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

convey the odor of disintegration; the letters of Isabella and

Beatrice d'Este, of Elisabetta Gonzaga and Alessandra Strozzi can be

quoted to paint a picture of sisterly tenderness and ideal family

life. The reader will have to be on his guard.

Many factors entered into the moral decline that accompanied the

intellectual exaltation of the Renaissance. Probably the basic

factor was the growth of wealth that resulted from Italy's strategic

position on the routes of trade between western Europe and the East,

and from the flow of tithes and annates out of a thousand Christian

communities into Rome. Sin became more prevalent as more funds were

provided to meet its costs. The spread of wealth weakened the

ascetic ideal: men and women came to resent an ethic that had been

born of poverty and fear, and that now ran counter to both their

impulses and their means. They heard with rising sympathy the view

of Epicurus that life should be enjoyed, and that all pleasures are to

be accounted innocent until proved guilty. The charms of woman

triumphed over the prohibitions of theology.

Perhaps next to wealth the main source of immorality was the

political unsettlement of the times. The strife of factions, the

frequency of war, the influx of foreign mercenaries, and, later, the

invasion of Italy by foreign armies recognizing no moral restraints on

Italian soil, the repeated disruption of agriculture and trade by

the ravages of war, the destruction of freedom by despots who replaced

peaceful legitimacy with autocratic force: all these disordered

Italian life, and cracked the "cake of custom" that normally conserves

morality. Men found themselves unmoored in a sea of violence.

Neither state nor Church seemed able to protect them; they protected

themselves as best they could, by arms or craft; lawlessness became

the law. The despots, placed above the law and dedicated to a short

but stirring life, indulged themselves in every pleasure; and their

example was followed by the moneyed minority.

In assessing the role of religious unbelief in releasing the natural

immorality of mankind, we must begin by distinguishing the

skepticism of the lettered few from the persistent piety of the

many. Enlightenment is of minorities, and emancipation is

individual; minds are not freed en masse. A few skeptics might

protest against false relics and bogus miracles and indulgences

offering promissory notes for cash; but the people accepted them

with awe and hope. In 1462 the scholar-Pope Pius II and some cardinals

went out to the Milvian Bridge to meet the head of the Apostle Andrew,

which was arriving from Greece; and the scholar-Cardinal Bessarion

pronounced a solemn oration when the precious figment was deposited in

St. Peter's. The people undertook pilgrimages to Loreto and Assisi,

flocked to Rome in jubilee years, made the stations of the cross

from church to church, and mounted on their knees the Scala Santa

which, they were told, was the very stairway that Christ had climbed

to the tribune of Pilate. Powerful characters might laugh at all

this while their health was good, but rare was the Renaissance Italian

who did not ask for the sacraments on his deathbed. Vitellozzo

Vitelli, the rough condottiere who had fought Alexander VI and

Caesar Borgia, begged a messenger to go to Rome and seek papal

absolution for him before Caesar's handy man tightened the noose

around his neck. Women especially worshiped Mary; almost every village

had a miracle-working icon of her; now (c. 1524) the Rosary became a

favorite form of prayer. Every decent house had a crucifix and a

holy picture or two; and before one or more of these, in many homes, a

lamp was kept burning endlessly. Village squares and city streets

might be adorned with a statue of Jesus or the Virgin, placed in a

separate tabernacle or a niche in a wall. The festivals of the

religious calendar were celebrated with a pomp and magnificence that

gave the people thrilling interruptions to their toil; and every

decade or so the coronation of a pope offered processions and games

that to antiquarians recalled the spectacles of ancient Rome. Never

was a religion more beautiful than when the artists of the Renaissance

housed and carved its shrines, and painted its heroes and legends, and

drama, music, poetry, and incense joined in the colorful, odorous,

sumptuous worship of God.

But this, again, is but one side of a scene too diverse and

contradictory to be briefly described. In the cities many of the

churches were left relatively empty of men then as now. `05201 As to

the countryside hear Archbishop Antonino of Florence describing the

peasants of his diocese about 1430:

-

In the churches themselves they sometimes dance and leap and sing

with women. On holydays they spend little time on divine service or

hearing the whole Mass, but most in games or taverns or contentions at

the church doors. They blaspheme God and His saints on slender

provocation. They are filled with lies and perjuries; they make no

conscience of fornication, and of worse sins still. Very many of

them do not confess even once a year; far fewer are those who take

Communion.... They do little to instruct their families in the

manner of faithful folk. They use enchantments for themselves and

their beasts. Of God, or their own souls' health, they think not at

all.... Their parish priests, caring not for the flock committed to

them, but only for its wool and milk, do not instruct them through

preaching and the confessional, or by private admonitions, but walk in

the same error as their flocks, following their corrupt ways. `05202

-

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." `05203 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; `05204 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. `05205 All over

Italy there were hospitals, orphan asylums, schools, almshouses,

monti di pieta (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." `05206 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. `05207 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." `05208 Poggio almost exhausts his

vocabulary of vituperation in exposing the immorality, hypocrisy,

cupidity, ignorance, and arrogance of monks and priests; `05209 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. `052010 Aretino speaks unquotably about the nuns of

Venice. `052011 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." `052012

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. `052013

-

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. `052014

-

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. `052016 In 1497

the physician Gabriele da Salo was protected from the Inquisition 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; `052017 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. `052018 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. `052019

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 Zaccaria 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. `052020

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. `052021

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. `052022 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

Niccolo III at Ferrara. When Pius Il came to Ferrara in 1459 he was

received by seven princes, all illegitimate. `052023 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. `052024 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; `052025 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. `052026 Aretino described the aberration as quite popular in

Rome, `052027 and he himself, between one mistress and another,

asked the duke of Mantua to send him an attractive boy. `052028 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. `052029 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." `052030 In 1492 a

noble and a priest, convicted of homosexual acts, were beheaded in the

Piazzetta, and their bodies were publicly burned. `052031 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. `052032 In Venice the

census of 1509 reported 11,654 prostitutes in a population of some

300,000. `052033 An enterprising printer published a "Catalogue of all

the principal and most honored courtesans of Venice, their names,

addresses, and fees." `052034 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. `052035

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

cortigiane oneste - genteel courtesans- developed, who rivaled the

finest ladies in dress, manners, culture, even in hebdomadal piety.

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

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