The house of Anjou had begun a rapid decline with the escapades of Queen Joanna I, which ended when Charles of Durazzo had her strangled with a silken cord (1382). Joanna II, though forty at her accession (1414), was as excitable as the first. She married thrice, banished her second husband, and had the third murdered. Faced by revolt, she called to her aid King Alfonso of Aragon and Sicily, and adopted him as her son and heir (1420). Rightly suspecting him of planning to replace her, she disowned him (1423), and left her state to René of Anjou at her death (1435). A long war of succession followed, in which Alfonso, having sampled Naples, fought to seize its throne. While he was besieging Gaeta he was captured by the Genoese, and was brought before Filippo Maria Visconti at Milan. With consummate logic surely never learned in schools, he persuaded the Duke that French power re-established in Naples, added to French power already pressing upon Milan from the north and Genoa from the west, would hold half of Italy in a vise, which the Visconti would be the first to feel. Filippo understood, freed his prisoner, and bade him Godspeed to Naples. After many battles and intrigues Alfonso won; the rule of the house of Anjou at Naples (1268–1442) ended, that of the house of Aragon (1442–1503) began. This usurpation provided the legal basis for the French invasion of Italy in 1494, which was the first act in the tragedy of Italy.
Alfonso was so pleased with his new royal seat that he left the rule of Aragon and Sicily to his brother John II. He was not an easy ruler; he taxed with a hard hand; allowed financiers to squeeze the people, then squeezed them in turn; and extorted money from Jews by threatening to baptize them. But most of his taxation fell upon the merchant class; Alfonso reduced the taxes levied from the poor, and helped the destitute. The Neapolitans thought him a good king; he walked among them unarmed, unattended, and unafraid. Having no children by his wife, he begot some on the ladies of his court; his wife killed one of these rivals, and Alfonso never admitted the Queen to his presence thereafter. He was a zealous churchgoer, and listened to sermons faithfully.
Nevertheless he caught the humanist fever, and supported classical scholars with so open a hand that they named him il Magnanimo. He welcomed Valla, Filelfo, Manetti, and other humanists to his table and his treasury. He paid Poggio 500 crowns ($12,500?) for a translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia into Latin; paid Bartolommeo Fazio 500 ducats a year for writing an Historia Alfonsi, and 1500 more when it was finished; in the one year 1458 he distributed 20,000 ducats ($500,000) among literary men. He carried some classic with him wherever he went; at home and on campaigns he had a classic read to him at meals; and students who wished to hear these readings were admitted to them. When the supposed remains of Livy were discovered at Padua, he sent Beccadelli to Venice to buy a bone, and he received it with all the awe and devotion of a good Neapolitan watching the flow of St. Januarius’ blood. When Manetti orated to him in Latin Alfonso was so fascinated by the Florentine scholar’s idiomatic style that he allowed a fly to feast on the royal nose till the oration was complete.1 He gave his humanists full freedom of speech, even to heresy and pornography, and protected them from the Inquisition.
The most remarkable of the scholars at Alfonso’s court was Lorenzo Valla. Born in Rome (1407), he studied the classics with Leonardo Bruni, and became an enthusiastic, even a fanatical, Latinist, among whose many wars was a campaign to destroy Italian as a literary language, and make good Latin live again. While teaching Latin and rhetoric at Pavia he wrote a violent diatribe against the famous jurist Bartolus, laughing at his laborious Latinity, and contending that only a man skilled in Latin and in Roman history could understand Roman law. The law students in the university defended Bartolus, the art students rallied around Valla; the debate graduated into riots, and Valla was asked to leave. Later, in Notes on the New Testament (Adnotationes ad novum testamentum), he applied his linguistic learning and fury to Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, and revealed many an error in that heroic undertaking; Erasmus would later praise, epitomize, and use Valla’s critique. In another treatise, Elegantiae linguae Latinae, Valla gave his rules for Latin elegance and purity, ridiculed the Latin of the Middle Ages, and joyfully exposed the bad Latin of many humanists. In an age that adored Cicero he preferred Quintilian. He was left with hardly a friend in the world.
To confirm his isolation he published (1431) a dialogue On Pleasure and the True Good (De voluptate et vero bono), which expounded the amoralism of the humanists with astonishing temerity. He used as persons of the dialogue three men still living: Leonardo Bruni to defend Stoicism, Antonio Beccadelli to vindicate Epicureanism, and Niccolò de’ Niccoli to reconcile Christianity and philosophy. Beccadelli was made to speak with such force that readers rightly assumed that his views were Valla’s own. We must suppose, argued Beccadelli, that human nature is good, for it was created by God; indeed Nature and God are one. Consequently our instincts are good, and our natural desire for pleasure and happiness is in itself a justification of the pursuit of these as the proper object of human life. All pleasures, whether of the senses or of the intellect, are to be held legitimate until proved injurious. Now we have an imperious instinct to mate, and certainly no instinct for lifelong chastity. Such continence is therefore unnatural; it is an intolerable torment, and should not be preached as virtue. Virginity, Beccadelli was made to conclude, is a mistake and a waste; and a courtesan is of more value to mankind than a nun.2
So far as his means allowed, Valla lived this philosophy. He was a man of promiscuous passion, hot temper, and extreme speech. He wandered from city to city, seeking literary employment. He asked for a place in the papal secretariat, and was turned away. When Alfonso took him up (1435), the King of Aragon and Sicily was fighting for the throne of Naples, and counted among his foes Pope Eugenius IV (1431–47), who claimed Naples as a lapsed papal fief. A reckless scholar like Valla, learned in history, skilled in polemics, and with nothing to lose, was a handy tool against the Pope. Under Alfonso’s protection Valla wrote (1440) his most famous treatise, On the Falsely Believed and Lying Donation of Constantine (De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione). He assailed as a ridiculous forgery the Constitutum Constantini by which the first Christian emperor transferred to Pope Sylvester I (314–35) full secular dominion over all Western Europe. Nicholas of Cusa had recently (1433) exposed the falsity of the Donation in his De concordantia Catholica, written for a Council of Basel also at odds with Eugenius IV; but Valla’s historical and linguistic criticism of the document was so devastating (though he himself made many errors) that the question was settled once and for all.
Valla and Alfonso were not content with scholarship; they waged war. “I attack not only the dead but the living,” said Valla; and he excoriated the relatively decent Eugenius with the most idiomatic abuse. “Even were the Donation authentic, it would be null and void, for Constantine could have no power to make it, and in any case the crimes of the papacy would already have annulled it.”3 And if the Donation was a forgery, Valla concluded (ignoring the territorial donations of Pepin and Charlemagne to the papacy), then the temporal power of the popes had been a thousand-yearlong usurpation. From that temporal power had come the corruption of the Church, and the wars of Italy, and the “overbearing, barbarous, tyrannical priestly domination.” Valla appealed to the people of Rome to rise and overthrow the papal government of their city, and invited the princes of Europe to deprive the popes of all territorial possessions.4 It sounded like the voice of Luther, but it was Alfonso who inspired the pen; humanism had become a weapon of war.
Eugenius fought back with the Inquisition. Valla was summoned before its agents at Naples; he ironically professed his complete orthodoxy, and refused to say more. Alfonso ordered the Inquisitors to let him alone, and they dared not disobey. Valla continued his attacks on the Church: he showed that the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite were unauthentic; that the letter of Abgarus to Jesus, published by Eusebius, was a forgery; and that the Apostles had had no hand in composing the Apostles’ Creed. However,
when he surmised that Alfonso was moving toward reconciliation with the papacy he decided that he too had better make peace. He addressed an apology to Eugenius, retracting his heresies, reaffirming his orthodoxy, and asking pardon for his sins. The Pope made no answer. But when Nicholas V ascended the papal throne, and sent out a call for scholars, Valla was made a secretary to the Curia (1448), and was employed to make Latin translations from the Greek. He ended his life as a canon of St. John Lateran, and was buried in holy ground (1457).
His friendly rival, Antonio Beccadelli, illustrated the morals of his time by writing an obscene book and receiving acclaim for it from the leading men of Italy. Born at Palermo (1394), and therefore nicknamed il Panormita, he imbibed his higher education, and perhaps his ambiguous morals, in Siena. About 1425 he composed, under the title of Hermaphroditus, a series of Latin elegies and epigrams rivaling Martial in Latinity and pornography. Cosimo de’ Medici accepted the dedication, probably without reading the book; the virtuous Guarino da Verona praised the eloquence of its language; a hundred others added encomiums; finally the Emperor Sigismund placed a poet’s crown upon Beccadelli’s head (1433). Priests denounced the volume, Eugenius proclaimed the excommunication of all who read it, friars publicly burned it at Ferrara, Bologna, Milan. Nevertheless Beccadelli lectured summa cum laude in the universities of Bologna and Pavia, received a stipend of eight hundred scudi from the Visconti, and was invited to Naples as court historiographer. His history Of the Memorable Words and Deeds of King Alfonso was written in such idiomatic Latin that Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini—Pope Pius II—himself no middling Latinist, considered it a model of Latin style. Beccadelli lived to be seventy-seven, and died rich in honors and property.
II. FERRANTE
Alfonso left his kingdom to his putative son Ferdinand (r. 1458–94). Ferrante, as his people called him, was of dubious parentage. His mother was Margaret of Hijar, who had other lovers besides the King; Pontano, Ferrante’s secretary, affirmed that the father was a Valencian marrano—i.e., a Christianized Spanish Jew. Valla was his tutor. Ferrante was not known for sexual profligacy, but he had most of the vices that can come from a passionate nature untamed by a firm moral code, and aroused by apparently unreasonable hostility. Pope Calixtus III legitimated his birth but refused to recognize him as king; he declared the Aragonese line in Naples extinct, and claimed the Kingdom as a fief of the Church. René of Anjou made another attempt to regain the throne bequeathed him by Joanna II. While he landed forces on the Neapolitan coast, the feudal barons rose in revolt against the house of Aragon, and allied themselves with the foreign foes of the King. Ferrante confronted these simultaneous challenges with angry courage, overcame them, and revenged himself with somber ferocity. One by one he lured his enemies with pretended reconciliation, gave them excellent dinners, killed some of them after dessert, imprisoned others, let several starve to death in his dungeons, kept some of them in cages for his occasional delectation, and, when they died, had them embalmed and dressed in their favorite costumes, and preserved them as mummies in his museum;5 these stories, however, may be “war atrocities” manufactured by historians in a hostile camp. It was this king who dealt so fairly with Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1479. Revolution nearly upset him in 1485, but he recovered his footing, completed a long reign of thirty-six years, and died amid general rejoicing. The rest of the story of Naples belongs to the collapse of Italy.
Ferrante did not continue Alfonso’s patronage of scholars, but he engaged as his prime minister a man who was at once a poet, a philosopher, and a skillful diplomat. Giovanni Pontano developed—Beccadelli had founded —the Neapolitan Academy. Its members were men of letters who met periodically to exchange verses and ideas. They took Latin names (Pontano became Jovianus Pontanus), and loved to think that they were continuing, after a long and cruel interlude, the stately culture of Imperial Rome. Several of them wrote a Latin worthy of the Silver Age. Pontanus composed Latin treatises on ethics, praising the virtues that Ferrante allegedly ignored, and an eloquent essay De principe, recommending to a ruler those amiable qualities which Machiavelli’s Prince, twenty years later, would contemn. Giovanni dedicated this exemplary tract to his pupil, Ferrante’s son and heir Alfonso II (1494–5), who practised all that Machiavelli preached. Pontano taught in verse as well as in prose, and expounded in Latin hexameters the mysteries of astronomy and the proper cultivation of oranges. In a series of pleasant poems he celebrated every species of normal love: the mutual itching of healthy youth, the tender attachment of newlyweds, the reciprocal satisfactions of marriage, the joys and griefs of parental love, the merger of mates into one being by the accumulation of the years. He described in verses seemingly as spontaneous as Virgil’s, and with a surprising command of the Latin lexicon, the holiday life of the Neapolitans: the workers sprawling on the grass, the athletes at their games, the picnickers in their carts, the seductive girls dancing the tarantella to the clash of their tambourines, the lads and lasses flirting on the bayside promenade, the lovers keeping tryst, the bluebloods taking the baths at Baiae as if fifteen centuries had not passed since Ovid’s raptures and despairs. Had Pontano written in Italian with the same felicity and grace with which he composed Latin verse, we should have ranked him with the bilingual Petrarch and Politian, who had the good sense to march with the present as well as roam in the past.
After Pontano the most prominent member of the Academy was Iacopo Sannazaro. Like Bembo he could write Italian in the purest Tuscan dialect—far different from the Neapolitan speech; like Politian and Pontano he could mold Latin elegies and epigrams that would not have shamed Tibullus or Martial. For one epigram praising Venice Venice sent him six hundred ducats.6 Alfonso II, at war with Alexander VI, took Sannazaro with him on his campaigns to shoot poetic darts into Rome. When the Justy Pope, whose Borgia family carried a Spanish bull on its coat of arms, took Giulia Farnese as his alleged mistress, Sannazaro gored him with two lines that must have made Alfonso’s soldiers regret their ignorance of Latin:
Europen Tyrio quondam sedisse iuvenco
quis neget? Hispano Iulia vecta tauro est;7
which is to say:
That once on Tyrian bull Europa sat,
Who doubts? A Spanish bull bears Julia.
And when Caesar Borgia took the field against Naples, a barb went his way:
Aut nihil aut Caesar vult dici Borgia; quidni?
cum simul et Caesar possit et esse nihil;8
i.e.,
Caesar or nothing Borgia would be called;
But why not both, since he is both at once?
Such sallies passed from mouth to ear in Italy, and shared in forming the legend of the Borgias.
In a gentler mood Sannazaro composed (1526) a Latin epic On the Virgin Birth (De partu Virginis). It was an astonishing tour de force: it used the classical machinery of the pagan gods, but brought them in as adjuncts to—eavesdroppers on—the Gospel narrative; and it dared comparison with Virgil by quoting the famous Fourth Eclogue in the body of the poem. It was excellent Latin, and delighted Clement VII, but not even a pope will lose himself in it today.
The masterpiece of Sannazaro was written in the living tongue of his people, in a medley of prose and verse—Arcadia (1504). Like Theocritus in ancient Alexandria, the poet had grown tired of cities, and had learned to love rural fragrance and peace. It was an urban sentiment that Lorenzo and Politian had expressed, with evident sincerity, some twenty years before. The landscapes in the painting of the time marked a growing appreciation of the countryside; and men of the world began to babble of woods and fields, limpid streams, and virile shepherds piping amorous lays. Sannazaro’s book caught these fancies at their flow, and was carried to such fame and popularity as favored no other book of the Italian Renaissance. He led his readers into an imaginary world of strong men and beautiful women—none of these old, and most of them nude; he described their splendor, and that of natural scenes, in a poetic prose that set a fashion in Italy, and later in France and England;
and he interspersed his prose with pardonable poetry. In this book the modern pastoral was born, perhaps less graceful than the ancient, more elongated and windy, but with interminable effect upon literature and art. Here Giorgione, Titian, and a hundred artists after them would find themes for their pigments; here Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney would take impressions for their faery queens and an English Arcadia. Sannazaro had rediscovered a continent more enchanting than the New World of Columbus, a melodious Utopia where any soul might enter at no other cost than literacy, and might build its castle to its taste and whim without lifting a finger from the page.
The art of the Regno was more masculine than its poetry, though there too the soft Italian touch showed its hand. Donatello and Michelozzo came down from Florence and set the pace with an imposing mausoleum for Cardinal Rinaldo Brancacci in the church of San Angelo a Nilo. For the Castel Nuovo, begun by Charles I of Anjou (1283), Alfonso the Magnanimous ordered a new gate (1443–70), which Francesco Laurana designed, and for which Pietro di Martino, and probably Giuliano da Maiano, carved handsome reliefs of the King’s achievements in war and peace. The church of Santa Chiara, built for Robert the Wise (1310), still contains the lovely Gothic monument set up by the brothers Giovanni and Pace da Firenze soon after the King’s death in 1343. The cathedral of San Gennaro (1272) received a new Gothic interior in the fifteenth century. There, in the costly Cappella del Tesoro, the blood of St. Januarius, protective patron of Naples, flows three times a year, insuring the prosperity of a city weary with commerce and burdened with centuries, but consoled by faith and love.