Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

The humanist movement spread throughout Italy, but until the

accession of a Florentine Medici to the papacy its leaders were almost

all citizens or graduates of Florence. Coluccio Salutati, who became

executive secretary or chancellor ( cancellarius ) to the Signory in

1375, was a bridge from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Cosimo, knowing

and loving all three. The public documents drawn up by him were models

of classical Latinity, and set an example that officials in Venice,

Milan, Naples, and Rome bestirred themselves to follow; Giangaleazzo

Visconti of Milan said that Salutati had done him more harm by

excellence of style than could have come from an army of

mercenaries. `050324 The fame of Niccolo de' Niccoli as a Latin

stylist rivaled his renown as a collector of manuscripts; Bruni called

him the "censor of the Latin tongue," and, like other authors,

submitted his own writings to Niccoli for correction before publishing

them. Niccoli filled his house with ancient classics, statuary,

inscriptions, vases, coins, and gems. He avoided marriage lest it

distract him from his books, but found time for a concubine stolen

from his brother's bed. `050325 He opened his library to all who cared

to study there, and urged young Florentines to abandon luxury for

literature. Seeing a wealthy youth idling the day away, Niccoli

asked him, "What is your object in life?" "To have a good time," was

the frank reply. "But when your youth is over, of what consequence

will you be?" `050326 The youth saw the point, and put himself under

Niccoli's tutelage.

Leonardo Bruni, secretary to four popes and then (1427-44) to the

Florentine Signory, translated several dialogues of Plato into a Latin

whose excellence for the first time fully revealed the splendor of

Plato's style to Italy; he composed a Latin History of Florence

for which the Republic exempted him and his children from taxation;

and his speeches were compared with those of Pericles. When he died

the priors decreed him a public funeral after the manner of the

ancients; he was buried in the church of Santa Croce, with his

History on his breast; and Bernardo Rossellino designed for his

resting place a noble and sumptuous tomb.

Born like Bruni in Arezzo, and succeeding him as secretary to the

Signory, Carlo Marsuppini awed his time by carrying half the

classics of Greece and Rome in his head; he left hardly one ancient

author unquoted in his inaugural address as professor of literature in

the University of Florence. His admiration for pagan antiquity was

such that he felt called upon to reject Christianity; `050327

nevertheless he became for a time apostolic secretary to the Roman

See; and though he was said to have died without bothering to

receive the sacraments, `050328 he too was buried in Santa Croce under

gorgeous oratory by Giannozzo Manetti and an ornate tomb by

Desiderio da Settignano (1453). Manetti, who pronounced this eulogy

over an atheist, was a man whose piety rivaled his learning. For

nine years he hardly stirred from his house and garden, steeping

himself in classical literature, and learning Hebrew as well as

Latin and Greek. Sent as ambassador to Rome, Naples, Venice, Genoa, he

charmed all, and won friendships precious to his government by his

culture, his liberality, and his integrity.

All these men except Salutati were members of the circle that

gathered in the city house or country villa of Cosimo, and led the

movement of scholarship during his ascendancy. Another friend of

Cosimo almost equaled him as a host to learning. Ambrogio

Traversari, general of the Camaldulite order, lived in a cell in the

monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Florence. He mastered

Greek, and suffered qualms of conscience in his affection for the

classics; he refrained from quoting them in his writings, but revealed

their influence in a Latin style whose idiomatic purity would have

shocked all the famous Gregories. Cosimo, who knew how to reconcile

the classics, as well as high finance, with Christianity, loved to

visit him. Niccoli, Marsuppini, Bruni, and others made his cell a

literary rendezvous.

The most active and troublesome of the Italian humanists was

Poggio Bracciolini. Born poor near Arezzo (1380), he was educated at

Florence, studied Greek under Manuel Chrysoloras, supported himself by

copying manuscripts, was befriended by Salutati, and secured

appointment, at twenty-four, as a secretary in the papal chancery at

Rome. For the next half century he served the Curia, never taking even

minor orders, but wearing ecclesiastical dress. Valuing his energy and

his learning, the Curia sent him on a dozen missions. From these he

digressed, time and again, to search for classic manuscripts; his

credentials as a papal secretary won him access to the most

jealously guarded, or most carelessly neglected, treasures in the

monastic libraries at St. Gall, Langres, Weingarten, and Reichenau;

and his spoils were so rich that Bruni and other humanists hailed them

as epochal. Back in Rome he wrote for Martin V vigorous defenses of

Church dogmas, and then, in private gatherings, joined with other

employees of the Curia in laughing at the Christian creed. `050329

He composed dialogues and letters in rough but breezy Latin,

satirizing the vices of the clergy even while practising them to the

extent of his means. When Cardinal Sant' Angelo reproved him for

having children, which hardly befitted a man in ecclesiastical

dress, and for maintaining a mistress, which seemed unbecoming in a

layman, Poggio replied with his usual insolence: "I have children,

which is becoming to a layman, and I have a mistress, which is an

old custom of the clergy." `050330 At fifty-five he abandoned the

mistress who had given him fourteen children, and married a girl of

eighteen. Meanwhile he almost founded modern archeology by

collecting ancient coins, inscriptions, and statuary, and by

describing with scholarly precision the surviving monuments of classic

Rome. He accompanied Pope Eugenius IV to the Council of Florence,

quarreled with Francesco Filelfo, and exchanged with him

enthusiastic invectives of the coarsest indecency, peppered with

accusations of theft, atheism, and sodomy. Again in Rome, he worked

with especial pleasure for the humanist Pope Nicholas V. At seventy he

composed his famous Liber facetiarum, a collection of stories,

satires, and obscenities. When Lorenzo Valla joined the papal

secretariat Poggio attacked him in a new series of Invectivae,

charging him with larceny, forgery, treachery, heresy, drunkenness,

and immorality. Valla replied by laughing at Poggio's Latin, quoting

his sins against grammar and idiom, and setting him aside as a fool in

his dotage. `050331 No one but the immediate victim took such literary

assaults seriously; they were competitive essays in Latin composition;

indeed Poggio proclaimed, in one of them, that he would show how

well classic Latin could express the most modern ideas and the most

private concerns. He was so adept in the art of erudite scurrility

that "the whole world," said Vespasiano, "was afraid of

him." `050332 His pen, like that of a later Aretine, became an

instrument of blackmail. When Alfonso of Naples delayed in

acknowledging Poggio's gift of Xenophon's Cyropaedia translated into

Latin, the irate humanist hinted that a good pen could stab any

king, and Alfonso hastily sent him 500 ducats to hold his tongue.

After enjoying every instinct and impulse for seventy years, Poggio

composed a treatise De miseriis humanae conditionis, in which he

reckoned that the ills of life outweigh the joys, and concluded,

like Solon, that the luckiest people are those who escape being

born. `050333 At seventy-two he returned to Florence, was soon made

secretary to the Signory, and finally was elected to the Signory

itself. He expressed his appreciation by writing a history of Florence

in the style of the ancients- politics, war, and imaginary speeches.

Other humanists breathed relief when at last, aged seventy-nine, he

died (1459). He too was buried in Santa Croce; his statue by Donatello

was erected on the facade of the duomo; and in 1560, in the

confusion of some alterations, it was set up inside the cathedral as

one of the twelve Apostles. `050334

It is clear that Christianity, in both its theology and its

ethics, had lost its hold on perhaps a majority of the Italian

humanists. Several, like Traversari, Bruni, and Manetti in Florence,

Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua, Guarino da Verona in Ferrara, and

Flavio Biondo in Rome, remained loyal to the faith. But to many others

the revelation of a Greek culture lasting a thousand years, and

reaching the heights of literature, philosophy, and art in complete

independence of Judaism and Christianity, was a mortal blow to their

belief in the Pauline theology, or in the doctrine of nulla salus

extra ecclesiam - "no salvation outside the Church." Socrates and

Plato became for them uncanonized saints; the dynasty of the Greek

philosophers seemed to them superior to the Greek and Latin Fathers,

the prose of Plato and Cicero made even a cardinal ashamed of the

Greek of the New Testament and the Latin of Jerome's translation;

the grandeur of Imperial Rome seemed nobler than the timid retreat

of convinced Christians into monastic cells; the free thought and

conduct of Periclean Greeks or Augustan Romans filled many humanists

with an envy that shattered in their hearts the Christian code of

humility, otherworldliness, continence; and they wondered why they

should subject body, mind, and soul to the rule of ecclesiastics who

themselves were now joyously converted to the world. For these

humanists the ten centuries between Constantine and Dante were a

tragic error, a Dantesque losing of the right road; the lovely legends

of the Virgin and the saints faded from their memory to make room

for Ovid's Metamorphoses and Horace's ambisexual odes; the great

cathedrals now seemed barbarous, and their gaunt statuary lost all

charm for eyes that had seen, fingers that had touched, the Apollo

Belvedere.

So the humanists, by and large, acted as if Christianity were a myth

conformable to the needs of popular imagination and morality, but

not to be taken seriously by emancipated minds. They supported it in

their public pronouncements, professed a saving orthodoxy, and

struggled to harmonize Christian doctrine with Greek philosophy. The

very effort betrayed them; implicitly they accepted reason as the

supreme court, and honoured Plato's Dialogues equally with the New

Testament. Like the Sophists of pre-Socratic Greece, they directly

or indirectly, willfully or unwittingly undermined their hearers'

religious faith. Their lives reflected their actual creed; many of

them accepted and practised the ethics of paganism in the sensual

rather than in the Stoic sense. The only immortality they recognized

was that which came through the recording of great deeds; they with

their pens, not God, would confer it, would destine men to everlasting

glory or shame. A generation after Cosimo they would agree to share

this magic power with the artists who carved or painted the effigies

of patrons, or built noble edifices that preserved a donor's name. The

desire of patrons to achieve such mundane immortality was one of the

strongest generative forces in the art and literature of the

Renaissance.

The influence of the humanists was for a century the dominant factor

in the intellectual life of Western Europe. They taught writers a

sharper sense of structure and form; they taught them also the

artifices of rhetoric, the frills of language, the abracadabra of

mythology, the fetishism of classical quotation, the sacrifice of

significance to correctness of speech and beauty of style. Their

infatuation with Latin postponed for a century (1400-1500) the

development of Italian poetry and prose. They emancipated science from

theology, but impeded it by worshiping the past, and by stressing

erudition rather than objective observation and original thought.

Strange to say, they were least influential in the universities. These

were already old in Italy; and at Bologna, Padua, Pisa, Piacenza,

Pavia, Naples, Siena, Arezzo, Lucca, the faculties of law, medicine,

theology, and "arts"- i.e., language, literature, rhetoric, and

philosophy- were too mortised in medieval custom to allow a new

emphasis on ancient cultures; at most they yielded, here and there,

a chair of rhetoric to a humanist. The influence of the "revival of

letters" operated chiefly through academies founded by patron

princes in Florence, Naples, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, and Rome.

There the humanists dictated in Greek or Latin the classic text they

proposed to discuss; at each step they commented in Latin on the

grammatical, rhetorical, geographical, biographical, and literary

aspects of the text; their students took down the dictated text,

and, in the margins, much of the commentary; in this way copies of the

classics, and of commentaries as well, were multiplied and were

scattered into the world. The age of Cosimo was therefore a period

of devoted scholarship, rather than of creative literature. Grammar,

lexicography, archeology, rhetoric, and the critical revision of

classical texts were the literary glories of the time. The form,

machinery, and substance of modern erudition were established; a

bridge was built by which the legacy of Greece and Rome passed into

the modern mind.

Not since the days of the Sophists had scholars risen to so high a

place in society and politics. The humanists became secretaries and

advisers to senates, signories, dukes, and popes, repaying their

favors with classic eulogies, and their snubs with poisoned

epigrams. They transformed the ideal of a gentleman from a man with

ready sword and clanking spurs into that of the fully developed

individual attaining to wisdom and worth by absorbing the cultural

heritage of the race. The prestige of their learning and the

fascination of their eloquence conquered transalpine Europe at the

very time when the arms of France, Germany, and Spain were preparing

to conquer Italy. Country after country was inoculated with the new

culture, and passed from medievalism to modernity. The same century

that saw the discovery of America saw the rediscovery of Greece and

Rome; and the literary and philosophical transformation had far

profounder results for the human spirit than the circumnavigation

and exploration of the globe. For it was the humanists, not the

navigators, who liberated man from dogma, taught him to love life

rather than brood about death, and made the European mind free.

Humanism influenced art last because it appealed rather to intellect

than to sense. The chief patron of art was still the Church, and the

chief purpose of art was still to convey the Christian story to the

letterless, and to adorn the house of God. The Virgin and her Child,

the suffering and crucified Christ, the prophets, Apostles, Fathers,

and saints remained the necessary subjects of sculpture and

painting, even of the minor arts. Gradually, however, the humanists

taught the Italians a more sensual sense of beauty; a frank admiration

for the healthy human body- male or female, preferably nude- permeated

the educated classes; the reaffirmation of life in Renaissance

literature, as against the medieval contemplation of another world,

gave art a secret secular leaning; and by finding Italian Aphrodites

to pose as Virgins, and Italian Apollos to serve as Sebastians, the

painters of Lorenzo's age, and later, introduced pagan motives into

Christian art. In the sixteenth century- when secular princes

rivaled ecclesiastics in financing artists- Venus and Ariadne,

Daphne and Diana, the Muses and the Graces challenged the rule of

the Virgin; but Mary the modest mother continued her wholesome

dominance to the end of Renaissance art.

V. ARCHITECTURE: THE AGE OF BRUNELLESCO

-

"Cursed be the man who invented this wretched Gothic

architecture!" cried Antonio Filarete in 1450; "only a barbarous

people could have brought it to Italy." `050335 Those walls of glass

hardly suited the sun of Italy; those flying buttresses- though at

Notre Dame de Paris they had been forged into a frame of beauty,

like fountain jets petrified in their flow- seemed to the South

unsightly scaffoldings left by builders who had failed to give their

structures a self-contained stability. The Gothic style of pointed

arch and soaring vault had well expressed the aspirations of tender

spirits turning from the laborious soil to the solacing sky; but men

new dowered with wealth and ease wished now to beautify life, not to

escape or malign it; earth would be heaven, and they themselves

would be gods.

The architecture of the Italian Renaissance was not basically a

revolt against Gothic, for Gothic had never conquered Italy. Every

kind of style and influence spoke its piece in the experiments of

the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the heavy columns and round

arches of Lombard Romanesque, the Greek cross of some ground plans,

the Byzantine pendentive and dome, the stately grace of campaniles

echoing Moslem minarets, the slender columns of Tuscan cloisters

remembering mosque or classic porticoes, the beamed ceilings of

England and Germany, the groined vault and ogive and tracery of

Gothic, the harmonious majesty of Roman facades, and, above all, the

simple strength of the basilican nave flanked by its supporting

aisles: all these, in Italy, were mingling fruitfully when the

humanists turned architectural vision to the ruins of Rome. Then the

shattered colonnades of the Forum, rising through the medieval mist,

seemed to Italian eyes more beautiful than the Byzantine bizarreries

of Venice, the somber majesty of Chartres, the fragile audacity of

Beauvais, or the mystic reaches of Amiens' vault. To build again

with columns finely turned, firmly mortised into massive plinths,

gayly crowned with flowering capitals, and bound to stability by

imperturbable architraves- this became, by the groping emergence of

the buried but living past, the dream and passion of men like

Brunellesco, Alberti, Michelozzo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

"Of Filippo Brunellesco," wrote the patriotic Vasari, "it may be

said that he was given by heaven to invest architecture with new

forms, after it had wandered astray for many centuries." `050336

Like so many artists of the Italian Renaissance, he began as a

goldsmith. He graduated into sculpture, and for a time entered into

friendly, rivalry with Donatello. He competed with him and Ghiberti

for a commission to sculpture the bronze doors of the Florentine

Baptistery; when he saw Ghiberti's sketches he pronounced them

superior to his own, and with Donatello he left Florence to study

perspective and design in Rome. He was fascinated by the ancient and

medieval architecture there; he measured the major buildings in all

their elements; he marveled above all at the dome of Agrippa's

Pantheon, 142 feet wide; and he conceived the idea of crowning with

such a dome the unfinished cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in the

city of his birth. He returned to Florence in time to take part in a

conference of architects and engineers on the problem of roofing the

cathedral's octagonal choir, 138 1/2 feet across. Filippo proposed a

dome, but the expansive pressure that so immense a cupola would

exert upon walls unsupported by external buttresses or internal

beams seemed to the conferees a forbidding obstacle. All the world

knows the story of Brunellesco's egg: how he challenged the other

artists to make an egg stand on end, and, after all the rest had

failed, himself succeeded by pressing the blunt and empty end down

upon the table. When they protested that they could have done the

same, he answered that they would make similar claims after he had

domed the cathedral. He received the commission. For fourteen years

(1420-34) he labored intermittently at the task, fighting a thousand

tribulations, raising the cupola precariously 133 feet above the

summit of its supporting walls. At last it was finished, and stood

firm; all the city gloried in it as the first major achievement- and

with one exception the boldest- in the architecture of the

Renaissance. When Michelangelo, a century later, planned the dome of

St. Peter's, and was told that he had an opportunity to surpass

Brunellesco's, he answered: "I will make a sister dome, larger, but

not more beautiful." `050337 The lordly colorful cupola still

dominates, for leagues around, the panorama of a red-roofed Florence

nestling like a bed of roses in the lap of the Tuscan hills.

Though Filippo had taken his conception from the Pantheon, he had

compromised gracefully with the Tuscan Gothic style of the

Florentine cathedral by curving his dome along the lines of the Gothic

pointed arch. But in buildings that he was allowed to design from

the ground he made his classic revolution more explicit and

complete. In 1419 he had begun, for Cosimo's father, the church of San

Lorenzo; he finished only the "Old Sacristy"; but there he chose the

basilican form, the colonnade and entablature, and the Romanesque arch

as the elements of his plan. In the cloisters of Santa Croce he

built for the Pazzi family a pretty chapel again recalling the dome

and colonnaded portico of the Pantheon; and in those same cloisters he

designed a rectangular portal- of fluted columns, flowered capitals,

sculptured architrave, and lunette reliefs- which formed the style

of a hundred thousand Renaissance doors, and survives everywhere in

western Europe and America. He began on classic lines the church of

Santo Spirito, but died while the walls had barely left the ground. In

1446 the corpse of the passionate builder lay in state in the

cathedral under the dome that he had raised; and from Cosimo to the

simple workingman who had labored there the people of Florence came to

mourn that geniuses must die. "He lived as a good Christian," said

Vasari, "and left to the world the savor of his goodness.... From

the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans until now there has been

no man more rare or more excellent." `050338

In his architectural enthusiasm Brunellesco had designed for

Cosimo a palace so extensive and ornate that the modest dictator,

fearing envy, denied himself the luxury of seeing it take form.

Instead he commissioned Michelozzo di Bartolommeo (1444) to build

for him, his family, and his offices, the existing Palazzo Medici or

Riccardi, whose thick stone walls, bare of ornament, reveal the social

disorder, the family feuds, the daily dread of violence or revolt,

that gave a zest to Florentine politics. Immense iron gates opened

to friends and diplomats, artists and poets, access to a court

decorated with statuary by Donatello, and thence to rooms of

moderate splendor, and a chapel brightened by the stately and colorful

frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. There the Medici lived till 1538, with

interludes of banishment; but surely they often left those gloomy

walls to take the sun at the villas that Cosimo built outside the city

in Careggi and Cafaggiolo, and on the slopes of Fiesole. It was in

those rural retreats that Cosimo and Lorenzo, with their friends and

proteges, took refuge from politics in poetry, philosophy, and art;

and to Careggi father and grandson retired for their rendezvous with

death. Glancing now and then beyond the grave, Cosimo gave substantial

sums to raise an abbey at Fiesole, and to rebuild more commodiously

the old convent of San Marco. There Michelozzo designed graceful

cloisters, a library for Niccoli's books, and a cell where,

occasionally, Cosimo withdrew even from his friends, and spent a day

in meditation and prayer.

In these enterprises Michelozzo was his favorite architect and the

unfailing friend who accompanied him into exile, and returned with

him. Soon thereafter the Signory gave Michelozzo the delicate task

of reinforcing the Palazzo Vecchio against threatened collapse. He

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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