Italy 1530-1630

Eric Cochrane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317872085
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book covers one of the more obscure periods of Italian history. What we know of it is presented almost always pejoratively: an unrelieved tale of political absolution, rural refeudalisation, economic crisis, religious repression and cultural decline. But this picture is both incomplete and inaccurate, and in this important new survey Eric Cochrane has at last given the period its due.

Chapter One
Introduction

Of all the periods covered in the Longman series, the years 1530-1630 have long been one of the least known in Italian history among English and American historians. They have preferred to study the Middle Ages, a turbulent yet formative period; or the Renaissance, an age when Italy became the epicentre of cultural and artistic creativity. They have favoured the Risorgimento of the nineteenth century, which witnessed the florescence of the Liberal State; or the twentieth century, which saw the rise and fall of Fascism and the establishment of the Communist party as a major force in Italian politics. Decadence, the falling away or declining from a prior state of excellence in art and literature, is a term often applied to the period after the Renaissance. It comes as no surprise that the Oxford English Dictionary gives as an example of 'decadence' 'the period subsequent to Raphael and Michelangelo'. 'Baroque', referring to queerness, grotesqueness, over-ornateness, is another denigrating label routinely applied to the period. No wonder, then, that Anglophone historians have been chary of investing their time and energy in the period between the Renaissance and Enlightenment, whose chief attributes are considered to be political absolutism, re-feudalization of the countryside, economic crisis, religious repression, and cultural decline.

Intent on finding a scapegoat for the assorted ills that delayed Italy's transition into modernity, nationalist historians of the Risorgimento attributed decadence to foreign invasions and Spanish domination. What began as an explanation quickly solidified into a preconception, one that was buttressed by the authority of the great literary historian and critic Francesco De Sanctis (1817—1883) and of the philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce (1866—1952), who produced the first major edition of De Sanctis' writings. For De Sanctis, culture could only flourish within the confines of an independent and democratic national state, and so when Italy succumbed to Spanish domination in the early sixteenth century its vibrant cultural and moral life fell into decay. He characterized the Baroque as nothing more than a degeneration of the Renaissance.¹ Cochrane observed, 'the enormous prestige enjoyed by De Sanctis' work during the half-century after national unification and its canonization in the Gentile educational reform of the 1920s as the official textbook of Italian literature in the schools of Italy assured for the "decadence" thesis a prosperous future'.² From the mid-sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, Croce accordingly pronounced, Italy 'was bereft of all political life and national sentiment, freedom of thought was extinguished, culture impoverished, literature became mannered and ponderous, the figurative arts and architecture became extravagant and grotesque [imbarocchirono]'.³ In his masterful History of the Age of the Baroque in Italy, he also indicted the Counter-Reformation Church, to which the Italian spirit meekly submitted, for the loss of artistic and intellectual leadership and the moral and spiritual torpor of the age.⁴ If, on empirical grounds, the works of De Sanctis and Croce are now outdated, their influence on the framing of questions has continued to thrive: it can be detected both in studies that dismiss the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a dreary interlude in Italian history⁵ and in revisionist works like Cochrane's, which treat the period as an age of authentic cultural creativity and religious renewal, an age demanding our respect.

A militant revisionist, Eric Cochrane spent his scholarly career combating the 'decadence thesis', which he believed was at variance with what he had discovered about the period. In his first book, Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies, published in 1962, he revealed the role these learned institutions played in the transformation of Tuscany from a hodgepodge of medieval city-states into a unified regional state and suggested that, despite the importance of French models, the intellectual vitality of eighteenth-century Tuscany was crucially indebted to the legacy of the Renaissance and to the labours of native academicians. A number of the themes advanced in this path-breaking work were enlarged in Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527—1800, published in 1973- Styled by the author as a journey for readers seeking pleasure as well as provocation, his picaresque recreation of Florence under the Grand Duchy was also deadly serious. It was aimed at destroying the universal assumption that, with Florence's fall from republican grace in 1530 and the passing of the generation of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, the well of creativity that had sustained Florentine culture in the Renaissance suddenly dried up. It was equally aimed at demonstrating that, even after the city's fall from cultural preeminence, Florentines continued to make original contributions to the fields of music and natural sciences and to the science of civil administration under the benign tutelage of the grand dukes. The essential validity of his bold hypotheses has now been stunningly confirmed by R. Burr Litchfield's Emergence of a Bureaucracy. The Florentine Patricians 1530-1790, published in 1986.

In singling out Cochrane's contributions, we must not ignore those of other scholars, which have both challenged rigid preconceptions and stimulated debate. Cochrane's debt to Hubert Jedin, Giuseppe Alberigo, Paolo Prodi, Alberto Vecchi, H. Outram Evennett and Jean Delumeau, for insisting that the Counter-Reformation was a multi-dimensional event — in character, time, place, and goals — and also for showing that it unleashed intense activity in administrative and social reconstruction, is enormous. His debt to S. J. Freedberg, John Sherman, Eugenio Battisti, Georg Weise, Riccardo Scrivano and other scholars, for providing working definitions of Mannerism as an artistic and literary style, is obvious. His debt to Paola Barocci, Bernard Weinberg, Cesare Vasoli and Eugenio Garin, for illuminating the paths taken by Renaissance humanism in the sixteenth century; to musicologists like Edward Lowinsky and Howard Mayer Brown, for documenting the bold innovations of Italian musicians and composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and to economic historians like Ruggiero Romano, for pointing to the economic crisis of the 1620s, and Domenico Sella, for deflating the myth of the re-feudalization of Spanish Lombardy, are amply recognized in the notes of this volume.

Thoroughly acquainted with recent scholarship and steeped in the literary and visual sources of the period, Cochrane set forth to produce a work covering a wide diversity of specialized disciplines and geographical areas, but also a narrative structured by distinguishable phases. As a self-avowed historicist, he firmly believed, along with Croce, that without careful attendance to the problem of periodization 'history inevitably degenerates either into an "undifferentiated continuum" or into metahistory or else into chronicle'.⁶ Italy 1530—1630 begins with the ruin perpetrated by the foreign invasions and the Sack of Rome in 1527. Yet, these calamities coincided with the completion of High Renaissance masterpieces: Michelangelo's Moses (c. 1515) and his Medici Chapel (1519—33), Raphael's Vatican fresco cycle (1509—14), Lodovico Ariosto's epic romance Orlando furioso (1532) and Baldassare Castiglione's dialogue The Courtier (1528). Mannerism, a stylistic term that continues to provoke controversy, refers to the audacious experiments in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and prose of the next two generations. These experiments, Cochrane insists, must be understood as a further evolution, not a rejection, of High Renaissance models. The first half of the sixteenth century was, moreover, a period of profound religious piety, manifested in the mystic flights of Caterina Fieschi of Genoa, the pastoral activities of the Veronese bishop, Gian Matteo Giberti, and the pastoral activities, preaching, missions and retreats of the Society of Jesus founded by Ignatius Loyola (1540).

The pan-Italian or Imperial alliance forged by the Emperor Charles v ushered in a period of peace and stability, reaching a climax in the half-century after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis of 1559- Here was the beginning, not of the Counter-Reformation, but of a period of consolidation. Besides political reconstruction and national unity, the 'age of consolidation' experienced population increase and industrial and commercial recovery. Ecclesiastical reform, which penetrated parishes up and down the peninsula, was achieved through the successful implementation of the disciplinary decrees of the Council of Trent (1545—62) and the heroic leadership of bishops like Carlo Borromeo of Milan. Religious devotion was reinforced by a revised catechism and standard editions of the Roman Missal, the Breviary, the Vulgate Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers. The result was a wellinstructed and devout laity. By the end of this phase, however, experimentation in the realms of visual arts, architecture and literature was becoming an end in itself.

Destabilization was brought about by a series of shocks that struck Italy in the early seventeenth century. The War of Monferrato (1613-17) brought to a halt half a century of peaceful coexistence among the northern Italian states, while the collision between Pope Paul v and Venice over the Church's prerogatives squandered the renewed power and prestige of the papacy. Competition from Dutch and English merchants and the European recession of the 1620s combined with the epidemics that struck in 1630—33 and again in 1656—57 to produce social dislocations and economic stagnation that would last for another hundred years. Mannerism was assaulted by Caravaggio's dramatic naturalism, the Petrarchan universe by Alessandro Tassoni's and Giambattista Marino's iconoclasm and overweening conceits, and the Aristotelian—Ptolemaic system by Galileo Galilei's astronomical discoveries.

Cochrane's views on 'the Baroque' are contained in a published summary of what was to be the final section of this volume.⁷ This final phase, he wrote, commenced after 1630 and was marked by the downward trajectory of the economy and a failure of nerve. Politics became a stage set where decorumconscious elites employed technical virtuosity and thematic originality to divert attention from social and economic ills defying traditional remedies. Mannerist refinement and artifice gave way to the robust naturalism of Baroque art, which subverted the High Renaissance models on which it claimed to be grounded. Parochialism narrowed the imaginative horizons of historians, whose works began to resemble news bulletins (awisi). Meanwhile, the trial and condemnation of Galileo — who was compelled to abjure the Copernican system in 1633 — cast a pall over the work of his disciples, who feared to examine the theoretical consequences of their scientific experiments. The practical piety of the Tridentine reformers withered in a fetishistic economy of miracles, hagiolatry, indulgence-counting, rosary recitals and processions. Eventually, the Baroque would spark the neo-Petrarchan, rationalist reaction first represented by neo-cultist jurists in Tuscany and the literary critics and poets who founded the Roman academy Arcadia in 1690.

In his summary of the Baroque Cochrane scrupulously avoids use of the term 'decadence'. Still, the years between 1630 and 1690, as seen through his eyes, were a period of palpable decay. His esteem for Renaissance moral values and humanism and Tridentine religiosity may have prevented him from extending to Baroque culture his refined, yet capacious, historical empathy. It certainly prevented him from fully appreciating the monumental accomplishments of Francesco Borromini (1599—1667), Pietro da Cortona (1596—1669), and Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598—1680). Had he been able to complete the book, recent research as well as his own investigations of post-Galilean science, post-Tridentine theology, non-Florentine poetry and art, and Neapolitan metaphysics might have led him to modify the unsympathetic picture of the Baroque presented in 1983- Galileo's intellectual heirs, for instance, continued to build upon their master's discoveries at the universities of Pisa, Bologna, Padua and the Jesuit Collegio Romano in Rome. They revised and updated their ideas as news reached them of the advances of Descartes and Newton.⁸ Baroque aesthetic theory, it now appears, represented yet another development in the humanist and Aristotelian ideas of literary criticism.⁹ Traditional urban crafts and industries, admittedly, declined in the face of transalpine competition and protectionism. In contrast, agriculture exhibited resilience in northern Italy, while new industries and technologies were introduced in provincial areas.¹⁰ Current work on the links connecting these developments to the reforms of the eighteenth century should provide fresh perspectives on the native origins of the Italian Enlightenment and serve to demolish the equation between decadence and the Baroque.

The history of Italy in the age of the Baroque is like a giant puzzle. Finding all the pieces, let alone making them fit together into a coherent pattern, seems, even in the age of the computer, a quixotic goal. More than anyone else, Cochrane, who had never before attempted a work of synthesis, was acutely aware of the provisional nature of his theses and the criticisms they would surely invite from specialists. This is not meant as a disclaimer. Cochrane's intent was to stir debate about a recalcitrant past that defied cheap description and trivialization, to shake the reader's confidence in the inevitability of the present by demonstrating the contingent nature of ideas and institutions, and, finally, to draw attention to the interdependence of past and present, a knowledge of which, he always insisted, was essential in order to bring about constructive change in the future.

Julius Kirshner

Notes and References

1. Francisco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Benedetto Croce, Bari 1939, 2, p. 143. For an astute appraisal of De Sanctis' method, see Gennaro Savarese, 'De Sanctis e i problemi dell'umanesimo', in Carlo Muscetta (ed.), Francesco De Sanctis nella storia e nella cultura, Rome and Bari 1984, pp. 279—300.

2. Eric Cochrane, 'The Renaissance academies in their Italian and European setting', in The Fairest Flower: The Emergence of Linguistic National Consciousness in Renaissance Europe, Florence 1985, p. 22.

3. Benedetto Croce, La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la rinascenza (4th edn), Bari 1949, p. 257.

4. Benedetto Croce, Storia della età barocca in Italia, Bari 1929, pp. 10, 16, 471 ff. For the intellectual background of this work, see Federico Chabod, 'Croce historien', in his De Machiavel à Benedetto Croce, Geneva 1970, pp. 179—230.

5. For example, Guido Quazza, La decadenza italiana nella storia europea. Saggi sul Sei-Settec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Editorial Note
• Abbreviations
• List of Plates
• Map
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Prologue: The Sack of Rome
• Chapter Three Monuments of the High Renaissance
• Chapter Four A New Political Order
• Chapter Five Institutions of Culture
• Chapter Six Mannerism
• Chapter Seven Tridentine Reform
• Chapter Eight Consolidation
• Chapter Nine Destabilization
• Appendix: Tables of Succession
• Index