If I have lingered a little over personal details in these brief
sketches, it is the better to show the versatile character of the
women who shed so much luster on the golden age of the Renaissance.
Of the relative moral value of these representative women of their
time I think there is little question, in spite of the fact that the
age is so persistently quoted to prove that women degenerate in virtue
as they advance in intelligence. That the tone of morality was very
low, that vice was scarcely frowned upon, that men in power and out
of it broke every commandment in the decalogue without compunction or
even taking the trouble to put on a veil of respectability, and that
a large class of women were swept into the vortex of corruption, is
true enough. But it is also true that the strongest protest against
this state of affairs was made by women, and that the few prelates who
dared lift their voices against the scandals in high places numbered
their most zealous assistants among them. To say nothing of the
multitudes who cast their jewels and ornaments into the flames at the
bidding of Savonarola, and consecrated themselves to a pure and simple
if not ascetic life,--all of which may be set down to the account
of emotionalism rather than intelligence,--it was the women most
noted for talent and learning, whether princess, poet, or university
professor, who were most honored for their virtues. The pure-minded
Contarini found in Vittoria Colonna his strongest support in a hopeless
struggle against the sins and corruptions of the church. Olympia
Morata was a conspicuous example of great intellect and great learning
put to the service of a bettered humanity at serious, indeed fatal,
personal sacrifice. And she was not alone. There were numbers of these
women--poets, scholars, and thinkers--who lived spotless lives and
worked for the good of their sex and race.
Of the noble ladies who presided over the literary courts, the few we
have recalled were among the greatest, and, with one exception, it
is generally conceded that their lives were without reproach. Others
were victims of a power over which they had no control. It must be
remembered that these women, however capable or high in place, were in
the last resort subject to the will of men. Their new intelligence had
made them helpers to be respected, and tempered a little the possible
tyranny of their self-constituted masters, but men themselves, the
nobler and wiser, saw the dangers in the abuse of their own power.
“If women corrupt, they have first been corrupted by their age,” said
Giuliano de’ Medici, the best and purest of his family, in one of the
conversations at Urbino, which, thanks to its women, had not only the
most intelligent but the most virtuous court in Italy.
When a Borgia or some other pope equally devoid of moral sense, who
sits at the head of Christendom and directs its conscience, orders
at pleasure the marriage and divorce of his own daughter, or of any
other woman who can serve his political or mercenary ends, giving her
no choice and no recourse; when Imperias and Tullias preside over
the salons of Rome because etiquette forbids a pure and high-minded
woman to live in this lax society of prelates and cardinals, which
she would be likely to find neither safe nor agreeable, there is
little to be said about the connection between woman’s intelligence
and moral decadence. Imperias and Tullias have lived in all ages, and
they have flourished best where good women were the most ignorant and
colorless. Some of them have had talent and esprit. They have sung,
acted, danced, written sonnets, affected learning, patronized the arts,
even put on the garb of virtue and piety; but they can be no more cited
as representatives of the women of centuries ago than the same class
to-day can be taken as a measure of our own moral standards, which is
clearly impossible. Intelligence was never a guaranty of morals, as the
mind can be sharpened for bad ends as well as good ones. It is even
possible that the woman of education and strong mental fiber may be
more easily led into the sins of ambition, but she is far less likely
to drift into the follies of vanity, passion, and a weak will than
the ignorant one who has no rational outlet for her energies and her
untempered sensibilities. The faults, too, of a luminous age are seen
in a glare of light that is wholly wanting in periods of darkness when
vice shelters itself behind closed doors upon which it too often hangs
the drapery of virtue.
It is difficult to measure the intellectual value of the women of the
Renaissance, as their influence went out in a thousand rills, seen and
unseen, to fertilize after-ages, and not least our own. There were many
good writers, but no great ones, unless we except Vittoria Colonna,
whose poems, though unequal, were of a high and intrinsic literary as
well as moral quality. As an _in memoriam_ her sonnets to her
husband are not likely to die, and as the first collection of sacred
poems her later work has a distinct and honorable place on the world’s
records. Why there were no artists of note is a problem not easy to
solve, as the field is one in which women seem especially fitted to
excel. Elisabetta Sirani might have won a high place on the roll of
fame, as great critics were struck with her vigor, her grasp of large
subjects, her facile style, and her careful finish; but she lived in
the decline of art, and died at twenty-six. Women were more famous as
scholars, and many of them stood on a level with distinguished men.
Educated with them in the best schools, their tastes were formed on the
best models. A lady who converses or lectures before learned dons in
Latin, and writes the purest Greek, is not a shallow pretender, though
she may be neither original nor profound. Nor do they seem to have been
pedants, though much of the phraseology of both men and women strikes
us now as stilted and inflated; it was the style of the day. No doubt
there was more or less dilettantism, which was a weakness of the time
that ended in the destruction of literary values; it is quite possible,
too, that many liked what it was the fashion to like, as they have done
in all ages, without any clear tastes or convictions of their own,
though this foible is by no means confined to women. That period, like
our own, had its army of pale imitators who follow in the wake of every
movement that is likely to reflect on them a small degree of honor, and
in the end sink its finest standards in hopeless mediocrity.
But the influence of a multitude of highly educated and intelligent
women is too subtle and far-reaching to put into definite terms. To
trace it in its large results, even if this were possible, would take
us far beyond our present limits. It is felt at every moment, in the
home, in society, in amusements, in the church. It directs the currents
of men’s lives from the starting-point, it infolds them like light, it
is a stimulant and an inspiration. But no one knows precisely where it
begins or ends. This is why it has been so ignored, why men, except in
individual cases, have so persistently depreciated the qualities that
opened for them the way to the finest issues.
The direct power of the learned princesses of the literary courts
is more readily seen. By virtue of their position, as well as their
talents, they created a society, spread a taste for things of the
intellect, and did a great deal to curb the vice and cruelty which
pressed with special severity on their own sex. If they could not
change the drift of the age, and were subject to conditions which
good men were unable to control, they tempered and modified them.
The whole Platonic movement, which they did so much to foster, was a
protest against the sensualism that has always been their worst enemy.
To sustain a spiritual cult in a race that worshiped, before all
things, material beauty was not easy. It had a tendency always to lose
itself in phrases and mystical subtleties, but it put woman on a new
pedestal, and social life on a higher plane. We have only to note the
bacchanalian revels of the poets, wits, and philosophers of Florence,
the orgies of folly, vulgarity, and sin which the great Lorenzo led and
the very wise Platonic Academy smiled upon, to learn the difference
between a lettered society of men without the tempering influence of
high-minded women, and the brilliant circles we have seen gathered
about princesses of learning, refinement, and grace, who guided its
amusements and restrained its license. No woman of conspicuous virtue
and ability has left a permanent stamp on the social life of Florence.
Clarice, the wife of the versatile Lorenzo, had many virtues, but she
was evidently in no sense a leader. Poliziano has no prejudice against
learned women, as he falls in love with the gifted and beautiful
Alessandra Scala and is inconsolable because she will not marry him. He
also pays court to Cassandra Fidelis, and corresponds with Lucrezia,
the mother of his patron, who is finely educated and writes poetry; but
he is angry when Clarice interferes with his manner of training her
children, “because she is a woman and unlettered”; indeed, he quarrels
with her about it and goes away. She, in her turn, finds fault with his
pagan morals, and is glad to be rid of his presence, no doubt with good
reason. But whatever she may have been as a mother, she seems to have
lacked the talent or the desire to gather about her a lettered society,
and the result is seen in the disgraceful orgies of her husband and his
clever satellites, with no advantage to the “unhampered intellects”
of these poets and savants, but with a decided disadvantage to their
manners and morals.
It was during the reign of pure, highly educated, and able women that
the Italian courts reached their highest point of power and brilliancy.
When, by the accident of succession, those of smaller caliber and more
frivolous tastes took the scepter, they invariably declined and lost
their prestige.
It is quite superfluous to cast a mantle of charity, or any mantle
whatever, over the crimes of the Renaissance, but I have tried in a
small way to recall another side of its abounding life, which had its
roots largely in the character of its forceful and intelligent women.
The age that gave us a Bianca Capello gave us also a Vittoria Colonna.
The one has long since been consigned to the fitful oblivion of
infamy; the other holds her imperishable place among the stars, still
lighting the sorrowful and world-weary with her messages of love and
hope. The centuries of beauty and sin when men like to say that woman
lost her birthright of virtue--a birthright which they never ceased
to invade from their own stronghold of power--saw her transfigured
by the imagination of Michelangelo into the immortal sibyls who sit
side by side with the prophets in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,
pure and passionless, with the brooding eyes that long ago fathomed
all the secrets of a suffering world, read in the mystic leaves the
records of nations still unborn, and saw from afar the light of the
ages--unchanging types of the wisdom and divination that lie in the
feminine soul. It saw, too, the Virgins of Fra Angelico, unfading
symbols of purity as of angelic sweetness; and the Madonnas of Raphael,
looking wistfully out of their repose with a ray of celestial love in
their eyes and a smile of eternal beauty on their lips.