The Renaissance

  We may reasonably conclude, from the existence and natural deaths of such men as Pomponazzi and Machiavelli, that a large section of the educated classes in the Italy of 1500 had lost faith in Catholic Christianity; and we may more precariously assume that even among the letterless religion had lost some of its power to control the moral life. An increasing proportion of the population had ceased to believe in the divine origin of the moral code. Once the Commandments appeared to be man-made, and were shorn of their supernatural sanctions in heaven and hell, the code lost its terrors and its efficacy. Tabus fell away, and a calculus of expediency took their place. The sense of sin, the gloom of guilt, waned; conscience was left comparatively free; and each man did what seemed to him convenient, even if not traditionally right. Men no longer wished to be good, but to be strong; many private individuals took to themselves, long before Machiavelli, those privileges of force and fraud—that principle of the end justifying the means—which he conceded to the rulers of states; perhaps his ethic was an after-image of the morals he had seen around him. Platina attributed to Pius II the remark that “even if the Christian faith had not been confirmed by miracles, it ought to be received because of its morality.”3 But men did not reason so philosophically. They said, simply: If there is no hell or heaven, we must enjoy ourselves here, and we may indulge our appetites without fear of punishment after death. Only a strong and intelligent public opinion could have taken the place of the lost supernatural sanctions; but neither the clergy nor the humanists nor the universities rose to this task.

  The humanists were as morally corrupt as the clergy they criticized. There were shining exceptions, scholars who found decency compatible with intellectual liberation—Ambrogio Traversari, Vittorino da Feltre, Marsilio Ficino, Aldus Manutius…. But an impressively large minority of the men who resurrected Greek and Roman literature lived like pagans who had never heard of Christianity. Their mobility deracinated them; they passed from city to city seeking laurels and fees, and sank no roots in stability. They were as fond of money as any moneylender or his wife. They were vain of their genius, their income, their features, their dress. They were coarse in their speech, ungenerous and disgraceful in their controversies, faithless in their friendships and transient in their loves. Ariosto, as we have noted, dared not trust his son to a humanist tutor for fear of moral contamination; probably he found it unnecessary to forbid the boy to read Orlando furioso, which was salted with melodious obscenity. Valla, Poggio, Beccadelli, Filelfo summarized in their loose lives one of the basic problems of ethics and civilization: must a moral code, to function effectively, have supernatural sanctions—the belief in another life, or in the divine origin of the moral code?

  II. THE MORALS OF THE CLERGY

  The Church might have sustained the supernatural sanctions provided by the Hebraic Scriptures and the Christian tradition, if her personnel had led lives of decency and devotion. But most of them accepted the bad as well as the good in the morals of the time, and reflected the antithetical facets of the laity. The parish priest was a simple ministrant, usually of slight education, but normally (pace the good Antonino) leading an exemplary life;4 ignored by the intelligentsia but welcomed by the people. Among the bishops and abbots there were some high livers, but many good men; and perhaps half the college of cardinals maintained a pious and Christian conduct that shamed the gay worldliness of their colleagues.5 All over Italy there were hospitals, orphan asylums, schools, almshouses, monti di pietà (loan offices), and other charitable institutions managed by the clergy. The Benedictine, Observantine, and Carthusian monks were honored for the relatively high moral level of their lives. Missionaries faced a thousand dangers to spread the faith in “heathen” lands and among the pagans of Christendom. Mystics hid themselves away from the violence of the times, and sought closer communion with God.

  Amid this devotion there was so much laxity of morals among the clergy that a thousand testimonies could be adduced to prove it. The same Petrarch who remained faithful to Christianity to the end, and who drew a favorable picture of discipline and piety in the Carthusian monastery where his brother lived, repeatedly denounced the morals of the clergy in Avignon. From the novelle of Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, through those of Masuccio in the fifteenth, to those of Bandello in the sixteenth, the loose lives of the Italian clergy form a recurrent theme of Italian literature. Boccaccio speaks of “the lewd and filthy life of the clergy,” in sins “natural or sodomitical.”6 Masuccio described the monks and friars as “ministers of Satan,” addicted to fornication, homosexualism, avarice, simony, and impiety, and professed to have found a higher moral level in the army than in the clergy.7 Aretino, familiar with all filth, railed at the errors of printers as rivaling in number the sins of the clergy; “truly it would be easier to find Rome sober and chaste than a correct book.”8 Poggio almost exhausts his vocabulary of vituperation in exposing the immorality, hypocrisy, cupidity, ignorance, and arrogance of monks and priests;9 and Folengo’s Orlandino tells the same tale. Apparently the nuns, who today are angels and ministers of grace, shared in the revelry. They were especially lively in Venice, where monasteries and nunneries were sufficiently close to each other to allow their inmates, now and then, to share a bed; the archives of the Proveditori sopra monasteri contain twenty volumes of trials for the cohabitation of monks and nuns.10 Aretino speaks unquotably about the nuns of Venice.11 And Guicciardini, usually temperate, loses his poise in describing Rome: “Of the Court of Rome it is impossible to speak with sufficient severity, for it is a standing infamy, an example of all that is most vile and shameful in the world.”12

  These testimonies seem exaggerated, and may be prejudiced. But hear St. Catherine of Siena:

  On whatever side you turn—whether to the secular clergy of priests and bishops, or to the religious orders, or to prelates small or great, old or young,… you see nothing but offenses; and all stink in my nostrils with a stench of mortal sin. Narrow, greedy, and avaricious… they have abandoned the care of souls.… Making a god of their belly, eating and drinking in disorderly feast, they fall thence forthwith into filth, living in lasciviousness… feeding their children with the substance of the poor…. They flee from choir service as from poison.13

  Here again we must discount something, since no saint can be trusted to speak of human conduct without indignation. But we may accept the summing up of a candid Catholic historian:

  It is not surprising, when the highest ranks of the clergy were in such a state, that among the regular orders and secular priests vice and irregularities of all sorts should have become more and more common. The salt of the earth had lost its savor.… It was such priests as these that gave occasion to the more or less exaggerated descriptions of the clergy by Erasmus and Luther, who visited Rome during the reign of Julius II. But it is a mistake to suppose that the corruption of the clergy was worse in Rome than elsewhere; there is documentary evidence of the immorality of the priests in almost every town in the Italian peninsula. In many places—Venice, for instance—matters were far worse than in Rome. No wonder, as contemporary writers sadly testify, the influence of the clergy had declined, and that in many places hardly any respect was shown for the priesthood. Their immorality was so gross that suggestions in favor of allowing priests to marry began to be heard…. Many of the monasteries were in a deplorable condition. The three essential vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were in some convents almost entirely disregarded…. The discipline of many convents of nuns was equally lax.14

  Less forgivable than irregularities of sex and festivities of diet were the activities of the Inquisition. But these remarkably declined in Italy during the fifteenth century. In 1440 Amadeo de’ Landi, a mathematician, was tried on a charge of materialism, but was acquitted. In 1478 Galeotto Marcio was condemned to death for writing that any man who lived a good life would go to heaven whatever his religion might be; but Pope Sixtus IV saved him.16 In 1497 the physician Gabriele da Salò was protected from the Inquis
ition by his patients, though he maintained that Christ was not God, but was the son of Joseph and Mary, conceived in the usual ridiculous way; that Christ’s body was not in the consecrated wafer; and that His miracles had been performed not by divine power but through the influence of the stars;17 so one myth drives out another. In 1500 Giorgio da Novara was burnt to death at Bologna, apparently for denying the divinity of Christ without having influential friends. In the same year the bishop of Aranda declared with impunity that there is neither heaven nor hell, and that indulgences were merely a means of raising funds.18 In 1510, when Ferdinand the Catholic tried to introduce the Inquisition into Naples, he met with such determined resistance from all classes of the population that he had to abandon the attempt.19

  Amid the ecclesiastical decay there were several centers of wholesome reform. Pius II deposed a general of the Dominicans, and disciplined lax monasteries in Venice, Brescia, Florence, and Siena. In 1517 Sadoleto, Giberti, Caraffa, and other churchmen founded the Oratory of the Divine Love as a center for pious men who desired some refuge from the pagan worldliness of Rome. In 1523 Caraffa organized the order of Theatines, in which secular priests lived under monastic rules of chastity, obedience, and poverty. Cardinal Caraffa resigned all his benefices and distributed his property among the poor; so did Saint Gaetano, another founder of the Theatines. These devotees, many of them men of noble lineage and great wealth, astonished Rome by strict adherence to their self-imposed rules, and their fearless visits to victims of the plague. In 1533 Antonio Maria Zacearia established at Milan a similar community of priests, first called the Regular Clerics of St. Paul, but soon to be known as Barnabites from the church of St. Barnabas. Caraffa drew up a helpful program of reform for the clergy of Venice, and Giberti essayed similar reforms in the diocese of Verona (1528–31). Egidio Canisio reformed the Augustinian eremites, and Gregorio Cortese effected a similar betterment among the Benedictines at Padua.

  The outstanding effort at monastic reform in this age was the foundation of the Capuchin Order. Matteo di Bassi, a friar of the Franciscan Observantines at Montefalcone, thought that he saw St. Francis in a vision, and that he heard him say: “I wish my rule to be observed to the letter, to the letter, to the letter.” Learning that St. Francis had worn a four-cornered pointed hood, he adopted that headdress. Going to Rome, he secured from Clement VII (1528) permission to establish a new branch of the Franciscans, distinguished by the cappuccio or cowl, and by firm adherance to the final rule of St. Francis. They dressed in the coarsest cloth, went barefoot throughout the year, lived on bread, vegetables, fruit, and water, kept rigorous fasts, dwelt in narrow cells in poor cottages made of wood and loam, and never journeyed except on foot. The new order was not numerous, but it gave a stirring example and stimulus to the more widespread self-reform that came to the monastic and mendicant orders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.20

  Some of these reforms were undertaken in response to the Protestant Reformation. Many of them were of spontaneous generation, and indicated a saving vitality in Christianity and the Church.

  III. SEXUAL MORALITY

  Turning now to laic morals, and beginning with the relations of the sexes, we should remind ourselves at the outset that man is by nature polygamous, and that only the strongest moral sanctions, a helpful degree of poverty and hard work, and uninterrupted wifely supervision, can induce him to monogamy. It is not clear that adultery was less popular in the Middle Ages than in the Renaissance. And as medieval adultery was tempered with chivalry, so in the Renaissance it was softened, in the lettered classes, by an idealization of the refinement and spiritual charms of the educated woman. Greater equality of the sexes in education and social standing made possible a new intellectual comradeship between men and women. In Mantua, Milan, Urbino, Ferrara, and Naples life was graced and stirred by the prominence of attractive and cultivated women.

  Girls of good family were kept in relative seclusion from men not of their own household. They were sedulously instructed in the advantages of premarital chastity; sometimes with such success that we hear of a young woman drowning herself after being raped. She was doubtless exceptional, for a bishop proposed to raise a statue to her.21 In the Roman catacombs a young gentlewoman strangled herself to avoid seduction; her body was borne in triumph through the streets of Rome, with a laurel crown on her head.22 Nevertheless there must have been considerable premarital adventure; otherwise it would be difficult to account for the extraordinary number of bastards to be found in any city of Renaissance Italy. Not to have bastards was a distinction; to have them was no serious disgrace; the man, on marrying, usually persuaded his wife to let his illegitimate progeny join the household and be brought up with her own children. To be a bastard was no great disability; the social stigma involved was almost negligible; legitimation could be obtained by lubricating an ecclesiastical hand. In default of legitimate and competent heirs bastard sons could succeed to an estate, even to a throne, as Ferrante I succeeded Alfonso I at Naples, and as Leonello d’Este succeeded Niccolò III at Ferrara. When Pius II came to Ferrara in 1459 he was received by seven princes, all illegitimate.23 The rivalry of bastards with legitimate sons was a rich source of Renaissance violence. Half the novelle turn on seductions; and usually such stories were read or heard by women with only a momentary lowering of the eyes. Robert, Bishop of Aquino, toward the close of the fifteenth century, described the morals of the young men in his diocese as unashamedly corrupt; they explained to him, he tells us, that fornication was no sin, that chastity was an old-fashioned tabu, and that virginity was on the wane.24 Even incest had its devotees.

  As for homosexuality, it became almost an obligatory part of the Greek revival. The humanists wrote about it with a kind of scholarly affection, and Ariosto judged that they were all addicted to it. Politian, Filippo Strozzi, and the diarist Sanudo were reasonably suspected of it;25 Michelangelo, Julius II, and Clement VII were less convincingly charged with it; San Bernardino found so much of it in Naples that he threatened the city with the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.26 Aretino described the aberration as quite popular in Rome,27 and he himself, between one mistress and another, asked the duke of Mantua to send him an attractive boy.28 In 1455 the Venetian Council of Ten took official note “how the abominable vice of sodomy multiplies in this city”; and “to avert the wrath of God,” it appointed two men in each quarter of Venice to put down the practice.29 The Council noted that some men had taken to wearing feminine garb, and that some women were adopting male attire, and it called this “a species of sodomy.”30 In 1492 a noble and a priest, convicted of homosexual acts, were beheaded in the Piazzetta, and their bodies were publicly burned.31 These, of course, were exceptional cases, from which we must not generalize; but we may assume that homosexuality was more than normally present in Renaissance Italy until the Counter Reformation.

  We may say likewise of prostitution. According to Infessura—who liked to load his statistics against papal Rome—there were 6,800 registered prostitutes in Rome in 1490, not counting clandestine practitioners, in a population of some 90,000.32 In Venice the census of 1509 reported 11,654 prostitutes in a population of some 300,000.33 An enterprising printer published a “Catalogue of all the principal and most honored courtesans of Venice, their names, addresses, and fees.”34 On the roads they frequented taverns; in the cities they were the favorite guests of young blades and fervent artists. Cellini recounts his night’s lodging with a courtesan as an incident of no moment, and describes a dinner of artists, including Giulio Romano and himself, in which each man was required to bring a woman of low resistance. At a higher level the banker Lorenzo Strozzi gave a banquet in 1519 to fourteen persons, including four cardinals and three women of the demimonde.35

  As wealth and refinement increased, a demand arose for courtesans with some education and social charm; and as in the Athens of Sophocles hetaerae rose to meet this demand, so in the Rome of the late fifteen century, and in the Venice of the sixteenth, a class of corti
giane oneste— genteel courtesans —developed, who rivaled the finest ladies in dress, manners, culture, even in hebdomadal piety. While the simpler prostitutes—cortigiane di candela—practised in brothels, these Roman hetaerae lived in their own homes, entertained lavishly, read and wrote poetry, sang and played music, and joined in educated conversation; some collected pictures and statuary, rare editions and the latest books; some maintained literary salons. To keep up with the humanists many of them took classical names—Camilla, Polyxena, Penthesilea, Faustina, Imperia, Tullia. One scandalous wit, in the pontificate of Alexander VI, wrote a series of epigrams beginning with a number in praise of the Virgin or the saints, and then, without a blush, continuing with several in honor of the distinguished courtesans of his time.36 When one such, Faustina Mancina, died, half of Rome mourned her, and Michelangelo was one of many who wrote sonnets to her memory.37

  The most renowned of these cortigiane oneste was Imperia de Cugnatis. Made rich by her patron Agostino Chigi, she adorned her home with luxurious furniture and choice art, and gathered about her a bevy of scholars, artists, poets, and churchmen; even the pious Sadoleto sang her praise.38 Probably it was Imperia whom Raphael took as his model for the Sappho of his Parnassus. She died in the flower of her beauty at the age of twenty-six (1511), and received honorable burial in the church of San Gregorio, with a marble tomb engraved in the finest lapidary style; and half a hundred poets lamented her in classic elegies.39 (Her daughter killed herself rather than submit to seduction.40) Almost as renowned was Tullia d’Aragona, illegitimate daughter of the Cardinal of Aragon. Admired for her golden hair and sparkling eyes, her generosity and carelessness with money, her grace of carriage and charm of conversation, she was received in Naples, Rome, Florence, and Ferrara like a visiting princess. The Mantuan ambassador at Ferrara described her entry in an undiplomatic letter to Isabella d’Este (1537):