In 1515 Andrea and Franciabigio undertook a series of frescoes in the cloisters of the Scalzo fraternity. They chose as subject the life of St. John the Baptist; but it was surely Andrea’s hand that in several figures displayed one of his specialties, picturing the female breast in all the perfection of its texture and form. In 1518 he accepted the invitation of Francis I to come to France; there he painted the figure of Charity that hangs in the Louvre. But his wife, left behind in Florence, begged him to come back; the king granted permission on Andrea’s pledge to return, and entrusted him with a considerable sum to buy works of art for him in Italy. Andrea, in Florence, spent the royal funds in building himself a house, and never went back to France. Facing bankruptcy nevertheless, he resumed his painting, and produced for the cloisters of the Annunziata a masterpiece which, said Vasari, “in design, grace, excellence of coloring, vivacity, and relief, proved him far superior to all his predecessors”—who included Leonardo and Raphael.36 This Madonna del Sacco— absurdly so called because Mary and Joseph are shown leaning against a sack—is now damaged and faded, and no longer conveys the full splendor of its color; but its perfect composition, soft tones, and quiet presentation of a family—with Joseph, suddenly literate, reading a book—make it one of the great pictures of the Renaissance.
In the refectory of the Salvi monastery Andrea challenged Leonardo with a Last Supper (1526), choosing the same moment and theme—“One of you shall betray me.” Bolder than Leonardo, Andrea finished the face of his Christ; even he, however, fell far short of the spiritual depth and understanding gentleness that we associate with Jesus. But the Apostles are strikingly individualized, the action is vivid, the colors are rich and soft and full; and the picture as seen from the entrance of the refectory conveys almost irresistibly the illusion of a living scene.
The Virgin Mother remained the favorite subject of Andrea, as of most artists of Renaissance Italy. He painted her again and again in studies of the Holy Family, as in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, or the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He pictured her, in one of the treasures of the Uffizi Gallery, as Madonna delle Arpie, Madonna of the Harpies;* this is the fairest of the Lucrezia Virgins, and the Child is the finest in Italian art. Across the Arno, in the Pitti Gallery, the Assumption of the Virgin shows Apostles and holy women looking up in amazement and adoration as cherubim raise the praying Madonna—again Lucrezia—to heaven. So, in Andrea’s colorful illumination, the moving epos of the Virgin is complete.
There is seldom any sublimity in Andrea del Sarto, no majesty of Michelangelo, nor the unfathomable nuances of Leonardo, nor the finished perfection of Raphael, nor yet the range or power of the great Venetians. Yet he alone of the Florentines rivals the Venetians in color and Correggio in grace; and his mastery of tones—in their depth and modulation and transparency—might well be preferred to the lavishment of color in Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. We miss variety in Andrea; his paintings move within too small a circle of subject and sentiment; his hundred Madonnas are always the same young Italian mother, modest and lovely and at last cloyingly sweet. But no one has surpassed him in composition, few in anatomy, modeling, and design. “There is a little fellow in Florence,” said Michelangelo to Raphael, “who will bring sweat to your brow if ever he is engaged in great works.”37
Andrea himself never lived to reach full maturity. The victorious Germans, capturing Florence in 1530, infected it with plague, and Andrea was one of its victims. His wife, who had aroused in him all the heartaches of jealousy that beauty brings to marriage, shunned his room in those last fevered days; and the artist who had given her an almost deathless life died with no one by his side, at the age of forty-four. About 1570 Iacopo da Empoli went to the court of the Annunziata to copy del Sarto’s Nativity. An old lady who had come to Mass stopped beside him and pointed to a figure in the foreground of the painting. “It is I,” she said. Lucrezia had outlived herself by forty years.
The few artists whom we have here commemorated must be viewed not as a record but as representatives of the plastic and graphic genius of this period. There were other sculptors and painters of the time, who still lead a ghostly existence in the museums—Benedetto da Rovezzano, Franciabigio, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, and hundreds more. There were half-secluded artists, monastic and secular, who still practised the intimate art of illuminating manuscripts, like Fra Eustachio and Antonio di Girolamo; there were calligraphers whose handwriting might excuse Federigo of Urbino for regretting the invention of print; there were mosaicists who despised painting as the perishable pride of a day; wood carvers like Baccio d’Agnolo, whose carved chairs, tables, chests, and beds were the glory of Florentine homes; and nameless other workers in the minor arts. Florence was so rich in art that she could bear the depredations of invaders, pontiffs, and millionaires from Charles VIII to our own times, and still retain so much of delicate workmanship that no man has ever compassed all the treasures deposited in that one city by the two centuries of the Renaissance. Or by one century; for just as the great age of Florence in art had begun with Cosimo’s return from exile in 1434, so it ended with Andrea del Sarto’s death in 1530. Civil strife, Savonarola’s puritan regime, siege and defeat and plague, had destroyed the joyful spirit of Lorenzo’s day, had broken the frail lyre of art.
But the great chords had been struck, and their music echoed throughout the peninsula. Orders came to Florentine artists from other Italian cities, even from France, Spain, Hungary, Germany, and Turkey. To Florence flocked a thousand artists to learn her lore and form their styles—Piero della Francesca, Perugino, Raphael…. From Florence a hundred artists took the gospel of art to half a hundred Italian cities and to foreign lands. In those half-hundred cities the spirit and taste of the age, the generosity of wealth, the heritage of technique worked together with the Florentine stimulus. Presently all Italy, from the Alps to Calabria, was painting, carving, building, composing, singing, in a creative frenzy that seemed to know, in the fever of its haste, that soon the wealth would vanish in war, and the pride of Italy would be humbled under an alien tyranny, and the prison doors of dogma would close again upon the marvelous exuberant mind of Renaissance man.
BOOK III
ITALIAN PAGEANT
1378–1534
CHAPTER VI
Milan
I. BACKGROUND
WE do injustice to the Renaissance when we concentrate our study on Florence, Venice, and Rome. For a decade it was more brilliant in Milan, under Lodovico and Leonardo, than in Florence. Its liberation and exaltation of woman found their best embodiment in Isabella d’Este at Mantua. It glorified Parma with Correggio, Perugia with Perugino, Orvieto with Signorelli. Its literature reached an apex with Ariosto at Ferrara, and its cultivation of manners at Urbino in the days of Castiglione. It gave name to a ceramic art at Faenza, and to the Palladian architectural style at Vicenza. It revived Siena with Pinturicchio and Sassetta and Sodoma, and made Naples a home and symbol of joyous living and idyllic poetry. We must pass leisurely through the incomparable peninsula from Piedmont to Sicily, and let the varied voices of the cities merge in the polyphonic chorus of the Renaissance.
The economic life of the Italian states in the fifteenth century was as diverse as their climate, dialects, and costumes. The north—i.e., above Florence—could have severe winters, sometimes freezing the Po from end to end; yet the coastal region around Genoa, sheltered by the Ligurian Alps, enjoyed mild weather in almost every month. Venice could shroud its palaces and towers and liquid streets in clouds and mist; Rome was sunny but miasmic; Naples was a climatic paradise. Everywhere, at one time or another, the cities and their countryside suffered those earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, famines, plagues, and wars that a Malthusian Nature sedulously provides to compensate for the reproductive ecstasies of mankind. In the towns the old handicrafts supplied the poor with a living and the rich with superfluities. Only the textile industry had reached the factory and capitalist stage; one silk mill at Bologna contracted with the
city authorities to do “the work of 4000 spinning women.”1 Petty tradesmen, merchants of import and export, teachers, lawyers, physicians, administrators, politicians, made up a complex middle class; a wealthy and worldly clergy added their color and grace to the courts and the streets; and monks and friars, somber or jovial, wandered about seeking alms or romance. The aristocracy of landowners and financiers lived for the most part within the city walls, occasionally in rural villas. At the top a banker, condottiere, marquis, duke, doge, or king, with his wife or mistress, presided over a court hampered with luxuries and gilded with art. In the countryside the peasant tilled his modest acres or some lord’s domain, and lived in a poverty so traditional that it seldom entered his thoughts.
Slavery existed on a minor scale, chiefly in domestic service among the rich; occasionally as a supplement and corrective to free labor on large estates, especially in Sicily; but here and there even in northern Italy.2 From the fourteenth century onward the slave trade grew; Venetian and Genoese merchants imported them from the Balkans, southern Russia, and Islam; male or female Moorish slaves were considered a shining ornament of Italian courts.3 In 1488 Pope Innocent VIII received a hundred Moorish slaves as a present from Ferdinand the Catholic, and distributed them as gratuities among his cardinals and other friends.4 In 1501, after the capture of Capua, many Capuan women were sold as slaves in Rome.5 But these stray facts illustrate the morals rather than the economy of the Renaissance; slavery rarely played a significant role in the production or transport of goods.
Transport was chiefly on muleback or by cart, or by river, canal, or sea. The well-to-do traveled on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages. Speed was moderate but exciting; it took two days and a good spine to ride from Perugia to Urbino—sixty-four miles; a boat might take fourteen days from Barcelona to Genoa. Inns were numerous, noisy, dirty, and uncomfortable. One at Padua could house 200 guests and stable 200 horses. Roads were rough and perilous. The main streets of the cities were paved with flagstones, but were only exceptionally lighted at night. Good water was brought in from the mountains, rarely to individual homes, usually to public fountains artistically designed, by whose cooling flow simple women and idle men gathered and distributed the news of the day.
The city-states that divided the peninsula were ruled in some cases-Florence, Siena, Venice—by mercantile oligarchies; more often by “despots” of diverse degree, who had superseded republican or communal institutions vitiated by class exploitation and political violence. Out of the competition of strong men one emerged—almost always of humble birth—who subdued and destroyed or hired the rest, made himself absolute ruler, and in some cases transmitted his power to his heir. So the Visconti or Sforzas ruled in Milan, the Scaligeri in Verona, the Carraresi in Padua, the Gonzagas in Mantua, the Estensi in Ferrara. Such men enjoyed a precarious popularity because they laid a lid upon faction, and made life and property safe within their whim and the city’s walls. The lower classes accepted them as a last refuge from the dictatorship of ducats; the surrounding peasantry reconciled itself to them because the commune had given it neither protection nor justice nor freedom.
The despots were cruel because they were insecure. With no tradition of legitimacy to support them, subject at any moment to assassination or revolt, they surrounded themselves with guards, ate and drank in fear of poison, and hoped for a natural death. In their earlier decades they governed by craft, corruption, and quiet murder, and practised all the arts of Machiavelli before he was born; after 1450 they felt more secure through sanctification by time, and contented themselves with pacific means in domestic government. They suppressed criticism and dissent, and maintained a horde of spies. They lived luxuriously, and affected an impressive pomp. Nevertheless they earned the tolerance and respect, even, in Ferrara and Urbino, the devotion, of their subjects, by improving administration, executing impartial justice where their own interests were not involved, helping the people in famine and other emergencies, relieving unemployment with public works, building churches and monasteries, beautifying their cities with art, and supporting scholars, poets, and artists who might polish their diplomacy, brighten their aura, and perpetuate their name.
They waged frequent but usually petty war, seeking the mirage of security through the advancement of their frontiers, and having an expansive appetite for taxable terrain. They did not send their own people to war, for then they would have had to arm them, which might be suicidal; instead they hired mercenaries, and paid them with the proceeds of conquests, ransoms, confiscations, and pillage. Dashing adventurers came down over the Alps, often with bands of hungry soldiers in their train, and sold their services as condottieri to the highest bidder, changing sides with the fluctuations of the fee. A tailor from Essex, known in England as Sir John Hawkwood and in Italy as Acuto, fought with strategic subtlety and tactical skill against and for Florence, amassed several hundred thousand florins, died as a gentleman farmer in 1394, and was buried with honors and art in Santa Maria del Fiore.
The despot financed education as well as war, built schools and libraries, supported academies and universities. Every town in Italy had a school, usually provided by the Church; every major city had a university. Under the schooling of humanists, universities, and courts, public taste and manners improved, every second Italian became a judge of art, every important center had its own artists and its own architectural style. The joy of life spread, for the educated classes, from one end of Italy to the other; manners were relatively refined, and yet instincts were unprecedentedly free. Never since the days of Augustus had genius found such an audience, such stimulating competition, and such liberty.
II. PIEDMONT AND LIGURIA
In northwestern Italy and what is now southeastern France lay the principality of Savoy-Piedmont, whose ruling house was till 1945 the oldest royal family in Europe. Founded by Count Humbert I as a dependency of the Holy Roman Empire, the proud little state expanded to a moment of glory under the “Green Count” Amadeus VI (1343–83), who annexed Geneva, Lausanne, Aosta, and Turin, which he made his capital. No other ruler of his time enjoyed so fair a reputation for wisdom, justice, and generosity. The Emperor Sigismund raised the counts to dukes (1416), but the first duke, Amadeus VIII, lost his head when he accepted nomination as Antipope Felix V (1439). A century later Savoy was conquered by Francis I for France (1536). Savoy and Piedmont became a battleground between France and Italy; Apollo surrendered them to Mars; they remained in the backwater of the Italian torrent, and never felt the full flow of the Renaissance. In the rich Turin Gallery, and in his native Vercelli, are the pleasant but mediocre paintings of Defendente Ferrari.
South of Piedmont, Liguria embraces all the glory of the Italian Riviera: on the east the Riviera di Levante, or Coast of the Rising (Sun); on the west the Riviera di Ponente, or Coast of the Setting; and at their junction Genoa, almost as resplendent as Naples on a throne of hills and a spreading pedestal of blue sea. To Petrarch it had seemed “a city of Kings, the very temple of prosperity, the gate of joy”;6 but that was before the Genoese debacle at Chioggia (1378). While Venice recovered rapidly through the orderly and devoted co-operation of all classes in restoring commerce and solvency, Genoa continued its tradition of civil strife between noble and noble, nobles and commoners. Oligarchic oppression provoked a minor revolution (1383); the butchers, armed with the persuasive cutlery of their trade, led a crowd to the palace of the doge, and compelled a reduction of taxes and the exclusion of nobles from the government. In five years (1390–4) Genoa had ten revolutions, ten doges rose and fell; finally order$$$nmed more precious than freedom, and the harassed republic, fearing absorption by Milan, gave itself over, with its Rivieras, to France (1396). Two years later the French were expelled in a passionate revolt; five bloody battles were fought in the streets; twenty palaces were burned, government buildings were sacked and demolished, property to the value of a million florins was destroyed. Genoa again found the chaos of freedom unbearable, and surrendered itself t
o Milan (1421). The Milanese rule became intolerable, revolution restored the republic (1435), and the strife of factions was resumed.
The one element of stability amid these fluctuations was the Bank of St. George. During the war with Venice the government had borrowed money from its citizens, and had given them promissory notes. After the war it was unable to redeem these pledges, but it turned over to the lenders the customs dues of the port. The creditors organized themselves into the Casa di San Giorgio, the House of St. George, chose a directorate of eight governors, and received from the state a palace for their use. The House or Company was well managed, being the least corrupt institution in the republic. It was entrusted with the collection of taxes; it lent some of its funds to the government, and received in return substantial properties in Liguria, Corsica, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. It became both the state treasury and a private bank, accepting deposits, discounting notes, making loans to commerce and industry. As all factions were financially tied to it, all respected it, and left it unharmed in revolution and war. Its magnificent Renaissance palace still stands in the Piazza Caricamento.