The Renaissance
6. Minor Artists and Arts
We must retrace our steps now, and briefly honor two painters who were born after Titian but died long before his death. We bow, in passing, to Girolamo Savoldo, who came to Venice from Brescia and Florence, and painted pictures of high excellence: the Madonna and Saints now in the Brera Gallery; an ecstatic St. Matthew in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and a Magdalen in Berlin, far more tempting than the stout lady of that name in Titian.
Giacomo Nigreti was named Palma from some hills near his birthplace, Serina, in the Bergamasque Alps; he became Palma Vecchio when his grand-nephew Palma Giovane also acquired fame. For a time he was considered the equal of Titian by their contemporaries. Perhaps some jealousy arose between them, which was not eased by Titian’s stealing of Giacomo’s mistress. Giacomo had painted her as Violante; Titian had her pose for his Flora. Like Titian, Palma handled sacred and profane themes with equal skill if not with equal zest; he specialized in Sacred Conversations or Holy Families, but probably owed his fame to his portraits of Venetian blondes—full-bosomed women who dyed their hair to an auburn hue. Nevertheless his finest pictures are religious: a Santa Barbara in the church of Santa Maria Formosa, the patron saint of the Venetian bombardiers; and the Jacob and Rachel of the Dresden gallery—a handsome shepherd sharing a kiss with a buxom lass. Palma’s portraits would have ranked with the best of his time and city had not Titian produced half a hundred deeper ones.
His pupil Bonifazio de’ Pitati, called Veronese from his birthplace, adopted the style of Giorgione’s Fête champêtre and Titian’s Diana to adorn Venetian walls and furniture with attractive landscapes and nudes; and his Diana and Actaeon is worthy of these masters.
Lorenzo Lotto, less popular than Bonifazio in their day, has gained repute with the years. A shy, pious, melancholy spirit, he was not quite at home in Venice, where paganism resumed its sway as soon as the church bells and choirs ceased to sing. At the age of twenty (1500) he produced one of the most original paintings of the Renaissance, the St. Jerome in the Louvre: no hackneyed image of the emaciated eremite, but an almost Chinese study of somber chasms and mountainous rocks, amid which the old scholar is a minor element, at first hardly seen; this is the first European painting that reproduces nature in its wild dominance rather than as an imaginary background.40 Passing to Treviso, Lorenzo painted for the church of Santa Cristina a monumental altar back of The Madonna Enthroned, which made his fame throughout northern Italy. Another success with a Madonna for the church of San Domenico at Recanati earned him a call to Rome. There Julius II commissioned him to paint some rooms in the Vatican; but when Raphael came the frescoes that Lotto had begun were destroyed. Perhaps this humiliation helped to darken Lorenzo’s mood. Bergamo better appreciated his peculiar talent for moderating the warm colors of Venetian art into softer tones more congruous with piety; twelve years he labored there, modestly paid but content to be first in Bergamo rather than fourth in Venice. For the church of San Bartolommeo he painted an overcrowded but still beautiful altarpiece, The Madonna in Majesty. Lovelier is an Adoration of the Shepherds at Brescia; the color, while full and pervasive, has a subdued tone more restful to eye and spirit than the brilliant effects of the great Venetians.
A sensitive soul like Lotto’s could at times penetrate more deeply into a personality than Titian. Few artists have caught the glow of healthy youth so intimately as in Lotto’s Portrait of a Boy in the Castello at Milan. His Self-Portrait shows Lorenzo himself apparently well and strong, but he must have known much sickness and pain to represent illness so sympathetically as in The Sick Man of the Borghese Gallery, or in another of the same title in the Galleria Doria at Rome—an emaciated hand pressed over the heart, a look of pain and bewilderment on the face, as if asking why should he, so good or so great, be chosen by the germ? A more famous portrait, Laura di Pola, shows a woman of quiet beauty, also puzzled by life, and finding no answer except in religious faith.
Lotto too came to that consolation. Restless, solitary, unmarried, he wandered from place to place, perhaps from philosophy to philosophy, until in his final years (1552–6) he settled down as a resident in the convent of the Santa Casa at Loreto, near the Holy House that pilgrims believed to have once sheltered the Mother of God. In 1554 he gave all his property to the convent, and took an oblate’s vows. Titian called him “as good as goodness, and as virtuous as virtue.”41 Lotto had outlived the Pagan Renaissance, and had sunk to rest, so to speak, in the arms of the Council of Trent.
In that vibrant century—1450–1550 —during which Venetian commerce suffered so many defeats, and Venetian painting scored so many victories, the minor arts shared in the cultural exuberance. It was not for them a Renaissance, for they were old and mature in Italy by Petrarch’s time, and merely continued their medieval excellence. Perhaps the mosaicists had lost some of their skill or patience; even so their work on St. Mark’s was at least abreast of their age. The potters were now learning to make porcelain; Marco Polo had brought some from China; a sultan had sent fine specimens of it to the doge (1461); by 1470 the Venetians were making their own. The glass blowers at Murano reached in this period the acme of their art, making cristallo of exquisite purity and design. The names of the leading glass blowers were known throughout Europe, and every royal house competed for their wares. Most of them used a mold or model; some put the mold aside, blew a bubble into the molten glass as it poured from the furnace, and shaped the substance into cups, vases, chalices, ornaments of a hundred colors and a thousand forms. Sometimes, learning from the Moslems, they painted the surface with colored enamel or gold. The glass artisans kept jealously in their families the secret processes by which they achieved their miracles of fragile beauty, and the Venetian government passed stern laws to prevent these esoteric subleties from becoming known in other lands. In 1454 the Council of Ten decreed that
if a workman carry into another country any art or craft to the detriment of the Republic, he will be ordered to return; if he disobeys, his nearest relatives will be imprisoned, in order that the solidarity of the family may persuade him to return; if he persists in his disobedience, secret measures will be taken to have him killed wherever he may be.42
The only known case of such an assassination was at Vienna in the eighteenth century. Despite the law, Venetian artists and artisans found their way over the Alps in the sixteenth century, and brought their technique to France and Germany as gifts to the conquerors of Italy.
Half the artisans of Venice were artists. The pewterers embellished dishes, platters, beakers, and cups with graceful borders and floral designs. The armorers were famous for damascened cuirasses, helmets, shields, swords, and daggers, and sheaths chased or engraved with elegant patterns; and other masters might make for short weapons ivory handles studded with gems. In Venice, about 1410, Baldassare degli Embriachi, a Florentine, carved in bone the great altarpiece, in thirty-nine sections, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The wood carvers not only made fine sculptural figures and reliefs, like the Circumcision in the Louvre, or the chest painted by Bartolommeo Montagna and formerly in the bombed Poldi-Pezzoli Museum in Milan; they decorated the ceilings and doors and furniture of Venetian aristocrats with carvings, bosses, and intarsia, and chiseled the choir stalls of such churches as the Frari and San Zaccaria. Venetian jewelers met a heavy foreign as well as domestic demand, but took time to rise from quantity to quality. The goldsmiths, now under German instead of Oriental influence, turned out tons of plate, personal adornment, and decorative fixtures for everything from cathedrals to shoes. The illumination and calligraphy of manuscripts continued, slowly yielding to print. French and Flemish influences entered into the designs of Venetian textiles, but Venetian dyes and skills gave the products their favored texture and hues. It was from Venice that the queen of France ordered three hundred pieces of dyed satin (1532); and it was in the soft and luxurious stuffs worked in Venetian shops, and in the colors given them in Venetian vats, that the great painters of Venice
found models for the lordly and glowing robes that made half the brillance of their art. Venice almost realized Ruskin’s ideal of an economy in which every industry would be an art, and every product would proudly express the personality and artistry of the artisan.
VI. VENETIAN LETTERS
1. Aldus Manutius
Venice was in this period too busy living to care much for books; and still its scholars, libraries, poets, and printers shared in giving it a fair name. It took no prominent part in the humanist movement; nevertheless humanism had here one of its noblest exemplars—Ermolao Barbaro, who was crowned poet by an emperor at fourteen, taught Greek, translated Aristotle, served his fellow men as a physician, his country as a diplomat, and his Church as a cardinal, and was killed by the plague at thirty-nine. Venetian women made as yet little pretense to education; they were content to be physically alluring, or maternally fertile, or finally venerable; but in 1530 Irene of Spilimbergo opened a salon for men of letters, studied painting under Titian, sang sweetly, played well on viol, harpsichord, and lute, and talked learnedly about ancient and modern literature. Venice gave protection to intellectual refugees from the Turks in the East and from the Christians in the West; here Aretino would laugh securely at popes and kings, as, centuries later, Byron would here celebrate their decay. Aristocrats and prelates formed clubs or academies for the cultivation of music and letters, and opened their homes and libraries to the assiduous, the melodious, and the erudite. Monasteries, churches, and private families collected books; Cardinal Domenico Grimani had eight thousand, which he gave to Venice; Cardinal Bessarion did the same with his precious hoard of manuscripts. To house these, and the remnants of Petrarch’s bequest, the government twice ordered the erection of a public library; war and other distractions foiled the plan; at last (1536) the Senate engaged Iacopo Sansovino to build the Libreria Vecchia, architecturally the most handsome library in Europe.
Meanwhile Venetian printers were producing the finest printed books of the age, perhaps of all time. They were not the first in Italy. Sweynheim and Pannartz, once aides to Johann Fust in Mainz, set up the first Italian press in a Benedictine monastery at Subiaco in the Apennines (1464); in 1467 they transferred their equipment to Rome, and published twenty-three books in the next three years. In 1469, or earlier, printing began in Venice and Milan. In 1471 Bernardo Cennini opened a printing establishment in Florence, to the dismay of Politian, who mourned that “now the most stupid ideas can in a moment be transferred into a thousand volumes and spread abroad”43 Copyists thrown out of work vainly denounced the new gadget. By the end of the fifteenth century 4987 books had been printed in Italy: 300 in Florence, 629 in Milan, 925 in Rome, 2835 in Venice.44
The superiority of Venice in this regard was due to Teobaldo Manucci, who changed his name to Aldo Manuzio, and later Latinized it into Aldus Manutius. Born at Bassiano in the Romagna (1450), he learned Latin at Rome and Greek at Ferrara, both under Guarino da Verona; and then him-self lectured at Ferrara on the classics. Pico della Mirandola, one of his pupils, invited him to come to Carpi and tutor his two nephews, Lionello and Alberto Pio. Teacher and pupils developed a lasting mutual affection; Aldus added the name Pio to his own, and Alberto and his mother, Countess of Carpi, agreed to finance the first large-scale adventure in publishing. Aldus’ plan was to collect, edit, print, and broadcast at nominal cost all the significant Greek literature that had been salvaged from the storms of time. It was a heady enterprise for a dozen reasons: manuscripts were hard to get; different manuscripts of the same classic varied dishearteningly in their text; nearly all manuscripts were heavy with errors of transcription; editors would have to be found and paid to collate and revise texts; fonts of Latin and Greek type would have to be designed and cast; paper would have to be imported in large quantities; typesetters and pressmen would have to be engaged and trained; a machinery of distribution would need to be improvised; a book-buying public would have to be coaxed into existence on a wider base than ever before; and all this would have to be financed without the protection of copyright laws.
Aldus chose Venice for his headquarters because its commercial connections made it an excellent center for distribution; because it was the richest city in Italy, and had many magnates who might want to adorn their rooms with uncut books; and because it harbored scores of refugee Greek scholars who would be glad to be employed as editors or proofreaders. John of Speyer had already established the first printing press in Venice (1469?); Nicholas Jensen of France, who had learned the new art in Gutenberg’s Mainz, set up another a year later. In 1479 Jensen sold his press to Andrea Torresano. In 1490 Aldus Manutius settled in Venice, and in 1499 he married Torresano’s daughter.
In his home near the church of Sant’ Agostino Aldus gathered Greek scholars, fed them, bedded them, and set them to editing classic texts. He talked Greek with them, and wrote in Greek his dedications and prefaces. In his house the new type was molded and cast, the ink was made, the books were printed and bound. His first publication (1495) was a Greek and Latin grammar by Constantine Lascaris, and in that same year he began to issue the works of Aristotle in the original. In 1496 he published the Greek grammar of Theodorus Gaza, and in 1497 a Greek-Latin dictionary compiled by himself. For he continued to be a scholar even amid the hazards and tribulations of publishing. So in 1502, after years of study, he printed his own Rudimenta grammaticae linguae Latinae, with an introduction to Hebrew for good measure.
From these technical beginnings he went on to publish one after another of the Greek classics (1495f): Musaeus (Hero and Leander), Hesiod, Theocritus, Theognis, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Lysias, Plato, Pindar, Plutarch’s Moralia.… In those same years he put forth a large number of Latin and Italian works, from Quintilian to Bembo, and the Adagia of Erasmus, who, sensing the vital import of Aldo’s enterprise, came in person to live with him for a time, and edit not only his own Adagia or Dictionary of Quotations, but Terence, Plautus, and Seneca too. For the Latin books Aldus had a graceful semiscript type designed, not, as legend said, from the handwriting of Petrarch, but by Francesco da Bologna, an expert calligrapher; this is the type that we now, from that origin, call italic. For the Greek texts he cut a font based on the careful handwriting of his chief Greek scholar, Marcus Musurus of Crete. He marked all his publications with a motto, Festina lente—”Make haste slowly”—and accompanied it with a dolphin symbolizing speed and an anchor standing for stability; this symbol, along with the pictured tower that Torresano had used, established the custom of the printer’s or publisher’s colophon.*
Aldus worked at his enterprise quite literally night and day. “Those who cultivate letters,” he wrote, in his preface to Aristotle’s Organon, “must be supplied with the books necessary for their purpose; and until this supply is secured I shall not rest.” Over the door of his study he placed a warning inscription: “Whoever thou art, thou art earnestly requested by Aldus to state thy business briefly, and to take thy departure promptly…. For this is a place of work.”45 He was so absorbed in his publishing campaign that he neglected his family and his friends, and ruined his health. A thousand tribulations sapped his energy: strikes disrupted his schedule, war suspended it for a year during the Venetian struggle for survival against the League of Cambrai; rival printers in Italy, France, and Germany pirated the editions whose manuscripts had cost him dearly, and whose texts he had paid scholars to revise. But the sight of his small and handy volumes, clearly typed and neatly bound, going forth to a widening public at a modest price (about two dollars in the currency of today) gladdened his heart and repaid his toil. Now, he told himself, the glory of Greece would shine upon all who cared to receive it.46
Inspired by his devotion, Venetian scholars joined with him to found the Neacademia, or New Academy (1500), dedicated to the acquisition, editing, and publishing of Greek literature. The members, at their meetings, spoke only Greek; they changed their names to Greek forms; they shared the ta
sks of editing. Distinguished men labored in this Academy—Bembo, Alberto Pio, Erasmus of Holland, Linacre of England. Aldus gave them much credit for the success of his enterprise, but it was his own energy and passion that carried it through. He died exhausted and poor (1515), but fulfilled. His sons continued the work; but when their son, Aldo the second, died (1597), the firm dissolved. It had served its purpose faithfully. It had taken Greek literature from the half-hidden shelves of rich collectors, and had scattered it so widely that even the ravaging of Italy in the third decade of the sixteenth century, and the desolation of northern Europe by the Thirty Years’ War, could lose that heritage as it had been so largely lost in the dying ages of ancient Rome.
2. Bembo
Besides helping to revive the literature of Greece, the members of the New Academy contributed vigorously to the literature of their time. Antonio Coccio, called Sabellicus, chronicled Venetian history in his Decades. Andrea Navagero composed Latin poems so nearly perfect in form that his proud countrymen hailed him as having snatched the leadership of letters from Florence to Venice. Marino Sanudo kept a lively diary of current events in politics, literature, art, manners, and morals; the fifty-eight volumes of these Diarii picture the life of Venice more fully and vividly than any history of any city in Italy.
Sanudo wrote in the racy language of daily speech; his friend Bembo devoted half a long life to polishing an artificial style in Latin and Italian. Pietro imbibed culture in his cradle, for he was the child of rich and lettered Venetians. Moreover, as if to confirm his literary purity, he was born in Florence, proud home of the Tuscan dialect. He studied Greek in Sicily under Constantine Lascaris, and philosophy at Padua under Pomponazzi. Perhaps, if we may judge from his conduct—for he seldom took sin very seriously—he imbibed some skepticism from Pomponazzi, who doubted the immortality of the soul; but he was too much of a gentleman to disturb the consolations of the faithful; and when the reckless professor was accused of heresy Bembo persuaded Leo X to deal with him leniently.