VI. THE VANGUARD OF THE RENAISSANCE
[Sidenote: [ca. 1250-1400 A.D.]]
We have seen much in recent chapters of the trials and disasters of Florence. We now have the more agreeable task of recording her triumphs. The record of petty quarrels and more pretentious warrings, through which Florence has thus far been called to our attention, might well have blinded our eyes to the observation of a remarkable culture development which went on coincidentally with these political jarrings. In point of fact, there was a most extraordinary intellectual development taking place in Italy in the later centuries of the so-called dark ages, and the focus and centre of that development was Florence; in proof of which that city now gave to the world within a single century a school of writers, led by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who virtually stamped the Italian language for the first time as a literary medium, and whose works marked the highest development of Italian creative genius. And contemporaneous with these writers were the artists Cimabue and Giotto, who gave an altogether similar impulse to art. All these men were Florentines, and so greatly did their influence preponderate over that of any other Italians of the epoch that Symonds[b] is fully justified in saying: “It may be affirmed without exaggeration that, prior to the close of the fifteenth century, what we called Italian genius was in truth the genius of Florence.”
This seemingly sudden efflorescence of genius had its origin, as has been intimated, in a gradual development, which now for the first time produced tangible results. If, on the one hand, it may be urged that these great men were spontaneously creative, it must not be forgotten that their genius was nurtured in a bed of classicism. Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio were all classical scholars, the last named being a student of Greek as well as of Latin. All of them harked back to the great Roman writers as their models of style, and founded their culture on a study of ancient literature. But each of them in turn broke away spontaneously from these ancient models when he came to his really creative efforts, and each put forth in the vernacular the works that were destined to give him perpetuity of fame. In their own day, to be sure, their Latin works were regarded as having great importance. Boccaccio never dreamed of placing his Italian writings on a par with his learned treatises on mythology, geography, and biography; and we are assured that for two centuries his name was famous all over Europe on account of these scientific works, while the Decameron was hardly known north of the Alps. “Petrarch himself,” says Burckhardt,[c] “trusted and hoped that his Latin writings would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tells us, he would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in blotting them out from the memory of man.” Yet these would-be forgotten poems became a standard of taste for all the world, and have kept their position in the estimate of critics of each succeeding generation.
This sudden outburst of creative genius of a high order in Italy, while the rest of the western world was bound by uncreative traditions, has been variously explained. Burckhardt finds the explanation in circumstances that led, in Italy earlier than elsewhere, to the emancipation of the individual.[a]
In the Middle Ages, he says, both sides of human consciousness--that which was turned within as that which was turned without--lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation--only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognised himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race. It will not be difficult to show that this result was owing above all to the political circumstances of Italy.
In far earlier times we can here and there detect a development of free personality which in northern Europe either did not occur at all, or could not display itself in the same manner. The band of audacious wrong-doers in the sixteenth century described to us by Liutprand, some of the contemporaries of Gregory VII, and a few of the opponents of the first Hohenstaufen show us characters of this kind. But at the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality; the charm laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a thousand figures meet us each in its own special shape and dress. Dante’s great poem would have been impossible in any other country of Europe, if only for the reason that they all still lay under the spell of race. For Italy the august poet, through the wealth of individuality which he set forth, was the most national herald of his time. This fact appears in the most decisive and unmistakable form. The Italians of the fourteenth century knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and seeming unlike his neighbours. By the year 1390 there was no longer any prevailing fashion of dress for men at Florence, each preferring to clothe himself in his own way.
Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the highest degree the individuality not only of the tyrant or condottiere himself, but also of the men whom he protected or used as his tools--the secretary, minister, poet, and companion. These people were forced to know all the inward resources of their own nature, passing or permanent; and their enjoyment of life was enhanced and concentrated by the desire to obtain the greatest satisfaction from a possibly very brief period of power and influence.
But even the subjects whom they ruled over were not free from the same impulse. Leaving out of account those who wasted their lives in secret opposition and conspiracies, we speak of the majority who were content with a strictly private station, like most of the urban population of the Byzantine Empire and the Mohammedan states. No doubt it was often hard for the subjects of a Visconti to maintain the dignity of their persons and families, and multitudes must have lost in moral character through the servitude they lived under. But this was not the case with regard to individuality; for political impotence does not hinder the different tendencies and manifestations of private life from thriving in the fullest vigour and variety. Wealth and culture, so far as display and rivalry were not forbidden to them, a municipal freedom which did not cease to be considerable, and a church which, unlike that of the Byzantine or of the Mohammedan world, was not identical with the state--all these conditions undoubtedly favoured the growth of individual thought, for which the necessary leisure was furnished by the cessation of party conflicts. The private man, indifferent to politics, and busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a dilettante, seems to have been first fully formed in these despotisms of the fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course, be required on such a point. The novelists, from whom we might expect information, describe to us oddities in plenty, but only from one point of view and in so far as the needs of the story demand. Their scene, too, lies chiefly in the republican cities.
In the latter, circumstances were also, but in another way, favourable to the growth of individual character. The more frequently the governing party was changed, the more the individual was led to make the utmost of the exercise and enjoyment of power. The statesmen and popular leaders, especially in Florentine history,[13] acquired so marked a personal character, that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a parallel to them in contemporary history, hardly even in Jacob van Artevelde.
The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand, often came into a position like that of the subjects of the despotic states, with the difference that the freedom or power already enjoyed, and in some cases the hope of recovering them, gave a higher energy to their individuality. Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (died 1446), whose work on domestic economy is the first complete programme of developed private life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the dangers and thanklessness of public life is in its way a true monument of the age.
Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. “In all our more populous cities,” says Giovanni Pontano, “we see a crowd of people who have left their homes of their own free will; but a man takes his virtues with him wherever he goes.” And, in fact, they were by no means only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native place voluntarily, because they found its political or economical condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.
The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as we have already said, finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond even this in the words, “My country is the whole world.” And when his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote back: “Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars, everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people? Even my bread will not fail me.” The artists exult no less defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. “Only he who has learned everything,” says Ghiberti, “is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.” In the same strain an exiled humanist writes: “Wherever a learned man fixes his seat, there is home.”[c]
EUROPEAN CULTURE IN GENERAL
The oppression which weighed upon the rest of Europe contributed to the maintenance of barbarism, less by rendering difficult and sometimes dangerous the acquisition of knowledge, than by taking away all attraction from the exercise of the mind. Thought was a pain to those capable of judging the state of the human species; of studying the past, of comparing it with the present; and of thus foreseeing the future. Danger and suffering appeared on all sides. The men who, in France, Germany, England, and Spain, felt themselves endued with the power of generalising their ideas, either smothered them, not to aggravate the pain of thought, or directed them solely to speculations the farthest from real life--towards that scholastic philosophy which so vigorously exercised the understanding, without bringing it to any conclusion.
In Italy, on the contrary, liberty secured the full enjoyment of intellectual existence. Everyone endeavoured to develop the powers which he felt within him, because each was conscious that the more his mind opened the greater was his enjoyment; everyone directed his powers to a useful and practical purpose, because each felt himself placed in a state of society in which he might attain some influence, either for his own benefit or that of his fellow creatures. The first want which towns had experienced was that of their defence. Accordingly, military architecture had taken precedence in the arts. From its exercise the transition was easy to that of religious architecture, at a time when religion was indispensable to every heart--to civil architecture, then encouraged by a government in which everything was for all. The study and pursuit of the beautiful in this first of the fine arts had paved the way to all the others. From the pleasures of the imagination through the eye, men ascended to those derived from the soul; and hence the birth of poetry.[d]
The language of Provence had attained its highest degree of cultivation; Spain and Portugal had already produced more than one poet; and the langue d’Oil, in the north of France, was receiving considerable attention, while the Italian was not yet enumerated amongst the languages of Europe, and the richness and harmony of its idiom, gradually and obscurely formed amongst the populace, were not as yet appreciated. But in the thirteenth century Dante arose to immortalise this hitherto neglected tongue, and, aided by his single genius, it soon advanced with a rapidity which left all competition at a distance.
The Lombardian duchy of Benevento, comprising the greater part of the modern kingdom of Naples, had preserved, under independent princes, and surrounded by the Greeks and the Saracens, a degree of civilisation which, in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, was unexampled throughout the rest of Italy. Many of the fine arts, and some branches of science, were cultivated there with success. The schools of Salerno communicated to the West the medical skill of the Arabs, and the commerce of Amalfi introduced into those fertile provinces not only wealth but knowledge. From the eighth to the tenth century, various historical works, written, it is true, in Latin, but distinguished for their fidelity, their spirit, and their fire, proceeded from the pen of several men of talent, natives of that district, some of whom clothed their compositions in hexameter verses, which, compared with others of the same period, display superior facility and fancy.
The influx of foreigners consequent upon the invasion of the Norman adventurers, who founded a sovereignty in Apulia, was not sufficiently great to effect a change in the language; and, under their government, the Italian or Sicilian tongue first assumed a settled form. The court of Palermo, early in the twelfth century, abounded in riches, and consequently indulged in luxurious habits; and there the first accents of the Sicilian muse were heard. There, too, at the same period, the Arabs acquired a degree of influence and credit which they have never possessed in any other Christian court. The palace of William I, like those of the monarchs of the East, was guarded by Mohammedan eunuchs. From them he selected his favourites, his friends, and sometimes even his ministers. To attach themselves to the arts and to the various avocations which contribute to the pleasures of life, was the peculiar province of the Saracens, by whom half of the island is still occupied. When Frederick II, at the end of the twelfth century, succeeded to the throne of the Norman monarchs, he transported numerous colonies of Saracens into Apulia and the principality, but he did not banish them from either his service or his court. Of them his army was composed; and the governors of his provinces, whom he denominated justiciaries, were chosen almost exclusively from their number. Thus was it the destiny of the Arabians, in the east as well as in the west of Europe, to communicate to the Latin nations their arts, their science, and their poetry.
From the history of Sicily, we may deduce the effects produced by Arabian influence on the Italian, or as it was then considered, the Sicilian poetry, with no less certainty than that with which we trace its connection, in the county of Barcelona and in the kingdom of Castile, with the first efforts of the Provençal and Spanish poets. William I, an effeminate and voluptuous prince, forgot, in his palace of Palermo, amidst his Moorish eunuchs, in the song and the feast, those commotions which agitated his realms. The regency of the kingdom devolved, at his decease, upon his widow, who entrusted the government to Gayto Petro, the chief of the eunuchs, connected with the Saracens of Africa. All the commerce of Palermo was monopolised by the infidels. They were the professors of every art, and the inventors of every variety of luxury. The nation accommodated itself to their customs; and in their public festivals it was usual for Christian and Moorish women to sing in concert to the music of their slaves. We may safely conclude that on these occasions each party adopted their mother-tongue; and that the Italian females who, in the words of Hugo Falcandus,[m] responded, in melancholy cadence to the tambours of their Moorish attendants, would, in all probability, adapt Sicilian words to African airs and measures.
THE UNIVERSITIES AND NASCENT SCHOLARSHIP
The universities and schools which were already founded obtained more fame and became more active. The clash of arms, which had not prevented their flourishing, did not prevent new ones being formed. That same spirit of rivalry which armed one against the other, princes and nations, led them to vie one with the other in seeking, by every means, greater renown and greater glory for their little states. At one time professors were seen quietly continuing their lectures while fighting was going on under the walls of the town, or even in the streets and squares; at another time, the rostrum was overthrown, the professors were driven away, the scholars put to flight; but they soon returned, either under the same government or under the new one which had taken its place, and studies continued their course.
The University of Bologna suffered continual vicissitudes. At one time excommunicated by Clement V, the greater number of the scholars passed to the University of Padua, Bologna’s rival; at another time, in consequence of quarrels which broke out between the professors and the magistrates, or between the scholars and the citizens, whole classes deserted and settled in the neighbouring towns. But all these wrongs were righted. John XXII withdrew Clement’s interdict, and confirmed and increased the privileges of the university; the magistrates and citizens granted the amends demanded by professors and pupils; and this school, which was already famous, became more brilliant and more famous. A short time later, Milan, Pisa, Pavia, Piacenza, Siena, but especially Florence, rivalled with Padua, Bologna, and the University of Naples founded by Frederick II, which had so vastly increased under Robert of Naples. Boniface VIII had founded the University of Rome, his successors confirmed and even extended its privileges; but their bulls could not repair the harm done to the new university by their absence; it could not do aught but decline so long as their residence at Avignon left the unfortunate town of Rome almost deserted, and, as a climax, always a prey to sedition and torn by internal factions.
It must be remembered that in these universities and schools nothing was taught except, as in the preceding century, what were commonly called the seven arts. Literature, properly so called, was almost entirely ignored. The ancient authors, who, later on, formed the base of literary study, were scarcely beginning to be discovered. Libraries of schools and monasteries, even those which several princes had worked to form, mostly contained some of the works of the fathers, books on theology, law, medicine, astrology, and scholastic philosophy; and even these were few in number. It was in the course of the century then beginning that a praiseworthy eagerness for the discovery of ancient manuscripts arose in Italy, and, following Italy’s example, spread throughout Europe. The most deserted and dusty corners of private houses and convents were searched for the works of these authors, of whom till then nothing remained but the name, and of those who had left many works of which only the smallest part was known. This revolution was principally due to Petrarch, and it is one of his strongest claims to glory.
One single example will prove the vastness of his work and how little advanced even the learned of that time were. A professor of the University of Bologna, writing to him on the subject of ancient authors, especially of poets, and wishing to include among the latter Plato[14] and Cicero, was ignorant of the name of Nævius, and even Plautius, and thought that Ennius and Statius were contemporaries. The ignorance of the copyists must be added to the imperfection of knowledge and the scarcity of books. In transcribing the best books they frequently disfigured them in such a manner that their authors themselves would have had trouble to recognise them. All this must be remembered to tone down the accounts found in histories of literature of the fine libraries given to certain universities, or founded in certain towns, formed by a certain prince and thrown open by his orders to the learned and to the public. When compared with our large libraries, they are insignificant book-cupboards--an absolute famine compared with appalling superabundance.
The science which obtained most assistance from them, and which was the most abundantly provided with books, was scholastic theology; it was therefore pursued more eagerly than ever. It was no longer the century of men like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura; but their example was quite recent, and their admirers and disciples entertained the hope of equalling them and even surpassing them in glory. Hence among theologians arose that eagerness, that general fervour to interpret the same books that their predecessors had interpreted, to explain the explanations themselves, to commentate the commentaries; to deepen the shadows while attempting to cast light upon them, and to obscure by explanation what was at first clear. These are not only the ideas, but the very words of the wise Tiraboschi; he added the very natural wish that none would disturb the repose of these indefatigable commentators in the profound oblivion and dust of the libraries where they lie buried. However, he does not include among them about a dozen doctors, whose fame it appears was very great in that century. We will only mention one of them--an Augustine monk named Denis, a native of St. Sépulcre--because he was the friend and spiritual adviser of Petrarch; this much may be said of him, all the rest may be relegated to the same place of refuge whose inviolability Tiraboschi reclaims for the mob of theologians of the century. There should be no rank in dust and oblivion. All authors of books which are unreadable or which teach nothing should sleep there alike.
LATIN AND THE VERNACULAR
A complete separation had now taken place between the ordinary language of the country and the Latin tongue. Of the latter, the women were ignorant. The general adoption of the language to which their delicacy gave new graces, and in which alone they were accessible to the gallantry of their admirers, was a necessary result. It was now submitted to rules, and enlivened by that sensibility of expression, of which a dead and pedantic language ceases to be susceptible. For a century and a half, in fact, it would seem that the Sicilians confined themselves to the composition of love-songs alone. These primitive specimens of Italian poetry have been studiously preserved, and they have been analysed by M. Ginguené, with equal talent and learning. To his work, such of our readers as may wish to obtain a more particular knowledge of these relics will have satisfaction in referring; nor can they apply to a better source of information for more complete and profound details on the subject of Italian poetry than can possibly find a place in a condensed history of the general literature of the south.
The merit of amatory poetry consists, almost entirely, in its expression. Its warmth and tenderness of sentiment is injured by any exertion of mere ingenuity and fancy, in the pursuit of which the poet, or the lover, seems to lose sight of his proper object. Little more is required from him than to represent with sensibility and with truth the feelings which are common to all who love. The harmony of language is the best means of expressing that of the heart. But this principle seems almost entirely to have escaped the notice of the first Sicilian and Italian writers. The example of the Arabs and of the Provençals induced them to prefer ostentation to simplicity, and to exercise a false and affected taste in the choice of their poetical ornaments. In the best specimens of this school, we should find little to reward the labour of translating them; and we feel less inclined to draw the inferior pieces from their deserved obscurity. It is, therefore, principally with a view to the history of the language, and of the versification, that we turn over the pages of Ciullo d’Alcamo the Sicilian, those of Frederick II, and of his chancellor, Pietro delle Vigne, of Oddo delle Colonne, of Mazzeo di Ricco, and of other poets of the same class.
The language employed by the Sicilians in their poetical attempts was not the popular dialect, as it then existed among the natives of the island and as we still find it preserved in some Sicilian songs, scarcely intelligible to the Italians themselves. From the imperial court and that of the kings of Sicily, it had already received a more elegant form; and those laws of grammar which were originally founded upon custom had now obtained the ascendency over it, and prescribed their own rules. The lingua cortigiana, the language of the court, was already distinguished as the purest of the Italian dialects. In Tuscany it came into general use; and previous to the end of the thirteenth century it received great stability from several writers of that country, in verse as well as in prose, who carried it very nearly to that degree of perfection which it has ever since maintained. For elegance and purity of style, Ricordano Malaspina, who wrote the History of Florence in 1280, may be pronounced, at the present day, to be in no degree inferior to the best writers now extant.
THE MASTER POET, AND HIS THEME
No poet, however, had yet arisen, gifted with absolute power over the empire of the soul; no philosopher had yet pierced into the depths of feeling and of thought, when Dante, the greatest name of Italy, and the father of her poetry, appeared, and demonstrated the mightiness of his genius by availing himself of the rude and imperfect materials within his reach, to construct an edifice resembling, in magnificence, that universe whose image it reflects. Instead of amatory effusions addressed to an imaginary beauty, instead of madrigals full of sprightly insipidity, sonnets laboured into harmony, and strained or discordant allegories, the only models, in any modern language, which presented themselves to the notice of Dante, that great genius conceived, in his vast imagination, the mysteries of the invisible creation, and unveiled them to the eyes of the astonished world.
In the century immediately preceding, the energy of some bold and enthusiastic minds had been directed to religious objects. A new spiritual force, surpassing in activity and fanaticism all monastic institutions before established, was organised by St. Francis and St. Dominic, whose furious harangues and bloody persecutions revived that zeal which, for several centuries past, had appeared to slumber. In the cells of the monks, nevertheless, the first symptoms of reviving literature were seen. Their studies had now assumed a scholastic character. To the imagination of the zealot, the different conditions of a future state were continually present; and the spiritual objects which he saw with the eyes of faith were invested with all the reality of material forms, by the force with which they were presented to his view in detailed descriptions and in dissertations displaying a scientific acquaintance with the exact limit of every torment, and the graduated rewards of glorification.
A very singular instance of the manner in which these ideas were impressed upon the people is afforded by the native city of Dante, in which the celebration of a festival was graced by a public representation of the infernal tortures; and it is not unlikely that the first circulation of the work of that poet gave occasion to this frightful exhibition. The bed of the Arno was converted into the gulf of perdition, where all the horrors coined by the prolific fancy of the monks were concentrated. Nothing was wanting to make the illusion complete; and the spectators shuddered at the shrieks and groans of real persons, apparently exposed to the alternate extremes of fire and frost, to waves of boiling pitch, and to serpents. This scene occurred at Florence on the 1st of May, 1304.
It appears, then, that when Dante adopted, as the subject of his immortal poem, the secrets of the invisible world, and the three kingdoms of the dead, he could not possibly have selected a more popular theme. It had the advantage of combining the most profound feelings of religion with those vivid recollections of patriotic glory and party contentions which were necessarily suggested by the reappearance of the illustrious dead on this novel theatre.
At the close of the century, in the year 1300, and in the week of Easter, Dante supposes himself to be wandering in the deserts near Jerusalem, and to be favoured with the means of access to the realm of shadows. He is there met by Virgil, the object of his incessant study and admiration, who takes upon himself the office of guide, and who, by his own admirable description of the heathen hell, seems to have acquired a kind of right to reveal the mysteries of these forbidden regions. The two bards arrive at a gate, on which are inscribed these terrific words:[e]
“Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Through me, among the people lost for aye. Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d: To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”[o]
The theme of the poem is too familiar to need further exposition here. It may be interesting to note, however, that the sequence of regions through which the poet journeys in witnessing the rewards of paradise is suggested by the ideas of cosmology that were prevalent in Dante’s time. The poem thus has interest from a scientific as well as from an artistic standpoint--an interest that is enhanced by the reflection that the time was almost at hand when a new system of cosmology would supplant the Ptolemaic one here suggested, and in so doing usher in a new scientific era, somewhat as the poem itself ushered in a new era of literature.[a]
The power of the human mind was never more forcibly demonstrated, in its most exquisite masterpieces, than in the poem of Dante. Without a prototype in any existing language, equally novel in its various parts and in the combination of the whole, it stands alone as the first monument of modern genius, the first great work which appeared in the reviving literature of Europe. In its composition, it is strictly conformable to the essential and invariable principles of the poetical art. It possesses unity of design and of execution; and bears the visible impress of a mighty genius, capable of embracing, at once, the parts and the whole of its scheme; of employing, with facility, the most stupendous materials, and of observing all the required niceties of proportion, without experiencing any difficulty from the constraint. In all other respects, the poem of Dante is not within the jurisdiction of established rules. It cannot with propriety be referred to any particular class of composition, and its author is only to be judged by those laws which he thought fit to impose upon himself. His modesty induced him to give his work the title of a comedy, in order to place it in a rank inferior to the epic, to which he conceived that Virgil had exclusive claims. Dante had not the slightest acquaintance with the dramatic art, of which he had, in all probability, never met with a single specimen; and from this ignorance proceeded that use of the word which now appears to us to be so extraordinary. In his native country, the title which he gave to his work was always preserved, and it is still known as The Divine Comedy. A name so totally different from every other seems to be happily bestowed upon a production which stands without a rival.
Dante the Man
The glory which Dante acquired, which commenced during his lifetime, and which raised him, in a little time, above the greatest names of Italy, contributed but little to his happiness. He was born in Florence in 1265, of the noble and distinguished family of the Alighieri, which was attached, in politics, to the party of the Guelfs.
Whilst yet very young, he formed a strong attachment to Beatrice, the daughter of Folco de’ Portinari, whom he lost at the age of twenty-five years. Throughout his future life, he preserved a faithful recollection of the passion which, during fifteen years, had essentially contributed to the happy development of his feelings, and which was thus associated with all his noblest sentiments and his most elevated thoughts. It was probably about ten years after the death of Beatrice when Dante commenced his great work, which occupied him during the remainder of his life, and in which he assigned the most conspicuous station to the woman he had so tenderly loved. In this object of his adoration, he found a common point of union for images both human and divine; and the Beatrice of his paradise appears to us sometimes in the character of the most beloved of her sex, and sometimes as an abstract emblem of celestial wisdom. Far from considering the passion of love in the same light as the ancients, the father of modern poetry recognises it as a pure, elevated, and sacred sentiment, calculated to ennoble and to sanctify the soul; and he has never been surpassed, by any who have succeeded him, in his entire and affecting devotion to the object of his attachment. Dante was, however, induced by considerations of family convenience to enter into a new engagement. In 1291, a year after the death of Beatrice, he married Gemma de’ Donati, whose obstinate and violent disposition embittered his domestic life. It is remarkable that, in the whole course of his work, into which he introduces the whole universe, he makes no personal allusion to his wife; and he was actuated, no doubt, by motives of delicacy towards her and her family, when he passed over, in similar silence, Corso Donati, the leader of the faction of his enemies, and his own most formidable adversary.
In the battle of Campaldino, in 1289, Dante bore arms for his country against the Aretini, and also against the Pisans in the campaign of 1290--the year subsequent to that in which the catastrophe of Count Ugolino occurred. He subsequently assumed the magisterial functions, at the period so fatal to the happiness of his country, when the civil wars between the Bianchi and the Neri broke out. He was accused of a criminal partiality to the interest of the former faction, during the time when he was a member of the supreme council; and when Charles de Valois, the father of Philip VI, proceeded to Florence, to appease the dissensions of the two parties, Dante was sentenced, in the year 1302, to the payment of an oppressive fine and to exile. By the subsequent sentence of a revolutionary tribunal, he was condemned, during his absence, to be burned alive, with all his partisans.
From that period, Dante was compelled to seek an asylum at such of the Italian courts as were attached to the Ghibelline interest, and were not unwilling to extend their protection to their ancient enemies. To that party, which he had opposed in the outset of his career, his perpetual exile and his misfortune compelled him, ultimately, to become a convert. He resided, for a considerable time, with the marquis Malaspina, in the Lunigiana, with the count Busone da Gubbio, and with the two brothers Della Scala, lords of Verona. But, in every quarter, the haughty obstinacy of his character, which became more inflexible in proportion to the difficulties with which he was surrounded, and the bitterness of his wit, which frequently broke out in caustic sarcasms, raised up against him new enemies. His attempts to re-enter Florence with his party, by force of arms, were successively foiled; his petitions to the people were rejected; and his last hope, in the emperor Henry VII, vanished on the death of that monarch. His decease took place at Ravenna, on the 14th of September, 1321, whilst he was enjoying the hospitable protection of Guido Novello da Polenta, the lord of that city, who had always treated him rather as a friend than as a dependant, and who, a short time before, had bestowed upon him an honourable mark of his confidence by charging him with an embassy to the republic of Venice.
On the death of her great poet, all Italy appeared to go into mourning. On every side copies of his work were multiplied, and enriched with numerous commentaries. In the year 1350, Giovanni Visconti, archbishop and prince of Milan, engaged a number of learned men in the laborious task of illustrating and explaining the obscure passages of the Divina Commedia. Six distinguished scholars, two theologians, two men of science, and two Florentine antiquaries united their talents in this undertaking. Two professorships were instituted for the purpose of expounding the works of Dante. One of these, founded at Florence, in the year 1373, was filled by the celebrated Boccaccio. The duties of the other, at Bologna, were no less worthily discharged by Benvenuto d’Imola, a scholar of eminence. It is questionable whether any other man ever exercised so undisputed an authority and so direct an influence over the age immediately succeeding his own.
An additional proof of the superiority of this great genius may be drawn from the commentaries upon his works. We are there surprised to see his most enthusiastic admirers incapable of appreciating his real grandeur. Dante himself, in his Latin treatise entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, appears to be quite unconscious of the extent of his services to the literature of his country. Like his commentators, he principally values himself upon the purity and correctness of his style. Yet he is neither pure nor correct; but, what is far superior to either, he had the powers of creative invention. For the sake of the rhyme, we find him employing a great number of barbarous words, which do not occur a second time in his verses. But, when he is himself affected, and wishes to communicate his emotions, the Italian language of the thirteenth century, in his powerful hands, displays a richness of expression, a purity, and an elegance which he was the first to elicit, and by which it has ever since been distinguished. The personages whom he introduces are moving and breathing beings; his pictures are nature itself; his language speaks at once to the imagination and to the judgment; and it would be difficult to point out a passage in his poem which would not form a subject for the pencil. The admiration of his commentators has also been abundantly bestowed upon the profound learning of Dante, who, it must be allowed, appears to have been master of all the knowledge and accomplishments of the age in which he lived. Of these various attainments, his poem is the faithful depository, from which we may infer, with great precision, the progress which science had at that time made, and the advances which were yet necessary to afford full satisfaction to the mind.[e]
The importance ascribed by Dante’s contemporaries to his writings other than the famous poem is well illustrated in the comment of the historian Giovanni Villani who, commenting on the death and burial of Dante, says: “This was a great and learned person in almost every science, although a layman; he was a consummate poet and philosopher and rhetorician; as perfect in prose and verse as he was in public speaking a most noble orator; in rhyming excellent, with the most polished and beautiful style that ever appeared in our language up to his time or since. He wrote in his youth the book of The Early Life of Love, and afterwards when in exile made twenty moral and amorous canzonets very excellent, and amongst other things three noble epistles; one he sent to the Florentine government complaining of his undeserved exile; another to the emperor Henry when he was at the siege of Brescia, reprehending him for his delay and almost prophesying; the third to the Italian cardinals during the vacancy after the death of Pope Clement, urging them to agree in electing an Italian pope--all in Latin, with noble precepts and excellent sentences and authorities, which were much commended by the wise and learned. And he wrote the Commedia where, in polished verse and with great and subtile arguments, moral, natural, astrological, philosophical, and theological, with new and beautiful figures, similes, and poetical graces, he composed and treated in a hundred chapters, or cantos, of the existence of hell, purgatory, and paradise, so loftily as may be said of it that whoever is of subtile intellect may by his said treatise perceive and understand. He was well pleased in this poem to blame and cry out in the manner of poets, in some places perhaps more than he ought to have done; but it may be that his exile made him do so. He also wrote the Monarchia, where he treats of the office of popes and emperors. And he began a comment on fourteen of the above-named moral canzonets in the vulgar tongue, which in consequence of his death is found imperfect except on three, which to judge from what is seen would have proved a lofty, beautiful, subtile, and most important work, because it is equally ornamented with noble opinions and fine philosophical and astrological reasoning. Besides these he composed a little book which he entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, of which he promised to make four books (but only two are to be found, perhaps in consequence of his early death), where in powerful and elegant Latin and good reasoning he rejects all the vulgar tongues of Italy.
“This Dante,” continues Villani, “from his knowledge, was somewhat presumptuous, harsh, and disdainful, like an ungracious philosopher; he scarcely deigned to converse with laymen; but for his other virtues, science, and worth as a citizen, it seems but reasonable to give him perpetual remembrance in this our chronicle; nevertheless his noble works left to us in writing bear true testimony of him and honourable fame to our city.”[f]
LESSER CONTEMPORARIES OF DANTE
To the same period with Dante belongs Francesco Barberini, the disciple, like Dante, of Brunetto Latini, and author of a treatise in verse on moral philosophy, which, in conformity with the affected spirit of the times, he entitled I Documenti d’Amore. Cecco d’Ascoli was also the contemporary of Dante, and his personal enemy. His poem in five books, called L’Acerba, or rather, according to M. Ginguené, L’Acerva, “the heap,” is a collection of all the sciences of his age, including astronomy, philosophy, and religion. It is much less remarkable for its intrinsic merit than for the lamentable catastrophe of its author, who was burned alive in Florence as a sorcerer, in 1327, at the age of seventy years, after having long held the professorship of judicial astrology in the University of Bologna.
Cino da Pistoia, of the house of the Sinibaldi, was the friend of Dante, and was equally distinguished by the brilliancy of his talents in two different departments: as a lawyer, by his commentary on the first nine books of the code, and, as a poet, by his verses addressed to the beautiful Selvaggia de’ Vergiolesi, of whom he was deprived by death, about the year 1307. As a lawyer, he was the preceptor of the celebrated Bartolo, who, if he has surpassed his master, yet owed much to his lessons. As a poet, he was the model which Petrarch loved to imitate; and, in this view, he perhaps did his imitator as much injury by his refinement and affectation as he benefited him by the example of his pure and harmonious style. Fazio de’ Uberti, grandson of the great Farinata, who, in consequence of the hatred which the Florentines entertained for his ancestor, lived and died in exile, raised himself to equal celebrity at this period by his sonnets and other verses. At a much later time of life, he composed a poem of the descriptive kind, entitled Dettamondo, in which he proposed to imitate Dante, and to display the real world, as that poet had portrayed the world of spirits. But it need hardly be said that the distance between the original and the imitation is great indeed.
In some respects all these poets, and many others whose names are yet more obscure, have common points of resemblance. We find, in all, the same subtlety of idea, the same incoherent images, and the same perplexed sentiments. The spirit of the times was perverted by an affected refinement; and it is a subject of just surprise that, in the very outset of a nation, simplicity and natural feeling should have been superseded by conceit and bombast. It is, however, to be considered that this nation did not form her own taste, but adopted that of a foreign country, before she was qualified, by her own improved knowledge, to make a proper choice. The verses of the troubadours of Provence were circulated from one end of Italy to the other. They were diligently perused and committed to memory by every poet who aspired to public notice, some of whom exercised themselves in compositions in the same language; and although the Italians, if we except the Sicilians, had never any direct intercourse with the Arabians, yet they derived much information from them by this circuitous route. The almost unintelligible subtleties with which they treated of love passed for refinement of sentiment; while the perpetual rivalry which was maintained between the heart and the head, between reason and passion, was looked upon as an ingenious application of philosophy to a literary subject. The causeless griefs, the languors, the dying complaints of a lover became a constituent portion of the consecrated language in which he addressed his mistress, and from which he could not without impropriety depart. Conventional feelings in poetry thus usurped the place of those native and simple sentiments which are the offspring of the heart.
PETRARCH
But, instead of dwelling upon these defects in the less celebrated poets, we shall attempt to exhibit the general spirit of the fourteenth century, as displayed in the works of the greatest man whom Italy, in that age, produced, whose reputation has been most widely spread, and whose influence has been most extensively felt, not only in Italy but in France, in Spain, and in Portugal. The reader will easily imagine that it is Petrarch, the lover of Laura, to whom we here allude.
Petrarch was the son of a Florentine, who, like Dante, had been exiled from his native city. He was born at Arezzo, on the night of the 19th of July, 1304, and he died at Arqua, near Padua, on the 18th of July, 1374. During the century of which his life occupied the greater portion, he was the centre of Italian literature. Passionately attached to letters, and more especially to history and to poetry, and an enthusiastic admirer of antiquity, he imparted to his contemporaries by his discourses, his writings, and his example that taste for the recovery and study of Latin manuscripts which so eminently distinguished the fourteenth century; which preserved the masterpieces of the classical authors, at the very moment when they were about to be lost forever; and gave a new impulse, by the imitation of those admirable models, to the progress of the human intellect.
Petrarch, tortured by the passion which has contributed so greatly to his celebrity, endeavoured, by travelling during a considerable portion of his life, to escape from himself and to change the current of his thoughts. He traversed France, Germany, and every part of Italy; he visited Spain; and, with incessant activity, directed his attention to the examination of the remains of antiquity. He became intimate with all the scholars, poets, and philosophers from one end of Europe to the other, whom he inspired with his own spirit. While he imparted to them the object of his own labours, he directed their studies; and his correspondence became a sort of magical bond, which, for the first time, united the whole literary republic of Europe. At the age in which he lived, that continent was divided into petty states, and sovereigns had not yet attempted to establish any of those colossal empires, so dreaded by other nations. On the contrary, each country was divided into smaller sovereignties. The authority of many a prince did not extend above thirty leagues from the little town over which he ruled; while at the distance of a hundred, his name was unknown. In proportion, however, as political importance was confined, literary glory was extended; and Petrarch, the friend of Azzo di Correggio, prince of Parma, of Lucchino and of Galeazzo Visconti, princes of Milan, and of Francesco di Carrara, prince of Padua, was better known and more respected, throughout Europe, than any of those petty sovereigns. This universal reputation, to which his high acquirements entitled him, and of which he frequently made use in forwarding the interests of literature, he occasionally turned to account for political purposes. No man of letters, no poet was doubtless ever charged with so many embassies to great potentates--to the emperor, the pope, the king of France, the senate of Venice, and all the princes of Italy. It is very remarkable that Petrarch did not fulfil these duties merely as a subject of the state which had committed its interests to his hands, but that he acted for the benefit of all Europe. He was intrusted with such missions on account of his reputation; and when he treated with the different princes, it was, as it were, in the character of an arbitrator, whose suffrage everyone was eager to obtain, that he might stand high in the opinion of posterity.
The prodigious labours of Petrarch to promote the study of ancient literature are, after all, his noblest title to glory. Such was the view in which they were regarded by the age in which he lived, and such also was his own opinion. His celebrity, notwithstanding, at the present day depends much more on his Italian lyrical poems than on his voluminous Latin compositions. These lyrical pieces, which were imitated from the Provençals, from Cino da Pistoia, and from the other poets who flourished at the commencement of that century, have served, in their turn, as models to all the distinguished poets of the south.
The Latin compositions upon which Petrarch rested his fame, and which are twelve or fifteen times as voluminous as his Italian writings, are now only read by the learned. The long poem entitled Africa, which he composed on the victories of the elder Scipio, and which was considered, in his own age, as a masterpiece worthy of rivalling the Æneid, is very fatiguing to the ear. The style is inflated, and the subject so devoid of interest and so exceedingly dull as absolutely to prevent the perusal of the work. His numerous epistles in verse, instead of giving interest to the historical events to which they allude, acquire it from that circumstance. The imitation of the ancients, and the fidelity of the copy, which in Petrarch’s eyes constituted their chief merit, deprive these productions of every appearance of truth. The invectives against the barbarians who had subjugated Italy are so cold, so bombastic, and so utterly destitute of all colouring suited to the time and place, that we might believe them to have been written by some rhetorician who had never seen Italy; and we might confound them with those which a poetic fury dictated to Petrarch himself, against the Gauls who besieged the capital.
His philosophical works, amongst which may be mentioned a treatise on Solitary Life, and another on Good and Bad Fortune, are scarcely less bombastic. The sentiments display neither truth nor depth of thought. They are merely a show of words on some given subject. The author pre-determines his view of the question, and never examines the arguments for the purpose of discovering the truth, but of vanquishing the difficulties which oppose him, and of making everything agree with his own system. His letters, of which a voluminous collection has been published--which is, however, far from being complete--are perhaps more read than any other of his works, as they throw much light upon a period which is well worthy of being known. We do not, however, discover in them either the familiarity of intimate friendship or the complete openness of an amiable character. They display great caution and studied propriety, with an attention to effect which is not always successful. An Italian would never have written Latin letters to his friends, if he had wished only to unfold the secrets of his heart; but the letters of Cicero were in Latin, and with them Petrarch wished to have his own compared. He was, evidently, always thinking more of the public than of his correspondent; and in fact the public were often in possession of the letter before his friend. The bearer of an elegantly written epistle well knew that he should flatter the vanity of the writer by communicating it; and he therefore often openly read it, and even gave copies of it, before it reached its destination.
It is difficult to say whether the extended reputation which Petrarch enjoyed, during the course of a long life, is more glorious to himself or to his age. We have elsewhere mentioned the faults of this celebrated man--that subtlety of intellect which frequently led him to neglect true feeling, and to abandon himself to a false taste; and that vanity which too often induced him to call himself the friend of cruel and contemptible princes, because they flattered him. But, before we part with him, let us once more take a view of those great qualities which rendered him the first man of his age--that ardent love for science to which he consecrated his life, his powers, and his faculties; and that glorious enthusiasm for all that is high and noble in the poetry, the eloquence, the laws, and the manners of antiquity. This enthusiasm is the mark of a superior mind. To such a mind, the hero becomes greater by being contemplated; while a narrow and sterile intellect reduces the greatest men to its own level, and measures them by its own standard.
This enthusiasm was felt by Petrarch, not only for distinguished men, but for everything that is great in nature, for religion, for philosophy, for patriotism, and for freedom. He was the friend and patron of the unfortunate Rienzi, who, in the fourteenth century, awakened for a moment the ancient spirit and fortunes of Rome. He appreciated the fine arts as well as poetry, and he contributed to make the Romans acquainted with the rich monuments of antiquity, as well as with the manuscripts which they possessed. His passions were tinctured with a sense of religion which induced him to worship all the glorious works of the Deity, with which the earth abounds; and he believed that, in the woman he loved, he saw the messenger of that heaven which thus revealed to him its beauty. He enabled his contemporaries to estimate the full value of the purity of a passion so modest and so religious as his own; while to his countrymen he gave a language worthy of rivalling those of Greece and Rome, with which, by his means, they had become familiar. Softening and ornamenting his own language by the adoption of proper rules, he suited it to the expression of every feeling, and changed, in some degree, its essence. He inspired his age with that enthusiastic love for the beauty, and that veneration for the study of antiquity, which gave it a new character, and which determined that of succeeding times. It was, it may be said, in the name of grateful Europe that Petrarch, on the 8th of April, 1341, was crowned by the senator of Rome, in the Capitol; and this triumph, the most glorious which was ever decreed to man, was not disproportioned to the authority which this great poet was destined to maintain over future ages.[e]
EARLY ITALIAN PROSE
Already, for half a century, Italian poetry had been cultivated with ardour and with success, and in Dante’s time there was scarcely a well-educated Florentine who could not at need rhyme a sonnet or write a short song in the vulgar tongue. It was not so easy to write in prose; for if the poet had a language and rules of style, there had not yet been a learned time for the prose writer; he had no fixed rules, the form in short which allows a writer to express his thought in the logical order necessary to convey all its shades of meaning, to show up its striking points, artistically to subordinate the less important or purely expletive parts. The poet, on the contrary, at his first attempt met with metrical forms, long adopted and practised in Provençal, a parent idiom, whose rules could, without any difficulty, be applied to Italian. He found moreover that the Provençal poetry, whose prosody he borrowed, had taken with slight differences the same subjects which he wished to sing in Italian; so that he found a poetical storehouse, if the expression may be allowed, of comparisons, epithets, connecting links, phrases, and permissible inversions.
It was not so with prose. The Italian language, which could without difficulty adopt the Provençal metrical system, found no prose developed which it could take as a model. Latin was the only perfect type which it could imitate; but the complete absence of any declension, the relatively limited number of conjunctions, the impossibility of freeing itself completely from analytical order, which it experienced in common with all modern languages, did not allow it to be modelled on Cicero, as poetry was modelled on Bertrand de Born or Sordello. To reach this point of perfection two or three more centuries were needed, during which deep thinkers and great artists moulded this refractory material.
It is true that the Latin historians, who were perfectly known, might have been taken as examples to be copied and even imitated; for these writers had treated the same kinds of subject which were again about to be attempted. However, there was one difference: ancient history, after all, was far distant, and the resemblance between the subjects was more apparent than real; or at least, if this resemblance really existed, men were too interested in the events to be able to judge them and compare them with others as coldly as we are accustomed to do. To sing the praises of his lady’s eyes, to express sentiments of fidelity or sadness, to paint chivalrous tournaments, it suffices to have read or to have listened to the Provençal troubadours, and the same words, with very few changes, can almost be transported from one language into the other. Imagine, on the other hand, a poor chronicler of the Middle Ages imitating Sallust or Titus Livius: could the vernacular furnish him with a single word to render those of his model--and the prose writer, accustomed to think in Latin, could he find in Italian a single expression equivalent to his thought? Whence could he have drawn that common fund of ideas and formulas which is so necessary to write a real history, however matter of fact, however little philosophic it might be? Even in order to relate facts, putting aside all thought of interest, one must have ideas.
But the difficulty was far greater when abstract subjects were treated. There is even some confusion in the beautiful prose of Dante’s Convito, and even in the scholastic digressions of The Divine Comedy, although at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Italian language was already far more developed than one hundred years before; and, to go no further, some idea of the extreme difficulty of such an enterprise may be found by calling to mind the obstacles which had to be overcome by the first French and German philosophers who had the courage and self-denial to expose in their mother-tongues (which were then nearly formed) ideas reasoned in Latin; for a certain effort is needed to follow the French and German writings of Descartes and Wolff, while their Latin works present no difficulty. Therefore, besides the general and constant causes for the priority of poetry to prose, there was in Italy a special cause which contributed to develop poetry first in the vulgar tongue; this cause was the existence of Provençal poetry, already flourishing and cultivated.
A fact common alike to the literary history of Italy and to that of all other nations is that the first attempts in prose were generally historical writings. In fact, among all primitive people we see that the first use they made of free speech was to decompose the epic poems, to give the importance of historical tradition to stories of popular imagination. Thus we see the Ionian chroniclers, up to Herodotus, add the history of contemporary events to the deeds of heroes of fable, just as the first Florentine chroniclers, till Villani, trace back the origin of their native town and its early history to Roman names whose traditions were doubtless retained in the popular poems prior to the Provençal school which reigned in Italy towards the middle of the fourteenth century, and relate, without metre or rhythm, what the Florentine woman of the time of Frederick Barbarossa sang, seated at her spindle:
“Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia De’ Trojani, di Fiesole, e di Roma.”
--DANTE.
However this may be, it was only about this time that the use of the vernacular spread little by little; that public treaties and commercial correspondence began to be written in this language, and the public already preferred to read in the Italian language stories and other works written originally in Latin or sometimes in Provençal. But these writings can scarcely be considered literary works; they cannot, therefore, be taken as the starting-point of a history of Italian prose.
Just as the first Italian poems had been written in Sicilian dialect, soon replaced by the Tuscan dialect, so the first somewhat important and truly literary work in Italian prose was written in Sicilian dialect, while nearly all the prose writers of the following period were Tuscans; and this fact is sufficiently explained by the general history of Italy in the thirteenth century.
While Florence and all the centre of the peninsula were in a state of civil war, or painfully working to attain an independent municipal life, Naples, the home of the Hohenstaufens and the capital of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was enjoying profound peace, royal luxury, great freedom of thought, and all the refinements of life, in the midst of institutions which may be considered perfect for their time. Queen Constanza had already granted special protection to the Provençal poets, and her son, Frederick II, only placed above the troubadours of the south of France the learned philosophers of Baghdad and Cordova, as if the great man only believed himself understood or appreciated by those whose glance was not troubled by religious, political, or local passions. The influence of this brilliant court, which united taste for science with frivolity, where serious discussions on law and philosophy alternated with the gay Provençal wisdom, and where displays of chivalry and love songs diverted the greatest statesmen of the Middle Ages after the fatigues or annoyances of politics, this preponderant influence made the Sicilian nation for a time the chief actor in the history of Italy, and their language the dominant organ of the rising literature; and it is not surprising that the first great work in Italian prose was written in the dialect made popular by the beautiful songs of the emperor Frederick II and his famous chancellor Pietro delle Vigne, King Enzio, and the brave Manfred, his half-brother.
Matteo Spinelli, the contemporary of these poets of noble birth, has left a chronicle under the very characteristic title “journal,” which enables us to judge at once what Italian prose was at that period. If we quote this work of Spinelli’s first, it is not because we are unaware of the numerous and often vague attempts which preceded him; but all previous writings may be considered as uncertain groping. The language of these works is not even completely Italian yet, and the true modern idiom has been considered to rise in all its individuality in the poems of Ciullo d’Alcamo and in the Journals of Spinelli. Moreover, the work of the Sicilian chronicler (although, as its name seems to indicate, it was a diary scarcely intended for publication) offers by its very extent more ample matter for literary and philological study than certain inscriptions, deeds, laws, decrees, and other documents of similar nature.
We do not mean to say that the Journals have nothing Latin about them, or that they are written in pure Italian or Sicilian. Latin words, even phrases, which recall the customs of a dead language, are frequently found in the midst of a speech in all other respects purely Italian; but these souvenirs are always isolated, and do not alter the general character of the tongue, which is essentially Sicilian. But what distinguishes the style of this delightful teller of stories is not only the sweetness characteristic of the dialect he employed, but also a certain carelessness, a certain freedom in the construction of his sentences. In the first prose writer of a language one certainly does not expect Ciceronian periods; it appears perfectly natural that all his sentences should be co-ordinate, instead of being subordinate to one another, and that he should simply join his propositions by copulative conjunctions, instead of arranging them in incidental phrases; but with Spinelli, we simply find conversational language, and nothing more; that is to say, his style is wanting in clearness. He writes as he would have spoken to an attentive audience, with all the assistance to be derived from gesture, intonation, and expressive glance. This conversational style, applied to written works of great length, is often unintelligible unless interpreted by a clever reader, who recites it as an actor recites his rôle in a comedy. In the end it becomes wearisome by the very fact that the necessary explanation, which recitation would give, is wanting. But, on the other hand, there is an animation which the finest art could not produce--each word, each expression creates a picture. One might be listening to a loquacious barber, on the lookout for the gossip of the day, serving up hot the talk of the town.
This is Spinelli’s specialty; he must not be looked on as a historian, not even a political chronicler, but as a teller of stories, often amusing, nearly always animated. The events of contemporary history are only mentioned incidentally in the midst of town and country gossip. But apart from the style and light shade of irony which form one of the charms of Boccaccio, Spinelli’s stories are not less wanting in interest than the stories of the Decameron. This is the great merit of the Journals; their historic value is almost worthless, and, on account of serious errors (chiefly those of chronology), they become dangerous guides for the reader who takes them seriously and refers to them for information on the period and country in which Spinelli lived. There is a great difference to be seen when one passes from this expansive and unpretentious gossip to professional men of letters, to the somewhat pedantic orators of Florence, from the neglected Sicilian dialect to the already majestic and developed language of Tuscany.
The study of rhetoric was first cultivated in Florence, and we see, by Dante’s education, the importance attached to this branch of knowledge. However, the earliest rhetoricians, such as Buoncompagni and Guidotto of Bologna, seldom employed the vernacular. The honour of fixing, so to say, the Tuscan dialect, of raising the Italian patois to the rank which Latin had occupied exclusively till then, belongs to Brunetto Latini, of whom Villani tells us that he was “the first to polish the Florentines,” and to whom Dante, his pupil, raised a monument more durable than any other claim to immortality which the poor orator possessed: “You taught me how man can make himself immortal, and it is right that while I live my tongue should declare the gratitude which I feel.”[g]
BOCCACCIO
But these after all are only tentative efforts. The first writer to make use of the new vehicle as a medium for really artistic prose of a creative type was a Florentine of a slightly later epoch, the contemporary of Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, the famous author of the Decameron. Boccaccio was born at Paris, in 1313, and was the natural son of a merchant of Florence, himself born at Certaldo, a castle in the Val d’Elsa, in the Florentine territory. His father had intended him for a commercial life, but before devoting him to it, indulged him with a literary education. From his earliest years, Boccaccio evinced a decided predilection for letters. He wrote verses, and manifested an extreme aversion to trade. He revolted equally at the prospect of a commercial life, and the study of the canon law, which his father was desirous of his undertaking. To oblige his father, however, he made several journeys of business; but he brought back with him, instead of a love for his employment, a more extended information, and an increased passion for study.
He at length obtained permission to devote himself wholly to literature, and fixed on Naples as his place of residence, where letters then flourished under the powerful protection of Robert, the reigning monarch. He was quickly initiated in all the sciences at that time taught. He acquired also the rudiments of the Greek tongue, which, though then spoken in Calabria, was an abstruse study with the early scholars. In 1341, he assisted at the celebrated examination of Petrarch, which preceded his coronation at Rome; and, from that time, a friendship arose between him and the poet, which terminated only with their lives. At this period, Boccaccio, distinguished no less for the elegance of his person than for the brilliancy of his wit, and devoted to pleasure, formed an attachment to a natural daughter of King Robert, named Maria, who for several years had been the wife of a Neapolitan gentleman. This lady he has celebrated in his writings, under the name of Fiammetta. In the attachment of Boccaccio, we must not look for that purity or delicacy which distinguished Petrarch in his love for Laura. This princess had been brought up in the most corrupt court of Italy; she herself partook of its spirit, and it is to her depraved taste that the exceptionable parts of the Decameron, a work undertaken by Boccaccio in compliance with her request, and for her amusement, are to be attributed. On his side, Boccaccio probably loved her as much from vanity as from real passion; for, although distinguished for her beauty, her grace, and her wit, as much as for her rank, she does not seem to have exercised any extraordinary influence on his life; and neither the conduct nor the writings of Boccaccio afford evidence of a sincere or profound attachment.
Boccaccio quitted Naples in 1342, to return to Florence. He came back again in 1344, and returned for the last time in 1350. From that year, he fixed himself in his native country, where his reputation had already assigned him a distinguished rank. His life was thenceforth occupied by his public employments in several embassies; by the duties which his increasing friendship to Petrarch imposed on him; and by the constant and indefatigable labours to which he devoted himself for the advancement of letters, the discovery of ancient manuscripts, the elucidation of subjects of antiquity, the introduction of the Greek language into Italy, and the composition of his numerous works. After taking the ecclesiastical habit, in 1361, he died at Certaldo, in the mansion of his ancestors, on the 21st of December, 1375.
The Decameron, the work to which Boccaccio is at the present day indebted for his highest celebrity, is a collection of one hundred novels or tales. He has ingeniously united them, under the supposition of a party formed in the dreadful pestilence of 1348, composed of a number of cavaliers, and young, intelligent, and accomplished women, retired to a delightful part of the country, to escape the contagion. It was there agreed that each person, during the space of ten days, should narrate, daily, a fresh story. The company consisted of ten persons, and thus the number of stories amounted to one hundred. The description of the enchanting country in the neighbourhood of Florence, where these gay recluses had established themselves; the record of their walks, their numerous fêtes, and their repasts, afforded Boccaccio an opportunity of displaying all the treasures of his powerful and easy pen.
These stories, which are varied with infinite art, as well in subject as in style, from the most pathetic and tender to the most sportive, and, unfortunately, the most licentious, exhibit a wonderful power of narration; and his description of the plague in Florence, which serves as an introduction to them, may be ranked with the most celebrated historical descriptions which have descended to us. The perfect truth of colouring; the exquisite choice of circumstances, calculated to produce the deepest impression, and which place before our eyes the most repulsive scenes, without exciting disgust; and the emotion of the writer, which insensibly pervades every part, give to this picture that true eloquence of history which, in Thucydides, animates the relation of the plague in Athens. Boccaccio had, doubtless, this model before his eyes; but the events, to which he was a witness, had vividly impressed his mind, and it was the faithful delineation of what he had seen, rather than the classical imitation, which served to develop his talent.
The praise of Boccaccio consists in the perfect purity of his language, in his elegance, his grace, and above all in that naïveté which is the chief merit of narration, and the peculiar charm of the Italian tongue.
Unfortunately Boccaccio did not prescribe to himself the same purity in his images as in his phraseology. The character of his work is light and sportive. He has inserted in it a great number of tales of gallantry; he has exhausted his powers of ridicule on the duped husband, on the depraved and depraving monks, and on subjects, in morals and religious worship, which he himself regarded as sacred; and his reputation is thus little in harmony with the real tenor of his conduct. The Decameron was published towards the middle of the fourteenth century (in 1352 or 1353), when Boccaccio was at least thirty-nine years of age; and from the first discovery of printing, was freely circulated in Italy, until the Council of Trent proscribed it in the middle of the sixteenth century. At the solicitation of the grand duke of Tuscany, and after two remarkable negotiations between this prince and popes Pius V and Sixtus V, the Decameron was again published, in 1573 and 1582, purified and corrected.
Many of the tales of Boccaccio appear to be borrowed from popular recitation, or from real occurrences. We trace the originals of several, in the ancient French fabliaux; of some, in the Italian collection of the Centi Novelli; and of others, again, in an Indian romance, which passed through all the languages of the East, and of which a Latin translation appeared as early as the twelfth century, under the name of Dolopathos, or The King and the Seven Wise Men. Invention, in this class of writing, is not less rare than in every other; and the same tales, probably, which Boccaccio had collected in the gay courts of princes, or in the squares of the cities of Italy, have been repeated to us anew in all the various languages of Europe. They have been versified by the early poets of France and England, and have afforded reputation to three or four imitators of Boccaccio. But, if Boccaccio cannot boast of being the inventor of these tales, he may still claim the creation of this class of letters. Before his time, tales were only subjects of social mirth. He was the first to transport them into the world of letters; and, by the elegance of his diction, the just harmony of all the parts of his subject, and the charm of his narration, he superadded the more refined gratifications of language and of art, to the simpler delight afforded by the old narrators.
It is unnecessary to speak here of Boccaccio’s other Italian works, beyond naming his romances Fiammetta and Filocopo, and his heroic poems La Teseide and Filostrato. The Latin compositions of Boccaccio are voluminous, and materially contributed, at the time they were written, to the advancement of letters. The most celebrated of these works are two treatises; the one on the genealogy of the gods, and the other on mountains, forests, and rivers. In the first, he gave an exposition of the ancient mythology; and in the second, rectified many errors in geography. These two works have fallen into neglect, since the discovery of manuscripts then unknown, and in consequence of the facilities which the art of printing, by opening new sources, has afforded to the study of antiquity. In the age in which they were composed, they were, however, equally remarkable for their extensive information and for the clearness of their arrangement; but the style is by no means so pure and elegant as that of Petrarch. But, while the claim to celebrity, in these great men, is restricted to the Italian poetry of Petrarch and to the novels of Boccaccio, our gratitude to them is founded on stronger grounds. They felt more sensibly than any other men that enthusiasm for the beauties of antiquity, without which we in vain strive to appreciate its treasures; and they each devoted a long and laborious life to the discovery and the study of ancient manuscripts. The most valued works of the ancients were at that time buried among the archives of convents, scattered at great distances, incorrect and incomplete, without tables of contents or marginal notes. Nor did those resources then exist, which printing supplies, for the perusal of works with which we are not familiar; and the facilities which are afforded by previous study, or the collation of the originals with each other, were equally wanting. It must have required a powerful intellect to discover, in a manuscript of Cicero, for example, without title or commencement, the full meaning of the author, the period at which he wrote, and other circumstances, which are connected with his subject; to correct the numerous errors of the copyists; to supply the chasms, which, frequently occurring at the beginning and the end, left neither title nor divisions nor conclusions, nor anything that might serve as a clew for the perusal; in short, to determine how one manuscript, discovered at Heidelberg, should perfect another, discovered at Naples. It was, in fact, by long and painful journeys that the scholars of those days equipped themselves for this task. The copying a manuscript, with the necessary degree of accuracy, was a work of great labour and expense. A collection of three or four hundred volumes was, at that time, considered an extensive library; and a scholar was frequently compelled to seek, at a great distance, the completion of a work, commenced under his own roof.
Petrarch and Boccaccio, in their frequent travels, obtained copies of such classics as they found in their route. Among other objects, Petrarch proposed to himself to collect all the works of Cicero; in which he succeeded after a lapse of many years. Boccaccio, with a true love of letters, introduced the study of the Greek to the Italians, not only with the view of securing the interests of commerce or of science, but of enriching their minds, and extending their researches to the other half of the ancient world of letters, which had, till then, remained hidden from his contemporaries. He founded, in Florence, a chair for the teaching of the Greek language; and he himself invited thither, and installed as professor, Leontius Pilatus, one of the most learned Greeks of Constantinople. He received him into his own house, although he was a man of a morose and disagreeable temper; placed him at his table, as long as this professor could be induced to remain at Florence; inscribed himself among the first of his scholars, and procured at his own expense, from Greece, the manuscripts, which were thus distributed in Florence, and which served as subjects for the lectures of Leontius Pilatus. For the instruction of those days consisted in the public delivery of lectures with commentaries, and a book, of which there perhaps existed only a single copy, sufficed for some thousand scholars.
LESSER CONTEMPORARIES OF PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO
There is an infinite space between the three great men whose works we have just enumerated, and even the most esteemed of their contemporaries; and, though these latter have preserved, until the present day, a considerable reputation, yet we shall only pause to notice their existence, and the epoch to which they belong. Perhaps the most remarkable are the three Florentine historians of the name of Villani. Giovanni, the eldest, who died in the first plague, in 1348; Matteo, his brother, who died in the second plague, in 1361; and Filippo, the son of Matteo, who continued the work of his father to the year 1364, and who wrote a history of the literature of Florence, the first attempt of this kind in modern times. Two poets of this age shared with Petrarch the honours of a poetic coronation: Zanobi di Strada, whom the emperor Charles IV crowned at Pisa in 1355, with great pomp, but whose verses have not reached us; and Coluccio Salutati, secretary of the Florentine Republic, one of the purest Latinists, and most eloquent statesmen whom Italy in that age produced. The latter, indeed, did not live to enjoy the honour which had been accorded him by the emperor, at the request of the Florentines. Coluccio died in 1406, at the age of seventy-six, before the day appointed for his coronation, and the symbol of glory was deposited on his tomb; as, at a subsequent period, a far more illustrious crown was placed on the tomb of Tasso.
Of the prose writers of Tuscany, Franco Sacchetti, born at Florence about the year 1335, and who died before the end of the century, after filling some of the first offices in the republic, approaches the nearest to Boccaccio. He imitated Boccaccio in his novels, and Petrarch in his lyric poems; but the latter were never printed, while of his tales there have been several editions. Whatever praise be due to the purity and eloquence of his style, we find his pages more valuable as a history of the manners of the age, than attractive for their powers of amusement, even when the author thinks himself most successful. His 258 tales consist, almost entirely, of the incidents of his own time, and of his own neighbourhood; domestic anecdotes, which in general contain little humour; tricks, exhibiting little skill, and jests of little point; and we are often surprised to find a professed jester vanquished by the smart reply of a child or a clown, which scarcely deserves our attention. After reading these tales, we cannot help concluding that the art of conversation had not made, in the fourteenth century, an equal progress with the other arts; and that the great men, to whom we owe so many excellent works, were not so entertaining in the social intercourse of life as many persons greatly their inferiors in merit.
Two poets of this time, of some celebrity, chose Dante for their model, and composed after him in terza rima, long allegories, partly descriptive, partly scientific. Fazio de’ Uberti, in his Dettamondo, undertook the description of the universe, of which the different parts, personified in turns, relate their history. Federigo Frezzi, bishop of Foligno, who died in 1416, at the Council of Constance, has, in his Quadriregio, described the four empires of Love, Satan, Virtue, and Vice. In both of these poets we meet, occasionally, with lines not unworthy of Dante; but they formed a very false estimate of the works of genius, when they regarded the Divina Commedia not as an individual poem, but as a species of poetry which anyone might attempt.
The passionate study of the ancients, of which Petrarch and Boccaccio had given an example, suspended, in an extraordinary manner, the progress of Italian literature, and retarded the perfection of that tongue. Italy, after having produced her three leading classics, sank, for a century, into inaction. In this period, indeed, erudition made wonderful progress; and knowledge became much more general, but sterile in its effects. The mind had preserved all its activity, and literary fame all its splendour; but the unintermitted study of the ancients had precluded all originality in the authors. Instead of perfecting a new language, and enriching it with works in unison with modern manners and ideas, they confined themselves to a servile copy of the ancients. A too scrupulous imitation thus destroyed the spirit of invention; and the most eminent scholars may be said to have produced, in their eloquent writings, little more than college themes. In proportion as a man was qualified by his rank, or by his talents, to acquire a name in literature, he blushed to cultivate his mother-tongue. He almost, indeed, forced himself to forget it, to avoid the danger of corrupting his Latin style; and the common people thus remained the only depositaries of a language which had exhibited so brilliant a dawn, and which had now again almost relapsed into barbarism.[e]
ART IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES
Turning from literature to the not distantly related field of art, let us glance at some of the tentative efforts which prepared the way for the succession of Florentine masters that were presently to take the lead in this field and hold it for some centuries.
The Renaissance, that is, the resurrection, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, of ideas and forms of classic antiquity, was preceded by individual efforts which, though often failing to reach the mark, ought to be taken account of in the history of this great revolution. The plastic memories of the Græco-Roman world have played in the preoccupation of the Middle Ages a more considerable rôle than is usually thought. Mere force of events put our ancestors in the presence of ancient chefs-d’œuvre, and they had to look at them whether they would or not. Some saw in them only idolatrous monuments, and have found fault with them as such. Others attributed to them magic virtues; some have given themselves up to the admiration they felt in looking at the immensity of Roman ruins, the richness of early materials, the perfection of the handiwork. These latter, it might be affirmed, are the most numerous. Even during the most sombre period of the Middle Ages, all Europe felt the fascination that Rome, the oldest city par excellence, exercised for twenty centuries. That which attracted from far and near thousands of visitors to the banks of the Tiber was not only the promise of indulgencies, a desire to pray on the tomb of martyrs, to contemplate basilics resplendent with gold and precious stones, but also memories left by the cæsars.
After having heard with a kind of incredulity the marvels of this incomparable city, one is further amazed by the number of its temples, palaces, baths, and amphitheatres. Have not reliable authors told us that she lately possessed thirty-six triumphal arches, twenty-eight libraries, 856 public baths, twenty-two equestrian statues in gilded bronze, eighty-four of the same in ivory, obelisks, and innumerable colossi?
From the twelfth century popular imagination laid hold of these pictures, transforming and amplifying them. Wondrous tales became current and were incorporated in works received as authoritative--the Descriptis plenaria Votius Urbis, the Graphia aurea urbis Romæ, and lastly the Mirabilia civitatis Romæ. Again at the end of the fifteenth century the valiant Charles VIII, wanting to give his subjects some idea of the town into which he had lately entered lance in hand, caused one of these records of another age to be translated for them. A few extracts will show with what strong faith these stories worthy of The Thousand and One Nights were received before the Renaissance:
“Inside the capital was the greater part of a golden palace adorned with precious stones and said to equal the third part of the world, in which there were as many statues of images as there are provinces in all the world. Each image had a tambourine round its neck, placed with mathematical art, so that if any region was in rebellion against the Romans, immediately the image of the province turned its back to the image of the city of Rome, which was the largest and dominated the others, and the tambourine at its neck sounded. Then immediately the Capitol guards told this to the senate, and people were forthwith sent to expugn that province.
“The horses and nude men denote that in the time of the emperor Tiberius there were two young philosophers, that is, Praxiteles and Phitas, who said they were so wise that anything the emperor said in his room, they not being there, could report word for word. And they did as they said, not demanding money for it, but to be always remembered, so the philosophers have two marble horses with their feet on the ground, which denote the princes of this century. And they who are naked on the horses denote that their arm, high and held out, and their bent backs speak of things to come, and as they are naked, so the science of this world was naked and open to their understanding.”
From admiration to imitation is only one step. Artists in their turn went to work and took without scruple from what was a common heritage. Doubtless many of these borrowings are unconscious or really only show up the immense inferiority of the copyist. But is the influence of the antique less striking? One must recall in this order of ideas the splendid creations of architects in the Roman period--the duomo, the campanile, and the baptistery of Pisa, the baptistery of Florence, and the basilica of San Miniato, the duomo of Lucca, and so many chefs-d’œuvre raised according to principles that innovators of the following age, the champions of Gothic style, were so audaciously to trample underfoot.
Nicholas Crescentius (son of the celebrated tribune) in the eleventh century, impelled by a desire to renew the ancient splendour of Rome, had the elegant little house at Ponte Rotto built of antique fragments. Similarly the emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1121-1190) had these former glories in mind, when he had graven on his seal a view of Rome with the Colosseum. But it was to his illustrious grandson Frederick II (1184-1250) that the honour is due of first pleading the cause of the Renaissance, and he should rightly be placed at the head of the precursors. We possess numerous witnesses of his love for the monuments of ancient art.
Now we see him striking Augustales, those curious imitations of Roman imperial money, bearing on one side an effigy crowned with laurels, with the epigraph AVG. IMP. ROM. and draped in the fashion of the cæsars; on the reverse an eagle with outspread wings with the epigraph FREDERICVS. Again he buys for a considerable sum (230 oz. of gold) an onyx cup and other curiosities. From Grotta Ferrata he takes away two bronzes, statues of a man and of a cow serving for a fountain, and carries them to Lucera. The church of St. Michael of Ravenna furnishes the monolithic columns he requires for his buildings at Palermo. Near Augusta in Sicily, he caused excavations to be made in the hope of discovering ancient remains. Once, it is true, yielding to urgent necessity he had several Roman monuments at Brindisi destroyed that he might use the materials in constructing a citadel. He tried just as he was departing for Palestine to make the town safe from any attacks, but political reasons outweighed his antiquarian scruples.
The work dreamed of by Frederick II as amateur was realised by his contemporary Nicholas of Pisa (1207?-1278) who, in the thirteenth century, held imitation of the antique as a principle, and used it as a mirror by which nature might be the more clearly shown. His attempt seems prodigious to us to-day; it supposes a power of initiative which Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Van Eyck have hardly equalled. Imitation with him was not confined to accessories--ornaments, costumes, armour--nor to types, nor to proportions of figures, which are all stumpy, as in the Roman sarcophagi of the decadence. The spirit of his work recalls ancient models.
“Nicholas,” says M. Gebhardt,[n] “in the pulpits of Pisa and Siena, and in the shrine of San Dominico at Bologna, recalls the traditions of a great art with a naïve gravity and assured taste. He is hardly a neo-Greek or a superstitious antiquary, but is imbued with the most generous principles of antique sculpture--the harmonious ordering of the scenes, the skilful employ of space where many persons move in a narrow frame, the majestic tranquillity of pose, the finely ordered draperies, the noble heads. But his eye and hand still express the fashion of primitive sculpture; the movements express awkward timidity, the faces are sometimes heavy. He gives an impression of Roman work at the end of the empire. Nicholas of Pisa (Niccolo Pisano), if he discovered and studied the Greek, did not renounce nature, and, in his best pieces, he has returned to a study of life. It is in this that he shows himself an intelligent disciple of the ancients. Apart from Nicholas of Pisa, the Italian masters each put their own personality in the antique; none were servile copyists, and it is Nicholas, the first and consequently the least learned, whose chisel has left the most instructive reminiscences.”
One of the most noted pupils and collaborators of Nicholas, Brother Guglielmo of Pisa (born about 1238, died after 1313), was inspired with like principles, but not so strongly. In the pulpit of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas at Pistoia, he has succeeded better than his master, in reconciling pagan reminiscences with Christian ideas.
The historic sentiment is one of the distinctive traits of the school of Nicholas of Pisa. It has recourse not only to antique marbles as models of style, but to documents as well. Whilst, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, painters and sculptors gave the costume of the period to sacred characters, their predecessors of the thirteenth century tried to restore, aided by archæology, the costumes of Christ and his family, the apostles, martyrs, as absolutely as did the Renaissance champions two hundred years later. Fra Guglielmo has pushed these scruples very far; his apostles wear the toga, tunic, and sandals, and hold a rolled volume in the hand.
In the Descent of the Holy Ghost he seeks, moreover, faithfully to reproduce the types of the primitive church, above all in the figures of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. As with the sculptors of sarcophagi in Rome, Milan, and the south of France, there is a complete absence of nimbi, showing to what extent Nicholas of Pisa and his like disdained mediæval tradition, at least as regards types, costumes, and attributes. In the scene just mentioned one remarks also the grouping of the apostles. They are placed in two ranks, one behind the other, just as in a curious mosaic in the chapel of St. Aguilino (church of St. Lawrence at Milan). An arrangement differing very little is found in another bas-relief on the pulpit--that is, Christ washing the disciples’ feet. The women’s dresses deserve special mention. In the Annunciation and Visitation, Mary and Elizabeth have the head half covered with a fold of their mantle so as to expose the forehead and the greater part of the hair. They might be Roman matrons.
In his quality as a member of the order of St. Dominican, Fra Guglielmo had more than once to reprove the too pagan tendencies of his master. The position of another disciple of Nicholas, Arnolfo of Cambio (died in 1310), the architect of the dome of Florence, was not less delicate, but for other reasons. One is surprised to see this master, the promoter of a style departing so singularly from antique tradition, returning to the latter when he exchanges the builder’s compass for the sculptor’s chisel. Let us hasten to add that the departure is not so great as one might think. In his tomb of the cardinal of Braye at Orvieto, Arnolfo has known how to give the Virgin a serene majesty, a simplicity which does not lack grandeur, without pushing imitation as far as his master. He shows still more entire independence in the tabernacle of St. Paul beyond the walls, near Rome. If one did not know Arnolfo to have been Nicholas’ disciple, it would be difficult to imagine it in looking at this hybrid monument.[i]
Without attempting even to name the other lesser schools of sculpture and of architecture that were beginning to make their influence felt, let us turn to culminating artistic achievements of the epoch, as represented in the work of the great Florentines Cimabue and Giotto.
The Tuscan School of Painters
It is an undisputed fact that the revival of painting, like that of sculpture, commenced in Tuscany. It is equally certain that about the middle of the thirteenth century, or a little later, which is the point at which improvement first manifested itself, the prevailing style was the Byzantine, introduced by Greek artists from Constantinople. But it has not by any means been clearly discerned wherein the peculiarities of that style consisted; and it has been usually assumed that it was a rude and defective manner which, as the first step in advance, the Italian painters had to discard. Materials are extant which justify a different conclusion, and evince that the introduction of this foreign taste, gross and faulty as it was, truly formed the first stage in improvement.
From the ninth century till the middle of the thirteenth, painting among the Byzantine artists differed from contemporary Italian works in several important particulars. In both quarters art was timidly imitative; but in the Eastern Empire the models from which it borrowed were more various than in the West, and the execution was usually better; the fashion of the drapery and ornament had a peculiar character of semi-oriental barbarism; and, while in both countries the drawing of the figure was generally bad, the common tendency of the Greeks was to lengthen it disproportionally, and that of the Italians to represent it as short and squab. But the most palpable distinctions were two in the technical treatment. First, in the oldest Italian paintings the vehicle of the colours is transparent, and the tone is therefore light and clear; in the works from Constantinople the tone is dark and yellowish, being produced by the use of some colouring matter which, if modern chemists have rightly analysed it, was wax. The second difference was this--that the Greeks, besides ornamenting their draperies richly with gilding, surrounded their figures with a golden ground; a barbarous practice, of which the oldest Italian works exhibit no trace. In those early productions of the thirteenth century, where we can trace the first ameliorations of art, we discover most, or all, of these peculiarities derived from the Greek style; some of them prevailed very long; and the most objectionable, the flaunting ground, was not entirely discarded even in the time of Raffaelle.
The oldest name celebrated in Italian painting is that of Cimabue, who, born about 1240, died in 1300. On the strength of his merit the Florentines claim the glory of having resuscitated art--a pretension which the school of Siena seems to have some right, in the person of Duccio, to contest with them. The works of Cimabue were Byzantine, in their style, in their colouring, and in their blaze of gold; and tradition says that he was taught in his youth by Greek artists. He improved, it is true, upon that school; but, though everything regarding him is obscure, there is no sufficient reason for believing that his improvement consisted in any departure from its principles. To him are commonly assigned some ill-preserved fresco paintings in the church of St. Francis at Assisi, which at all events give an idea of the masters from whom he learned; but his boldness and loftiness of conception are more clearly evinced by two rudely grand figures of Madonnas on wood, both at Florence, the more celebrated of the two in the church of Santa Maria Novella, the other in the Ducal Gallery.
To this great artist succeeds the Florentine Giotto (1276-1336), whose history and works are somewhat better known. The Italian novelists have preserved anecdotes of his wealth, his ugliness, and his profane wit. The story which describes him as a shepherd boy, discovered by Cimabue drawing rude figures on a stone, is perhaps too picturesque to be true; and his undoubted pieces display a marked dissimilarity in spirit to those of his alleged teacher, while they deviate also from the Byzantine style in colouring, if in nothing else, having a clear rosy hue which indicates a return to the older Italian method, though it is also an improvement on it. In the theory of his art, however, Giotto departed essentially from all his predecessors. When we combine the criticisms of the older writers with the few pictures which still can be certainly or probably identified as his, we may describe his characteristics as consisting in an attempt, made under manifold difficulties, but attended with surprising success, to establish, instead of the rude, vague, devotional loftiness of Cimabue, a beauty derived from a closer observation of life, as well as enlivened by a better and less formal expression of ordinary human feeling. His only existing work, which is ascertained by a genuine inscription, is one in the church of the Santa Croce in Florence, containing five divisions, of which that in the centre represents the Saviour crowning the Virgin. The gallery of the Florentine Accademia delle Arti contains some small compositions of his, representing, in a fashion half religious and half comic, events from the history of St. Francis. Frescoes in the upper church of that saint at Assisi, assigned to Giotto by some critics, have been pronounced by others to be inferior, and unlike his genuine remains; but others on the vaulted roof of the subterranean part of the same building are undoubtedly his, and resemble the pieces of the academy both in execution and in spirit. Other pictures laying claim to his name occur in various galleries throughout Italy as well as elsewhere.[e]
Notwithstanding all the enthusiasm that has been bestowed upon the paintings of Giotto, it must frankly be admitted that these are to be regarded as remarkable only when viewed in relation to the art of the time in which they were produced. To extol them as masterpieces according to the standards that were developed by the later Florentines would be to throw criticism to the winds. But the architectural efforts of Giotto may be praised with less reserve. The Campanile of Florence has aroused the enthusiasm of most critics who have viewed it; Ruskin[k] declares that “of living Christian works, none is so perfect as the tower of Giotto.”
The same writer speaks with equal enthusiasm of Giotto’s work in another field: “Of representations of human art under heavenly guidance,” he says, “the series of bas-reliefs which stud the base of this tower of Giotto must be held certainly the chief in Europe. Read but these inlaid jewels of Giotto once with patient following, and your hour’s study will give you strength for all your life.” This may be held by colder criticism to be an over-enthusiastic estimate, but few who have come under the spell of the Campanile will wish to modify the eloquent words in which Ruskin characterises that structure as a whole.[a]
Ruskin’s Estimate of Giotto’s Tower
“The characteristics of power and beauty,” he says, “occur more or less in different buildings, some in one and some in another. But all together, and all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building in the world, the Campanile of Giotto. In its first appeal to the stranger’s eye there is something unpleasing--a mingling, as it seems to him, of over-severity with over-minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other consummate art. I well remember how, when a boy, I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The contrast is indeed strange if it could be quickly felt, between the rising of those gray walls out of their quiet swarded space, like dark and barren rocks out of a green lake, with their rude, mouldering, rough-grained shafts and triple lights, without tracery or other ornament than the martins’ nests in the height of them, and that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud and chased like a sea-shell. And if this be, as I believe it, the model and mirror of perfect architecture, is there not something to be learned by looking back to the early life of him who raised it? I said that the power of human mind had its growth in the wilderness; much more must the love and the conception of that beauty, whose every line and hue we have seen to be, at the best, a faded image of God’s daily work, and an arrested ray of some star or creation, be given chiefly in the places which he has gladdened by planting there the fir-tree and the pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but among the far-away fields of her lilies, was the child trained who was to raise that headstone of beauty above her towers of watch and war. Remember all that he became; count the sacred thoughts with which he filled the heart of Italy; ask those who followed him what they learned at his feet; and when you have numbered his labours and received their testimony, if it seem to you that God had verily poured out upon this his servant no common nor restrained portion of his spirit, and that he was indeed a king among the children of men, remember also that the legend upon his crown was that of David’s: ‘I took thee from the sheep-cote and from following the sheep.’”[k]
FOOTNOTES
[13] Franco Sacchetti, in his Capitolo (Rime, publ. dal Poggiali, p. 56), enumerates about 1390 the names of over a hundred distinguished people in the ruling parties who had died within his memory. However many mediocrities there may have been among them, the list is still remarkable as evidence of the awakening of individuality.
[14] There was a comic poet named Plato.
VII. ROME UNDER RIENZI
He is accused not of betraying but of defending liberty; he is guilty not of surrendering but of holding the Capitol. The supreme crime with which he is charged, and which merits expiation on the scaffold, is that he dared affirm that the Roman Empire is still at Rome, and in possession of the Roman people. Oh, unpious age! Oh, preposterous jealousy, malevolence unprecedented! What dost thou, O Christ, ineffable and incorruptible judge of all? Where are thine eyes with which thou art wont to scatter the clouds of human misery? Why dost thou turn them away? Why dost thou not, with thy forked lightning, put an end to this unholy trial?--PETRARCH.[i]
[Sidenote: [1347-1354 A.D.]]
The story of Cola di Rienzi furnishes a unique chapter in Italian history. It is the story of a patriot and reformer, whose early enthusiasm was not supported by true moral greatness, and whose efforts were thus foredoomed to failure, after a momentary semblance of success.
The date of the accession of Charles IV is coincident with that of the first and greatest rise of Rienzi to power in Rome. To disengage Rienzi from the atmosphere of romance into which he has been cast for the reader of to-day by the unguarded rhetoric in Lord Lytton’s novel, and its offspring the libretto of an opera by Richard Wagner, is a task which could serve little by its accomplishment. In whatever light we regard the tribune we are bound to admit that his history is an eloquent memorial of the sudden extinction of what at least appeared to be the most brilliant possibilities. Who can refuse an ear to the story that captivated the attention of Petrarch--that story whose fantastic glamour the poet never entirely shook from him even when his faith in the power of his friend was being rudely shaken? It is through Petrarch that the romantic vision of Rienzi’s career has been transmitted to us, and though we may smile at the poet’s unreal sense of government, we are left to wonder at his great imaginative sympathy with the dreams of the young Nicholas from the moment when he first heard them from the lips of his friend at Avignon (in 1343) to the time when it needed all his eloquence with the pope to save Rienzi from execution (in 1352). Against such a story, illustrated in numerous glowing letters of Petrarch, Hallam’s cold sense of justice rebels. He quotes the words of the staunch republican Giovanni Villani,[b] a contemporary of Rienzi. “The design he formed was a fantastic work and one of short duration.” He reminds us of the passage in Madame de Staël’s Corinne, in which Oswald, Lord Nelvil, and the heroine happen upon the castle of St. Angelo in their intellectual perambulations through Rome. Nelvil is a descendant, in the direct line, of another English hero in French fiction, Edward, Lord Bumpton--the saddened English peer with beautiful manners and a heart all Rousseau. Corinne attacks the monuments with a conscientious zeal worthy of Baedeker and with more than Baedeker’s tenderness for the general spirit of reflection which such sights are wont to raise. But her critical faculty is never dormant. She couples Rienzi with Crescentius and Arnold of Brescia, calling them “those friends of Roman liberty who so often mistook their memories for hopes.” The phrase strikes a note of enthusiasm from Hallam which all the rhetoric of Rienzi himself fails to produce in the historian. Could Tacitus have excelled this, he asks?
But even robbed of the setting by which Petrarch has made it forever memorable, the story of Rienzi’s attitude towards the institutions of his time is in itself picturesque. Sismondi[c] says of him, “He rejected with deep indignation the usurpation of two barbarians, the one German, calling himself Roman emperor; the other a Frenchman who called himself the pontiff of Rome.” In the disruption into which Rome was thrown by the contests of the noble families, Rienzi saw a possible foundation for creating a powerful sovereignty. The removal of the popes to Avignon made his designs appear all the more feasible. The people of Rome were to be the backbone of his strength. He won them by a singular eloquence to which Petrarch bears evidence even at that period when he is tempted to minimise the wisdom of his early enthusiasm for Rienzi. Rome was the prey of feudal anarchy: the municipal government was reduced to impotence. Seizing the opportune moment Cola di Rienzi (Nicola Gabrini), the son of an innkeeper, makes a brilliant coup d’état and becomes tribune elect of the people in 1347. The feuds of the families of Colonna, Orsini and Savelli have served the ends of the ambitious youth who at the age of thirty-four found himself in a position of power all the greater that it was comparatively undefined and absolutely unparalleled in the annals of history. We can hardly be surprised that the success of his endeavours, the material realisation of what even to Rienzi himself must have clearly possessed some of the attributes of a dream, should have misled him into the most extravagant abuses of power. He had dreamed even at that early period of the unification of Italy, and now it seemed as if he were the divine agent to bring about this unification. Sovereign princes became his allies. He surrounded himself with all the tokens of magnificence that occurred to a fertile and greedy imagination. He bathed in the porphyry font of Constantine; he assumed the dalmatic worn by the ancient emperors at their coronation, took the sceptre of government in his hand and placed seven crowns on his head symbolising the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost; he even compared himself to Christ.
The novel of Lord Lytton is a genuine attempt to convey a picture of an achievement that offered an attractive subject for romantic treatment. It lacks the sincere ring of the silver eloquence of Petrarch--its main source of inspiration. It has little of the critical faculty revealed in the phrase quoted from Madame de Staël; it is a curious combination of diligent research, sympathetic insight, and a passion for high talk. In the case of one to whom contemporaries affix the epithet “fantastic” with noticeable frequency, the difficulties of precise delineation are more than usually great. But such a chapter as that describing the climax of Rienzi’s power during his first and greatest tribunate is a valuable contribution towards that truth of narrative which lies midway between the barren enumeration of facts and the perfervid rhapsodies of those whom the facts have dazzled. For the main narrative of Rienzi’s picturesque career, however, we shall trust to the more prosaic, yet still appreciative, account of a recent Italian historian.[a]
THE RISE OF RIENZI
[Sidenote: [1342-1347 A.D.]]
Cola di Rienzi, full of the glories of ancient Rome, thought it possible to realise politically the thoughts contained in his own works, and those of his friend Petrarch, and of other great minds of his century. One idea dominated Rienzi. He was the great dreamer of his time; but he was not mad in thinking that Rome should rise above the party spirit of Guelfs and Ghibellines which he equally blamed whilst lamenting the strife continually excited by the one against the other.
In 1342, after the election of Clement VI in Avignon, the thirteen good men who ruled Rome sent orators to the new pope asking him to return to St. Peter’s seat. They had done the same at the election of Clement V, John XXII, and Benedict XII. A young Roman, born to a tavern-keeper and a washerwoman about the time of the coronation of Henry VII, took part in the embassy. He was learned in Livy, Seneca, Cicero, and Valerius; he was enthusiastic over the deeds of Julius Cæsar; he had learned to read the ancient inscriptions which were no longer understood, and he loved to expound them to the degenerate citizens; and, whilst telling them of the good Romans and their great justice, he regretted not having been born in their time. He either did not know or he forgot the stormy scenes of the republic, the pusillanimity and the iniquity of the empire, and ignored the virtues and the victories of that Rome which now lay abandoned not only by her emperor, but even by her pope.
Being presented to Clement VI, Rienzi described to him the robberies of the lords at Rome, their misdeeds, and the desolation of the city; he spoke in such forcible words that Clement was astonished, and the elegance of the Latin language used by the gifted citizen seemed extraordinary. Petrarch also, who a few years previously had pressed Benedict XII to return to Rome, represented to the new pope the city that invited his return.
But Clement, more impressed by the miserable condition of Rome and the states of the church than by the ardent words of poet or orator, had no wish to leave Avignon. He authorised the jubilee for the year 1350, and he deputed the young Stefano Colonna and Bertoldo Orsini to be his vicars in Rome. He complimented Cola and appointed him notary of the chamber; but the latter now began to show his teeth. The murder of a brother for which he was unable to obtain justice had exasperated him against the bad judges of Rome; so now returning from Avignon in favour with the pope, he took courage to reprove them as kings of the “blood of the poor people”; he admonished them with mysterious pictures; and he had a presentment made of a ship about to sink in a stormy sea, under which was written: “This is Rome.”
In his increasing assurance, and ascendency over the people, Cola convoked them one day to the Lateran when he spoke in the vulgar tongue so as to be understood by all. He showed the people the Lex Regia of Vespasian, which he had brought to light for the first time, and which he thought had been hidden by Boniface VIII out of hatred of the empire. In this the senate in the ancient Roman forms conferred the imperial power on Vespasian. Cola, who took it literally, extolled the authority of the Roman people: “See how fine the senate was, what authority it gave to the empire;” and he lamented the loss of so much greatness, and deplored above all the present desolation of the city, and implored the people not to disgrace themselves before the pilgrims who would come to Rome for the jubilee of 1350.
All the people applauded, and the nobles scoffed, but he replied in allegorical pictures and discourses. Rome was in a miserable condition; murder and rapine were practised on the highways with impunity, pilgrims were robbed and wounded, and honesty was out of court. Robert and Peter Colonna were senators, but they were not sufficient to restrain anarchy. Stefano Colonna, the elder, the valorous and terrible head of the powerful family of that name, was a cornet in the Roman military; and Cola thought that the time had arrived to summon the people to reorganise the city and to substitute the “good state” for the present disorder.
On the 20th of May, 1347, he assembled the populace and addressed it from the Campidoglio. Three standards were displayed before him--on the one was depicted Rome, and signified Liberty; upon another was St. Paul, who represented Justice; and upon the third was St. Peter, indicating Peace and Concord. He was accompanied by Raymond, bishop of Orvieto, the pope’s vicar in Rome for ecclesiastical matters. Cola spoke of the misery and servitude of the people of Rome, and as “he for the love of the pope and the salvation of the people exposed his person to every danger,” he then published his decrees for the prevention of murder, for the right distribution of justice, the organisation of the soldiery of the corporation and for the assistance of widows, orphans, and monasteries--the barons were to maintain the security of the thoroughfares and not to favour any malefactor. Stefano Colonna returned to Rome in indignation, but as he heard the sound of uproar and saw the people bearing arms, he fled to Palestrina and shut himself up in his family castle. The Orsini, Colonnas, and other barons who caused the desolation of the city by their incessant strifes were expelled. Those who had fled in terror at the sudden revolution responded to Cola’s invitation and gradually returned, took the oath, and offered their assistance to the city.
Cola di Rienzi hastened to restore peace by punishing the evil-doers, and reinstating justice and security. He then took the title of tribune, as head of the people. The pontifical vicar had been appointed his colleague; but this was only nominal, for the true and sole head of Rome was Cola.
The distance of the pope from Rome gave the tribune freedom to establish his authority. Neither he nor the Roman people would have thought of the tribunate if the pope had been there; but his absence, and the faint hope of his return after his recent refusal, made a profound impression upon the Romans.
Now the idea of the empire and the republic dazzled the eyes of the new tribune. He wrote letters to the pope at Avignon, and to the cities of Tuscany, Lombardy, and Romagna, to Lucchino Visconti, lord of Milan, to the marquis of Ferrara, and to Ludwig the Bavarian at Naples.
He who called himself “Nicolaus severus et clemens, sancte romane reipublice liberator illustris,” reported himself to the territories of Italy as having assumed the title of tribune to repair the evils which oppressed Rome, and requested that on the 1st of August all should send two orators to treat on the welfare of the whole of Italy (della salute di tutta Italia). The fame of the ardent dreamer who sought to reinstate the Roman Empire, with Rome at the head and the Italian territories dependent upon it, and united almost in confederation, ran throughout Italy. The courier sent to Avignon said that thousands of people pressed upon Rienzi as he passed by to kiss the wand he bore. The pope gave a favourable reply.
The tribune, moreover, wishing to revive the pomp of old imperialism, made a triumphal course through the city, and visiting the church of St. Peter he was received by the clergy singing: “Veni Creator Spiritus.” He ordered the barons to concede to the restoration of the palace of the Campidoglio, the seat of the tribunate, and instituted the trained bands of cavalry and foot-soldiers according to the wards of the city, so that thirteen hundred infantry and three hundred and sixty cavalry were enrolled. All the barons had obeyed, with the exception of Giovanni da Vico, who by direct inheritance maintained the title of prefect of the city, in which dignity he had succeeded his father. He was descended from a family of German origin and of the imperial party which several times gave Rome reason for war. He had been vicar in Viterbo during the pontificate, and during its absence he had been tyrant; and he was not inclined to submit now to the tribune. But Cola, with the aid of Tuscany, the Campania, and the maritime provinces, forced him to obey the people of Rome. Cola then reinvested him with the prefecture and left him Viterbo; Cività Vecchia, Anagni, and the other territories submitted.
August approached, and the ambassadors arrived from Florence, Siena, Teramo, Spoleto, Rieti, Amelia, Tivoli, Velletri, Foligno, Assisi; the Venetians showed themselves favourable. The majority of the tyrants of Lombardy made light of embassies (like Taddeo, Pepoli of Bologna, Francesco Ordelaffi of Forlì, and Malatesta of Rimini) although many almost repented later of having treated the invitation so disrespectfully. It seems that Ludwig the Bavarian himself sent secret envoys to Rome because the tribune wished to conciliate him with the church. Also Louis of Hungary, who, by the murder of Andrea was Robert’s successor to the kingdom of Naples, aspired to that kingdom, and, accusing Joanna of complicity in the death of her husband, sent orators to demand justice; and he wrote letters to the tribune, as also did Joanna. Letters, moreover, arrived from Philip of France; but they came too late--when Cola had fallen.
Cola, wishing to unite the glamour of pomp with the honour of the tribune of Rome, was dressed as a cavaliere. In the presence of the orators of the various Italian cities and amid a great concourse of people he proceeded in triumph towards the Lateran. Cavaliere Vico Scotto presented him with the sword and order of a cavaliere, and he had the vanity to bathe in Constantine’s bath, in which it was said that Constantine washed after being cured of leprosy by St. Silvester. Much was said by the people at this seeming act of profanation, and Cola was unconscious of the grave error that he made. His vanity began to be his ruin. Made a cavaliere, he addressed a speech to the people on the dignities lost by the citizens of Rome, he spoke of the empire and the popedom, and finally summoned before his presence the imperial electors and Ludwig the Bavarian and Charles IV of Bohemia who were pretendants to the empire under the ancient law of the election of the future emperor by the Roman people.[d]
Turning for the moment from the calm narrative of the historian, let us listen to the eloquent account in which Lord Lytton describes this remarkable scene.
LORD LYTTON ON THE SPEECH OF RIENZI
The bell of the great Lateran church sounded shrill and loud, as the mighty multitude, greater even than that of the preceding night, swept on. The appointed officers made way with difficulty for the barons and ambassadors, and scarcely were those noble visitors admitted ere the crowd closed in their ranks, poured headlong into the church, and took the way to the chapel of Boniface VIII. There, filling every cranny, and blocking up the entrance, the more fortunate of the press beheld the tribune surrounded by the splendid court his genius had collected, and his fortune had subdued. At length, as the solemn and holy music began to swell through the edifice, preluding the celebration of the mass, the tribune stepped forth, and the hush of the music was increased by the universal and dead silence of the audience. His height, his air, his countenance, were such as always commanded the attention of crowds; and at this time they received every adjunct from the interest of the occasion, and that peculiar look of intent yet suppressed fervour, which is, perhaps, the sole gift of the eloquent that nature alone can give.
“Be it known,” said he, slowly and deliberately, “in virtue of that authority, power, and jurisdiction, which the Roman people, in general parliament, have assigned to us, and which the sovereign pontiff hath confirmed, that we, not ungrateful of the gift and grace of the Holy Spirit--whose soldier we now are--nor of the favour of the Roman people, declare that Rome, capital of the world, and base of the Christian church, and that every city, state, and people of Italy, are henceforth free. By that freedom, and in the same consecrated authority, we proclaim that the election, jurisdiction, and monarchy of the Roman Empire appertain to Rome and Rome’s people, and the whole of Italy. We cite, then, and summon personally, the illustrious princes, Ludwig duke of Bavaria, and Charles king of Bohemia, who would style themselves emperors of Italy, to appear before us, or the other magistrates of Rome, to plead and to prove their claim between this day and the Day of Pentecost. We cite also, and within the same term, the duke of Saxony, the prince of Brandenburg, and whosoever else, potentate, prince, or prelate, asserts the right of elector to the imperial throne--a right that, we find it chronicled from ancient and immemorial time, appertaineth only to the Roman people--and this in vindication of our civil liberties, without derogation of the spiritual power of the church, the pontiff, and the sacred college.[15] Herald, proclaim the citation, at the greater and more formal length, as written and entrusted to your hands, without the Lateran.”
As Rienzi concluded this bold proclamation of the liberties of Italy, the Tuscan ambassadors, and those of some other of the free states, murmured low approbation. The ambassadors of those states that affected the party of the emperor looked at each other in silent amaze and consternation. The Roman barons remained with mute lips and downcast eyes; only over the aged face of Stefano Colonna settled a smile, half of scorn, half of exultation. But the great mass of the citizens were caught by words that opened so grand a prospect as the emancipation of all Italy; and the reverence of the tribune’s power and fortune was almost that due to a supernatural being; so that they did not pause to calculate the means which were to correspond with the boast.
While his eye roved over the crowd, the gorgeous assemblage near him, the devoted throng beyond; as on his ear boomed the murmur of thousands and ten thousands, in the space without, from before the palace of Constantine (palace now his own!) sworn to devote life and fortune to his cause; in the flush of prosperity that yet had known no check; in the zenith of power, as yet unconscious of reverse, the heart of the tribune swelled proudly; visions of mighty fame and limitless dominion; fame and dominion once his beloved Rome’s, and by him to be restored, rushed before his intoxicated gaze; and in the delirious and passionate aspirations of the moment, he turned his sword alternately to the three quarters of the then known globe, and said, in an abstracted voice, as a man in a dream, “In the right of the Roman people this too is mine!”
Low though the voice, the wild boast was heard by all around as distinctly as if borne to them in thunder. And vain it were to describe the various sensations it excited; the extravagance would have moved the derision of his foes, the grief of his friends, but for the manner of the speaker, which, solemn and commanding, hushed for the moment even reason and hatred themselves in awe; afterwards remembered and repeated, void of the spell they had borrowed from the utterer, the words met the cold condemnation of the well-judging; but at that moment all things seemed possible to the hero of the people. He spoke as one inspired--they trembled and believed; and, as rapt from the spectacle, he stood a moment silent, his arms still extended, his dark dilating eye fixed upon space, his lips parted, his proud head towering and erect above the herd, his own enthusiasm kindled that of the more humble and distant spectators; and there was a deep murmur begun by one, echoed by the rest, “The Lord is with Italy and Rienzi!”
The tribune turned, he saw the pope’s vicar astonished, bewildered, rising to speak. His sense and foresight returned to him at once, and, resolved to drown the dangerous disavowal of the papal authority for this hardihood, which was ready to burst from Raymond’s lips, he motioned quickly to the musicians, and the solemn and ringing chant of the sacred ceremony prevented the bishop of Orvieto all occasion of self-exoneration or reply.
The moment the ceremony was over, Rienzi touched the bishop, and whispered, “We will explain this to your liking. You feast with us at the Lateran. Your arm.” Nor did he leave the good bishop’s arm, nor trust him to other companionship, until to the stormy sound of horn and trumpet, drum and cymbal, and amidst such a concourse as might have hailed, on the same spot, the legendary baptism of Constantine, the tribune and his nobles entered the great gates of the Lateran, then the palace of the world.
Thus ended that remarkable ceremony and that proud challenge of the northern powers, in behalf of the Italian liberties, which, had it been afterwards successful, would have been deemed a sublime daring; which, unsuccessful, has been construed by the vulgar into a frantic insolence; but which, calmly considering all the circumstances that urged on the tribune, and all the power that surrounded him, was not, perhaps, altogether so imprudent as it seemed. And, even accepting that imprudence in the extremest sense, by the more penetrating judge of the higher order of character, it will probably be considered as the magnificent folly of a bold nature, excited at once by position and prosperity, by religious credulities, by patriotic aspirings, by scholastic visions too suddenly transferred from reverie to action, beyond that wise and earthward policy which sharpens the weapon ere it casts the gauntlet.[e]
RIENZI’S OPPONENTS; HIS FRIENDS; HIS PROCLAMATIONS
Germany was at this time divided, and Ludwig the Bavarian, who in the first years of his reign had found a rival in Frederick of Austria, and now another who was much more formidable in Charles, son of John of Bohemia, grandson of Henry VII, was no longer reconciled with the pope. In 1337 he approached the king of France, but here his friendship with Edward of England stopped the way of unanimity. His protests of submission provoked the declaration of the German electors on the independence of the empire of the pontificate (1338). The negotiation was continued in 1346. Ludwig wavered, and Clement VI again excommunicated him, enjoining the electors to fill the vacancy by the election of the king of the Romans.
Charles meanwhile, a candidate of the kingdom, came to Avignon to renew the promises of Henry VII. He was elected the same year. Ludwig, now weary of such a long strife, felt the need more than ever of reconciliation and peace.
Now the tribune with no other power than that of the name of Rome summoned before his tribunal the two rivals already adjudged by the pope without regard to the orders given by the pope, nor of those of the electors. “But the Roman Empire remains in Rome,” said Rienzi. “There is no name on earth more august than that of the Roman Republic; all the world recognises its supremacy. Rome is also the foundation of the church. Can the Roman Empire be found elsewhere than at Rome? Do we not find its laws among the Parthians, Persians, and Medes, and is it in Rome that we are not to find the Roman Empire? And if not at Rome, where is it to be?”
These were the ideas of Francesco Petrarch, who had become the firm and enthusiastic friend of the tribune, having first been thrown with him at Avignon. Thus when the daring attempt began to fail, the poet laureate was untiring in exhorting the tribune to insure the welfare of Rome and Italy. He was astounded at hearing many who were accredited with wisdom doubt the importance of the cause that Rome and Italy should be in concord.
The gentle spirit of Petrarch, intolerant at the pope’s residing at Avignon, and regretting his sojourn in Gaul, and complaining of the western Babylonia, now forgot his Colonna friends and incited Cola against the barons. Cæsar Augustus at one time had prohibited the Romans using the title of domini, and now everything is changed. “O miserabilem fortune vertiginem.” But in the meanwhile a great cause of discord had arisen. Raymond, alarmed at the tribune’s speeches, made a formal protest, but the voice of the notary who recorded it was drowned by musical instruments.
Cola withdrew all the privileges and the concessions given solely to the Roman people, and declared the Italian cities free; and on the 3rd of August in a festival which can be called that of the Italian cities he presented symbolical standards to the orators of some of the towns. Those of Perugia, Siena, and Todi received the standards; but those of Florence, to whom he wished to present a standard with Rome represented as an aged woman seated before two young ones, were not there to receive it, because they thought it would compromise the independence of their city, as they opined that one of the young women represented Florence.
Henceforward the Florentines, practised in the affairs of the world, knew that Cola’s enterprise “was a fantastic work of short durance.” Cola figured as a messenger of God, and took the title of “candidate of the Holy Spirit,” and had his titles engraved on a marble tablet on the door of Santa Maria in Ara Cœli. He afterwards wrote to the pope acquainting him with the deeds done, and wrote to the Italian cities repeating and delineating his programme with greater exactitude. He was to re-establish the laws of Rome; he declared that the monarchy of the world should belong to Rome and all Italy. He summoned the ruling authorities in Italy, the electors, and the German chancellors to appear in Rome before him, and the other officials of the pope and the Roman people to justify his laws (the 5th-6th of August). He wished to elect a new emperor at Rome, and whilst (August) the matter was being debated in Rome before him between Joanna of Naples and Louis of Hungary, his orators went to the different cities (November, December) asking them to send ambassadors to Rome for the coming festival of St. John, to treat on the election of the new emperor, maintaining that in antiquity his election was always looked for at the hands of the Romans and Italians, and to find means of preventing the Germans ever descending that side of the Alps.
Subsequently when Cola himself was forced to take refuge with Charles IV in Bohemia, he was astonished at the audacity with which, trusting in the “majesty of the name of Rome,” he had cast down the gauntlet of defiance before the German emperor.
On the 15th of August he had himself crowned in the Lateran with several symbolical crowns, of oak, ivy, myrtle, laurel, olive, and silver. The comptroller placed a golden apple in his hand. Then he forbade the use of the names of Guelf and Ghibelline; he promulgated the Roman freedom of the city of all Italians, and believing himself a hero of antique type, he wrote of his coronation to the pope and to Charles IV. He gave feasts and dressed in sumptuous attire.
He also ignored the signification of Guelf and Ghibelline, the laws of the pope and the emperor, but all, according to Petrarch, was done in the name of Rome, amid whose present miseries vivified by history and ancient literature there arose before his eyes, drunk with enthusiasm, the temples and courts of august Rome. The nobility, not being impressed with his dreams, worked against him, and he was now in fear of treachery. He invited Stefano Colonna, the elder, and other of the chief barons of the Colonnas, the Orsini, and the Savelli, to a banquet and then kept them prisoners. He wished to have them all killed, and had the room adorned with white and red decorations as a sign of blood. Their approaching death was announced to them, but then his courage failed him for the execution of the sentence. Granting the prayers of several citizens he pardoned them, believed in the sincerity of their promises, liberated them, and covered them with honours. In all practical matters Rienzi’s weakness and lack of judgment were clearly shown.
But naturally discontent arose among the Roman people, and a fire and flame were kindled which could not be extinguished (the 15th of September). The liberated barons rushed to their castles, fortified Marino, and openly prepared for war, skirmishing even as far as the gates of Rome. Cola was thus forced to besiege Marino. In the meanwhile the causes of division with the pope increased. Clement VI was filled with suspicion against Cola, seeing that he arbitrarily ruled the territories of Sabina, which were under the pontifical sway. He sent to Rome the cardinal Bertrando di Deux (the pontifical legate in Italy until 1346), who subsequently co-operated in the ruin of the tribune. He came to Rome in October and Cola arrogantly appeared before him clad in the imperial dalmatic, to the sound of trumpets, the sceptre in his hand and crown upon his head, terrible and fantastic to look at.
DISASTER SUCCEEDS VICTORY
Clement had written to this legate saying that Cola had exceeded the limits of his authority, breaking the pontifical and imperial decrees and favouring Louis of Hungary against Joanna of Naples whom the pope held to be innocent of the accusation of complicity in the murder of her husband Andrea. He gave orders for Cola to revoke the very fatuous laws he had made and ordered him to be contented with the government of Rome. But Cola was unwilling to receive such admonitions, which prevented the fulfilment of his designs. The Colonnas in the meanwhile arrived from Palestrina, and favoured by the discontent commencing in Rome they entered upon the perilous venture of storming Rome at the gate of San Lorenzo. Among the chief barons were Stefano Colonna, the younger, and Giovanni his son, who died fighting. Cola felt certain of the prefect Da Vico,--who, however, secretly favoured the Colonnas, the Orsini, and the Savelli,--and had tried to imbue the others with his enthusiasm, saying that St. Boniface, i.e., Boniface VIII, had appeared to him and assured him of victory over the Colonnas. They in fact were conquered (the 20th of November). Many of the most illustrious barons died in that fierce battle, which was the grave of the old Roman nobility. The tribune, being no warrior, could not boast of a real victory, but he nevertheless celebrated his triumph, and like the ancients, he had arms hung up in the temples, and he laid his steel sceptre and his crown of olive leaves at the feet of the Virgin in Santa Maria in Ara Cœli, boasting before the people of having done with his sword what neither pope nor emperor had been able to do.
The next day he made his son Lorenzo a cavalier (knight) at the scene of victory, sprinkling him with water from the ditch in which Stefano Colonna had fallen, and bathing him with blood and water, he said to him: “Thou shalt be a cavalier of victory”; and thus in vain and barbarous ceremonies he lost precious time in which he could easily have surprised Marino. The people murmured at seeing Rienzi sprinkle his son with the blood of the Colonnas, for he seemed like an Asiatic tyrant, who forgot the execution of justice in his love of eating and drinking.
Cola began to be suspicious of the populace, and fearing their fury he was in no hurry to assemble them for parliament. He had to cease governing Sabina, although in the name of the church he continued to issue laws and tracts. He approached the legate, but he did not recover the good will of the people, who now regarded him as a tyrant (December, 1347).
Together with a pontifical vicar, he assembled the parliament of the people, proposing a tax on salt, but in this the citizens did not concur, and soon afterwards a council was formed of twenty-nine sages. But scarcely were they assembled than he accused two of the members of treachery; a tumult arose, and Cola, alarmed, and to reassemble the sole public council and to excuse himself of any excess, said that he wished to hold the court in the name of the pope and according to the orders that the cardinal brought him in his name. But he postponed publishing them (the 10th of December), and thus from hesitancy to hesitancy, from vanity to vanity, he worked his own ruin.
The people were no longer with him, he was no longer the tribune of a few months previous--full of confidence and enthusiasm. He did not know how to keep the vicar on his side; and he withdrew to the legate at Montefiascone, who was commencing operations against the tribune, as he sided with the Colonnas and Savelli.
Letters arrived from the pope, accusing Cola of having summoned to his court the Bavarian and the Bohemian, and for having incited the Italian cities to assemble to elect the emperor, which he had asserted to be a matter independent of the church and the city of Rome; in fact he had incited the people to abandon him. Although Cola then abandoned (at least in appearance) all his pretensions, it was too late.
Petrarch had left Valchiusa to come to Rome to visit the tribune and the city, no longer in the hands of the barons, no longer decimated by massacres, but ruled by a vigorous hand of ancient Roman descent. When he arrived at Genoa, he heard on the way bad reports of Cola’s government. He then wrote to him to reprove his decadence, and quoting Cicero and Terence, he strove to inspire him with Roman steadfastness. “The foot must be well planted,” he said to him, “so as to be firm and not to present a ridiculous spectacle to the enemies.”
But these oratorical exhortations were fruitless--resistance had become impossible; the legate, the people, were all against him; and those who a few months before had hailed him as the restorer of the Roman Republic now grumbled at him as the “iniquitous one who wished to tyrannise by force.”
John Pipino of Altarmara who was put in prison by Robert had been set free by Andrew in 1343. When Andrew was killed he left the kingdom and went to Hungary, where he incited King Louis to go down to Italy to vindicate the death of his brother, whilst he went to Rome to await him. The tribune had banished him from Rome for the robberies he had committed near Terracina, but favoured by the enemies of Cola, he was able to fortify himself in the district of the Holy Apostles, under the protection of the Colonnas.
Cola liberated the prefect Da Vico; but he was mistaken in thinking to acquire a powerful friend, for he had already voted against the tribune; his orders were not followed. The tribune was now quite cast down and disheartened at seeing that the country which had glowed with the ardour of a whole populace was now destitute of one in his favour; and he fell to weeping and sighing.
The people meanwhile came to the Campidoglio, but full of a bad spirit and actuated by his enemies. Cola appeared before them and told them how much he had done in his tribunate; he justified his conduct, and said that if his fellow-citizens were not satisfied with him it was the fault of their jealousy, and that he would renounce power in the seventh month from that in which he had assumed it. But the eloquent language which had once affected Clement VI, and intoxicated the people with enthusiasm, was now received coldly, and not a voice rose in his defence.
Weeping, Cola came out on horseback, and to the sound of trumpets and with imperial accompaniments he passed through the city almost in triumph and shut himself up in the castle of St. Angelo. When the tribune descended from his grandeur, he bewailed the others who were associated with him and he lamented over the unhappy people. The barons did not dare to set foot in Rome for three days, and they finally returned, with the legate, who disapproved of most of the deeds of the tribune, and condemned him as a heretic. The count Pipino was executed eight days afterwards in the Abruzzi, and a mitre was put upon his head with the inscription that he was mockingly called the “liberator of the people of Rome.”
Cola on the arrival of the king of Hungary fled to the Naples district from the dangers which menaced him.
ANARCHY AND JUBILEE IN ROME
[Sidenote: [1347-1350 A.D.]]
Rome now returned to her old state of anarchy. The senators Bertoldo Orsini and Luca Savelli failed in maintaining a more orderly government than the senators preceding them. Stefano Colonna, the elder, died about this time (1348-1350); Werner von Urslingen, the fierce captain of the Great Company, had returned about a year before to this side of the Alps after having laid Romagna waste, and in November, 1347, he, with fifteen hundred armed soldiers, followed Louis of Hungary in Italy to the conquest of Naples. The confusion with which he filled the kingdom led to the victory of the Hungarians; then Urslingen was licensed, and it being easy to find them he gathered mercenaries under him, and marching towards Rome took and destroyed Anagni; but he did not get any further.
The Black Plague [described in our previous chapter], brought from the Levant in a Genoese galley in 1347, broke out in that year in some places of Tuscany, Romagna, and Provence. It ceased at the advent of winter, and broke out again with devastating force at the approach of spring, and ran riot over the whole of Italy, in 1348, excepting Milan and Piedmont. John Villani fell a victim to this terrible disease. Three-fifths of the population died in Florence, and two-thirds in Bologna. In Rome, on the contrary, it seems to have been less prevalent; at least we have no authentic records of the evil attending this city, now squalid and desolate. At the end of the following year the arrival of the pilgrims for the jubilee at Rome commenced. Germans and Hungarians came in great numbers. The arrival of the pilgrims was attended with no disorder. They were at first attacked by beggars when they reached the district of Rome, and some were killed; but subsequently the Romans had the roads protected. Countless were the Christians that went by thousands to the Holy City. The roads leading to the churches of St. Peter, St. John the Lateran, and St. Paul, and the highways outside the walls, were all crowded with people. Louis of Hungary came to Rome after having returned to his kingdom. Petrarch also came, but he neither found his old friends the Colonnas there, nor his new friend Cola, and he was grieved to see the Lateran half in ruins, the Vatican in disorder, and the church of the Apostles in ruins.
What feelings must have filled the heart of the poet on revisiting the Campidoglio and the district of the Apostles and the Colonna palace--in all Rome there was nothing to remind him of the happy days of his coronation! “Ah! it is not only we who are getting old that change, for the things about us deteriorate,” he said some years later.
[Sidenote: [1350-1351 A.D.]]
Aribaldo, a Tuscan bishop, was legate in Rome during the jubilee; he died on the 17th of August, 1350. The pope some time previously had deputed him to continue the proceedings commenced by Cardinal Bertrand against Cola.
The jubilee over, Rome relapsed into anarchy soon after it had elected the thirteen good men; and Clement VI, whilst showing himself favourable to the new administration, nominated four cardinals to examine into matters, and he confided to them the main part of the government of Rome. To them Petrarch addressed a letter full of the ideas he had expressed in his epistle to Cola, and, incensed against the malevolent Roman barons, he spoke of the plebe Romana who in old times elected their magistrates; and without touching on the tribunate he added that the two senators of his time, the only advance on the conscript (conscritti) fathers, represented the two consuls of ancient times.
He did not descend to especial admonitions upon the mode of governing, but only maintained the necessity of restoring ancient liberty and freeing the house of the apostles from the tyrants who had laid it waste.
RIENZI IN EXILE; HIS RENEWED OPPORTUNITY; HIS DEATH
Cardinal Aribaldo had always been in fear of Cola; he suspected that the pope would change and desire the tribune’s return, and having been wounded on the road he had no hesitation in attributing the deed to the fugitive, who was leading a wandering life full of dangers. Cola travelled in the Abruzzi, and there met with the friars who retained faith in the poverty of Christ; and here Brother Angelo prophesied a great future for him.
In the meanwhile Ludwig the Bavarian died (the 11th of October, 1347) and there remained only Charles IV from whom Cola began to expect the fulfilment of his aspirations.[d] Petrarch had written a long letter to the emperor in 1350 inviting him to interest himself in Italy. “Let not solicitude for transalpine affairs, nor the love of your native soil detain you; but whenever you look upon Germany think of Italy. There you were born, here you were nurtured; there you enjoy a kingdom, here both a kingdom and an empire; and as I believe I may, with the consent of all nations and peoples, safely add, while the members of the empire are everywhere, here you will find the head itself.” Shortly after he had received this strange communication from Petrarch, the emperor was confronted with Rienzi himself at Prague. He listened to his proposals and then calmly handed him over to the pope at Avignon. Petrarch writing to Nelli about him in 1352 says: “Cola di Rienzi has recently come, or rather been brought a prisoner to the papal curia. He who was once the tribune of the city of Rome, inspiring terror far and wide, is now the most miserable of men.” Had it not been for Petrarch’s influence with the pope and the complexion of politics at the moment, Rienzi no doubt would have been killed. As it was, he was kept in prison while Clement lived.[a]
[Sidenote: [1351-1353 A.D.]]
In the meanwhile the people in Rome had given full authority to Giovanni Cerrone (1351), to whom the pope had shown himself favourable, and had appointed him senator and captain. But he fell very soon. The prefect Giovanni da Vico, also under the ban of excommunication, did not wish to submit to him and had re-occupied Viterbo, Toscanella, and other territories of the patrimony, and then Corneto and Orvieto. Cerrone could not subdue him, and with the same want of success he so alienated everybody from him that he had to quit the city, which relapsed into the usual anarchy. On the 6th of December, 1352, Clement VI died, leaving the pontifical seat settled in Avignon, as he had obtained the city from Queen Joanna of Naples for 8,000 florins.
His successor, Etienne d’Albert or Aubert, a Frenchman like his predecessors, took the name of Innocent VI. He was a just, austere, and severe man, a man of science and practical views. He began to reform the curia of Avignon, and sought to find a remedy for the present prostration of the pontificate by reconstructing the ecclesiastical state and dividing it among petty and great vicars, tyrants, and lords.
The condition of the lands of the church has been often touched upon, but it must now be examined more closely. The family of the prefect Da Vico ruled over Viterbo, Orvieto, Toscanella, Corneto, Cività Vecchia, Terni, Vertralla, etc. The lordships of the Malatesta of Rimini extended over Fano, Pesaro, Sinigaglia, Ascoli, Osima, Ancora, etc.; the Montefeltri ruled in Urbino and Cagli, the Varani in Camerino, the Da Montemilone in Tolentino, the Gabrieli in Gubbio, the Trinci in Foligno, the Da Mogliani in Fermo, the Alidosi in Imola, and the Manfredi in Faenza. The dominion of the Ordelaffi embraced Forlì, Forlimpopoli, Cesena, etc.; that of the Da Polentas, Ravenna, Cervia, etc. We omit the minor lordships.
Now Bologna was under the Visconti. Although the Da Varani, Di Camerini, the Alidosi of Imola, and the Estes from time to time renewed their declarations of fidelity and dependence, receiving under the title of vicars the lands they possessed, the tenure was of an uncertain character. Naturally such lordships were not always of the same extent, but they were increased and reduced according to the various political conditions and causes of war.
The man appointed by Innocent VI to undertake the difficult task of raising a state on such insecure and insufficient soil was a Spaniard. Don Gil Albornoz was born at Cuenca of illustrious family. Alfonso XI of Aragon procured him the archbishopric of Toledo; he fought the Moors who had invaded Andalusia and directed the siege of Algeciras; but when Peter the Cruel succeeded to the throne he fled from Spain to Avignon, where Clement VI promoted him to be cardinal (1350). This man, cultured, zealous, and with the habits of a knight and of a resolute character, was the friend and adviser of Innocent VI, who finding in him the man fitted to punish the tyrants, sent him as legate to Italy. He wished him to be accompanied by Cola di Rienzi, whom in accordance with the wish of the Romans he liberated from prison, being persuaded, as the pope said when announcing the liberation to the people of Rome, that if he had done evil, he had also done good (September, 1353). Thus Innocent VI combined the strongest and most courageous cardinal of the century with the man of fancies, the skilled politician, the only person who could excite the feeling of the Romans, and to these two men he entrusted the restoration of pontifical authority in Italy.
So Cola di Rienzi, who was the Roman of authority in 1347, being now persuaded of the real state of affairs, had to lower himself to take part in the party struggle; and as he had made himself a Ghibelline at the court of Charles IV at Prague so far as to boast of being the bastard of Henry VII, so he now adhered to the idea of Guelf in the prison of Avignon. The prison of Avignon had not been too hard for him, for although he had been shut up in a tower he had been given a certain amount of liberty, and he had been able to follow his wish of studying the Bible, and the famous histories of Titus Livius, and several other books.
[Sidenote: [1353-1354 A.D.]]
In Rome, at the beginning of 1353, Bertoldo Orsini and Stefano Colonna were senators, and amid the turbulent vortex of factions they had succeeded in occupying the lordship after the flight of Cerrone. The two senators were not loved, and before long they were hated by the people, who, harassed with want of provisions, rose up in fury on the 15th of February, 1353. Colonna fled to his palace, but Orsini put on his armour and descended the stairway to mount his horse in view of the people. Then braving the populace he advanced until his strength failed him and he was buried under a storm of stones.
The people then took a second tribune, Francesco Baroncelli, a friend of Cola’s, who governed according to his powers, but not with vigour. He was not recognised by the pope, who had different views on the government of the city. The Baroncelli were descended from a civil family, and he was the orator sent to Florence by Cola to announce his elevation to the tribune at the beginning of his reign.
Albornoz and Cola then left Avignon together to put down the tyrants and reorganise Rome. The cardinal Egidio (Gil), as he was called, was in Lombardy in the summer of 1353. Hordes of Tuscans increased the numbers of Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Germans in his following. He went down to Montefiascone which he made the centre of his doings in Romagna. Cola being in the service of the cardinal in the war was against the prefect Da Vico, who retook Viterbo, and other places in the patrimony, and being reinforced he had turned the anarchy of Rome to his own advantage. The resistance was obstinate and it only terminated after a long struggle on the 5th of June, when the prefect surrendered. Whilst Viterbo was fighting, and the tyrants Bernardo Polenta, lord of Ravenna and Cervia, Galeotto Malatesta of Rimini, Francesco Ordelaffi of Forlì were being expelled from Romagna, the Roman people looked once more for salvation from Cola, forgetting his bad government and the little peace he had procured them.
The feeling for Cola revived from the time he was incarcerated in the Avignon prison; and now that he was near Rome with the legate, it increased still more, although it was not the spontaneous, universal acclamation of 1347. Suspected by the Baroncelli of having communication with the prefect, the public aversion towards him increased, until at the end of 1353 rebellion broke out and the poor tribune was expelled and nearly killed.
The Romans devoted themselves to the legate and assisted him in the siege of Viterbo. The war and the negotiations proceeded prosperously for the church. Roman Tuscany, Umbria, and Sabina gradually gave in, and the way was being cleared for Cola to return to the government of Rome. But he had not the necessary money to provide an army of mercenaries, with which to maintain his dominion. The money he had in Perugia was from the two young brothers Moriale (Monreal). Fra Moriale was a gentleman of Provence by birth. The terrible freebooter from 1345 took part in the majority of the Italian wars, fought with Louis of Hungary in the Neapolitan enterprise, and in the neighbourhood of Rome both for and against the prefect Da Vico. Subsequently tired of serving, he formed (1352) a company of his own of fifteen hundred helmeted men and two thousand foot-soldiers, and marched against Malatesta da Rimini, against whom he had fought in the wars of Naples. The successful enterprises increased the company, into which he introduced regulations like those of a regular standing army independent of every state. Pisa, Siena, Arezzo, Florence, and other cities of Tuscany and Romagna had dearly paid the price of immunity from his terrible devastations.
In the July of 1354 he sent his company under the rightful vicar, Count Lando, to fight for the league against the Visconti. Being a citizen of Perugia, he there amassed the treasures extorted by terror or gained by sacking the populations of all Italy. His brothers Arimbaldo, doctor of law, and Brettone, cavaliere di Narbona, lived there; and they with their brother’s permission gave Cola 4,000 florins to collect some followers and to make other necessary provisions.
Fra Moriale, wiser than the brothers, did not believe in the success of the enterprise. “My reason contradicts it,” said he; but he let the money be given whilst preparing “magnificent things” with his mercenaries.
Cola was made senator of Rome by the legate, and having enlisted sixty companies, with a few Perugian and Tuscan soldiery, he, on the 1st of August, 1354, made a solemn entry into Rome by the Castello gate, under triumphal arches and decorations of gold and silver. The people, joyous and shouting, accompanied him to the Campidoglio, where Cola made an eloquent speech, calling himself senator of Rome in the name of the pope. He formed his government; he made the two brothers of Fra Moriale captains of the militia; he announced his promotion to Florence, and he received the embassies from the neighbouring places. Cola was not the person he was of old to the Roman people, who were shocked at his intemperate way of living. He had become stout, and he consumed his time in eating and drinking. His former courage in restraining the barons had not been forgotten, and he received obedience from them.
Stefano Colonna, who had been senator in 1351, shut himself up in Palestrina, the Orsini shut themselves up in Marino, and from these fortified spots they laid waste the territory near Rome. Cola proceeded against Palestrina, as he was in need of the money with which to pay the German mercenaries, but he wished to find means of oppressing Stefano, the “poisonous serpent, the broken reed.” And he tried once more to bring ruin on the house of Colonna, “the cursed house whose pride had brought the city of Rome to poverty, whilst other places lived in wealth.”
So spoke Cola, and with a thousand Roman cavalry and soldiery, with the people of Tivoli and Velletri, and reinforcements from the neighbouring places, he laid siege to the famous Rock of the Colonnas. But the siege had not long commenced and the raising of the earthworks was not finished before disputes arose between the Velletrani and Tiburtini; but worse than that was the arrival of Fra Moriale--for now that his brothers were with Cola, he was able to come to Rome, from whence he had been formerly banished. He came to defend the rights of his brothers, who could not get the new senator to repay the money lent to him--perhaps, moreover, he was moved by the terrible idea of taking possession of Rome, and sacking it for his mercenaries, and then making it the centre for great power. His fierce soldiers were already saying that “some fine city would be their spoil.” What spoil could be better than Rome!
It seems that the Colonnas, reduced to a desperate condition, treated with Moriale for the fall of the tribune. The latter, suspecting that Moriale was planning his death, returned suddenly to town, and left the siege of Palestrina without arranging for his return to it. In Rome he sent for Moriale, and he appeared before Cola, who took him and had him imprisoned in the Campidoglio, together with his brothers. At first Fra Moriale thought he could purchase his liberty. Being brought forward tied, and examined, he confessed he was the head of the Great Company. Then when sent back to prison, he knew there was no hope for him. In the morning, accompanied by his brothers, he was brought out of prison, and beheaded on the 29th of August, 1354.
The Romans of those days, only judging from the number and the greatness of his enterprises relative to the theatre in which they were enacted, compared him to Cæsar; but Innocent VI, with more reason, likened him to Holofernes and Attila. The destruction of the great terror of Italy was considered a great credit to Cola, as he would have caused as much harm in the future as he had in the past; but it must be remembered that Cola was most anxious to take possession of the riches of the brigand. “It seems,” says Matteo Villani,[f] “that he stained his fame with ingratitude and avarice”; and Fra Moriale himself, at the moment of his death, turned to the people and said, “I die for your poverty and my wealth.”
Muratori[k] gives the following unpleasant word-portrait of Rienzi at this period: “Formerly he was sober, temperate, abstemious; he had now become an inordinate drunkard; he was always eating confectionery and drinking. It was a terrible thing to be forced to see him. They said that in person he was of old quite meagre; he had become enormously fat; he had a belly like a tun; jovial like an Asiatic abbot. He was full of shining flesh (carbuncles?) like a peacock-red, and with a long beard; his face was always changing; his eyes would suddenly kindle like fire; his understanding, too, kindled in fitful flashes like fire.”
After the death of Moriale, Cola pursued the war against the Colonnas with ardour. He entrusted it to Riccardo degli Anibaldi, a doughty warrior. He gave orders from the Campidoglio to his officers, and it seems that he devoted attention and diligence to his soldiers. Cola also once more gave a proof of constancy and ardour. The want of money for the war forced him to increase or to again impose the taxes on wine and salt. The Romans bore it silently until it seemed that he even taxed the common foods. The pope conjured him to govern justly, and confirmed him as senator. But causes of complaint now arose; and it appeared that Cola’s weak nature broke under its own weight. He would first weep, and then laugh; he incurred everybody’s suspicion, and he patronised one and another without rhyme or reason, and would release people for money.
On the 4th of October he notified the legate at Montefiascone of his great danger and that he had received no help. The blow fell suddenly on the morning of the 8th of October. The Colonnas and Savelli were to the fore. The people pressed to the palace crying, “Long live the people! death to the traitor Cola di Rienzi! death to the traitor who has made the tax, death!”
The tribune, unconscious of his danger, made no defence, nor sounded a bell. “I also,” he said, “am with the people; the pontifical confirmation has arrived; I have only to publish it to the council.” He was not afraid until he saw he was abandoned by all, and that the uproar increased. He wished to harangue the people from the window, but it was impossible, for they threw stones and sticks at him, crying still louder, “Death to the traitor!” Confusion filled the palace; he was doubtful of Brettone, the brother of Fra Moriale, who was a prisoner. He vacillated, he put on his helmet and took it off again, uncertain whether to meet death with the dignity of the ancient Romans or to take refuge in flight--he finally decided on the latter course.
The Romans were now firing the doors, when the tribune divested himself of all his arms, laid aside the insignia of dignity, cut off his beard, dyed his face black, and put on the door-keeper’s mantle and enveloped his head with a bed-cover. Thus disguised he descended the stairway to the outside door, and changing his voice, he mingled with the insurgents, himself crying “Down with the traitor!” He was outside the palace when he was recognised by his gold armlets, and conducted to the Place of the Lion in the Campidoglio where the sentences were given. Here he stood for the space of an hour, a wretched spectacle for the people who stood in silence and seemed frightened at what they had done and uncertain whether to pardon or sacrifice him. Cola stood firm and calm awaiting death, and the people seemed in no hurry to bathe their hands in the blood of him whom a few months previously they had accompanied in triumph to the Campidoglio, crowning him with olive leaves, and uttering shouts of joy.
What memories must have filled the mind of the unhappy tribune!
Cecco del Vecchio gave him a blow in the stomach. The sight of blood changed compassion to fury. A notary wounded him with his sword. He was soon covered with wounds. He did not say a word, he did not utter a cry. He was taken to St. Mark’s, and he was tied by the feet to a pillar. His head was mangled and tufts of his hair strewed the way; he was riddled with wounds in every part of his body. There he remained two days, whilst rogues cast stones at him. On the third day Guigurth and Sciarretta Colonna had him taken over to the field of Augustus, where he was burned upon a pile of dry thistles. Such was the end of Cola di Rienzi, who made himself august tribune of Rome, and constituted himself the champion of the Romans.[d] “In the death, as in the life of Rienzi,” says Gibbon,[g] “the hero and the coward were strangely mingled.” Posterity will compare the virtues and failings of this extraordinary man; but in a long period of anarchy and servitude the name of Rienzi has often been celebrated as the deliverer of his country, and the last of the Roman patriots.
FOOTNOTES
[15] “Il tutto senza derogare all’autorità della Chiesa, del Tapa e del Sacro Collegio.” So concludes this extraordinary citation, this bold and wonderful assertion of the classic independence of Italy, in the most feudal time of the fourteenth century. The anonymous biographer of Rienzi declares that the tribune cited also the pope and the cardinals to reside in Rome. De Sade powerfully and incontrovertibly refutes this addition to the daring or the extravagance of Rienzi. Gibbon, however, who has rendered the rest of the citation in terms more abrupt and discourteous than he was warranted by any authority, copies the biographer’s blunder, and sneers at De Sade, as using arguments “rather of decency than of weight.” Without wearying the reader with all the arguments of the learned abbé, it may be sufficient to give the first two:
(1) All the other contemporaneous historians that have treated of this event, G. Villani, Hocsemius, the Vatican manuscripts and other chroniclers, relating the citation of the emperor and electors, say nothing of that of the pope and cardinals; and the pope (Clement VI), in his subsequent accusations of Rienzi, while very bitter against his citation of the emperor, is wholly silent on what would have been to the pontiff the much greater offence of citing himself and the cardinals.
(2) The literal act of this citation, as published formally in the Lateran, is extant in Hocsemius (whence is borrowed, though not at all its length, the speech in the text of our present tale), and in this document the pope and his cardinals are not named in the summons.