The Renaissance
I have to record the arrival among us of a gentle lady, so modest in behavior, so fascinating in manners, that we cannot help considering her something divine. She sings impromptu all kinds of airs and motets…. There is not one lady in Ferrara, not even Vittoria Colonna the Duchess of Pescara, who can stand comparison with Tullia.41
Moretto da Brescia painted a bewitching portrait of her, looking as innocent as a novice nun. She made the mistake of outliving her charms; she died in a wretched hut near the Tiber; and her total belongings, at auction, brought a dozen crowns ($150?). But in all her poverty she had kept her lute and harpsichord to the last. She left also a book that she had composed On the Infinity of Perfect Love.42
Doubtless that title reflected the Renaissance fashion of talking and writing about Platonic love. If a woman could not commit adultery she might at least allow herself to arouse in a man a kind of poetic gallantry that made her the object of verses, courtesies, and dedications. The devotions of the troubadours, the Vita Nuova of Dante, and Plato’s discourses on spiritual love had begotten in a few circles a fine sentiment of adoration toward woman—usually another man’s wife. Most people paid no attention to the idea, preferring their love in a frankly sensual form; they might write sonnets, but their goal was coitus; and hardly once in a hundred cases, despite the novelists, did they marry the object of their love.
For marriage was an affair of property, and property could not be made dependent upon the passing whims of physical desire. Betrothals were arranged by family councils, and most young people accepted without effectual protest the mates so assigned to them. Girls could be betrothed at the age of three, though marriage had to be delayed till twelve. In the fifteenth century a daughter unmarried at fifteen was a family disgrace; in the sixteenth century the age of disgrace was deferred to seventeen, to allow time for higher education.43 Men, who enjoyed all the privileges and facilities of promiscuity, could be lured into marriage only by brides bringing substantial dowries. In Savonarola’s day there were many marriageable girls who, for lack of dowries, had failed to find a husband. Florence established a kind of state dowry insurance—Monte delle fanciulle, or fund of the maidens—from which marriage portions were given to girls that had paid small yearly premiums.44 In Siena there were so many bachelors that the laws had to inflict legal disabilities upon them; in Lucca a decree of 1454 debarred from public office all unmarried men between twenty and fifty. “The times are not favorable to matrimony,” wrote Alessandra Strozzi in 1455.45 Raphael painted half a hundred Madonnas, but would not take a wife; and this was the one thing in which Michelangelo agreed with him. Weddings themselves consumed enormous sums; Leonardo Bruni complained that his matrimonium had squandered his patrimonium.46 Kings and queens, princes and princesses spent half a million dollars on a wedding while famine raged among the people.47 When Alfonso the Magnificent of Naples married, he set up tables for 30,000 diners on the shores of the Bay. Lovelier was the reception that Urbino gave to Duke Guidobaldo when he brought from Mantua his bride Elisabetta Gonzaga: ranged on a hill slope stood the ladies of the city, beautifully dressed; before them their children carried olive branches; mounted choristers, in graceful formation, sang a cantata that had been composed for the occasion; and an especially comely matron, impersonating a goddess, offered the new Duchess the loyalty and affection of the people.48
After marriage the woman usually kept her own name; so Lorenzo’s wife continued to be called Donna Clarice Orsini; sometimes, however, the wife might add her husband’s name to her own—Maria Salviati de’ Medici. In the medieval theory of marriage it was expected that love would develop between man and wife through the varied partnerships of marriage in joy and sorrow, prosperity and adversity; and apparently the expectation was fulfilled in the majority of cases. No love of youth for maiden could be deeper or truer than that of Vittoria Colonna for the Marquis of Pescara, to whom she had been engaged from the age of four; no loyalty could have been greater than that of Elisabetta Gonzaga, accompanying her crippled husband through all his misfortunes and exiles, and faithful to his memory till her death.
Nevertheless adultery was rampant.49 Since most marriages among the upper classes were diplomatic unions of economic or political interests, many husbands felt warranted in having a mistress; and the wife, though she might mourn, usually closed her eyes—or her lips—to the offense. Among the middle classes some men assumed that adultery was a legitimate diversion; Machiavelli and his friends seem to have thought nothing of exchanging notes about their infidelities. When, in such cases, the wife avenged herself by imitation, the husband was as like as not to ignore it, and wear his horns with grace.50 But the influx of Spaniards into Italy, via Naples and Alexander VI and Charles V, brought the Spanish “point of honor” into Italian life, and in the sixteenth century the husband felt called upon to punish his wife’s adultery with death, while preserving his pristine privileges unimpaired. The husband might desert his wife and still prosper; the deserted wife had no remedy except to reclaim her dowry, return to her relatives, and live a lonely life; she was not allowed to marry again. She might enter a convent, but it would expect a donation of her dowry.51 In general, in the Latin countries, adultery is condoned as a substitute for divorce.
IV. RENAISSANCE MAN
The combination of intellectual enfranchisement and moral release produced “the man of the Renaissance.” He was not typical enough to merit that title; there were a dozen types of man in that age as in any other; he was merely the most interesting, perhaps because he was exceptional. The Renaissance peasant was what peasants have always been until machinery made agriculture an industry. The Italian proletaire of 1500 was like those of Rome under the Caesars or Mussolini; occupation makes the man. The Renaissance businessman was like his past and present peers. The Renaissance priest, however, was different from the medieval or modern priest; he believed less and enjoyed more; he could make love and war. Amid these types was an arresting mutation, a sport of the species and the time, the kind of man we think of when we recall the Renaissance, a type unique in history, except that Alcibiades, seeing him, would have felt reborn.
The qualities of this type revolved about two foci: intellectual and moral audacity. A mind sharp, alert, versatile, open to every impression and idea, sensitive to beauty, eager for fame. It was a recklessly individualistic spirit, set on developing all its potential capacities; a proud spirit, scorning Christian humility, despising weakness and timidity, defying conventions, morals, tabus, popes, even, occasionally, God. In the city such a man might lead a turbulent faction; in the state, an army; in the Church he would gather a hundred benefices under his cassock, and use his wealth to climb to power. In art he was no longer an artisan working anonymously with others on a collective enterprise, as in the Middle Ages; he was “a single and separate person,” who stamped his character upon his works, signed his name to his paintings, even, now and then, carved it on his statues, like Michelangelo on the Pietà. Whatever his achievements, this “Renaissance man” was always in motion and discontent, fretting at limits, longing to be a “universal man”—bold in conception, decisive in deed, eloquent in speech, skilled in art, acquainted with literature and philosophy, at home with women in the palace and with soldiers in the camp.
His immorality was part of his individualism. His goal being the successful expression of his personality, and his environment imposing upon him no standards of restraint either from the example of the clergy or from the terror of a supernatural creed, he allowed himself any means to his ends, and any pleasure on the way. None the less he had his own virtues. He was a realist, and seldom talked nonsense except to a reluctant woman. He had good manners when he was not killing, and even then he preferred to kill with grace. He had energy, force of character, direction and unity of will; he accepted the old Roman conception of virtue as manliness, but added to it skill and intelligence. He was not needlessly cruel, and he excelled the Romans in his capacity for pity. He was vain, but that wa
s part of his sense of beauty and form. His appreciation of the beautiful in woman and nature, in art and crime, was a mainspring of the Renaissance. He replaced the moral with the esthetic sense; if his type had multiplied and prevailed, an irresponsible aristocracy of taste would have supplanted the aristocracies of birth or wealth.
But, again, he was only one of many kinds of Renaissance man. How different was the idealistic Pico, with his belief in the moral perfectibility of mankind—or the grim Savonarola, blind to beauty and absorbed in righteousness—or the gentle gracious Raphael, scattering beauty about him with an open hand—or the demonic Michelangelo, haunted with the Last Judgment long before he painted it—or the melodious Politian, who thought there would be pity even in hell—or the honest Vittorino da Feltre, so successfully binding Zeno to Christ—or the second Giuliano de’ Medici, so kindly just that his brother the Pope considered him unfit for government! We perceive, after every effort to abbreviate and formulate, that there was no “man of the Renaissance.” There were men, agreeing only in one thing: that life had never been lived so intensely before. The Middle Ages had said—or had pretended to say—No to life; the Renaissance, with all its heart and soul and might, said Yes.
V. RENAISSANCE WOMAN
The emergence of woman was one of the brightest phases of the period. Her status in European history has usually risen with wealth, though Periclean Greece, too near the Orient, was an exception. When hunger is no longer feared, the male quest turns to sex; and if man still despoils himself for gold, it is to lay it at a woman’s feet, or before the children she has given him. If she resists him he idealizes her. Usually she has the good sense to resist him, and to make him pay dearly for the boons whose contemplated splendor swells his veins. If, moreover, she adds graces of mind and character to her body’s charms, she gives man the highest satisfaction he can find this side of glory; and in return he raises her to an almost queenly dominance in his life.
We must not imagine that this was the pleasant role of the average woman in the Renaissance; it fell to a fortunate few, while the far greater number put off their bridal robes to carry domestic burdens and family headaches to their graves. Hear San Bernardino on the proper time for beating a wife:
And I say to you men, never beat your wives while they are great with child, for therein would lie great peril. I say not that you should never beat them; but choose your time…. I know men who have more regard for a hen that lays a fresh egg daily than for their own wives. Sometimes the hen will break a pot or a cup, but the man will not beat her, for fear of losing the egg that is her fruit. How stark mad, then, are many that cannot suffer a word from their own lady who bears such fair fruit! For if she speak a word more than he thinks fit, forthwith he seizes a staff and begins to chastise her; and the hen, which cackles all day without ceasing, you suffer patiently for her egg’s sake.52
A girl of good family was carefully trained for success in getting and keeping a prosperous mate; this was the major subject of her curriculum. Till a few weeks before marriage she was kept in relative seclusion in a convent or in the home, and received from her tutors or nuns an education as thorough as that which came to all but the scholars among the men of her class. Usually she learned some Latin, and became distantly acquainted with the leading figures of Greek and Roman history, literature, and philosophy. She practised some form of music, and sometimes played at sculpture or painting. A few women became scholars, and publicly debated problems of philosophy with men, like the learned Cassandra Fedeli of Venice; but this was highly exceptional. Several women wrote good verse, like Costanza Varano, Veronica Gambara, and Vittoria Colonna. But the educated woman of the Renaissance retained her femininity, her Christianity, and its moral code; and this gave her a union of culture and character that made her irresistible to the higher Renaissance man.
For the lettered men of that age felt her attractiveness intensely, even to writing and reading books that analyzed her charms in scholarly detail. Agnolo Firenzuola, a Vallombrosan monk, composed a dialogue Sopra la bellezza delle donne, on the beauty of women, and carried off this difficult subject with a skill and erudition hardly becoming a monk. Beauty itself he defines after Plato and Aristotle as “an orderly concord, a harmony inscrutably resulting from the composition, union, and commission of divers members, each of which shall itself be well proportioned and in a certain sense beautiful, but which, before they combine to make one body, shall be different and discrepant among themselves.”53 He proceeds to examine with finesse every part of the feminine frame, laying down the standard of beauty for each. The hair should be thick, long, and blonde—a soft yellow nearing brown; the skin bright and clear, but not pale white; the eyes dark, large, and full, with touches of blue in a white iris; the nose must not be aquiline, for that is especially disconcerting in a woman; the mouth should be small, but the lips full; the chin round and dimpled; the neck round and rather long—but let not Adam’s apple show; the shoulders should be broad, the bosom full—with a gentle fall and swell; the hands white and plump and soft; the legs long, the feet small.54 We perceive that Firenzuola had spent much time contemplating his subject, and had discovered an admirable new topic for philosophy.
Not content with these gifts, Renaissance woman, like any other, dyed her hair—almost always to blonde—and added false locks to fill it out; peasant women, having spent their beauty, cut off their tresses and hung them out for sale.55 Perfumes were a mania in sixteenth-century Italy: hair, hats, shirts, stockings, gloves, shoes, all had to be scented; Aretino thanks Duke Cosimo for perfuming the roll of money he had sent him; “some objects that date from that period have not yet lost their odor.”56 A well-to-do woman’s dressing table was a wilderness of cosmetics, usually in fancy containers of ivory, silver, or gold. Rouge was applied not only to the face but to the breasts, which in the larger cities were left mostly bare.57 Various preparations were used to remove blemishes, to polish the fingernails, to render the skin soft and smooth. Flowers were placed in the hair and on the dress. Pearls, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, agates, amethysts, beryls, topazes, or garnets adorned the fingers in rings, the arms in bracelets, the head in tiaras, and (after 1525) the ears in earrings; besides which jewelry might be studded into the headgear, the dress, the shoes, and the fan.
Feminine dress, if we may judge from the portraits, was rich, heavy, and uncomfortable. Velvets, silks, and furs hung in massive folds from the shoulders or—when the shoulders were bare—from fastenings over the breasts. Dresses were bound with a girdle at the waist, and swept the floor behind the feet. The shoes of the well-to-do woman were high of both sole and heel, to protect her feet from the filth of the streets; nevertheless the upper portion was often of delicate brocade. Handkerchiefs were now in use in the upper classes; they were made of fine linen, often striped with gold thread or fringed with lace. Petticoats and lingerie were trimmed with lace and embroidered with silk. Sometimes the dress reached up around the neck in a ruff stiffened with metal ribs, and occasionally rising above the head. The headdress of the women took a hundred forms: turbans, tiaras, kerchiefs or veils bound with pearls, hoods stiffly shaped with wire, caps like a boy’s or a forester’s…. Frenchmen visiting Mantua were delightfully shocked to find the Marchioness Isabella wearing a fancy cap with jeweled feathers, and, beneath, shoulders and bosom bare almost to the nipples.58 Preachers complained about the amount of female bosom that invited the male eye. Now and then the flair for nudity went out of bounds, and Sacchetti observed of some women that if they took off their shoes they would be naked.59 Most women imprisoned themselves in corsets that could be tightened by turning a key, so that Petrarch pitied “their bellies so cruelly squeezed that they suffer as much pain from vanity as the martyrs suffered for religion.”60
Armed with all these weapons, the Renaissance woman of the upper classes raised her sex out of medieval bondage and monastic contempt to be almost the equal of man. She conversed on equal terms with him about literature and philo
sophy; she governed states with wisdom, like Isabella, or with all-too-masculine force, like Caterina Sforza; sometimes, clad in armor, she followed her mate to the battlefield, and bettered the instruction of his violence. She refused to leave the room when rough stories came up; she had a good stomach, and could hear realistic language without losing her modesty or her charm. The Italian Renaissance is rich in women who made a high place for themselves by their intelligence or their virtue: Bianca Maria Visconti who, in the absence of her husband Francesco Sforza, governed Milan so capably that he used to say he had more confidence in her than in his whole army, and who at the same time was known for her “piety, compassion, charity, and beauty of person”;61 or Emilia Pio, whose husband died in her youth, but who so cherished his memory that she was never known, through all her remaining years, to encourage the attentions of any man; or Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother and molder of Lorenzo the Magnificent; or Elisabetta Gonzaga, or Beatrice d’Este, or the maligned and gentle Lucrezia Borgia; or the Caterina Cornaro who made Asolo a school for poets, artists, and gentlemen; or Veronica Gambara, the poetess and salonnière of Correggio; or Vittoria Colonna, the untouched goddess of Michelangelo.
Vittoria recaptured, without proud display, all the quiet virtue of a Roman heroine of the Republic, and combined with it the noblest features of Christianity. She had distinguished ancestry: her father was Fabrizio Colonna, grand constable of the Kingdom of Naples; her mother, Agnese da Montefeltro, was a daughter of Federigo, the scholarly Duke of Urbino. Betrothed in childhood to Ferrante Francesco d’Ávalos, Marquis of Pescara, she married him at nineteen (1509); and the love that united them before and after marriage was a finer poem that any of the sonnets that they exchanged during his campaigns. At the battle of Ravenna (1512) he was wounded almost to death, and was taken prisoner; he took advantage of his captivity to compose A Book of Loves, which he dedicated to his wife. Meanwhile he had carried on a liaison with one of Isabella d’Este’s maids of honor.62 After his release he returned to Vittoria briefly, then sallied forth on one campaign after another, so that she seldom saw him again. He led the forces of Charles V at Pavia (1525), and won a decisive victory. Offered the crown of Naples if he would join a conspiracy against the Emperor, he thought it over for a while, then revealed the plot to Charles. When he died (November, 1525) he had not seen his wife for three years. Ignorant of, or ignoring, his infidelities, she spent her twenty-two years of widowhood in works of charity, piety, and devotion to his memory. When she was urged to marry again she replied: “My husband Ferdinand, who to you seems dead, is not dead to me.”63 She lived in quiet retirement at Ischia, then in convents at Orvieto and Viterbo, then in semiconventual privacy in Rome. There, while herself remaining apparently orthodox, she befriended several Italians who sympathized with the Reformation. For a time she was placed under the surveillance of the Inquisition, and to be her friend was to risk indictment for heresy. Michelangelo took the risk, and developed for her an intense spiritual affection that never dared go beyond poetry.