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RENAISSANCE IN ITALY
The Age of the Despots
by
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
Author of _Studies of the Greek Poets_, _Sketches in Italy and Greece_,
etc.
'Di questi adunque oziosi principi, e di queste vilissime armi, sarà
piena la mia Istoria'
Mach. 1_st_. _Fior_. lib. i.
New York
Henry Holt and Company
1888
TO
MY FRIEND
JOHN BEDDOE, M.D., F.R.S.,
I DEDICATE MY WORK
ON
THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.
AUTHOR'S EDITION
AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
Though these books taken together and in the order planned by the author
form one connected study of Italian culture at a certain period of
history, still each aims at a completeness of its own, and each can be
read independently of its companions. That the author does not regard
acquaintance with any one of them as essential to a profitable reading
of any other has been shown by the publication of each with a separate
title-page and without numeration of the volumes, while all three bear
the same general heading of "Renaissance in Italy."
PREFACE.
This volume is the First Part of a work upon the 'Renaissance in Italy.'
The Second Part treats of the Revival of Learning. The Third, of the
Fine Arts. The Fourth Part, in two volumes, is devoted to Italian
Literature.
Owing to the extent of the ground I have attempted to traverse, I feel
conscious that the students of special departments will find much to be
desired in my handling of each part. In some respects I hope that the
several portions of the work may complete and illustrate each other.
Many topics, for example, have been omitted from Chapter VIII. in this
volume because they seemed better adapted to treatment in the future.
One of the chief difficulties which the critic has to meet in dealing
with the Italian Renaissance is the determination of the limits of the
epoch. Two dates, 1453 and 1527, marking respectively the fall of
Constantinople and the sack of Rome, are convenient for fixing in the
mind that narrow space of time during which the Renaissance culminated.
But in order to trace its progress up to this point, it is necessary to
go back to a far more remote period; nor, again, is it possible to
maintain strict chronological consistency in treating of the several
branches of the whole theme.
The books of which the most frequent use has been made in this first
portion of the work are Sismondi's 'Républiques Italiennes'; Muratori's
'Rerum Italicarum Scriptores'; the 'Archivio Storico Italiano'; the
seventh volume of Michelet's 'Histoire de France'; the seventh and
eighth volumes of Gregorovius' 'Geschichte der Stadt Rom'; Ferrari's
'Rivoluzioni d' Italia'; Alberi's series of Despatches; Gino Capponi's
'Storia della Repubblica di Firenze'; and Burckhardt's 'Cultur der
Renaissance in Italien.' To the last-named essay I must acknowledge
especial obligations. It fell under my notice when I had planned, and in
a great measure finished, my own work. But it would be difficult for me
to exaggerate the profit I have derived from the comparison of my
opinions with those of a writer so thorough in his learning and so
delicate in his perceptions as Jacob Burckhardt, or the amount I owe to
his acute and philosophical handling of the whole subject. I must also
express a special debt to Ferrari, many of whose views I have adopted in
the Chapter on 'Italian History.' With regard to the alterations
introduced into the substance of the book in this edition, it will be
enough to say that I have endeavored to bring each chapter up to the
level of present knowledge.
In conclusion, I once more ask indulgence for a volume which, though it
aims at a completeness of its own, is professedly but one part of a long
inquiry.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
Difficulty of fixing Date--Meaning of Word Renaissance--The Emancipation
of the Reason--Relation of Feudalism to the Renaissance--Mediæval
Warnings of the Renaissance--Abelard, Bacon, Joachim of Flora, the
Provencals, the Heretics, Frederick II.--Dante, Petrarch,
Boccaccio--Physical Energy of the Italians--The Revival of Learning--The
Double Discovery of the World and of Man--Exploration of the Universe
and of the Globe--Science--The Fine Arts and Scholarship--Art Humanizes
the Conceptions of the Church--Three Stages in the History of
Scholarship--The Age of Desire--The Age of Acquisition--The Legend of
Julia's Corpse--The Age of the Printers and Critics--The Emancipation of
the Conscience--The Reformation and the Modern Critical
Spirit--Mechanical Inventions--The Place of Italy in the Renaissance P. 1.
CHAPTER II.
ITALIAN HISTORY.
The special Difficulties of this Subject--Apparent Confusion--Want of
leading Motive--The Papacy--The Empire--The Republics--The Despots--The
People--The Dismemberment of Italy--Two main Topics--The Rise of the
Communes--Gothic Kingdom--Lombards--Franks--Germans--The Bishops--The
Consuls--The Podestas--Civil Wars--Despots--The Balance of Power--The
Five Italian States--The Italians fail to achieve National Unity--The
Causes of this Failure--Conditions under which it might have been
achieved--A Republic--A Kingdom--A Confederation--A Tyranny--The Part
played by the Papacy P. 32.
CHAPTER III.
THE AGE OF THE DESPOTS.
Salient Qualities of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries in
Italy--Relation of Italy to the Empire and to the Church--The
Illegitimate Title of Italian Potentates--The Free Emergence of
Personality--Frederick II. and the Influence of his Example--Ezzelino da
Romano--Six Sorts of Italian Despots--Feudal Seigneurs--Vicars of the
Empire--Captains of the People--Condottieri--Nephews and Sons of
Popes--Eminent Burghers--Italian Incapacity for Self-government in
Commonwealths--Forcible Tenure of Power encouraged Personal Ability--The
Condition of the Despot's Life--Instances of Domestic Crime in the
Ruling Houses--Macaulay's Description of the Italian
Tyrant--Savonarola's and Matteo Villani's Descriptions of a Tyrant--The
Absorption of Smaller by Greater Tyrannies in the Fourteenth
Century--History of the Visconti--Francesco Sforza--The Part played in
Italian Politics by Military Leaders--Mercenary Warfare--Alberico da
Barbiano, Braccio da Montone, Sforza Attendolo--History of the Sforza
Dynasty--The Murder of Galeazzo Maria Sforza--The Ethics of Tyrannicide
in Italy--Relation of the Despots to Arts and Letters--Sigismondo
Pandolfo Malatesta--Duke Federigo of Urbino--The School of Vittorino and
the Court of Urbino--The Cortegiano of Castiglione--The Ideals of the
Italian Courtier and the Modern Gentleman--General Retrospect P. 99.
CHAPTER IV.
THE REPUBLICS.
The different Physiognomies of the Italian Republics--The Similarity of
their Character as Municipalities--The Rights of Citizenship--Causes of
Disturbance in the Commonwealths--Belief in the Plasticity of
Constitutions--Example of Genoa--Savonarola's
Constitution--Machiavelli's Discourse to Leo X.--Complexity of Interests
and Factions--Example of Siena--Small Size of Italian Cities--Mutual
Mistrust and Jealousy of the Commonwealths--The notable Exception of
Venice--Constitution of Venice--Her wise System of Government--Contrast
of Florentine Vicissitudes--The Magistracies of Florence--Balia and
Parlamento--The Arts of the Medici--Comparison of Venice and Florence in
respect to Intellectual Activity and Mobility--Parallels between Greece
and Italy--Essential Differences--The Mercantile Character of Italian
Burghs--The 'Trattato del Governo della Famiglia'--The Bourgeois Tone of
Florence, and the Ideal of a Burgher--Mercenary Arms P. 193.
CHAPTER V.
THE FLORENTINE HISTORIANS.
Florence, the City of Intelligence--Cupidity, Curiosity, and the Love of
Beauty--Florentine Historical Literature--Philosophical Study of
History--Ricordano Malespini--Florentine History compared with the
Chronicles of other Italian Towns--The Villani--The Date
1300--Statistics--Dante's Political Essays and Pamphlets--Dino
Compagni--Latin Histories of Florence in Fifteenth Century--Lionardo
Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini--The Historians of the First Half of the
Sixteenth Century--Men of Action and Men of Letters; the
Doctrinaires--Florence between 1494 and 1537--Varchi, Segni, Nardi,
Pitti, Nerli, Guicciardini--The Political Importance of these
Writers--The Last Years of Florentine Independence, and the Siege of
1529--State of Parties--Filippo Strozzi--Different Views of Florentine
Weakness taken by the Historians--Their Literary Qualities--Francesco
Guicciardini and Niccolo Machiavelli--Scientific Statists--Discord
between Life and Literature--The Biography of Guicciardini--His 'Istoria
d'Italia,' 'Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze,' 'Storia Fiorentina,'
'Ricordi'--Biography of Machiavelli--His Scheme of a National
Militia--Dedication of 'The Prince'--Political Ethics of the Italian
Renaissance--The 'Discorsi'--The Seven Books on the Art of War and the
'History of Florence. P. 246.
CHAPTER VI.
'THE PRINCE' OF MACHIAVELLI.
The Sincerity of Machiavelli in this Essay--Machiavellism--His
deliberate Formulation of a cynical political Theory--Analysis of 'The
Prince'--Nine Conditions of Principalities--The Interest of the
Conqueror acknowledged as the sole Motive of his Policy--Critique of
Louis XII.--Feudal Monarchy and Oriental Despotism--Three Ways of
subduing a free City--Example of Pisa--Principalities founded by
Adventurers--Moses, Romulus, Cyrus, Theseus--Savonarola--Francesco
Sforza--Cesare Borgia--Machiavelli's personal Relation to
him--Machiavelli's Admiration of Cesare's Genius--A Sketch of Cesare's
Career--Concerning those who have attained to Sovereignty by
Crimes--Oliverotto da Fermo--The Uses of Cruelty--Messer Ramiro d'
Orco--The pessimistic Morality of Machiavelli--On the Faith of
Princes--Alexander VI.--The Policy of seeming virtuous and
honest--Absence of chivalrous Feeling in Italy--The Military System of a
powerful Prince--Criticism of Mercenaries and Auxiliaries--Necessity of
National Militia--The Art of War--Patriotic Conclusion of the
Treatise--Machiavelli and Savonarola P. 334.
CHAPTER VII.
THE POPES OF THE RENAISSANCE.
The Papacy between 1447 and 1527--The Contradictions of the Renaissance
Period exemplified by the Popes--Relaxation of their hold over the
States of the Church and Rome during the Exile in Avignon--Nicholas
V.--His Conception of a Papal Monarchy--Pius II.--The
Crusade--Renaissance Pontiffs--Paul II.--Persecution of the
Platonists--Sixtus IV.--Nepotism--The Families of Riario and Delia
Rovere--Avarice--Love of Warfare--Pazzi Conspiracy--Inquisition in
Spain--Innocent VIII.--Franceschetto Cibo--The Election of Alexander
VI.--His Consolidation of the Temporal Power--Policy toward Colonna and
Orsini Families--Venality of everything in Rome--Policy toward the
Sultan--The Index--The Borgia Family--Lucrezia--Murder of Duke of
Gandia--Cesare and his Advancement--The Death of Alexander--Julius
II.--His violent Temper--Great Projects and commanding Character--Leo
X.--His Inferiority to Julius--S. Peter's and the Reformation--Adrian
VI.--His Hatred of Pagan Culture--Disgust of the Roman Court at his
Election--Clement VII.--Sack of Rome--Enslavement of Florence P. 371.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHURCH AND MORALITY.
Corruption of the Church--Degradation and Division of Italy--Opinions of
Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and King Ferdinand of Naples--Incapacity of
the Italians for thorough Reformation--The Worldliness and Culture of
the Renaissance--Witness of Italian Authors against the Papal Court and
the Convents--Superstitious Respect for Relics--Separation between
Religion and Morality--Mixture of Contempt and Reverence for the
Popes--Gianpaolo Baglioni--Religious Sentiments of the
Tyrannicides--Pietro Paolo Boscoli--Tenacity of Religions--The direct
Interest of the Italians in Rome--Reverence for the Sacraments of the
Church--Opinions pronounced by Englishmen on Italian Immorality--Bad
Faith and Sensuality--The Element of the Fancy in Italian Vice--The
Italians not Cruel, or Brutal, or Intemperate by Nature--Domestic
Murders--Sense of Honor in Italy--Onore and Onesta--General
Refinement--Good Qualities of the People--Religious Revivalism P. 447.
CHAPTER IX.
SAVONAROLA.
The Attitude of Savonarola toward the Renaissance--His Parentage, Birth,
and Childhood at Ferrara--His Poem on the Ruin of the World--Joins the
Dominicans at Bologna--Letter to his Father--Poem on the Ruin of the
Church--Begins to preach in 1482--First Visit to Florence--San
Gemignano--His Prophecy--Brescia in 1486--Personal Appearance and Style
of Oratory--Effect on his audience--The three Conclusions--His
Visions--Savonarola's Shortcomings as a patriotic Statesman--His sincere
Belief in his prophetic Calling--Friendship with Pico della
Mirandola--Settles in Florence, 1490--Convent of San Marco--Savonarola's
Relation to Lorenzo de' Medici--The death of Lorenzo--Sermons of 1493
and 1494--the Constitution of 1495--Theocracy in Florence--Piagnoni,
Bigi, and Arrabbiati--War between Savonarola and Alexander VI.--The
Signory suspends him from preaching in the Duomo in 1498--Attempts to
call a Council--The Ordeal by Fire--San Marco stormed by the Mob--Trial
and Execution of Savonarola P. 497.
CHAPTER X.
CHARLES VIII.
The Italian States confront the Great Nations of Europe--Policy of Louis
XI. of France--Character of Charles VIII.--Preparations for the Invasion
of Italy--Position of Lodovico Sforza--Diplomatic Difficulties in Italy
after the Death of Lorenzo de' Medici--Weakness of the Republics--Il
Moro--The year 1494---Alfonso of Naples--Inefficiency of the Allies to
cope with France--Charles at Lyons is stirred up to the Invasion of
Italy by Giuliano della Rovere--Charles at Asti and Pavia--Murder of
Gian Galeazzo Sforza--Mistrust in the French Army--Rapallo and
Fivizzano--The Entrance into Tuscany--Part played by Piero de'
Medici--Charles at Pisa--His Entrance into Florence--Piero Capponi--The
March on Rome--Entry into Rome--Panic of Alexander VI.--The March on
Naples--The Spanish Dynasty: Alfonso and Ferdinand--Alfonso II. escapes
to Sicily--Ferdinand II. takes Refuge in Ischia--Charles at Naples--The
League against the French--De Comines at Venice--Charles makes his
Retreat by Rome, Siena, Pisa, and Pontremoli--The Battle of
Fornovo--Charles reaches Asti and returns to France--Italy becomes the
Prize to be fought for by France, Spain, and Germany--Importance of the
Expedition of Charles VIII. P. 537.
* * * * *
APPENDICES.
No. I.--The Blood-madness of Tyrants 589
No. II.--Translations of Nardi, 'Istorie di Firenze,' lib. l. cap. 4;
and of Varchi, 'Storia Fiorentina,' lib. iii. caps. 20,
21, 22; lib. ix. caps. 48, 49, 46 592
No. III.--The Character of Alexander VI., from Guicciardini's
'Storia Fiorentina,' cap. 27 603
No. IV.--Religious Revivals in Mediæval Italy 606
No. V.--The 'Sommario della Storia d' Italia dal 1511 al 1527,
by Francesco Vettori 624
RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
CHAPTER I.
THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
Difficulty of fixing Date--Meaning of Word Renaissance--The Emancipation
of the Reason--Relation of Feudalism to the Renaissance--Mediæval
Warnings of the Renaissance--Abelard, Bacon, Joachim of Flora, the
Provençals, the Heretics, Frederick II.--Dante, Petrarch,
Boccaccio--Physical Energy of the Italians--The Revival of Learning--The
Double Discovery of the World and of Man--Exploration of the Universe
and of the Globe--Science--The Fine Arts and Scholarship--Art Humanizes
the Conceptions of the Church--Three Stages in the History of
Scholarship--The Age of Desire--The Age of Acquisition--The Legend of
Julia's Corpse--The Age of the Printers and Critics--The Emancipation of
the Conscience--The Reformation and the Modern Critical
Spirit--Mechanical Inventions--The Place of Italy in the Renaissance.
The word Renaissance has of late years received a more extended
significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent--the
Revival of Learning. We use it to denote the whole transition from the
Middle Ages to the Modern World; and though it is possible to assign
certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we
cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say--between this year and
that the movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to
name the days on which spring in any particular season began and ended
Yet we speak of spring as different from winter and from summer. The
truth is, that in many senses we are still in mid-Renaissance. The
evolution has not been completed. The new life is our own and is
progressive. As in the transformation scene of some great Masque, so
here the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled; the new forms, at
first shadowy and filmy, gain upon the old; and now both blend; and now
the old scene fades into the background; still, who shall say whether
the new scene be finally set up?
In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the Renaissance to
any one cause or circumstance, or limit them within the field of any one
department of human knowledge. If we ask the students of art what they
mean by the Renaissance, they will reply that it was the revolution
effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of
antique monuments. Students of literature, philosophy, and theology see
in the Renaissance that discovery of manuscripts, that passion for
antiquity, that progress in philology and criticism, which led to a
correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in poetry, to new
systems of thought, to more accurate analysis, and finally to the
Lutheran schism and the emancipation of the conscience. Men of science
will discourse about the discovery of the solar system by Copernicus and
Galileo, the anatomy of Vesalius, and Harvey's theory of the circulation
of the blood. The origination of a truly scientific method is the point
which interests them most in the Renaissance. The political historian,
again, has his own answer to the question. The extinction of feudalism,
the development of the great nationalities of Europe, the growth of
monarchy, the limitation of the ecclesiastical authority and the
erection of the Papacy into an Italian kingdom, and in the last place
the gradual emergence of that sense of popular freedom which exploded in
the Revolution; these are the aspects of the movement which engross his
attention. Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based
upon the false decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the Roman
Code, and the attempt to introduce a rational method into the theory of
modern jurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of international
law. Men whose attention has been turned to the history of discoveries
and inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or
will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of
printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and
by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all
these instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid
the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and
perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving. Yet neither any one of
these answers taken separately, nor indeed all of them together, will
offer a solution of the problem. By the term Renaissance, or new birth,
is indicated a natural movement, not to be explained by this or that
characteristic, but to be accepted as an effort of humanity for which
at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we
still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of
arts, or of sciences, or of literature, or even of nations. It is the
history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit
manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no
new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The
arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books, which suddenly
became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on
the shores of the Dead Sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not
their discovery which caused the Renaissance. But it was the
intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which
enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them. The force then
generated still continues, vital and expansive, in the spirit of the
modern world.
How was it, then, that at a certain period, about fourteen centuries
after Christ, to speak roughly, the intellect of the Western races awoke
as it were from slumber and began once more to be active? That is a
question which we can but imperfectly answer. The mystery of organic
life defeats analysis; whether the subject of our inquiry be a
germ-cell, or a phenomenon so complex as the commencement of a new
religion, or the origination of a new disease, or a new phase in
civilization, it is alike impossible to do more than to state the
conditions under which the fresh growth begins, and to point out what
are its manifestations. In doing so, moreover, we must be careful not
to be carried away by words of our own making. Renaissance, Reformation,
and Revolution are not separate things, capable of being isolated; they
are moments in the history of the human race which we find it convenient
to name; while history itself is one and continuous, so that our utmost
endeavors to regard some portion of it independently of the rest will be
defeated.
A glance at the history of the preceding centuries shows that, after the
dissolution of the fabric of the Roman Empire, there was no immediate
possibility of any intellectual revival. The barbarous races which had
deluged Europe had to absorb their barbarism: the fragments of Roman
civilization had either to be destroyed or assimilated: the Germanic
nations had to receive culture and religion from the people they had
superseded; the Church had to be created, and a new form given to the
old idea of the Empire. It was further necessary that the modern
nationalities should be defined, that the modern languages should be
formed, that peace should be secured to some extent, and wealth
accumulated, before the indispensable conditions for a resurrection of
the free spirit of humanity could exist. The first nation which
fulfilled these conditions was the first to inaugurate the new era. The
reason why Italy took the lead in the Renaissance was, that Italy
possessed a language, a favorable climate, political freedom, and
commercial prosperity, at a time when other nations were still
semi-barbarous. Where the human spirit had been buried in the decay of
the Roman Empire, there it arose upon the ruins of that Empire; and the
Papacy, called by Hobbes the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, seated,
throned and crowned, upon the ashes thereof, to some extent bridged over
the gulf between the two periods.
Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of the
Renaissance was intellectual, that it was the emancipation of the reason
for the modern world, we may inquire how feudalism was related to it.
The mental condition of the Middle Ages was one of ignorant prostration
before the idols of the Church--dogma and authority and scholasticism.
Again, the nations of Europe during these centuries were bound down by
the brute weight of material necessities. Without the power over the
outer world which the physical sciences and useful arts communicate,
without the ease of life which wealth and plenty secure, without the
traditions of a civilized past, emerging slowly from a state of utter
rawness, each nation could barely do more than gain and keep a difficult
hold upon existence. To depreciate the work achieved during the Middle
Ages would be ridiculous. Yet we may point out that it was done
unconsciously--that it was a gradual and instinctive process of
becoming. The reason, in one word, was not awake; the mind of man was
ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to
think of the mediæval students poring over a single ill-translated
sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole
systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles
hardly less idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the
time, at Constantinople and at Seville, in Greek and Arabic, Plato and
Aristotle were alive but sleeping, awaiting only the call of the
Renaissance to bid them speak with voice intelligible to the modern
mind. It is no less pathetic to watch tide after tide of the ocean of
humanity sweeping from all parts of Europe, to break in passionate but
unavailing foam upon the shores of Palestine, whole nations laying life
down for the chance of seeing the walls of Jerusalem, worshiping the
sepulcher whence Christ had risen, loading their fleet with relics and
with cargoes of the sacred earth, while all the time within their
breasts and brains the spirit of the Lord was with them, living but
unrecognized, the spirit of freedom which erelong was destined to
restore its birthright to the world.
Meanwhile the middle age accomplished its own work. Slowly and
obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance, were being forged the nations
and the languages of Europe. Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany took
shape. The actors of the future drama acquired their several characters,
and formed the tongues whereby their personalities should be expressed.
The qualities which render modern society different from that of the
ancient world, were being impressed upon these nations by Christianity,
by the Church, by chivalry, by feudal customs. Then came a further
phase. After the nations had been molded, their monarchies and dynasties
were established. Feudalism passed by slow degrees into various forms of
more or less defined autocracy. In Italy and Germany numerous
principalities sprang into pre-eminence; and though the nation was not
united under one head, the monarchical principle was acknowledged.
France and Spain submitted to a despotism, by right of which the king
could say, 'L'Etat c'est moi.' England developed her complicated
constitution of popular right and royal prerogative. At the same time
the Latin Church underwent a similar process of transformation. The
Papacy became more autocratic. Like the king, the Pope began to say,
'L'Eglise c'est moi.' This merging of the mediæval State and mediæval
Church in the personal supremacy of King and Pope may be termed the
special feature of the last age of feudalism which preceded the
Renaissance. It was thus that the necessary conditions and external
circumstances were prepared. The organization of the five great nations,
and the leveling of political and spiritual interests under political
and spiritual despots, formed the prelude to that drama of liberty of
which the Renaissance was the first act, the Reformation the second, the
Revolution the third, and which we nations of the present are still
evolving in the establishment of the democratic idea.
Meanwhile, it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst suddenly
upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms.
Far from that: within the middle age itself, over and over again, the
reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth
century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and
words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning of
the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that
man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of Flora, intermediate
between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his
lips, and cried that 'the Gospel of the Father was past, the Gospel of
the Son was passing, the Gospel of the Spirit was to be.' These three
men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as
an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable
emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs,
especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were
ready to resume their sway. The premature civilization of that favored
region, so cruelly extinguished by the Church, was itself a reaction of
nature against the restrictions imposed by ecclesiastical discipline;
while the songs of the wandering students, known under the title of
_Carmina Burana_, indicate a revival of Pagan or pre-Christian feeling
in the very stronghold of mediæval learning. We have, moreover, to
remember the Cathari, the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the
Hussites--heretics in whom the new light dimly shone, but who were
instantly exterminated by the Church. We have to commemorate the vast
conception of the Emperor Frederick II., who strove to found a new
society of humane culture in the South of Europe, and to anticipate the
advent of the spirit of modern tolerance. He, too, and all his race were
exterminated by the Papal jealousy. Truly we may say with Michelet that
the Sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal
Europe. In vain because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus
early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those
headless trunks and zoophitic members of half-molded humanity which, in
the vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man. The
nations were not ready. Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for
venturing to examine what God had meant to keep secret; Dominicans
preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles of Toulouse; Popes
stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the
masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies
and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity
devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy
sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal: these still ruled
the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations
of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile.
Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious art,
conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the
first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had
shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed. His ideal, of antique culture
as the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race,
his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and
speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the
Renaissance--its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After
Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of
freedom. His conception of human existence as joy to be accepted with
thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering,
familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semi-pagan
gladness which marked the real Renaissance.
In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of
intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived;
but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain.
With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to
create confidently after its own fashion. With Petrarch the same genius
reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a
splendid past. With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty of
the world, the goodliness of youth and strength and love and life,
unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.
It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had
lost indeed the heroic spirit which we admire in her Communes of the
thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that
repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last
began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried
the civilization of the old world. Behind stretched the centuries of
mediævalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were
as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who
were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted;
their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of
enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially
preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fiber of the men who
were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to
delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their
capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No
generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them
down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from skepticism, the despair of
thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted senses
rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural. They
yearned for magnificence, and instinctively comprehended splendor. At
the same time the period of satiety was still far off. Everything seemed
possible to their young energy; nor had a single pleasure palled upon
their appetite. Born, as it were, at the moment when desires and
faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions are not blunted nor
the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the first time on a world of
wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed what we may term the first
transcendent springtide of the modern world. Nothing is more remarkable
than the fullness of the life that throbbed in them. Natures rich in all
capacities and endowed with every kind of sensibility were frequent. Nor
was there any limit to the play of personality in action. We may apply
to them what Mr. Browning has written of Sordello's temperament:--
A footfall there
Suffices to upturn to the warm air
Half germinating spices, mere decay
Produces richer life, and day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.
During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not
seen the beauty of the world or had seen it only to cross himself, and
turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like S. Bernard traveling along
the shores of the Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the
waters, nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the
mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a
thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule; even like this
monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of
sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had
scarcely known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing.
Beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man
fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell
everlasting, heaven hard to win; ignorance is acceptable to God as a
proof of faith and submission; abstinence and mortification are the only
safe rules of life: these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediæval
Church. The Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick
veil which they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world,
and flashing the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own
nature. For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in
the classical humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man
strove to make himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his
privilege as well as destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation
of the reason from a dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the
inner world.
An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the
spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with
the ancient mind which followed upon what is called the Revival of
Learning. The fall of the Greek Empire in 1453, while it signalized the
extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated
forces of the new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under
all previous manifestations and in its uninterrupted continuity was
generated. Men found that in classical as well as Biblical antiquity
existed an ideal of human life, both moral and intellectual, by which
they might profit in the present. The modern genius felt confidence in
its own energies when it learned what the ancients had achieved. The
guesses of the ancients stimulated the exertions of the moderns. The
whole world's history seemed once more to be one.
The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery of the
world and the discovery of man.[1] Under these two formulæ may be
classified all the phenomena which properly belong to this period. The
discovery of the world divides itself into two branches--the exploration
of the globe, and that systematic exploration of the universe which is
in fact what we call Science. Columbus made known America in 1492; the
Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar
system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain
statement; for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid
what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is
only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with
the four centuries which have ensued, that we can estimate the magnitude
of that Renaissance movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been
added to civilization. In like manner, it is worth while to pause a
moment and consider what is implied in the substitution of the
Copernican for the Ptolemaic system. The world, regarded in old times
as the center of all things, the apple of God's eye, for the sake of
which were created sun and moon and stars, suddenly was found to be one
of the many balls that roll round a giant sphere of light and heat,
which is itself but one among innumerable suns attended each by a
_cortège_ of planets, and scattered, how we know not, through infinity.
What has become of that brazen seat of the old gods, that Paradise to
which an ascending Deity might be caught up through clouds, and hidden
for a moment from the eyes of his disciples. The demonstration of the
simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a blow the legends that were
most significant to the early Christians by annihilating their
symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo for his proof of the
world's mobility. Instinctively she perceived that in this one
proposition was involved the principle of hostility to her most
cherished conceptions, to the very core of her mythology. Science was
born, and the warfare between scientific positivism and religious
metaphysic was declared. Henceforth God could not be worshiped under the
forms and idols of a sacerdotal fancy; a new meaning had been given to
the words: 'God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him
in spirit and in truth.' The reason of man was at last able to study the
scheme of the universe, of which he is a part, and to ascertain the
actual laws by which it is governed. Three centuries and a half have
elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized astronomy. It is only by
reflecting on the mass of knowledge we have since acquired, knowledge
not only infinitely curious but also incalculably useful in its
application to the arts of life, and then considering how much ground of
this kind was acquired in the ten centuries which preceded the
Renaissance, that we are at all able to estimate the expansive force
which was then generated. Science, rescued from the hand of astrology,
geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with the Renaissance. Since then,
as far as to the present moment she has never ceased to grow.
Progressive and durable, Science may be called the first-born of the
spirit of the modern world.
[1] It is to Michelet that we owe these formulæ, which have
passed into the language of history.
Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the
appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable
globe, and on the other the conquest by Science of all that we now know
about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is
possible to trace a twofold process. Man in his temporal relations,
illustrated by Pagan antiquity, and man in his spiritual relations,
illustrated by Biblical antiquity; these are the two regions, at first
apparently distinct, afterwards found to be interpenetrative, which the
critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for
investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at
work, art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like
philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism--a
frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without
inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected
with the religious feelings of the people, formulæ from which to deviate
would be impious in the artist and confusing to the worshiper.
Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and
stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy; and, even
had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the natural forms
he saw around him. But with the dawning of the Renaissance, a new spirit
in the arts arose. Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in
itself and worthy of patient study. The object of the artist then became
to unite devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the
utmost beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from
the nude; he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery,
invented attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the
expression of his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he
humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister-frescoes upon which he
worked. In this way the painters rose above the ancient symbols, and
brought heaven down to earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living
human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they silently
substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual life for the
principles of the Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the
display of physical perfection, and to introduce 'un bel corpo ignudo'
into the composition was of more moment to them than to represent the
macerations of the Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the
relique and the host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which
gave it expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of
progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly
human, was revealed to their astonished eyes. Thus art, which had begun
by humanizing the legends of the Church, diverted the attention of its
students from the legend to the work of beauty, and lastly, severing
itself from the religious tradition, became the exponent of the majesty
and splendor of the human body. This final emancipation of art from
ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting.
Gazing at Michael Angelo's prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed
in contact with ideas originally religious. But the treatment of these
ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of
Pheidias. Titian's Virgin received into Heaven, soaring midway between
the archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who yearn to
follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis of
humanity conceived as a radiant mother. Throughout the picture there is
nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional. Nor did the art of
the Renaissance stop here. It went further, and plunged into Paganism.
Sculptors and painters combined with architects to cut the arts loose
from their connection with the Church by introducing a spirit and a
sentiment alien to Christianity.
Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art
introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world
a real resurrection of the body, which, since the destruction of antique
civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements within
the tomb of the mediæval cloister. It was scholarship which revealed to
men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the
value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a
thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle Ages a
few students had possessed the poems of Virgil and the prose of
Boethius--and Virgil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been
honored as saints--together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius,
Juvenal, Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading
public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same
time the Bible in its original tongues was rediscovered. Mines of
Oriental learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and
Arabic traditions. The Aryan and Semitic revelations were for the first
time subjected to something like a critical comparison. With unerring
instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous subject-matter
of scholarship 'Litteræ Humaniores,'--the more human literature, or the
literature that humanizes.
There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the
Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire; Petrarch poring
over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity
learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of
poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the
Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of
acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican
Library in 1453, Cosimo de Medici, who began the Medicean Collection a
little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and
convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek,
who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from
Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the
heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of
uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshiped by
these men, just as the reliques of Holy Land had been adored by their
great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the Crusades was revived in this
quest of the Holy Grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of Pagan
authors were valued like precious gems, reveled in like odoriferous and
gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes
of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the indifferent received
an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet begun. The world was bent
on gathering up its treasures, frantically bewailing the lost books of
Livy, the lost songs of Sappho--absorbing to intoxication the strong
wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that kept pouring from those
long-buried amphora of inspiration. What is most remarkable about this
age of scholarship is the enthusiasm which pervaded all classes in
Italy for antique culture. Popes and princes, captains of adventure and
peasants, noble ladies and the leaders of the demi-monde, alike became
scholars. There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates the
temper of the times with singular felicity. On the 18th of April 1485 a
report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen had discovered a
Roman sarcophagus while digging on the Appian Way. It was a marble tomb,
engraved with the inscription, 'Julia, Daughter of Claudius,' and inside
the coffer lay the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years,
preserved by precious unguents from corruption and the injury of time.
The bloom of youth was still upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and
mouth were half open; her long hair floated round her shoulders. She was
instantly removed, so goes the legend, to the Capitol; and then began a
procession of pilgrims from all the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this
saint of the old Pagan world. In the eyes of those enthusiastic
worshipers, her beauty was beyond imagination or description: she was
far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last
Innocent VIII. feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new
cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly and at night by his
direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble
coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in
Nantiporto with slight variations. One says that the girl's hair was
yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for
the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us
rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which
prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty
in the tomb of the classic world.[1]
[1] The most remarkable document regarding the body of Julia
which has yet been published is a Latin letter, written by
Bartholomæus Fontius to his friend Franciscus Saxethus,
minutely describing her, with details which appear to prove
that he had not only seen but handled the corpse. It is printed
in Janitschek, _Die Gesellschaft der R. in It._: Stuttgart,
1879, p. 120.
Then came the third age of scholarship--the age of the critics,
philologers, and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa
had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus. They began
their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries.
There were then no short cuts to learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no
dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of mythology
and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole mass of
classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle,
and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be struck.
Florence, Venice, Basle, Lyons, and Paris groaned with printing presses.
The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day, employing
scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose
work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate,
to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place beyond the reach of
monkish hatred or of envious time that everlasting solace of humanity
which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field
of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men,
who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the
accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer
in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1513. They then became the
inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious
expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were
endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to
think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with
emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius, or of Henricus Stephanus,
or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we
owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of
intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the
future of human culture.
This third age in the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said
to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed
on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his
"Adagia" in 1500, marks the advent of a more critical and selective
spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength
in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and
sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the
ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation,
comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of
scholarship. The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic literature
was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect. The modern world was
brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world,
and emancipated from the thralldom of unproved traditions. The force to
judge and the desire to create were generated. The immediate result in
the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely
from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The
minds of the Italians assimilated Paganism. In their hatred of mediæval
ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew
to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This
extravagance led of necessity to a reaction--in the north to Puritanism,
in the south to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation effected
under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity, that
most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously
imperiled by the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance; nor, on the
other hand, was the progressive emancipation of the reason materially
retarded by the reaction it produced.
The transition at this point to the third branch in the discovery of
man, the revelation to the consciousness of its own spiritual freedom,
is natural. Not only did scholarship restore the classics and encourage
literary criticism; it also restored the text of the Bible, and
encouraged theological criticism. In the wake of theological freedom
followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the
Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate
the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to
the reason has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as
yet by any means accomplished. On the one side Descartes and Bacon,
Spinoza and Locke, are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found
philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the
Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. The whole
movement of the Reformation is a phase in that accelerated action of the
modern mind which at its commencement we call the Renaissance. It is a
mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon or as a mere
effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits in the
region of religious thought and national politics what the Renaissance
displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science--the recovered
energy and freedom of the reason. We are too apt to treat of history in
parcels, and to attempt to draw lessons from detached chapters in the
biography of the human race. To observe the connection between the
several stages of a progressive movement of the human spirit, and to
recognize that the forces at work are still active, is the true
philosophy of history.
The Reformation, like the revival of science and of culture, had its
mediæval anticipations and foreshadowings. The heretics whom the Church
successfully combated in North Italy, France, and Bohemia were the
precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared the way in the fifteenth
century. Teachers of Hebrew, founders of Hebrew type--Reuchlin in
Germany, Aleander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pamphleteer, and Erasmus as
a humanist--contribute each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part,
incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical authority, urges the
necessity of a return to the essential truth of Christianity, as
distinguished from the idols of the Church, and asserts the right of the
individual to judge, interpret, criticise, and construct opinion for
himself. The veil which the Church had interposed between the human soul
and God was broken down. The freedom of the conscience was established.
Thus the principles involved in what we call the Reformation were
momentous. Connected on the one side with scholarship and the study of
texts, it opened the path for modern biblical criticism. Connected on
the other side with the intolerance of mere authority it led to what has
since been named rationalism--the attempt to reconcile the religious
tradition with the reason, and to define the logical ideas that underlie
the conceptions of the popular religious consciousness. Again, by
promulgating the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself
with national politics, the reformation was linked historically to the
revolution. It was the Puritan Church in England stimulated by the
patriotism of the Dutch Protestants, which established our
constitutional liberty, and introduced in America the general principle
of the equality of men. This high political abstraction, latent in
Christianity, evolved by criticism, and promulgated as a gospel in the
second half of the last century, was externalized in the French
Revolution. The work that yet remains to be accomplished for the modern
world is the organization of society in harmony with democratic
principles.
Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty--the
spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of
self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world, and of
the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the
conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and
establishing the principle of political freedom. The Church was the
schoolmaster of the Middle Ages. Culture was the humanizing and refining
influence of the Renaissance. The problem for the present and the future
is how through education to render knowledge accessible to all--to break
down that barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and
layman, and which in the intermediate period has arisen between the
intelligent and ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world,
in which all men shall enjoy the same social, political, and
intellectual advantages, be realized or not, we cannot doubt that the
whole movement of humanity from the Renaissance onward has tended in
this direction. To destroy the distinctions, mental and physical, which
nature raises between individuals, and which constitute an actual
hierarchy, will always be impossible. Yet it may happen that in the
future no civilized man will lack the opportunity of being physically
and mentally the best that God has made him.
It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions which
aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern age. Discovered over
and over again, and offered at intervals to the human race at various
times and on divers soils, no effective use was made of these material
resources until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered according
to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for
the voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians in
the Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in 1250, helped Copernicus
to prove the revolution of the earth in 1530, and Galileo to
substantiate his theory of the planetary system. Printing, after
numerous useless revelations to the world of its resources, became an
art in 1438; and paper, which had long been known to the Chinese, was
first made of cotton in Europe about 1000, and of rags in 1319.
Gunpowder entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the
Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of
which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The
feudal castle, the armor of the Knight and his battle-horse, the prowess
of one man against a hundred, and the pride of aristocratic cavalry
trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the
canon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory
was delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established, as
indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common property
of every one, all thought; while paper has made the work of printing
cheap. Such reflections as these, however, are trite, and must occur to
every mind. It is far more to the purpose to repeat that not the
inventions, but the intelligence that used them, the conscious
calculating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our attention when
we direct it to the phenomena of the Renaissance.
In the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe shared.
But it must never be forgotten that as a matter of history the true
Renaissance began in Italy. It was there that the essential qualities
which distinguish the modern from the ancient and the mediæval world
were developed. Italy created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture
and of intellectual freedom which has been the life-breath of the
European races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people of
divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen and peculiar
vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in
science, in the mediation between antique culture and the modern
intellect, they took the lead, handing to Germany and France and
England the restored humanities complete. Spain and England have since
done more for the exploration and colonization of the world. Germany
achieved the labor of the Reformation almost single-handed. France has
collected, centralized, and diffused intelligence with irresistible
energy. But if we return to the first origins of the Renaissance, we
find that, at a time when the rest of Europe was inert, Italy had
already begun to organize the various elements of the modern spirit, and
to set the fashion whereby the other great nations should learn and
live.