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.

The corruption of the Papal Court involved a corresponding moral

weakness throughout Italy. This makes the history of the Popes of the

Renaissance important precisely in those details which formed the

subject of the preceding chapter. Morality and religion suffered an

almost complete separation in the fifteenth century. The chiefs of the

Church with cynical effrontery violated every tradition of Christ and

the Apostles, so that the example of Rome was in some sense the

justification of fraud, violence, lust, filthy living, and ungodliness

to the whole nation.

The contradiction between the spiritual pretensions of the Popes and

their actual worldliness was not so glaring to the men of the

Renaissance, accustomed by long habit to the spectacle of this anomaly,

as it is to us. Nor would it be scientific to imagine that any Italian

in that age judged by moral standards similar to ours. Æsthetic

propriety rather than strict conceptions of duty ruled the conduct even

of the best, and it is wonderful to observe with what artless simplicity

the worst sinners believed they might make peace in time of need with

heaven. Yet there were not wanting profound thinkers who traced the

national decay of the Italians to the corruption of the Church. Among

these Machiavelli stands foremost. In a celebrated passage of the

_Discorsi_,[1] after treating the whole subject of the connection

between good government and religion, he breaks forth into this fiery

criticism of the Papacy: 'Had the religion of Christianity been

preserved according to the ordinances of its founder, the states and

commonwealths of Christendom would have been far more united and far

happier than they are. Nor is it possible to form a better estimate of

its decay than by observing that, in proportion as we approach nearer to

the Roman Church, the head of this religion, we find less piety prevail

among the nations. Considering the primitive constitution of that

Church, and noting how diverse are its present customs, we are forced to

judge that without doubt either ruin or a scourge is now impending over

it. And since some men are of opinion that the welfare of Italy depends

upon the Church, I wish to put forth such arguments as occur to my mind

to the contrary; and of these I will adduce two, which, as I think, are

irrefutable. The first is this: that owing to the evil ensample of the

Papal Court, Italy has lost all piety and all religion: whence follow

infinite troubles and disorders; for as religion implies all good, so

its absence implies the contrary. Consequently, to the Church and

priests of Rome we Italians owe this obligation first--that we have

become void of religion and corrupt. But we also owe them another, even

greater, which is the cause of our ruin. I mean that the Church has

maintained and still maintains Italy divided. Of a truth no province

ever was united and prosperous, unless it were reduced beneath the sway

of one republic or one monarch, as is the case with France and Spain.

And the reason why Italy is not in this condition, but has neither

commonwealth nor monarch for her head, is none other than the Church:

for the Church, established in our midst and exercising a temporal

authority, has never had the force or vigor to extend its sway over the

whole country and to become the ruling power in Italy. Nor on the other

hand has it been so feeble as not to be able, when afraid of losing its

temporalities, to call in a foreign potentate, as a counterpoise in its

defense against those powers which threatened to become supreme. Of the

truth of this, past history furnishes many instances; as when, by the

help of Charlemagne, the Popes expelled the Lombards; and when in our

own days they humbled Venice by the aid of France, and afterwards drove

out the French by calling in the Swiss. So then the Church, being on the

one hand too weak to grasp the whole of Italy, and at the same time too

jealous to allow another power to do so, has prevented our union beneath

one head, and has kept us under scattered lords and princes. These have

caused so much discord and debility that Italy has become the prey not

only of powerful barbarians, but also of every assailant. And this we

owe solely and entirely to the Church. In order to learn by experience

the truth of what I say, one ought to be able to send the Roman Court,

armed with like authority to that it wields in Italy, to take up its

abode among the Swiss, who at the present moment are the only nation

living, as regards religion and military discipline, according to the

antique fashion; he would then see that the evil habits of that Court

would in no long space of time create more disorders than any other

misfortune that could arise there in any period whatever.' In this

scientific and deliberate opinion pronounced by the profoundest thinker

of the sixteenth century, the Papacy is accused of having caused both

the moral depravation and the political disunion of Italy. The second of

these points, which belongs to the general history of the Italian

nation, might be illustrated abundantly: but one other sentence from the

pen of Machiavelli exposes the ruinous and selfish policy of the Church

more forcibly than could be done by copious examples:[2] 'In this way

the Pontiffs at one time by love of their religion, at other times for

the furtherance of their ambitious schemes, have never ceased to sow the

seeds of disturbance and to call foreigners into Italy, spreading wars,

making and unmaking princes, and preventing stronger potentates from

holding the province they were too feeble to rule.'

[1] Lib. i. cap. 12.

[2] _Ist. Fior._ lib. i.

Guicciardini, commenting upon the _Discorsi_ of Machiavelli, begins his

gloss upon the passage I have just translated, with these emphatic

words:[1] 'It would be impossible to speak so ill of the Roman Court but

that more abuse would not be merited, seeing it is an infamy, an example

of all the shames and scandals of the world.' He then proceeds to argue,

like Machiavelli, that the greatness of the Church prevented Italy from

becoming a nation under one head, showing, however, at the same time

that the Italians had derived much benefit from their division into

separate states.[2] To the concurrent testimony of these great

philosophic writers may be added the evidence of a practical statesman,

Ferdinand, king of Naples, who in 1493 wrote as follows:[3] 'From year

to year up to this time we have seen the Popes seeking to hurt and

hurting their neighbors, without having to act on the defensive or

receiving any injury. Of this we are ourselves the witness, by reason of

things they have done and attempted against us through their inborn

ambition; and of the many misfortunes which have happened of late in

Italy it is clear that the Popes are authors.' It is not so much however

with the political as with the moral aspect of the Church that we are at

present concerned: and on the latter point Guicciardini may once more be

confronted with his illustrious contemporary. In his aphorisms he

says:[4] 'No man hates the ambition, avarice, and effeminacy of the

priests more than I do; for these vices, odious in themselves, are most

unseemly in men who make a profession of living in special dependence on

the Deity. Besides, they are so contradictory that they cannot be

combined except in a very extraordinary subject. My position under

several Popes has compelled me to desire their aggrandizement for the

sake of my own profit.[5] Otherwise, I should have loved Martin Luther

like myself--not that I might break loose from the laws which

Christianity, as it is usually interpreted and comprehended, imposes on

us, but that I might see that horde of villains reduced within due

limits, and forced to live either without vices or without power.'

[1] Guicc. _Op. Ined._ vol. i. p. 27.

[2] In another place (_Op. Ined._ vol. i. p. 104) Guicciardini

describes the rule of priests as founded on violence of two

sorts; 'perchè ci sforzano con le armi temporali e con le

spirituali.' It may be well to collect the chief passages in

Machiavelli and Guicciardini, besides those already quoted,

which criticise the Papacy in relation to Italian politics. The

most famous is at the end of the fourth book of the _Istoria d'

Italia_ (Edn. Rosini, vol. ii. pp. 218-30). Next may be placed

the sketch of Papal History in Machiavelli's _Istorie

Fiorentine_ (lib. i. cap. 9-25). The eleventh chapter of the

_Principe_ gives a short sketch of the growth of the temporal

power, so framed as to be acceptable to the Medici, but steeped

in the most acid irony. See, in particular, the sentence

'Costoro solo hanno stati e non li difendono, hanno sudditi e

non li governano,' etc.

[3] See the dispatch quoted by Gregorovius, _Stadt Rom_, vol.

vii. p. 7, note.

[4] _Op. Ined. Ricordi_ No. 28. Compare Ariosto, Satire i.

208-27.

[5] Guicciardini had been secretary and vicegerent of the

Medicean Popes. See back, p. 206.

These utterances are all the more remarkable because they do not proceed

from the deep sense of holiness which animated reformers like

Savonarola. Machiavelli was not zealous for the doctrines of

Christianity so much as for the decencies of an established religion. In

one passage of the _Discorsi_ he even pronounces his opinion that the

Christian faith compared with the creeds of antiquity, had enfeebled

national spirit.[1] Privately, moreover, he was himself stained with the

moral corruption which he publicly condemned. Guicciardini, again, in

the passage before us, openly avows his egotism. Keen-sighted as they

were in theory, these politicians suffered in their own lives from that

gangrene which had penetrated the upper classes of Italy to the marrow.

Their patriotism and their desire for righteousness were not strong

enough to make them relinquish the pleasure and the profit they derived

from the existing state of things. Nor had they the energy or the

opportunity to institute a thorough revolution. Italy, as Machiavelli

pointed out in another passage of the _Discorsi_, had become too

prematurely decrepit for reinvigorating changes;[2] and the splendid

appeal with which the _Principe_ is closed must even to its author have

sounded like a flourish of rhetorical trumpets.

[1] _Discorsi_, ii. 2, iii. 1. These chapters breathe the

bitterest contempt for Christianity, the most undisguised

hatred for its historical development, the intensest rancor

against Catholic ecclesiastics.

[2] _Discorsi_, i. 55.

Moreover, it seemed impossible for an Italian to rise above the

conception of a merely formal reformation, or to reach that higher

principle of life which consists in the enunciation of a new religious

truth. The whole argument in the _Discorsi_ which precedes the chapter I

have quoted, treats religion not in its essence as pure Christianity,

but as a state engine for the maintenance of public order and national

well-being.[1] That Milton and Cromwell may have so regarded religion is

true: but they had, besides, a personal sense of the necessity of

righteousness, the fear of God, at the root of their political

convictions. While Machiavelli and Guicciardini wished to deprive the

Popes of temporal sovereignty, in order that the worst scandals of their

Court might be suppressed, and that the peace of Italy might be secured,

Savonarola desired to purge the Church of sin, but to retain its

hierarchy and its dogmas inviolate. Neither the politicians nor the

prophet had discerned, what Luther and the nations of the North saw

clearly, that a fresh element of spiritual vitality was necessary for

the regeneration of society; or in other words, that good government

presupposes living religion, and not that religion should be used as an

engine for the consolidation of empire over the people.[2]

[1] Mach. _Disc._ i. 12, after exposing the shams on which, as

he believed, the religious institutions of Numa rested, asserts

that, however much governors may be persuaded of the falseness

of religions, it is their duty to maintain them: 'e debbono ...

come che le giudicassero false, favorirle e accrescerle.'

[2] Yet read the curious passage (_Disc_. iii. 1) in which

Machiavelli discusses the regeneration of religion by a return

to its vital principle, and shows how S. Francis and S. Dominic

had done this in the thirteenth century. It was precisely what

Luther was designing while Machiavelli was writing.

The inherent feebleness of Italy in this respect proceeded from an

intellectual apathy toward religious questions, produced partly by the

stigma attaching to unorthodoxy, partly by the absorbing interests of

secular culture, partly by the worldliness of the Renaissance, partly by

the infamy of the ecclesiastics, and partly by the enervating influence

of tyrannies. However bold a man might be, he dread of heretic; the term

_paterino_, originally applied to religious innovators, had become

synonymous in common phraseology with rogue. It was a point of good

society and refined taste to support the Church. Again, the mental

faculties of Italy had for three centuries been taxed to the utmost in

studies wide apart from the field of religious faith. Art, scholarship,

philosophy, and meditation upon politics had given a definite direction

to the minds of thinking men, so that little energy was left for those

instinctive movements of the spirit which produced the German

Reformation. The great work of Italy had been the genesis of the

Renaissance, the development of modern culture. And the tendencies of

the Renaissance were worldly: its ideal of human life left no room for a

pure, and ardent intuition into spiritual truth. Scholars occupied with

the interpretation of classic authors, artists bent upon investing

current notions with the form of beauty, could hardly be expected to

exclaim: 'The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil,

that is understanding.'[1] Materialism ruled the speculations no less

than the conduct of the age. Pamponazzo preached an atheistic doctrine,

with the plausible reservation of _Salva Fide_, which then covered all.

The more delicate thinkers, Pico and Ficino, sought to reconcile

irreconcilables by fusing philosophy and theology, while they

distinguished truths of science from truths of revelation. It seems

meanwhile to have occurred to no one in Italy that the liberation of the

reason necessitated an abrupt departure from Catholicism. They did not

perceive that a power antagonistic to mediæval orthodoxy had been

generated. This was in great measure due to indifference; for the Church

herself had taught her children by example to regard her dogmas and her

discipline as a convenient convention. It required all the scourges of

the Inquisition to flog the nation back, not to lively faith, but to

hypocrisy. Furthermore, the political conditions of Italy were highly

unfavorable to a profound religious revolution. The thirst for national

liberty which inspired England in the sixteenth century, impelling the

despotic Tudors to cast off the yoke of Rome, arming Howard the Catholic

against the holy fleet of Philip, and joining prince and people in one

aspiration after freedom, was impossible in Italy. The tone of

Machiavelli's _Principe_, the whole tenor of Castiglione's _Cortigiano_,

prove this without the need of further demonstration.

[1] It is well known that Savonarola's objection to classical

culture was based upon his perception of its worldliness. It is

very remarkable to note the feeling on this point of some of

the greatest northern scholars. Erasmus, for example, writes:

'unus adhuc scrupulus habet animum meum, ne sub obtentu priscæ

literaturæ renascentis caput erigere conetur Paganismus, ut

sunt inter Christianos qui titulo pæne duntaxat Christum

agnoscunt, ceterum intus Gentilitatem spirant'--Letter 207

(quoted by Milman in his Quarterly article on Erasmus). Ascham

and Melanchthon passed similar judgments upon the Italian

scholars. The nations of the north had the Italians at a

disadvantage, for they entered into their labors, and all the

dangerous work of sympathy with the ancient world, upon which

modern scholarship was based, had been done in Italy before

Germany and England came into the field.

Few things are more difficult than to estimate the exact condition of a

people at any given period with regard to morality and religion. And

this difficulty is increased tenfold when the age presents such rapid

transitions and such bewildering complexities as mark the Renaissance.

Yet we cannot omit to notice the attitude of the Italians at large in

relation to the Church, and to determine in some degree the character of

their national morality. Against the corruption of Rome one cry of

hatred and contempt arises from a crowd of witnesses. Dante's fiery

denunciations, Jacopone's threats, the fierce invectives of Petrarch,

and the thundering prophecies of Joachim lead the chorus. Boccaccio

follows with his scathing irony. 'Send the most obstinate Jew to Rome,'

he says, 'and the profligacy of the Papal Court will not fail to convert

him to the faith that can resist such obloquy.'[1] Another glaring

scandal was the condition of the convents. All novelists combine in

painting the depravity of the religious houses as a patent fact in

social life. Boccaccio, Sacchetti, Bandello, and Masuccio may be

mentioned in particular for their familiar delineation of a profligacy

which was interwoven with the national existence.[2] The comic poets

take the same course, and delight in ridiculing the gross manners of the

clergy. Nor do the ecclesiasties spare themselves. Poggio, the author

of the _Facetiæ_, held benefices and places at the Papal Court. Bandello

was a Dominican and nephew of the General of his order. Folengo was a

Benedictine. Bibbiena became a cardinal. Berni received a Canonry in the

Cathedral of Florence. Such was the open and acknowledged immorality of

the priests in Rome that more than one Papal edict was issued forbidding

them to keep houses of bad repute or to act as panders.[3] Among the

aphorisms of Pius II. is recorded the saying that if there were good

reasons for enjoining celibacy on the clergy, there were far better and

stronger arguments for insisting on their marriage.[4]

[1] We may compare this Umbrian Rispetto for the opposite view.

A Roma Santa ce so gito anch'io,

E ho visto co'miei occhi il fatto mio:

E quando a Roma ce s'e posto il piede,

Resta la rabbia e se ne va la fede.

[2] It may not be out of place to collect some passages from

Masuccio's Novelle on the Clergy, premising that what he writes

with the fierceness of indignation is repeated with the

cynicism of indulgence by contemporary novelists. Speaking of

the Popes, he says (ed, Napoli, Morano, 1874): 'me tacerò non

solo de loro scelesti ed enormissimi vizi e pubblici e occulti

adoperati, e de li officii, de beneficil, prelature, i vermigli

cappelli, che all' incanto per loro morte vendono, ma del

camauro del principe San Pietro che ne è gia stato latto

partuito baratto non farò alcuna mentione.' Descending to

prelates, he uses similar language (p. 64): 'non possa mai

pervenire ad alcun grado di prelatura se non col favore del

maestro della zecca, e quelle conviensela comprare all' incanto

come si fa dei cavalli in fiera.' A priest is (p. 31) 'il

venerabile lupo.' The members of religious orders are (p. 534)

'ministri de satanasso ... soldati del gran diavolo: (p. 25)

'piu facilmente tra cento soldati se ne trovarebbero la meta

buoni, che tra tutto un capitolo de frati ne fosse uno senza

bruttissima macchia.' It is perilous to hold any communication

with them (p. 39): 'Con loro non altri che usurai, fornicatori,

e omini di mala sorte conversare si vedeno.' Their sins against

nature (p. 65), the secret marriages of monks and nuns (p. 83),

the 'fetide cioache oi monache,' choked with the fruits of

infanticide (p. 81), not to mention their avarice (p. 55) and

gross impiety (p. 52), are described with a naked sincerity

that bears upon its face the stamp of truth.

[3] A famous passage from Agrippa (De Vanitate Scientiarum)

deserves a place here. After alluding to Sixtus IV, he says

that many state officers 'in civitatibus suis lupanaria

construunt foventque, non nihil ex meretricio questu etiam

ærario suo accumulantes emolumenti; quod quidem in Italiâ non

rarum est, ubi etiam Romana scorta in singulas hebdomadas

Julium pendent Pontifici, qui census annuus nonnunquam viginti

millia ducatos excedit, adeoque Ecclesiæ procerum id munus est,

ut una cum Ecclesiarum proventibus etiam lenociniorum numerent

mercedem. Sic enim ego illos supputantes aliquando audivi:

Habet, inquientes, ille duo beneficia, unum curaturn aureorum

viginti, alterum prioratum ducatorum quadraginta, el tres

putanas in burdello, quæ reddunt singulis hebdomadibus Julios

Viginti.'

[4] Very few ecclesiastics of high rank escaped the contagion

of Roman society. It was fashionable for men like Bembo and La

Casa to form connections with women of the _demi-monde_ and to

recognize their children, whose legitimation they frequently

procured. The Capitoli of the burlesque poets show that this

laxity of conduct was pardonable, when compared with other

laughingly avowed and all but universal indulgences. Once more,

compare Guidiccioni's letter to M. Giamb. Bernardi Opp. vol. i.

p. 102.

Some of the contempt and hatred expressed by the Italian satirists for

the two great orders of S. Francis and S. Dominic may perhaps be due to

an ancient grudge against them as a Papal police founded in the

interests of orthodoxy. But the chief point aimed at is the mixture of

hypocrisy with immorality, which rendered them odious to all classes of

society. At the same time the Franciscans embraced among their lay

brethren nearly all the population of Italy, and to die in the habit of

the order was thought the safest way of cheating the devil of his due.

Corruption had gone so far and deep that it was universally recognized

and treated with the sarcasm of levity. It roused no sincere reaction,

and stimulated no persistent indignation. Every one acknowledged it; yet

every one continued to live indolently according to the fashion of his

forefathers, acting up to Ovid's maxim--

Pro magna parte vetustas

Creditur; acceptam parce movere fidem.

It is only this incurable indifference that renders Machiavelli's comic

portraits of Fra Alberigo and Fra Timoteo at all intelligible. They are

neither satires nor caricatures, but simple pictures drawn for the

amusement of contemporaries and the stupefaction of posterity.

The criticism of the Italian writers, so far as we have yet followed it,

was directed against two separate evils--the vicious worldliness of

Rome, and the demoralization of the clergy both in their dealings with

the people and in their conventual life. Contempt for false miracles and

spurious reliques, and the horror of the traffic in indulgences,

swelled the storm of discontent among the more enlightened. But the

people continued to make saints, to adore wonder-working shrines, and to

profit by the spiritual advantages which could be bought. Pius II.,

mindful of the honor of his native city, canonized S. Bernardine and S.

Catherine of Siena. Innocent VIII consecrated a chapel for the Lance of

Longinus, which he had received from the Turk as part-payment for the

guardianship of Djem. The Venetian Senate offered 10,000 ducats for the

seamless coat of Christ (1455). The whole of Italy was agitated by the

news that S. Andrew's head had arrived from Patras (1462). The Pope and

his Cardinals went forth to meet it near the Milvian bridge. There Pius

II. pronounced a Latin speech of welcome, while Bessarion delivered an

oration when the precious member was deposited in S. Peter's. In this

passion for reliques two different sentiments seem to have been

combined--the merely superstitious belief in the efficacy of charms,

which caused the Venetians to guard the body of S. Mark so jealously,

and the Neapolitans to watch the liqifaction of the blood of S.

Januarius with a frenzy of excitement--and that nobler respect for the

persons of the mighty dead which induced Sigismondo Malatesta to

transport the body of Gemistus Pletho to Rimini, and which rendered the

supposed coffin of Aristotle at Palermo an object of admiration to

Mussulman and Christian alike. The bones of Virgil, it will be

remembered, had been built into the walls of Naples, while those of Livy

were honored with splendid sepulture at Padua.

Owing to the separation between religion and morality which existed in

Italy under the influence of Papal and monastic profligacy, the Italians

saw no reason why spiritual benefits should not be purchased from a

notoriously rapacious Pontiff, or why the penalty of hell should not

depend upon the mere word of a consecrated monster. The Pope as

successor of S. Peter, and the Pope as Roman sovereign, were two

separate beings. Many curious indications of the mixed feeling of the

people upon this point, and of the advantage which the Pope derived from

his anomalous position, may be gathered from the historians of the

period. Machiavelli, in his narrative of the massacre at Sinigaglia,

relates that Vitellozzo Vitelli, while being strangled by Cesare

Borgia's assassin, begged hard that the father of his murderer, the

horrible Alexander, might be entreated to pronounce his absolution. The

same Alexander was nearly suffocated in the Vatican by the French

soldiers who crowded round to kiss his mantle, and who had made him

tremble for his life a few days previously. Cellini on his knees

implored Pope Clement to absolve him from the guilt of homicide and

theft, yet spoke of him as 'transformed to a savage beast' by a sudden

access of fury. At one time he trembled before the awful Majesty of

Christ's Vicar, revealed in Paul III.; at another he reviled him as a

man 'who neither believed in God nor in any other article of religion.

A mysterious sanctity environed the person of the Pontiff. When

Gianpaolo Baglioni held Julius II. in his power in Perugia, he respected

the Pope's freedom, though he knew that Julius would overthrow his

tyranny. Machiavelli condemns this as cowardice, but it was wholly

consistent with the sentiment of the age. 'It cannot have been goodness

or conscience which restrained him,' writes the philosopher of Florence,

'for the heart of a man who cohabited with his sister, and had massacred

his cousins and his nephews, could not have harbored any piety. We must

conclude that men know not how to be either guilty in a noble manner, or

entirely good. Although crime may have a certain grandeur of its own, or

at least a mixture of more generous motives, they do not attain to this.

Gianpaolo, careless though he was about incest and parricide, could not,

or dared not, on a just occasion, achieve an exploit for which the whole

world would have admired his spirit, and by which he would have won

immortal glory: for he would have been the first to show how little

prelates, living and ruling as they do, deserve to be esteemed, and

would have done a deed superior in its greatness to all the infamy, to

all the peril, that it might have brought with it.'[1] It is difficult

to know which to admire most, the superstition of Gianpaolo, or the

cynicism of the commentary, the spurious piety which made the tyrant

miss his opportunity, or the false standard of moral sublimity by which

the half-ironical critic measures his mistake. In combination they

produce a lively impression of the truth of what I have attempted to

establish--that in Italy at this period religion survived as

superstition even among the most depraved, and that the crimes of the

Church had produced a schism between this superstition and morality.

[1] _Discorsi_, i. 27. This episode in Gianpaolo Baglioni's

life may be illustrated by the curious story told about Gabrino

Fondulo, the tyrant of Cremona. The Emperor Sigismund and Pope

John XXIII. were his guests together in the year 1414. Part of

their entertainment consisted in visiting the sights of Cremona

with their host, who took them up the great Tower (396 feet

high) without any escort. They all three returned safely, but

when Gabrino was executed at Milan in 1425, he remarked that he

only regretted one thing in the course of his life--namely,

that he had not pitched Pope and Emperor together from the

Torazzo. What a golden opportunity to have let slip! The story

is told by Antonio Campo, _Historia di Cremona_ (Milan, 1645),

p. 114.

While the Church was thus gradually deviating more and more directly

from the Christian ideal, and was exhibiting to Italy an ensample of

worldliness and evil living, the Italians, earlier than any other

European nation, had become imbued with the spirit of the ancient world.

Instead of the Gospel and the Lives of the Saints, men studied Plutarch

and Livy with avidity. The tyrannicides of Greece and the suicides of

the Roman Empire, patriots like Harmodius and Brutus, philosophers like

Seneca and Pætus Thrasea, seemed to the humanists of the fifteenth

century more admirable than the martyrs and confessors of the faith.

Pagan virtues were strangely mingled with confused and ill-assimilated

precepts of the Christian Church, while pagan vices wore a halo borrowed

from the luster of the newly found and passionately welcomed poets of

antiquity. Blending the visionary intuitions of the Middle Ages with the

positive and mundane ethics of the ancients, the Italians of the

Renaissance strove to adopt the sentiments and customs of an age long

dead and not to be resuscitated. At the same time the rhetorical taste

of the nation inclined the more adventurous and passionate natures to

seek glory by dramatic exhibitions of personal heroism. The Greek ideal

of [Greek: _to êalon_], the Roman conception of _Virtus_, agitated the

imagination of a people who had been powerfully influenced by professors

of eloquence, by public orators, by men of letters, masters in the arts

of style and of parade. Painting and sculpture, and that magnificence of

public life which characterized the fifteenth century, contributed to

the substitution of æsthetic for moral or religious standards. Actions

were estimated by the effect which they produced; and to sin against the

laws of culture was of more moment than to transgress the code of

Christianity. Still, the men of the Renaissance could not forget the

creed which they had drawn in with their mothers' milk, but which the

Church had not adjusted to the new conditions of the growing age. The

result was a wild phantasmagoric chaos of confused and clashing

influences.

Of this peculiar moral condition the records of the numerous

tyrannicides supply many interesting examples.[1] Girolamo Olgiati

offered prayers to S. Ambrose for protection before he stabbed the Duke

of Milan in S. Stephen's Church.[2] The Pazzi conspirators, intimidated

by the sanctity of the Florentine Duomo, had to employ a priest to wield

the sacrilegious dagger.[3] Pietro Paolo Boscoli's last confession,

after the failure of his attempt to assassinate the Medici in 1513, adds

further details in illustration of the mixture of religious feeling with

patriotic paganism. Luca della Robbia, the nephew of the great sculptor

of that name, and himself no mean artist, visited his friend Boscoli on

the night of his execution, and wrote a minute account of their

interview. Both of these men were members of the Confraternità de' Neri,

who assumed the duty of comforting condemned prisoners with spiritual

counsel, prayer, and exhortation. The narrative, dictated in the

choicest vernacular Tuscan, by an artist whose charity and beauty of

soul transpire in every line in contrast with the fiercer fortitude of

Boscoli, is one of the most valuable original documents for this period

which we possess.[4] What is most striking is the combination of deeply

rooted and almost infantine piety with antique heroism in the young

patriot. He is greatly concerned because, ignorant of his approaching

end, he had eaten a hearty supper: 'Son troppo carico di cibo, et ho

mangiatccose insalate; in modo che non mi pare poter unir Io spirito a

Dio ... Iddio abbi di me misericordia, che costoro m' hanno carico di

cibo. Oh indiscrezione!'[5] Then he expresses a vehement desire for the

services of a learned confessor, to resolve his intellectual doubts,

pleading with all the earnestness of desperate conviction that the

salvation of his soul must depend upon his orthodoxy at the last. He

complains that he ought to have been allowed at least a month's

seclusion with good friars before he was brought face to face with

death. At another time he is chiefly anxious to free himself from

classic memories: 'Deh! Luca, cavatemi della testa quel Bruto, acciò ch'

io faccia questo passo interamente da Cristiano'.[6] Then again it

grieves him that the tears of compunction, which he has been taught to

regard as the true sign of a soul at one with God, will not flow. About

the mere fact of dying he has no anxiety. The philosophers have

strengthened him upon that point. He is only eager to die piously. When

he tries to pray, he can barely remember the Paternoster and the Ave

Maria. That reminds him how easy it would have been to have spent his

time better, and he bids Luca remember that the mind a man makes for

himself in life, will be with him in death. When they bring him a

picture of Christ, he asks whether he needs _that_ to fix his soul upon

his Saviour. Throughout this long contention of so many varying

thoughts, he never questions the morality of the act for which he is

condemned to die. Luca, however, has his doubts, and privately asks the

confessor whether S. Thomas Aquinas had not discountenanced tyrannicide.

'Yes,' answers the monk, 'in case the people have elected their own

tyrant, but not when he has imposed himself on them by force.' This

casuistical answer satisfies Luca that his friend may reasonably be held

blameless. After confessing, Boscoli received the sacrament with great

piety, and died bravely. The confessor told Luca, weeping, that he was

sure the young man's soul had gone straight to Paradise, and that he

might be reckoned a real martyr. His head after death was like that of

an angel; and Luca was, we know, a connoisseur in angels' heads. Boscoli

was only thirty-two years of age; he had light hair, and was

short-sighted.

[1] For the Italian ethics of tyrannicide, see back, pp. 169,

170.

[2] See p. 166.

[3] See p. 398.

[4] It is printed in _Arch. Stor_, vol. i.

[5] 'I am over-burdened with food, and I have eaten salt meats;

so that I do not seem able to join my spirit to God.... God

have pity on me, for they have burdened me with food. Oh, how

thoughtless of them!' His words cannot be translated. Naïf in

the extreme, they become ludicrous in English.

[6] 'Ah, Luca, turn that Brutus out of my head, in order that I

may take this last step wholly as a Christian man!'

To this narrative might be added the apology written by Lorenzino de'

Medici, after the murder of his cousin Alessandro in 1536.[1] He relies

for his defense entirely upon arguments borrowed from Pagan ethics, and

by his treatment of the subject vindicates for himself that name of

Brutus with which Filippo Strozzi in person at Venice, and Varchi and

Molsa in Latin epigrams, saluted him. There is no trace of Christian

feeling in this strong and splendid display of rhetorical ability; nor

does any document of the age more forcibly exhibit the extent to which

classical studies had influenced the morality of the Renaissance.

Lorenzino, however, when he wrote it, was not, like Boscoli, upon the

point of dying.

[1] It is printed at the end of the third volume of Varchi, pp.

283-95; compare p. 210. A medal in honor of Lorenzino's

tyrannicide was struck with a profile copied from Michael

Angelo's bust of Brutus.

The last thing to perish in a nation is its faith. The whole history of

the world proves that no anomalies are so glaring, no inconsistencies so

paradoxical, as to sap the credit of a religious system which has once

been firmly rooted in the habits, instincts, and traditions of a race:

and what remains longest is often the least rational portion. Religions

from the first are not the product of logical reflection or experiment,

but of sentiment and aspiration. They come into being as simple

intuitions, and afterwards invade the province of the reason and

assimilate the thought of centuries to their own conceptions. This is

the secret of their strength as well as the source of their weakness. It

is only a stronger enthusiasm, a new intuition, a fresh outburst of

emotional vitality, that can supplant the old:--

'Cotal rimedio ha questo aspro furore,

Tale acqua suole spegner questo fuoco,

Come d'asse si trae chiodo con chiodo.'

Criticism from without, internal corruption, patent absurdity, are

comparatively powerless to destroy those habits of belief which once

have taken hold upon the fancy and the feeling of a nation. The work of

dissolution proceeds in silence and in secret. But the established

order subsists until the moment comes for a new synthesis. And in the

sixteenth century the necessary impulse of regeneration was to come, not

from Italy, satisfied with the serenity of her art, preoccupied with her

culture, and hardened to the infamy of her corruption, but from the

Germany of the barbarians she despised.

These considerations will help to explain how it was that the Church, in

spite of its corruption, stood its ground and retained the respect of

the people in Italy. We must moreover bear in mind that, bad as it was,

it still to some extent maintained the Christian verity. Apart from the

Roman Curia and the Convents, there existed a hierarchy of able and

God-fearing men, who by the sanctity of their lives, by the gravity of

their doctrine, by the eloquence of their preaching, by their

ministration to the sick, by the relief of the poor, by the maintenance

of hospitals, Monti di Pietà, schools and orphanages, kept alive in the

people of Italy the ideal at least of a religion pure and undefiled

before God.[1] In the tottering statue of the Church some true metal

might be found between the pinchbeck at the summit and the clay of the

foundation.

[1] See the life of S. Antonino, the good Archbishop of

Florence.

It must also be remembered how far the worldly interests and domestic

sympathies of the Italians were engaged in the maintenance of their

Church system. The fibers of the Church were intertwined with the very

heartstrings of the people. Few families could not show one or more

members who had chosen the clerical career, and who looked to Rome for

patronage, employment, and perhaps advancement to the highest honors.

The whole nation felt a pride in the Eternal City: patriotic vanity and

personal interest were alike involved in the maintenance of the

metropolis of Christendom, which drew the suites of ambassadors,

multitudes of pilgrims, and the religious traffic of the whole of Europe

to the shores of Italy. It was easy for Germans and Englishmen to reason

calmly about dethroning the Papal hierarchy. Italians, however they

might loathe the temporal power, could not willingly forego the

spiritual primacy of the civilized world.

Moreover, the sacraments of the Church, the absolutions, consecrations,

and benedictions which priests dispensed or withheld at pleasure, had by

no means lost their power. To what extent even the nations of the north

still clung to them is proved by our own Liturgy, framed in the tumult

of war with Rome, yet so worded as to leave the utmost resemblance to

the old ritual consistent with the spirit of the Reformation. Far more

imposing were they in their effect upon the imagination of Italians, who

had never dreamed of actual rebellion, who possessed the fountain of

Apostolical privileges in the person of the Pope, and whose southern

temperament inclined them to a more sensuous and less metaphysical

conception of Christianity than the Germans or the English. The dread of

the Papal Interdict was still a reality. Though the clergy of Florence,

roused to retaliative fury, might fling back in the teeth of Sixtus such

words as _leno matris suæ, adulterorum minister, diaboli vicarius_, yet

the people could not long endure 'the niggardly and imperfect rites, the

baptism sparingly administered, the extreme unction or the last

sacrament coldly vouchsafed to the chosen few, the churchyard closed

against the dead,' which, to quote the energetic language of Dean

Milman,[1] were the proper fruits of the Papal ban, however unjustly

issued and however manfully resisted.

[1] Latin Christianity, vol. vi. p. 361.

The history of the despots and the Popes, together with the analysis of

Machiavelli's political ethics, prove the demoralization of a society in

which crimes so extravagant could have their origin, and cynicism so

deliberate could be accepted as a system. Yet it remains in estimating

the general character of Italian morality to record the judgment passed

upon it by foreign nations of a different complexion. The morality of

races, as of individuals, is rarely otherwise than mixed--virtue

balancing vice and evil vitiating goodness. Still the impression

produced by Renaissance Italy upon observers from the North was almost

wholly bad. Our own ancestors returned from their Italian travels either

horrified with what they had witnessed, or else contaminated. Ascham

writes:[1] 'I was once in Italy myself; but I thank God my abode there

was but nine days; and yet I saw in that little time, in one city, more

liberty to sin than ever I heard tell of in our noble City of London in

nine years. I saw it was there as free to sin, not only without all

punishment, but also without any man's marking, as it is free in the

City of London to choose without all blame whether a man lust to wear

shoe or pantocle.' Robert Greene, who did so much to introduce the

novels of Italy into England, confesses that during his youthful travels

in the south he 'saw and practiced such villany as it is abominable to

declare.'[2] The whole of our dramatic literature corroborates these

witnesses, while the proverb, _Inglese Italianato è un diavolo

incarnato_, quoted by Sidney, Howell, Parker, Ascham, shows how

pernicious to the coarser natures of the north were the refined vices of

the south. What principally struck our ancestors in the morality of the

Italians was the license allowed in sensual indulgences, and the bad

faith which tainted all public and private dealings. In respect to the

latter point, what has already been said about Machiavelli is

enough.[3] Loyalty was a virtue but little esteemed in Italy:

engagements seemed made to be broken; even the crime of violence was

aggravated by the crime of perfidy, a bravo's stiletto or a slow poison

being reckoned among the legitimate means for ridding men of rivals or

for revenging a slight. Yet it must not be forgotten that the commercial

integrity of the Italians ranked high. In all countries of Europe they

carried on the banking business of monarchs, cities, and private

persons.

[1] _The Schoolmaster;_ edn. 1863, p. 87. The whole discourse

on Italian traveling and Italian influence is very curious,

when we reflect that at this time contact with Italy was

forming the chief culture of the English in literature and

social manners. The ninth satire in Marston's _Scourge of

Villanie_ contains much interesting matter on the same point.

Howell's _Instructions for forreine Travell_ furnishes the

following illustration: 'And being in Italy, that great

limbique of working braines, he must be very circumspect in his

carriage, for she is able to turne a Saint into a devill, and

deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himself, and

become a prey to dissolute courses and wantonnesse.'

[2] _The Repentance of Robert Greene_, quoted in the memoir to

Dyce's edition of his Dramatic Works.

[3] See chapter v.

With reference to carnal vice, it cannot be denied that the corruption

of Italy was shameful. Putting aside the profligacy of the convents, the

City of Rome in 1490 is reported to have held as many as 6,800 public

prostitutes, besides those who practiced their trade under the cloak of

concubinage.[1] These women were accompanied by confederate ruffians,

ready to stab, poison, and extort money; thus violence and lust went

hand in hand, and to this profligate lower stratum of society may be

ascribed the crimes of lawlessness which rendered Rome under Innocent

VIII. almost uninhabitable. Venice, praised for its piety by De

Comines,[2] was the resort of all the debauchees of Europe who could

afford the time and money to visit this modern Corinth. Tom Coryat, the

eccentric English traveler, gives a curious account of the splendor and

refinement displayed by the demi-monde of the lagoons, and Marston

describes Venice as a school of luxury in which the monstrous Aretine

played professor.[3] Of the state of morals in Florence Savonarola's

sermons give the best picture.

[1] Infessura, p. 1997. He adds: 'Consideratur modo qualiter

vivatur Romæ ubi caput fidei est.' From what Parent Duchatelet

_(Prostitution dans la Ville de Paris,_ p. 27) has noted

concerning the tendency to exaggerate the numbers of

prostitutes in any given town, we have every reason to regard

the estimate of Infessura as excessive. In Paris, in 1854,

there were only 4,206 registered 'filles publiques,' when the

population of the city numbered 1,500,000 persons; while those

who exercised their calling clandestinely were variously

computed at 20,000 or 40,000 and upwards to 60,000. Accurate

statistics relating to the population of any Italian city in

the fifteenth century do not, unfortunately, exist.

[2] _Memoirs,_ lib. vii. 'C'est la plus triomphante cité que

j'ai jamais vue, et qui plus fait d'honneur à ambassadeurs et

étrangers, et qui plus sagement se gouverne, _et ou le service

de Dieu est le plus solemnellement faict.'_ The prostitutes of

Venice were computed to number 11,654 so far back as the end of

the 14th century. See Filiasi, quoted by Mutinelli in his

_Annali urbani di Venezia._

[3] Satires, ii.

But the characteristic vice of the Italian was not coarse sensuality. He

required the fascination of the fancy to be added to the allurement of

the senses.[1] It is this which makes the Capitoli of the burlesque

poets, of men of note like Berni, La Casa, Varchi, Mauro, Molsa, Dolce,

Bembo, Firenzuola, Bronzino, Aretino, and de' Medici, so amazing. The

crudest forms of debauchery receive the most refined and highly finished

treatment in poems which are as remarkable for their wit as for their

cynicism. A like vein of elaborate innuendo runs through the _Canti

Carnascialeschi_ of Florence, proving that however profligate the people

might have been, they were not contented with grossness unless seasoned

with wit. The same excitement of the fancy, playing freely in the

lawlessness of sensual self-indulgence and heightening the consciousness

of personal force in the agent, rendered the exercise of ingenuity or

the avoidance of peril an enhancement of pleasure to the Italians. This

is perhaps one of the reasons why all the imaginative compositions of

the Renaissance, especially the _Novelle,_ turn upon adultery. Judging

by the majority of these romances, by the comedies of the time, and by

the poetry of Ariosto, we are compelled to believe that such illicit

love was merely sensual, and owed its principal attractions to the scope

it afforded for whimsical adventures. Yet Bembo's _Asolani,_

Castiglione's panegyric of Platonic Love, and much of the lyrical poetry

in vogue warn us to be cautious. The old romantic sentiment expressed by

the Florentines of the thirteenth century still survived to some extent,

adding a sort of dignity in form at least to these affections.

[1] Much might be written about the play of the imagination

which gave a peculiar complexion to the profligacy, the

jealousy, and the vengeance of the Italians. I shall have

occasion elsewhere to maintain that in their literature at

least the Italians were not a highly imaginative race; nor were

they subject to those highly wrought conditions of the brooding

fancy, termed by the northern nations Melancholy, which Dürer

has personified in his celebrated etching, and Burton has

described in his _Anatomy._ But in their love and hatred, their

lust and their cruelty, the Italians required an intellectual

element which brought the imaginative faculty into play.

It was due again in a great measure to their demand for imaginative

excitement in all matters of the sense, to their desire for the

extravagant and extraordinary as a seasoning of pleasure, that the

Italians came to deserve so terrible a name among the nations for

unnatural passions.[1] This is a subject which can hardly be touched in

passing: yet the opinion may be recorded that it belongs rather to the

science of psychopathy than to the chronicle of vulgar lusts. English

poets have given us the right key to the Italian temperament, on this as

on so many other points. Shelley in his portrait of Francesco Cenci has

drawn a man in whom cruelty and incest have become appetites of the

distempered soul; the love of Giovanni and Annabella in Ford's tragedy

is rightly depicted as more imaginative than sensual. It is no excuse

for the Italians to say that they had spiritualized abominable vices.

What this really means is that their immorality was nearer that of

devils than of beasts. But in seeking to distinguish its true character,

we must take notice of the highly wrought fantasy which seasoned both

their luxury and their jealousy, their vengeance and their lust.

[1] Italian literature is loud-voiced on this topic. The

concluding stanzas of Poliziano's _Orfeo_, recited before the

Cardinal of Mantua, the Capitoli of Berni, Bronzino, La Casa,

and some of the _Canti Carnasialeschi_, might be cited. We

might add Varchi's express testimony as to the morals of

Filippo Strozzi, Lorenzino de' Medici, Pier Luigi Farnese, and

Clement VII. What Segni (lib. x. p. 409) tells us about the

brave Giovanni Bandini is also very significant. In the Life of

San Bernardino of Siena, Vespasiano (_Vite di Illustri Uomini_,

p. 186) writes: 'L'Italia, ch' era piena di queste tenebre, e

aveva lasciata ogni norma di buoni costumi, e non era più chi

conoscesse Iddio. Tanto erano sommersi e sepulti ne' maladetti

e abbominevoli vizi nefandi! Gli avevano in modo messi in uso,

che non temevano nè Iddio nè l'onore del mondo. Maladetta

cecità! In tanto eccesso era venuto ogni cosa, che gli

scellerati ed enormi vizi non era più chi gli stimasse, per lo

maladetto uso che n'avevano fatto ... massime il maladetto e

abominando e detestando peccato della sodomia. Erano in modo

stracorsi in questa cecità, che bisognava che l'onnipotente

Iddio facesse un' altra volta piovere dal cielo zolfo e fuoco

come egli fece a Sodoma e Gomorra.' Compare Savonarola passim,

the inductions to the Sacre Rappresentazioni, the familiar

letters of Machiavelli, and the statute of Cosimo against this

vice (year 1542, Sabellii Summa. Venice, 1715; vol. v. p. 287).

The same is to some extent true of their cruelty. The really cruel

nation of the Renaissance was Spain, not Italy.[1] The Italians, as a

rule, were gentle and humane, especially in warfare.[2] No Italian army

would systematically have tortured the whole population of a captured

city day after day for months, as the Spaniards did in Rome and Milan,

to satisfy their avarice and glut their stolid appetite for blood. Their

respect for human life again was higher than that of the French or

Swiss. They gave quarter to their foes upon the battle-field, and were

horrified with the massacres in cold blood perpetrated at Fivizzano and

Rapallo by the army of Charles VIII. But when the demon of cruelty

possessed the imagination of an Italian, when, like Gian Maria Visconti,

he came to relish the sight of torment for its own sake, or when he

sought to inspire fear by the spectacle of pain, then no Spaniard

surpassed him in the ingenuity of his devices. In gratifying his thirst

for vengeance he was never contented with mere murder. To obtain a

personal triumph at the expense of his enemy by the display of superior

cunning, by rendering him ridiculous, by exposing him to mental as well

as physical anguish, by wounding him through his affections or his sense

of honor, was the end which he pursued. This is why so many acts of

violence in Italy assumed fantastic forms. Even the country folk showed

an infernal art in the execution of their _vendette_. To serve the flesh

of children up to their fathers at a meal of courtesy is mentioned, for

example, as one mode of wreaking vengeance in country villages. Thus the

high culture and æsthetic temperament of the Italians gave an

intellectual quality to their vices. Crude lust and bloodshed were

insipid to their palates: they required the pungent sauce of a

melodramatic catastrophe.

[1] Those who wish to gain a lively notion of Spanish cruelty

in Italy should read, besides the accounts of the Sacco di Roma

by Guicciardini and Buonaparte, the narrative of the Sacco di

Prato in the _Archivio Storico Italiano_, vol. i., and

Cagnola's account of the Spanish occupation of Milan, ib. vol.

iii.

[2] De Comines more than once notices the humanity shown by the

Italian peasants to the French army.

The drunkenness and gluttony of northern nations for a like reason found

no favor in Italy. It disgusted the Romans beyond measure to witness the

swinish excesses of the Germans. Their own sensuality prompted them to a

refined Epicureanism in food and drink; on this point, however, it must

be admitted that the prelates, here as elsewhere foremost in profligacy,

disgraced the age of Leo with banquets worthy of Vitellius.[1] We trace

the same play of the fancy, the same promptitude to quicken and

intensify the immediate sense of personality at any cost of

after-suffering, in another characteristic vice of the Italians.

Gambling among them was carried further and produced more harm than it

did in the transalpine cities. This we gather from Savonarola's

denunciations, from the animated pictures drawn by Alberti in his

_Trattato della Famiglia_ and _Cena della Famiglia_ and also from the

inductions to many of the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_.[2]

[1] See Gregorovius, _Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. p. 225: 'E li

cardinali comenzarono a vomitar e cussi li altri,' quoted from

Sanudo.

[2] One of the excellent characteristics of Alfonso the Great

(_Vespasiano_, p. 49) was his abhorrence of gambling.

Another point which struck a northern visitor in Italy was the frequency

of private and domestic murders.[1] The Italians had and deserved a bad

reputation for poisoning and assassination. To refer to the deeds of

violence in the history of a single family, the Baglioni of Perugia, as

recorded by their chronicler Matarazzo; to cite the passages in which

Varchi relates the deaths by poison of Luisa Strozzi, Cardinal Ippolito

de' Medici, and Sanga; or to translate the pages of annalists, who

describe the palaces of nobles swarming with _bravi_, would be a very

easy task.[2] But the sketch of Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, which

will form part of my third volume, gives so lively a picture of this

aspect of Italian life, that there is no reason to enlarge upon the

topic now. It is enough to observe that, in their employment of poison

and of paid assassins, the Italians were guided by those habits of

calculation which distinguished their character.[3] They thought nothing

of removing an enemy by craft or violence: but they took no pleasure in

murder for its own sake.[4] The object which they had in view prompted

them to take a man's life; the mere delight in brawls and bloodshed of

Switzers, Germans, and Spaniards offended their taste.

[1] See Guicc. _St. Il._ vol. i. p. 101, for the impression

produced upon the army of Charles by the murder by poison of

Gian Galeazzo Sforza.

[2] A vivid illustration of the method adopted by hired

assassins in tracking and hunting down their victims is

presented by Francesco Bibboni's narrative of his murder of

Lorenzino de' Medici at Venice. It casts much curious light,

moreover, on the relations between paid _bravi_ and their

employers, the esteem in which professional cutthroats were

held, and their connection with the police of the Italian

towns. It is published in a tract concerning Lorenzino, Milano,

Daelli, 1862.

[3] See the instructions given by the Venetian government to

their agents for the purchase of poison and the hiring of

secret murderers. See also the Maxims laid down by Sarpi.

[4] This at least was accounted eccentric and barbarous in the

extreme. See Pontano, _de Immanitate_, vol. i. p. 326,

concerning Niccolo Fortibraccio, Antonio, Pontadera, and the

Riccio Montechiaro, who stabbed and strangled for the pleasure

of seeing men die. I have already discussed the blood-madness

of some of the despots.

While the imagination played so important a part in the morality of the

Italians, it must be remembered that they were deficient in that which

is the highest imaginative safeguard against vice, a scrupulous sense of

honor. It is true that the Italian authors talk much about _Onore_.

Pandolfini tells his sons that _Onore_ is one of the qualities which

require the greatest thrift in keeping, and Machiavelli asserts that it

is almost as dangerous to attack men in their _Onore_ as in their

property. But when we come to analyze the word, we find that it means

something different from that mixture of conscience, pride, and

self-respect which makes a man true to a high ideal in all the possible

circumstances of life. The Italian _Onore_ consisted partly of the

credit attaching to public distinction, and partly of a reputation for

_Virtù_, understanding that word in its Machiavellian usage, as force,

courage, ability, virility. It was not incompatible with craft and

dissimulation, or with the indulgence of sensual vices. Statesmen like

Guicciardini, who, by the way, has written a fine paragraph upon the

very word in question,[1] did not think it unworthy of their honor to

traffic in affairs of state for private profit. Machiavelli not only

recommended breaches of political faith, but sacrificed his principles

to his pecuniary interests with the Medici. It would be curious to

inquire how far the obtuse sensibility of the Italians on this point was

due to their freedom from vanity.[2] No nation is perhaps less

influenced by mere opinion, less inclined to value men by their

adventitious advantages: the Italian has the courage and the

independence of his personality. It is, however, more important to take

notice that Chivalry never took a firm root in Italy; and honor, as

distinguished from vanity, _amour propre_, and credit, draws its life

from that ideal of the knightly character which Chivalry established.

The true knight was equally sensitive upon the point of honor, in all

that concerned the maintenance of an unsullied self, whether he found

himself in a king's court or a robber's den. Chivalry, as epitomized in

the celebrated oath imposed by Arthur on his peers of the Round Table,

was a northern, a Teutonic, institution. The sense of honor which formed

its very essence was further developed by the social atmosphere of a

monarch's court. It became the virtue of the nobly born and chivalrously

nurtured, as appears very remarkably in this passage from Rabelais[3]:

'En leur reigle n'estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras. Parce

que gens liberes, bien nayz, bien instruictz, conversans en compaignies

honnesties, ont par nature ung instinct et aguillon qui toujours les

poulse à faitctz vertueux, et retire de vice: lequel ils nommoyent

honneur.' Now in Italy not only was Chivalry as an institution weak; but

the feudal courts in which it produced its fairest flower, the knightly

sense of honor, did not exist.[4] Instead of a circle of peers gathered

from all quarters of the kingdom round the font of honor in the person

of the sovereign, commercial republics, forceful tyrannies, and the

Papal Curia gave the tone to society. In every part of the peninsula

rich bankers who bought and sold cities, adventurers who grasped at

principalities by violence or intrigue, and priests who sought the

aggrandizement of a sacerdotal corporation, were brought together in the

meshes of diplomacy. The few noble families which claimed a feudal

origin carried on wars for pay by contract in the interest of burghers,

popes, or despots. Of these conditions not one was conducive to the

sense of honor as conceived in France or England. Taken altogether and

in combination, they could not fail to be eminently unfavorable to its

development. In such a society Bayard and Sir Walter Manny would have

been out of place: the motto _noblesse oblige_ would have had but little

meaning.[5] Instead of Honor, Virtù ruled the world in Italy. The moral

atmosphere again was critical and highly intellectualized. Mental

ability combined with personal daring gave rank. But the very subtlety

and force of mind which formed the strength of the Italians proved

hostile to any delicate sentiment of honor. Analysis enfeebles the tact

and spontaneity of feeling which constitute its strongest safeguard. All

this is obvious in the ethics of the _Principe_. What most astounds us

in that treatise is the assumption that no men will be bound by laws of

honor when utility or the object in view require their sacrifice. In

conclusion; although the Italians were not lacking in integrity,

honesty, probity, or pride, their positive and highly analytical genius

was but little influenced by that chivalrous honor which was an

enthusiasm and a religion to the feudal nations, surviving the decay of

chivalry as a preservative instinct more undefinable than absolute

morality. Honor with the northern gentry was subjective; with the

Italians _Onore_ was objective--an addition conferred from without, in

the shape of reputation, glory, titles of distinction, or offices of

trust.[6]

[1] Ricordi politici e civili, No. 118, _Op. Ined._ vol. i.

[2] See De Stendhal, _Histoire de la peinture en Italie_, pp.

285-91, for a curious catalogue of examples. The modern sense

of honor is based, no doubt, to some extent on a delicate

_amour propre_, which makes a man desirous of winning the

esteem of his neighbors for its own sake. Granting that

conscience, pride, vanity, and self-respect are all

constituents of honor, we may, perhaps, find more pride in the

Spanish, more _amour propre_ in the French, and more conscience

in the English.

[3] Gargantua, lib. 1. ch. 57.

[4] See, however, what I have already said about Castiglione

and his ideal of the courtier in Chapter III. We must remember

that he represents a late period of the Renaissance.

[5] It is curious to compare, for example, the part played by

Italians, especially by Venice, Pisa, Genoa, Amalfi, as

contractors and merchants in the Crusades, with the enthusiasm

of the northern nations.

[6] In confirmation of this view I may call attention to

Giannotti's critique of the Florentine constitution (Florence,

1850, vol. i. pp. 15 and 156), and to what Machiavelli says

about Gianpaolo Baglioni (_Disc_. i. 27), 'Gli uomini non sanno

essere _onorevolmente_ tristi'; men know not how to be bad with

credit to themselves. The context proves that Gianpaolo failed

to win the honor of a signal crime. Compare the use of the word

_onore_ in Lorinzino de' Medici's 'Apologia.'

With the Italian conception of _Onore_ we may compare their view of

_Onestà_ in the female sex. This is set forth plainly by Piccolomini in

_La Bella Creanza delle Donne_.[1] As in the case of _Onore_, we have

here to deal, not with an exquisite personal ideal, but with something

far more material and external. The _onestà_ of a married woman is

compatible with secret infidelity, provided she does not expose herself

to ridicule and censure by letting her amour be known. Here again,

therefore, the proper translation of the word seems to be credit.

Finally, we may allude to the invective against honor which Tasso puts

into the mouths of his shepherds in _Aminta_[2] Though at this period

the influence of France and Spain had communicated to aristocratic

society in Italy an exotic sense of honor, yet a court poet dared to

condemn it as unworthy of the _Bell' età dell' oro_, because it

interfered with pleasure and introduced disagreeable duties into life.

Such a tirade would not have been endured in the London of Elizabeth or

in the Paris of Louis XIV. Tasso himself, it may be said in passing, was

almost feverishly punctilious in matters that touched his reputation.

[1] _La Raffaella, ovvero Delia bella Creanza delle Donne_

(Milano, Daelli). Compare the statement of the author in his

preface, p. 4, where he speaks in his own person, with the

definition of _Onore_ given by Raffaella, pp. 50 and 51 of the

Dialogue: 'l'onore non è riposto in altro, se non nella

stimazione appresso agli uomini ... l'onor della donna non

consiste, come t'ho detto, nel fare o non fare, chè questo

importa poco, ma nel credersi o non credersi.'

[2] This invective might be paralleled from one ot Masuccio's

Novelle (ed. Napoli, pp. 389, 390), in which he almost

cynically exposes the inconvenience of self-respect and

delicacy. The situation of two friends, who agree that honor is

a nuisance and share their wives in common, is a favorite of

the Novelists.

An important consideration, affecting the whole question of Italian

immorality, is this. Whereas the northern races had hitherto remained in

a state of comparative poverty and barbarism, distributed through

villages and country districts, the people of Italy had enjoyed

centuries of wealth and civilization in great cities. Their towns were

the centers of luxurious life. The superfluous income of the rich was

spent in pleasure, nor had modern decorum taught them to conceal the

vices of advanced culture beneath the cloak of propriety. They were at

the same time both indifferent to opinion and self-conscious in a high

degree. The very worst of them was seen at a glance and recorded with

minute particularity. The depravity of less cultivated races remained

unnoticed because no one took the trouble to describe mere barbarism.[1]

Vices of the same sort, but less widely dispersed, perhaps, throughout

the people, were notorious in Italy, because they were combined with so

much that was beautiful and splendid. In a word, the faults of the

Italians were such as belong to a highly intellectualized society, as

yet but imperfectly penetrated with culture, raised above the

brutishness of barbarians, but not advanced to the self-control of

civilization, hampered by the corruption of a Church that trafficked in

crime, tainted by uncritical contact with pagan art and literature, and

emasculated by political despotism. Their vices, bad as they were in

reality, seemed still worse because they attacked the imagination

instead of merely exercising the senses. As a correlative to their

depravity, we find a sobriety of appetite, a courtesy of behavior, a

mildness and cheerfulness of disposition, a widely diffused refinement

of sentiment and manners, a liberal spirit of toleration, which can

nowhere else be paralleled in, Europe at that period. It was no small

mark of superiority to be less ignorant and gross than England, less

brutal and stolid than Germany, less rapacious than Switzerland, less

cruel than Spain, less vain and inconsequent than France.

[1] Read, however, the Saxon Chronicles or the annals of

Ireland in Froude.

Italy again was the land of emancipated individuality. What Mill in his

Essay on Liberty desired, what seems every day more unattainable in

modern life, was enjoyed by the Italians. There was no check to the

growth of personality, no grinding of men down to match the average. If

great vices emerged more openly than they did elsewhere in Europe, great

qualities also had the opportunity of free development in heroes like

Ferrucci, in saints like Savonarola, in artists like Michael Angelo.

While the social atmosphere of the Papal and despotic courts was

unfavorable to the highest type of character, we find at least no

external engine of repression, no omnipotent inquisition, no

overpowering aristocracy.[1] False political systems and a corrupt

Church created a malaria, which poisoned the noble spirits of

Machiavelli, Ariosto, Guicciardini, Giuliano della Rovere. It does not,

however, follow therefore that the humanities of the race at large, in

spite of superstition and bad government, were vitiated.

[1] I am of course speaking of the Renaissance as distinguished

from that new phase of Italian history which followed the

Council of Trent and the Spanish despotism.

We have positive proofs to the contrary in the art of the Italians. The

April freshness of Giotto, the piety of Fra Angelico, the virginal

purity of the young Raphael, the sweet gravity of John Bellini, the

philosophic depth of Da Vinci, the sublime elevation of Michael Angelo,

the suavity of Fra Bartolommeo, the delicacy of the Della Robbia, the

restrained fervor of Rosellini, the rapture of the Sienese and the

reverence of the Umbrian masters, Francia's pathos, Mantegna's dignity,

and Luini's divine simplicity, were qualities which belonged not only to

these artists but also to the people of Italy from whom they sprang. If

men not few of whom were born in cottages and educated in workshops

could feel and think and fashion as they did, we cannot doubt that their

mothers and their friends were pure and pious, and that the race which

gave them to the world was not depraved. Painting in Italy, it must be

remembered, was nearer to the people than literature: it was less a

matter of education than instinct, a product of temperament rather than

of culture.

Italian art alone suffices to prove to my mind that the immorality of

the age descended from the upper stratum of society downwards. Selfish

despots and luxurious priests were the ruin of Italy; and the bad

qualities of the princes, secular and ecclesiastical, found expression

in the literature of poets and humanists, their parasites. But in what

other nation of the fifteenth century can we show the same of social

urbanity and intellectual light diffused throughout all classes from the

highest to the lowest? It is true that the sixteenth century cast a

blight upon their luster. But it was not until Italian taste had been

impaired by the vices of Papal Rome and by contact with the Spaniards

that the arts became either coarse or sensual. Giulio Romano (1492-1546)

and Benvenuto Cellini (1500-70) mark the beginning of the change. In

Riberia, a Spaniard, in Caravaggio, and in the whole school of Bologna,

it was accomplished. Yet never at any period did the native Italian

masters learn to love ugliness with the devotion that reveals innate

grossness. It remained for Dürer, Rembrandt, and Hogarth to elevate the

grotesque into the region of high art, for Rubens to achieve the

apotheosis of pure animalism, for Teniers to devote distinguished genius

to the service of the commonplace.

In any review of Italian religion and morality, however fragmentary it

may be, as this indeed is, one feature which distinguishes the acute

sensibility of the race ought not to be omitted. Deficient in profound

intellectual convictions, incapable of a fixed and radical determination

towards national holiness, devoid of those passionate and imaginative

intuitions into the mysteries of the world which generate religions and

philosophies, the Italians were at the same time keenly susceptible to

the beauty of the Christian faith revealed to them by inspired orators.

What we call Revivalism was an institution in Italy, which the Church

was too wise to discountenance or to suppress, although the preachers of

repentance were often insubordinate and sometimes even hostile to the

Papal system. The names of Arnold of Brescia, San Bernardino of Siena,

John of Vicenza, Jacopo Bussolari, Alberto da Lecce, Giovanni

Capistrano, Jacopo della Marca, Girolamo Savonarola, bring before the

memory of those who are acquainted with Italian history innumerable

pictures of multitudes commoved to tears, of tyrannies destroyed and

constitutions founded by tumultuous assemblies, of hostile parties and

vindictive nobles locked in fraternal embraces, of cities clothed in

sackcloth for their sins, of exhortations to peace echoing by the banks

of rivers swollen with blood, of squares and hillsides resonant with

sobs, of Lenten nights illuminated with bonfires of Vanity.[1] In the

midst of these melodramatic scenes towers the single form of a Dominican

or Franciscan friar: while one voice thundering woe or pleading peace

dominates the crowd. Of the temporary effects produced by these

preachers there can be no question. The changes which they wrought in

states and cities prove that the enthusiasm they aroused was more than

merely hysterical. Savonarola, the greatest of his class, founded not

only a transient commonwealth in Florence, but also a political party of

importance, and left his lasting impress on the greatest soul of the

sixteenth century in Italy--Michael Angelo Buonarroti. There was a real

religious vigor in the people corresponding to the preacher's zeal. But

the action of this earnest mood was intermittent and spasmodic. It

coexisted with too much superstition and with passions too vehemently

restless to form a settled tone of character. In this respect the

Italian nation stands not extravagantly pictured in the life of Cellini,

whose violence, self-indulgence, keen sense of pleasure, and pagan

delight in physical beauty were interrupted at intervals by inexplicable

interludes of repentance, Bible-reading, psalm-singing, and visions. To

delineate Cellini will be the business of a distant chapter. The form of

the greatest of Italian preachers must occupy the foreground of the

next.

[1] I have thrown into an appendix some of the principal

passages from the chronicles about revivals in mediæval Italy.

Before closing the imperfect and scattered notices collected in this

chapter, it will be well to attempt some recapitulation of the points

already suggested. Without committing ourselves to the dogmatism of a

theory, we are led to certain general conclusions on the subject of

Italian society in the sixteenth century. The fierce party quarrels

which closed the Middle Ages had accustomed the population to violence,

and this violence survived in the too frequent occurrence of brutal

crimes. The artificial sovereignty of the despots being grounded upon

perfidy, it followed that guile and fraud came to be recognized in

private no less than public life. With the emergence of the bourgeois

classes a self-satisfied positivism, vividly portrayed in the person of

Cosimo de' Medici, superseded the passions and enthusiasms of a previous

age. Thus force, craft, and practical materialism formed the basis of

Italian immorality. Vehement contention in the sphere of politics,

restless speculation, together with the loosening of every tie that

bound society together in the Middle Ages, emancipated personality and

substituted the freedom of self-centered vigor and virility (Virtù) for

the prescriptions of civil or religions order. In the nation that had

shaken off both Papal and Imperial authority no conception of law

remained to control caprice. Instead of law men obeyed the instincts of

their several characters, swayed by artistic taste or tyrannous

appetite, or by the splendid heroism of extinct antiquity. The Church

had alienated the people from true piety. Yet no new form of religious

belief arose; and partly through respect for the past, partly through

the convenience of clinging to existing institutions, Catholicism was

indulgently tolerated. At the same time the humanists introduced an

ideal antagonistic to Christianity of the monastic type. Without

abruptly severing themselves from the communion of the Church, and while

in form at least observing all its ordinances, they thought, wrote,

spoke, felt, and acted like Pagans. To the hypocrisies of obsolete

asceticism were added the affectations of anachronistic license.

Meanwhile, the national genius for art attained its fullest development,

simultaneously with the decay of faith, the extinction of political

liberty, and the anarchy of ethics. So strong was the æsthetic impulse

that it seemed for a while capable of drawing all the forces of the

nation to itself. A society that rested upon force and fraud, corroded

with cynicism, cankered with hypocrisy recognizing no standard apart

from success in action and beauty in form, so conscious of its own

corruption that it produced no satirist among the many who laughed

lightly at its vices, wore the external aspect of exquisite refinement,

and was delicately sensitive to every discord. Those who understood the

contradictions of the age most deeply were the least capable of rising

above them Consequently we obtain in Machiavelli's works the ideal

picture of personal character, moving to calculated ends by

scientifically selected means, none of which are sanctioned by the

unwritten code of law that governs human progress. Cosimo's positivism

is reduced to theory. Fraud becomes a rule of conduct. Force is

advocated, when the dagger or the poisoned draught or the extermination

of a city may lead the individual straight forward to his object.

Religion is shown to be a political engine. Hypocrisy is a mask that

must be worn. The sanctities of ancient use and custom controlling

appetite have no place assigned them in the system. Action is analyzed

as a branch of the fine arts; and the spirit of the age, of which the

philosopher makes himself the hierophant, compels him to portray it as a

sinister and evil art.

In the civilization of Italy, carried prematurely beyond the conditions

of the Middle Ages, before the institutions of mediævalism had been

destroyed or its prejudices had been overcome, we everywhere discern

the want of a co-ordinating principle. The old religion has died; but

there is no new faith. The Communes have been proved inadequate; but

there is no nationality. Practical positivism has obliterated the

virtues of a chivalrous and feudal past; but science has not yet been

born. Scholarship floods the world with the learning of antiquity; but

this knowledge is still undigested. Art triumphs; but the æsthetic

instinct has invaded the regions of politics and ethics, owing to

defective analysis in theory, and in practice to over-confident reliance

on personal ability. The individual has attained to freedom; but he has

not learned the necessity of submitting his volition to law. At all

points the development of the Italians strikes us as precocious, with

the weakness of precocity scarcely distinguishable from the decay of old

age. A transition from the point attained in the Renaissance to some

firmer and more solid ground was imperatively demanded. But the fatality

of events precluded the Italians from making it. Their evolution,

checked in mid career by the brilliant ambition of France and the

cautious reactionary despotism of Spain, remained suspended. Students

are left, face to face with the sixteenth century, to decipher an

inscription that lacks its leading verb, to puzzle over a riddle whereof

the solution is hidden from us by the ruin of a people. It must ever be

an undecided question whether the Italians, undisturbed by foreign

interference, could have passed beyond the artificial and exceptional

stage of the Renaissance to a sounder and more substantial phase of

national vitality; or whether, as their inner conscience seems to have

assured them, their disengagement from moral obligation and their mental

ferment foreboded an inevitable catastrophe.