The Renaissance
Medicine was the only science that made any significant progress in this period of Italy’s decline. The greatest scientists of the age spent many years in Italy as students and teachers—Copernicus from 1496 to 1506, Vesalius from 1537 to 1546; but we must not steal them from Poland and Flanders to further honor Italy. Realdo Colombo, who succeeded Vesalius as professor of anatomy at Padua, expounded the pulmonary circulation of the blood in De re anatomica (1558), probably unaware that Servetus had proposed the same theory twelve years before. Colombo practised the dissection of human cadavers at Padua and Rome, apparently without ecclesiastical opposition;19 he seems also to have vivisected dogs. Gabriele Fallopio, a pupil of Vesalius, discovered and described the semicircular canals and the chorda tympani of the ear, and the tubes, now named after him, that bear the ova from the ovaries to the uterus. Bartolommeo Eustachio described and gave his name to the Eustachian tube of the ear and the Eustachian valve of the heart; to him also we owe the discovery of the abducens nerve, the suprarenal bodies, and the thoracic duct. Costanzo Varoli studied the pons Varolii—a mass of nerves on the undersurface of the brain.
We have no figures as to the effects of medicine on human longevity in the Renaissance. Varoli died at thirty-two, Fallopio at forty, Colombo at forty-three, Eustachio at fifty; on the other hand Michelangelo lived to eighty-nine, Titian to ninety-nine, Luigi Cornaro to approximately a century. Born at Venice in 1467 or earlier, Luigi was rich enough to indulge in every luxury of food, drink, and love. These “excesses caused me to fall a prey to various ailments, such as pains in the stomach, frequent pains in the side, symptoms of gout… a low fever that was almost continuous… and an unquenchable thirst. This evil condition left me nothing to hope for except that death should terminate my troubles.” When he was forty his physicians abandoned all medicaments and advised him that his only hope of recovery lay in “a temperate and orderly life…. I was not to partake of any foods, either solid or liquid, save such as are prescribed for invalids; and of these in small quantities only.” He was allowed to eat meat and drink wine, but always in moderation; and he soon reduced his total daily intake to twelve ounces of food and fourteen of wine. Within a year, he tells us, “I found myself entirely cured of all my complaints…. I grew most healthy, and have remained so from that time to this”20—i.e., age eighty-three. He found that this order and moderation of physical habits made for similar qualities and health of mind and character; his “brain remained constantly in a clear condition;…. melancholy, hatred, and the other passions” left him; even his esthetic sense was sharpened, and all lovely things seemed to him now more beautiful than ever before.
He spent a quiet and comfortable old age at Padua, undertook and financed public works, and wrote, at eighty-three, his autobiographical Discorsi della vita sobria. Tintoretto has pictured him for us in a delectable portrait: bald head but ruddy face, eyes clear and penetrating, wrinkles spelling benevolence, white beard thinned with years, hands still revealing, so near to death, an aristocratic youth. His octogenarian vivacity encourages us as he rallies those who thought life after seventy to be a meaningless valetudinarian procrastination:
Let them come and see, and wonder at my good health, how I mount on horseback without help, how I run upstairs and uphill, how cheerful, amusing, and contented I am, how free from care and disagreeable thoughts. Peace and joy never quit me…. All my senses (thank God!) are in the best condition, including the sense of taste; for I enjoy more the simple food that I now take in moderation than all the delicacies that I ate in my years of disorder…. When I come home I see before me not one or two but eleven grandchildren.… I take delight in hearing them sing and play on different musical instruments. I sing myself, and find my voice better, clearer, and louder than ever…. My life, therefore, is alive, not dead; nor would I exchange my old age for the youth of such as live in the service of their passions.21
At eighty-six, “full of health and strength,” he wrote a second discourse, expressing his joy at the conversion of several friends to his way of life. At ninety-one he added a third essay, and told how “I constantly write, and with my own hand, eight hours a day, and…. in addition to this I walk and sing for many other hours… For I feel, when I leave the table, that I must sing…. Oh, how beautiful and sonorous my voice has become!” At ninety-two he composed “A loving exhortation… to all mankind to follow the orderly and temperate life.”22 He looked forward to completing a century, and to an easy death through the gradual diminution of his senses, feelings, and vital spirits. He died peacefully in 1566; some say at ninety-nine, others at one hundred and three or four. His wife, we are told, obeyed his precepts, lived to nearly a century, and died in “perfect ease of body and security of soul.”23
We must not expect to find a major philosopher in so small a span of space and time. Iacopo Aconzio, an Italian Protestant, in a treatise De methodo (1558), prepared part of the way for Descartes; and in De strata-gematibus Satanae (1565) he had the audacity to suggest that all Christianity might be reduced to a few doctrines held by all Christians, and not including the idea of the Trinity.24 Mario Nizzoli made a path for Francis Bacon by inveighing against the continued reign of Aristotle in philosophy, appealing for direct observation against deductive reasoning, and denouncing logic as the art of proving the false to be true.25 Bernardino Telesio of Cosenza, in De rerum natura (1565–86), Joined Nizzoli and Pierre La Ramée in the spreading revolt against the authority of Aristotle, and called for empirical science: Nature must be explained in her own terms through the experience of our senses. What we see, said Telesio, is matter acted upon by two forces: heat coming from the sky, cold rising from the earth; heat producing expansion and motion, cold producing contraction and rest; in the conflict of these two principles lies the inner essence of all physical phenomena. These phenomena proceed according to natural causes and inherent laws, without the intervention of deity. Nature, however, is not inert; there is a soul in things as well as in man. Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno, and Francis Bacon would all take something from these ideas. Some measure of liberalism must have survived in the Church to let Telesio die a natural death (1588). Twelve years later the Inquisition would burn Bruno at the stake.
III. LITERATURE
The great age of Italian scholarship was now ended: France took the torch when Julius Caesar Scaliger migrated from Verona to Agen in 1526. Note the effect of war upon the book trade: in the last decade of the fifteenth century Florence published 179 books, Milan 228, Rome 460, Venice 1491; in the first decade of the sixteenth century Florence published 47, Milan 99, Rome 41, Venice 536.26 The academies founded for classical scholarship—the Platonic Academy at Florence, the Roman Academy of Pomponius Laetus, the Neacademia at Venice, the Neapolitan Academy of Pontanus—died out in this period; the study of pagan philosophy was frowned upon except in a Scholastified Aristotle; and Latin gave place to Italian as the language of literature. New academies sprang up, chiefly devoted to literary and linguistic criticism, and serving as central exchanges of ears for the poets of the town. So Florence had the Della Crusca Academy (1572) and the Umidi; Venice had the Pellegrini, Padua the Eretei; and each new society took a sillier name. These academies encouraged talent and stifled genius; poets struggled to obey the rules laid down by the purists, and inspiration fled to airier haunts. Michelangelo belonged to no literary academy, and though he, like the rest, indulged his Muse in trite conceits, and forced his fire into cold Petrarchian molds, his sonnets, rough in form but warm in feeling and thought, are the best Italian poetry of the time. Luigi Alamanni fled from Florence to France, and composed a poem on agriculture—La coltivazione— which did not fall far short of Virgil’s Georgics in combining tillage with poetry.* Bernardo Tasso rehearsed, in the misfortunes of his life, the vicissitudes of his famous son Torquato; his lyrics are among the choicest artificialities of the age; his epic, Amadigi, versified with heavy seriousness the chivalric romance, Amadis de Gaul. The Italian public, missing in it Arios
to’s leavening humor, gave it a quiet burial.
The novella, or short story, had remained popular ever since The Decameron had given it a classic form. Written in simple language, and usually describing dramatic incidents or intimate scenes of Italian life, the novelle were welcomed by all ranks. Often they were read aloud to avid listeners, none more avid than the letterless, so that their audience was all Italy. We may marvel today at the broad tolerance of Renaissance women who heard these tales without reported blushing. Love, seduction, violence, adventure, humor, sentiment, descriptions of scenery, provided the material of the stories, and every class furnished types and characters.
Almost every city had a skilled practitioner of the form. At Salerno Tommaso de’ Guardati, known as Masuccio, published in 1476 his Novellino —fifty stories illustrating the generosity of princes, the incontinence of women, the vices of monks, and the hypocrisy of mankind. Less polished than Boccaccio’s novelettes, they often surpass them in sincerity, power, and eloquence. At Siena the novella took on a highly sensuous quality, filling its pages with tales of unlicensed love. Florence had four famous novellieri. Franco Sacchetti, friend and imitator of Boccaccio, outwinded him by writing three hundred novelle, whose vulgarity and obscenity made them almost universally popular. Agnolo Firenzuola devoted many of his stories to satirizing the sins of the clergy; he described the goings-on in a dissolute convent, exposed the arts by which confessors induced pious women to leave legacies to monasteries, and himself became a monk of the Vallombrosan order. Antonfrancesco Grazzini, known to Italy as il Lasca, the Roach, excelled in comic stories, featuring the prankster Pilucca, but he could also season his dish with sex and blood, as when a husband, finding his wife in adultery with his son, cuts off their hands and feet, cuts out their eyes and tongues, and lets them bleed to death on their bed of love. Antonfrancesco Doni, a Servite monk and priest, was expelled from the cloister of the Annunciation (1540), apparently for sodomy; at Piacenza he joined a club of profligates devoted to Priapus; in Venice he became a devoted enemy of Aretino, against whom he wrote a pamphlet ominously entitled “Earthquake of Doni the Florentine, with the Ruin of the Great Colossus and Bestial Antichrist of Our Age”; meanwhile composing novelle noted for their pungent humor and style.
The best of the novellieri was Matteo Bandello, whose life spanned half a continent and most of a century (1480–1562). Born near Tortona, he was soon entered into the Dominican order, whose general was his uncle. He grew up in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan; he was presumably there when Leonardo painted The Last Supper in the refectory, and when Beatrice d’Este was buried in the adjoining church. He lived at Mantua for six years as tutor in the ruling family, carried on a flirtation with Lucrezia Gonzaga, and saw Isabella fight with all her arts the coming of old age. Returning to Milan, he actively supported the French against the Spanish-German forces in Italy; after the French disaster at Pavia his house was burned and his library was almost totally destroyed, including a Latin dictionary which he had almost completed. He fled to France, served Cesare Fregoso, General of the Dominicans, well, and was made Bishop of Agen (1550). In his leisure hours he gathered together the 214 stories that he had written during the years, gave them their finished literary form, covered their mild indecency with his episcopal absolution, and had them printed in three volumes at Lucca (1554), and a fourth at Lyons (1573).
As in the other novellieri, so in Bandello the plots turn mostly on love or violence, or the morals of friars, monks, and priests. A sweet lass revenges herself upon a faithless lover by tearing him to pieces with pincers; a husband forces his adulterous wife to strangle her lover with her own hands; a convent abandoned to debauchery is described with tolerant good humor. Some of Bandello’s stories provided material for exciting dramas, as when Webster took from one of them the plot for The Duchess of Malfi. Bandello tells with feeling and skill the romance of Romeo Montecchio and Giulietta Capelletti, and vividly conveys the passion of their love. Shall we sample him at his most romantic?
Romeo, not daring to inquire who the damsel was, applied himself to feed his eyes on her lovely sight, and minutely considering all her movements, drank the sweet amorous poison, marvelously commending her every part and gesture. He was seated in a corner wherein, when dancing was toward, all passed before him. Giulietta (for so was the damsel called) was the daughter of the master of the house and giver of the feast. And she likewise, not knowing Romeo, but seeing withal that he was the handsomest and sprightliest youth that might be found, was marvelously pleased with his sight, and softly and furtively eyeing him a while askance, felt I know not what sweetness at heart, which all to-flooded her with exceeding delight; wherefore she would fain have had him join the dance, so she might the better see him and hear him speak, herseeming as much delight should issue from his speech as she still drank in at his eyes, what while she gazed on him; but he sat all alone and showed no wish to dance. All his study was to ogle the fair damsel, and she thought of nothing but to look upon him, and so they viewed each other on such wise that, their eyes by times encountering, and the flashing rays of the one and the other’s glances mingling, they lightly perceived that they eyed each other amorously; more by token that, whenassoever their eyes met, both filled the air with amorous sighs, and it seemed they desired for the nonce no otherwhat than to discover one to other by speech their newborn flame.27
The climax in Bandello is subtler than in Shakespeare. Instead of Romeo dying before Juliet emerges from her coma, she awakes before Romeo feels the effect of the poison he has drunk in despair at her apparent death. In his joy at her recovery he forgets the poison, and the lovers have a few moments of delirious joy. When the poison wreaks its force and Romeo dies, Juliet stabs herself with his sword.*
IV. TWILIGHT IN FLORENCE: 1534–74
It is easier to rule a state in its decline than in its youth; diminished vitality almost welcomes subjugation. Florence, beaten down again by the Medici (1530), submitted wearily to domination by Clement VII; it rejoiced when the coarse tyrant Alessandro de’ Medici was slain by his remote relative Lorenzino (1537); and, instead of seizing the opportunity to re-establish the republic, it accepted a second Cosimo, in hopes that he might show the wisdom and statesmanship of the first. The direct line of Cosimo Pater Patriae was now legally extinct; the younger Cosimo was descended from his older namesake’s brother Lorenzo (1395–1440). Guicciardini manoeuvred the new ruler, then eighteen, into lordship in the hope of being the power behind the throne; but he forgot that the young Medici was the son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere and the grandson of Caterina Sforza, and therefore had at least two generations of iron in his blood. Cosimo took the reins in his own hands, and held them firmly for twenty-seven years.
His character and government mingled evil and good. He was as severe and cruel as unsentimental policy might dictate. He did not bother, like earlier Medici, to maintain republican forms and façade. He arranged a system of espionage that entered every family, and used parish priests as spies.29 He enforced unanimity of professed religious belief, and co-operated with the Inquisition. He was greedy of wealth and power, exploited the state monopoly of grain, taxed his subjects avidly, overthrew the semi-republic of Siena to make that city, like Arezzo and Pisa, part of his dominions, and persuaded Pope Pius V to give him the title of grand duke of Tuscany (1569).
In partial compensation for the absolutism of his rule, he organized efficient administration, a reliable army and police, a competent and incorruptible judiciary. He lived simply, avoided costly ceremony and display, managed finances stringently, and left a full treasury to his son and heir. The order and safety that were now maintained on streets and highways revived the commerce and industry that had ailed under repeated revolutions. Cosimo brought in new manufactures, as of coral and glass; he invited and protected Portuguese Jews as a stimulus to industrial development; he enlarged Livorno (Leghorn) as a busy port. He had the marshes of the Maremma drained in an effort to free that regi
on, and nearby Siena, from malaria. Under his conscientious despotism Siena, like Florence, became more prosperous than ever before. He used part of his levied wealth to support literature and art without extravagance and with discrimination. He raised the Accademia degli Umidi to an official position as the Accademia Fiorentina, and commissioned it to set norms for proper Tuscan usage. He befriended Vasari and Cellini, tried hard to win Michelangelo back to Florence, and founded, under his absent presidency, an Arte del Disegno, or Academy of Design. He established at Pisa (1544) a school of botany second only to Padua’s in age and excellence. Doubtless Cosimo would have argued that he could not have accomplished this good had he not begun with a little evil and an iron fist.
At forty-five this iron Duke was already worn out with the strains of power and family tragedies. Within a few months, in 1562, his wife and two of his sons died from malarial fever caught during his efforts to drain the Maremma swamps. A year later he lost a daughter. In 1564 he resigned the actual government to his son Francesco. He tried to console himself with amours but found more boredom in promiscuity than in marriage. He died in 1574, aged fifty-five. He had lived up to the best and the worst in his ancestry.
Though Florence no longer produced Leonardos or Michelangelos, and had no artists to compare in this period with the urbane and universal Titian, the volcanic Tintoretto, or the festal Veronese, she experienced under her second Cosimo as vigorous a revival as could be expected from a generation that had grown up amid frustrated revolt and unsuccessful war. Even so, Cellini judged the artists employed by Cosimo to be “a band the like of which is not to be found at present in the world”30—which is a typically Florentine understatement of Venetian art. Benvenuto thought the Duke a patron with more taste than generosity, but perhaps this able governor considered economic reconstruction and political order more vital than the artistic decoration of his court. Vasari described Cosimo as “loving and favoring all artists, and indeed all men of genius.” It was Cosimo who financed at Chiusi, Arezzo, and elsewhere the excavations that revealed a remarkable Etruscan culture, and unearthed the famous Etruscan bronze statues of The Chimera, The Orator, and Minerva. He bought back as many as he could locate of the art treasures looted from the Medici palace in 1494 and 1527, added his own collections to them, and housed the total in that palace-fortress that Luca Pitti had begun a hundred years before. Cosimo had this monstrous edifice enlarged by Bartolommeo Ammaaati, and made it his official dwelling (1553).