[1116]</span></a> <i>Decamerone</i> i. nov. 3. Boccaccio is the first to name the Christian
+religion, which the others do not. For an old French authority of the
+thirteenth century, see Tobler, <i>Li di dou Vrai Aniel</i>, Leipzig, 1871. For
+the Hebrew story of Abr. Abulafia (b. 1241 in Spain, came to Italy about
+1290 in the hope of converting the Pope to Judaism), in which two servants
+claim each to hold the jewel buried for the son, see Steinschneider, <i>Polem.
+und Apol. Lit. der Arab. Sprache</i>, pp. 319 and 360. From these and other
+sources we conclude that the story originally was less definite than as we
+now have it (in Abul. e.g. it is used polemically against the Christians),
+and that the doctrine of the equality of the three religions is a later addition.
+Comp. Reuter, <i>Gesch. der Relig. Aufklärung im M. A.</i> (Berlin,
+1877), iii. 302 sqq. 390.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1117_1117" id="Footnote_1117_1117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1117_1117"><span class="label">[1117]</span></a> <i>De Tribus Impostoribus</i>, the name of a work attributed to Frederick
+II. among many other people, and which by no means answers the expectations
+raised by the title. Latest ed. by Weller, Heilbronn, 1876. The
+nationality of the author and the date of composition are both disputed.
+See Reuter, op. cit. ii. 273-302.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1118_1118" id="Footnote_1118_1118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1118_1118"><span class="label">[1118]</span></a> In the mouth, nevertheless, of the fiend Astarotte, canto xxv. str. 231
+sqq. Comp. str. 141 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1119_1119" id="Footnote_1119_1119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1119_1119"><span class="label">[1119]</span></a> Canto xxviii. str. 38 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1120_1120" id="Footnote_1120_1120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1120_1120"><span class="label">[1120]</span></a> Canto xviii. str. 112 to the end.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1121_1121" id="Footnote_1121_1121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1121_1121"><span class="label">[1121]</span></a> Pulci touches, though hastily, on a similar conception in his Prince
+Chiaristante (canto xxi. str. 101 sqq., 121 sqq., 145 sqq., 163 sqq.), who
+believes nothing and causes himself and his wife to be worshipped. We
+are reminded of Sigismondo Malatesta (<a href="#page_245">p. 245</a>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1122_1122" id="Footnote_1122_1122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1122_1122"><span class="label">[1122]</span></a> Giov. Villani, iv. 29, vi. 46. The name occurs as early as 1150 in
+Northern countries. It is defined by William of Malmesbury (iii. 237, ed.
+Londin, 1840): ‘Epicureorum ... qui opinantur animam corpore solutam
+in aerem evanescere, in auras effluere.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1123_1123" id="Footnote_1123_1123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1123_1123"><span class="label">[1123]</span></a> See the argument in the third book of Lucretius. The name of
+Epicurean was afterwards used as synonymous with freethinker. Lorenzo
+Valla (<i>Opp.</i> 795 sqq.) speaks as follows of Epicurus: ‘Quis eo parcior,
+quis contentior, quis modestior, et quidem in nullo philosophorum
+omnium minus invenio fuisse vitiorum, plurimique honesti viri cum
+Graecorum, tum Romanorum, Epicurei fuerunt.’ Valla was defending
+himself to Eugenius IV. against the attacks of Fra Antonio da Bitonto
+and others.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1124_1124" id="Footnote_1124_1124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1124_1124"><span class="label">[1124]</span></a> <i>Inferno</i>, vii. 67-96.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1125_1125" id="Footnote_1125_1125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1125_1125"><span class="label">[1125]</span></a> <i>Purgatorio</i>, xvi. 73. Compare the theory of the influence of the
+planets in the <i>Convito</i>. Even the fiend Astarotte in Pulci (<i>Morgante</i>,
+xxv. str. 150) attests the freedom of the human will and the justice of
+God.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1126_1126" id="Footnote_1126_1126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1126_1126"><span class="label">[1126]</span></a> Comp. Voigt, <i>Wiederbelebung</i>, 165-170.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1127_1127" id="Footnote_1127_1127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1127_1127"><span class="label">[1127]</span></a> <i>Vespasiano Fiorent.</i> pp. 26, 320, 435, 626, 651. Murat. xx. col. 532.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1128_1128" id="Footnote_1128_1128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1128_1128"><span class="label">[1128]</span></a> In Platina’s introd. to his Life of Christ the religious influence of the
+Renaissance is curiously exemplified (<i>Vitæ Paparum</i>, at the beginning):
+Christ, he says, fully attained the fourfold Platonic ‘nobilitas’ according
+to his ‘genus’: ‘quem enim ex gentilibus habemus qui gloria et nomine
+cum David et Salomone, quique sapientia et doctrina cum Christo ipso
+conferri merito debeat et possit?’ Judaism, like classical antiquity, was
+also explained on a Christian hypothesis. Pico and Pietro Galatino
+endeavoured to show that Christian doctrine was foreshadowed in the
+Talmud and other Jewish writings.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1129_1129" id="Footnote_1129_1129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1129_1129"><span class="label">[1129]</span></a> On Pomponazzo, see the special works; among others, Bitter, <i>Geschichte
+der Philosophie</i>, bd. ix.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1130_1130" id="Footnote_1130_1130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1130_1130"><span class="label">[1130]</span></a> Paul. Jovii, <i>Elog. Lit.</i> p. 90. G. M. was, however, compelled to recant
+publicly. His letter to Lorenzo (May 17, 1478) begging him to intercede
+with the Pope, ‘satis enim poenarum dedi,’ is given by Malagola, Codro
+Urceo, p. 433.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1131_1131" id="Footnote_1131_1131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1131_1131"><span class="label">[1131]</span></a> <i>Codri Urcei Opera</i>, with his life by Bart. Bianchini; and in his
+philological lectures, pp. 65, 151, 278, &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1132_1132" id="Footnote_1132_1132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1132_1132"><span class="label">[1132]</span></a> On one occasion he says, ‘In Laudem Christi:’
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Phoebum alii vates musasque Jovemque sequuntur,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">At mihi pro vero nomine Christus erit.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+He also (fol. x. <i>b</i>) attacks the Bohemians. Huss and Jerome of Prague
+are defended by Poggio in his famous letter to Lion. Aretino, and placed
+on a level with Mucius Scaevola and Socrates.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1133_1133" id="Footnote_1133_1133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1133_1133"><span class="label">[1133]</span></a> ‘Audi virgo ea quae tibi mentis compos et ex animo dicam. Si forte
+cum ad ultimum vitae finem pervenero supplex accedam ad te spem
+oratum, ne me audias neve inter tuos accipias oro; cum infernis diis in
+aeternum vitam degere decrevi.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1134_1134" id="Footnote_1134_1134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1134_1134"><span class="label">[1134]</span></a> ‘Animum meum seu animam’&mdash;a distinction by which philology used
+then to perplex theology.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1135_1135" id="Footnote_1135_1135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1135_1135"><span class="label">[1135]</span></a> Platina, <i>Vitae Pontiff.</i> p. 311: ‘Christianam fidem si miraculis non
+esset confirmata, honestate sua recipi debuisse.’ It may be questioned
+whether all that Platina attributes to the Pope is in fact authentic.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1136_1136" id="Footnote_1136_1136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1136_1136"><span class="label">[1136]</span></a> Preface to the <i>Historia Ferdinandi I.</i> (<i>Hist. Ztschr.</i> xxxiii. 61) and
+<i>Antid. in Pogg.</i> lib. iv. <i>Opp.</i> p. 256 sqq. Pontanus (<i>De Sermone</i>, i. 18)
+says that Valla did not hesitate ‘dicere profiterique palam habere se
+quoque in Christum spicula.’ Pontano, however, was a friend of Valla’s
+enemies at Naples.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1137_1137" id="Footnote_1137_1137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1137_1137"><span class="label">[1137]</span></a> Especially when the monks improvised them in the pulpit. But the
+old and recognised miracles did not remain unassailed. Firenzuola
+(<i>Opere</i>, vol. ii. p. 208, in the tenth novel) ridicules the Franciscans of
+Novara, who wanted to spend money which they had embezzled, in adding
+a chapel to their church, ‘dove fusse dipinta quella bella storia, quando S.
+Francesco predicava agli uccelli nel deserto; e quando ei fece la santa
+zuppa, e che l’agnolo Gabriello gli portò i zoccoli.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1138_1138" id="Footnote_1138_1138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1138_1138"><span class="label">[1138]</span></a> Some facts about him are to be found in Bapt. Mantuan. <i>De Patientia</i>,
+l. iii. cap. 13.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1139_1139" id="Footnote_1139_1139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1139_1139"><span class="label">[1139]</span></a> Bursellis, <i>Ann. Bonon.</i> in Murat. xxiii. col. 915.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1140_1140" id="Footnote_1140_1140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1140_1140"><span class="label">[1140]</span></a> How far these blasphemous utterances sometimes went, has been
+shown by Gieseler (<i>Kirchengeschichte</i>, ii. iv. § 154, anm.) who quotes
+several striking instances.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1141_1141" id="Footnote_1141_1141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1141_1141"><span class="label">[1141]</span></a> Voigt, <i>Enea Silvio</i>, iii. 581. It is not known what happened to the
+Bishop Petro of Aranda who (1500) denied the Divinity of Christ and the
+existence of Hell and Purgatory, and denounced indulgences as a device
+of the popes invented for their private advantage. For him, see <i>Burchardi
+Diarium</i>, ed. Leibnitz, p. 63 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1142_1142" id="Footnote_1142_1142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1142_1142"><span class="label">[1142]</span></a> Jov. Pontanus, <i>De Fortuna</i>, <i>Opp.</i> i. 792-921. Comp. <i>Opp.</i> ii. 286.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1143_1143" id="Footnote_1143_1143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1143_1143"><span class="label">[1143]</span></a> Æn. Sylvii, <i>Opera</i>, p. 611.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1144_1144" id="Footnote_1144_1144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1144_1144"><span class="label">[1144]</span></a> Poggius, <i>De Miseriis Humanae Conditionis</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1145_1145" id="Footnote_1145_1145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1145_1145"><span class="label">[1145]</span></a> Caracciolo, <i>De Varietate Fortunae</i>, in Murat. xxii., one of the most
+valuable writings of a period rich in such works. On Fortune in public
+processions, see p. 421.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1146_1146" id="Footnote_1146_1146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1146_1146"><span class="label">[1146]</span></a> <i>Leonis X. Vita Anonyma</i>, in Roscoe, ed. Bossi, xii. p. 153.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1147_1147" id="Footnote_1147_1147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1147_1147"><span class="label">[1147]</span></a> Bursellis, <i>Ann. Bonon.</i> in Murat. xxiii. col. 909: ‘Monimentum hoc
+conditum a Joanne Bentivolo secundo patriae rectore, cui virtus et fortuna
+cuncta quæ optari possunt affatim praestiterunt.’ It is still not quite
+certain whether this inscription was outside, and visible to everybody, or,
+like another mentioned just before, hidden on one of the foundation stones.
+In the latter case, a fresh idea is involved. By this secret inscription,
+which perhaps only the chronicler knew of, Fortune is to be magically
+bound to the building.
+</p><p>
+[According to the words of the chronicle, the inscription cannot have
+stood on the walls of the newly built tower. The exact spot is uncertain.&mdash;L.G.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1148_1148" id="Footnote_1148_1148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1148_1148"><span class="label">[1148]</span></a> ‘Quod nimium gentilitatis amatores essemus.’ Paganism, at least in
+externals, certainly went rather far. Inscriptions lately found in the
+Catacombs show that the members of the Academy described themselves as
+‘sacerdotes,’ and called Pomponius Lætus ‘pontifex maximus;’ the latter
+once addressed Platina as ‘pater sanctissimus.’ Gregorovius, vii. 578.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1149_1149" id="Footnote_1149_1149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1149_1149"><span class="label">[1149]</span></a> While the plastic arts at all events distinguished between angels and
+‘putti,’ and used the former for all serious purposes. In the <i>Annal. Estens.</i>
+Murat. xx. col. 468, the ‘amorino’ is naively called ‘instar Cupidinis
+angelus.’ Comp. the speech made before Leo X. (1521), in which the passage
+occurs: ‘Quare et te non jam Juppiter, sed Virgo Capitolina Dei
+parens quæ hujus urbis et collis reliquis præsides, Romamque et Capitolium
+tutaris.’ Greg. viii. 294.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1150_1150" id="Footnote_1150_1150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1150_1150"><span class="label">[1150]</span></a> Della Valle, <i>Lettere Sanesi</i>, iii. 18.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1151_1151" id="Footnote_1151_1151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1151_1151"><span class="label">[1151]</span></a> Macrob. <i>Saturnal.</i> iii. 9. Doubtless the canon did not omit the
+gestures there prescribed. Comp. Gregorovius, viii. 294, for Bembo. For
+the paganism thus prevalent in Rome, see also Ranke, <i>Päpste</i>, i. 73 sqq.
+Comp. also Gregorovius, viii. 268.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1152_1152" id="Footnote_1152_1152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1152_1152"><span class="label">[1152]</span></a> <i>Monachus Paduan.</i> l. ii. ap. Urstisius, <i>Scriptt.</i> i. pp. 598, 599, 602,
+607. The last Visconti (<a href="#page_037">p. 37</a>) had also a number of these men in his
+service (Comp. Decembrio, in Murat. xx. col. 1017): he undertook nothing
+without their advice. Among them was a Jew named Helias. Gasparino
+da Barzizzi once addressed him: ‘Magna vi astrorum fortuna tuas res
+reget.’ G. B. <i>Opera</i>, ed. Furietto, p. 38.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1153_1153" id="Footnote_1153_1153"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1153_1153"><span class="label">[1153]</span></a> E.g. Florence, where Bonatto filled the office for a long period. See
+too Matteo Villani, xi. 3, where the city astrologer is evidently meant.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1154_1154" id="Footnote_1154_1154"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1154_1154"><span class="label">[1154]</span></a> Libri, <i>Hist. des Sciences Mathém.</i> ii. 52, 193. At Bologna this professorship
+is said to have existed in 1125. Comp. the list of professors
+at Pavia, in Corio, fol. 290. For the professorship at the Sapienza under
+Leo X., see Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, v. p. 283.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1155_1155" id="Footnote_1155_1155"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1155_1155"><span class="label">[1155]</span></a> J. A. Campanus lays stress on the value and importance of astrology,
+and concludes with the words: ‘Quamquam Augustinus sanctissimus ille
+vir quidem ac doctissimus, sed fortassis ad fidem religionemque propensior
+negat quicquam vel boni vel mali astrorum necessitate contingere.’
+‘Oratio initio studii Perugiæ habita,’ compare <i>Opera</i>, Rome, 1495.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1156_1156" id="Footnote_1156_1156"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1156_1156"><span class="label">[1156]</span></a> About 1260 Pope Alexander IV. compelled a Cardinal (and shamefaced
+astrologer) Bianco to bring out a number of political prophecies.
+Giov. Villani, vi. 81.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1157_1157" id="Footnote_1157_1157"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1157_1157"><span class="label">[1157]</span></a> <i>De Dictis, &amp;c. Alfonsi, Opera</i>, p. 493. He held it to be ‘pulchrius
+quam utile.’ Platina, <i>Vitae Pontiff.</i> p. 310. For Sixtus IV. comp. Jac.
+Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 173, 186. He caused the hours for
+audiences, receptions, and the like, to be fixed by the ‘planetarii.’ In
+the <i>Europa</i>, c. 49, Pius II. mentions that Baptista Blasius, an astronomer
+from Cremona, had prophesied the misfortunes of Fr. Foscaro ‘tanquam
+prævidisset.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1158_1158" id="Footnote_1158_1158"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1158_1158"><span class="label">[1158]</span></a> Brosch, <i>Julius II.</i> (Gotha, 1878), pp. 97 and 323.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1159_1159" id="Footnote_1159_1159"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1159_1159"><span class="label">[1159]</span></a> P. Valeriano, <i>De Infel. Lit.</i> (318-324) speaks of Fr. Friuli, who wrote
+on Leo’s horoscope, and ‘abditissima quæque anteactæ ætatis et uni
+ipsi cognita principi explicuerat quæque incumberent quæque futura
+essent ad unguem ut eventus postmodum comprobavit, in singulos fere
+dies prædixerat.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1160_1160" id="Footnote_1160_1160"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1160_1160"><span class="label">[1160]</span></a> Ranke, <i>Päpste</i>, i. 247.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1161_1161" id="Footnote_1161_1161"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1161_1161"><span class="label">[1161]</span></a> <i>Vespas. Fiorent.</i> p. 660, comp. 341. <i>Ibid.</i> p. 121, another Pagolo is
+mentioned as court mathematician and astrologer of Federigo of Montefeltro.
+Curiously enough, he was a German.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1162_1162" id="Footnote_1162_1162"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1162_1162"><span class="label">[1162]</span></a> Firmicus Maternus, <i>Matheseos Libri</i> viii. at the end of the second
+book.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1163_1163" id="Footnote_1163_1163"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1163_1163"><span class="label">[1163]</span></a> In Bandello, iii. nov. 60, the astrologer of Alessandro Bentivoglio, in
+Milan, confessed himself a poor devil before the whole company.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1164_1164" id="Footnote_1164_1164"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1164_1164"><span class="label">[1164]</span></a> It was in such a moment of resolution that Ludovico Moro had the
+cross with this inscription made, which is now in the Minster at Chur.
+Sixtus IV. too once said that he would try if the proverb was true. On
+this saying of the astrologer Ptolemæus, which B. Fazio took to be
+Virgilian, see Laur. Valla, <i>Opera</i>, p. 461.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1165_1165" id="Footnote_1165_1165"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1165_1165"><span class="label">[1165]</span></a> The father of Piero Capponi, himself an astrologer, put his son into
+trade lest he should get the dangerous wound in the head which threatened
+him. <i>Vita di P. Capponi, Arch. Stor.</i> iv. ii. 15. For an instance in the
+life of Cardanus, see p. 334. The physician and astrologer Pierleoni of
+Spoleto believed that he would be drowned, avoided in consequence all
+watery places, and refused brilliant positions offered him at Venice and
+Padua. Paul. Jov. <i>Elog. Liter.</i> pp. 67 sqq. Finally he threw himself
+into the water, in despair at the charge brought against him of complicity
+in Lorenzo’s death, and was actually drowned. Hier. Aliottus had been
+told to be careful in his sixty-second year, as his life would then be in
+danger. He lived with great circumspection, kept clear of the doctors,
+and the year passed safely. H. A. <i>Opuscula</i> (Arezzo, 1769), ii. 72. Marsilio
+Ficino, who despised astrology (<i>Opp.</i> p. 772) was written to by a friend
+(<i>Epist.</i> lib. 17): ‘Praeterea me memini a duobus vestrorum astrologis
+audivisse, te ex quadam siderum positione antiquas revocaturum philosophorum
+sententias.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1166_1166" id="Footnote_1166_1166"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1166_1166"><span class="label">[1166]</span></a> For instances in the life of Ludovico Moro, see Senarega, in Murat,
+xxiv. col. 518, 524. Benedictus, in Eccard, ii. col. 1623. And yet his
+father, the great Francesco Sforza, had despised astrology, and his grandfather
+Giacomo had not at any rate followed its warnings. Corio, fol.
+321, 413.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1167_1167" id="Footnote_1167_1167"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1167_1167"><span class="label">[1167]</span></a> For the facts here quoted, see <i>Annal. Foroliviens</i>. in Murat. xxii. col.
+233 sqq. (comp. col. 150). Leonbattista Alberti endeavoured to give a
+spiritual meaning to the ceremony of laying the foundation. <i>Opere Volgari</i>,
+tom. iv. p. 314 (or <i>De Re Ædific</i>. 1. i.). For Bonatto see Filippo
+Villani, <i>Vite</i> and <i>Delia Vita e delle Opere di Guido Bonati, Astrologo e
+Astronomo del Secolo Decimoterzo, raccolte da E. Boncompagni</i>, Rome
+1851. B.’s great work, <i>De Astronomia</i>, lib. x. has been often printed.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1168_1168" id="Footnote_1168_1168"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1168_1168"><span class="label">[1168]</span></a> In the horoscopes of the second foundation of Florence (Giov. Villani,
+iii. 1. under Charles the Great) and of the first of Venice (see above,
+p. 62), an old tradition is perhaps mingled with the poetry of the Middle
+Ages.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1169_1169" id="Footnote_1169_1169"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1169_1169"><span class="label">[1169]</span></a> For one of these victories, see the remarkable passage quoted from
+Bonatto in Steinschneider, in the <i>Zeitschr. d. D. Morg. Ges.</i> xxv. p. 416.
+On B. comp. <i>ibid.</i> xviii. 120 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1170_1170" id="Footnote_1170_1170"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1170_1170"><span class="label">[1170]</span></a> <i>Ann. Foroliv.</i> 235-238. Filippo Villani, <i>Vite.</i> Macchiavelli, <i>Stor.
+Fior.</i> l. i. When constellations which augured victory appeared, Bonatto
+ascended with his book and astrolabe to the tower of San Mercuriale
+above the Piazza, and when the right moment came gave the signal for
+the great bell to be rung. Yet it was admitted that he was often wide of
+the mark, and foresaw neither his own death nor the fate of Montefeltro.
+Not far from Cesena he was killed by robbers, on his way back to Forli
+from Paris and from Italian universities where he had been lecturing.
+As a weather prophet he was once overmatched and made game of by a
+countryman.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1171_1171" id="Footnote_1171_1171"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1171_1171"><span class="label">[1171]</span></a> Matteo Villani, xi. 3; see above, p. 508.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1172_1172" id="Footnote_1172_1172"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1172_1172"><span class="label">[1172]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. <i>De Fortitudine</i>, l. i. See p. 511 note 1, for the
+honourable exception made by the first Sforza.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1173_1173" id="Footnote_1173_1173"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1173_1173"><span class="label">[1173]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Elog.</i> sub v. Livianus, p. 219.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1174_1174" id="Footnote_1174_1174"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1174_1174"><span class="label">[1174]</span></a> Who tells it us himself. Benedictus, in Eccard, ii. col. 1617.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1175_1175" id="Footnote_1175_1175"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1175_1175"><span class="label">[1175]</span></a> In this sense we must understand the words of Jac. Nardi, <i>Vita
+d’Ant. Giacomini</i>, p. 65. The same pictures were common on clothes and
+household utensils. At the reception of Lucrezia Borgia in Ferrara, the
+mule of the Duchess of Urbino wore trappings of black velvet with
+astrological figures in gold. <i>Arch. Stor. Append.</i> ii. p. 305.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1176_1176" id="Footnote_1176_1176"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1176_1176"><span class="label">[1176]</span></a> Æn. Sylvius, in the passage quoted above p. 508; comp. <i>Opp.</i> 481.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1177_1177" id="Footnote_1177_1177"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1177_1177"><span class="label">[1177]</span></a> Azario, in Corio, fol. 258.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1178_1178" id="Footnote_1178_1178"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1178_1178"><span class="label">[1178]</span></a> Considerations of this kind probably influenced the Turkish astrologers
+who, after the battle of Nicopolis, advised the Sultan Bajazet I. to
+consent to the ransom of John of Burgundy, since ‘for his sake much
+Christian blood would be shed.’ It was not difficult to foresee the further
+course of the French civil war. <i>Magn. Chron. Belgicum</i>, p. 358. <i>Juvénal
+des Ursins</i>, ad. a. 1396.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1179_1179" id="Footnote_1179_1179"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1179_1179"><span class="label">[1179]</span></a> Benedictus, in Eccard, ii. col. 1579. It was said of King Ferrante
+in 1493 that he would lose his throne ‘sine cruore sed sola fama’&mdash;which
+actually happened.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1180_1180" id="Footnote_1180_1180"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1180_1180"><span class="label">[1180]</span></a> Comp. Steinschneider, <i>Apokalypsen mit polemischer Tendenz</i>, D.
+M. G. Z. xxviii. 627 sqq. xxix. 261.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1181_1181" id="Footnote_1181_1181"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1181_1181"><span class="label">[1181]</span></a> Bapt. Mantuan. <i>De Patientia</i>, l. iii. cap. 12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1182_1182" id="Footnote_1182_1182"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1182_1182"><span class="label">[1182]</span></a> Giov. Villani, x. 39, 40. Other reasons also existed, e.g. the jealousy
+of his colleagues. Bonatto had taught the same, and had explained the
+miracle of Divine Love in St. Francis as the effect of the planet Mars.
+Comp. Jo. Picus, <i>Adv. Astrol.</i> ii. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1183_1183" id="Footnote_1183_1183"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1183_1183"><span class="label">[1183]</span></a> They were painted by Miretto at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
+Acc. to Scardeonius they were destined ‘ad indicandum nascentium
+naturas per gradus et numeros’&mdash;a more popular way of teaching than we
+can now well imagine. It was astrology ‘à la portèe de tout le monde.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1184_1184" id="Footnote_1184_1184"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1184_1184"><span class="label">[1184]</span></a> He says (<i>Orationes</i>, fol. 35, ‘In Nuptias’) of astrology: ‘haec efficit
+ut homines parum a Diis distare videantur’! Another enthusiast of the
+same time is Jo. Garzonius, <i>De Dignitate Urbis Bononiae</i>, in Murat. xxi.
+col. 1163.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1185_1185" id="Footnote_1185_1185"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1185_1185"><span class="label">[1185]</span></a> Petrarca, <i>Epp. Seniles</i>, iii. 1 (p. 765) and elsewhere. The letter in
+question was written to Boccaccio. On Petrarch’s polemic against the
+astrologers, see Geiger. <i>Petr.</i> 87-91 and 267, note 11.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1186_1186" id="Footnote_1186_1186"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1186_1186"><span class="label">[1186]</span></a> Franco Sacchetti (nov. 151) ridicules their claims to wisdom.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1187_1187" id="Footnote_1187_1187"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1187_1187"><span class="label">[1187]</span></a> Gio. Villani, iii. x. 39. Elsewhere he appears as a devout believer in
+astrology, x. 120, xii. 40.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1188_1188" id="Footnote_1188_1188"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1188_1188"><span class="label">[1188]</span></a> In the passage xi. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1189_1189" id="Footnote_1189_1189"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1189_1189"><span class="label">[1189]</span></a> Gio. Villani, xi. 2, xii. 58.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1190_1190" id="Footnote_1190_1190"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1190_1190"><span class="label">[1190]</span></a> The author of the <i>Annales Placentini</i> (in Murat. xx. col. 931), the
+same Alberto di Ripalta mentioned at p. 241, took part in this controversy.
+The passage is in other respects remarkable, since it contains
+the popular opinion with regard to the nine known comets, their colour,
+origin, and significance. Comp. Gio. Villani, xi. 67. He speaks of a
+comet as the herald of great and generally disastrous events.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1191_1191" id="Footnote_1191_1191"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1191_1191"><span class="label">[1191]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Vita Leonis</i> xx. l. iii. where it appears that Leo himself was
+a believer at least in premonitions and the like, see above p. 509.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1192_1192" id="Footnote_1192_1192"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1192_1192"><span class="label">[1192]</span></a> Jo. Picus Mirand. <i>Adversus Astrologos</i>, libri xii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1193_1193" id="Footnote_1193_1193"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1193_1193"><span class="label">[1193]</span></a> Acc. to Paul, Jov. <i>Elog. Lit.</i> sub tit. Jo. Picus, the result he achieved
+was ‘ut subtilium disciplinarum professores a scribendo deterruisse
+videatur.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1194_1194" id="Footnote_1194_1194"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1194_1194"><span class="label">[1194]</span></a> <i>De Rebus Caelestibus</i>, libri xiv. (<i>Opp.</i> iii. 1963-2591). In the twelfth
+book, dedicated to Paolo Cortese, he will not admit the latter’s refutation
+of astrology. Ægidius, <i>Opp.</i> ii. 1455-1514. Pontano had dedicated his
+little work <i>De Luna</i> (<i>Opp.</i> iii. 2592) to the same hermit Egidio (of Viterbo?)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1195_1195" id="Footnote_1195_1195"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1195_1195"><span class="label">[1195]</span></a> For the latter passage, see p. 1486. The difference between Pontano
+and Pico is thus put by Franc. Pudericus, one of the interlocutors in the
+dialogue (p. 1496): ‘Pontanus non ut Johannes Picus in disciplinam
+ipsam armis equisque, quod dicitur, irrumpit, cum illam tueatur, ut cognitu
+maxime dignam ac pene divinam, sed astrologos quosdam, ut parum
+cautos minimeque prudentes insectetur et rideat.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1196_1196" id="Footnote_1196_1196"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1196_1196"><span class="label">[1196]</span></a> In S. Maria del Popolo at Rome. The angels remind us of Dante’s
+theory at the beginning of the <i>Convito</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1197_1197" id="Footnote_1197_1197"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1197_1197"><span class="label">[1197]</span></a> This was the case with Antonio Galateo who, in a letter to Ferdinand
+the Catholic (Mai, <i>Spicileg. Rom.</i> vol. viii. p. 226, ad a. 1510), disclaims
+astrology with violence, and in another letter to the Count of Potenza
+(<i>ibid.</i> p. 539) infers from the stars that the Turks would attack Rhodes
+the same year.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1198_1198" id="Footnote_1198_1198"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1198_1198"><span class="label">[1198]</span></a> <i>Ricordi</i>, l. c. n. 57.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1199_1199" id="Footnote_1199_1199"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1199_1199"><span class="label">[1199]</span></a> Many instances of such superstitions in the case of the last Visconti
+are mentioned by Decembrio (Murat. xx. col. 1016 sqq.). Odaxius says in
+his speech at the burial of Guidobaldo (<i>Bembi Opera</i>, i. 598 sqq.), that the
+gods had announced his approaching death by thunderbolts, earthquakes,
+and other signs and wonders.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1200_1200" id="Footnote_1200_1200"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1200_1200"><span class="label">[1200]</span></a> Varchi, <i>Stor. Fior.</i> l. iv. (<a href="#page_174">p. 174</a>); prophecies and premonitions were
+then as rife in Florence as at Jerusalem during the siege. Comp. <i>ibid.</i> iii.
+143, 195; iv. 43, 177.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1201_1201" id="Footnote_1201_1201"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1201_1201"><span class="label">[1201]</span></a> Matarazzo, <i>Archiv. Stor.</i> xvi. ii. p. 208.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1202_1202" id="Footnote_1202_1202"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1202_1202"><span class="label">[1202]</span></a> Prato, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. 324, for the year 1514.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1203_1203" id="Footnote_1203_1203"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1203_1203"><span class="label">[1203]</span></a> For the Madonna dell’Arbore in the Cathedral at Milan, and what
+she did in 1515, see Prato, l. c. p. 327. He also records the discovery of
+a dead dragon as thick as a horse in the excavations for a mortuary
+chapel near S. Nazaro. The head was taken to the Palace of the Triulzi
+for whom the chapel was built.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1204_1204" id="Footnote_1204_1204"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1204_1204"><span class="label">[1204]</span></a> ‘Et fuit mirabile quod illico pluvia cessavit.’ <i>Diar. Parmense</i> in
+Murat. xxii. col. 280. The author shares the popular hatred of the usurers.
+Comp. col. 371.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1205_1205" id="Footnote_1205_1205"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1205_1205"><span class="label">[1205]</span></a> <i>Conjurationis Pactianae Commentarius</i>, in the appendices to Roscoe’s
+<i>Lorenzo</i>. Politian was in general an opponent of astrology. The saints
+were naturally able to cause the rain to cease. Comp. Æneas Sylvius, in
+his life of Bernadino da Siena (<i>De Vir. Ill.</i> p. 25): ‘jussit in virtute Jesu
+nubem abire, quo facto solutis absque pluvia nubibus, prior serenitas
+rediit’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1206_1206" id="Footnote_1206_1206"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1206_1206"><span class="label">[1206]</span></a> <i>Poggi Facetiae</i>, fol. 174. Æn. Sylvius (<i>De Europa</i>, c. 53, 54, <i>Opera</i>,
+pp. 451, 455) mentions prodigies which may have really happened, such
+as combats between animals and strange appearances in the sky, and
+mentions them chiefly as curiosities, even when adding the results attributed
+to them. Similarly Antonio Ferrari (il Galateo), <i>De Situ Iapygiae</i>,
+p. 121, with the explanation: ‘Et hae, ut puto, species erant earum
+rerum quæ longe aberant atque ab eo loco in quo species visae sunt
+minime poterant.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1207_1207" id="Footnote_1207_1207"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1207_1207"><span class="label">[1207]</span></a> <i>Poggi Facetiae</i>, fol. 160. Comp. Pausanias, ix. 20.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1208_1208" id="Footnote_1208_1208"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1208_1208"><span class="label">[1208]</span></a> Varchi, iii 195. Two suspected persons decided on flight in 1529,
+because they opened the Æneid at book iii. 44. Comp. Rabelais, <i>Pantagruel</i>,
+iii. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1209_1209" id="Footnote_1209_1209"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1209_1209"><span class="label">[1209]</span></a> The imaginations of the scholars, such as the ‘splendor’ and the
+‘spiritus’ of Cardanus, and the ‘dæmon familiaris’ of his father, may be
+taken for what they are worth. Comp. Cardanus, <i>De Propria Vita</i>, cap.
+4, 38, 47. He was himself an opponent of magic; cap. 39. For the
+prodigies and ghosts he met with, see cap. 37, 41. For the terror of
+ghosts felt by the last Visconti, see Decembrio, in Murat. xx. col. 1016.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1210_1210" id="Footnote_1210_1210"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1210_1210"><span class="label">[1210]</span></a> ‘Molte fiate i morti guastano le creature.’ Bandello, ii. nov. 1. We
+read (Galateo, p. 177) that the ‘animæ’ of wicked men rise from the
+grave, appear to their friends and acquaintances, ‘animalibus vexi, pueros
+sugere ac necare, deinde in sepulcra reverti.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1211_1211" id="Footnote_1211_1211"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1211_1211"><span class="label">[1211]</span></a> Galateo, l. c. We also read (<a href="#page_119">p. 119</a>) of the ‘Fata Morgana’ and other
+similar appearances.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1212_1212" id="Footnote_1212_1212"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1212_1212"><span class="label">[1212]</span></a> Bandello, iii. nov. 20. It is true that the ghost was only a lover wishing
+to frighten the occupier of the palace, who was also the husband of
+the beloved lady. The lover and his accomplices dressed themselves up
+as devils; one of them, who could imitate the cry of different animals,
+had been sent for from a distance.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1213_1213" id="Footnote_1213_1213"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1213_1213"><span class="label">[1213]</span></a> Graziani, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. i. p. 640, ad a. 1467. The guardian died of
+fright.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1214_1214" id="Footnote_1214_1214"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1214_1214"><span class="label">[1214]</span></a> <i>Balth. Castilionii Carmina</i>; Prosopopeja Lud. Pici.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1215_1215" id="Footnote_1215_1215"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1215_1215"><span class="label">[1215]</span></a> Alexandri ab Alexandro, <i>Dierum Genialium</i>, libri vi. (Colon. 1539), is
+an authority of the first rank for these subjects, the more so as the author,
+a friend of Pontanus and a member of his academy, asserts that what he
+records either happened to himself, or was communicated to him by
+thoroughly trustworthy witnesses. Lib. vi. cap. 19: two evil men and a
+monk are attacked by devils, whom they recognise by the shape of their
+feet, and put to flight, partly by force and partly by the sign of the cross.
+Lib. vi. cap. 21: A servant, cast into prison by a cruel prince on account
+of a small offence, calls upon the devil, is miraculously brought out of the
+prison and back again, visits meanwhile the nether world, shows the
+prince his hand scorched by the flames of Hell, tells him on behalf of a
+departed spirit certain secrets which had been communicated to the latter,
+exhorts him to lay aside his cruelty, and dies soon after from the effects
+of the fright. Lib. ii. c. 19, iii. 15, v. 23: Ghosts of departed friends, of
+St. Cataldus, and of unknown beings in Rome, Arezzo and Naples. Lib.
+ii. 22, iii. 8: Appearances of mermen and mermaids at Naples, in Spain,
+and in the Peloponnesus; in the latter case guaranteed by Theodore Gaza
+and George of Trebizond.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1216_1216" id="Footnote_1216_1216"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1216_1216"><span class="label">[1216]</span></a> Gio. Villani, xi. 2. He had it from the Abbot of Vallombrosa, to
+whom the hermit had communicated it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1217_1217" id="Footnote_1217_1217"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1217_1217"><span class="label">[1217]</span></a> Another view of the Dæmons was given by Gemisthos Pletho, whose
+great philosophical work <span title="Greek: oi nomoi">οἱ νὁμοι</span>, of which only fragments are now left
+(ed. Alexander, Paris, 1858), was probably known more fully to the
+Italians of the fifteenth century, either by means of copies or of tradition,
+and exercised undoubtedly a great influence on the philosophical, political,
+and religious culture of the time. According to him the dæmons, who
+belong to the third order of the gods, are preserved from all error, and
+are capable of following in the steps of the gods who stand above them;
+they are spirits who bring to men the good things ‘which come down
+from Zeus through the other gods in order; they purify and watch over
+man, they raise and strengthen his heart.’ Comp. Fritz Schultze, <i>Gesch.
+der Philosophie der Renaissance</i>, Jena, 1874.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1218_1218" id="Footnote_1218_1218"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1218_1218"><span class="label">[1218]</span></a> Yet but little remained of the wonders attributed to her. For probably
+the last metamorphosis of a man into an ass, in the eleventh
+century under Leo IX., see Giul. Malmesbur. ii. 171.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1219_1219" id="Footnote_1219_1219"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1219_1219"><span class="label">[1219]</span></a> This was probably the case with the possessed woman, who in 1513
+at Ferrara and elsewhere was consulted by distinguished Lombards as
+to future events. Her name was Rodogine. See Rabelais, <i>Pantagruel</i>,
+iv. 58.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1220_1220" id="Footnote_1220_1220"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1220_1220"><span class="label">[1220]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. Antonius.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1221_1221" id="Footnote_1221_1221"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1221_1221"><span class="label">[1221]</span></a> How widespread the belief in witches then was, is shown by the fact
+that in 1483 Politian gave a ‘praelectio’ ‘in priora Aristotelis Analytica
+cui titulus Lamia’ (Italian trans. by Isidore del Lungo, Flor. 1864)
+Comp. Reumont, <i>Lorenzo</i>, ii. 75-77. Fiesole, according to this, was, in a
+certain sense, a witches’ nest.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1222_1222" id="Footnote_1222_1222"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1222_1222"><span class="label">[1222]</span></a> Graziani, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> xvi. i. p. 565, ad a. 1445, speaking of a witch at
+Nocera, who only offered half the sum, and was accordingly burnt. The
+law was aimed at such persons as ‘facciono le fature overo venefitie overo
+encantatione d’ommunde spirite a nuocere,’ l. c. note 1, 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1223_1223" id="Footnote_1223_1223"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1223_1223"><span class="label">[1223]</span></a> Lib. i. ep. 46, <i>Opera</i>, p. 531 sqq. For ‘umbra’ p. 552 read ‘Umbria,’
+and for ‘lacum’ read ‘locum.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1224_1224" id="Footnote_1224_1224"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1224_1224"><span class="label">[1224]</span></a> He calls him later on: ‘Medicus Ducis Saxoniæ, homo tum dives tum
+potens.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1225_1225" id="Footnote_1225_1225"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1225_1225"><span class="label">[1225]</span></a> In the fourteenth century there existed a kind of hell-gate near Ansedonia
+in Tuscany. It was a cave, with footprints of men and animals in
+the sand, which whenever they were effaced, reappeared the next day.
+Uberti. <i>Il Dittamondo</i>, l. iii. cap. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1226_1226" id="Footnote_1226_1226"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1226_1226"><span class="label">[1226]</span></a> <i>Pii II. Comment.</i> l. i. p. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1227_1227" id="Footnote_1227_1227"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1227_1227"><span class="label">[1227]</span></a> Benv. Cellini, l. i. cap. 65.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1228_1228" id="Footnote_1228_1228"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1228_1228"><span class="label">[1228]</span></a> <i>L’Italia Liberata da’ Goti</i>, canto xiv. It may be questioned whether
+Trissino himself believed in the possibility of his description, or whether
+he was not rather romancing. The same doubt is permissible in the case
+of his probable model, Lucan (book vi.), who represents the Thessalian
+witch conjuring up a corpse before Sextus Pompejus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1229_1229" id="Footnote_1229_1229"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1229_1229"><span class="label">[1229]</span></a> <i>Septimo Decretal</i>, lib. v. tit. xii. It begins: ‘Summis desiderantes
+affectibus’ &amp;c. I may here remark that a full consideration of the subject
+has convinced me that there are in this case no grounds for believing in
+a survival of pagan beliefs. To satisfy ourselves that the imagination of
+the mendicant friars is solely responsible for this delusion, we have only
+to study, in the Memoirs of Jacques du Clerc, the so-called trial of the
+Waldenses of Arras in the year 1459. A century’s prosecutions and persecutions
+brought the popular imagination into such a state that witchcraft
+was accepted as a matter of course and reproduced itself naturally.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1230_1230" id="Footnote_1230_1230"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1230_1230"><span class="label">[1230]</span></a> Of Alexander VI., Leo X., Hadrian VI.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1231_1231" id="Footnote_1231_1231"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1231_1231"><span class="label">[1231]</span></a> Proverbial as the country of witches, e.g. <i>Orlandino</i>, i. 12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1232_1232" id="Footnote_1232_1232"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1232_1232"><span class="label">[1232]</span></a> E.g. Bandello, iii. nov. 29, 52. Prato, <i>Arch. Stor.</i> iii. 409. Bursellis,
+<i>Ann. Bon.</i> in Murat. xxiii. col. 897, mentions the condemnation of a prior
+in 1468, who kept a ghostly brothel: ‘cives Bononienses coire faciebat
+cum dæmonibus in specie puellarum.’ He offered sacrifices to the
+dæmons. See for a parallel case, Procop. <i>Hist. Arcana</i>, c. 12, where a
+real brothel is frequented by a dæmon, who turns the other visitors out
+of doors. The Galateo (<a href="#page_116">p. 116</a>) confirms the existence of the belief in
+witches: ‘volare per longinquas regiones, choreas per paludes dicere et
+dæmonibus cnogredi, ingredi et egredi per clausa ostia et foramina.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1233_1233" id="Footnote_1233_1233"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1233_1233"><span class="label">[1233]</span></a> For the loathsome apparatus of the witches’ kitchens, see <i>Maccaroneide</i>,
+Phant. xvi. xxi., where the whole procedure is described.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1234_1234" id="Footnote_1234_1234"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1234_1234"><span class="label">[1234]</span></a> In the <i>Ragionamento del Zoppino</i>. He is of opinion that the
+courtesans learn their arts from certain Jewish women, who are in possession
+of ‘malie.’ The following passage is very remarkable. Bembo
+says in the life of Guidobaldo (<i>Opera</i>, i. 614): ‘Guid. constat sive corporis
+et naturae vitio, seu quod vulgo creditum est, actibus magicis ab Octaviano
+patruo propter regni cupiditatem impeditum, quarum omnino ille artium
+expeditissimus habebatur, nulla cum femina coire unquam in tota vita
+potuisse, nec unquam fuisse ad rem uxoriam idoneum.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1235_1235" id="Footnote_1235_1235"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1235_1235"><span class="label">[1235]</span></a> Varchi, <i>Stor. Fior.</i> ii. p. 153.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1236_1236" id="Footnote_1236_1236"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1236_1236"><span class="label">[1236]</span></a> Curious information is given by Landi, in the <i>Commentario</i>, fol. 36 a
+and 37 <i>a</i>, about two magicians, a Sicilian and a Jew; we read of magical
+mirrors, of a death’s-head speaking, and of birds stopped short in their
+flight.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1237_1237" id="Footnote_1237_1237"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1237_1237"><span class="label">[1237]</span></a> Stress is laid on this reservation. Corn. Agrippa, <i>De Occulta Philosophia</i>,
+cap. 39.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1238_1238" id="Footnote_1238_1238"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1238_1238"><span class="label">[1238]</span></a> <i>Septimo Decretal</i>, l. c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1239_1239" id="Footnote_1239_1239"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1239_1239"><span class="label">[1239]</span></a> <i>Zodiacus Vitae</i>, xv. 363-549, comp. x. 393 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1240_1240" id="Footnote_1240_1240"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1240_1240"><span class="label">[1240]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> ix. 291 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1241_1241" id="Footnote_1241_1241"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1241_1241"><span class="label">[1241]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> x. 770 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1242_1242" id="Footnote_1242_1242"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1242_1242"><span class="label">[1242]</span></a> The mythical type of the magician among the poets of the time
+was Malagigi. Speaking of him, Pulci (<i>Morgante</i>, canto xxiv. 106 sqq.)
+gives his theoretical view of the limits of dæmonic and magic influence.
+It is hard to say how far he was in earnest. Comp. canto xxi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1243_1243" id="Footnote_1243_1243"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1243_1243"><span class="label">[1243]</span></a> Polydorus Virgilius was an Italian by birth, but his work <i>De
+Prodigiis</i> treats chiefly of superstition in England, where his life was
+passed. Speaking of the prescience of the dæmons, he makes a curious
+reference to the sack of Rome in 1527.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1244_1244" id="Footnote_1244_1244"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1244_1244"><span class="label">[1244]</span></a> Yet murder is hardly ever the end, and never, perhaps, the means.
+A monster like Gilles de Retz (about 1440) who sacrificed more than 100
+children to the dæmons has scarcely a distant counterpart in Italy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1245_1245" id="Footnote_1245_1245"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1245_1245"><span class="label">[1245]</span></a> See the treatise of Roth ‘Ueber den Zauberer Virgilius’ in Pfeiffer’s
+<i>Germania</i>, iv., and Comparetti’s <i>Virgil in the Middle Ages</i>. That Virgil
+began to take the place of the older Telestæ may be explained partly by
+the fact that the frequent visits made to his grave even in the time of the
+Empire struck the popular imagination.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1246_1246" id="Footnote_1246_1246"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1246_1246"><span class="label">[1246]</span></a> Uberti, <i>Dittamondo</i>, 1. iii. cap. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1247_1247" id="Footnote_1247_1247"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1247_1247"><span class="label">[1247]</span></a> For what follows, see Gio. Villani, i. 42, 60, ii. 1, iii. v. 38, xi. He
+himself does not believe such godless superstitions. Comp. Dante, <i>Inferno</i>
+xiii. 146.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1248_1248" id="Footnote_1248_1248"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1248_1248"><span class="label">[1248]</span></a> According to a fragment given in Baluz. Miscell ix. 119, the Perugians
+had a quarrel in ancient times with the Ravennates, ‘et militem
+marmoreum qui juxta Ravennam se continue volvebat ad solem usurpaverunt
+et ad eorum civitatem virtuosissime transtulerunt.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1249_1249" id="Footnote_1249_1249"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1249_1249"><span class="label">[1249]</span></a> The local belief on the matter is given in <i>Annal. Forolivens</i>. Murat.
+xxii. col. 207, 238; more fully in Fil. Villani, <i>Vite</i>, p 33.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1250_1250" id="Footnote_1250_1250"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1250_1250"><span class="label">[1250]</span></a> Platina, <i>Vitae Pontiff.</i> p. 320: ‘Veteres potius hac in re quam Petrum,
+Anacletum, et Linum imitatus.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1251_1251" id="Footnote_1251_1251"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1251_1251"><span class="label">[1251]</span></a> Which it is easy to recognise e.g. in Sugerius, <i>De Consecratione
+Ecclesiae</i> (Duchesne, <i>Scriptores</i>, iv. 355) and in <i>Chron. Petershusanum</i>, i.
+13 and 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1252_1252" id="Footnote_1252_1252"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1252_1252"><span class="label">[1252]</span></a> Comp. the <i>Calandra</i> of Bibiena.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1253_1253" id="Footnote_1253_1253"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1253_1253"><span class="label">[1253]</span></a> Bandello, iii. nov. 52. Fr. Filelfo (<i>Epist. Venet.</i> lib. 34, fol. 240 sqq.)
+attacks nercromancy fiercely. He is tolerably free from superstition (<i>Sat.</i>
+iv. 4) but believes in the ‘mali effectus,’ of a comet (<i>Epist.</i> fol. 246 <i>b</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1254_1254" id="Footnote_1254_1254"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1254_1254"><span class="label">[1254]</span></a> Bandello, iii. 29. The magician exacts a promise of secrecy strengthened
+by solemn oaths, in this case by an oath at the high altar of S.
+Petronio at Bologna, at a time when no one else was in the church.
+There is a good deal of magic in the <i>Maccaroneide</i>, Phant. xviii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1255_1255" id="Footnote_1255_1255"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1255_1255"><span class="label">[1255]</span></a> Benv. Cellini, i. cap. 64.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1256_1256" id="Footnote_1256_1256"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1256_1256"><span class="label">[1256]</span></a> Vasari, viii. 143, <i>Vita di Andrea da Fiesole</i>. It was Silvio Cosini,
+who also ‘went after magical formulæ and other follies.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1257_1257" id="Footnote_1257_1257"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1257_1257"><span class="label">[1257]</span></a> Uberti, <i>Dittamondo</i>, iii. cap. 1. In the March of Ancona he visits
+Scariotto, the supposed birthplace of Judas, and observes: ‘I must not
+here pass over Mount Pilatus, with its lake, where throughout the summer
+the guards are changed regularly. For he who understands magic comes
+up hither to have his books consecrated, whereupon, as the people of the
+place say, a great storm arises.’ (The consecration of books, as has been
+remarked, p. 527, is a special ceremony, distinct from the rest.) In the
+sixteenth century the ascent of Pilatus near Luzern was forbidden ‘by lib
+und guot,’ as Diebold Schilling records. It was believed that a ghost
+lay in the lake on the mountain, which was the spirit of Pilate. When
+people ascended the mountain or threw anything into the lake, fearful
+storms sprang up.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1258_1258" id="Footnote_1258_1258"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1258_1258"><span class="label">[1258]</span></a> <i>De Obsedione Tiphernatium</i>, 1474 (Rer. Ital. Scrippt. ex Florent.
+codicibus, tom. ii.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1259_1259" id="Footnote_1259_1259"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1259_1259"><span class="label">[1259]</span></a> This superstition, which was widely spread among the soldiery (about
+1520), is ridiculed by Limerno Pitocco, in the <i>Orlandino</i>, v. 60.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1260_1260" id="Footnote_1260_1260"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1260_1260"><span class="label">[1260]</span></a> Paul. Jov. <i>Elog. Lit.</i> p. 106, sub voce ‘Cocles.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1261_1261" id="Footnote_1261_1261"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1261_1261"><span class="label">[1261]</span></a> It is the enthusiastic collector of portraits who is here speaking.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1262_1262" id="Footnote_1262_1262"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1262_1262"><span class="label">[1262]</span></a> From the stars, since Gauricus did not know physiognomy. For his
+own fate he had to refer to the prophecies of Cocle, since his father had
+omitted to draw his horoscope.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1263_1263" id="Footnote_1263_1263"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1263_1263"><span class="label">[1263]</span></a> Paul. Jov. l. c. p. 100 sqq. s. v. Tibertus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1264_1264" id="Footnote_1264_1264"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1264_1264"><span class="label">[1264]</span></a> The most essential facts as to these side-branches of divination, are
+given by Corn. Agrippa, <i>De Occulta Philosophia</i>, cap. 57.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1265_1265" id="Footnote_1265_1265"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1265_1265"><span class="label">[1265]</span></a> Libri, <i>Hist. des Sciences Mathém.</i> ii. 122.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1266_1266" id="Footnote_1266_1266"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1266_1266"><span class="label">[1266]</span></a> ‘Novi nihil narro, mos est publicus’ (<i>Remed. Utr. Fort.</i> p. 93), one of
+the lively passages of this book, written ‘ab irato.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1267_1267" id="Footnote_1267_1267"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1267_1267"><span class="label">[1267]</span></a> Chief passage in Trithem. <i>Ann. Hirsaug.</i> ii. 286 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1268_1268" id="Footnote_1268_1268"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1268_1268"><span class="label">[1268]</span></a> ‘Neque enim desunt,’ Paul. Jov. <i>Elog. Lit.</i> p. 150, s. v. ‘Pomp,
+Gauricus;’ comp. ibid. p. 130, s. v. Aurel. Augurellus, <i>Maccaroneide</i>.
+Phant. xii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1269_1269" id="Footnote_1269_1269"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1269_1269"><span class="label">[1269]</span></a> In writing a history of Italian unbelief it would be necessary to refer
+to the so-called Averrhoism, which was prevalent in Italy and especially
+in Venice, about the middle of the fourteenth century. It was opposed by
+Boccaccio and Petrarch in various letters, and by the latter in his work:
+<i>De Sui Ipsius et Aliorum Ignorantia</i>. Although Petrarch’s opposition
+may have been increased by misunderstanding and exaggeration, he was
+nevertheless fully convinced that the Averrhoists ridiculed and rejected
+the Christian religion.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1270_1270" id="Footnote_1270_1270"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1270_1270"><span class="label">[1270]</span></a> Ariosto, <i>Sonetto</i>, 34: ‘Non credere sopra il tetto.’ The poet uses the
+words of an official who had decided against him in a matter of property.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1271_1271" id="Footnote_1271_1271"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1271_1271"><span class="label">[1271]</span></a> We may here again refer to Gemisthos Plethon, whose disregard of
+Christianity had an important influence on the Italians, and particularly
+on the Florentines of that period.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1272_1272" id="Footnote_1272_1272"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1272_1272"><span class="label">[1272]</span></a> <i>Narrazione del Caso del Boscoli, Arch. Stor.</i> i. 273 sqq. The standing
+phrase was ‘non aver fede;’ comp. Vasari, vii. 122, <i>Vita di Piero di
+Cosimo</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1273_1273" id="Footnote_1273_1273"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1273_1273"><span class="label">[1273]</span></a> Jovian. Pontan. <i>Charon</i>, <i>Opp.</i> ii. 1128-1195.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1274_1274" id="Footnote_1274_1274"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1274_1274"><span class="label">[1274]</span></a> <i>Faustini Terdocei Triumphus Stultitiae</i>, l. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1275_1275" id="Footnote_1275_1275"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1275_1275"><span class="label">[1275]</span></a> E.g. Borbone Morosini about 1460; comp. Sansovino, <i>Venezia</i> l.
+xiii. p. 243. He wrote ‘de immortalite animæ ad mentem Aristotelis.’
+Pomponius Lætus, as a means of effecting his release from prison,
+pointed to the fact that he had written an epistle on the immortality of
+the soul. See the remarkable defence in Gregorovius, vii. 580 sqq. See
+on the other hand Pulci’s ridicule of this belief in a sonnet, quoted by
+Galeotti, <i>Arch. Stor. Ital.</i> n. s. ix. 49 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1276_1276" id="Footnote_1276_1276"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1276_1276"><span class="label">[1276]</span></a> <i>Vespas. Fiorent.</i> p. 260.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1277_1277" id="Footnote_1277_1277"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1277_1277"><span class="label">[1277]</span></a> <i>Orationes Philelphi</i>, fol. 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1278_1278" id="Footnote_1278_1278"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1278_1278"><span class="label">[1278]</span></a> <i>Septimo Decretal.</i> lib. v. tit. iii. cap. 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1279_1279" id="Footnote_1279_1279"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1279_1279"><span class="label">[1279]</span></a> Ariosto, <i>Orlando</i>, vii. 61. Ridiculed in <i>Orlandino</i>, iv. 67, 68. Cariteo,
+a member of the Neapolitan Academy of Pontanus, uses the idea of the
+pre-existence of the soul in order to glorify the House of Aragon. Roscoe,
+<i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi, ii. 288.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1280_1280" id="Footnote_1280_1280"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1280_1280"><span class="label">[1280]</span></a> Orelli, ad Cic. <i>De Republ.</i> l. vi. Comp. Lucan, <i>Pharsalia</i>, at the
+beginning.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1281_1281" id="Footnote_1281_1281"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1281_1281"><span class="label">[1281]</span></a> Petrarca, <i>Epp. Fam.</i> iv. 3, iv. 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1282_1282" id="Footnote_1282_1282"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1282_1282"><span class="label">[1282]</span></a> Fil. Villani, <i>Vite</i>, p. 15. This remarkable passage is as follows: ‘Che
+agli uomini fortissimi poichè hanno vinto le mostruose fatiche della
+terra, debitamente sieno date le stelle.’</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1283_1283" id="Footnote_1283_1283"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1283_1283"><span class="label">[1283]</span></a> <i>Inferno</i>, iv. 24 sqq. Comp. <i>Purgatorio</i>, vii. 28, xxii. 100.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1284_1284" id="Footnote_1284_1284"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1284_1284"><span class="label">[1284]</span></a> This pagan heaven is referred to in the epitaph on the artist Niccolò
+dell’Arca:
+</p>
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Nunc te Praxiteles, Phidias, Polycletus adora<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Miranturque tuas, o Nicolae, manus.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+<p class="nind">
+In Bursellis, <i>Ann. Bonon.</i> Murat. xxiii. col. 912.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1285_1285" id="Footnote_1285_1285"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1285_1285"><span class="label">[1285]</span></a> In his late work <i>Actius</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1286_1286" id="Footnote_1286_1286"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1286_1286"><span class="label">[1286]</span></a> Cardanus, <i>De Propria Vita</i>, cap. 13: ‘Non pœnitere ullius rei quam
+voluntarie effecerim, etiam quæ male cessisset;’ else I should be of all
+men the most miserable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1287_1287" id="Footnote_1287_1287"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1287_1287"><span class="label">[1287]</span></a> <i>Discorsi</i>, ii. cap. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1288_1288" id="Footnote_1288_1288"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1288_1288"><span class="label">[1288]</span></a> <i>Del Governo della Famiglia</i>, p. 114.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1289_1289" id="Footnote_1289_1289"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1289_1289"><span class="label">[1289]</span></a> Comp. the short ode of M. Antonio Flaminio in the <i>Coryciana</i> (see
+p. 269):
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Dii quibus tam Corycius venusta<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Signa, tam dives posuit sacellum,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ulla si vestros animos piorum<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Gratia tangit,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Vos jocos risusque senis faceti<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sospites servate diu; senectam<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vos date et semper viridem et Falerno<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Usque madentem.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">At simul longo satiatus ævo<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Liquerit terras, dapibus Deorum<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lætus intersit, potiore mutans<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Nectare Bacchum.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1290_1290" id="Footnote_1290_1290"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1290_1290"><span class="label">[1290]</span></a> Firenzuola, <i>Opere</i>, iv. p. 147 sqq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1291_1291" id="Footnote_1291_1291"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1291_1291"><span class="label">[1291]</span></a> Nic. Valori, <i>Vita di Lorenzo</i>, <i>passim</i>. For the advice to his son
+Cardinal Giovanni, see Fabroni, <i>Laurentius</i>, adnot. 178, and the appendices
+to Roscoe’s <i>Leo X.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1292_1292" id="Footnote_1292_1292"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1292_1292"><span class="label">[1292]</span></a> <i>Jo. Pici Vita</i>, auct. Jo. Franc. Pico. For his ‘Deprecatio ad Deum,’
+see <i>Deliciae Poetarum Italorum</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1293_1293" id="Footnote_1293_1293"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1293_1293"><span class="label">[1293]</span></a> <i>Orazione</i>, Roscoe, <i>Leone X.</i> ed. Bossi viii. 120 (Magno Dio per la
+cui costante legge); hymn (oda il sacro inno tutta la natura) in Fabroni,’
+<i>Laur.</i> adnot. 9; <i>L’Altercazione</i>, in the <i>Poesie di Lor. Magn.</i> i. 265. The
+other poems here named are quoted in the same collection.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1294_1294" id="Footnote_1294_1294"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1294_1294"><span class="label">[1294]</span></a> If Pulci in his <i>Morgante</i> is anywhere in earnest with religion, he is
+so in canto xvi. str. 6. This deistic utterance of the fair pagan Antea is
+perhaps the plainest expression of the mode of thought prevalent in
+Lorenzo’s circle, to which tone the words of the dæmon Astarotte (quoted
+above p. 494) form in a certain sense the complement.</p></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="transcrib" id="transcrib"></a></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><th align="center">Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:</th></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">belonged orginally to Florentine=> belonged originally to Florentine {pg 204}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">the Citadal of Milan=> the Citadel of Milan {pg 38}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">nature of Lndovico Moro=> nature of Ludovico Moro {pg 43}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">Die Kriegskunt als Kunst=> Die Kriegskunst als Kunst {pg 98 fn 210}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">to to take any interest=> to take any interest {pg 101}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">of its vasals, the legitimate=> of its vassals, the legitimate {pg 125}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">do so by imfamous deeds=> do so by infamous deeds {pg 152}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">forged chroncle of Ricardo Malespini=> forged chronicle of Ricardo Malespini {pg 182 fn 420}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">fight its way amongt he heathen=> fight its way among the heathen {pg 206}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">to the annoyance of to Petrarch=> to the annoyance of Petrarch {pg 208}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">was familar with the writings=> was familiar with the writings {pg 227}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">now altogether lose it supremacy=> now altogether lose its supremacy {pg 255 fn 594}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">The plays of Platus and Terence=> The plays of Plautus and Terence {pg 242}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">and minged with the general mourning=> and mingled with the general mourning {pg 296}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">compelled them for awhile to see=> compelled them for a while to see {pg 298}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">I go for awhile=> I go for a while {pg 336}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">Jo. Pici oratio de hominis dignatate=> Jo. Pici oratio de hominis dignitate {pg 354 fn 805}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">he gives us a humorout description=> he gives us a humorous description {pg 387}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">Cronaco di Perugia, Arch. Stor.=> Cronaca di Perugia, Arch. Stor. {pg 413 fn 934}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">eyes of Delio and Atellano=> eyes of Delio and Attelano {pg 444}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">Guilia Gonzaga, 385;=> Giulia Gonzaga, 385; {pg 552}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">futherers of, 217-229.=> furtherers of, 217-229. {pg 554}</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">Illigitimacy, indifference to, 21, 22.=> Illegitimacy, indifference to, 21, 22. {pg 554}</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in
+Italy, by Jacob Burckhardt
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+</pre>
+
+</body>
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