THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
A just remark of Coventry Patmore’s on the contrast between Dante and
Shakespeare in their relation to their respective literatures might
be extended to the Italian literature of the fourteenth century in
general: it has lofty peaks, but little elevated table-land. Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio tower above their contemporaries, who, viewed
from such eminences, are almost indiscernible. It might have been
expected, nevertheless, that the example of surpassing excellence,
which could complain of no want of popularity or recognition, would
have powerfully stimulated contemporaries and successors, and that, as
Homer gave birth to the Cyclic poets, and Alcæus followed in the wake
of Alcman, the great Italians would have appeared as the immediate
progenitors of epicists, lyrists, and novelists of kindred if inferior
power. On the contrary, the century from the death of Boccaccio to
the appearance of Lorenzo de’ Medici as a poet is the most barren in
Italian literary history. It produces no vernacular writer of genius,
and but few of eminent talent. It is indeed no reproach to it to have
brought forth no second Dante, or to have failed, like all other ages,
to reproduce the inimitable perfection of Petrarch. But it might have
been anticipated that the new ways opened out by Boccaccio alike in
metrical epic and in prose narrative would have been followed up, and
that history and allied branches of literature would have assumed a
classic form.
Little of the kind occurred, and classical study itself ceased to
produce a vivifying effect upon letters. This may have been partly
owing to excessive admiration for the ancient writers, degenerating
into pedantic imitation; partly from the great demand for Latin
translations from the Greek, and Latin official correspondence,
encouraging Latin composition at the expense of the vernacular; but
cannot be wholly explained by any cause peculiar to Italy, for the same
phenomenon manifested itself over Europe. Chaucer, who had carried the
poetry of England so high, had no successors; and it would be difficult
to point to a work of genius anywhere, except the _Imitatio Christi_,
which might have been produced in any Christian age, and the _Amadis of
Gaul_, the parent of the romances of chivalry, composed in Portugal or
Spain about the beginning of the fifteenth century. How far this is to
be ascribed to the Black Death, which, in sweeping away so much of the
existing generation, blighted so much of the hope of the future; how
far to calamities like the Great Schism and the Jacquerie; how far to
causes unfathomable by the human intellect, will always be a question.
Certain it is that, while material civilisation continued to develop,
and Leonardo Bruni, thinking only of the cultivation of Greek, is
able to say, “Letters at this time grew mightily in Italy,” creative
genius received a check; and the standard of public virtue in most
countries fell lower than it had ever been, or has been again. We can
only note the few who in Italy, otherwise than as classical scholars,
did anything to vindicate their age from the imputation of intellectual
barrenness. Two didactic poems with epic affinities, produced, one
shortly before, the other shortly after the death of Boccaccio, attest
more than pages of panegyric the power with which Dante controlled
the imaginations of his countrymen. FAZIO DEGLI UBERTI, a Florentine
of whose life little is known, except that he spent most of it in
exile, and died about 1367, seems to have thought that if Dante had
appropriated heaven, hell, and purgatory, the earth at least remained
for himself. He undertook to describe, in a number of cantos in _terza
rima_, his perlustration of it under the escort of a singular guide,
the Latin topographer Solinus. What Solinus is to Virgil, Uberti is
to Dante; yet, though an uninspired, he is not a contemptible writer.
His geographical epic the _Dittamondo_ (Discourse of the World) may
be unduly prejudiced in the eyes of English readers from Rossetti’s
rendering of a canto in blank verse. It would indeed have been a waste
of time to have striven to reproduce the original metre, yet Uberti’s
tercets glide with an ease and fluency of which the blank verse gives
no notion. The poem is not altogether destitute of poetical spirit;
one conception, that of the forlorn Genius of Rome herself guiding
the poet to her ruins, is truly fine, but force was wanting to work
it out. Otherwise it is chiefly interesting as a repertory of the
geographical knowledge and fancies of the age. The canto on England
has been translated by Rossetti, and is entertaining from its naïveté.
Uberti must have been an accomplished man, for he intersperses French
and Provençal verses with his Italian. He is more truly a poet in his
lyrical than in his epic performances, if, at least, the sonnets and
canzoni which pass under his name are really his. One, translated
by Rossetti, has so much poetical merit as to have been frequently
ascribed to Dante:
_I look at the crisp golden-threaded hair
Whereof, to thrall my heart, Love twists a net;
Using at times a string of pearls for bait,
And sometimes with a single rose therein.
I look into her eyes, which unaware,
Though mine own eyes to her heart penetrate;
Their splendour, that is excellently great,
To the sun’s radiance seeming near akin,
Vet from herself a sweeter light to win.
So that I, gazing on that lovely one,
Discourse in this wise with my secret thought:
“Woe’s me! why am I not,
Even as my wish, alone with her alone,--
That hair of hers, so heavily uplaid,
To shed down braid by braid,
And make myself two mirrors of her eyes
Within whose light all other glory dies?_”
Another writer of mark, nearer than Fazio to Dante both in style and
subject, is FREDERICO FREZZI, citizen and bishop of Foligno, who died
at the Council of Constance in 1416. His _Quatriregio_, a moral poem
describing the author’s progress through the realms of Love, Pluto,
the Vices and Virtue, so close an imitation of Dante as to border upon
servility, is, notwithstanding, not a mean performance. Frezzi has
considerable rhetorical, if not much poetical power, and many passages
are really impressive. The diction also is good; but the book’s chief
repute at this day is among artists, on account of the remarkable
designs adorning the edition of 1506, which present an affinity to
Botticelli’s illustrations of Dante, and have been attributed, although
on insufficient authority, to Luca Signorelli. The poem was republished
at Foligno in 1725, with a learned commentary, of which it was in
great need. MATTEO PALMIERI’S poem, _Città di Vita_, probably much in
Frezzi’s style, arouses interest from its having been suppressed as
heretical, but its poetical merit has never yet sufficed to allure a
publisher. “The object,” says Symonds, who read it in MS., “is to show
how free-will is innate in men.” It is founded upon an actual vision,
according lo the assertion of the author.
Many other poets might be mentioned, but they are now mere names,
except SENUCCIO DEL BENE, chiefly renowned as Petrarch’s friend, but
himself a graceful writer, and two of considerably later date, of
one of whom it may be truly if paradoxically said that he is chiefly
remembered for being forgotten. This is DOMENICO BURCHIELLO, a standing
example of the fickleness of popular taste. He was a Florentine, who
lived from about 1400 to 1448, and composed numerous burlesque sonnets
_alla coda_ (with a tag of three lines), which retained sufficient
vitality to go through thirty editions soon after the invention of
printing, but are now inevitably neglected, inasmuch as the Florentine
slang in which they are mainly composed has ceased to be amusing, or
even intelligible. The other poet of the period, GIUSTO DE’ CONTI,
a jurist, who lived at the court of Sigismondo Malatesta, Prince
of Rimini, and died there about 1452, is remarkable as the chief
contemporary imitator of Petrarch, whom he followed with such servility
as greatly to impair the credit otherwise due to him for the sweetness
of his verse and the occasional dignity of his style. His collection
of sonnets, entitled _La Bella Mano_, from its perpetual reference to
the beauties of his lady’s hand, stands out at all events, as even
an inferior work might have done, from the almost total poetical
barrenness of the middle of the fifteenth century, otherwise only
relieved by the elegant sonnets of another Petrarchist, Bonaccorso da
Montemagno, and the popular carols which gained Leonardo Giustiniani
deserved reputation.
More genuine poetry is to be found in the occasional lyrics of two
writers near the end of the fourteenth century, chiefly eminent in
a different species of composition, the novelette. FRANCO SACCHETTI
and GIOVANNI FIORENTINO are artists in words, and men of true poetic
feeling. A canzonet of Sacchetti’s (the earliest Italian poet, says
Rossetti, with whom playfulness was a characteristic), _O vaghe
montanine pastorelle_, was so popular as to have been transmitted
for some generations by oral recitation, while his novelettes, until
printed in the eighteenth century, existed only in a single mutilated
manuscript. This is the conclusion of Rossetti’s translation of this
charming lyric:
_I think your beauties might make great complaint
Of being thus shown ever mount and dell;
Because no city is so excellent
But that your stay therein were honourable.
In very truth now does it like you well
To live so poorly on the hillside here?_
_Better it liketh one of us, pardie,
Behind her flock to seek the pasture-stance,
Far better than it liketh one of ye
To ride unto your curtained rooms and dance.
We seek no riches, neither golden chance,
Save wealth of flowers to weave into our hair._
_Ballad, if I were now as once I was,
I’d make myself a shepherd on some hill,
And, without telling any one, would pass
Where these girls went, and follow at their will,
And “Mary,” and “Martin,” we would murmur still,
And I would be for ever where they were._
This exquisite poem, however, rather belongs to the late fourteenth
than to the early fifteenth century, as do other songs of equal beauty
by Sacchetti and his contemporaries, which contrast favourably with
earlier Italian lyrics by their brevity and simplicity. This is partly
attributable to their having been in general written for music. Some
of the most charming examples have been collected in Carducci’s _Studi
Letterari_.
Sacchetti and Giovanni mark the termination of the _Trecentisti_
period. Many writings of their contemporaries have been printed as
models of pure diction, but are otherwise too unimportant to deserve
independent notice in a literary history[9]. After the beginning of
the fifteenth century Italian prose for a while declined, mainly from
the false standard of excellence produced by exaggerated enthusiasm
for the newly recovered classics. Neglecting the spirit, though only
too attentive to the letter, of these models, writers corrupted their
diction with Latinisms. The best books were histories, and the best
of these were written in Latin. It might have been said that to find
a really good vernacular historian we must go back to the fourteenth
century, were it not for the doubts which beset the alleged chronicle
of DINO COMPAGNI, which professedly details events at Florence
from 1286 to 1318. The question of its genuineness has aroused the
sharpest controversy, which cannot be regarded as even yet absolutely
determined: the prevailing opinion, however, seems to be that it is
a fabrication dating from about 1450. It is so entertaining that one
would wish it trustworthy.
GINO CAPPONI, a leading Florentine citizen of the latter fourteenth
and earlier fifteenth century, has left valuable memoirs of some of the
transactions in which he was engaged. The great Florentine historian
of the age, however, is GIOVANNI VILLANI, a characteristic embodiment
of all the better qualities of his city, who, inspired by ardent
patriotism, wrote its history, including a review of the contemporary
transactions of the world, from the Tower of Babel to 1346, on the
verge of the Black Death of 1348, by which he was himself carried off.
His work was continued by his brother Matteo and his nephew Filippo to
1368. Villani possessed every qualification which experience of public
business could afford, having filled several important offices, among
them those of Prior and Master of the Mint. His language is exceedingly
pure, his fidelity and impartiality are beyond suspicion, and he is
peculiarly valuable from his preservation of financial and economical
details, and other matters affecting ordinary life. He would have been
a model historian if he had lived when the spirit of critical inquiry
was awake, and historians had learned the delineation of character
and the artistic construction of narrative; he must, however, in this
case have forfeited the golden simplicity which renders his narrative
so delightful. His nephew Filippo, who lived far into the fifteenth
century, wrote in Latin the _Lives of Illustrious Florentines_, already
cited as an authority on Dante. His memoir of Boccaccio has been
frequently reprinted.
No place having hitherto occurred suitable for mention of the _Travels
of Marco Polo_, they, although belonging to the thirteenth century, may
find mention here. From the purely literary point of view they are of
no great importance, but as the first book that opened the knowledge of
the East to Europeans, their significance cannot be overrated. Mention
should also be made of another traveller, CIRIACO DI ANCONA, the first
archæologist, who, in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, set
the example of collecting inscriptions and works of antiquity.
The next prose author whom it is necessary to mention, ENEA SILVIO
PICCOLOMINI, afterwards Pope Pius the Second (1405-64), writing solely
in Latin, has no place in the literary history of the Italian language,
but is perhaps the most typical example of the fifteenth-century man
of letters, accomplished, versatile, adroit, imperfectly restrained by
principle, but inspired by a genuine zeal for culture and humanity. No
literary personage since Petrarch had displayed such various activity,
or, by his controversial, no less than by his diplomatic ability, had
exerted an equal influence in the affairs of Church and State. Apart
from the substantial merits of his writings, Æneas is a typical figure
as indicating that the pen was beginning to govern the world, and that
literary dexterity could make a Pope of a struggling adventurer. As
an author he has come down to our day by his Commentaries of his own
times, one of that valuable class of histories whose authors can say,
“Pars magna fui”; and by his _Euryalus and Lucretia_, a romance founded
on an actual occurrence, and noteworthy as a precursor of the modern
novel.
In LEONE BATTISTA ALBERTI (1404-72) we at length encounter a humanist
accomplished alike in the learned and the vulgar tongue; while, like
Leonardo da Vinci, to whom he offers a strong resemblance, less
remarkable for any particular work than for the universality of his
genius. An architect and mathematician, an engineer and the inventor
of the camera obscura, he was almost the first of the moderns to treat
these subjects scientifically, and extended his researches to painting
and sculpture. His literary celebrity, however, arises rather from his
treatise _Della Famiglia_, a model of practical wisdom, couched in the
clear and cheerful spirit of a Goethe, and affording a pleasing insight
into the Italian family life of the period, as yet unspoiled by luxury.
“What he says about the beauty of the body is worthy of a Greek, what
he says about exercise might have been written by an Englishman”
(Symonds). The third book, superior to the others in diction, has been
attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini, a distinguished Florentine statesman
of an earlier date, but Alberti’s claim to it seems satisfactorily
established. His _Iciarchia_, a treatise on the ideal prince, is
also a remarkable work; and his novelette, _Ippolito and Leonora_,
founded on a Florentine tradition, is distinguished by pathos and
simplicity. Alberti was the natural son of a Florentine exile, and
was born at Genoa. His early years were years of hardship. Restored
to his ancestral city, he there executed important architectural and
engineering works, and subsequently metamorphosed into a splendid
temple the old church at Rimini, which Sigismondo Malatesta dedicated
in its altered form to the memory of his mistress Isotta. He was
afterwards abbreviator of Papal briefs at Rome. Deprived of this
office, along with sixty-nine other eminent scholars, by the Philistine
but practical Pope Paul II., he devoted himself to architecture at
Florence and Mantua, and died at Rome in 1472.
The excellent VESPASIANO DA BISTICCI (1421-98), almost alone among
his literary contemporaries, followed a trade, being a bookseller at
Florence. He formed the great library of the first Duke of Urbino, and
has left particulars of his zeal in the preparation of illuminated
manuscripts, and a vigorous expression of his disesteem for printed
books in comparison with them. We are indebted to him for no fewer than
105 biographies of contemporaries, most of whom were personally known
to him. A few, of considerable length and elaboration, record the lives
of popes, kings, and cardinals; the great majority are brief and simple
notices of scholars and literary men, some of whom, but for Bisticci,
would be almost unknown. All are charming from their unaffected
simplicity and geniality, and the curious traits of the age which they
preserve.
Had GIOVANNI PONTANO (1426-1503) written in the vernacular, he
would have won a place equal to any contemporary’s as a poet, and
a place among prose-writers entirely his own. Though a statesman
and diplomatist, the confidant of the King of Naples, a philologist
beside, and the life and soul of the Neapolitan Academy, he is none
the less the Lucian and the Martial of his age; the lively satirist
and delineator of popular manners in his dialogues; in his verse a
genuine lyrist, careful of form as a Greek, animated and eager as if
he had been a born Neapolitan. His prose and verse palpitate with
feeling, and he gains life at the expense of Latinity. His historical
writings, though respectable, are of less mark; but as a popular poet
and satirist, Italian speech had an infinite loss in him. Even as it
is, he seems but one remove from a vernacular author. His dialogues had
probably much influence upon Erasmus. Another contemporary figure is
strange and enigmatical. We know but imperfectly who FRANCESCO COLONNA,
the author of the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_, was, and can only guess
why he composed his visionary romance in a macaronic jargon neither
Latin nor Italian. The book describes a vision in which Polifilo, after
viewing magnificent processions and going through various adventures,
ultimately obtains the hand of his lady, Polia, who has been identified
with Lucrezia Lello, daughter of a jurisconsult at Treviso. It is
barely readable, and yet its very inarticulateness gives it a charm
which it would not have possessed if the author had been another
Boccaccio. The soul of the Renaissance seems to have passed into it,
and to be dumbly yearning for a manifestation never found, “moving
apart in worlds not realised.” The impression is greatly assisted by
the unique illustrations to which it owes its preciousness in artistic
eyes, and whose origin is still an unsolved problem. Their lavish fancy
and skill in rendering every variety of expression by mere outline
are apparent to all; but behind these technical qualities lies the
suggestion of a romantic and far-away world, comparable to the Hades
adumbrated in the tender farewells on Greek sepulchral reliefs.
On the whole the literary harvest of the century following the death
of Petrarch was poor, and the seed dispersed by him and Boccaccio
seemed to have fallen upon barren ground. It was not, however, entirely
thus: some of the Latin poets, such as Baptista Mantuanus, Campanus,
Augurellus, whom we have been compelled to pass without special notice,
might have won durable renown if they had written in Italian; and
though there is little achievement in vernacular literature, several
branches of human activity are for the first time in modern Europe
brought under literary influence. The dearth of literary genius was
paralleled by an equal paucity of statesmen and warriors of real
greatness, though a Ziska or a Sforza appears here and there. Some
mysterious cause had depressed the intellectual vitality of the age,
which, nevertheless, continued to progress in social refinement and
in opulence. Its æsthetic sensitiveness was chiefly expressed in the
rapid development of pictorial and plastic art, and the renovation
of architecture; its literary ideal was mainly manifested by the
philological and critical apostles of the Renaissance, a remarkable
band, who must find place in another chapter. As was to be expected
under such circumstances, one of the features of the time was the
improvement of the old universities and the formation of private
societies of scholars, which expressed Italian intellectual needs as
clearly as the foundation of the Royal Society expressed English needs
at a later elate. Two achieved special celebrity--the Roman Academy,
persecuted by Pope Paul II. for its relapse into paganism, and the
Platonic Academy at Florence, cherished by the Medici. It fell to the
lot of the latter to solemnly decide, under the auspices of Lorenzo
de’ Medici, that the Italian language actually was on a par with the
Latin, and that a man of wit or learning need not fear to lose caste by
writing in it.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Many will be found in a collection unfortunately published on too
limited a scale to be generally accessible, Daelli’s _Biblioteca Rara_.