OTHER PROSE-WRITERS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Italy now possessed a perfect standard of prose. She had already had
one in the fourteenth century, when so rapid had been the development
of the power of expression that the form had outrun the substance. She
could say anything; but except by the mouth of the novelist Boccaccio,
and that of Petrarch, who preferred to write his prose in Latin, had
found little worthy of emphatic utterance. It may be partly owing to
this poverty of matter in the vernacular literature, as well as to the
passion for Latin, that style decayed so greatly during the fifteenth
century. Yet, so far as the latter of these causes operated, the evil
brought its own remedy: it was impossible to be as deeply versed
as Pontano or Politian in the elegances of Latin without becoming
impatient of barbarism and pedantry in Italian. Sannazaro, an exquisite
Latin writer, was perhaps the first considerable man who insisted
on an even standard of distinction in both languages. Fortunately
for Italy, the _Arcadia_ was a very popular book; fortunately, too,
the Latin constructions with which it is replete were not so easily
imitated as its general refinement of phrase. By the time of Leo X.
inelegance had almost disappeared from Italian literature, and Italy
might boast herself the only country in Europe that possessed a perfect
literary language; wanting, indeed, the golden simplicity of the
thirteenth century, but still the prose of cultivated men, and adequate
for every form of literary composition. The intellectual distinction
thus conferred upon the nation, combined with her still more
pronounced superiority in the arts, seemed, as with Greece in similar
circumstances, to regain for her a dominion more illustrious than that
of which she had been despoiled. For a hundred years her authors were
the arbiters of taste and the models of Europe, a sovereignty which
might have been prolonged had it been possible for her to place herself
on the right and victorious side in the great battle for civil and
religious freedom that resounded throughout the sixteenth century.
As in all countries at their first awakening to an era of literary
culture, this culture had gone deep enough to produce a multitude of
authors, but not deep enough to generate a literary public capable of
supporting them. The appetite for fame and the delight in authorship
filled the ranks of literature with aspiring recruits, but the
commissariat, without which no army can keep the field, had to be
supplied by patronage, either from individuals or the state. Hence,
except when some wealthy noble like Angelo di Costanzo was smitten
with the passion for literary fame, we usually find the writers of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even when most illustrious,
in a condition of dependence. When with this is considered the utter
absence of civil freedom (for Venice, the one free city, hospitable to
authors, allowed little liberty to printers), it is remarkable that
the servility of the writers should have extended so little beyond
their dedications. Especially is this the case with history, which,
notwithstanding the influences at work to disfigure and corrupt it,
remained on the whole surprisingly impartial. This must be ascribed in
great part to the influence of classic models; partly, also, to the
real mental superiority of most of those who in the sixteenth century
essayed this form of composition.
No form is more attractive than the historical to men ambitious to
shine in letters, and conscious of high talent without creative genius.
“_No merita il nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta_;” but
delineation of character and representation of events are as it were
an inferior kind of creation out of pre-existing material, like that
ascribed by ancient theology to the Demiurgus. The literary genius
of Italy addressed itself eagerly to the task. Ere long almost every
considerable state had its vernacular historian. Some of the most
important writers, nevertheless, continued to compose in Latin. Among
these the most eminent was that very secular prelate and not very
trustworthy historian PAOLO GIOVIO, Bishop of Nocera (1483-1552), one
of the men whose chief title to fame in our day is to have been famous
in their own, but who was certainly reckoned as the chief historian
of his time, and whose biographies of eminent men of letters and
illustrious captains are still found valuable. Part of his general
history of his own times perished in the sack of Rome (1527), and, with
a sensitiveness not dishonourable to him, he shrank from recording
the transactions of a time when the vials of wrath seemed so visibly
poured out upon the Papacy. Except for the gaps indicated, his history
extends from 1494 to 1547. Literature sustained a heavy loss in the
disappearance of the work of Andrea Navagero, another Latin historian
(1483-1529), who had been entrusted by the Venetian Government with
the history of their Republic. The loss of another historian--Girolamo
Borgia, who wrote the history of Italy in the days of Alexander VI. and
Julius II.--is greatly to be deplored, not because he was distinguished
as a writer, but because he was a Borgia.
The historian of Florence had given the first example of really
classic Italian history, and Florence, though backward in comparison
with Venice in the diffusion of literature by the art of printing,
still took the lead among Italian cities in literary as well as
artistic cultivation. A group of Florentine annalists sprung up, whose
pens were chiefly exerted for the honour of their birthplace. Their
candour generally prevented the publication of their works in their
lifetime. Such is the case with JACOPO NARDI, who wrote the history
of Florence from the expulsion of the Medici in 1494 to their final
restoration in 1530, “with sincerity of intention and painstaking
accuracy” (Symonds), but also with the acrimony to be expected from
a banished patriot who fought for liberty to the last, and for the
remainder of his life ate the bread of exile at Venice. The style is
accused of aridity; but his translation of Livy is regarded as one of
the best in the Italian language. His own history was not published
until 1582, nor that of his continuator Segni until 1713, although
this elegant historian, whose work occupies the period from 1527 to
1555, was a partisan of the Medici. A portion of the same epoch, from
1527 to 1538, is described much more diffusely by BENEDETTO VARCHI,
one of the most prolific men of letters of his time. Varchi, though
a devotee of the liberty of whose restoration he despaired, wrote by
the special commission of the Grand Duke Cosmo, which neither affected
his impartiality nor protected him from being nearly murdered by some
private persons who had been offended by his honesty, nor prevented his
history from remaining in MS. until the eighteenth century. In 1570
SCIPIONE AMMIRATO, a Neapolitan, received a commission from the Grand
Duke to write a general history of Florence, which he brought down to
1574. His free access to archives enabled him to be more accurate than
any predecessor. He also compiled some valuable genealogical works. The
history of Ferrara was written by Pigna, and that of Genoa by Foglietta
and Bonfadio, all of whom may be considered standard historians. The
same can hardly be said of any other of the numerous local writers
whom Italy produced in this age, except Porzio, the historian of the
conspiracy of the Neapolitan barons against King Ferdinand; Graziani,
who recounted the Venetian wars in Cyprus; and three others who deserve
notice not merely as historians but as typical figures.
Never since Petrarch’s day had the sceptre of Italian literature
rested so unequivocally in one hand as in PIETRO BEMBO’S during the
second quarter of the sixteenth century. In one respect Bembo’s
pre-eminence is even more remarkable than his predecessor’s, for
Petrarch towered immeasurably above any possible competitor except
Boccaccio, while Bembo was so far from being the first man of his day
that he was not even a man of genius. His wonderful gift for felicitous
imitation, whether in prose or verse, was unaccompanied by any power of
original thought. But he possessed beyond any contemporary the formal
perfection of style, whether in Latin or Italian, demanded by the age.
His History of Venice, which alone concerns us here, was originally
published in the former language, but Bembo vindicated his claim to a
place among Italian historians by himself translating it into Italian.
He had succeeded Andrea Navagero as Venetian historiographer in 1529.
Born at Venice in 1470, and son of the magistrate who so honourably
distinguished himself by raising a monument to Dante at Ravenna, Bembo
had all his life enjoyed the favour of the great. He had been the
Platonic admirer of Lucrezia Borgia, who had honoured him with the
shining tress and the dull letters religiously preserved in the Brera
Library at Milan. Leo X. had made him his secretary before issuing
from his own conclave, and, with munificence for once well applied,
had provided him with means to occupy a delicious retreat at Padua,
where he was residing when he received the Venetian commission. At a
later period Paul III., who loved to surround himself with illustrious
men, raised him to the Cardinalate and drew him to Rome, where he
died in 1547, more admired and lamented than any man of letters of
his time. His history, which extends from 1487 to 1513, and which he
composed with his eye upon Cæsar, is the image of the writer, perfect
in the harmony of its periods, and carrying the reader rapidly along
its smooth surface, but surface alone, describing every occurrence as
the ordinary man saw it and the statesman did not, with no attempt to
search out the secret springs of action, no reference to documents
public or private, and, which is more surprising, no effort to
delineate a remarkable character. That this would not have exceeded his
powers is shown by his beautiful portrait of the Duchess of Urbino, in
his Latin life of her husband.
Bembo’s successor, PIETRO PARUTA (1540-98), who continued his history
to 1551, typifies the statesman historian, versed in diplomacy and
public business, and so highly endowed with the qualifications demanded
by such employments as to have become Procurator of the Republic, and
to have been prevented only by his death from becoming Doge. He was
consequently well fitted to write the annals of a state like Venice,
and his work stands high among Italian histories. The third exceptional
historian of the age, typical of the accomplished literary amateur, is
ANGELO DI COSTANZO, a Neapolitan noble whom we shall meet again among
the poets. He wrote the history of Naples from 1250 to 1486, and is
interesting as the pupil of Sannazaro, the friend of Vittoria Colonna,
a patrician whose love of letters led him to cultivate authorship, and
a patriot whose love of country gave umbrage to the jealous Spanish
viceroy, and subjected him to perpetual confinement to his estates. His
history does not disappoint the favourable prepossessions thus aroused,
being composed with great elegance and dignity, and a manifest love
of truth; insomuch that the author of the modern standard history of
Naples, Giannone, while supplying Costanzo’s defects by close attention
to jurisprudence, public economy, and other subjects neglected by his
predecessor, has transfused most of the latter’s narrative into his own.
Biography, the most attractive form of prose composition, was also
well represented in this age, but inspired only two standard works,
extremely unlike in style and spirit, but both possessions for all
time, and both relating to the line arts. GIORGIO VASARI (1512-74),
biographer-general of painters, sculptors, and architects, may be
called the Herodotus of art; a practitioner himself, and acquainted
with many of the persons whom he describes; lively and garrulous,
apparently most artless, he possesses either the science or the knack
of felicitous composition in an extraordinary degree. Living when
picturesque stories about artists were accepted without question, he
is entirely unembarrassed in relating such as commend themselves to
him, to the joy of the readers and the scandal of the critics of the
future. It is probable that scepticism of the truth of his anecdotes
and the authority due to his attributions of pictures has gone much too
far; but however this may be, criticism will never be able to turn his
living book into a dead one, or to invalidate our debt to him for the
mass of unquestionably authentic particulars which he has preserved.
His good taste in art as well as in literature is evinced by his
admiration for the first-fruits of the early Tuscan school, neglected
in his day, and his character appears throughout his work in the most
amiable light. His chief defect, a serious one, is the imperfection of
his information respecting the important schools of Lombardy and Venice.
There is little amiability in a still more distinguished writer, whose
pen has gained him the immortality which he expected from the chisel
and the graver. BENVENUTO CELLINI (1501-71) was undoubtedly a very
eminent artist; yet the autobiography which has preserved his name,
while those of Pompeo Tarcone and Alessandro Cesati are forgotten, is
a greater work of art than any he accomplished in his own vocation. It
may be compared to the realistic sculpture of Donatello, surpassing
in vigour and animation the ideal models of which it falls short in
elegance and grace. It is the counterpart of a man, and a very manly
man, all muscle and sinew and rude force, a boaster, a bully, a
libertine, a duellist, almost an assassin, one whom a slight change of
circumstances would easily have made a brigand or a bravo but always
the artist. No book, it is probable, gives a better idea of the general
atmosphere of the Italy of the sixteenth century; assuredly no other
delineation is nearly so vivid. With truly Pepysian unconsciousness
the writer depicts in himself the man of turbulent and impracticable
character moving among princes and nobles, outraging their forbearance
by every action of his life, and revenging himself for their exhausted
patience by malicious truth or reckless calumny. The general fidelity
of the picture, however, does not depend upon the accuracy of
particular statements, and Cellini’s untruths where his own vanity is
concerned do not impair his claim to confidence as a delineator of his
age. Of the literary merit of his performance it is needless to speak;
if not at the very head of entertaining autobiographies, it is at least
second to none. The English reader will be continually reminded of
Haydon; although, however, Haydon’s confidence in himself was no less
robust than Cellini’s, he had far less reason for it, nor, with all his
vividness, is he the Italian’s equal in graphic power.
One other prose-writer of the period, and perhaps only one, may be
considered as much an author for all time as Vasari and Cellini. This
is BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE, whose _Cortegiano_ depicts the ideal life
of the accomplished Italian courtier--a character of more importance
in that day than he can be in ours. In Castiglione’s time not only
were the court and good society almost convertible expressions, but
the relation of the courtier to the court was far more intimate than
it can be now. It actually was his sphere, which he seldom forsook
except when absent on military enterprises or public business; he
was in habits of daily intercourse with his sovereign, and professed
courtesy and civility as others professed arts or trades. A competent
writer on the court and its accomplishments, therefore, was necessarily
an instructor in manners and refinement, and as such might exercise an
important influence on his age. While the equally accomplished Casa,
in his _Galateo_, instructed the average gentleman in good manners,
the courtier’s training fell to the lot of Castiglione, than whom no
man could be better qualified either by actual disposition or the
circumstances of his life. A Mantuan by birth, he had served the Duke
of Urbino, had exemplified Italian refinement at the English court on
a mission to receive the Garter for his sovereign, and when he wrote
(1518), was envoy at the court of Leo X., and the intimate friend of
the most cultivated men of his age.
The machinery of his book is a report, imaginary in form, but
faithful in spirit, of dialogues held at the court of Urbino among the
distinguished persons who frequented it at various times. They are by
no means frivolous; Castiglione’s standard, not merely of deportment
and manly exercise, but of intellectual accomplishment, is very high.
The conversations deal with such themes as the preferable form of
government and the condition of women, and are handled with signal
elegance, acumen, and graceful but not cumbrous erudition. They are
interspersed with pleasant stories admirably told, and would give a
fascinating idea of Italian court life, were it not so evident that
its darker features have been kept out of view, and that the general
relation of Castiglione’s picture to reality is that of Sannazaro’s
Arcadia to the actual life of shepherds. Yet the picture has many
elements of truth, and it speaks well for the age that it could
produce even such an ideal. “Carried to the north of Europe,” says Mr.
Courthope, “and grafted on the still chivalrous manners of the English
aristocracy, the ideal of Castiglione contributed to form the character
of Sir Philip Sidney.” The delicacy of Castiglione’s sentiments is
shown by his bitter mortification at the unjust reproaches of Clement
VII., into whose service he afterwards entered, and who accused him of
failure as a diplomatist. These are said to have broken his heart. He
died in 1529. Raphael had painted his portrait, his tomb was designed
by Giulio Romano, and his epitaph was written by Bembo.
“Love rules the court, the camp, the grove.” The _Asolani_ of Bembo,
therefore, a disquisition on Love from different points of view,
composed in imitation of Cicero’s Tusculan Questions, should take
precedence of Castiglione’s _Cortegiano_, but it can hardly be said
that it does. The _Cortegiano_ is a piece of real life, indicating, if
not precisely what the highest Italian society was, at all events what
it felt it ought to be. Bembo’s dialogues, or rather monologues, might
have been composed in any age of refinement; they are purely academical
in form, and the perpetual justice of the sentiments is purchased by
perpetual commonplace. Seldom, however, have commonplaces been set
off with such harmony and polish of style, or with more ingenious
eloquence, especially at the conclusion, where the Hermit reconciles
Love’s advocates and his accusers by descanting on the charms of ideal
beauty. If it be true that to have read it was the indispensable
passport to good society, the circumstance is creditable to the age’s
literary taste, and still more so to its standard of ideal excellence.
Bembo’s prose is more satisfactory than his poetry, perhaps because
it raises less expectation; in verse the wonder is that he attains no
further, and in prose that he attains so far. _Gli Asolani_, first
published in 1505, was written at the age of twenty-eight, and was
dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia. On the strength of it Bembo is made the
chief interlocutor in Castiglione’s _Cortegiano_ when the question of
love is touched upon.
The number of writers at this period who, if not always moral, may be
described as moralists, is very considerable. ALESSANDRO PICCOLOMINI,
afterwards Archbishop of Patras, wrote a complete institution of the
citizen which is not devoid of merit; but he is better remembered by
a sin of his youth, the _Dialogo della bella creauza delle donne_,
in which an Italian Martha successfully exhorts an Italian Margaret
to add a lover to a husband. The literary merits of this otherwise
reprehensible performance are considerable; it is also an authority
on cosmetics. Sperone Speroni, eminent for the dignity of his life
and the elegance of his style, has the further honour of having first
employed the dialogue in the discussion of purely ethical questions.
Lodovico Dolce and A. F. Doni, industrious _littérateurs_, obtained
a reputation in their own day which posterity has not ratified. The
former, says Tiraboschi, wrote much in every style and well in none;
the latter is tersely characterised by Niceron as “grand diseur de
riens.” Far superior is GIOVANNI BATTISTA GELLI, the learned tailor of
Florence, who had the great advantage over the other moralists of being
able to clothe his wit and wisdom in an objective form. In his _Circe_,
Ulysses is represented as unsuccessfully endeavouring to persuade his
metamorphosed companions to reassume human shape. They know better, and
their argumentation might well have suggested the machinery of Dryden’s
_Hind and Panther_; even as that of Gelli’s _Capricci_, where Giusto
disputes with his own soul, was very probably copied in Smollett’s
_Adventures of an Atom_.
One of the most characteristic writers of the time is AGNOLO
FIRENZUOLA (1497-1547), an authority “on the form and colour of the
ear, and the proper way of wearing ornamental flowers,” whose elegant
and frequently licentious stories, idiomatically Tuscan in style,
fresh in humour, and brilliant in description, are interwoven with his
_Dialoghi d’Amore_, and who also gained fame by his comedies, and as
the translator, or rather adapter, of Apuleius. As the combination of
the photographic portraits of several members of any class of society
gives the mean average of its physiognomy, so Firenzuola represents the
average constitution of such men of letters of his day as wrote with a
real vocation for literature. It is doubtful whether any such vocation
can be credited to another satirist who greatly surpassed him in
celebrity, the notorious PIETRO ARETINO (1492-1556). Aretino was merely
a literary blackmailer, whose profligate and venal pen was employed to
extort or cajole money from the great men of the age. His indubitable
success is difficult to understand, except as the irrepressible and
irreversible decree of fashion. Apart from his comedies and his
letters, an amazing record of the abasement of rank before impudence,
only one of his works has any literary merit, and the genuineness of
this is questionable. His other immoralities are as insipid as his
moralities, and his personalities are of the kind best answered by a
cudgel. Notwithstanding, he became a power in public life as well as in
literature, rivalled the opulence and the pomp of his friend Titian,
and, like him, trained up disciples of his craft. The charm may have
lain in some measure in the boldness of the man, who alone in his age
made a show of free speech, although the real motor of his pen was
cupidity, who lived libelling, and died laughing. Worthless as he was,
he might have anticipated Pope’s boast that men not afraid of God were
afraid of him.
Aretino is only one among a host of letter-writers, who included
the most accomplished men of the age. Bembo appears as its typical
representative, here as elsewhere, although the unfortunate historian
Bonfadio is held to have written best. All wrote with an eye to the
publication of their epistles, and asked themselves what Cicero
would have said in their place. None had the delightful candour
and exuberance of Petrarch; they are in consequence much less
national, interesting, and human; and their letters, stripped of
the complimentary phrases which eke them out, are in general brief.
Yet it would be hard to refuse any among them the praise due to two
excellent qualities, good style and good sense. Such were the general
characteristics of the age, a period, but for Ariosto, almost devoid of
creative power in letters, yet fully worthy to be ranked with the other
great eras of artificial literature, the eras of Augustus, and Anne,
and Louis XIV. Its truest praise is perhaps afforded by a comparison of
it with the other contemporary literatures of Europe, then, the French
excepted, which is immensely indebted to the Italian, almost equally
destitute of genius and of art, although the magnificent rhythm of
English prose even then showed what an instrument had been provided for
performers yet to come. But temporal and spiritual tyranny were fast
destroying the elementary requisites of great literature in Italy. The
hare was lamed, and the tortoises were overtaking her. A little while
yet, and it would be needful to look beyond Alp and sea for the true
Italy, and find her in the bosoms of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney.