The Renaissance

  Bembo’s happiest days were spent at Ferrara, from his twenty-eighth to his thirty-sixth year (1498–1506). There he fell in love, if only in a literary way, with Lucrezia Borgia, queen of that courtly court. He forgot her dubious background at Rome in the lure of her quiet grace, the glow of her “Titian” hair, the fascination of her fame; for fame too, like beauty, can intoxicate. He wrote her, in scholarly diction, letters as tender as might comport with his safety in the precincts of that excellent gunner, her husband Alfonso. He dedicated to her an Italian dialogue on Platonic love, Gli asolani (1505); and he composed in her praise Latin elegiacs as elegant as any in Rome’s Silver Age. She wrote to him carefully, and may have sent him that tress of her hair which is preserved, with her letters to him, in the Ambrosian Library at Milan.47

  When Bembo moved from Ferrara to Urbino (1506) he was at the height of his charm. He was tall and handsome, of noble birth and breeding, of distinguished presence without obtrusive pride; he could write poetry in three languages, and his letters were already prized; his conversation was that of a Christian, a scholar, and a gentleman. His Asolani, published during his stay at Urbino, fell in with the spirit of that court. What topic could be more pleasant than love?—what mise en scène fitter for such discourse than the gardens of Caterina Cornaro at Asolo?—what occasion more suitable than the wedding of one of her maids of honor?—who could better speak of love, however Platonic, than the three youths and three maidens into whose mouths Bembo put his savory mixture of philosophy and poetry? Venice, whose artists took hints and scenes from the book, Ferrara, whose Duchess received the adoring dedication, Rome, where ecclesiastics were glad ragionar (d’amore, Urbino, which boasted the author in the flesh—all Italy acclaimed Bembo as a master of delicate sentiment and polished style. When Castiglione idealized in The Courtier the discussions he had heard or imagined in the Ducal Palace at Urbino, he gave to Bembo the most distinguished role in the dialogue, and chose him to phrase the famed concluding passages on Platonic love.

  In 1512 Bembo accompanied Giuliano de’ Medici to Rome. A year later Giuliano’s brother became Leo X. Bembo was soon lodged in the Vatican as a secretary to the Pope. Leo liked his wit, his Ciceronian Latin, his easy-going ways. For seven years Bembo was an ornament of the papal court, an idol of society, an intellectual father to Raphael, a favorite with millionaires and generous women. He was only in minor orders, and accepted the opinion current in Rome that his trial marriage with the Church did not forbid a little gracious venery. Vittoria Colonna, purest of the pure, doted on him.

  Meanwhile, at Venice, Ferrara, Urbino, Rome, he wrote such Latin poetry as Catullus or Tibullus might have penned—elegies, idyls, epitaphs, odes; many frankly pagan, some, like his Priapus, in the best vein of Renaissance licentiousness. The Latin of Bembo and Politian was idiomatically perfect, but it came at the wrong time; had they been born fourteen centuries earlier they would have been de rigueur in the schools of modern Europe; writing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they could not be the voice of their country, their epoch, even of their class. Bembo realized this, and in an essay Delia volgar lingua he defended the use of Italian for literary purposes. He tried to show the way by composing canzoni in the manner of Petrarch; but here his passion for polish devitalized his verse, and turned his amours into poetic conceits. Nevertheless many of these poems were set to music as madrigals, some by the great Palestrina himself.

  The sensitive Bembo found Rome a ghostly city after the death of his friends Bibbiena, Chigi, and Raphael. He retired from his papal post (1520), and, like Petrarch, sought health and ease in a rural home near Padua. Now, at fifty, he fell in love in no mild Platonic way. For the next twenty-two years he lived in a free union with Donna Morosina, who gave him not only three children but such comforts and consolations, such solicitude and care, as had never graced his fame, and now came doubly welcome to his declining years. He still enjoyed the income of several ecclesiastical benefices. He used his wealth largely to collect fine paintings and sculptures, and among them Venus and Jove held an honored place beside Mary and Christ.48 His home became a goal of literary pilgrimage, a salon of artists and wits; and from that throne he laid down the laws of style for Italy. Even while papal secretary he had cautioned his associate Sadoleto to avoid reading the Epistles of St. Paul, lest their unpolished speech of the commonalty should mar his taste; “put away these trifles,” Bembo told him, “for such absurdities do not become a man of dignity.”49 All Latin, he told Italy, must be modeled upon Cicero, all Italian upon Petrarch and Boccaccio. He himself, in his old age, wrote histories of Florence and Venice; they are beautiful and dead. But when his Morosina died the great stylist forgot his rules, forgot Plato and Lucrezia and Castiglione, and wrote to a friend a letter that, perhaps alone of all that flowed from his pen, invites remembrance:

  I have lost the dearest heart in the world, a heart which tenderly watched over my life—which loved it and sustained it neglectful of its own; a heart so much the master of itself, so disdainful of vain embellishments and adornments, of silk and gold, of jewels and treasures of price, that it was content with the single and (so she assured me) supreme joy of the love I bore it. This heart, moreover, had for vesture the softest, gracefulest, daintiest of limbs; it had at its service pleasant features, and the sweetest, most graciously endowed form that I have ever met in this land.

  He can never forget her dying words:

  “I commend our children to you, and beseech you to have care of them, both for my sake and for yours. Be sure they are your own, for I have never deceived you; that is why I could take Our Lord’s body just now with a soul at peace.” Then, after a long pause, she added, “Rest with God,” and a few minutes afterward closed her eyes forever, those eyes that had been the clear-shining faithful stars of my weary pilgrimage through life.50

  Four years later he was still mourning her. Losing his ties with life, he became pious at last; and in 1539 Paul III could make him a priest and a cardinal. For his remaining eight years he was a pillar and exemplar of the Church.

  VII. VERONA

  If now, leaving the egregious Aretino to a later chapter, we move out of Venice to her northern and western dependencies, we shall find there too some radiance of the Golden Age. Treviso could boast that it had begotten Lorenzo Lotto and Paris Bordone; and its cathedral had an Annunciation by Titian and a fine choir designed by the innumerable Lombardi. The little town of Pordenone gave its name to Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchi, and still shows in its duomo one of his chefs-d’oeuvre, a Madonna with Saints and Donor. Giovanni was a man of buoyant energy and self-confidence, ready of wit and sword, willing to undertake anything anywhere. We find him painting in Udine, Spilimbergo, Treviso, Vicenza, Ferrara, Mantua, Cremona, Piacenza, Genoa, Venice, forming his style on Giorgione’s landscapes, Titian’s architectural backgrounds, and Michelangelo’s muscles. He gladly accepted an invitation to Venice (1527), anxious to pit his brush against Titian’s; his St. Martin and St. Christopher, painted for the church of San Rocco, achieved an almost sculptural effect by modeling with light and shade; Venice hailed him as a worthy rival of Titian. Pordenone resumed his travels, married thrice, was suspected of killing his brother, was knighted by King John of Hungary (who had never seen any of his pictures), and returned to Venice (1533) to resume his duel with Titian. Hoping to prod Titian on to finishing his battle picture in the Ducal Palace, the Signory engaged Pordenone to do a panel on the opposite wall. The competition between Leonardo and Michelangelo was here repeated (1538), with a dramatic supplement: Pordenone wore a sword at his belt. His canvas—splendid in color, too violent in action—was adjudged second best, and Pordenone moved on to Ferrara to design some tapestries for Ercole II. Two weeks after arrival he died. His friends said it was poisoning; his enemies said it was time.

  Vicenza too had heroes. Bartolommeo Montagna founded a school of painting rich in middling Madonnas. Montagna’s best is the Madonna En throned in the Brera; it cleaves safely to Anto
nello’s model of two saints on the right, two on the left, and angels making music at the Virgin’s feet; but these angels deserve their name, and the Virgin, with comely features and graceful robe, is one of the finest figures in the crowded gallery of Renaissance Madonnas. Vicenza’s heyday, however, awaited Palladio.

  Verona, after a proud history of fifteen hundred years, became a Venetian dependency in 1404, and remained so till 1796. Nevertheless she had a healthy cultural life of her own. Her painters fell behind those of Venice, but her architects, sculptors, and woodworkers were not surpassed in the “Most Serene” capital. The fourteenth-century tombs of the Scaligers, though too ornate, suggest no lack of sculptors; and the equestrian statue of Can Grande della Scala, with the flowing caparison of the horse so vividly portraying motion, falls short only of the masterpieces of Donatello and Verrocchio. The most sought-for wood carver in Italy was Fra Giovanni da Verona. He worked in many cities, but he devoted a large part of his life to carving and inlaying the choir stalls of Santa Maria in Organo in his native city.

  The great name in Veronese architecture was “that rare and universal genius” (Vasari calls him), Fra Giocondo. Hellenist, botanist, antiquarian, philosopher, and theologian, this remarkable Dominican friar was also one of the leading architects and engineers of his time. He taught Latin and Greek to the famous scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger, who practised medicine in Verona before moving to France. Fra Giocondo copied the inscriptions on the classic remains in Rome, and presented a book on the subject to Lorenzo de’ Medici. His researches led to the discovery of the greater part of Pliny’s letters in an old collection in Paris. While in that city he built two bridges over the Seine. When the detritus of the River Brenta threatened to fill up the lagoons that made Venice possible, Fra Giocondo persuaded the Signory to order, at great cost, the diversion of the river to empty farther south; but for this procedure Venice would not be today a miracle of liquid streets; hence Luigi Cornaro called Giocondo the second founder of the city. In Verona his masterpiece is the Palazzo del Consiglio, a simple Romanesque loggia surmounted by an elegant cornice, and crowned with statues of Cornelius Nepos, Catullus, Vitruvius, Pliny the Younger, and Emilius Macer—all ancient gentlemen of Verona. In Rome Giocondo was made architect of St. Peter’s with Raphael and Giuliano da Sangallo, but died in that year (1514), aged eighty-one. It was a well-spent life.

  Giocondo’s work on the ruins of Rome excited another Veronese architect. Giovanmaria Falconetto, after drawing all the antiquities of his own locality, marched off to Rome to do the same thing there, and devoted twelve years, on and off, to the task. Returning to Verona, he took the losing side in politics, and had to move to Padua. There Bembo and Cornaro encouraged him in the application of classical design to architecture; and the generous centenarian housed, fed, financed, and loved Giovanmaria to the end of the artist’s seventy-six years. Falconetto designed a loggia for Cornaro’s palace in Padua, two of that city’s gates, and the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Giocondo, Falconetto, and Sanmicheli constituted a trio of architects rivaled only in Rome.

  Michele Sanmicheli gave himself chiefly to fortification. Son and nephew of Veronese architects, he went to Rome at sixteen, and carefully measured the ancient buildings. After making a name for himself in designing churches and palaces, he was sent by Clement VII to build defenses for Parma and Piacenza. The distinguishing feature of his military architecture was the pentagonal bastion, from whose projecting balcony guns could be fired in five directions. When he examined the fortifications of Venice he was arrested as a spy; but his examiners were so impressed by his knowledge that the Signory engaged him to construct fortresses in Verona, Brescia, Zara, Corfu, Cyprus, and Crete. Back in Venice, he built a massive fort on the Lido. In preparing for the foundations he soon struck water. Following the example of Fra Giocondo, he sank a double cordon of connected piles, pumped the water from between the two circles, and set the foundations in this dry ring. It was a hazardous undertaking, whose success was in doubt to the last minute. Critics predicted that when heavy artillery should be fired from this fort the structure would shake itself loose from its foundations and collapse. The Signory placed in it the stoutest cannon in Venice, and ordered them all fired at once. Pregnant women fled from the neighborhood to avoid premature deliveries. The cannon were fired, the fort stood firm, the mothers returned, and Sanmicheli was the toast of Venice.

  In Verona he designed two majestic city gates, adorned with Doric columns and cornices; Vasari ranked these structures, architecturally, with the Roman theater and amphitheater that had survived in Verona from Roman days. He built the Palazzo Bevilacqua there, and the Grimani and Mocenigo palaces; he reared a campanile for the cathedral, and a dome for San Giorgio Maggiore. His friend Vasari tells us that though Michele in youth had indulged in some moderate adultery, he became in later life a model Christian, taking no thought for material gains, and treating all men with kindness and courtesy. He bequeathed his skills to Iacopo Sansovino and a nephew whom he loved exceedingly. When news came to him that this nephew had fallen in Cyprus while fighting for Venice against the Turks, Sanmicheli developed a fever, and died in a few days, aged seventy-three (1559).

  To Verona belonged the finest medalist of the Renaissance, perhaps of all time.51 Antonio Pisano, known to history as Pisanello, always signed himself Pictor, and thought of himself as a painter. Half a dozen of his paintings survive, and they are of excellent quality;* but it is not these that have sustained his name through the centuries. Recapturing the skill and compact realism of Greek and Roman coin designs, Pisanello molded little circular reliefs, seldom more than two inches in diameter, combining finesse of workmanship with such fidelity to truth that his medallions are the most trustworthy representations we have of several Renaissance notables. These are not profound works; they have no philosophical overtones; but they are treasures of painstaking workmanship and historical illumination.

  Excepting Pisanello and the Carotos, Verona, in painting, remained medieval. After the fall of the Scaligers it subsided quietly into a secondary role. It was not, like Venice, a Rialto where merchants from a dozen lands rubbed elbows and faiths and wore out one another’s dogmas with mutual attrition. It was not, like Lodovico’s Milan, a political power, nor like Florence a focus of finance, nor like Rome an international house. It was not so close to the Orient, nor so captivated by humanism, as to tincture its Christianity with paganism; it continued content with medieval themes, and rarely reflected in its art the sensuous zest that evoked the nudes of Giorgione and Titian, Correggio and Raphael. In a later period one of its sons, who indeed is known by its name, entered gaily into the pagan mood; but Paolo Veronese became in life a Venetian rather than a Veronese. Verona was becalmed.

  In the fourteenth century its painters were still abreast of their times; note how Padua called one of them—Altichiero da Zevio—to decorate the chapel of San Giorgio. Toward the end of that century Stefano da Zevio went to Florence and learned the Giottesque tradition from Agnolo Gaddi; returning to Verona he painted frescoes that Donatello pronounced the best yet done in those parts. His pupil Domenico Morone advanced upon him by studying the works of Pisanello and the Bellini; the Defeat of the Buonacolsi, in the Castello at Mantua, emulates the multitudinous panoramas of Gentile. Domenico’s son Francesco, by his murals, helped Fra Giovanni’s woodwork to make the sacristy of Santa Maria in Organo one of the treasure rooms of Italy. Domenico’s pupil Girolamo dai Libri, at the age of sixteen (1490), painted in the same favorite church an altarpiece—Deposition from the Cross— “which when uncovered,” reports Vasari, “excited such wonder that the whole city ran to congratulate the artist’s father”;52 its landscape was one of the best in fifteenth-century art. In another of Girolamo’s pictures (New York) a tree was so realistically portrayed that—on the word of a holy Dominican—birds tried to perch on its branches; and the grave Vasari himself avers that in a Nativity that Girolamo painted for Santa Maria in Organo you might count
the hairs on the rabbits.53 Girolamo’s father had received the name dai Libri from his skill in illuminating manuscripts; the son carried on the art, and came to excel in it all other miniaturists in Italy.

  About 1462 Iacopo Bellini painted in Verona. One of the boys who served him was Liberale, who later received the name of his city; through this Liberale da Verona a touch of Venetian color and vitality entered Veronese painting. Liberale, like Girolamo, found that he prospered best by illuminating manuscripts; he earned 800 crowns ($20,000?) in Siena by his miniatures. Badly treated in his old age by his married daughter, he bequeathed his estate to his pupil Francesco Torbido, went to live with him, and died at the reasonable age of eighty-five (1536). Torbido studied also with Giorgione, and improved upon Liberale, who forgave him. Another of Liberale’s pupils, Giovanfrancesco Caroto, was strongly influenced by Mantegna’s masterly polyptych in San Zeno. He went to Mantua to study with the old master, and made such progress that Mantegna sent out Caroto’s work as his own. Giovanfrancesco made excellent portraits of Guidobaldo and Elisabetta, Duke and Duchess of Urbino. He returned to Verona a rich man, who could afford, now and then, to speak his mind. When a priest accused him of making lascivious figures, he asked, “If painted figures move you so, how can you be trusted with flesh and blood?”54 He was among the few Veronese painters who wandered from religious themes.