The Renaissance

  Rienzo, exalted by success, more and more ignored and thrust aside the papal representative whom he had associated with himself in office and authority. Cardinals from Italy and from France warned Clement that a unified Italy—and much more an empire ruled from Rome—would make the Italian Church a prisoner of the state. On October 7 Clement commissioned his legate Bertrand de Deux to offer Rienzo a choice between deposition and the restriction of his powers to the secular affairs of the city of Rome. After some resistance Cola yielded; he promised obedience to the Pope, and withdrew the edicts that had annulled imperial and papal privileges. Unmollified, Clement resolved to unseat the incalculable tribune. On December 3 he published a bull stigmatizing Cola as a criminal and a heretic, and called upon the Romans to banish him. The legate suggested that if this should not be done no jubilee would be proclaimed. Meanwhile the nobles had raised another army, which now advanced upon Rome. Rienzo had the tocsin rung to call the people to arms. Only a few came; many resented the taxes he had levied; some preferred the profits of a jubilee to the responsibilities of freedom. As the forces of the aristocracy neared the Capitol Rienzo’s wonted courage waned; he discarded the insignia of his office, said good-by to his friends, broke into tears, and shut himself up in the Castello Sant’ Angelo (December 15, 1347). The triumphant nobles re-entered their city palaces, and the papal legate named two of them as senators to rule Rome.

  Unmolested by the nobles but still under the ban of the Church, Rienzo fled to Naples, and then to the mountain forests of the Abruzzi near Sulmona; there he donned the garb of a penitent, and for two years lived as an anchorite. Then, surviving a thousand hardships and tribulations, he made his way, secretly and in disguise, through Italy and the Alps and Austria to the Emperor Charles IV at Prague. He pronounced before him an angry indictment of the popes; to their absence from Rome he attributed the anarchy and poverty of that city, and to their temporal power and policy the abiding division of Italy. Charles rebuked him and defended the popes; but when Clement demanded that Cola be sent as a papal prisoner to Avignon Charles kept him in protective confinement in a fortress on the Elbe. After a year of unbearable inactivity and isolation Cola asked to be sent to the papal court. On his journey to Avignon crowds flocked to see him, and gallant knights offered to guard him with their swords. On August 10, 1352, he reached Avignon in such miserable raiment that all men pitied him. He asked for Petrarch, who was at Vaucluse; the poet responded by issuing to the people of Rome a clarion call to protect the man who had offered them liberty.

  To the Roman people… invincible… conquerors of nations!… Your former tribune is now a captive in the power of strangers; and—a sad spectacle indeed!—like a nocturnal thief or a traitor to his country, he pleads his cause in chains. The highest of earthly tribunals refuses him the opportunity of a legitimate defense…. Rome assuredly does not merit such treatment. Her citizens, once inviolable by alien law… are now indiscriminately maltreated; and this is done not only without the guilt that attaches to a crime, but even with the high praise of virtue…. He is accused not of betraying but of defending liberty; he is guilty not of surrendering but of holding the Capitol. The supreme crime with which he is charged, and which merits expiation on the scaffold, is that he dared affirm that the Roman Empire is still at Rome, and in possession of the Roman people. O impious age! O preposterous jealousy, malevolence without precedent! What dost thou, O Christ! ineffable and incorruptible judge of all? Where are thine eyes with which thou art wont to scatter the clouds of human misery?… Why dost thou not, with thy forked lightning, put an end to this unholy trial?26

  Clement did not ask for Cola’s death, but ordered him kept in custody in the tower of the papal palace at Avignon. While Rienzo studied Scripture and Livy there, a new tribune, Francesco Baroncelli, seized power in Rome, banished the nobles, flouted the papal legate, and allied himself with the Ghibelline supporters of the emperors against the popes. Clement’s successor, Innocent VI, released Cola, and sent him to Italy as an aide to Cardinal Albornoz, whom he charged with restoring the papal authority in Rome. As the subtle cardinal and the subdued dictator neared the capital a revolt was staged; Baroncelli was deposed and killed, and the Romans turned over the city to Albornoz. The populace welcomed Rienzo with arches of triumph and joyful acclamations in crowded streets. Albornoz appointed him senator, and delegated to him the secular government of Rome (1353).

  But years of imprisonment had fattened the body, broken the courage, and dulled the mind of the once brilliant and fearless tribune. His policies cleaved to the papal line, and shunned the grand emprises of his younger reign. The nobility still hated him, and the proletariat, seeing in him now a cautious conservative cured of Utopia, turned against him as disloyal to their cause. When the Colonna declared war upon him, and besieged him in Palestrina, his unpaid troops verged on mutiny; he borrowed money to pay them, raised taxes to redeem the debt, and alienated the middle class. Hardly two months after his return to power a revolutionary mob marched to the Capitol shouting “Long live the people! Death to the traitor Cola di Rienzo!” He came out of his palace in knightly armor, and tried to control the crowd with eloquence. But the rebels drowned his voice with noise, and showered him with missiles; an arrow struck him in the head, and he withdrew into the palace. The mob set fire to the doors, broke through them, and plundered the rooms. Hiding in one of these, Rienzo hastily cut off his beard, donned a porter’s cloak, and piled some bedding upon his head. Emerging, he passed through part of the crowd unrecognized. But his gold bracelet betrayed him, and he was led as a prisoner to the steps of the Capitol, where he himself had condemned men to death. He asked for a hearing, and began to move the people with his speech; but an artisan fearful of eloquence cut him short with a sword thrust in the stomach. A hundred demiheroes plunged their knives into his dead body. The bloody corpse was dragged through the streets, and was hung up like carrion at a butcher’s stall. It remained there two days, a target for public contumely and urchins’ stones.27

  V. THE WANDERING SCHOLAR

  Rienzo failed to restore ancient Rome, which was dead to all but poetry; Petrarch succeeded in restoring Roman literature, which had never died. He had so openly supported Cola’s revolt that he had forfeited the favor of the Colonna in Avignon. For a time he thought of joining Rienzo in Rome; he was as far on the way as Genoa when he heard that the tribune’s position and conduct were deteriorating. He changed his course to Parma (1347). He was in Italy when the Black Death came, taking many of his friends, and killing Laura in Avignon. In 1348 he accepted the invitation of Iacopo II da Carrara to be his guest in Padua.

  The city had a burdensome antiquity; it was already hundreds of years old when Livy was born there in 59 B.C. It became a free commune in 1174, suffered the tyranny of Ezzelino (1237–56), recovered its independence, sang litanies to liberty, and subjected Vicenza to its domination. Attacked and almost overcome by Can Grande della Scala of Verona, it abandoned its freedom and chose as dictator Iacopo I da Carrara (1318), a man as hard as the marble that bore his name. Later members of the family succeeded to his power by inheritance or assassination. Petrarch’s host seized the reins in 1345 by murdering his predecessor, tried to atone by good government, but was stabbed to death after four years of rule. Francesco I da Carrara (1350–89), in a remarkable reign of almost forty years, raised Padua to a passing rivalry with Milan, Florence, and Venice. He made the mistake of joining Genoa against Venice in the bitter war of 1378; Venice won, and subjected Padua to her rule (1404).

  Meanwhile the city contributed more than its share to the cultured life of Italy. The majestic church of St. Anthony, known affectionately as II Santo, was completed in 1307. The great Salone, or Sala della Ragione (Hall of Parliament), was repaired in 1306 by the monastic architect Fra Giovanni Eremitano, and still stands. The Reggia, or Royal Palace (1345f), had 400 rooms, many with frescoes that were the pride of the Carraresi; nothing remains of them but a tower whose celebrated clock first chimed
in 1364. At the beginning of the century an ambitious merchant, Enrico Scrovegni, bought a palace in the old Roman amphitheater known as the Arena, and summoned Italy’s most famous sculptor, Giovanni Pisano, and her most famous painter, Giotto, to decorate the chapel of his new home (1303–5); as a result the little Arena Chapel is now known throughout the educated world. Here the genial Giotto painted half a hundred murals, roundels, and medallions, telling again the wondrous story of the Virgin and her Son, surrounding the main frescoes with the heads of prophets and saints, and with ample female forms symbolizing the virtues and vices of mankind. Over the inner portal his pupils, with half-hearted seriousness, depicted the Last Judgment in a carnal confusion of gargoylelike grotesques. Mantegna, decorating a chapel in the near-by church of the Eremitani a century and a half later, may have smiled at the simple draftsmanship, the primitive perspective, the monotonous similarity of faces, poses, and figures, the imperfect sense and command of anatomy, the blonde heaviness of nearly all the figures, as if the Lombards of Padua were still Longobards freshly come from well-fed Germany. But the lovely features of the Virgin in the Nativity, the noble head of Jesus in the Raising of Lazarus, the stately high priest in The Wooers, the calm Christ and coarse Judas of The Betrayal, the serene grace, harmonious composition, and developing action of the spacious panorama in color and form, make these paintings—still fresh and clear after six centuries—the first pictorial triumph of the fourteenth century.

  Petrarch may have seen the Arena frescoes; certainly he appreciated Giotto, for in his will he left to Francesco da Carrara a Madonna “by that excellent painter, Giotto, a picture whose beauty… surprises the masters of the art.”28 But at the time he was more interested in literature than in art. He must have been stimulated by hearing that Albertino Mussato, a humanist even before Petrarch, had been crowned as Padua’s poet laureate in 1314 for writing a Latin drama, Ecerinis, in the style of Seneca; this, so far as we know, was the first Renaissance play. Surely Petrarch visited the university that was the city’s noble pride. It was at this time the most celebrated school in Italy, rivaling Bologna as a center of legal training, and Paris as a hotbed of philosophy. Petrarch was shocked by the frank “Averroism” of some Paduan professors, who questioned the immortality of the individual soul, and spoke of Christianity as a useful superstition privately discarded by educated men.

  In 1348 we find our restless poet at Mantua, then at Ferrara. In 1350 he joined the flow of pilgrims bound for the jubilee in Rome. On the way he visited Florence for the first time, and established a cordial friendship with Boccaccio. Thereafter, said Petrarch, they “shared a single heart.”29 In 1351, on Boccaccio’s urging, the Florentine Signory repealed the edict that had confiscated Ser Petracco’s property, and sent Boccaccio to Padua to offer Petrarch a money recompense and a professorship in the University of Florence. When he rejected the offer Florence repealed the repeal.

  VI. GIOTTO

  It is difficult to love medieval Florence,* she was so hard and bitter in industry and politics; but it is easy to admire her, for she devoted her wealth to the creation of beauty. There, in the very youth of Petrarch, the Renaissance was in full swing.

  It developed in a stimulating atmosphere of business competition, family feuds, and private violence unparalleled in the rest of Italy. The population was divided by class war, and each class itself was split into factions merciless in victory and vengeful in defeat. At any moment the defection of a few families from one parte to another would tip the scales of power. At any moment some discontented element might take to arms and try to oust the government; if successful it exiled the leaders of the beaten party, usually confiscated their property, sometimes burned down their homes. But this economic strife and political agitation were not all of Florentine life. Though more devoted to their party than to their city, the citizens had a proud civic sense, and spent much of their substance for the common good. Rich individuals or guilds would pay for paving a street, constructing sewers, improving the water supply, housing a public market, establishing or improving churches, hospitals, or schools. An esthetic sense as keen as that of the ancient Greeks or the modern French dedicated public and private funds to the embellishment of the city with architecture, sculpture, and painting, and to the interior adornment of homes with these and a dozen minor arts. Florentine pottery led all Europe in this period. Florentine goldsmiths decorated necks, bosoms, hands, wrists, girdles, altars, tables, armor, coins with jewelry or intarsia or engraved or embossed designs unsurpassed in that or any other age.

  And now the artist, reflecting the new emphasis on personal ability or virtù, stood out from the guild or the group, and identified his product with his name. Niccolò Pisano had already freed sculpture from limitation to ecclesiastical motives, and subservience to architectural lines, by uniting a sturdy naturalism with the physical idealism of the Greeks. His pupil Andrea Pisano cast for the Florentine Baptistery (1300–6) two bronze halfdoors depicting in twenty-eight reliefs the development of the arts and sciences since Adam delved and Eve span; and these fourteenth-century works survive comparison with Ghiberti’s fifteenth-century “doors to Paradise” on the same building. In 1334 the Florentine Signory approved the designs of Giotto for a tower to bear the weight and scatter the chimes of the cathedral bells, and a decree was passed, in the spirit of the age, that “the campanile should be built so as to exceed in magnificence, height, and excellence of workmanship everything of the kind achieved of old by the Greeks and Romans when at the zenith of their greatness.”30 The loveliness of the tower lies not in its square and undistinguished form (which Giotto had wished to top with a spire), but in the Gothic traceried windows, and the reliefs, in colored marble, carved on the lower panels by Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Luca della Robbia. After Giotto’s death the work was carried on by Pisano, Donatello, and Francesco Talenti, to whom the tower owes the culminating beauty of its highest arcade (1359).

  Giotto di Bondone dominated the painting of the fourteenth century as Petrarch dominated its poetry; and the artist rivaled the poet in ubiquity. Painter, sculptor, architect, capitalist, man of the world, equally ready with artistic conceptions, practical devices, and humorous repartee, Giotto moved through life with the confidence of a Rubens, and spawned masterpieces in Florence, Rome, Assisi, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Faenza, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo, Padua, Verona, Naples, Urbino, Milan. He seems never to have worried about obtaining commissions; and when he went to Naples it was as the palace guest of the king. He married and had ugly children, but this did not disturb the placid grace of his compositions, or the cheerful tenor of his life. He leased looms to artisans at twice the ordinary rental;31 however, he told the story of St. Francis, the apostle of poverty, in one of the outstanding works of the Renaissance.

  He was still a youth when Cardinal Stefaneschi called him to Rome to design a mosaic—the celebrated Navicella, or Little Ship, showing Christ saving Peter from the waves; it survives, considerably altered, in the vestibule of St. Peter’s, inconspicuous above and behind the portico colonnade. It was probably the same Cardinal who commissioned the polyptych preserved in the Vatican. These products show an immature Giotto, vigorous in conception, weak in execution. Possibly a study of Pietro Cavallini’s mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere, and his fresco in Santa Cecilia, helped to form Giotto in those Roman years; while the naturalistic sculpture of Niccolò Pisano may have moved him to turn his eyes from the works of his predecessors to the actual features and feelings of living women and men. “Giotto appeared,” said Leonardo da Vinci, “and drew what he saw,”32 and the Byzantine petrifaction faded from Italian art.

  Moving to Padua, Giotto painted in three years the famous frescoes of the Arena Chapel. Perhaps at Padua he met Dante; he may have known him in Florence; Vasari, always interesting and sometimes accurate, calls Dante the “close companion and friend” of Giotto,33 and ascribes to Giotto a portrait of Dante that formed part of a fresco in the Florentine Bargello or Palace of the Podesta. Th
e poet, with exceptional amiability, celebrates the painter in The Divine Comedy.34

  In 1318 two banking families, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, engaged Giotto to tell in frescoes the stories of St. Francis, St. John the Baptist, and St. John the Evangelist, in the chapels that they were dedicating in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. These paintings were whitewashed in later years; they were uncovered in 1853 and were repainted, so that only the drawing and the composition are Giotto’s. A like fate befell the celebrated frescoes in the double church of St. Francis at Assisi. That hilltop shrine is one of the major goals of pilgrimage in Italy, and those visitors who come to view the paintings attributed to Cimabue and Giotto seem as numerous as those who come to honor or solicit the saint. It was probably Giotto who planned the subjects and drew the outlines for the lower frescoes of the Upper Church; for the rest he seems to have confined himself to supervising the work of his pupils. These frescoes of the Upper Church narrate in detail the life of St. Francis; Christ Himself had rarely received so extensive a painted biography. They are masterly in their conception and composition, pleasant in their gentle mood and flowing harmony; they end once and for all the hieratic stiffness of Byzantine forms; but they lack depth and force and individuality, they are graceful tableaux without the color of passion or the blood of life. The frescoes in the Lower Church, less mangled by time, mark an advance in Giotto’s power. He seems to have been directly responsible for the pictures in the Magdalen Chapel, while his aides painted the allegories illustrating the Franciscan vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. In this duplex church the legend of Francis gave a mighty stimulus, almost a new birth, to Italian painting, and generated a tradition ideally completed in the work of the Dominican Fra Angelico.