The Renaissance
Renaissance Bologna was proud of its civic architecture. The guild of merchants raised an elegant Mercanzia, or Chamber of Commerce (1382f), and the lawyers rebuilt (1384) their imposing Palazzo dei Notari. The nobles built handsome palaces like the Bevilacqua, where the Council of Trent would hold its sittings in 1547, and the Palazzo Pallavicini, described by a contemporary as “not unworthy of kings.”3 The massive Palazzo del Podestà, seat of the government, received a new façade (1492), and Bramante designed a stately spiral staircase for the Palazzo Comunale. Many façades had arcades on the street level, so that one might walk for miles in the heart of the city without being exposed—except at crossings—to sun or rain.
While in the university skeptics like Pomponazzi questioned the immortality of the soul, the people and their rulers built new churches, adorned or repaired old ones, and brought hopeful offerings to miracle-working shrines. The Franciscan friars added to their picturesque church of San Francesco one of the fairest campaniles in Italy. The Dominicans enriched their church of San Domenico with choir stalls painstakingly carved and inlaid by Fra Damiano of Bergamo; and they engaged Michelangelo to carve four figures for the ornate arca or tabernacle in which the bones of their founder were zealously preserved. The great pride and tragedy of Bolognese art was the cathedral of San Petronio. Far back in the fifth century this Petronius had served the city as its bishop, and had been deeply loved for his beneficence. In 1307 many worshipers claimed to have been healed of blindness, deafness, or other infirmities by washing the diseased parts with water from the well beneath his shrine. Soon the city had to provide accommodations for hundreds of pilgrims seeking cures. In 1388 the communal council decreed that a church should be built for San Petronio, and on a scale that would humble the Florentines and their duomo; it was to be 700 by 460 feet, with a dome rising to 500 feet from the ground. Money proved less ample than pride; only nave and aisles to the transept were completed, and only the lower part of the façade. But that lower part is a masterpiece that attests the noble aspirations and taste of Renaissance art. The portal jambs and architrave were carved with reliefs (1425–38) challenging in subjects and surpassing in power Ghiberti’s gates to the Florentine Baptistery, and yielding to them only in refinement of finish; and in the pediment, along with unprepossessing figures of Petronius and Ambrose, a Madonna and Child, carved in the round, worthy of comparison with Michelangelo’s Pietà. These works of Iacopo della Quercia of Siena were an inspiration to Michelangelo, and he might have been saved from the muscular exaggerations of his sculptural style had he accepted more of the classic purity in della Quercia’s designs.
Sculpture rivaled architecture in Bologna. Properzia de’ Rossi carved a bas-relief for the façade of San Petronio; it won such praise that when Clement VII came to Bologna he asked to see her; but she had died in that week. Alfonso Lombardi, whose reliefs won Michelangelo’s praise, stepped into history on the coattails of Titian. Learning that Charles V, during the conference at Bologna (1530), was to sit for Titian, he persuaded the painter to take him along as a servant; and while Titian painted, Alfonso, partly concealed behind him, modeled the Emperor in stucco. Charles spied him, and asked to see his work; he liked it, and asked Alfonso to copy it in marble. When Charles paid Titian a thousand crowns he bade him give half to Alfonso. Lombardi brought the finished marble to Charles at Genoa, and received an additional three hundred crowns. Now famous, Alfonso was taken to Rome by Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, and was commissioned by him to carve tombs for Leo X and Clement VII. But the Cardinal died in 1535; and Alfonso, losing his commissions and his patron, followed him, within a year, to the grave.
Painting, in fourteenth-century Bologna, was chiefly illumination; and when it graduated into murals it followed a stiff Byzantine style. It was apparently two artists from Ferrara who aroused Bolognese painters from the rigor mortis of Byzantium. When Francesco Cossa came to make his home in Bologna (1470) there was still in his painting a certain Mantegnesque severity and sculptural hardness of line, but he had learned to infuse his figures with feeling as well as dignity, to set them in motion, and to bathe them in a living play of light. Lorenzo Costa arrived in Bologna when he was a lad of twenty-three (1483), and he stayed there for twenty-six years. He took a studio in the same house as Francia; the two men became fast friends, and influenced each other to mutual advantage; sometimes they painted a picture together. Costa won the praise and ducats of Giovanni Bentivoglio by painting an excellent Madonna Enthroned in San Petronio. When Giovanni fled at the approach of the terrible Julius (1506), Costa accepted an invitation to succeed Mantegna at Mantua.
Meanwhile Francesco Francia was making himself the head and crown of the Bolognese school. His father was Marco Raibolini, but as surnames were loose in Italy, Francesco became known by the name of the goldsmith to whom he was apprenticed. For many years he practised the goldsmith’s art, silverwork, niello, enameling, and engraving. He was made master of the mint, and engraved the coins of the city for both Bentivoglio and the popes; and his coins were so distinguished by their beauty that they became collectors’ items, bringing high prices soon after his death. Vasari describes him as a lovable man, “so pleasant in conversation that he could divert the most melancholy individuals, and won the affection of princes and lords and all who knew him.”4
We cannot say what turned Francia to painting. Bentivoglio discovered his talent, and commissioned him—already forty-nine—to paint an altarpiece for a chapel in San Giacomo Maggiore (1499). The dictator was pleased, and engaged Francia to decorate his palace with murals. They were destroyed when the populace sacked the palace in 1507, but we have Vasari’s word for it that these and other frescoes “brought Francia such reverence in the city that he was reckoned as a god.”5 Commissions poured in upon him, and perhaps he accepted too many to allow his best potentialities to mature. Mantua, Reggio, Parma, Lucca, and Urbino received panels from his brush; the Pinacoteca Bolognese has a roomful of them; Verona has a Holy Family, Turin an Entombment, the Louvre a Crucifixion, London a Dead Christ and a striking portrait of Bartolommeo Bianchini, the Morgan Library a Virgin and Child, the Metropolitan Museum of Art a delightful portrait of Federigo Gonzaga in youth. None of these is of the first order, but each is gracefully drawn, softly colored, and suffused with a tenderness and piety that makes them heralds of Raphael.
Francia’s epistolary friendship with Raphael is one of the pleasantest episodes of the Renaissance. Timoteo Viti was among Francia’s pupils at Bologna (1490–5), and became at Urbino one of Raphael’s early teachers; possibly some quality of Francia passed to the young artist.6 When Raphael had achieved fame in Rome he invited Francia to visit him. Francia excused himself as too old, but he wrote a sonnet in Raphael’s praise. Raphael sent him a letter (September 5, 1508) rich in Renaissance courtesy:
M. Francesco mio caro:
I have just received your portrait, brought to me in good condition… for which I thank you very warmly. It is most beautiful, so lifelike that I sometimes mistake, believing myself to be with you and to hear your words. I pray you to excuse and pardon the delay and postponement of my self-portrait, which, because of important and incessant occupation, I have not yet been able to execute with my own hand in accordance with our agreement…. However, I send you meanwhile another drawing, of the Nativity, done amid so many other things that I blush for it; I do this trifle rather in sign of obedience and love than for anything else. If in exchange I shall receive [the drawing of] your story of Judith I shall place it among the things that are dearest and most precious to me.
Monsignor il Datario expects your little Madonna with great anxiety, and Cardinal Riario the large one.… I look for them with that pleasure and satisfaction with which I see and praise all your works, never seeing any others more beautiful, or more devout and well done, than yours.
Meanwhile take courage, take care of yourself with your wonted prudence, and be assured that I feel your afflictions as if they were my own. Continue to
love me as I love you with all my heart.
Always entirely at your service,
Your Raffaelle Sancio.7
We may allow here for some mannerly flourish, but that this mutual affection was real appears from another letter, in which Raphael sent his famous St. Cecilia to Francia, to be placed in a chapel at Bologna, and asked him, “as a friend, to correct any errors he might find in it.”8 Vasari relates that when Francia saw the picture he was so overwhelmed by its beauty, and so painfully recognized his own inferiority, that he lost all will to paint, grew ill, and presently died, in the sixty-seventh year of his age (1517). This is one of many dubious deaths in Vasari; but he adds, graciously, that there were other theories.
Perhaps, before his death, Francia saw some engravings made in Rome by his pupil Marcantonio Raimondi from the drawings of Raphael. Visiting Venice, Mark saw some engravings by Albrecht Dürer on copper or wood. He spent almost all his travel money buying thirty-six wood engravings by the Nuremberg master on the Passion of Christ; he copied them on copper, made prints from the copies, and sold the prints as Dürer’s works. Going to Rome, he engraved on copper a drawing by Raphael, so faithfully that the painter allowed a great number of his drawings to be engraved, and prints to be made and sold. Raimondi copied also the paintings of Raphael and others, transferred the copy to copper, and sold the prints. While he made a living in this novel way, the artists of Europe, without visiting Italy, could now know the design of the famous paintings of the Renaissance masters. Finiguerra, Raimondi, and their successors did for art what Gutenberg and Aldus Manutius and others did for scholarship and literature: they built new lines of communication and transmission, and offered to youth at least the outlines of its heritage.
III. ALONG THE EMILIAN WAY
Eastward from Bologna lies a string of minor towns that contributed their commensurate luster to the total splendor of the Renaissance. Little Imola had its Innocenzo da Imola, who studied with Francia, and left a Holy Family almost worthy of Raphael. Faenza gave its name and partial industry to faience; there—as in Gubbio, Pesaro, Castel Durante, and Urbino—Italian potters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries perfected the art of coating earthenware with opaque enamel, and painting thereon, with metallic oxides, designs that on firing became brilliant purples, greens, and blues. Forlì (anciently Forum Livii) was made famous by two painters and one virile heroine. Melozzo da Forlì we defer to Rome, his favorite theater of operations. His pupil Marco Palmezzano painted the old Christian themes for a hundred churches or patrons, and left us a deceptively charming portrait of Caterina Sforza.
Born out of wedlock to Galeazzomaria Sforza, Duke of Milan, Caterina married the cruel and rapacious Girolamo Riario, despot of Forlì. In 1488 his subjects rebelled, killed him, and captured Caterina and her children; but troops loyal to her held the citadel. She promised her captors, if released, to go and persuade these soldiers to surrender; they agreed, but kept her children as hostages. Once in the castle she had its gates closed, and vigorously directed the resistance of the garrison. When the rebels threatened to kill her children unless she and her men submitted, she defied them, and told them from the ramparts that she had another child in her womb, and could easily conceive more. Lodovico of Milan sent troops who effected her rescue; the rebellion was mercilessly suppressed; and Caterina’s son Ottaviano was made lord of Forlì under his mother’s iron thumb. We shall meet her again.
North and south of the Emilian Way two ancient capitals survive: Ravenna, once the retreat of Roman emperors, and San Marino, the inextinguishable republic. Around the ninth-century convent of St. Marinus (d. 366) a tiny settlement formed, which, from its once easily defensible perch on a rocky mountain top, remained immune to all the condottieri of the Renaissance. Its independence was formally recognized by Pope Urban VIII in 1631, and endures by the courtesy of the Italian government, which finds little there to tax. Ravenna recaptured a passing prosperity after the Venetians took it in 1441; Julius II reclaimed it for the papacy in 1509; and three years later a French army, having won a famous battle near by, felt entitled to sack the city so thoroughly that it never recovered until the Second World War, which shattered it again. There, on a commission from Bernardo Bembo, father of the poet cardinal, Pietro Lombardo designed the tomb (1483) that houses Dante’s bones.
Rimini—where the Emilian Way, just south of the Rubicon, reached its Adriatic end—entered violently into Renaissance history through its ruling family, the Malatestas—Evil Heads. They appear first toward the end of the tenth century as lieutenants of the Holy Roman Empire, governing the Marches of Ancona for Otho III. By playing Guelf and Ghibelline factions against each other, and making obeisance now to the emperor, now to the pope, they acquired actual, though not formal, sovereignty over Ancona, Rimini, and Cesena, and ruled them as despots acknowledging no morals except those of intrigue, treachery, and the sword. Machiavelli’s Prince was a feeble echo of their reality—blood and iron turned into ink, like Bismarck into Nietzsche. It was a Malatesta, Giovanni, who, in a monogamous moment, killed his wife Francesca da Rimini and his brother Paolo (1285). Carlo Malatesta established the repute of the family in the patronage of arts and letters. Sigismondo Malatesta carried the dynasty to its zenith of power, culture, and assassination. His many mistresses gave him several children, in some instances with disturbing simultaneity.9 He married thrice, and killed two wives on pretext of adultery.10 He was alleged to have made his daughter pregnant, to have attempted sodomy with his son, who repelled him with drawn dagger,11 and to have wreaked his lust upon the corpse of a German lady who had preferred death to his embrace;12 however we have for these exploits only the word of his foes. To his final mistress, Isotta degli Atti, he gave unwonted devotion and ultimately marriage; and after her death he set up in the church of San Francesco a monument marked Divae Isottae sacrum—”Sacred to the Divine Isotta.” He seems to have denied God and immortality; he thought it a merry prank to fill with ink the holy-water stoup of a church, and to watch the worshipers bespatter themselves as they entered.13
Crime had not enough varieties to exhaust his energy. He was an able general, known for reckless bravery, and for resolute endurance of all the hardships incident to military life. He wrote poetry, studied Latin and Greek, supported scholars and artists, and delighted in their company. He was especially fond of Leon Battista Alberti, the Leonardo before da Vinci, and commissioned him to transform the cathedral of San Francesco into a Roman temple. Leaving the thirteenth-century Gothic church intact, Alberti fronted it with a classic façade modeled on the Arch of Augustus erected at Rimini 27 B.C.; he planned to cover the choir with a dome, but this was never built; the result is an unpleasant torso, called by contemporaries Tempio Malatestiano. The art with which Sigismondo had the interior refinished was a paean to paganism. In a brilliant fresco by Piero della Francesca, Sigismondo was shown kneeling before his patron saint; but this was almost the only Christian symbol left in the church. In one of the chapels Isotta was buried; and on the tomb an inscription was placed twenty years before her death: “To Isotta of Rimini, in beauty and virtue the glory of Italy.” In another chapel were representations of Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Diana, and Venus. The walls of the church were carved with marble reliefs of a high order, chiefly by Agostino di Duccio, representing satyrs, angels, singing boys, and personified arts and sciences, and emblazoned with the initials of Sigismondo and Isotta. Pope Pius II, a lover of the classics, described the new structure as a “nobile templum… so filled with pagan symbols that it seemed the shrine not of Christians but of infidels worshiping heathen deities.”14
At the Peace of Mantua (1459) Pius compelled Sigismondo to restore his principalities to the Church. When the doughty despot renewed his hold upon them, Pius hurled a bull of excommunication at him, charging him with heresy, parricide, incest, adultery, rape, perjury, treason, and sacrilege.15 Sigismondo laughed at the bull, saying that it had not perceptibly lessened his enjoyment of food and wine.16 But the pa
tience, arms, and strategy of the scholar Pope proved too much for him; in 1463 he knelt in penitence before a papal legate, surrendered his realm to the Church, and received absolution. Still afire with energy, he took command of a Venetian army, won several victories against the Turks, and returned to Rimini with what seemed to him a prize as precious as the bones of the greatest saint—the ashes of the philosopher Gemistus Pletho, the Greek Platonist who had in effect proposed the replacement of Christianity with a Neoplatonic pagan faith. Sigismondo buried his treasure in a splendid tomb alongside his Tempio. Three years later (1468) he died. We must not forget him in our composite image of the Renaissance.
If Sigismondo represented that small but influential minority which had more or less openly ceased to accept the medieval Christian creed, we need only follow the Adriatic down from Rimini into the Marches to Loreto to find a living symbol of the old religion still warm in Italian hearts. Every year during the Renaissance, as in our times, thousands of earnest pilgrims traveled to Loreto to visit the Casa Santa, or Holy House, in which, they were told, Mary and Joseph and Jesus had lived in Nazareth, and which, said the marvelous legend, had been miraculously transported by angels first to Dalmatia (1291), then (1294) over the Adriatic to a laurel grove (lauretum) near Recanati. Around the little stone house a marble screen was built from designs by Bramante, and Andrea Sansovino added sculptural decorations; and over the Casa a church called the santuario was raised by Giuliano da Maiano and Giuliano da Sangallo (1468f). On a small altar inside the Holy House was a figure of Mary and her Child in black cedar, which piety ascribed to the artist hand of Luke the Evangelist. Consumed by fire in 1921, the group was replaced by a reproduction, adorned with jewels and precious stones; and silver lamps keep lights burning before it day and night. This too was part of the Renaissance.