Against these barbarities we may place the high development of organized charity. Every man who made a will left a sum to be distributed among the poor of his parish. Since beggars were numberless, some churches provided the equivalent of modern “soup kitchens”; so the church of Santa Maria in Campo Santo, at Rome, fed thirteen beggars daily, and two thousand on Mondays and Fridays.85 Hospitals, lazarettos, asylums for incurables, for the poor, for orphans, for destitute pilgrims, for reformed prostitutes, were numerous in Renaissance as in medieval Italy. Pistoia and Viterbo were celebrated for the scope of their charities. At Mantua Lodovico Gonzaga established the Ospedale Maggiore for the care of the poor and infirm, and gave it three thousand ducats a year of governmental funds.86 At Venice a society known as the Pellegrini, including in its membership Titian and the two Sansovini, provided mutual aid to its members, dowered poor girls, and practised other charities. Florence in 1500 had seventy-three civic organizations devoted to works of charity. The Confraternità della Misericordia, founded in 1244 but allowed to decay, was restored in 1475; its members were laymen who visited the sick, practised other charities, and earned the love of the people by their courageous attendance upon victims of the plague; their silent black-robed processions are still among the most impressive sights of Florence.87 Venice had a similar Confraternità di San Rocco; Rome had a Sodality of the Dolorosa, now 504 years old; and Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici founded in 1519 the Confraternità della Carità to take care of poor persons above the mendicant class, and to provide decent burial for the destitute. The private charity of unrecorded millions lent some mitigation to the struggle of man against man, nature, and death.
VIII. MANNERS AND AMUSEMENTS
Amid violence and dishonesty, and the boisterous life of university students, and the rough humor and kindliness of peasant and proletaire, good manners grew as one of the arts of the Renaissance. Italy now led Europe in personal and social hygiene, dress, table manners, cooking, conversation, and recreations; and in all of these except dress Florence claimed to lead Italy. Florence patriotically mourned the filth of other cities, and Italians made Tedesco, German, a synonym for coarseness of language and life.88 The old Roman habit of frequent bathing continued in the educated classes; the well-to-do displayed their finery and “took the waters” at various spas, and drank sulphurous streams as an annual penance to purge digestive sins. Male dress was as ornate as female, except for jewelry: tight sleeves and colored hose, and such wondrous baggy bonnets as Raphael caught on Castiglione. Hose ran up the legs to the loins, splitting men into prancing absurdities; but above the hips a man could be elegant in velvet tunic and silk frills and ruffles of lace; even gloves and shoes sported wisps of lace. At a tournament given by Lorenzo de’ Medici his brother Giuliano wore garments costing 8000 ducats.89
A revolution in table manners came in the fifteenth century with the increasing substitution of a fork for the fingers in carrying food to the mouth. Thomas Coryat, touring Italy about 1600, was struck by the novel custom, “which,” he wrote, “is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels”; and he shared in introducing the idea into England.90 Knives, forks, and spoons were of brass, sometimes of silver—which was lent out to neighbors preparing banquets. Meals were modest except on such outstanding occasions or at state functions; then excess was compulsory. Spices—pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, juniper, ginger, etc.—were used in abundance to flavor food and stimulate thirst; hence every host offered his guests a variety of wines. The reign of garlic in Italy can be traced back to 1548, but doubtless had begun long before. There was very little drunkenness or gluttony; the Italians of the Renaissance, like the later French, were gourmets, not gourmands. When men ate apart from the women of their families they might invite a courtesan or two, as Aretino did when he entertained Titian. More careful people would grace the meal with music, poetic improvisations, and educated conversation.
The art of conversation—bel parlare—to speak with intelligence, urbanity, courtesy, clarity, and wit—was reinvented by the Renaissance. Greece and Rome had known it, and here and there in medieval Italy—as at the courts of Frederick II and Innocent III—it had been kept precariously alive. Now in Lorenzo’s Florence, in Elisabetta’s Urbino, in Leo’s Rome, it flourished again: nobles and their ladies, poets and philosophers, generals and scholars, artists and musicians met in the companionship of minds, quoted famous authors, made an occasional obeisance to religion, graced their language with a light fantastic touch, and basked in one another’s audience. Such conversation was so admired that many essays and treatises were cast in dialogue form to appropriate its elegance. In the end the game was carried to excess; language and thought became too precious and refined; an enervating dilettantism softened manliness. Urbino became Rambouillet in France, and Molière attacked les précieuses ridicules just in time to save the art of good converse for France.
Despite the preciosity of a few, Italian speech enjoyed a freedom of subject and epithet that would not be allowed by social manners today. Since general conversation was rarely heard by unmarried women of good character, it was assumed that sex might be openly discussed. But beyond this, and even in the highest male circles, there was a looseness of sexual jest, a gay freedom in poetry, a coarse obscenity in drama, that seem to us now among the less presentable aspects of the Renaissance. Educated men could scribble lewd verses on statuary, the refined Bembo wrote in praise of Priapus.91 Youths competed in obscenity and profanity to prove their maturity. Men of all classes swore great oaths and curses, often involving blasphemy of the most sacred names in the Christian faith. And yet the phrases of courtesy had never been so flowery, forms of address had never been so gracious; women kissed the hand of any intimate male friend on meeting or leaving him, and men kissed the hand of a woman; presents were ever passing from friend to friend; and tact of word and deed reached a development that seemed unattainable in northern Europe. Italian manuals of manners became favored texts beyond the Alps.
The same was true of Italian handbooks of dancing, fencing, and other recreations; in recreation, as in conversation and profanity, Italy led the Christian world. On summer evenings girls danced in the squares of Florence, and the most graceful won a silver garland; in the villages young men and women danced on the green. In homes and at formal balls women danced with women or men, and men with men or women; in any case the aim was grace. In the Renaissance the ballet flourished; the poetry of motion was added to the arts.
Cardplaying was even more popular than dancing; in the fifteenth century it became a mania in all classes; Leo X was an addict. Often it involved gambling; recall how Cardinal Raffaello Riario won 14,000 ducats in two games with the son of Innocent VIII. Men gambled also with dice, and sometimes loaded them.92 This too became a passion, which legislation vainly sought to moderate. In Venice gambling ruined so many noble families that the Council of Ten twice forbade the sale of cards or dice, and called upon servants to report masters violating these ordinances.93 The monte di pietà established by Savonarola in 1495 required of borrowers a pledge to avoid gambling at least till the loan had been paid.94 Sedate people brooded over chess, and fondled expensive sets; Giacomo Loredano at Venice had chessmen valued at 5000 ducats.
Young men had their special games, mostly in the open air. The upperclass Italian was trained to ride, wield sword and lance, and tilt in tournaments. For such contests the towns, on certain holidays, roped off space in a square, usually convenient to windows and balconies whence the ladies could encourage their knights. As these combats proved insufficiently mortal, some rash youths, in the Roman Colosseum in 1332, introduced the bullfight, with a man on foot armed only with a spear; on that occasion eighteen knights, all of old Roman families, were killed, and only eleven bulls.95 Such contests were occasionally repeated in Rome and Siena, but never caught the Italian taste. Horse racing was more popular, and aroused the enthusiasm of Romans, Sienese, and Florentines alike. Hunting, falconry, foot races, boat regatta
s, tennis, and boxing rounded out the sports, and kept the Italians individually in form, while collectively the defense of the cities was left to mercenary aliens.
All in all it was a gay life despite its toils and risks, its natural and supernatural terrors. City folk had the pleasure of walking or riding out to the countryside, to the banks of the rivers or the shores of the sea; they cultivated flowers to adorn their homes and persons, and, by their villas, carved stately gardens into geometrical forms. The Church was generous with holydays, and the state added holidays of its own. Water festivals were held on the Venetian lagoons, on the Arno at Venice, the Mincio at Mantua, the Ticino at Milan. Or, on special days, great processions moved down the city streets, with floats and banners designed for the guilds by artists of international renown; bands played, pretty girls sang and danced, dignitaries marched; and in the evening fireworks shot their evanescent wonder into the sky. On Holy Saturday, in Florence, three flints brought from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem lit a taper that lit a candle that-carried along a wire by a mechanical dove—reached and set off the fireworks in the Carro or emblematic car of state in the piazza before the cathedral. On Corpus Christi the parade would be halted to hear a cantata sung by a choir of girls and boys, or see an episode of Scriptural history or pagan mythology enacted by some confraternity. If a great dignitary came to town he might be received with a trionfo, a procession arranged with chariots in the manner of a Roman triumph for a victorious general. When Leo X visited his beloved Florence in 1513, all the city turned out to watch his triumphal car—decorated and painted by Pontormo—pass under great arches that spanned the central street; seven other chariots moved in that cavalcade, bearing impersonations of famous figures in Roman history; on the last a naked boy, covered with gilt, represented the coming, with Leo, of the Golden Age; but the boy died shortly afterward from the effect of the gilt.96
At carnival time the processional floats in Florence might symbolize some idea like Prudence, Hope, Fear, Death, or the elements, the winds, the seasons, or tell in pantomime a story like Paris and Helen, or Bacchus and Ariadne, with songs appropriate to each scene; for such a “masque” Lorenzo wrote his famous ode to youth and joy. On those carnival nights everyone from urchins to cardinals wore masks, played pranks, and made love, with a freedom that revenged itself in advance for the restraints of Lent. In 1512, when Florence seemed still prosperous, but unsuspected misfortunes were only a few months away, Piero di Cosimo and Francesco Granacci designed for a carnival pageant a “Masque of the Triumph of Death”: an enormous triumphal car, drawn by black buffaloes, was covered with a black cloth on which were painted skeletons and white crosses; in the car stood a colossal figure of Death with a scythe in his hand; around him were tombs, and lugubrious figures on whose black robes were painted white bones gleaming in the dark; and behind the car masked figures walked, whose black hoods were painted with death heads both in front and behind. From the tombs on the cars rose other figures, painted to seem only bones; and these skeletons chanted a song reminding men that all must die. Before and after the car came a cavalcade of decrepit horses, bearing the bodies of dead men.97 So, at the height of carnival, Piero di Cosimo, echoing Savonarola, pronounced his judgment on the pleasures of Italy, and his prophecy of the doom to come.
IX. DRAMA
In such masques and carnival fetes the Italian drama had one of its progenitors. For often some scene, usually from sacred history, would be performed on one of the floats or cars, or on temporary stages at points on the procession route. But the primary source of the Italian drama was the divozione, an episode of the Christian story acted by the members of any guild, sometimes by professional players belonging to a confraternity that made a business of presenting such spectacles. The texts of several divozioni have come down through time, and show a surprising dramatic power; so the Virgin, finding Christ in Jerusalem and then again losing him, searches frantically for him, crying out: “O my so loving Son! O my Son, where have you gone? O my so gracious Son, through what gate have you gone? O my divine Son, you were so sorrowful when you left me! Tell me, for the love of God, where, where has my Son gone?”98
In the fifteenth century, especially in Florence, a more developed form of drama, the sacra rappresentazione, was played in the oratory of a guild, or in the refectory of a convent, or in a field or public square. The scenic arrangements for these performances were often complex and ingenious: skies were simulated by vast awnings painted with stars; clouds were represented by masses of wool suspended and swaying in the air; angels were impersonated by boys supported aloft on metal frames concealed in waving draperies. The libretto was usually in poetic form, accompanied with music on the viol or the lute. Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Pulci were among the poets who wrote words for such religious plays. Politian, in his Orfeo, adapted the form of the sacra rappresentazione to a pagan theme.
Meanwhile other components of Italian life were sharing in the birth of Italian drama. The farse or farces that had long been played by passing mummers in the medieval towns contained the germ of Italian comedy. Some players excelled in improvising dialogue for simple scenarios or plots; this commedia dell’ arte was a favorite vehicle of the Italian genius for satire and burlesque. In such farces the traditional masks or characters of popular comedy took form and name: Pantalone, Arlecchino, Pulcinella or Punchinello.
The humanists played their part in the complex of factors leading to the drama by restoring the texts, and arranging performances, of ancient Roman comedies. Twelve plays of Plautus were discovered in 1427, and served as an additional stimulus. At Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Siena, Rome the comedies of Plautus and Terence were staged, and the old classic tradition soared over centuries to form again a secular theater. In 1486 the Menaechmi of Plautus was for the first time presented in Italian, and the transition from ancient to Renaissance drama was fully prepared. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the religious drama lost its hold on educated audiences in Italy; pagan subjects increasingly replaced Christian themes; and when native dramatists like Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Aretino wrote plays, it was in the ribald style of Plautus, a world away from the once-beloved stories of Mary and Christ. All the old scenes of Roman comedy, all the superficial plots turning on mistaken sex or identity or rank, all the stock characters, including panders and prostitutes, with which Plautus had pleased the groundlings, all the old plebian coarseness and rough play, reappeared in these Italian comedies.
Despite the preservation of Seneca’s plays, and the recovery of the Greek drama, tragedy never acquired a standing on the Renaissance stage. Even the upper classes wished to be amused rather than deepened, and turned a cold eye upon Gian Trissino’s Sophonisba (1515), and Giovanni Rucellai’s Rosamunda, which in the same year was performed in the Rucellai gardens at Florence before Leo X.
It was the misfortune of Italian comedy that it took form when Italian morals were at nadir. That such plays as Bibbiena’s Calandra and Machiavelli’s Mandragola could satisfy the tastes of the Italian upper classes, even at refined Urbino, and could be performed before popes without arousing protest, reveals again how intellectual freedom can comport with moral deterioration. When the Counter Reformation came with the Council of Trent (1545f), the morals of clergy and laity were severely censored, and the comedy of the Renaissance was banished from the amusements of Italian society.
X. MUSIC
It was a redeeming feature of Italian comedy that ballets, pantomimes, and concerts were presented as intermezzi between the acts. For next to love itself, music was the chief recreation and consolation of every class in Italy. Montaigne, traveling in Tuscany in 1581, was “astounded to see peasants with lutes in their hands, and, beside them, shepherds reciting Ariosto by heart”; but this, he adds, “is what we may see in all of Italy.”99 Renaissance painting has a thousand representations of people playing music, from the luting angels at the Madonna’s feet in so many Coronations, and Melozzo’s serenading seraphim, to the
quiet exaltation of the man at the harpischord in The Concert; and note the boy—whom we can hardly believe to be the painter himself—in the center of Sebastiano del Piombo’s Three Ages of Man. The literature likewise conveys a picture of a people singing or playing music in their homes, at their work, on the street, in music academies, monasteries, nunneries, churches, in processions, masques, trionfi, and pageants, in religious or secular plays, in the lyric passages and interludes of dramas, in such outings as Boccaccio imagined in the Decameron. Rich men kept a variety of musical instruments in their homes, and arranged private musicales. Women organized clubs for the study and performance of music. Italy was—is—mad about music.
Folk song flourished at all times, and learned music periodically rejuvenated itself at that fount; popular melodies were adapted for complex madrigals, for hymns, even for passages in music for the Mass. “In Florence,” says Cellini, “people were wont to meet on the public streets of a summer night” to sing and dance.100 Street singers—canton di piazza—strummed their sad or merry notes on handsome lutes; people gathered to sing laudes, hymns of praise, to the Virgin before her street or roadside shrines; and in Venice mating songs rose to the moon from a hundred gondolas, or throaty lovers hopefully serenaded hesitant lasses in the mystic shadows of labyrinthine canals. Almost every Italian could sing, and nearly as many could sing in simple vertical harmony. Hundreds of these popular part songs have come down to us under the picturesque name of frottole, little fruits; usually short, usually amorous; arranged for a dominant soprano supported by tenor, alto, and bass. Whereas in previous centuries the tenor voice had “held” the melody and so derived its name, now in the fifteenth the air was carried by the soprano—so called because its music was written above the rest. This part did not need a female voice; as often as not it was sung by a boy, or by the falsetto of an adult male. (Castrati did not appear in the papal choir till 1562.)101