himself from insignificance to the dictatorship of Florence, he
surpassed his grandfather in the use he made of literary patronage. It
is not paradoxical to affirm that in his policy we can trace the
subordination of a genuine love of art and letters to statecraft. The
new culture was one of the instruments that helped to build his
despotism. Through his thorough and enthusiastic participation in the
intellectual interests of his age, he put himself into close sympathy
with the Florentines, who were glad to acknowledge for their leader by
far the ablest of the men of parts in Italy.
According as we choose our point of view, we may regard him either as a
tyrant, involving his country in debt and dangerous wars, corrupting the
morals and enfeebling the spirit of the people, and systematically
enslaving the Athens of the modern world for the sake of founding a
petty principality; or else as the most liberal-minded noble of his
epoch, born to play the first part in the Florentine Republic, and
careful to use his wealth and influence for the advancement of his
fellow-citizens in culture, learning, arts, and the amenities of life.
Savonarola and the Florentine historians adopt the former of these two
opinions. Sismondi, in his passion for liberty, arrays against Lorenzo
the political assassinations he permitted, the enervation of Florence,
the national debt incurred by the republic, and the exhausting wars with
Sixtus carried on in his defense.
His panegyrists, on the contrary, love to paint him as the pacificator
of Italy, the restorer of Florentine poetry, the profound critic, and
the generous patron. The truth lies in the combination of these two
apparently contradictory judgments. Lorenzo was the representative man
of his nation at a moment when political institutions were everywhere
inclining to despotism, and when the spiritual life of the Italians
found its noblest expression in art and literature. The principality of
Florence was thrust upon him by the policy of Cosimo, by the vote of the
chief citizens, and by the example of the sister republics, all of whom,
with the exception of Venice, submitted to the sway of rulers. Had he
wished, he might have found it difficult to preserve the commonwealth in
its integrity. Few but _doctrinaires_ believed in a _governo misto_;
only aristocrats desired a _governo stretto_; all but democrats dreaded
a _governo largo_. And yet a new constitution must have been framed
after one of these types, and the Florentines must have been educated to
use it with discretion, before Lorenzo could have resigned his office of
dictator with any prospect of freedom for the city in his charge. Such
unselfish patriotism, in the face of such overwhelming difficulties, and
in antagonism to the whole tendency of the age, was not to be expected
from an oligarch of the Renaissance born in the purple, and used from
infancy to intrigue.
Lorenzo was a man of marvelous variety and range of mental power. He
possessed one of those rare natures fitted to comprehend all knowledge
and to sympathize with the most diverse forms of life. While he never
for one moment relaxed his grasp on politics, among philosophers he
passed for a sage, among men of letters for an original and graceful
poet, among scholars for a Grecian sensitive to every nicety of Attic
idiom, among artists for an amateur gifted with refined discernment and
consummate taste. Pleasure-seekers knew in him the libertine who jousted
with the boldest, danced and masqueraded with the merriest, sought
adventures in the streets at night, and joined the people in their
May-day games and carnival festivities. The pious extolled him as an
author of devotional lauds and mystery-plays, a profound theologian, a
critic of sermons. He was no less famous for his jokes and repartees
than for his pithy apothegms and maxims, as good a judge of cattle as of
statues, as much at home in the bosom of his family as in the riot of an
orgy, as ready to discourse on Plato as to plan a campaign or to plot
the death of a dangerous citizen.
An apologist may always plead that Lorenzo was the epitome of his
nation’s most distinguished qualities, that the versatility of the
Renaissance found in him its fullest incarnation. It was the duty of
Italy in the fifteenth century not to establish religious or
constitutional liberty, but to resuscitate culture. Before the
disastrous wars of invasion had begun, it might well have seemed even to
patriots as though Florence needed a Mæcenas more than a Camillus.
Therefore, the prince who in his own person combined all
accomplishments, who knew by sympathy and counsel how to stimulate the
genius of men superior to himself in special arts and sciences, who
spent his fortune lavishly on works of public usefulness, whose palace
formed the rallying-point of wit and learning, whose council-chamber was
the school of statesmen, who expressed his age in every word and every
act, in his vices and his virtues, his crimes and generous deeds, can
not be fairly judged by an abstract standard of republican morality. It
is nevertheless true that Lorenzo enfeebled and enslaved Florence. At
his death he left her socially more dissolute, politically weaker,
intellectually more like himself, than he found her. He had not the
greatness to rise above the spirit of his century, or to make himself
the Pericles instead of the Pisistratus of his republic. In other words,
he was adequate, not superior to, Renaissance Italy.
This, then, was the man round whom the greatest scholars of the third
period assembled, at whose table sat Angelo, Poliziano, Cristoforo
Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista
Alberti, Michael Angelo Buonarotti, Luigi Pulci. The mere enumeration of
these names suffices to awake a crowd of memories in the mind of those
to whom Italian art and poetry are dear. Lorenzo’s villas, where this
brilliant circle met for grave discourse or social converse, heightening
the sober pleasures of Italian country life with all that wit and
learning could produce of delicate and rare, have been so often sung by
poets and celebrated by historians that Careggi, Caffagiolo, and Poggio
a Cajano are no less familiar to us than the studious shades of Academe.
“In a villa overhanging the towers of Florence,” writes the austere
Hallam, moved to more than usual eloquence in the spirit-stirring beauty
of his theme, “on the steep slope of that lofty hill crowned by the
mother city, the ancient Fiesole, in gardens which Tully might have
envied, with Ficino, Landino, and Politian at his side, he delighted his
hours of leisure with the beautiful visions of Platonic philosophy, for
which the summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the most congenial
accompaniment.” As we climb the steep slope of Fiesole or linger beneath
the rose trees that shed their petals from Careggi’s garden walls, once
more in our imagination “the world’s great age begins anew”; once more
the blossoms of that marvelous spring unclose. While the sun goes down
beneath the mountains of Carrara, and the Apennines grow purple-golden,
and Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno, and the large Italian stars
come forth above, we remember how those mighty master spirits watched
the sphering of new planets in the spiritual skies. Savonarola in his
cell below once more sits brooding over the servility of Florence, the
corruption of a godless church. Michael Angelo, seated between Ficino
and Poliziano, with the voices of the prophets vibrating in his memory,
and with the music of Plato sounding in his ears, rests chin on hand and
elbow upon knee, like his own Jeremiah, lost in contemplation, whereof
the after-fruits shall be the Sistine Chapel and the Medicean tombs.
Then, when the strain of thought, “unsphering Plato from the skies,”
begins to weary, Pulci breaks the silence with a brand-new canto of
Morgante, or a singing boy is bidden to tune his mandoline to Messer
Angelo’s last made _ballatta_.
GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA.
BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
[An Italian reformer, a member of the Dominican order of monks,
born 1452, executed 1498. His fervid eloquence as a preacher, and
his fierce denunciation of the vice and corruption of the Italian
Renaissance speedily made Savonarola a power to be reckoned with in
Florentine affairs. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the
prophet’s activity extended to political as well as religious
ideals, and he preached an austere theocratic republic and the
deposition of the Pope. The return of the Medici family to power
was the downfall of Savonarola’s hopes; and he and two of his
companion reformers were strangled and their bodies burned.]
We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading frescoes of
Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange feudal
towers, tall pillows of brown stone, crowded together within the narrow
circle of the town walls. Very beautiful is the prospect from these
ramparts on a spring morning, when the song of nightingales and the
scent of acacia flowers ascend together from the groves upon the slopes
beneath. The gray Tuscan landscape for scores and scores of miles all
round melts into blueness, like the blueness of the sky, flecked here
and there with wandering cloud-shadows. Let those who pace the
grass-grown streets of the hushed city remember that here the first
flash of authentic genius kindled in Savonarola’s soul. Here for the
first time he prophesied, “The Church will be scourged, then
regenerated, and this quickly.” These are the celebrated three
conclusions, the three points to which Savonarola in all his prophetic
utterances adhered.
But not yet had he fully entered on his vocation. His voice was weak,
his style uncertain; his soul, we may believe still wavering between
strange dread and awful joy, as he beheld, through many a backward
rolling mist of doubt, the mantle of the prophets descend upon him.
Already he had abandoned the schoolmen for the Bible. Already he had
learned by heart each voice of the Old and New Testaments. Pondering on
their texts, he had discovered four separate interpretations for every
suggestion of Sacred Writ. For some of the pregnant utterances of the
prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in
wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery. The flame
which began to smolder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze
at Brescia, in 1486. Savonarola was now aged thirty-four. “Midway upon
the path of life,” he opened the book of Revelation; he figured to the
people of Brescia the four-and-twenty elders rising to denounce the sins
of Italy, and to declare the calamities that must ensue. He pictured to
them their city flowing with blood. His voice, which now became the
interpreter of his soul, in its resonance and earnestness and piercing
shrillness, thrilled his hearers with strange terror. Already they
believed his prophecy; and twenty-six years later, when the soldiers of
Gascon de Foix slaughtered six thousand souls in the streets of Brescia,
her citizens recalled the apocalyptic warnings of the Dominican monk.
As Savonarola is now launched upon his vocation of prophecy, this is the
right moment to describe his personal appearance and his style of
preaching. We have abundant material for judging what his features were,
and how they flashed beneath the storm of inspiration. Fra Bartolommeo,
one of his followers, painted a profile of him in the character of St.
Peter Martyr. This shows all the benignity and grace of expression which
his stern lineaments could assume. It is a picture of the sweet and
gentle nature latent within the fiery arraigner of his nation at the bar
of God. In contemporary medals the face appears hard, keen,
uncompromising, beneath its heavy cowl. But the noblest portrait is an
intaglio engraved by Giovanni della Corniole, now to be seen in the
Uffizi at Florence. Of this work Michael Angelo, himself a disciple of
Savonarola, said that art could go no further. We are therefore
justified in assuming that the engraver has not only represented fully
the outline of Savonarola’s face, but has also indicated his peculiar
expression.
A thick hood covers the whole head and shoulders. Beneath it can be
traced the curve of a long and somewhat flat skull, rounded into
extraordinary fullness at the base and side. From a deeply sunken
eye-socket emerges, scarcely seen, but powerfully felt, the eye that
blazed with lightning. The nose is strong, prominent, and aquiline, with
wide nostrils, capable of terrible dilation under the stress of vehement
emotion. The mouth has full, compressed, projecting lips. It is large,
as if made for a torrent of eloquence; it is supplied with massive
muscles, as if to move with energy and calculated force and utterance.
The jaw-bone is hard and heavy, the cheek-bone emergent; between the two
the flesh is hollowed, not so much with the emaciation of monastic
vigils as with the athletic exercise of wrestling in the throes of
prophecy. The face, on the whole, is ugly, but not repellent; and, in
spite of its great strength, it shows signs of feminine sensibility.
Like the faces of Cicero and Demosthenes, it seems the fit machine for
oratory. But the furnaces hidden away behind that skull, beneath that
cowl, have made it haggard with a fire not to be found in the serener
features of the classic orators. Savonarola was a visionary and a monk.
The discipline of the cloister left its trace upon him. The wings of
dreams have winnowed and withered that cheek as they passed over it. The
spirit of prayer quivers upon those eager lips. The color of
Savonarola’s flesh was brown; his nerves were exquisitely sensitive yet
strong; like a network of wrought steel, elastic, easily overstrained,
they recovered their tone and temper less by repose than by the
evolution of fresh electricity. With Savonarola fasts were succeeded by
trances, and trances by tempests of vehement improvisation. From the
midst of such profound debility that he could scarcely crawl up the
pulpit steps, he would pass suddenly into the plenitude of power,
filling the Dome of Florence with denunciations, sustaining his
discourse by no mere trick of rhetoric that flows to waste upon the lips
of shallow preachers, but marshaling the phalanx of embattled arguments
and pointed illustrations, pouring his thought forth in columns of
continuous flame, mingling figures of sublimest imagery with reasonings
of severest accuracy, at one time melting his audience to tears, at
another freezing them with terror, again quickening their souls with
prayers and pleadings and blessings that had in them the sweetness of
the very spirit of Christ.
His sermons began with scholastic exposition; as they advanced, the
ecstasy of inspiration fell upon the preacher, till the sympathies of
the whole people of Florence gathered round him, met and attained, as it
were, to single consciousness in him. He then no longer restrained the
impulse of his oratory, but became the mouth-piece of God, the
interpreter to themselves of all that host. In a fiery _crescendo_,
never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of vision, he
ascended the altar-steps of prophecy, and, standing like Moses on the
mount between the thunders of God and the tabernacles of the plain,
fulminated period after period of impassioned eloquence. The walls of
the church re-echoed with sobs and wailings, dominated by one ringing
voice.
The scribe to whom we owe the fragments of these sermons at times breaks
off with these words: “Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could
not go on.” Pico della Mirandola tells us that the mere sound of
Savonarola’s voice, startling the stillness of the Duomo, thronged
through all its space with people, was like a clap of doom; a cold
shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, the hairs of his head stood
on end, as he listened. Another witness reports: “These sermons caused
such terror, alarm, sobbing, and tears that every one passed through the
streets without speaking, more dead than alive.”
Such was the preacher, and such was the effect of his oratory. The theme
on which he loved to dwell was this: “Repent! A judgment of God is at
hand. A sword is suspended over you. Italy is doomed for her
iniquity--for the sins of the Church, whose adulteries have filled the
world--for the sins of the tyrants who encourage crime and trample upon
souls--for the sins of you people, you fathers and mothers, you young
men, you maidens, you children that lisp blasphemy!” Nor did Savonarola
deal in generalities. He described in plain language every vice; he laid
bare every abuse; so that a mirror was held up to the souls of his
hearers, in which they saw their most secret faults appallingly betrayed
and ringed around with fire. He entered with particularity into the
details of the coming woes. One by one he enumerated the bloodshed, the
ruin of cities, the trampling down of provinces, the passage of armies,
the desolating wars that were about to fall on Italy. You may read
pages of his sermons which seem like vivid narratives of what afterward
took place in the sack of Prato, in the storming of Brescia, in the
battle of the Ronco, in the cavern-massacre of Vicenza. No wonder that
he stirred his audience to their center. The hell within them was
revealed. The coming down above them was made manifest. Ezekiel and
Jeremiah were not more prophetic. John crying to a generation of vipers,
“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” was not more weighty
with the mission of authentic inspiration.
“I began,” Savonarola writes himself with reference to a course of
sermons delivered in 1491--“I began publicly to expound the Revelation
in our Church of St. Mark. During the course of the year I continued to
develop to the Florentines these three propositions: That the Church
would be renewed in our time; that before that renovation God would
strike all Italy with a fearful chastisement; that these things would
happen shortly.” It is by right of the foresight of a new age, contained
in these three famous so-called conclusions, that Savonarola deserves to
be named the Prophet of the Renaissance. He was no apostle of reform; it
did not occur to him to reconstruct the creed, to dispute the discipline
or to criticise the authority of the Church. He was no founder of a new
order; unlike his predecessors, Dominic and Francis, he never attempted
to organize a society of saints or preachers; unlike his successors,
Caraffe the Theatine, and Loyola the Jesuit, he enrolled no militia for
the defense of the faith, constructed no machinery for education.
Starting with simple horror at the wickedness of the world, he had
recourse to the old prophets. He steeped himself in Bible studies. He
caught the language of Malachi and Jeremiah. He became convinced that
for the wickedness of Italy a judgment was imminent. From that
conclusion he rose upon the wings of faith to the belief that a new age
would dawn. The originality of his intuition consisted in this, that
while Italy was asleep, and no man trembled for the future, he alone
felt that the stillness of the air was fraught with thunder, that its
tranquillity was like that which precedes a tempest blown from the very
nostrils of the God of hosts.
CÆSAR BORGIA.
BY CHARLES YRIARTE.
[Son of Pope Alexander VI, at first prelate, then soldier and
statesman, born about 1457, died 1507. All the contemporary annals
concur in giving Cæsar Borgia nearly every private vice, and stamp
him as murderer, sensualist, and a man of ruthless ambition.
Successively made bishop and cardinal in his earlier years, he was
finally secularized and became Duke of Romagna and Valentinois.
After having dispossessed the rulers of many small principalities
and united them into a duchy, he is believed to have nourished the
scheme of founding a united Italy. After some years of vicissitudes
Cæsar lost his political ascendency by the election of a pope
inimical to his interests, and his military power by the jealousy
of the Kings of France and Spain. A consummate soldier and
politician, he showed during the short period during which he
exercised the functions of a ruler all the traits of a wise,
upright, and public-spirited sovereign, in shining contrast with
the hideous crimes which had blackened his career as a man. Cæsar
Borgia was the model on which Machiavelli drew his “Prince,” in the
celebrated politico-historical treatise of that title.]
Was Cæsar merely going straight before him, led by the insatiable
ambition which lays hands upon all within its reach, or was he aiming at
a distinct end, at the realization of a vast conception? Granting that
he had no dreams of reconstituting the kingdom of Central Italy himself,
Florence at least felt herself threatened. As long ago as his first
campaign, when, after making himself master of Imola and Forli, he was
still besieging Cesena preparatory to his entry into Pesaro and his
progress to Rome by way of Urbino, the Florentine Republic had sent
Soderini on a mission to him, to find out his intentions and his terms.
The following year, with increased anxiety, as she felt herself
approached more closely through the taking of Arezzo, which had fallen
into the hands of Cæsar’s troops, she sent him Machiavelli, the most
clear-sighted of her secretaries. The spectacle of these two champions
face to face is one unique in history. From the day when he arrived in
the camp, Machiavelli, who had recognized in the Duke of Valentinois a
terrible adversary, felt that it was of vital interest to the state that
he should not lose sight of him for a moment. As a point of fact, he
never left his side up to the day when he saw him hunted down like a
wild beast, vanquished by destiny, fettered beyond all power of doing
harm to any one.
Of course, we may refuse to accept the verdict of the secretary of the
Florentine Republic. Gregorovius, the celebrated author of the “History
of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages,” goes so far as to say that it
is a reproach to the memory of the founder of political science that he
made a blood-stained adventurer like Cæsar the “Italian Messiah”--the
precursor, in a word, of Italian unity. Again, P. Villari, in his fine
work “N. Machiavelli e suoi tempi,” says that the Florentine secretary,
though he was an eyewitness of the actual deeds of Valentinois, made of
him an imaginary personage, to whom he attributed the great ideas by
which he himself was animated.
Still, we have a right to point out that in history purpose is
controlled by action. A great number of the heroic deeds and of the
portentous decisions which have determined the lofty destiny of empires
have not been the consequence of long premeditation; they have often
been the result of the passions and desires of mankind, or simply that
of the need of action natural to a vigorous mind. Undoubtedly the
immediate object of Alexander VI was the aggrandizement of his children,
and the increase of their territory; he cared only for the power of the
Church insomuch as it augmented that of his own family, but the deeds
accomplished by father and son contributed none the less to
reconstitute the temporal dominion of the Church--a work which, after
its completion by Julius II, was destined to continue for more than
three centuries, from 1510 to 1860.