The Renaissance
At first he merely proposed to continue and expand Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato. He took from his predecessor the chivalric setting and theme, the loves and battles of Charlemagne’s knights, the central characters, the loose episodic construction, the suspension of one narrative to pass to another, the magic operations that often turn the tale, even the idea of tracing the pedigree of the Estensi to the marriage of the mythical Ruggiero and Bradamante. And yet, while praising a hundred others, he never mentions Boiardo’s name; no man is a hero to his debtor. Perhaps Ariosto felt that the theme and characters belonged to the cycle of legends themselves, rather than to Boiardo.
Like the Count, and unlike the legends, he stressed the role of love above that of war, and so proclaimed in his opening lines:
Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto—
“Women I sing, and knights, and arms, and loves, and deeds of chivalry and bold emprise.” The story carries out this program faithfully: it is a series of combats, some for Christianity against Islam, most for women. A dozen counts and kings contest Angelica; she flirts with them all, plays them one against another, and is caught in an anticlimax when she falls in love with a handsome mediocrity, and marries him before she has time to make the usual examination of his income. Orlando, who enters the story after eight cantos have rolled by, pursues her over three continents, neglecting meanwhile to go to the aid of his sovereign Charlemagne when the Saracens attack Paris. He goes mad on learning that he has lost her (canto XXIII), and recovers sanity sixteen cantos later when his lost wits are found in the moon and brought back to him by a predecessor of Jules Verne’s lunar navigators. This central theme is confused and obfuscated by the interpolated adventures of a dozen other knights, who pursue their respective women through forty-six cantos of seductive verse. The women enjoy the chase, perhaps excepting Isabella, who persuades Rodomonte to cut off her head rather than to deflower her, and earns a monument. The old legend of St. George is included: the beautiful Angelica is chained to the rocks beside the sea as a propitiatory offering to a dragon who hungers for a virgin annually; and before Ruggiero can arrive to rescue her the poet contemplates her with Correggian appreciation:
La fiera gente inospitale e cruda
Alla bestia crudel nel lito espose
La bellissima donna così ignuda
Come Natura prima la compose.
Un velo non ha pure in che rinchiuda
I bianchi gigli e le vermiglie rose,
Da non cader per Iuglio o per Decembre,
Di che non sparse le polite membre.
Creduta avria che fosse statua finta
O d’alabastro o d’altri marmi illustri
Ruggiero, e su lo scoglio così avvinta
Per artificio di scultori industri;
Se non videa la lachrima distinta
Tra fresche rose e candidi ligustri
Far rugiadose le crudette pome,
E l’ aura sventolar l’aurate chiome.13
Which may be rendered, musicless:
A people fierce, inhospitable, crude
Exposed upon the shore, to savage beast,
A woman fairest of the fair, and nude
As when first Nature her sweet form composed.
No smallest veil enclosed the lilies white
And vermeil roses of her flesh, that bear
Midsummer’s ardor and December’s cold
Unhurt, and gleam on her resplendent limbs.
She might have seemed to him a statue made
Of alabaster, or some marble form
Bound to the stone by sculptor’s artifice,
Had he not seen a bright tear fall between
The roses and white privets of her cheeks,
Bedewing breasts like apples firm, and seen
The breezes breathing on her golden hair.
Ariosto does not take all this too seriously; he is writing to amuse; he deliberately charms us, by the incantation of his verse, into an unreal world, and mystifies his tale with fairies, magic weapons and enchantments, winged horses touring the clouds, men turned into trees, fortresses melting at an imperious word. Orlando spits six Dutchmen on one spear; Astolfo creates a fleet by throwing leaves into the air, and catches the wind in a bladder. Ariosto laughs with us at all this, and smiles tolerantly, not sarcastically, at the tilts and shams of chivalry. He has an excellent sense of humor, salted with gentle irony; so he includes, in the waste deposited by the earth upon the moon, the prayers of hypocrites, the flatteries of poets (peccavit), the services of courtiers, the Donation of Constantine (XXXIV). Only now and then, in a few moral exordiums, does Ariosto pretend to philosophy. He was so completely the poet that he lost and consumed himself in forging and polishing a beautiful form for his verse; he had no energy left to pour into it an ennobling purpose or a philosophy of life.13a
Italians love the Furioso because it is a treasury of exciting stories—with never a pretty woman too far away—told in melodious and yet unaffected language, and in racy stanzas that lure us swiftly on from scene to scene. They forgive the long detours and descriptions, the innumerable and sometimes labored similes, for these too are dressed in sparkling verse. They are rewarded, and silently shout “Bravo!” when the poet hammers out a striking line, as when he says of Zerbino,
Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa,—14
“Nature made him, and then broke the mold.” They are not long disturbed by Ariosto’s expectant flattery of the Estensi, his paeans to Ippolito, his praise of Lucrezia’s chastity. These obeisances were in the manner of the times; Machiavelli would stoop as low to conquer a subsidy; and a poet must live.
But this became difficult when the Cardinal decided to campaign in Hungary, and desired Ariosto to accompany him. Ariosto demurred, and Ippolito freed him from further service and recompense Alfonso saved the poet from penury by giving him an annual stipend of eighty-four crowns ($1050?), plus three servants and two horses, and requiring almost nothing in return. After forty-seven years of obstinate but hardly celibate bachelordom, Ariosto now married Alessandra Benucci, whom he had loved when she was still the wife of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi. By her he had no children, but two natural sons had rewarded his premarital efforts.
For three years (1522–5) he served unhappily as governor of the Garfagnana, a mountainous region racked with brigandage. But he was unfit for action or command, and gladly retired to spend the remaining eight years of his life in Ferrara. In 1528 he bought a plot of land on the outskirts of the city, and built a pretty house, still shown in the Via Ariosto, and maintained by the state. Across the front he inscribed Horatian lines of proud simplicity: Parva sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non sordida, parta meo sed tamen aere domus—”Small but suitable for me, hurtful to no one, not mean, yet acquired by my own funds: home.” there he lived quietly, working occasionally in his garden, and revising or expanding the Furioso every day.
Meanwhile, further emulating Horace, he had written to various friends seven poetical epistles that have come down to us under the name of satires. They are not as sharp and compact as those of his model, nor as bitter and lethal as Juvenal’s; they were the product of a mind loving and never quite finding peace, bearing fretfully the whips and scorns of time, the proud man’s contumely. They describe the faults of the clergy, the simony rampant in Rome, the nepotism of worldly popes (Satire i). They excoriate Ippolito for paying his menials better than his poet (ii). They expound a cynical conception of women as rarely faithful or honest, and offer the advice of a tardy expert on choosing and taming a wife (iii). They lament the indignities of a courtier’s life, and wryly recount an unsuccessful visit to Leo X (iv):
I kissed his foot, he bent down from the holy seat, took my hand, and saluted me on both cheeks. Besides, he made me free of half the stamp dues I was bound to pay. Then, breast full of hope but body soaked with rain and smirched with mud, I went and had my supper at the Ram.
Two s
atires mourn his narrow life at Garfagnana, his days “spent in threatening, punishing, persuading, or acquitting,” his muse frightened and paralyzed into silence by crimes, lawsuits, and brawls; and his mistress so many miles away! (v-vi) The last epistle asks Bembo to recommend a Greek tutor for Ariosto’s son Virginio:
The Greek must be learned but also of sound principles, for erudition without morality is worse than worthless. Unhappily, in these days, it is difficult to find a teacher of this sort. Few humanists are free from the most infamous of vices, and intellectual vanity makes most of them skeptics also. Why is it that learning and infidelity go hand in hand?15
Ariosto himself had through most of his life taken religion lightly; but, like nearly all the intellects of the Renaissance, he made his peace with it in the end. Even from youth he had suffered from a bronchial catarrh, which was probably aggravated by his travels as courier for the Cardinal. In 1532 the trouble sank deeper, and became tuberculosis. He struggled against it as if not satisfied with a mere immortality of fame. He was only fifty-eight when he died (1533).
He had become a classic long before his death. Twenty-three years earlier Raphael had painted him, in the Parnassus fresco of the Vatican, with Homer and Virgil, Horace and Ovid, Dante and Petrarch, among the unforgettable voices of mankind. Italy calls him her Homer, and the Furioso her Iliad; but even to an idolater of Italy this appears more generous than just. The world of Ariosto seems light and fantastic beside the ruthless siege of Troy; his knights—some as indistinguishable in their character as in their armor—hardly rise to the majesty of Agamemnon, the passion of Achilles, the wisdom of Nestor, the nobility of Hector, the tragedy of Priam; and who will equate the fair and flighty Angelica with the dia gynaikon, the goddess among women, Helen conqueror in defeat? And yet the last word must be as the first: only those can judge Ariosto who know his language thoroughly, who can catch the nuances of his gaiety and his sentiment, and can respond to all the music of his melodious dream.
V. AFTERMATH
It was the Italians themselves, with their lusty sense of humor, who provided an antidote to the romanticism of the two Orlandos. Six years before Ariosto’s death Girolamo Folengo published an Orlandino in which the absurdities of the epics were caricatured with hilarious exaggerations. Girolamo heard the skeptical lectures of Pomponazzi at Bologna, adopted a curriculum of amours, intrigues, fisticuffs, and duels, and was expelled from the University. His father disowned him, and he became a Benedictine monk (1507), perhaps as a means of subsistence. Six years later he fell in love with Girolama Dieda, and eloped with her. In 1519 he published a volume of burlesques under the title of Maccaronea, which thenceforth gave its name to a swelling literature of rough and ribald satire in mingled Latin and Italian verse. The Orlandino was a riotous mock epic, in coarse and popular vernacular, pursuing a serious vein for a stanza or two, then startling the reader with a thought and phrase worthy of the most scatophilic privy councilor. The knights, armed with kitchen utensils, rush into the lists on limping mules. The leading churchman of the tale is the monk Griffarosto—Abbot Grab-the-Roast—whose library consists of cook books interspersed with victuals and wine, and “all the tongues he knew were those of oxen and swine”;16 through him Folengo satirizes the clergy of Italy to any Lutheran’s content. The work was received with guffaws of applause, but the author continued to starve. Finally he retired again to a monastery, wrote pious poetry, and died in the odor of sanctity at fifty three (1544). Rabelais relished him,17 and perhaps Ariosto, in his final years, joined in the merriment.
Alfonso I kept his little state secure against all the assaults of the papacy, and at last took a reckless revenge by encouraging and abetting the German-Spanish army that besieged, captured, and plundered Rome (1527).18 Charles V expressed appreciation by restoring to him Ferrara’s ancient fiefs, Modena and Reggio, so that Alfonso transmitted his duchy undiminished to his heirs. In 1528 he sent his son Ercole to France to bring home a diplomatic bride from the royal family—Renée or Renata—tiny, somber, deformed, and secretly won by the heresy of Calvin. Alfonso, after Lucrezia’s passing, consoled himself with a mistress, Laura Dianti, and perhaps married her before his death (1534). He had outwitted every enemy but time.
CHAPTER XI
Venice and Her Realm
1378–1534
I. PADUA
UNDER the dictatorship of the Carraresi Padua was a major Italian power, rivaling and threatening Venice. In 1378 Padua joined Genoa in attempting to subjugate the island republic. In 1380 Venice, exhausted by her war with Genoa, ceded to the duke of Austria the city of Treviso, strategically situated on her north. In 1383 Francesco I da Carrara bought Treviso from Austria; soon afterward he tried to take Vicenza, Udine, and Friuli; had he succeeded he would have commanded the roads from Venice to her iron mines at Agordo, and the routes of Venetian trade with Germany; i.e., Padua would have controlled vital sources of Venetian industry and commerce. Venice was saved by the skill of her diplomats. They persuaded Giangaleazzo Visconti to join Venice in war against Padua; Gian, while doubtless distrusting Venice, seized the opportunity to extend his frontier eastward with Venetian connivance. Francesco I da Carrara was defeated and abdicated (1389); and his son, namesake, and successor renewed (1399) a treaty of 1338 that had acknowledged Padua to be a dependency of Venice. When Francesco II da Carrara resumed the struggle and attacked Verona and Vicenza, Venice declared war to the death, captured and executed him and his sons, and brought Padua under direct rule by the Venetian Senate (1405). The weary city abandoned the luxury of a native exploiter, prospered under an alien but competent administration, and became the educational center of the Venetian domain. From all quarters of Latin Christendom students came to its renowned university—Pico della Mirandola, Ariosto, Bembo, Guicciardini, Tasso, Galileo, Gustavus Vasa who would be King of Sweden, John Sobieski who would be King of Poland…. The chair of Greek was founded in 1463 and occupied by Demetrius Chalcondyles sixteen years before he went to Florence. A century later Shakespeare could still speak of “Fair Padua, nursery of arts.”
One Paduan was himself a famous educational institution. Trained as a tailor, Francesco Squarcione developed a passion for classic art, traveled widely in Italy and Greece, copied or sketched Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, collected ancient medals, coins, and statuary, and returned to Padua with one of the best classical collections of his time. He opened a school of art, installed his collection there, and gave his pupils two main directives: to study ancient art and the new science of perspective. Few of the 137 artists whom he formed remained in Padua, since most of them came from outside. But in return Giotto came from Florence to paint the Arena frescoes; Altichiero came from Verona (c. 1376) to adorn a chapel in St. Anthony’s; and Donatello left memorials of his genius in the cathedral and its square. Bartolommeo Bellano, a pupil of Donatello, set up two lovely female statues for Gattamelata’s chapel in the same church; Pietro Lombardo of Venice added a fine figure of the condottiere’s son, and a splendid tomb for Antonio Roselli. Andrea Briosco—“Riccio”—and Antonio and Tullio Lombardo carved for the Gattamelata chapel some superb marble reliefs; and Riccio set up in the choir of the church one of the most imposing candelabra in Italy. He shared with Alessandro Leopardi of Venice and Andrea Morone of Bergamo in designing the unfinished church of Santa Giustina (1502f), a chaste example of the Renaissance architectural style.
It was from Padua and Verona that Iacopo Bellini and Antonio Pisanello brought to Venice the seeds of that Venetian school of painting through which the splendor of Venice was blazoned to the world.
II. VENETIAN ECONOMY AND POLICY
In 1378 Venice was at nadir: her Adriatic trade was bottled up by a victorious Genoese fleet, her communications with the mainland were blocked by Genoese and Paduan troops, her people were starving, her government contemplated surrender. Half a century later she ruled Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Treviso, Belluno, Feltre, Friuli, Istria, the Dalmatian coast, L
epanto, Patras, and Corinth. Secure in her many-moated citadel, she seemed immune to the political vicissitudes of the Italian mainland; her wealth and power mounted until she sat like a throned queen at the head of Italy. Philippe de Comines, arriving as French ambassador in 1495, pictured her as “the most triumphant city that I have ever seen.”1 Pietro Casola, coming from hostile Milan about the same time, found it “impossible to describe the beauty, magnificence, and wealth”2 of this unique assemblage of 117 islands, 150 canals, 400 bridges, all dominated by the flowing promenade of the Grand Canal, which the traveled Comines pronounced “the most beautiful street in the world.”
Whence came the wealth that supported this magnificence? Partly from a hundred industries—shipbuilding, iron manufactures, glass blowing, leather dressing and tooling, gem cutting and setting, textiles… all organized in proud guilds (scuole) that united master and man in patriotic fellowship. But perhaps more of Venetian opulence came from the mercantile marine whose sails flapped on the lagoons, whose galleys took the products of Venice and her mainland dependencies, and the German and other wares that scaled the Alps, and carried them to Egypt, Greece, Byzantium, and Asia, and returned from the East with silks, spices, rugs, drugs, and slaves. The exports of an average year were valued at 10,000,000 ducats ($250,000,000?);3 no other city in Europe could equal this trade. The Venetian vessels could be seen in a hundred ports, from Trebizond in the Black Sea to Cadiz, Lisbon, London, Bruges, even in Iceland.4 On the Rialto, the commercial center of Venice, merchants could be seen from half the globe. Marine insurance covered this traffic, and a tax on imports and exports was the mainstay of the state. The annual income of the Venetian government in 1455 was 800,000 ducats ($20,000,000?); in the same year the revenue of Florence was some 200,000 ducats, of Naples 310,000, of the Papal States 400,000, of Milan 500,000, of all Christian Spain, 800,000.5