The Renaissance Wars in Italy

Jean de Sismondi

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781537819037
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

When Innocent III. died, vast sums began to pour into the Roman banks. It was evident that the Papacy was for sale to the highest bidder, and that the bidding would run high. One of the competitors, Roderigo Borgia, the nephew of Calixtus III., was a man of great wealth. He expended it lavishly, and by this and by the unsparing but judicious placing of big promises, he got the requisite majority of votes. It is said that only five votes were not for sale. Roderigo was then a hale, sanguine man of sixty-one years, of no very large brain, but of a good deal of driving power. He was half intoxicated with joy at his success. "I am Pope, Pontiff, Vicar of Christ!" he shouted, with the delight of a successful schoolboy at a game. Roderigo was the adoring father of a fair-sized family, chiefly by a lady to whom he gave a variety of husbands and to her husband's place and emolument; but this hardly deserves notice: his predecessor had openly avowed himself as the proud head of a family of sixteen well-favored youths and maidens, all of his own begetting, and the new Pope does not appear to have laid claim to so |many. He was, indeed, rather a welcome successor to the Papal chair, for he had had considerable discipline and experience in affairs, was a trained jurisconsult of Bologna, and esteemed to be a good companion and full of bonhomie. For Alexander was one of those essentially selfish men who gain a good name among their fellows by a bluff manner and the absence of any hypocrisy concerning those little frailties to which most men are inclined, and which they freely excuse in one another. Such petits defauts were almost commendable in a man who had become an Italian Prince and the official head of a Church that was now almost purely official. They did not detract from the qualifications of the Vicar of Christ.

LIFE, LITERATURE, AND ART FROM THE CLOSE OF THE FOURTEENTH TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

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LIFE

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THE OUTWARD LIFE OF THE Italian people in the fifteenth century exhibited a far greater degree of refinement than that of their contemporaries; some measure of cleanliness began to return to the world, and cities that vied with ancient Athens in the splendour of their buildings were paved. Not all the sumptuary laws could stem the tide of luxury in living and in dress; owing to the influence of Courts, society became splendid and life magnificent; while the moral notions of the age fell into a tumultuous and transitional condition; for causes already mentioned, the struggle of men to secure and maintain positions of command, and the increase of individualism, continued to weaken the compelling force of the family and even of the trade association, while the Great Schism and the secularization of the Papacy weakened the authority of religion.

The series of great plagues that continued during the century had much to do with the dissolution of morals; it subverted the social order, and rendered men more careless and bent on snatching at the pleasures of the moment. Religion became a mere formal habit, and the desires of men turned more than ever to the joy of life. The worst moral centres were the small despotisms, where the struggle for existence was keenest. A Princess of the great House of Este was beheaded for committing adultery with her stepson; a Prince poisoned his wife because he discovered that she was plotting to poison him,· bastards were perpetually conspiring against their legitimate brothers; Sigismond Malatesta of Rimini (1417-1468) had many mistresses who presented him with various children at the same time, of whom he was the reputed father; he gave free vent to the fiercest and most degraded passions; he is said to have wreaked his lust on the corpse of a married German lady who courted death to escape him; he poisoned his second wife, and attempted a criminal offence on his own son; yet, from youth to death, he remained the devoted lover of the famous Isotta; she so inspired him that he became a poet, and, finally, he made her his wife; after her death he erected what is, perhaps, the purest gem of the Renaissance architecture, the church of St. Francis at Rimini, to her memory, and paid her divine honours. This monster, in whom the highest and most bestial of human desires were strangely commingled, had a genuine love of art, and attracted poets and artists to his little Court; a daring soldier and an astute ruler, he was a passionate admirer of classical writers; he is but one example among a hundred rulers of similar dissolute ferocity, practical ability, artistic appreciation, and love for letters. Quite of another type was Federigo da Montefeltro, the lord of Urbino from 1442 to 1482. A successful mercenary Captain, he made Urbino the centre of cultivated society, and the Athens of his time; and, although his means were not great, he lavished them on the poet, the artist, and the scholar, while he reared a palace that was a paradise of rare device and perfect art. His Court was a school of military education to which Princes sent their sons; his library was filled with scholars; artists preferred his patronage to that of far richer rulers; and he went about unarmed, receiving the blessing of his peasants, for each of whom he had some kindly word. Few rulers were so urbane as Frederick; but all surrounded themselves with clever people, whatever their origin might be. Men of force of character and high intelligence alone had any chance of success: even in the republics men of wealth had to choose between being hammer and anvil; want of scruple was necessary to success, as well as an astuteness that could dominate the State under the forms of freedom. There were few States that were not well administered from motives of self-preservation, though public offices were sold. The revenue of the Prince was immense. At the close of the previous century Gian Galeazzo Visconti received 1,200,000 florins in regular taxes, and subsidies brought his income up to 2,000,000: he expended 300,000 florins in dykes to render Mantua and Padua defenceless, and he meditated going to the further expense of diverting the Brenta, so as to drain the Venetian lagoons, with the object of reducing Venice. Though the States were well governed, their rulers almost invariably seized or maintained power by crime. Studying the records of Courts is as revolting as reading the Newgate Calendar: there is an embarras de richesse in these archives of crime, from which a few specimens of no marked atrocity may be given as illustrations. In 1434 Bernardo Varano, of Comarino, put his two brothers to death, in order that his sons might acquire their uncles’ property (Chron. Eugubinium). The funeral oration of Francesco Sforza informs us that an aunt poisoned his first wife, the wealthy Duchess of Montralto, and her little daughter, in order to seize the inheritance. Cesare Borgia, who governed Romagna with marked ability, and who gained the devotion of his soldiers, according to the Venetian Ambassador, made all Rome tremble before him; he is credited with having murdered his elder brother, the Duke of Gandia, and of having got rid of everybody that stood in his way, until he found himself the sole support and reliance of his father, Pope Alexander VI., who “ loved and hugely feared him.” Then with the perfidy and invention of a past master in the art, he subdued the fierce, turbulent Romagnans, of whom Cardinal Juan Borgia had said that “ the devils cannot be turned out by holy water.” Profligate alike in public and private life, these men rarely made a mistake in the calculations of statecraft and policy: under the conditions of life in the higher orders of society there was atrophy of the moral sense and an undue development of the intellectual faculties. Even more remarkable than man’s power of associating ideas is his faculty of dissociating them: while the brains of the fifteenth century fermented with ideas, the various mental functions pursued their separate and independent courses. The merchants of the republics and the satellites of the Court were equally subjected to conditions that favoured intellectual development; and not merely did sterling originality of every kind avail in the struggle for power which was often necessitated in the struggle for existence, but it began to be valued for its own sake. Where there were no despots, or where real despotism was disguised by republican forms, the same contradictions are everywhere to be found. Even at the beginning of the next century, in Perugia, where an emotional word could convert the blackest sinner into an emotional saint, a cruel vendetta was kept up between the rival families of Oddi and Baglioni at the very time when Perugino was painting his pictures that overflow with sentiment and serenity, and the young Raphael was nursing the central peace and gentle wonder that peeps from the eyes of his Madonnas, his bambini, and his skies. While the Houses of Perugia are waging fiercest war and meditating the blackest plots, the leaders seek the society of a saintly nun and listen, moved, to her words of peaceful counsel, and then the exiled Oddi ravage the valleys of soft, billowy Umbria, so that they are inhabited by stags and wolves alone, and the peasants turn to a bandit’s life for sustenance. Together with superb heroism in street-fights there are surprises by night; spectators, including foreign students, gather round a dead body, and compare the grace and proportions of the slain youth to those of a Roman hero; the mother of a dying man appears followed by sympathetic eyes, and beseeches her son to pardon his murderer; the desecrated cathedral is washed with wine and reconsecrated, and then the whole story of crime and bloodshed is recommenced. In the South, Ferrante of Naples, a master of craft and courage, though he governed in a manner that was economically ruinous, would invite his enemies to dinner, caress them, and then send them to his prisons to die slowly and miserably: he was wont to regale his sense of power by viewing his museum of their embalmed bodies (P. Jovius Hist., i.).

The despots were careful to marry in such a way as to increase their power, and they set the example of entire disregard of the obligations of wedded life. Pius II. tells us that when he rode to Mantua, the reigning Duke, who was a bastard, met him accompanied by seven other bastards. The sober bed of loveless marriage was seldom blessed with children of sufficient force of character to uphold the House; sons born out of wedlock, if they had sufficient boldness and ability, secured the family confidence; if personal courage were wanting, intellectual resource had to supply its place. Filippo Maria Visconti, who could not endure death to be mentioned, had wonderful penetration into character; to couple an honest man with a knave was his favourite device; he perfected a system of espionage, and was so intellectual, and even imaginative, that he employed his leisure in studying the classics and reading the chivalrous romances of France.

Efficiency was the sole passport to society and the sole standard employed to measure the man. The great trading republics had asserted the principle that not hawking, nor hunting, nor owning landed property was the occupation of a gentleman, nor did his lineage constitute him: what a man was, made his worth, though birth and wealth were, of course, valuable adjuncts to that perfection of life towards which everyone aspired. The mercantile republics had constituted an industrial aristocracy at a time when the barbarian prejudices that linger to-day were most pronounced in other countries, and a dying Florentine merchant prayed the State to fine his sons if they did not follow some useful employment. All people of mark associated together on equal terms; the greatest scholars and wisest men were sought for to occupy secretaryships of State, or to serve as Ambassadors. In the early part of the century the learned Poggio, in his dialogue on nobility, declares that personal merit alone confers it, and despises the claim of the man who grounds it on the fact that his ancestors led the lives of brigands; he laughs at a life devoted to field-sports, which is, he says, the life of a brute, and the ideals of chivalry seem to him to be intrinsically vulgar and ignoble. A territorial nobility did, indeed, exist in North Italy; in the kingdom of Naples the foreign influence prevailed, the aristocracy was idle, and lived on the profits of their estates; but in Central Italy the feudal ideal, which still prevails in Germany and in this country, had died out. In Genoa nobles and new men were alike merchants and sailors,-though caste prejudices obtained, as they did in Venice also. But, in the more cultivated Courts, personal merit was the chief passport to the best society, which was entirely constituted of men and women of ability, and, early in the next century, Baldessare Castiglione wrote his “Courtier,” which Italians called “The Golden Book”; it gives a delightful picture of the Court of Guidobaldo da Montrefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and there, from the mouths of able, polished men and clever, gracious women, Castiglione elaborates, in a subtle and delicate discussion, that ideal of the true gentleman which has influenced the world for four centuries.

Great attention was paid to the education of youth. Guarino Veronese, who had studied Greek at Constantinople, returned home with a store of precious manuscripts, and was called to the Court of Ferrara. A hard worker, an excellent father, of blameless life, he kept his house full of pupils, of whom thirty became famous for their learning, and, owing to his influence, Ferrara became a centre for higher culture, and his pupils of the great House of Este famous for their support of letters. Another schoolmaster, Vittorino da Feltre, attained such a command over his passions that he remained chaste throughout his life, which he devoted to study and the education of youth. No gifted youth, however poor, was refused admission to his home; they sat side by side with Princes, and were educated “ for the love of God.” His system combined noble discipline of the body with noble cultivation of the mind; he took his pupils away with him to his country villa; and, not merely did parents and pupils alike respect him, but Mantua, where he resided, was visited for the sole sake of seeing him. The education of lads of ability as well as the sons of the rich and powerful was entirely in the hands of zealous and capable scholars, who regarded the classics as an avenue to self-knowledge, and honestly tried to train the pupils into perfect manhood.

Girls were intellectually disciplined as if sex made little difference, for classical learning was too precious for such an accident to disfranchise; hence individuality of character marks the educated woman of the Renaissance no less than the man. Women became no less scholarly and cultured than men; Lucrezia Borgia had her own library, and even the courtesan was often an accomplished poetess or musician, and a woman of culture. Many women knew how to seize and hold the opportunities that the menacing mutations of the time gave, and women of beauty, intelligence, and instruction were sung by the poets, whether they were mistresses or wives. The women of the period combined the wiles and attractions of Aphrodite with the wisdom and attainments of Athene; they are typified in the enigmatic eyes and impenetrable smile of that subtlest of all delineations of character, the Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci.

History shows us that no institution is so variable and adaptable as that of sex relationship; the freeing of the individual led to strange results in this regard. The emancipated woman of the Renaissance was no less intellectually evolved, no more purged of the deeper, darker passions, and as little visited by moral scruples as the emancipated man of that period. The women of a family often evinced no less personal courage and force of character than their brothers. Caterina Sforza, a natural daughter of Francesco, Duke of Milan, and widow of Girolamo Riario, son or nephew of Pope Sixtus IV., defended the citadel of Forli against an insurrection. Her husband had been murdered, and the populace dragged the dead body through the streets of the town. Caterina herself fell into the power of the mob; she asked to be allowed to visit the commander of the citadel in order to persuade him to bow to the inevitable, and yield the fortress. She left her children with the people as hostages, but directly she was safe inside the citadel, which had been held by a man nearly as resolute as herself, she ordered the mob to be fired upon. They threatened death to her children. “ If you kill them,” replied the descendant of the doughty Romagnan peasant, “ I still have a son at Imola, I bear another beneath my girdle, and they shall be their brothers’ avengers.” Other authorities quote a reply equally courageous, but less modest: they report her to have said: “ I am young enough to bear more.”

On the other hand, the Roman nobles, who kept bravi, secluded their women; while at the Court of Lodovico the Moor, a Court that shone like a star for the personal ability of its men and the beauty and intelligence of its women, there was such concurrent degradation of sex-relations that it was common for the husband to sell his wife’s honour; the brother his sister’s; the father his daughter’s; assassination was much dreaded, and Lodovico himself would not permit strangers to approach him nearer than an appointed bar (Corio, fol. 448).

Venice produced many women scholars; but neither Venetian nor other Italian women appear to have entered the bottega and attained proficiency in the fine arts, probably because the emancipation movement had not reached the lowly class from which artists were recruited. But Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547), the daughter of the high constable of Naples, and a grand-daughter of the good Duke Frederick of Urbino, poured forth her passionate soul in delicate prose and sympathetic verse: there is little originality, however, in her writings, and she is chiefly known to us for the pure chivalrous friendship she established with Michelangelo and the noble verse with which that friendship inspired him. But it was not in such high intercourse only that the inequalities of sex were ignored. The same note of equal companionship that distinguished the Court, where patrons, men of letters, and artists met on a common platform, characterized ordinary social intercourse between man and woman. The lady who knew the classics talked freely and with open mind on all kinds of subjects with her male acquaintance. Modern society restricts itself to the delicate innuendo : conversation during the Renaissance was naked, unconscious, and unashamed; the world was regarded as a realm of absorbing interest, and what interested might be discussed without scruple; there was no restraining influence of religious conviction or social code, and each individual not merely did what he desired to do, but spoke about his deeds unashamedly, unless, as was not infrequent, he concealed his thoughts in the prosecution of some design. Even the peasants were not merely better off, but more intelligent and well-informed than those of other countries. It has been pointed out by more than one author that there is evidence of the continued existence of thoroughly wholesome domestic life during the periods of greatest corruption. Moreover, a time where we find women leading armies and, clad in armour, following their candottiere lovers, allowed a freedom to the spirit wherein noble natures could expand into high manifestation. What the age suffered from was the want of a synthesis. The Church had lost its force; the form was retained, but the Papacy, now a temporal princedom, was horribly corrupt, and, except from a few, the Christian spirit had departed; the old bonds of brotherhood such as the gens, the trade associations, were loosened; there was no real spirit of nationality; and party feuds and proscription had injured, where it had not destroyed, local patriotism; men’s minds were directed to the old world, and through it they had come to a new inheritance; they were lords of themselves, with no tradition, authority, or inward or outward conviction to serve as a guide or standard of conduct; men, then, had no conception of how vice becomes registered in the delicate cells of the nervous system, of how calm, unperturbed Nature inscribes man’s smallest defection in the pitiless book of doom; men had neither the sense of social nor transcendental obligation; there was no true perception of the nature and claims of society; hardly any “ home sickness “ of the soul for what lies beyond the visible world of sense was yet awakened in the passionate perfervid Italian nature, though it had awakened to the beauty of sense and the pride of life. If there was any vital religion at all, it was the sense of beauty. Intellectually active as men were in so many departments, there was no very serious attempt to synthesize experience. Luini, who certainly painted in Milan about the year a.d. 1500, and whose pictures are obviously the product of sincerity and devotion, painted a picture of St. Catherine, now in the Besozzi Chapel; it is the portrait of a woman who, according to Bandello, was “ over free and little honest.” This woman tried to persuade one lover to kill another, and, on his refusal, returned to the man she had discarded and tried to get him to avenge her by slaying the rival she had enticed to murder him. Unable to succeed with either lover, she allured a silly Sicilian youth into her toils, and so worked on him that he murdered both. The crime was detected, and the woman, though of high rank, was beheaded; but she was beautiful, and no one was in the least shocked at the criminal being portrayed as a saint. The human mind is apt to resemble a series of water-tight compartments, a highly convenient arrangement; there are comparatively few people in whom intellection is a ferment capable of leavening the whole lump; and, in an age of universal inquiry without any cementing synthesis, all kinds of strange, inconsistent manifestations of the human spirit co-existed; the spiritual wolf lay down with the spiritual lamb, the leopard with the kid. Examples such as that of Luini might be furnished almost without end.

The many-sidedness of the men of the age strikes the modern world of specialization with astonishment. Every artist was goldsmith, sculptor, painter, and often teacher and architect. Many of the men of the Renaissance seem to have been endowed with universal genius: it was not that they were great in one thing and knew something about others, but they were really great in many departments. In the thirteenth century Dante was encyclopaedic; his friend Giotto, the shepherd lad, was equally great as sculptor, painter, and architect. In the fifteenth century it is scarcely possible to name a single man of distinction who did not excel in more than one department of human activity. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the finest painter of his generation, and one of the greatest of all time: he was also a sculptor, musician, architect, and a penetra...