The Renaissance
The fall of Constantinople was an almost fatal blow to Genoa. The rich Genoese settlement at Pera, near Constantinople, was taken over by the Turks. When the impoverished republic once more submitted to France (1458), Francesco Sforza financed a revolution that expelled the French and made Genoa again a dependency of Milan (1464). The confusion that weakened Milan after the assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476) allowed the Genoese a brief interlude of freedom; but when Louis XII seized Milan (1499), Genoa too succumbed to his power. At last, in the long conflict between Francis I and Charles V, a Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, turned his ships against the French, drove them out of Genoa, and established a new republican constitution (1528). Like the governments of Florence and Venice, it was a commercial oligarchy; only those families were enfranchised whose names were inscribed in il libro d’oro (The Golden Book). The new regime—a senate of 400, a council of 200, a doge elected for two years—brought a disciplined peace to the factions, and maintained the independence of Genoa till the coming of Napoleon (1797).
Amid this passionate disorder the city contributed far less than her due share to Italian letters, science, and art. Her captains explored the seas avidly, but when her son Columbus appeared among them Genoa was too timid or too poor to finance his dream. The nobles were absorbed in politics, the merchants in gain; neither class spared much for the adventures of the mind. The old cathedral of San Lorenzo was remodeled in Gothic (1307) with a majestic interior; its chapel of San Giovanni Battista (1451f) was adorned with a handsome altar and canopy by Matteo Civitali and a somber statue of the Baptist by Iacopo Sansovino. Andrea Doria effected almost as significant a revolution in Genoese art as in government. He brought Fra Giovanni da Montorsoli from Florence to remodel the Palazzo Doria (1529), and Perino del Vaga from Rome to adorn it with frescoes and stucco reliefs, grotesques, and arabesques; the result was one of the most ornate residences in Italy. Leone Leoni, rival and foe of Cellini, came from Rome to cast a fine medallion of the admiral, and Montorsoli designed his tomb. In Genoa the Renaissance did not long antedate Doria, and did not long survive his death.
III. PAVIA
Between Genoa and Milan the ancient city of Pavia lay quietly along the Ticino. Once it had been the seat of the Lombard kings; now, in the fourteenth century, it was subject to Milan, and was used by the Visconti and the Sforzas as a second capital. There Galeazzo Visconti II began (1360), and Gian (i.e., Giovanni, John) Galeazzo Visconti completed, the majestic Castello that served as a ducal residence for its second founder, and as a pleasure palace for later dukes of Milan. Petrarch called it “the noblest product of modern art,” and many contemporaries ranked it first among the royal dwellings of Europe. The library contained one of the most precious collections of books in Europe, including 951 illuminated manuscripts. Louis XII, having taken Milan in 1499, carried off this Pavia library among his spoils; and a French army destroyed the interior of the castle with the latest artillery (1527). Nothing remains but the walls.
Though the Castello is ruined, the finest jewel of the Visconti and the Sforzas survives intact—the Certosa, or Carthusian monastery, hidden off the highway between Pavia and Milan. Here, in a placid plain, Giangaleazzo Visconti undertook to build cells, cloisters, and a church in fulfillment of a vow made by his wife. From that beginning until 1499 the dukes of Milan continued to develop and embellish the edifice as the favorite embodiment of their piety and their art. There is nothing more exquisite in Italy. The Lombard-Romanesque façade of white Carrara marble was designed, carved, and erected (1473f) by Cristoforo Mantegazza and Giovanni Antonio Amadeo of Pavia sponsored by Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Lodovico il Moro. It is too ornate, too fondly gifted with arches, statues, reliefs, medallions, columns, pilasters, capitals, arabesques, carved angels, saints, sirens, princes, fruits, and flowers to convey a sense of unity and harmony; each part importunes attention regardless of the whole. But each part is a labor of love and skill; the four Renaissance windows by Amadeo would of themselves entitle him to the remembrance of mankind. In some Italian churches the façade is a brave front on an otherwise undistinguished exterior; but in this Certosa di Pavia every external feature and aspect is arrestingly beautiful: the stately attached buttresses, the noble towers, arcades, and spires of the north transept and the apse, the graceful columns and arches of the cloisters. Within the court the eye rises from these slender columns through three successive stories of arcades to the four superimposed colonnades of the cupola; this is an ensemble harmoniously conceived and admirably wrought. Within the church everything is of unsurpassed excellence: columns rising in clusters and Gothic arches to carved and coffered vaults; bronze and iron grilles as delicately designed as royal lace; doors and archways of elegant form and ornament; altars of marble studded with precious stones; paintings by Perugino, Borgognone, and Luini; the magnificent inlaid choir stalls; the luminous stained glass; the careful carving of pillars, spandrels, archivolts, and cornices; the stately tomb of Giangaleazzo Visconti by Cristoforo Romano and Benedetto Briosco; and, as the last relic of a pathetic romance, the tomb and figures of Lodovico il Moro and Beatrice d’Este, here united in exquisite marble, though they died ten years and five hundred miles apart. In a like union of diverse moods the Lombard, Gothic, and Renaissance styles are here wedded in the most nearly perfect architectural product of the Renaissance. For under Lodovico the Moor Milan had gathered fair women to create an unrivaled court, and supreme artists like Bramante, Leonardo, and Caradosso to snatch the leadership of Italy, for one bright decade, from Florence, Venice and Rome.
IV. THE VISCONTI: 1378–1447
Galeazzo II, dying in 1378, bequeathed his share of the Milanese realm to his son Giangaleazzo Visconti, who continued to use Pavia as a capital. Here was a man who would have warmed Machiavelli’s heart. Immersed in the great library of his palace, taking care of a delicate constitution, winning his subjects by moderate taxation, attending church with impressive piety, filling his court with priests and monks, he was the last prince in Italy whom diplomats would have suspected of planning to unite the entire peninsula under his rule. Yet this was the ambition that seethed in his brain; he pursued it to the end of his life, and almost realized it; and in its service he used craft, treachery, and murder as if he had studied the unwritten Prince with reverence, and had never heard of Christ.
Meanwhile his uncle Bernabò was ruling the other half of the Visconti realm from Milan. Bernabò was a candid villain; he taxed his subjects to the edge of endurance, compelled the peasantry to keep and feed the five thousand hounds that he used in the chase, and stilled resentment by announcing that criminals would be tortured for forty days. He laughed at Giangaleazzo’s piety, and schemed how to dispose of him and make himself master of all the Visconti heritage. Gian, equipped with the spies necessary to any competent government, learned of these plans. He arranged a meeting with Bernabò, who came conveniently with two sons; Gian’s secret guard arrested all three, and apparently poisoned Bernabò (1385). Gian now ruled Milan, Novara, Pavia, Piacenza, Parma, Cremona, and Brescia. In 1387 he took Verona, in 1389 Padua; in 1399 he shocked Florence by buying Pisa for 200,000 florins; in 1400 Perugia, Assisi, and Siena, in 1401 Lucca and Bologna, submitted to his generals; and Gian was master of nearly all north Italy from Novara to the Adriatic. The Papal States were now weakened by the Schism (1378–1417) that had followed the return of the papacy from Avignon. Gian played pope against rival pope, and dreamed of absorbing all the lands of the Church. Then he would send his armies against Naples; his control of Pisa and other outlets would force Florence into submission; Venice alone would remain unbound, but helpless against a united Italy. However in 1402 Giangaleazzo, aged fifty-one, died.
All this time he had hardly moved from Pavia or Milan. He liked intrigue better than war, and achieved by subtlety more than his generals won for him by arms. Nor could these political enterprises exhaust the fertility of his mind. He issued a code of laws including the regulation of public health and t
he compulsory isolation of infectious disease.7 He built the Castello of Pavia, and began the Certosa di Pavia and the cathedral of Milan. He called Manuel Chrysoloras to the chair of Greek in the University of Milan, fostered the University of Pavia, helped poets, artists, scholars, and philosophers, and relished their company. He extended the Naviglio Grande, or Great Canal, from Milan to Pavia, thereby opening an inland waterway across the breadth of Italy from the Alps through Milan and the Po to the Adriatic Sea, and providing irrigation for thousands of acres of soil. The agriculture and commerce so promoted encouraged industry; Milan began to rival Florence in woolen goods; her smiths made weapons and armor for warriors throughout western Europe; in one crisis two master armorers forged arms for six thousand soldiers in a few days.8 In 1314 the silk weavers of Lucca, impoverished by faction and war, had migrated by hundreds to Milan; by 1400 the silk industry was well developed there, and moralists complained that clothing had become shamefully beautiful. Giangaleazzo protected this flourishing economy with wise administration, equable justice, and reliable currency, and a tolerable taxation that extended to clergy and nobility as well as laymen and commoners. Under his prodding the postal service was expanded; in 1425 over a hundred horses were regularly employed by the post; private correspondence was accepted at post offices, and traveled all day—in emergency, all night as well. In 1423 Florence had an annual state revenue of 4,000,000 gold florins ($100,000,000), Venice 11,000,000, Milan 12,000,000.9 Kings were glad to have their sons and daughters marry into the Visconti family. Emperor Wenceslas merely crowned fact with form when (1395) he gave imperial sanction and legitimacy to Gian’s title of duke, and invested him and his heirs with the duchy of Milan “forever.”
This proved to be fifty-two years. Gian’s oldest son, Gianmaria Visconti,* was thirteen when his father died (1402). The generals who had led Gian’s victorious armies competed for the regency. While they fought for Milan, Italy resumed her fragmentation: Florence recaptured Pisa; Venice took Verona, Vicenza, and Padua; Siena, Perugia, and Bologna submitted to individual despots. Italy was as before, and worse, for Gianmaria, leaving the government to oppressive regents, devoted himself to his dogs, trained them to eat human flesh, and joyfully watched them feed on the live men whom he had condemned as political offenders or social criminals.10 In 1412 three nobles stabbed him to death.
His brother Filippo Maria Visconti seemed to have inherited the subtle intelligence, the patient industry, the ambitious and farseeing policies of his father. But what had been sedentary courage in Giangaleazzo became in Filippo sedentary timidity, a perpetual fear of assassination, a haunting belief in universal human perfidy. He shut himself up in the castle of Porta Giovia at Milan, ate and grew fat, cherished superstitions and astrologers, and yet by pure craft remained to the end of his long reign the absolute master of his country, his generals, and even of his family. He married Beatrice Tenda for her money, and condemned her to death for infidelity. He married Maria of Savoy, kept her secluded from all but her ladies in waiting, brooded over his lack of a son, took a mistress, and became partly human in his affection for the pretty daughter Bianca who was born of this liaison. He continued his father’s patronage of learning, called noted scholars to the University of Pavia, and gave commissions to Brunellesco and the incomparable medalist Pisanello. He ruled Milan with efficient autocracy, suppressing faction, maintaining order, protecting peasants against feudal exactions, and merchants against brigandage. By deft diplomacy and adroit manipulation of his armies he restored to Milanese allegiance Parma and Piacenza, all of Lombardy to Brescia, all the lands between Milan and the Alps; and in 1421 he persuaded the Genoese that his dictatorship was milder than their civil wars. He encouraged marriages between rival families, so ending many feuds. For a hundred petty tyrannies he set up one; and the population, shorn of liberty but free from internal strife, grumbled, prospered, and multiplied.
He had a flair for finding able generals; suspected them all of wishing to replace him; played them off against one another; and kept war brewing in the hope of regaining all that his father had won and his brother had lost. A breed of powerful condottieri developed in his wars with Venice and Florence: Gattamelata, Colleoni, Carmagnola, Braccio, Fortebraccio, Montone, Piccinino, Muzio Attendolo…. Muzio was a country lad, one of a large family of male and female fighters; he won the cognomen Sforza by the strength of body and will with which he served Queen Joanna II of Naples; he lost her favor and was thrown into prison; his sister, in full armor, forced his jailers to set him free; he was given command of one of the Milanese armies, but was drowned soon afterward while crossing a stream (1424). His bastard son, then twenty-two, leaped into his father’s place, and fought and married his way to a throne.
V. THE SFORZAS: 1450–1500
Francesco Sforza was the ideal of Renaissance soldiers: tall, handsome, athletic, brave; the best runner, jumper, wrestler in his army; sleeping little, marching bareheaded winter and summer; winning the devotion of his men by sharing their hardships and rations, and leading them to lucrative victories by strategy and tactics rather than by superior numbers or arms. So unrivaled was his reputation that enemy forces, on more than one occasion, laid down their arms at sight of him, and greeted him with uncovered heads as the greatest general of his time. Ambitious to found a state of his own, he allowed no scruple to hinder his policy; he fought alternately for Milan, Florence, and Venice until Filippo won his loyalty by giving him Bianca in marriage, with Cremona and Pontremoli as her dowry (1441). When, six years later, Filippo died heirless, bringing the Visconti dynasty to an end, Francesco felt that the dowry should include Milan.
The Milanese thought differently; they proclaimed a republic named Ambrosian from the masterful bishop who had chastened Theodosius and converted Augustine a thousand years before. But the rival factions in the city could not agree; the dependencies of Milan snatched the opportunity to declare themselves free; some of them fell before Venetian arms; danger was imminent of a Venetian or Florentine attack; moreover the Duke of Orléans, the Emperor Frederick III, and King Alfonso of Aragon all claimed Milan as their own. In this crisis a deputation sought Sforza, gave him Brescia, and begged him to defend Milan. He fought off its enemies with resourceful energy; but when the new government made peace with Venice without consulting him he turned his troops against the Republic, besieged Milan to the edge of starvation, accepted its surrender, entered the city amid the acclamations of a hungry populace, and dulled the lust for liberty by distributing bread. A general assembly was summoned, composed of one man from each household; it invested him with the ducal authority over the protests of the Emperor, and the Sforza dynasty began its brief and brilliant career (1450).
His elevation did not change his character. He continued to live simply and to work hard. Now and then he was cruel or treacherous, alleging the good of the state as his excuse; generally he was a man of justice and humanity. He suffered from a lawless sensitivity to the beauty of women. His accomplished wife killed his mistress, and then forgave him; she bore him eight children, advised him wisely in politics, and won the people to his rule by succoring the needy and protecting the oppressed. His administration of the state was as competent as his leadership of its armies. The social order that he enforced brought back to the city a prosperity that dimmed the memory of its suffering and its fitful liberty. As a citadel against revolt or siege he began to build the enormous Castello Sforzesco. He cut new canals through the land, organized public works, and built the Ospedale Maggiore, or Great Hospital. He brought the humanist Filelfo to Milan, and encouraged education, scholarship, and art; he lured Vincenzo Foppa from Brescia to develop a school of painting. Threatened by the intrigues of Venice, Naples, and France, he held them all at bay by winning the decisive support and firm friendship of Cosimo de’ Medici. He disarmed Naples by wedding his daughter Ippolita to Ferdinand’s son Alfonso; he checkmated the Duke of Orléans by signing an alliance with Louis XI of France. Some nobles continued to seek hi
s death and his power, but the success of his government disordered their plans, and he lived to die, in peace, the traditional death of generals (1466).
Born to the purple, his son Galeazzo Maria Sforza never knew the discipline of poverty and struggle. He gave himself up to pleasure, luxury, and pomp, seduced with special relish the wives of his friends, and punished opposition with a cruelty that seemed to have descended to him, deviously and mysteriously, through the kindly Bianca from the hot Visconti blood. The people of Milan, inured to absolute rule, offered no resistance to his despotism, but private vengeance punished what public terror brooked. Girolamo Olgiati grieved over a sister seduced and then discarded by the Duke; Giovanni Lampugnani thought himself despoiled of property by the same lord; together with Carlo Visconti they had been trained by Niccolò Monteno in Roman history and ideals, including tyrannicide from Brutus to Brutus. After imploring the help of the saints, the three youths entered the church of St. Stephen, where Galeazzo was worshiping, and stabbed him to death (1476). Lampugnani and Visconti were killed on the spot. Olgiati was tortured till almost every bone in his body was broken or torn from its socket; he was then flayed alive; but to his last breath he refused to repent, called upon pagan heroes and Christian saints to approve his deed, and died with a classic and Renaissance phrase on his lips: Mors acerba, fama perpetua—”Death is bitter, but fame is everlasting.”11
Galeazzo left his throne to a seven-year-old boy, Giangaleazzo Sforza. For three chaotic years Guelf and Ghibelline factions competed in force and fraud to capture the regency. The victor was one of the most colorful and complex personalities in all the crowded gallery of the Renaissance. Lodovico Sforza was the fourth of Francesco Sforza’s sons. His father gave him the cognomen Mauro; his contemporaries jokingly transformed this into il Moro—“the Moor”—because of his dark hair and eyes; he himself good-humoredly accepted the nickname, and Moorish emblems and costumes became popular at his court. Other wits found in the name a synonym for the mulberry tree (in Italian, moro); this too became a symbol for him, made the mulberry color fashionable in Milan, and provided a theme and motive for some of Leonardo’s decorations in the Castello rooms. Lodovico’s chief teacher was the scholar Filelfo, who gave him a rich grounding in the classics; but his mother Bianca warned the humanist that “we have princes to educate, not merely scholars”; and she saw to it that her sons should also be skilled in the arts of government and war. Lodovico was seldom physically brave; but in him the intelligence of the Visconti freed itself from their cruelty, and with all his faults and sins, he became one of the most civilized men in history.