THE CINQUECENTO (16TH CENTURY)
The _Cinquecento_, as the Italians call the sixteenth century, exhibits
in the arts the same disintegration and decay that we have found in the
political life of Italy. Honesty, independence, genuineness fade away,
and in their stead we find cleverness and effort. The high tide of the
Renaissance was in the pontificate of Julius II, but the flood lingered
on at the full till 1540, and then the ebb began. This is the date which
the famous German scholar and critic, Jakob Burckhardt, assigns as the
limit of the Golden Age; and it is interesting to find how closely it
corresponds with the political dates which marked the establishment of
the new political order in Italy. In 1530 Florence was definitely handed
over to the Medici; in 1535 the duchy of Milan was annexed to Spain; in
1540 the Pope sanctioned the Order of Jesus; in 1542 he established the
Holy Office in Rome; in 1543 he accepted the scheme of an _Index
Librorum Prohibitorum_; and in 1545 the Council of Trent was opened.
The change from maturity to decay was all-pervasive; yet it was slow,
and a period of excellence and good taste intervened between the High
Renaissance and the Baroque. This process is most clearly marked in
architecture. During the High Renaissance dignity was law, the grand
manner dominated, and charm determined subordinate parts. Domes were
noble, loggias elegant, pilasters decorative, cornices well
proportioned, ceilings splendid. After 1540 indications of decline
appeared; but this fading brilliance was a kind of _goetterdaemmerung_,
and, though it heralded the Baroque, displayed at times a purity of
detail and a noble restraint worthy of the earlier period.
Of the architects of this intervening stage the greatest was Giacomo
Barozzi, surnamed Vignola after the little town where he was born in the
province of Modena. He was a man of theories, had great knowledge of
classical architecture, and wrote a manual on the architectural orders
which enjoyed great authority for two centuries and more. He built
various buildings at Bologna, and designed a gigantic palace at Piacenza
for the Farnesi, the ducal children of Alexander Farnese, Paul III, and
nephews of the beautiful Giulia. The art of making gardens, of using
cypress trees, greensward, pools, terraces, and clumps of ilex as joint
partners with stone, brick, and stucco, in one artistic whole, had come
into being in the sixteenth century; and Vignola was one of the masters
of this new art. He designed the Farnese gardens on the Palatine Hill,
since destroyed by time, neglect, subsequent owners, and eager
archaeologists. He was an artist of great ideas, and sometimes caught the
grand manner. On the other hand, he also helped to bring on the Baroque.
His famous church at Rome, the Gesu, despite its vast, high-arching
nave, lent itself with fatal facility to a gorgeous hideousness of
decoration, and set the fashion for many imitative Jesuit churches,
which caught the hideous gorgeousness but missed the grandeur of their
exemplar. He had an important part in building the _Villa di Papa
Giulio_ (Pope Julius III), a little outside the city walls, charming in
its grace, its variety, and its succession of arcades, courts, loggias,
balustrades, grotto, terrace, and garden.
The next in rank, Bartolommeo Ammanati of Florence, may be called the
court architect of Duke Cosimo I. He built two bridges across the Arno,
the Ponte alia Carraia and the Ponte Santa Trinita, finished the main
body of the Pitti Palace, originally designed by Brunelleschi, and
completed the elaborate Boboli garden, the pleasure grounds behind the
palace. He also was drawn to Rome at the behest of villa-building Popes,
and had a share in elaborating the plans of the Villa of Papa Giulio.
Giorgio Vasari, architect, painter, biographer, designed the Uffizi at
Florence, painted many indifferent pictures, and wrote "Lives of the
Painters," a garrulous, discursive, inaccurate, and delightful book.
Galeazzo Alessi of Perugia built the stately, tourist-haunted palaces of
Genoa, once occupied by opulent merchants, and also the gigantic church
of S. Maria degli Angeli, which covers the Portiuncula of St. Francis,
like a bowl turned over a forget-me-not. Jacopo Tatti Sansovino of
Florence was the architect of many noble buildings in Venice. Andrea
Palladio of Vicenza embodied his passionate love of classical
architecture in palaces and churches in his native town and in Venice.
During the revival of classic enthusiasm in the eighteenth century
Palladio became a demi-god. The captivated Goethe, as soon as he arrived
at Vicenza, hurried to see the Palladian palaces. "When we stand face to
face with these buildings, then we first realize their great excellence;
their bulk and massiveness fill the eye, while the lovely harmony of
their proportions, admirable in the advance and retreat of perspective,
brings peace to the spirit." In Venice, he says, "Before all things I
hastened to the Carita.... Alas! scarcely a tenth part of the edifice is
finished. However, even this part is worthy of that heavenly genius....
One ought to pass whole years in the contemplation of such a work."
These men and their rivals kept alive the traditions of the great
period; nevertheless, in course of time stiltedness and exaggeration
usurped the place of elegance and force. A servile imitation of Roman
models, an absolute acceptance of classical correctness, prevailed; the
classic orders, especially the Corinthian, spread themselves everywhere;
in one place barren and formal simplicity obtruded itself, in another
pretentious magnificence. After 1580 the transition is complete; the
baroque triumphs; sham tyrannizes, wood and plaster mimic stone, columns
twist themselves awry; monstrous scrolls, heavy mouldings, crazy
statues, gilt deformities, and all the contortions to which stucco and
other cohesive substances will submit, hang and cling everywhere, inside
and out. But this is to anticipate, for the full revel of the Baroque
takes place in the seventeenth century.
The same degeneration prevailed in sculpture. Michelangelo, in his
statues in the Medicean chapel at Florence, "Night" and "Day," "Evening"
and "Dawn" (1529-34), had achieved the utmost which thought and emotion
could express in marble. They stand, pillars set up by Hercules, at the
end of the noble sculpture of the Renaissance. His successors tried to
imitate him, in vain; they produced bulk, or writhing or distortion. Yet
some men of this period did excellent work: Benvenuto Cellini, delicate
goldsmith, and sculptor of the Florentine Perseus; John of Bologna, who
modelled the Flying Mercury; Taddeo Landini of Florence, who designed
the charming fountain in Rome, in which several boys are boosting
turtles into a basin above; Bandinelli, whose big statues are familiar
in Florence, "a man strangely composed," as Burckhardt says, "of natural
talent, of reminiscence of the old school, and of a false originality
which carried him beyond a disregard of nicety even to grossness." After
these men and a few others, sculpture followed architecture in its
facile descent into the Baroque, and expressed itself in prophets,
saints, and Popes, who stand in swaying and vacillating postures in nave
and aisle, on roof and balustrade. These decadent sculptors strictly
belong to the next century; they are but heralded by the last works of
the Cinquecento.
In painting, too, the same story is repeated all over Italy. In Florence
after the close of the High Renaissance twilight darkened rapidly. There
are few artists of note except two fashionable portrait painters,
Pontormo and Bronzino, who display the characteristics of the period.
Bronzino's picture of the Descent of Christ into Hades almost justifies
Ruskin's comment, a "heap of cumbrous nothingness and sickening
offensiveness;" on the other hand, Pontormo's decorations in the great
hall of the Medicean Villa at Poggio a Caiano are as graceful, gay, and
charming as can well be imagined. After them in dreary succession come
the decadent painters, who painted figures bigger and bigger in would-be
Michelangelesque attitudes, as may be seen in one of the rooms of the
_Belle Arti_ in Florence. Elsewhere, also, the generation bred under the
great masters faded away,--the sweet Luini of Milan, Leonardo's
follower; the facile Giulio Romano, Raphael's pupil; the beauty-loving
Sodoma of Siena; the romantic Dosso Dossi of Ferrara. These names show
how loath the genius of painting was to leave Italy, but she obeyed
fate; and, at the end of the century, we have the Caracci beginning to
paint in Bologna, and Caravaggio (1569-1609) in Naples. It needs but a
glance at these later pictures to see what a change had come over the
spirit of beauty during the hundred years since Botticelli painted Venus
fresh from the salt sea foam.
In literature, also, at the opening of the sixteenth century, we had the
historian, Guicciardini; the political writer, Machiavelli; the poet,
Ariosto; the cultivated Castiglione: at the end we have the pathetic
figure of Torquato Tasso (1544-95), who stands drooping, like a symbol
of Italy. Tasso is always inscribed in textbooks as one of the four
greatest Italian poets, and it would be useless and impertinent to
dispute the concordant testimony of many witnesses. Byron apostrophizes
him, "O victor unsurpassed in modern song;" yet one with difficulty
avoids thinking that his sad story has added to the beauty of his poetry
and heightened his reputation.
Torquato Tasso was the last great genius of the Italian Renaissance, and
stands there facing the oncoming decadence in gifted helplessness; he
had many talents, a noble nature, a melancholy temperament, and a weak
character. In boyhood his religious emotions and his intellectual
faculties were both over-stimulated. His story is a medley of court
favour, success, rivalry, suspicion. His home was Ferrara, but he
wandered about, as a sick person seeks to ease his body by changing
posture. Early forcing and some natural weakness combined to bring too
great a strain upon his mind, which gave way, and the unfortunate man
was put in a madhouse by his patron, the Duke of Ferrara. He was
confined for seven years, but not ill treated. He died in the monastery
of Sant' Onofrio on the Janiculum at Rome, where tourists stop to gaze at
the poor remnant of an oak tree, under whose shade he used to sit.
Carducci, the great poet, says: "Italy's great literature, the living,
national, and at the same time, human literature, with which she
reconciled Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and, in a Roman way,
represented a renewed Europe, ended with Tasso." His sad story is a
fitting epilogue to the Italian Renaissance.
This general course of ascent, culmination, and decline holds true even
of Venice, except in chronology; for Venice preserved her independence
from the normal Italian experience almost as resolutely in the arts as
in politics. She produced no literature, piqued perhaps because Italy
had taken the Tuscan dialect rather than hers for the national language;
but in the arts, after decay had elsewhere set in, she bloomed in the
fulness of perfection, as late roses blossom when other bushes show
nothing but hips. Of her individual career a few words must be said.
In architecture and sculpture, the Lombardi, a Venetian family probably
from Lombardy, flourished for nearly a hundred years (1452-1537), and
left their mark on Venice, in tombs and statues, in churches and
palaces. Contemporary with the last generation of Lombardi came the more
gifted Alessandro Leopardi, who completed the great statue of Colleoni
designed by Verrocchio, and gave a new impulse to Venetian sculpture.
While the Tuscan sculptors had been studying Roman remains, the Isles of
Greece had been giving Greek models to their Venetian conquerors, and
Leopardi in particular profited greatly by them. In the sister art the
first famous architect after the Lombardi was the Florentine, Jacopo
Sansovino, who spent most of a long life in Venice, where he built the
Zecca, the Loggetta, the Libreria Vecchia (the Old Library), and also
the Scala d'Oro (the Golden Stairway) of the ducal palace. Sanmicheli, a
military engineer, as well as a builder of palaces, came from Verona to
work in Venice. Palladio (1508-80), of whom we have spoken, came from
Vicenza, and bequeathed his name to the neo-classic style, known as
Palladian.
In painting first came the famous Bellini family, Jacopo (1400-64?) and
his two sons, Gentile and the more gifted Giovanni, painter of tenderest
Madonnas; after them came Carpaccio, painter of St. Jerome and his lion,
and of St. George and his dragon. Then followed in rapid succession the
most gifted group of painters that ever lived together, all born within
twenty years of one another, as if to prove how prodigally Nature could
endow a petty province that had the luck to please her: Giorgione, from
Castelfranco on the Venetian mainland, of highest fame and disputed
pictures; Titian, of Cadore, noblest of portrait painters; Palma
Vecchio, of Bergamo, creator of the most glorious of animals, the superb
Venetian women; Sebastiano del Piombo, who painted the Fornarina of the
Uffizi Gallery long attributed to Raphael, and deserved his fortune of
being pupil to Giorgione and friend to Michelangelo; Lorenzo Lotto, of
Bergamo, another painter of exquisite women, high-bred men, noble
saints, and poetical angels; Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone, inferior
only to Titian; Bonifazio from Verona, painter of patrician luxury;
Paris Bordone, of Treviso, so uncertain in merit, yet at his best so
rich in hue, so tender in sentiment, so admirable in his pictures of
Venetian ceremonial; and at the close, the giant Tintoretto (1512-94)
and Paolo Veronese (1528-88) the glorious: all, though in different
degrees, splendid in colour, voluptuous ministers to the sensuous eye.
This cluster of names serves to show that while elsewhere in Italy art
was dwindling into mannerism and exaggeration, Venice put forth an
extraordinary burst of pictorial magnificence; yet even in Venice at
the end of the century none of the great men were left.
The reason for this decadence of the arts from their splendour in the
early decades of the century is not easy to assign; no one can say why
genius spurts up in one spot or in one individual, why the brilliant
Italian race should have achieved so many masterpieces and then have
become ineffectual. One can merely notice, whether as a cause or an
accompanying phenomenon, that, with individual exceptions,--no man could
be nobler than Michelangelo,--Italy of the High Renaissance was a great
moral failure. In intellectual achievement the Italians eclipsed the
world; in morality they stumbled about like blind men. This lack of
morality finds its fullest expression, at least its most conspicuous
expression, at the very time of the culmination of the arts. Let me
illustrate.
The night that the Duke of Gandia, son of Pope Borgia, was murdered in
Rome (1497), a wood-seller, living beside the Tiber, saw several men
come cautiously to the river. They peered about and made a sign to some
one behind. Up came a horseman, with a dead body lying across his
horse's back, head and heels dangling down; the horse was turned rump to
the river, and two men on foot seized the body and flung it into the
water. The wood-seller was asked why he had not reported the fact. He
answered that he had seen some hundred bodies thrown into the river at
that spot, and had never heard any inquiries made. The duke's brother,
Caesar, was at the time believed to have done the deed, but evidence
fails.
The same Caesar Borgia, bearing the somewhat ambitious motto _Aut Caesar
aut nihil_, energetic, ruthless, vigorous, ingenious, and plausible,
embodied the Italian conception of what a political leader should be; so
much so, that Machiavelli, the greatest of Italian political writers,
cites him as a model. Machiavelli was a patriot, animated by real love
of his country, but he was free from our conceptions of morality, or
perhaps sceptical of Italian virtue, and believed that the achievement
of liberating Italy from foreign tyranny could only be accomplished by
the qualities of an Iago. In the chapter in "The Prince" entitled "In
what manner Princes should keep faith," he says: "How praiseworthy it is
for a Prince to keep faith, to practise integrity and eschew trickery,
everybody knows; nevertheless, within our own lifetime and our own
experience, we know that those Princes have done great things who have
made small account of good faith and have known how to turn men's heads
by means of trickery, and in the end have surpassed those who planted
themselves on loyalty.... Therefore a prudent lord ought not to keep
faith, when keeping faith would make against him, and the reasons which
made him promise are no more. If men were all good this precept would
not be good; but as they are bad and would not keep faith with you, you,
too, ought not to keep faith with them; and a Prince will never lack
legitimate reasons to colour the breach.... I shall even make bold to
say this, that to have certain moral qualities and always observe them
is bad, but to seem to have them is good; as to seem to be pious,
faithful, kind, religious, honest, or even to be so, provided your mind
be so adjusted that, in case of need, you will know how to be the
opposite. For you must know that a Prince, and especially a newly
crowned Prince, cannot do all the things for which men are esteemed
good, for, in order to maintain the state, they are often obliged to act
contrary to humanity, contrary to charity, contrary to religion;
therefore, he must have a mind prompt to veer with the wind and the
fluctuations of fortune; and, as I have said, not to forsake the good,
if may be, but to know how to cleave to evil, if he must."
Another illustration shall be the life of Pietro Aretino (1492-1557),
born the child of an artist's model in a hospital at Arezzo, who, by wit
and infinite impudence, by toadying, bullying, and blackmail, worked his
way to such a position that he could say, "Without serving courts I have
compelled the great world, dukes, princes, kings, to pay tribute to my
genius." Once a pious lady, the Marchesa di Pesaro, remonstrated with
him upon his life, and bade him mend his ways. He wrote back: "I must
say that I am not less useful to the world, or less pleasing to Jesus,
spending my vigils upon trifles than if I had employed them on works of
piety. But why do I do this? If princes were as devout as I am needy, my
pen would write nothing but _misereres_.... Let us see. I have a friend
named Brucioli, who dedicated his translation of the Bible to the Most
Christian King [of France]. Four years passed and he got no answer. On
the other hand, my comedy, 'The Courtesan,' won a rich necklace from
this same king; so that my Courtesan would have felt tempted to make fun
of the Old Testament, if that were not a trifle unbecoming. Forgive me
lady for the jests I have written, not from malice, but for a
livelihood. All the world does not possess the inspiration of divine
grace. Music and comedy are to us what prayer and preaching are to you.
May Jesus grant you His grace to get for me from Sebastiano di Pesaro
[her husband?] the rest of the money of which I have only received
thirty scudi; for this I am in anticipation your debtor." Of Pietro
Aretino a recent Italian critic says: "His memory is infamous; no
gentleman would mention his name before a lady." Yet, perhaps, we may
doubt if he was peculiarly bad; he possessed the cynical views of
morality current at the time. Aretino made a fortune, received
knighthood from the Pope, nearly obtained a cardinal's hat, and was
painted by Titian.
The following anecdote is taken from the autobiography of the famous
goldsmith and sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71). He was travelling
on a sort of canal boat on his way from Venice to Florence. "We went to
lodge for the night in an inn on this side of Chioggia, on the left as
we were approaching Ferrara. Our host wished to be paid, according to
his custom, before we went to bed. I told him that in other places it
was the custom to pay in the morning, but he said, 'I wish to be paid,
according to my way, in the evening.' I replied that men who wanted
their own special way would have to make a world to suit their special
way, because in this world that was not the way things were done. The
host answered that I need not vex my wits, for he wished to do according
to his way. My companion was trembling for fear, and poked me to be
quiet lest the host do worse; so we paid him, according to his way, and
went to bed. We had excellent new beds, everything new, spick and span;
in spite of this I did not sleep a wink, thinking all night long what I
could do to revenge myself; first I thought of setting fire to the
house, next of cutting the throats of the four good horses that he had
in his stable; I could see that this would be easy to do, but not how it
would be easy for me and my companion to escape afterwards. At last I
hit on a plan. In the morning I put my companion and all the things into
the canal boat. When the horses were hitched to the rope that pulled the
boat, I said that they must not start the boat till I got back, as I had
left a pair of slippers in my room.... When I got in the room I took my
knife, which was sharp as a razor, and I cut the mattresses on the four
beds to little bits, so that I knew I had done more than fifty scudi
worth of damage." Throughout a delightful autobiography, which we need
not accept too literally, Cellini exhibits a perfectly unmoral
disposition, a mind with no sense of social law and no respect for
anything except Michelangelo and art.
These four men, Caesar Borgia, Machiavelli, Aretino, and Cellini,
possessed fortitude, energy, subtlety, and courage, but they showed no
appreciation of the fundamental social virtues, loyalty, trust,
subordination of self to the general good; and for this reason they
enable us to understand why Italy fell like a ripe apple, without
resistance, into the lap of foreigners and lay helpless under Jesuit,
inquisitor, petty duke, and Spanish viceroy, and why freedom to think
and freedom to act faded from art and intellectual life as well as from
political life.