THE AGE OF STAGNATION, THE ARTS (1580-1789)
We should do wrong to leave these centuries to stand solely on their
political record. Even this dreary period has contributed not a little
to the sum of Italy's attractions. After the moral vigour of republican
Florence, after the freshness of the Renaissance and its later grandeur,
after the elegance of the courts of Urbino, Ferrara, and Milan, it
requires time to adjust ourselves to a different standard and to acquire
a relish for this period of dissipated little kings and dukes. But once
familiar with the altered standard of excellence, these centuries, with
their arts, their habits, their idleness, become exceedingly
sympathetic, and lure with peculiar dexterity the idler who seeks
entertainment and the picturesque. Not that there is no serious element
in them, for there is. Italy, though known to us through her lovers as a
woman land, has always happily commingled feminine charm and masculine
strength. Like the Apennines which stretch their grim strength from the
Alps to the toe of the peninsula, virility runs throughout the length of
Italian history, though at times it avoids notice. In this period it is
best represented by science; and we must not omit to mention a few of
the most distinguished scientific thinkers.
Giordano Bruno (1550-1600) and Campanella (1568-1639) were philosophers
rather than men of science; their philosophy ran counter to the
scholastic philosophy sanctioned by the Church, and they came into
collision with the stern spirit of the Catholic Reaction. Campanella was
persecuted and punished; Bruno was condemned as a heretic and burnt to
death in the city of Rome. Greater than either was Galileo (1564-1642),
whose name is one of the most illustrious in astronomy. He was born at
Pisa, where he was educated in the university. He devoted himself to
study, especially to mathematics, and became a professor. In 1609 he
heard that a Dutchman had made an instrument which in some way by means
of a lens magnified objects. Acting on this hint he constructed a
telescope; and, if not strictly the inventor, he was the first to use
the telescope in astronomy. The next year he made various eventful
discoveries: that there are mountains in the moon, and spots on the sun;
that Venus has phases; that Saturn has an appendage, which later was
proved to be rings; that Jupiter has four satellites, a discovery which
increased the number of heavenly bodies from the mystically sacred seven
(sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) to the
uninspiring eleven. These discoveries persuaded Galileo to adopt the
Copernican theory, and brought him into collision with the Church. Much
has been said about his cruel persecution, but he appears to have
received gentle treatment and to have undergone a merely nominal
imprisonment. Another philosopher, Vico (1668-1744), a Neapolitan,
enjoys a very high reputation in Italy as a thinker. He wrote a
philosophy of history, in which he investigated the laws that govern
human progress, showed that philosophical theories must treat mankind
collectively, and anticipated Comte's theory of the three stages of
social development.
Science is not the characteristic trait of this period; for that is to
be found in the arts or in the pleasant enervating lassitude of life. In
the grand-ducal atmosphere there is a sense of having browsed on
lotus-flowers. As we glance back on the great centuries, their efforts
look splendid, their high purposes noble, their infinite curiosity
commendable, but we are content to sit in a ducal garden, to listen to
the Tritons spout into the fountains, to sip chocolate, to meditate
sonnets to a partner for the minuet, to gossip about "His Highness and
Contessa B----, who, so that young _milord_, Horry Walpole, says, was
once a ballerina," and to confess our sins to fat, amiable priests. We
enjoy the badinage of the abbes, the ingenious vacuity of the
litterateurs, the cheerful buzz of the cafe, the daily saunter on the
fashionable promenade, the drive in the park, and all the details of
theatrical make-believe existence.
As one becomes used to this lotos-laden atmosphere, one gets lenient
impressions of the arts, of their peculiar and characteristic
agreeableness, and rapidly loses one's previous too scornfully classical
attitude. In an earlier chapter we indulged in some high-flown
denunciation of the Baroque in architecture. That was because we were
fresh from the Renaissance. Now that we have eaten of the lotos, we
refrain from comparison and enjoy the arts in their new phases, in and
for themselves. There is hardly an Italian city that would not be poorer
for the absence of the Baroque. Rome, for instance, owes most of its
charm to these decadent generations, to the Villa Medici, the Villa
Borghese, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Piazza Navona.
A Neapolitan, Bernini (1598-1680), was the master spirit of the best
Baroque, both in architecture and in sculpture. His greatest achievement
is the splendid colonnade which reaches out like two arms from St.
Peter's Church and clasps the sunny _piazza_ in its embrace (1667).
Bernini's statues, his fountains, his decorations and ornaments, make a
good history of the time. They undoubtedly reveal decadence, yet they
are respectfully imitative of the great achievements of the Renaissance,
whereas the works of his numerous disciples are surcharged with
contortion, obvious effort, and strain for effect. There is a maximum of
visible exertion with a minimum of real accomplishment. Details are
multiplied, and ornaments bear little or no relation to the organic
structure of the buildings which they adorn; yet that practice is an
Italian trait, and even in excess has a picturesque merit. The baser
work of this style, exhibited in the vainglorious churches of the
Jesuits, is sometimes called the Jesuit style. After this period of
stormy ornament came a calm in the eighteenth century, facades became
rectilinear, and there was a general subsidence of obvious effort.
In painting the school of Bologna, led by Lodovico Caracci (1555-1619)
and his nephews, Agostino and the more noted and gifted Annibale, set
the fashion. They endeavoured to combine faithfulness to nature with all
the merits of all their predecessors, and are therefore called the
eclectic school. They remained the cynosure of touring eyes until the
middle of the nineteenth century. Sir Joshua Reynolds admired and
praised them. Some of their disciples were for a long time almost as
famous as Raphael. Domenichino's Last Communion of St. Jerome held a
place of honour in the Vatican Gallery equal to Raphael's
Transfiguration. Guido Reni's Aurora, painted on the ceiling of the
casino in the Rospigliosi palace in Rome, had a tremendous vogue, and
even now tourists, escaped from the critics, admire it privily.
Guercino, Sassoferrato, and also the lachrymose Carlo Dolci are other
celebrated members of the school. Another school, almost equally famous,
was devoted to Naturalism,--imitation of starving old beggars and a
general depiction of want, misery, and squalor. Of these painters the
principal were Caravaggio (1569-1609), a Neapolitan, and his pupil
Ribera, known as _Lo Spagnoletto_, because he was born in Spain. A later
group, the Venetians of the eighteenth century, consisted of Canaletto,
Bellotto, Guardi, and others who painted again and again the idle canals
and pleasure-loving palaces of Venice. The greatest of this group was
Tiepolo (1693-1770), who attained in a measure the grand manner of the
great masters of the sixteenth century.
In literature, though that also had flashes of seriousness, as in
Filicaia's celebrated sonnet to Italy adapted by Lord Byron,--
Italia! O Italia! thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty--
the spirit of the Baroque, in its lightest and pleasantest manner,
expressed itself to the full by means of the Academy of Arcadia. The
unreality of the whole Italian world was concentrated in this Academy,
which soon had branches, imitations, colonies all over the peninsula. It
was founded in Rome (1692) by Gravina, a jurist, Crescimbeni, a priest,
and other dilettanti, for the ennoblement of literature, the
purification of taste, and other meritorious purposes. The members
called themselves Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses, took pastoral
names, composed sonnets by the bushel, wrote one another's biographies,
and were altogether delightfully silly. Goldoni, the playwright, gives a
glimpse of these litterateurs in the eighteenth century as he observed
them in Pisa.
One day he passed a garden gate and saw within the garden a crowd of
ladies and gentlemen grouped by an arbour. He was told, "The assembly
which you see is a colony of the Arcadia of Rome, called the Colony of
Alpheus, named after a very celebrated river in Greece, which flowed
through the ancient Pisa in Elis." Goldoni went up to the circle and
listened to a number of gentlemen who recited poems, canzoni, ballads,
sonnets, etc. He observed that the company looked at him as if desirous
to know who he was. Eager to satisfy their curiosity, he asked the
president if a stranger might be permitted to express in poetry the
satisfaction which he experienced in being present on so interesting an
occasion. Goldoni had a sonnet in his head, composed by him in his youth
for some similar festival; he hastily changed a few words to adapt it to
the present occasion, and recited the fourteen lines with the tone and
inflection of voice which set off sentiment and rhyme to the best
advantage. The sonnet had all the appearance of being extemporaneous,
and was very much applauded. Whether the meeting had come to its
appointed end or not he did not know, but everybody got up and crowded
about him. Thereupon he was introduced to a whole troop of Arcadian
shepherds, who welcomed him most heartily. At another meeting the
president, whose proper title was Guardian of the Shepherds, drew a
large packet from his pocket, and presented Goldoni with two documents,
a certificate of his membership in the Arcadia of Rome under the name of
Polisseno (Polixenes), and a legal deed which bestowed upon him the
Fegean Fields in Greece; whereupon the whole assembly saluted him under
the name of Polixenes Fegeus, and embraced him as a fellow shepherd.
Goldoni says that, in spite of the formality of the conveyance, the
Turks never acknowledged his title.
Mention of the Arcadia and of Goldoni leads to another art, most
characteristic of these two centuries, the player's art. The drama had
never been a success in Italy; Machiavelli and Ariosto wrote comedies,
but they were no better from a dramatic than from an ethical point of
view. After the acknowledged failure of serious comedy, another species
took the field, the "Commedia dell'Arte," and definitely established
itself at about the time of the beginning of the Baroque. In this
species of comedy the dramatis personae were masked and always
impersonated certain definite characters, and the dialogue was
improvised. These masks were _Pantalone_, our Pantaloon, a Venetian
merchant, who always wore a black robe and scarlet stockings, and spoke
the Venetian dialect; _Il Dottore_, the doctor, a pompous ass from
Bologna; _Arlecchino_, Harlequin, a silly and credulous servant in tight
hose and motley jerkin, and _Brighella_, a quick-witted and knavish
servant, both speaking the patois of Bergamo; _Colombina_, the
soubrette, a pretty maid-servant from Tuscany; _Capitano Spavento_,
Captain Terrible, a fire-eater from Naples, etc. This comedy,
necessarily kept within narrow limits by these characters, was strictly
improvisation, except that the playwright provided a _scenario_, a
skeleton plot. It had great success, and troops of Italian comedians
went all over Europe; but by the eighteenth century it had run its
course and become mere vulgar horseplay, and Goldoni (1707-93), the only
brilliant comic playwright that Italy has produced, gave it a
death-blow.
Goldoni was a Venetian, and a perfect embodiment of the happy, careless,
amiable, entertaining society of the time. He led a roaming life, going
to Tuscany to learn good Italian, and finally ending his career with
twenty years in Paris. Some of his plays are in the Venetian dialect;
two were written in French. There are more than a hundred, counting
tragedies, interludes, and all. Their virtue is their lightness. They
are made of foam, a delicious dramatic _souffle_, and in the hands of
accomplished Italian actors, like Eleonora Duse or Ermete Novelli,
retain their charm to this day. They are essential for the history of
the period, with their counts, barons, marquesses, their ladies, their
waiting-maids, their innkeepers, _camerieri_, cobblers, adventurers, and
all their gay mockery of the idle habits of the time.
It will throw a little more light upon the customs of that day to
mention _cicisbeismo_, an unwritten rule of an artificial and idle
society, which prescribed that a lady should have a _cavaliere
servente_, a gentleman dangling in attendance upon her. Every lady had a
husband, as maidens were not allowed in society, and widows had to
choose between a convent and a second marriage; but the husband could
not wait upon her, for his own duty as _cavaliere servente_ required him
to be in attendance upon somebody else's wife. The duties of the
_cavaliere servente_ were to devote himself solely to his lady, to write
_billets-doux_, compose sonnets to her lapdog, to hand her chocolate at
_conversazioni_, to give her his arm on all occasions, to ride beside
her coach when she was out driving, and so on. In fact, he was required
to do all those little offices, _petits soins_, which a young gentleman
is accustomed to render to the lady whom he is engaged to marry. It was
a state of active flirtation, not only sanctioned but required by
society. It is said that in some cases the _cavaliere servente_ was
agreed upon before marriage, and his name inserted in the marriage
contract.
Besides Goldoni's comic drama and the "Commedia dell'Arte" this Baroque
Italy gave the world another and far more important gift, the Opera.
Italian genius flared up once more and led the world in music. As far
back as the days of the Council of Trent the reforming spirit of the
Church found its noblest expression in Palestrina's (1524?-94) masses,
but after his death, after the Catholic Revival had lost its deeply
serious feeling, music took another step. Florence, the old home of
genius, was the spot. A group of music lovers, who were full of classic
theories about art, wished to revive antique Greek drama, with its
combination of poetry, music, and dance. They decided that the words
were the chief element, that the music must be subservient to the full
emotional expression of the poetry, must intensify the dramatic
significance of the story. To give effect to their opinion they devised
a method of setting music to declamation, the earliest form of
recitative. They meant to revive the Greek drama, but they produced the
opera. After a few years of work over the new ideas, in 1600, at the
Pitti Palace, an opera was publicly performed in honor of the espousals
of Maria dei Medici and Henry IV of France. This was the first public
performance of a secular opera. Soon afterwards Monteverdi (1567-1643),
a revolutionary genius in the history of music, produced his operas at
Mantua. In 1637 the first public opera house was opened in Venice;
others quickly followed; the opera became a favourite diversion, and
Italian singers carried it to France, Germany, Austria, and England. In
the same year as the performance in the Pitti Palace, a dramatic
oratorio, "The Soul and the Body," was publicly performed in Rome. The
oratorio was greatly developed by Carissimi (1604-74) of the Roman
school, and with him and his successors acquired much stateliness and
beauty. Its influence on the opera, however, was not good, at least if
we adopt the opinion of those Florentine Hellenes and of Wagner, for it
developed music as an independent element, and did not subordinate it to
dramatic action.
With the exception of this misdevelopment of the opera, all music
evolved brilliantly and well in Italy, and especially in Naples, which
eclipsed all other cities, and showed that she, too, had her individual
genius. Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725) wrote a great number of operas
and oratorios, and composed a vast quantity of ecclesiastical music. He
was followed by his son Domenico Scarlatti, by Durante, Leo, and
Jommelli, by Pergolesi, Piccinni, Cimarosa, and Paisiello, who followed
one another, like a flight of singing birds, through the eighteenth
century. The Italian opera, even then, had the characteristics of
subordinating dramatic propriety and all semblance of reality to
_arias_, trills, and vocal exaggeration, but it was not till the
beginning of the nineteenth century--with Rossini, Bellini,
Donizetti--that the Italian opera (if I may venture to adapt a famous
phrase) became melted Baroque. There were other schools of music at
Rome, Bologna, and Venice. It was in Venice that the four famous asylums
for girls, _conservatori_, were turned into music schools, and gave
their name to training schools for musicians all over the world.
Besides the opera one must note, in mentioning Italian musical genius,
the violin-makers, the Amati of Cremona, the greater Stradivarius
(1644-1737), and other famous makers of Cremona, Brescia, and Venice;
also the organ-builders, the Antignati of Brescia; the great Italian
singers, then as now favourites of the world; as well as the greatest of
libretto-writers, Metastasio.
Metastasio (1698-1782) had a career that can only be compared to that of
a successful _prima donna_. As a boy he was adopted by the Arcadian
lawyer, Gravina, and brought early to drink of the Pierian spring. After
Gravina's death he spent his money, got into the company of singers and
musicians at Naples, and composed the words of an opera "Dido," while
still a youth of five-and-twenty. "Dido" had immense success, and from
this time on Metastasio poured out play after play in words that went
halfway and more to meet the accompanying music. His renown was
triumphant throughout Europe; he became the pet of lords, ladies, kings,
and Popes. He flitted from court to court, and sipped the honey of
facile success; he serves as the embodiment of the Italian opera, or
rather as a poetical spirit, a kind of baroque nightingale, to chant the
charm, the sentiment, the sweetness, the unreality, of these two
make-believe centuries.
As we take leave of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (a
somewhat ignoble pair), their architecture, painting, literature, and
music, we must, as in other matters, remember the good and forget the
bad. We must keep in mind the Spanish Steps, which offer at their base
ample room for all the flowers of all the flower-sellers of Rome, then
rise in easy flight, pause, rest, and mount again, tier upon tier, till
the top step stretches out into a terrace, where the pedestrian, glad to
pause, turns and looks back over Rome towards the majestic dome of St.
Peter's. We must remember the Trevi Fountain where gods and nymphs and
waters splash and frolic together, or Guido's Aurora, where Apollo
looses the rein to his heavenly horses as they gallop after Lucifer,
while the straight-backed hours dance divinely alongside. We must recall
the sweet sentiment in Metastasio, the light nothingness of Goldoni, the
merriment of Harlequin and Columbine, the violins of Stradivarius, the
singing of Farinello and Pacchierotti, the melodies of Pergolesi, and
the general pleasantness of an idle, amiable society. Then we want to
join the eighteenth-century travellers,--Addison, Walpole, President de
Brosses, or Goethe,--and we look back with vain regret to that happy
lotos-eating time, and wish it would return again.