Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism

John M. McManamon, S.J., John M. McManamon S.J.

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807865668, 9780807817834
• eBook ISBN: 9781469639673
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

By studying the funeral orations of Renaissance Italy, McManamon analyzes Italian humanism as a characteristic phase in Western rhetorical culture. By examining hundreds of funeral speeches, he provides a valuable overview of major civic issues and humanistic themes, adding significant new material to the history of rhetoric. When Italian humanists spoke at funerals, they took this unique opportunity to press for their reformist goals.

Originally published in 1989.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

CHAPTER ONE

THE RHETORICAL SITUATION

This book builds upon a scholarly consensus and examines Italian humanism through new sources in a different context. Those who study humanism generally agree with Paul Oskar Kristeller in seeing the movement as a characteristic phase in the rhetorical tradition of Western culture.¹ Rhetoric, as conceptualized by the ancient Greeks, intended to teach students how to invent, organize, stylistically embellish, and deliver a speech. As Cicero stated in the Orator (19.61), the essence of oratory lies in artful speaking. Cicero argued that the Greek word rhetor should be rendered in Latin by eloquens. Rhetoric primarily means speechmaking.²

Historians of humanism have focused upon its literary and scholarly concerns and only recently have begun to treat those more directly rhetorical. When discussing Renaissance eloquence, moreover, scholars have directed their energy to technical aspects like the theory and teaching of rhetoric. Little attention has been paid to its practice. Historians have generally ignored or despised the primary products of Renaissance eloquence, the orations composed for occasions like weddings, funerals, the opening of the academic year, and the arrival of political and judicial officials or their departure after a period of service.³

This study examines one popular species of oration from the Italian Renaissance: Latin funeral orations delivered in the geographical region now known as Italy, between the time of Petrarch’s death in 1374 and the death of Pope Clement VII in 1534. Any chronological definition of the Renaissance is arbitrary. These limits were chosen for the following reasons.

Petrarch died in 1374 at Arquà near Padua. Any study of humanism appropriately begins with Petrarch. A study of funeral oratory confirms the rule in reverse fashion. Petrarch delivered a funeral sermon for Archbishop Giovanni Visconti of Milan in 1354 and was eulogized after his death by a member of his circle, Bonaventura Badoer. Both of these funeral sermons aid our understanding of the evolution of early humanism. They are typically scholastic, not humanist products. Clement VII died in 1534, when new issues of reform and counter-reform had begun to cloud the cultural horizon. The editors of the Annales ecclesiastici incorporated into their history a funeral oration written for Cardinal Cajetan in 1534 because of its anti-Lutheran polemics.⁴ An era of intellectual tolerance had drawn to a close.

Funeral oratory comprises a species within the genre of epideictic rhetoric. Italian humanists overwhelmingly pursued the eloquence of praise and censure and used that genre in typical fashion to deepen values or to change attitudes. It is a rhetoric prone to portray things as they should be.⁵ One of the first humanists to practice classicizing oratory defined a proper funeral speech. In 1426 Poggio Bracciolini rebuked Francesco da Vellate for his incompetence in writing a funeral oration on Jean de Broniac, the papal vice-chancellor. Poggio’s criticisms betray his conception of the “ideal funeral oration.”⁶

In his attack on Francesco, Poggio upheld two traditional virtues of style. First, any funeral oration should be delivered in correct Latin, but Francesco did not speak or write Latin correctly. Secondly, his grammatical errors and frequent use of circumlocutions and superlatives obfuscated the sense of his discourse. Poggio thus advocated clarity in public speaking. Further, with regard to invention, Poggio derided Francesco for failing to adduce historical deeds as proof for the virtues of de Broniac: he had merely listed virtues without substantiating them. Worse yet, Francesco admitted in a letter to Poggio that he had affirmed things that were less than true and amplified others on the basis of hearsay. Poggio cited Cicero (De or. 2.85.345) and Quintilian (3.7.4) to defend his position that all authorities on rhetoric have taught that an orator who praises must prove his assertions by referring to historical deeds. An epideictic orator should proceed as Cicero had in the De lege Manilla, when he described actions that Pompey had performed in order to demonstrate his virtues.

Humanists felt that panegyrists should amplify historical deeds in order to reaffirm values or to convince the audience of their necessity. Orators shirked their duty when they lied or expatiated on deeds unfamiliar to them. The orations supplied norms for future conduct and advocated ideals in an important social moment. Death easily suggested an examination of values, and Renaissance Italians developed a variety of commemorative exercises.⁷ Funeral eulogies were unique among those forms because they were delivered publicly.

Who constituted a humanist’s public? The question is difficult to answer. Often we have only a humanist’s own assessment of his success in persuading those present. State funerals attracted large audiences throughout the peninsula. They were an elaborate and solemn public ritual. Would those huge crowds understand a eulogy delivered in classicizing Latin? In Leonardo Bruni’s estimation, the question required a double response. One had to distinguish the majority of the audience from the ruling class. The illiterate masses would comprehend the ceremony and its oration much as they understood the Latin spoken during the Mass. Governors would bring a more refined comprehension to the rite. Bruni admitted that he addressed his message primarily to civic authorities. He felt confident that humanist orators successfully communicated their message because they put into words what people saw.⁸

The various elements in the speech act—speaker, speech, audience, occasion—guide the investigation of Italian humanism that follows. Though state funerals attracted large crowds, they were primarily an exercise among society’s elite. Humanists principally directed their funeral eulogies to the rulers, bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, and merchants of their day—and to fellow humanists as well. They focused their attention on those who wielded power in society. Their speeches sought to propagate or reinforce values by presenting historical deeds in vivid terms. They felt that they could convince people by making them see those values portrayed in real life.

Only an orator trained in classical rhetoric could craft such a speech. If humanists persuaded their audiences, they would prove the value of a humanist education. That education fostered concern for the common good. In their public activities, humanists revealed themselves as idealists and as social reformers whose program fundamentally derived from the Roman notion of ethos as a mode of persuasion. Like the Romans, they insisted that the orator combine virtues with gifts of speech (Quintilian 1.Pr.9).

This book seeks to filter out ideals that were shared by humanists in various Italian states. It would be impossible here to supply a detailed analysis of the more than five hundred speeches examined, and their individual contexts. The appendix is offered to assist future scholars who may wish to analyze a particular speech more closely. Here, however, the ideals are presented synthetically. They should enrich the spirit of any commonwealth no matter what its constitutional form. We shall see the public world of the humanists as they desired it to be.

CHAPTER TWO

A HUMANIST CONVICTION

“Virtue Increases When Praised”

“Farewell, my dog, and may you gain the immortality to which your virtue aspires!”¹ With this dramatic apostrophe Leon Battista Alberti concluded a witty eulogy written on a hot summer’s night in the mid-Quattrocento to honor his canine companion. Data supplied in the speech lead one to infer that Alberti’s dog was prodigious and shared many interests with distinguished persons of his era. Descended from a long line of noble, courageous, and loyal animals, the wily pet renounced a career in combat at a young age in order to devote himself to the liberal arts. Alberti marveled at his friend’s speed in mastering literary studies. His dog learned Greek, Latin, and Tuscan in less than three years. Moreover, since his companion spurned wealth in favor of learning and lived a life of self-control, to which a single suit of clothing and no shoes attested, Alberti could adduce him as an exemplar of “moral living.”²

Alberti’s satiric purpose is apparent and effective. That he could present a parody of humanist funeral oratory in the middle of the Quattrocento demonstrates how well entrenched that species had become. Funeral orations provided worthy grist for his satirizing mill.³ Renaissance humanists had fastened on funeral oratory in part because it had been developed and practiced by their classical forebears. In the exordium of his eulogy, Alberti himself alluded to classical precedents, stressing that the Athenians had invented panegyric and that the Romans had extended the practice beyond public heroes to private individuals and family members. He therefore pressed on to commend his dog.⁴ Certainly Italian humanists attempted to imitate ancient practice by delivering funeral eulogies. But in the half-century between the emergence of classicizing funeral oratory in Renaissance Italy and the composition of Alberti’s satire, a creative transformation had occurred.

One can only appreciate the creative contribution of the humanists against the background of the history of the funeral eulogy as a species of epideictic oration. That history, however, defies simple summation for several reasons. The epitaphios logos first appeared, in all likelihood, at Athens in the fifth century B.C. and consisted of a collective commemoration of all those who had died in the military campaigns of the previous year. The tradition of commemorative speeches continued into the Hellenistic period.⁵ Funeral orators in ancient Greece primarily eulogized war casualties and only rarely and uncharacteristically restricted their focus to important individuals. Scholars therefore tend to agree that the laudatio funebris for an individual constitutes an autochthonous Roman oratorical species, perhaps the only major type of epideictic oratory not borrowed from the Greeks.⁶

Whereas the Greek epitaphios logos was much more concerned with celebrating the state and its ideology, the Roman laudatio funebris focused on the historical person and his or her virtuous actions. Originally a private practice whereby the orator was frequently the deceased’s closest relative, the laudatio became part of a public ceremony late in the Republican period. The species served the purposes of the ruling elite in Rome, for eulogies generally underlined the nobility and prowess of the governing aristocracy.

Though a Roman creation, the funeral laudatio received scant or no attention whatsoever in the Latin technical treatises on rhetoric. The explanation is simple. The Greek treatises, on which the Roman works were modeled, completely ignored such a form. Cicero himself even disparaged the oratorical possibilities of the funeral oration, observing that a funeral speech “is by no means a suitable occasion for parading one’s distinction in rhetoric” (De or. 2.84.341).⁷

Because the funeral oration received no explicit treatment in Roman technical treatises, orators had two ways to learn to deliver such a speech. They could follow the general prescriptions for an encomium in the compositional exercises known as progymnasmata, taught in the grammatical schools and repeated in almost identical terms in rhetorical treatises like the Rhetorica ad Herennium (3.6.10–8.15).⁸ Or they could learn from the living tradition, imitating the methods and style of other orators accomplished in actual delivery.

Explicit instructions for the composition of a funeral oration only appeared for the first time in Menander Rhetor’s Peri epideiktik

n (late third century).⁹ By that time, the Roman practice of celebrating the virtuous deeds of an individual had made its influence felt on Greek orators. Sophists of the Roman imperial period like Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, and Libanius wrote funeral encomia on individual persons.¹⁰ Moreover, leaders of the Christian community, often trained by such sophists, adopted the practice and adapted it to the young community’s pastoral needs. In fact, Gregory of Nazianzus’ funeral oration for his brother Basil constitutes one of the finest examples of the species that survives from antiquity.¹¹

By the fourth or fifth century, panegyrics of living persons had largely supplanted funeral oratory in the Latin West. The tradition of funeral eulogies virtually ceased with the gradual collapse of Roman rule and its replacement by Germanic kingdoms.¹² The Byzantine rhetorical tradition, not the Western one, preserved and developed the legacy of the Second Sophistic. Epideictic oratory dominated rhetorical training and practice throughout the history of the Eastern Empire.¹³ Rhetoric in the medieval West, in contrast, focused on the technical side of the classical heritage and its application to literary forms like letter-writing (dictamen) and poetry (ars poetriae).¹⁴ Preaching was the single major form of oral discourse practiced continuously in the medieval West. From the thirteenth century on, sermons fell under the sway of scholasticism and its logical propensities. Preaching manuals known as the artes praedicandi prescribed the use of scholastic logic in inventing sermons.¹⁵

The results of these developments are critical for an appreciation of the Renaissance achievement. The living tradition of funeral oratory had vanished in the West. In addition, no examples of funeral orations were preserved from ancient Rome.¹⁶ Funeral oratory did continue to be popular and to be practiced in the Byzantine East. These three factors all played an important role in the humanist revival of classicizing panegyric during the Renaissance.

When communes were established in many cities of central and northern Italy from the eleventh century on, a civic context again existed in which certain types of classical ora...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One: The Rhetorical Situation
• Chapter Two: A Humanist Conviction: “Virtue Increases When Praised”
• Chapter Three: Bona Externa: Birthplace, Descent, Education
• Chapter Four: Ecclesiastical Ideals: “As You Did It to Any of the Least”
• Chapter Five: Political Ideals: “Be Merciful to the Submissive, and Crush the Arrogant”
• Chapter Six: Academic Ideals: “Perfected in the Arts Appropriate to Humanity”
• Chapter Seven: Ethos Enshrined
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Appendix: A Short-title Finding List of Funeral Orations from the Italian Renaissance, ca. 1374–1534
• Bibliography
• Index of Manuscripts
• General Index